The Templar Heresy

28

When Bronson and Angela reached the vicinity of Orleans Angela managed to tune into British Radio 4. After a few minutes, the programme ended and then a man with a very deep BBC voice began reading the news. Bronson turned up the volume — both he and Angela were desperate to hear whether or not news of the events in Iraq had broken internationally. If they had, they both guessed the massacre would be headline news.

It soon became clear that nothing had been released about it by the Iraqi authorities, but just before the end of the broadcast they both registered the importance of one other breaking news story: the body of an Englishman, believed to be an archaeologist, had been found murdered that morning in a hotel in Milan.

When the broadcast ended, Angela reached up and switched off the radio. Her hand covering her mouth in horror, she turned to Bronson.

‘That was Stephen,’ she said quietly, ‘wasn’t it?’

Bronson sighed heavily. ‘I’d like to say that it wasn’t, that it was just a bizarre coincidence, but I don’t think it was. I’m sorry,’ he said, and squeezed Angela’s shoulder.

Angela was staring straight ahead through the windscreen, taking in deep breaths to steady herself.

‘They got to him so quickly. I mean, how did they manage that?’ Her voice was quiet with shock.

‘Realistically, he wouldn’t be that difficult to find. If they had access to the airline schedules of Kuwait City our three names would have popped up as probably travelling together, because we bought tickets at exactly the same time.’

‘But they were in Iraq! They couldn’t have got to Milan any quicker than we did. It doesn’t make sense.’

Bronson shook his head.

‘Unfortunately, crime is a business these days — an international business, in fact — and it’s quite common for one criminal organization to contact another one in a different country to arrange a particular job. In fact, and especially with assassinations, this is a really good technique — from their point of view — because it provides a complete separation between the person who actually orders the killing and the victim. The murder is committed by someone who has never met the victim and has no possible links with him, and that type of crime is virtually impossible to solve.’

‘I didn’t know that,’ Angela said. ‘So you think someone in Iraq just picked up a telephone, rang a contact in Italy and told him to find us and kill us?’

‘That’s about the size of it, yes. Obviously you can’t just open up a telephone directory, look under “M” and expect to find the Mafia listed, but there’s a lot of international cooperation between criminal organizations in those areas where they’re not directly competing with each other. In fact,’ Bronson added, ‘what probably saved us was the time it took the men in Iraq to establish their bona fides.’

‘Sorry, you’ve lost me.’

‘Even in the criminal world, committing murder is still pretty serious, and it would take a lot more than one phone call to convince some Mafia capo to send out a group of his soldiers to track down and kill three people. There would have been checks and double checks and then they’d have to agree the fee and the payment method. All that would have taken time. My guess is that our aircraft had probably already landed in Milan several hours before the Italians were ready to move, and they were playing catch-up all the way.’

Angela shivered. ‘So if we’d taken a later flight somewhere, or the men in Iraq had moved quicker, the Italian killers might have been waiting for us at the airport?’

‘Yes. That was why I was so keen to get out of Kuwait as quickly as possible.’

For a few minutes, they were both silent, the gravity of the situation weighing heavily on them. Then Bronson glanced across at his former wife who was still staring straight ahead through the windscreen at the unwinding road in front of them.

‘I’m starting to have second thoughts,’ he said.

‘What about?’

‘What we do next. I think it’s time for Plan B.’