James Twining - The Geneva Deception

‘A hotel?’ Gallo guessed.

‘Out near the airport. The manager saw her picture this morning and called it in.’

‘They ran the story?’

Salvatore reached across to the back seat and handed Gallo a copy of that morning’s La Repubblica. Allegra ’s face dominated the front page under a single shouted headline:

Killer cop on the run.

‘Apparently she checked in late last night and paid in cash. I guess we got lucky.’

‘Funny how much luckier you get when you load the dice,’ Gallo growled as he scanned through the article. He wouldn’t normally have leaked the details of a case, but he’d seen enough of Allegra to realise that, for all her inexperience, she was smart. And in a city of 2.7 million people, that was more than enough to hide and stay hidden. The more people who knew what she looked like, the better. As long as he found her first.

Salvatore ended his call. Gallo turned the key.

‘Who else is running it?’

‘Everyone.’

‘What about the old man?’

‘Professor Eco?’

‘Is that what he calls himself?’ Gallo shrugged as he checked his mirrors and swung out, tyres shrieking.

‘According to him, she took off before telling him anything.’

‘I want him watched anyway,’ Gallo insisted. ‘Just in case she tries to contact him again.’

‘She’s probably armed now, by the way. Eco had a gun. Illegal. Says he can’t find it any more.’

‘Even better.’ Gallo gave a satisfied nod. ‘Gives us an excuse to go in heavy.’

Smiling, he punched the siren on.

Vicolo de Panieri, Travestere, Rome 19th March-7.27 a.m.

Allegra wasn’t about to take any chances. Snatching the gun from Tom’s grasp, she immediately turned it back on him. Unflustered, he settled into his chair.

‘Who are you running from?’ he asked.

The easy thing, the smart thing, she knew, would be to walk away right there and then. She had enough of her own problems already, without getting swept up into his.

But it wasn’t that simple. For a start, it was hard to ignore that, whoever this man was and whatever dark secret had drawn him to this place, it seemed to involve Cavalli and the mysterious symbol that had been linked to three different corpses. What’s more, he’d just placed his fate in her hands by handing her the gun. It was, she knew, a rather unsubtle attempt to win her trust. But it was a powerful gesture all the same, and one that had, if nothing else, earned him the right to be heard.

‘How can you help me?’ she demanded, answering his question with one of her own.

There was a pause, and she guessed from the slight twitch of his left eye that he was debating how much he should tell her.

‘Thirty-six hours ago a friend of mine was murdered,’ he said eventually. ‘Shot by a sniper in a casino in Vegas. I think they were killed because they were closing in on someone.’

‘“Closing in”? What was he, a cop?’ Allegra guessed with a surprised frown. This guy didn’t look or feel like any policeman she’d ever met.

‘ She was FBI,’ he corrected her. ‘Special Agent Jennifer Browne. Cavalli was fingered by a man she arrested in New York. A dealer for a tombaroli smuggling ring. She found a drawing of the symbol I showed you in his trash. I’ve got the case file, if you want to see it,’ he offered, leaning forward to reach into his bag.

‘Wait,’ she said sharply. ‘Kick it over here.’

With a shrug, he placed his bag on the floor and slid it towards her with his foot. Keeping her eyes fixed on him, she felt inside it, her fingers eventually closing around a thick file that she pulled on to her lap. Seeing the FBI crest, she shot him a questioning, almost concerned look.

‘Don’t tell me you’re FBI too?’

‘No,’ he admitted.

‘Then where did you get this?’

A pause.

‘I borrowed it.’

‘You borrowed it?’ She gave him a disbelieving smile. ‘From the FBI?’

‘When one agent gets killed, another one gets blamed,’ he said, an impatient edge to his voice for the first time. ‘Everyone was too busy covering their own ass to worry about finding Jennifer’s killer. I did what I had to do.’

‘And came here? Why? What were you hoping to find?’

‘I don’t know. Something that might tell me why Jennifer was murdered, or what this symbol means, or who the Delian League is.’

‘The Delian League?’ she shot back. ‘What do you know about them?’

‘Not as much as you, by the sound of things,’ he replied with a curious frown.

‘I just know what it used to be,’ she said, his story so far and the reassuring weight of the gun in her hand convincing her she wasn’t risking much by sharing a little more of what she knew.

‘What do you mean, “used to be”?’

‘There was an association of city states in Ancient Greece. A military alliance, formed to protect themselves from the Spartans,’ she explained. ‘The members used to throw lead into the sea when they joined, to symbolise that their friendship would last until it floated back to the surface.’

‘Lead. Like the engraved disc you found on Cavalli?’

‘Not just on Cavalli,’ she admitted, trying not to think of Ricci’s sagging skin and Argento’s tortured smile. ‘There have been two other murders. The discs were found with them too.’

‘Did Cavalli know them?’

‘I doubt it,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘Cavalli was an attorney based in Melfi. Adriano Ricci was an enforcer for the De Luca crime family. While Giulio Argento worked for the Banco Rosalia, a subsidiary of the Vatican bank. A priest would have more in common with a prostitute than those three with each other.’

‘But the same killer, right?’

Allegra’s eyes snapped to the door before she could answer, the sound of approaching sirens lifting her to her feet.

‘You must have been followed,’ Tom glared at her accusingly.

She ignored him, instead picking up a chair and swinging it hard against one of the sliding glass doors. It fractured on the third blow, the safety glass falling out in a single, crazed sheet. They leapt through the frame as they heard three, maybe four cars roar up the street outside.

‘Here-’

Tom cradled his hands and gave Allegra a boost, then reached up so she could help haul him up on to the garden wall beside her.

‘You’ll slow me down,’ she said with a firm shake of her head.

‘You need me,’ Tom insisted.

‘I’ve done okay so far.’

‘Really? Then how do you explain that?’ Tom glanced towards the muffled sound of the police banging on the front door.

‘They got lucky,’ she said with a shrug, readying herself to jump down.

‘You mean they got smart. Let me guess. You turned your phone on just before you got here, right?’

‘How did you know…?’ she breathed, Tom’s question pulling her back from the edge. She had briefly switched it on. Just long enough to see if Aurelio had left her a message. Something, anything, that might explain what she had overheard. But all there had been was a series of increasingly frantic messages from her boss to turn herself in.

‘It only takes a few seconds to triangulate a phone signal. You led them straight here.’

She took a deep breath, a small and increasingly insistent voice at the back of her head fighting her instinct to just jump down.

‘Who are you?’

‘Someone who knows what it’s like to be on the run,’ he shot back. ‘Someone who knows what it takes, keep running fast enough to stay alive.’

Sighing heavily, she reached down, her hand clutching on to his.