The Medusa Amulet

Chapter 40

Once she was sure that the car had been swallowed up for good, Olivia had stumbled, soaking wet and missing one shoe, up the muddy bank. But she knew that if she didn’t find some dry clothes or some cover fast, she’d freeze to death while waiting for David and Ascanio to come back.

She didn’t even allow herself to think that they might not return.

She made her way across the cold, hard ground to the cement dock, then back to the spot where the Maserati had been parked. Unless her attacker had followed them on foot, he must have left a car hidden somewhere nearby. But the woods were dark, and it was slow going over the rough, uneven terrain. Her blouse and pants were still dripping, and her one shoe kept her off-kilter. She followed the trail as well as she could, taking advantage of every spot of moonlight to plot her course, and eventually she spotted the back bumper of a car hidden among the trees close to the road. She started to run toward it before realizing that there might be an accomplice inside.

Wiping the wet hair back from her eyes, she inched forward, keeping among the foliage, until she was close enough to see that it was a little, beige Peugeot, with no one in it. It was pointed out toward the road, just as she had done with the Maserati. Everybody, she surmised, had been preparing for a quick getaway.

Now if only it was unlocked.

And it was, with the key still sitting in the ignition. She turned it on and started the heat going at full blast. Then she surveyed the interior, which looked as if somebody had been living in it. Cigarette butts crammed the ashtrays, cardboard coffee cups littered the floor, and clothes were spilling out of an open duffel bag on the backseat. She quickly rummaged around in it and found a heavy fisherman’s knit sweater. Peeling off her wet blouse, she pulled it on over her head, then a pair of woolly white socks that came halfway up her shins. The heat was going strong and she had stopped her shivering altogether.

But her curiosity was greater than ever. Who was this man who had been so relentlessly tracking them? She popped open the glove compartment for the car registration papers and found instead a brochure from the rental agency, with his completed application inside.

“Escher,” she read, “Ernst Escher.” The name meant nothing to her, and though he’d paid with a credit card from a Swiss bank, he listed his address as a post-office box in the States. Chicago, in fact-where David, of course, was from.

Had he been following David’s trail all the way from America? On his own? Or at someone else’s behest?

On the passenger seat, there was another rucksack, which she quickly unbuckled. This one looked like a doctor’s bag inside, stuffed with prescription pills and bottles, along with a BlackBerry and a burgundy Austrian passport, with its distinctive gold coat of arms.

She flipped the dog-eared passport open. The pages bore dozens of stamps, for every place from Liechtenstein to Dubai, but the picture in front was of a weaselly-looking little man named Julius Jantzen. The same man who had drugged their drinks. He was thirty-eight years old, five-foot-six, unmarried, and although his current address was Florence, Italy, his birthplace was listed as Linz, Austria.

Hitler’s hometown, she thought.

She wondered if this Jantzen character wasn’t still out there in the woods somewhere. She tossed the passport back into the bag, steering the Peugeot out of the trees and back toward the dock. She parked it out of sight again, with the motor off and the lights out.

And was surprised to find that her hands and feet were becoming numb. Inside her, despite the warm interior of the car, she felt a cold and hollow spot growing. She was going into shock, she dimly recognized. While she’d been fighting for her life and struggling to find safety, she had been operating on sheer survival instinct and adrenaline. But now, now that she was temporarily-and provisionally-safe, now that she was warm and dry and no gun was grazing her cheek, her heart was still racing, her breath was coming in short, shallow bursts, and her mind was grappling with the trauma she had just undergone.

She had escaped dying by the skin of her teeth.

And she had killed a man in the process. Not a good man, not some innocent, but a man, nonetheless.

She had killed him-and nearly died herself.

Her thoughts were flying back and forth between those two poles, like a shuttlecock, and the cold spot in her gut was only getting colder. She had a whole pharmacy in the bag beside her, but she had no idea what to take. She began searching the glove compartment, the storage slots in the doors, and under the driver’s seat, where she finally found what she was looking for. It was an old, dented flask, but she unscrewed the top and took a whiff of what smelled like good Irish whiskey. She took a gulp, then another, and felt the warmth of the alcohol blooming like a rose inside her. She closed her eyes for a second, willing herself to breathe more slowly, and let the feeling diffuse. An owl hooted in the trees, reminding her of her own Glaucus back home. Her cluttered little apartment in Florence had never seemed so appealing.

And then, glancing at her ashen face in the rearview mirror, she shook her head, as if to physically dismiss all the fears from her mind, and pinched her own cheeks, hard. She could not afford the luxury of a breakdown at that moment. Not while David and Ascanio were still out there. Not while the job was still undone. She knew David. She knew he would not give up. His sister’s life was at stake, and even in the short time they had been together, she had seen what a fierce and unbreakable bond that was. She took another sip of the whiskey, and even though she was not a religious woman-for her, churches were places to tour, not worship-she found herself praying all the same. Not to Jesus or Mother Mary. But to the miraculous powers of the universe, the benign and unseen forces in which she did believe. Olivia’s mind had always been open, and as she stared into the darkness of the trees, she prayed, with a fervency she had never felt before, that she would see David emerge again, safe and unscathed. It would not be fair, she thought, for something so wonderful, something that she had waited so long for, to come to such an abrupt and awful end. A wave of indignation came over her-not an uncustomary sensation for someone of her temperament-and it felt good. She felt like she was coming back to herself. Indignation, in her opinion, was very underrated.