The Lost Testament

92

For a few minutes after he’d ended the phone call to the man in Madrid, Morini did nothing, just sat on the bench with the phone in his hand, staring down at it as if the slim fusion of metal and plastic and silica could somehow provide the answers that he sought. But his mind was racing.

The body count was rising. Two people dead in Cairo, then the market trader Husani gunned down in Madrid, and now two more men — and he didn’t even know their names, he realized at that moment — also shot to death. That made five so far and, from what Tobí had told him on the telephone, the Spaniard was utterly determined to add the names of Christopher Bronson and Angela Lewis to that tally. And still they were no closer to recovering the relic than they had been at the very start of the operation.

In fact, they were probably a good deal further away, because Bronson and Lewis would definitely now be very well aware of what was going on and would be on their guard. And this Bronson man didn’t seem to be scared of taking the fight to them.

Morini had no idea what forces or numbers of men Tobí would be able to deploy in an attempt to track down Bronson and Angela Lewis, but he did know that Spain was a very big country with a vast road network, and he guessed that trying to locate those two people, even if details of their car were known to all the watchers, would actually be a very difficult task. And if they did manage to elude their pursuers in Spain, and somehow made it into France it would be even harder — the French road system was even more complex and convoluted than that in Spain.

Morini knew he would have to make yet another telephone call to the Englishman, to update him on the utter failure of the actions his colleagues had taken in Spain — the other man had made it very clear that he needed to be kept fully informed at all times. But was it now time to call a halt to the operation? If Bronson and Lewis somehow managed to get out of Spain, would it be better to just let them go? That was one consideration, and yet the threat posed by the ancient text on the parchment was as potent as ever, and the consequences of the secret it held becoming known simply terrified Morini.

For several minutes, Morini tossed the arguments backwards and forwards in his head, and then decided to do nothing. He would wait to hear from the Spaniard again and, with any luck, the next telephone call he received might well bring him the news that he sought: that the troublesome pair from England had been eliminated and the parchment recovered.

That night he would, he knew, yet again pray for guidance, for some kind of confirmation that the events he’d set in train were justified in the eyes of the god he thought he still worshipped.