Jon Tracy - The Rome Prophecy

‘Of course.’ Guilio points towards where the black rat ran off. ‘There’s a thin passage through there. It will bring us out about half a kilometre away.’ He picks up the lantern and inspects it as he starts to walk. ‘We’ve probably got just about enough paraffin to get us there.’

Tom trudges along after him. ‘I still need to know why you were at Santa Cecilia, and why did you help me?’

‘I’ve been following you. Ever since I was released. I watched you with that priest having coffee near St Peter’s and I watched that other policeman, the one who questioned me.’

‘Federico.’

‘ Si, the lieutenant.’

‘Why?’

‘Simple. You didn’t want to hurt Anna, you wanted to protect her, and I was trying to think of a way to reach out to you.’

Guilio swings the lamp low to shine it on a nest of black rats. ‘Unusual. You don’t normally get this many black ones underground. The excavations must have disturbed them.’

The rodents don’t bother Tom; his church in LA was infested with them.

They turn a corner and they’re both pleased to see daylight filtering through a sloping tunnel straight ahead.

As they get closer, it’s clear that the light is being diced through an old gateway.

All around there is rubble and broken rock.

Guilio extinguishes the lamp and hides it away before opening the gate.

The sky is dull, but it still makes them squint.

They’ve emerged at the bottom of a hillside near a quiet road north of Santa Cecilia, but Tom has no real idea where he is as he phones Valentina’s number.

Please God, let her be all right.

It trips to her voicemail message. ‘This is Valentina Morassi, I can’t take your call at the moment…’

He cuts it off.

She’s probably busy calling him. Maybe she’s already left messages for him. He checks his own voicemail.

Nothing.

That seems strange.

He’s sure she would have rung him. Especially in light of the fact that she sent him after Louisa and hasn’t heard from him since.

The silence gives him a bad feeling.

He dials again, lets the answerphone play through, and then leaves a message. ‘Valentina, it’s Tom…’ He checks his watch. ‘It’s almost one o’clock. Please call me when you get this.’ He clicks off and looks at Guilio sitting on the kerb lighting the stub of a cigarette that he’s found in the gutter.

The guy looks as grey as the pavement, almost as though he’s a chameleon blending in with his new surroundings.

Tom scrolls through his phone’s memory and finds Valentina’s office number. He knows she’s not there but figures it’s the only way he’s going to get Federico’s cell phone number.

He just hopes his Italian is good enough to charm someone into giving it to him.

Lorenzo Silvestri sits in his office, staring at Federico Assante and Louisa Verdetti.

His chair creaks under his two hundred pounds of battle-trained muscle, as he rocks on the back two legs and sizes the pair of them up.

They don’t seem hysterical and they don’t seem jerk-offs. But the story they’ve been telling is incredible.

His number two, Captain Pasquale Conti, has a reputation for double-checking everything, and so he’s far from done with them. ‘Doctor Verdetti, please tell me again, are you sure that the place these people held you was further below ground than just a basement or old wine cellar?’

Louisa’s hands are still trembling, but that doesn’t stop her being annoyed. ‘They scared me, not turned me stupid. I know where they held me. I took as much notice as I could, and it was way below ground level. They had some kind of cells there.’

‘And they did this because they wanted to kidnap this patient of yours, Anna?’

‘Anna Fratelli.’

‘And Anna’s now dead, but they don’t know it?’

Her temper is close to snapping. ‘Correct.’

‘And you have no rough idea of the location of the place where they held you?’

Louisa knows this is the biggest clue she can give them, but she has nothing. ‘I’m afraid not. I was drugged going into my apartment and the next thing I remember was waking up in the cell they kept me in. It was small and made me panic, I have some claustrophobia problems from my childhood.’

Lorenzo can see she’s distressed. ‘Are you okay, Doctor? Would you like to take a short break?’

Louisa shakes her head. ‘No. I want to get on with it.’ She just wishes this nightmare was over and she could start trying to make her life normal again.

She shuts her eyes and pictures the dark hole they held her in. ‘The place had iron bars, like you’d expect a police cell to have, but they were very old and rusty. There were no windows. No daylight. In fact, no light at all.’ She feels her heart start to race. ‘Everything was pitch black until they came along with their torches. Not the battery kind; rag torches like you see in those old cave-man movies.’

‘Primitive torches?’ queries Lorenzo.

Louisa sees them clearly. ‘Yes. I could smell the stuff, flaming rags soaked in oil or paraffin.’

Lorenzo takes it all in. These days it’s so easy to run miles of electric cable to almost anywhere you want, so there has to be a more sinister reason behind the use of old-fashioned torches.

Then there’s the location.

Either someone has made use of some old and now disused jail facility, or else they’ve gone to great lengths to create one because they regularly hold people against their will.

Pasquale resumes his questioning. ‘Doctor, do you think you were the only one who had been held there?’

Louisa hasn’t thought about that. ‘I don’t know. At one point I thought I heard voices, maybe a young woman, but I never saw her or anyone else.’ She looks flustered and is struggling to breathe normally. ‘I’m sorry, just talking about it is making me edgy. I really don’t know. It all seems like one big unbelievable nightmare to me.’

‘It’s fine. Don’t stress yourself.’ The major gives the nod to his number two to carry on with the questioning.

Pasquale continues as carefully as he can. ‘Doctor, when they moved you, you said the place you woke up in looked like it had just been decorated. Can you explain what you mean?’

Louisa takes a deep breath and slowly exhales. ‘It was more like it was in the process of being decorated. The walls had only just been plastered and smelled wet. There were dust sheets on the floor, cans of paint, and I think some kind of small machine in the middle of the room.’

Pasquale turns to Lorenzo. ‘Maybe a generator or a heater to dry out the plaster?’

‘Could be. Have someone check tool-hire shops.’

The captain presses on. ‘That’s good, that’s helpful. Did you see anything else?’

‘No. They covered my eyes and walked me out of there to a car park.’

‘How far? How far from the newly plastered place to the car?’

Louisa’s hands start to shake again. ‘Not far. They took me up a staircase, a spiral one, I think. I seemed to be doubling back on myself and I was dizzy when it levelled out. Then they walked me a few paces… to the left.’ She swallows her fear and tries hard to get the sequence right in her head. ‘I remember that as we came out into the cold, someone pulled me over to one side. We were standing on a gravel surface, or something like gravel. We didn’t go far, maybe eight, ten steps, and then they pushed me into a car.’ She corrects herself. ‘No, not a car, one of those big things. A Land Rover. I saw it when I jumped out near the church.’

Lorenzo’s impressed. ‘You’ve got good recall. A good memory.’

She smiles for the first time for a long while. ‘ Grazie. It’s the medical training. If you forget little details, you end up killing someone.’