Douglas Preston - The Book of the Dead

Despite everything-despite the extremity of the moment-Pendergast continued to stare. This is my brother’s house, he thought.

With an officious swagger, the carabiniere went to the iron gate-which stood open-and pressed the buzzer. And now, spell broken, Pendergast brushed past him, ducked through the gate, and ran at a crouch toward the side door on the terrace, which was banging in the wind.

“Wait, signore!”

Pendergast slipped out his Colt 1911 and pressed himself on the wall against the door, catching it in his hand as it swung to. It was riddled with bullet holes. He glanced around: a shutter outside the kitchen was also open, swinging in the wind.

The carabiniere came puffing up beside him. He eyed the door. “Minchia!” His own firearm came out immediately.

“What is it, Antonio?” said the Ape driver, coming up, the tip of his cigarette dancing in the roaring dark.

“Go back, Stefano. This does not look good.”

Pendergast pulled out a flashlight, ducked into the house, shone it around. Splinters of wood lay scattered across the floor. The beam of the flashlight illumined a large living room in the Mediterranean style, with cool plastered surfaces, a tiled floor, and heavy antique furniture: spare and surprisingly austere. He had a glimpse, beyond an open door, of an extraordinary library, rising two stories, done up in a surreal pearl gray. He ducked inside, noting that a second shutter in the library had been shot open.

Still, no signs of a struggle.

He strode back to the side door, where the carabiniere was examining the bullet holes. The man straightened up.

“This is a crime scene, signore. I must ask you to leave.”

Pendergast exited onto the terrace and squinted up the dim mountain. “Is that a trail?” he asked the Ape driver, who was still standing there, gaping.

“It goes up the mountain. But they would not have taken that trail-not at night.”

The carabiniere appeared a moment later, radio in hand. He was calling the carabiniere caserma on the island of Lipari, thirty miles away.

Pendergast exited through the gate and walked up to the end of the lane. A ruined staircase in stone ran up the side of the hill, joining a larger, very ancient trail on the slope just above. Pendergast knelt, shone his light on the ground. After a moment, he rose and took a dozen steps up the trail, examining it with his light.

“Do not go up there, signore! It is extremely dangerous!”

He knelt again. In a thin layer of dust protected from the wind by an ancient stone step, he could make out the impression of a heel-a small heel. The impression was fresh.

And there, above it, another small, faint print, lying on top of a larger one. Diogenes, pursued by Constance.

Pendergast rose and gazed up the dizzying slope of the volcano. It was so black he could see nothing except the faint flicker of muffled orange light around its cloud-shrouded summit.

“This trail,” he called back to the policeman. “Does it go to the top?”

“Yes, signore. But once again, it is very dangerous and is for expert climbers only. I can assure you, they did not go up there. I have called the carabinieri on Lipari, but they cannot come until tomorrow. And maybe not even then, with this weather. There is nothing more I can do, aside from searching the town… where surely your niece and the professor have gone.”

“You won’t find them in the town,” Pendergast said, turning and walking up the trail.

“Signore! Do not take that trail! It leads to the Sciara del Fuoco!”

But the man’s voice was carried away in the wind as Pendergast climbed with all the speed he could muster, his left hand gripping the flashlight, his right the handgun.

Diogenes Pendergast jogged along a windswept shoulder of lava 2,500 feet up the side of the mountain. The wind blew demonically, lashing the dense ginestra brush that crowded the trail. He paused to catch his breath. Looking down, he could just barely see the dim surface of the sea, flecked with bits of lighter gray that were whitecaps. The lighthouse of Strombolicchio sat alone on its rock, surrounded by a gray ring of surf, blinking its mindless, steady message out to an empty sea.

His eye followed the sea in toward land. From his vantage point, he could make out fully a third of the island, a great swerve of shoreline from Piscità to the crescent beach below Le Schiocciole, where the sea raged in a broad band of white surf. The dim illumination of the town lay sprinkled along the shore: dirty, wavering points of light, an uncertain strip of humanity clinging to an inhospitable land. Beyond and above, the volcano rose massively, like the ribbed trunk of a giant mangrove, in great parallel ridges, each with its own name: Serra Adorno, Roisa, Le Mandre, Rina Grande. He turned, looked up. Above him loomed the immense black fin of the Bastimento Ridge, behind which lay the Sciara del Fuoco-the Slope of Fire. That ridge ran up to the summit itself: still shrouded in fast-moving clouds, blooming with the lurid glow of each fresh eruption, the thunderous booms shaking the ground.

A few hundred meters up, Diogenes knew, the trail split. The left fork cut eastward and switchbacked to the summit crater up the broad cinder slopes of the Liscione. The right fork, the ancient Greek trail, continued westward, climbing the Bastimento and ending abruptly where it was cut by the Sciara del Fuoco.

She would be at least fifteen, twenty minutes behind him by now-he had been pushing himself to the utmost, climbing at maximum speed up the crumbling stone staircases and cobbled switchbacks. It was physically impossible for her to have kept up. That gave him time to think, to plan his next step-now that he had her where he wanted her.

He sat down on a crumbling wall. The obvious mode of attack would be an ambush from the almost impenetrable brush that crowded each side of the trail. It would be simple: he could hide himself in the ginestra at, say, one of the switchback turns, and shoot straight down the trail as she came up. But this plan had the great disadvantage of being the obvious one, a plan she would most certainly anticipate. And the brush was so thick he wondered if he could even push into it without leaving a ragged hole behind or, at the least, signs of damage visible to a keen eye-and she had a damnably keen eye.

On the other hand, she did not know the trail-could not know the trail. She had arrived at the island and come straight to his villa. No map could convey the steepness, the danger, the roughness of the trail. There was a spot ahead, just below the fork, where the trail ran close under a bluff of hardened lava, looped back around, and then topped the bluff. There were cliffs all around it-there was no way for her to get off the trail at that point. If he waited for her on the bluff above, she would have to pass almost directly underneath him. There was simply no other way for her to go. And because she did not know the trail, she could not anticipate that it doubled back over the bluff.

Yes. That would serve nicely.

He continued up the mountain and in another ten minutes had reached the final switchback and gained the top of the bluff. But as he looked around for a hiding place, he saw there was an even better position-indeed, it was nearly perfect. She would see the bluff as she approached and might anticipate a strike from it. But well before the bluff itself was another ambush point-in the deep shadows below it, half obscured by rocks-that looked to be far subtler; indeed, it was completely invisible from farther down the trail.

With an unutterable feeling of relief that it would soon be over, he carefully took up a position in the shadow of the switchback and prepared to wait. It was a perfect spot: the deep darkness of the night and the natural lines of the terrain making it appear there was no break at all in the rocks behind which he hid. Within fifteen minutes or so, she should appear. After he killed her, he would throw her body into the Sciara, where it would vanish forever. And he would once again be free.