12

Gregori Mandino was furious. He’d ordered the stone and computer unit to be taken out to the Lancia, and he’d planned to have Pierro drive the vehicle away from the house, leaving the three of them in the property to await the return of Hampton and his companion. But the call from his bodyguard, telling him the two Englishmen were already heading back to the house, had changed all that.

The maneuver by his bodyguard had worked perfectly, completely blocking the entrance to the driveway, but the way the car had escaped had been totally unexpected. That, and the way the Alfa had evaded them minutes later, had convinced Mandino that the driver was either desperate or an expert.

They’d turned to give chase as quickly as possible, but by the time they’d reached the first junction, the Alfa Romeo was nowhere in sight, and there were three possible routes the driver could have taken. Mandino had guessed Hampton and the other man would head for the autostrada, and he’d ordered the Lancia driver to take that route, but they’d seen no sign of their quarry before they reached the tollbooths and, without knowing which way the Alfa had gone, any further attempt at pursuit was pointless.

Mandino hated making mistakes. He’d assumed that the two Englishmen wouldn’t be returning to the house for at least two hours, and assumption, as an American colleague had been fond of saying, was the mother of all screwups. But it was too late now.

“Search the house,” he ordered. “Look for any documents that identify the second man, and anything that might help us find the two of them.”

As his men dispersed to do his bidding, Pierro walked over to Mandino. “What would you like me to do?”

“Take another look around the place, just in case my men miss anything.”

“Where do you think the Englishmen have gone?”

“If they’ve got any sense,” Mandino replied, “they’ll be heading for England. They’ll have picked up the autostrada and headed north, out of Italy.”

“Can’t you stop them? Get the Carabinieri to intercept them?”

Mandino shook his head. “I have some influence with them, but this whole matter is supposed to be handled as discreetly as possible. We’ll have to find these two using our own resources.”

Mandino was right—Bronson had taken the autostrada and turned north, heading for the Italian border.

“Do you think they’ll be following us?” Mark asked, as the Alfa rounded a gentle curve at an indicated speed of one hundred and forty kilometers per hour.

“Not unless they’ve got a helicopter or something,” Bronson said, keeping his eyes on the road. “We lost the Fiat and Lancia well before we picked up the autostrada.”

“Which route are we taking, so I can program the navigation system?”

“Just in case those guys are planning on a roadblock or something, we’ll take the short route out of Italy. The closest frontier is with Switzerland, but as the gnomes aren’t yet a part of the E.U. we’ll probably be asked for paperwork. So we’ll turn north just outside Modena and head up through Verona and Trento to Austria, then on through Innsbruck into Germany and Belgium.

“This is going to be a bloody quick trip. I plan to stop for petrol, food, coffee and the loo, and nothing else. When we’re too tired to drive on, we’ll find a hotel somewhere. But that won’t be until at the very least we’ve crossed two borders and are well inside Germany.”

They’d met absolutely no problems on their very rapid drive across Europe. Bronson had been as good as his word, and he’d driven as fast as the traffic would allow, staying on the toll roads as much as possible, up through Italy, and crossed western Austria before entering Germany just north of Innsbruck.

They’d driven on to Munich, then turned west to Stuttgart and on to Frankfurt, but by then Bronson was really feeling the strain. He’d pulled off the autobahn at Montabaur and headed north. At Langenhahn they’d found a small hotel and fallen into bed.

The next morning, Bronson pushed the Alfa hard on the back roads until he picked up the autobahn just southeast of Cologne. After that it was toll roads all the way to the south of Aachen, where they entered Belgium, and on to the French border near Lille. And then it was only a short hop to the Channel Tunnel terminal just outside Calais, where Mark handed over a small fortune for the privilege of sitting in his own car for the brief journey under La Manche.

“I’ll tell you this, Chris,” he said, as Bronson drove the Alfa onto the train. “The next time I cross to France I’m taking a ferry.”

An hour later, Bronson dropped Mark off at his apartment in Ilford, and then picked up the south-bound M25 and opened the front door of his house only seventy minutes after leaving his friend.

He left his computer bag in the living room and spent a few minutes transferring the photographs of both inscriptions onto a high-capacity USB memory stick, because he didn’t want to drag his laptop all the way up to London with him.

He hadn’t eaten since his breakfast in Germany, what seemed like a week ago, so on his way to the railway station he grabbed a packet of sandwiches and a can of soft drink from a convenience store.

Thirty minutes later he was sitting in a train heading for Charing Cross Station and the British Museum.

Gregori Mandino had returned to Rome as soon as it was clear that his quarry wouldn’t be going back to the house. He had managed to track down Mark Hampton’s home address in Ilford and his place of work in the City of London. The second man was proving more elusive: an Englishman who spoke fluent Italian, and who had introduced himself to the staff of the funeral home as “Chris Bronson.”

But there were ways of tracing people, and Mandino knew the two Englishmen had flown to Rome from Britain, and the Cosa Nostra had extensive connections at all levels of Italian bureaucracy. So he dialed a number and issued certain orders.

Just more than three hours later Antonio Carlotti called with the result.

“Mandino.”

“We have a match, capo,” Carlotti said. “Our contact in passport control in Rome has identified the man as Christopher James Bronson, and I have an address for him in Tunbridge Wells.”

Mandino grabbed a pencil and paper as Carlotti dictated Bronson’s address and telephone number to him.

“Where is this Tunbridge Wells?” Mandino asked.

“Kent, about fifty kilometers south of London. And there’s something else. The reason the inquiry took so long was because my man had to explain the reasons for his request to the British authorities. Usually, a passport check is just a formality, but in this case they refused to release the information until he had told them why he was making the inquiry.”

“What did he tell them?”

“He said that Bronson might have been a witness to a road accident in Rome, and that seemed to satisfy them.”

“But why,” Mandino asked the obvious question, “were they reluctant to divulge this?”

“Because this man Bronson is a serving police officer,” Carlotti explained. “In fact, he’s a detective sergeant based at the station in Tunbridge Wells. And, just like in the Carabinieri, the British police protect their own.”

For a few moments Mandino didn’t respond. This was an unexpected development, and he wasn’t sure if it was good or bad news.

“Family?” he asked, finally.

“His parents are both dead, he has no children, and he’s recently divorced. His ex-wife’s name is Angela Lewis. She’s employed by the British Museum in London.”

“As what? A secretary or something?”

“No. She’s a ceramics conservator.”

And that, Mandino knew, definitely was bad news. He had no idea what a ceramics conservator actually did, but the mere fact that the Lewis woman worked in one of the most celebrated museums in the world meant that she would have immediate access to experts from a number of disciplines.

Time, Mandino now knew, was fast running out. He needed to get to London as quickly as he could if he was to have any chance of retrieving the situation. But before he ended the call, he obtained Angela Lewis’s London address and phone number. He also instructed that changes be made in the Internet monitoring system and added some very specific new criteria to the searches the syntax checkers were to analyze.

The monitoring system he’d put in place was both comprehensive and expensive, but as the Vatican was picking up the tab, the cost didn’t bother him. It was based on a product called NIS, or NarusInsight Intercept Suite, which Mandino’s people had modified so it could be installed on remote servers without the host’s knowledge and operated like a computer virus or, more accurately, a Trojan Horse. Once in place, the NIS software could be programmed to monitor whole networks to detect specific Internet search strings or even individual e-mail messages.

Whenever Bronson accessed the Internet, and whatever he searched for, Mandino was sure he’d find out about it.