Michael Morley - Viper

The grey light of another drizzly morning brought with it the harsh reality of the impending crowds. Those who would come to stop and stare. Well, today he'd give them something to gawp at.

Franco got to his feet. His bones ached. Blood rushed to his head and pounded hard in his temples. He was short of breath and it took him several minutes of walking before he felt okay.

He could hear voices from a long way off. Workers moving down Via dell'Abbondanza, the long cobbled road that stretches past the Stabian Baths. They were heading into the Forum and then the Basilica and Temple of Apollo.

Soon they would be around him. Their eyes on him. Scorching his skin with scowls and prejudice.

For a moment the December sun dodged a rain cloud and painted the cobbled streets and stone walls in shimmering gold.

Franco hoped Paolo and his grandfather would forgive him. Not only for what he'd done – but, most of all, for what he was about to do.

He put his hand in his pocket. One more shot of heroin. Two more magazines of bullets.

It was enough.

He set off on his walk. His final walk around Pompeii. 8.45 a.m. Capo di Posillipo, La Baia di Napoli The Mercedes Maybach wound its way down the spiralling hillside. The interior temperature, as always, was twenty degrees. Outside it was down to four. And it was foggy too. Fredo Finelli sat in the back reading La Gazzetta, trying not to think of the doctor's appointment and how late he was going to be. This was the crunch meeting. If his blood sugar levels hadn't normalized, then they were going to start treating him for diabetes. That's what they'd warned, and he was damned sure that was what was going to happen.

He'd ignored symptoms of raging thirst, dizziness, tiredness and headaches for as long as possible. Now he simply hoped that whatever they decided to do, it wouldn't involve needles. He'd heard somewhere that these days there were tablets that could be taken instead. If a clean bill of health wasn't in the offing, then that's what he wanted.

The 62S was itching to go, keen to get on the auto-strada and ignite its V12 engine. Instead, the traffic was getting worse. Soon it was forced to a halt.

'What's wrong?' Fredo called from the back.

Armando Lopapa, a fifty-year-old no-nonsense Neapolitan who'd been his driver for more than a decade, slid down the dividing glass. 'I'm not sure. It's not the car in front. Must be something ahead of that. Looks like a kind of accident.'

'Probably the damned fog. People seem to have forgotten how to drive properly these days.'

The driver behind them honked his horn.

'Go see what it is,' insisted the Don. 'Get them out of the damned way.'

Armando did as he was told. The horn behind him blared again. 'Hey, fuckhole, shut the fuck up,' he shouted, slipping on his chauffeur's cap.

A racing bike lay on the misty blacktop. A teenage boy in yellow cycling Lycra was struggling to sit up. He was holding his face and had badly cut legs. A thirty-something businessman in a blue suit leaned over him. 'He fell. I didn't hit him,' he protested weakly. 'It was an accident, I did nothing.'

Armando wanted to backhand him. He was clearly the kind of asshole who wouldn't slow down for a kid on a bike. Naples was full of them. Maybe later he would slap him. 'You okay?' he asked the boy. The youngster was about fourteen, could easily have been his own son. 'Can you stand up?'

The driver behind them blasted his horn once more, got out, banged shut his door and joined them. 'What the fuck's happening? I'm really late for a meeting. Can't we get things going here?'

'Kid fell off his bike,' repeated the coward in the suit.

Armando ignored them both and checked his watch. The Don would be furious if this wasn't sorted quickly.

'My head hurts, I feel really sick,' groaned the kid. He looked shaken, maybe concussed.

'Come on,' said Armando. 'Let's get him to the side of the road. Someone call an ambulance.' He moved round the boy and carefully put his arms under his body. He knew he should really leave him until medical help arrived but there wasn't the time, so he tried his best to keep the kid's head and spine straight.

Traffic was backing up badly. Inside the Merc, Fredo Finelli was growing impatient. He'd give it another five minutes and then call the doctor and rearrange his appointment.

The jerk in the blue suit picked the boy's bike up and wheeled it about twenty metres down the road and rested it against a tree. Meanwhile, horn blaster called for help on his mobile, then muttered more about being late for something and headed back to his car.

Armando quickly settled the kid on the grass verge and checked him again. 'It'll be all right, we'll have a doctor here pronto.' The kid rolled over on to his side and clutched his head, then pulled up his legs. 'You okay? Try to stay still. Don't move about, you might do yourself some more damage.' Maybe that bastard in the car had hit him after all.

But the kid wasn't in pain.

The blood on his legs and face was fake.

He was curled up because he was taking cover.

The car at the front of the Mercedes, and the one at the back, blew up simultaneously.

The Merc's custom-made bulletproof glass and reinforced metalwork could only do so much. The explosion flipped the Maybach like a pancake. It flopped and tumbled over the crash barriers. Slid down the hillside, taking out trees and rolling over boulders.

The noise ruptured Armando's eardrum and the blast threw him to the ground. He scrambled to his feet and ran to the edge. The car had fallen nearly twenty metres on to rocks. The windows were blown out and the roof was mangled. It had dropped on to the road below, broken through the next set of barriers, then careered down another part of the hillside.

Armando turned round.

He was alone.

The boy and everyone else had gone.

It had been a classic hit. 9.00 a.m. Santa Maria Eliana, centro citta, Napoli Morning service was a traditional Latin High Mass. As always, Carmine Cicerone settled down to what he knew would be a truly uplifting experience. A spiritual detox.

Thunder rumbled outside but there was still enough daylight to shine sharply through sections of the pristine stained-glass windows that depicted the Stations of the Cross and ran the complete length of the seventeenth-century church. A pepper cloud of dust swirled in multicoloured shafts of light and a small rainbow fell across the white marble of the altar floor. Carmine the Dog loved everything about going to church. The architectural grandeur of the building. The deeply colourful and symbolic costumes. The centuries-old script. Even the smell of frankincense swung by the broody-looking altar boy whose eyebrows met in the middle. It was wonderful. Pure theatre.

Today he placed two hundred euros in the rose-wood collection plate that passed down his pew and he thanked God for making him wise enough to have slept on things. The plan that Vito had put together and shown him just before he'd settled in his pew was crude and shabby. He really wished he could instill a more businesslike approach in the man. Put bluntly, he'd advocated the simultaneous killing of Finelli, Valsi and as many other of their Capi and soldiers as they could manage. A day of bloodshed, then a decade of peace, that's what he'd promised. No, thank you. Carmine wasn't buying. He knew it was shrewder to take compensation from Finelli and then let his clan rip itself apart. Once they were weak, then he might consider finishing them off.

The service lasted forty-five minutes. He looked around at the end and was sad to see that the grand old church was virtually empty. Never mind – Father Mario had still put on a stellar performance. Carmine had taken la sacra Comunione and, as he filed out behind half a dozen people, he felt positively rejuvenated.