Gregg Loomis - The Pegasus Secret

Lang finally took off his helmet and turned to watch Gurt unbuckle hers. "I had forgotten you won the Agency's shooting competition in eighty-seven. Pistol and rifle, if I recall."

She smiled demurely as though he had complimented a new dress. "Eighty-eight and eighty-nine also. After that, I quit competing."

"What happened to the gun?"

"Over the hillside along with the Schweinhund in the truck. When the police find the wreck, they are likely to start interrogating anyone in the area. There are bullet holes in the windscreen. I didn't want to have a weapon on me." "The gun is clean?"

She was leaning forward, inspecting her makeup in the bike's mirrors, more like a debutante than someone who had just made a shot James Bond wouldn't have dared. "It is Agency-issue. My gloves prevented my fingers from printing on it or powder marks on my hands for paraffin to detect. I need only to also dispose of the extra clip in the Krausers."

"Should we go back, see what happened to the driver?"

She turned from the mirror to ruefully regard the cracked fiberglass of the BMW's rear fender. "And have the authorities show up while we're poking around? I do not think they would listen to the explanations of an international fugitive."

Lang thought about that. "There may be a clue as to who he is, was."

"Perhaps if you take off your leathers, put them back in the bags, I will go back alone. If the police come, they will never connect a woman to such a shooting. They are, after all, Italian. They will think it was an attempted high-john."

"Hijack."

"Him, too. I will see if the driver has any identification. I will also make sure he is unable to tell anyone what happened."

He watched her ride off. Kipling, he thought, must have known someone like Gurt when he wrote that "the female of the species is more deadly than the male."

The Umbrian Auto Strada

Thirty minutes later

Lang waited in one of the road stops that litter the Auto Strada. With its islands of gas pumps, cafeterias and bathrooms reeking of disinfectant, it could just as well have been on the interstates of New York or on Florida's Sunshine State Parkway. Why does America export only the tacky? Lang had a theory that someday all of Europe would look like Kansas or, worse, California. With that to look forward to, how could anybody be in favor of globalization?

He was thinking of something else that day, however. The cappuccino in front of him was simply his ticket of admission, the price to be paid for a seat at the bar. The caffeine provided a small high, lost in the tide of adrenaline that was just now beginning to ebb. How had he lived this long without the rush only danger gives? Even if his job at the Agency had never involved a life-or-death situation, a shoot-out, or a high-speed chase, it had been exciting to plan the smuggling of a defector across an armed border. Even guessing an opponent's next move on the chessboard of Europe had its thrills before the red king and its pawns were swept from the table.

Now all he had to look forward to was verbal fencing in a courtroom, a competition as highly stylized as any Kabuki performance. At this moment, he missed the game more than he had ever anticipated. The fast-paced developments and the challenge had faded into a memory he suspected was tainted by nostalgia as he had pursued the crushing sameness of law school and practice. At the time, it had been more than an even swap: the certainty he would be coming home every evening in exchange for broken promises and a wife sick with worry when he could only tell her he would be gone for an undetermined period.

Dawn wasn't here anymore and Lang was involved in a game with stakes higher than he would have chosen. Even the Reds, those world-threatening hoards of Godless communists, the Agency's raison d'être, had not been fanatics. At least, not the ones he had known. He had never heard of an opposing agent willing, let alone eager, to die for Marxism like a mujahedeen ready to sacrifice all for Allah. They, the name Lang had unconsciously pasted on the unknown group, They were as zealous as any bomb-toting Arab terrorist. His would-be assassin had dashed across the room to jump, to meet whatever maker he contemplated, rather than risk capture. The driver of that truck could not have expected to survive the crash his speed made inevitable oh that winding road. He had only hoped to take the two motorcyclists with him to whatever place he thought worth his life on earth.

For what?

To Lang, such fervor implied religion, a religious group, more likely a cult. History was replete with dismal examples: the Moslem cult of Assassins, from whom we take the word, who had greeted the Crusaders with nocturnal knives, the Hindu Thuggee, stealthy stranglers of the imperial English, Japanese kamikaze dying for their emperor-god.

Brother Marcenni's explanation had given Lang an idea 'why They might want the picture, might kill to get it. All sorts of wealth could be hidden somewhere, Poussin's painting the key to its location. But he'd never heard of martyrs for material riches. Men died for causes, for ideas, for vengeance. But for earthly wealth they would never possess?

But then, the old monk hadn't said the picture was a map to pirates' gold, buried treasure or the like, had he? But why else would a painting, one that did not even exactly copy the original, be worth killing for? Something of ideological value?

Like what, the holy grail?

There were some facts of which Lang was fairly certain. They wanted the painting and intended to eradicate anyone who might have learned its secret. That secret had to do with the physical location of something of great value to Them. Lang was interested in what that something might be. It could lead him to whoever had killed Janet and Jeff. And tried to kill him. Now that he knew the painting might have a secret, he needed to find out who was guarding the truth the enigma concealed. And why.

He had a plan.

There was a hush in the crowded room as Gurt entered and took the vacant seat at the bar beside Lang. A six-foot Valkyrie in motorcycle leathers was apparently not a common sight. Oblivious to the eyes following her every breath, she lit a Marlboro and motioned to the man behind the bar, pointing to Lang's cup. She also wanted cappuccino.

Lang would have bet that was the fastest service the barman had provided in weeks. He grinned as the hum of conversation resumed. "You make quite an entrance."

She took a deep drag from the cigarette, speaking through the haze of her own tobacco smoke. "They'll get over it."

He waited impatiently for her to tell what she had found. She waited until she tasted her coffee.

"Well?"

With her free hand, she reached into a pocket and held up a silver chain. From it dangled the same design Lang had seen in Atlanta, four triangles meeting in the center of a circle.

She let the pendant twirl on the chain. "No papers, no wallet, no identification other than this."

"I take it he was…?"

"As a herring."

"Mackerel."

"Why should one fish be more dead than another? The jewelry mean anything to you?"

"Same as the man who broke into my apartment in Atlanta had."

She stubbed out her cigarette and put the circle on its chain back into a pocket of the leathers."Would have been easier to have used a rifle than a truck. Any guess why he tried to run us under instead of taking an easy shot from behind a tree?"

Lang wasn't eager to question the wisdom of the decision that had left Gurt and him alive, but he said, "Maybe there was some reason for us to die in a traffic accident."

Gurt shrugged as though it was a matter of no consequence. "Dead is dead. And we aren't. What's next?"

"I need to get out of Italy, go to London."