The Rome Prophecy

83

The blanket is warm.

Warm, but rough and unfamiliar.

The bed she’s lying on is not her own.

Louisa Verdetti is on the slow and painful road to consciousness.

Her head aches, and for a moment her chloroformed mind plays tricks on her. She’s a student again, helping out in a field hospital in a Third World country. She’s dozed off at the end of a hard day’s work and is sleeping in one of the supply tents; the headache is a hangover courtesy of a bottle or two of rough red shared with a hunky aid worker from Sweden.

If only that were the case.

Slowly Louisa starts to focus.

Everywhere is brown.

Dark – depressingly dark – brown.

Her fuddled brain tries to snatch information. The smell of damp. The hardness of the surface she’s lying on. The near pitch darkness.

She’s underground.

Buried.

Her heart skips a beat.

Buried alive.

Louisa sits up.

Childhood claustrophobia sucks the air from her throat.

She tells herself not to panic. She’s no longer a young girl accidentally locked in her grandmother’s gardening shed.

Panic is the worst thing she can do.

Relax. Breathe slowly. Nothing bad is going to happen to her.

But it already has.

The rough knitted blanket slips from her shoulders as she puts out a hand.

A wall.

Lumpy. Not plastered. Damp. Crumbling.

Like the wall of a cave.

She feels an aching in her chest.

Breathe. Force yourself to take long, slow, deep breaths. Let it out slowly.

All her panic training comes back to her.

In through your nose. Out through your mouth.

You’re fine.

You’re okay.

Everything’s going to be all right.

Memories choke her now. The chloroform. The man and woman she let into her apartment block.

They did this.

They drugged her and have taken her somewhere.

But where?

And why?

A flash of yellowy-orange suddenly blinds her. She guesses from the accompanying sound and smell that the light is coming from rags soaked in oil or paraffin and bound to a heavy stick.

She backs up.

The torchlight shows her where she is.

Underground.

Behind bars.

In a cell carved out of solid rock.