Scott Mariani - The Armada Legacy

Because a crazy, dangerous, irresistible idea had just come into her mind. She stood up, slipped off her shoes and crept silently across to the door through which the guards had brought her. After listening for sounds outside the door and hearing nothing, she gently opened it a crack and peeked through. There was nobody around.

She swallowed. You’re as mad as he is , she thought. But the opportunity was too tempting to resist. She stepped out of the dining room and glanced around her. The wide hallway had four other doors, all gleaming walnut with shiny gold handles, any of which could lead to some kind of exit.

Brooke was committed now. She padded furtively across the hallway to the nearest of the doors, pressed her ear to it for a moment and then turned the handle.

The room behind the door was a lounge that looked like something from a gentlemen’s club circa 1850: heavily varnished panelling, yet more artwork, a mirror over the fireplace, Chesterfield furniture. Brooke searched the room for a phone. She had no idea what country she was in, let alone what number to call for the police, but if she could make a call to Ben’s mobile, she might be able to get through to him. The thought of being able to speak to him made her heart jump.

But there was no phone. Brooke was about to leave the room and try another when the sudden tap of approaching footsteps outside made her back away from the door and press herself against the wall. The footsteps paused outside. Voices: two men, speaking Spanish.

She held her breath. The door was a couple of inches ajar, and leaning forward she could just about make out the two guards in the hallway. Both were armed with pistols. They’d paused so that one could show the other something on his phone, some picture that made them both laugh. Brooke drew away from the door. Would they notice it was hanging open and come inside to check the room? For a terrifying instant she glanced about her for a hiding place, convinced she was about to be caught – but then the guards moved on and she could breathe again.

Their footsteps grew fainter. She counted one – two – three –

And stopped at four.

She stopped because she’d just realised that what she’d taken to be a mirror over the fireplace, framed in ornate gilt wood, was actually a painting.

It was a portrait of a woman. A woman in a shimmering green dress, with long, curling auburn hair that was elegantly swept up to show off the diamonds and emeralds around her neck. The slender hand posed resting on her lap wore the matching bracelet. Her green eyes looked straight into the viewer’s, stunningly lifelike and filled with joy and excitement. She was smiling.

Brooke gaped at the painting. It couldn’t be … was it … ?

It was of her.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Her mind reeling so much she could hardly walk straight, Brooke crossed the room to stare at the painting more closely. It seemed incredible, impossible.

And yet it seemed true. The woman had her face, her hair. The dress in the picture was the exact same one that she was wearing. The jewels were the ones that Serrato had given her at dinner. Brooke couldn’t believe what she was seeing.

It was only when she got right up close and stared hard at the detail of the picture that she began to make out subtle differences and realised that the painting was of someone else. The eyes were a slightly different shade, and slightly closer together than hers. The shape of the nose, the ears, the chin. But nonetheless the resemblance was unsettling.

Brooke ran her hand along the bottom of the painting’s ornate frame and her fingers found something. She looked at it: a small rectangular plaque sculpted into the golden wood. A plaque that bore, in tiny black script, the name ‘Alicia’.

Her thoughts were racing as she left the room and ran up the passage in the opposite direction that the guards had gone, searching left and right for an exit as she went, the marble floor hard and cold under her bare soles. The notion of trying to escape now, dressed as she was, barefoot, totally vulnerable and lost, was insane – it was against everything she’d ever learned or taught. But none of her training or knowledge were of any use to her now. She was no normal hostage; and this Ramon Serrato, whoever the hell he was, was certainly no normal kidnapper.

Alicia. Did Serrato truly believe that Brooke was Alicia? It was hard to grasp what was happening to her. She almost wished he was holding her for ransom in a dank cellar, hooded and chained up. Anything was better than this bizarre, fetishistic kind of slavery. She had to get out of here.

Doors; more doors. They passed in a flurry as she ran on, gathering up the hem of the dress to keep it from tangling up her legs. Nothing that looked like an exit, and there could have been a bunch of guards standing right behind any of them. She’d never been inside such a huge house before – it seemed to go on forever and now she was starting to panic, her breath coming in gasps as she thought about what would happen when Serrato returned to the dining room to find it empty. A whole army of his men would go storming through the whole place searching for her. She couldn’t possibly evade them for long.

A glimpse of a window as she tore down a passage and went hurrying down a narrow flight of steps told her night had fallen. This part of the house was workmanlike and plain, dimly lit with bare walls and rough concrete floors that chafed on her bare feet as she ran. She hurried round a corner and had to fling herself into a shady alcove for cover as a set of doors swung open and she almost ran right into two men dressed in catering aprons. The place they’d emerged from was a kitchen, but from the pungent aroma of grease, fried beans, tomato and chilli that wafted out of the doors she guessed it catered for Serrato’s troops rather than meeting the elevated gastronomic tastes of the man himself. She waited hidden, holding her breath, for the cooks to pass by, then ran on.

She was quite lost now, and becoming more panic-stricken by the second. The passage she was heading down was getting narrower and seemed to be leading nowhere. Brooke was on the verge of turning round to head back the way she’d come or find another route through the house, when she suddenly stopped dead.

She’d heard something. And as she stood there tensed up in the gloomy passage, she heard it again. The sound of a woman’s voice not far away. She cocked her head, listening in alarm. No, there were two distinct voices – two women.

And they were both screaming in fear.

Brooke moved along more slowly now, wondering where the terrible keening sound was coming from. She paused at a door, gave it a tentative shove and peered inside as it creaked open. It was a laundry room, with a row of large, squat washing machines along one wall and stacks of laundry baskets along another. Near the ceiling above the machines was a window, thick with dirt and cobwebs. She realised she’d wandered into a basement.

Her escape attempt was forgotten for the moment as she felt herself drawn to the source of the awful, continuous screaming that she now realised was coming from through that high window. A bright white light, like a floodlamp from outside, was glaring through the dirty glass.

Despite the awkward dress Brooke managed to clamber up onto one of the washing machines, so that the window ledge was about eight inches above her head. She reached up to the ledge with both hands and hauled her chin level with the window sill, scrabbling with her bare toes to get a purchase on the wall, then peered through the dirty glass.

The window was a few inches above the ground level of a brightly-lit concrete yard, about ten metres square and surrounded by a whitewashed block wall. There were six men standing in the yard, one of them just inches from where Brooke was straining to peer through the window, so that the leg of his combat trousers half-blocked the view. But she could see enough.