Clive Cussler - Plague Ship

Another barrage pummeled the back of the bus, and the tourists outside started to scatter like startled birds.

Eddie knew it was only a matter of time before they hit something critical or that he’d run into a police roadblock. The distant sound of sirens blaring was drawing closer by the second. A sign said he was on the VIA DEI FORI IMPERIALI, not that it meant anything to him. The road was broad, by Roman standards, and too open for Eddie’s tastes. It divided ahead, next to an open parking area filled with buses much like the one he’d commandeered.

He veered left down a street hemmed in by four- and five-story brick buildings. The storefronts offered everything from leather goods to electronics to exotic pets. But it was still too wide for what Eddie had in mind. Brake lights suddenly flared in front of the bus as traffic came to a crawl. Eddie pounded on the horn, and he steered the bus onto the curb. The sidewalk wasn’t nearly wide enough for the large vehicle.

As he made his way down the cobbled walkway, the bus mowed down parking meters like wheat before a combine and shouldered aside automobiles amid a cacophony of car alarms and shouts.

The bus plowed through the outside displays of a tourist shop, sending up a blizzard of brightly colored postcards and what Eddie thought, for one terrifying moment, was the body of a woman, but it turned out to be a mannequin displaying a T-shirt. The right-side mirror was ripped off when the bus scraped against a building.

He burst out onto an intersection. Cars screeched all around him, as Eddie guided the bus toward a narrow lane that was more of a trench cut between buildings than a road. There were cars going into the alley but not emerging from it.

Kovac’s men fired at the bus again, having replaced spent magazines. The gas pedal suddenly felt mushy under Eddie’s foot, and in the undamaged left-side mirror he could see smoke erupting from the back of the bus.

“Come on, baby, fifty more yards.”

The engine coughed and caught again and again, sputtering and surging in its death throes. Eddie reached for the microphone, as the gap between the buildings grew closer but not larger.

“Everybody, brace yourselves.”

Eddie sensed the engine about to let go, so he slipped the transmission into neutral and coasted the last thirty feet. Behind him, he heard the motor seize, in a tearing of metal that would have lanced Max’s engineer heart.

The bus entered the dim alley with barely five inches of clearance on either side. The remaining left mirror was sheared off. Eddie saw that the road constricted even further just ahead, because one apartment building was slightly larger than its neighbors. He hit the brakes an instant before the bus struck the building, bounced back, and smeared against the opposite apartments, before becoming completely jammed. The impact caused a fresh wave of frightened screams from above, but Eddie could tell by how quickly the sound faded that no one had been hurt.

A large red fire extinguisher was clipped just below his legs. He popped it free and smashed it into the windshield. The glass starred but didn’t break. He hit the windshield again and again until he’d opened a man-size hole. He jumped though it, setting a hand on the warm asphalt when he landed to steady himself before taking off at a run. When he looked back, he could see dense smoke boiling from behind the bus.

Kovac’s men couldn’t climb over the vehicle, so they would have to backtrack around the apartment block, provided they weren’t boxed in by other cars who’d followed them into the alley.

He rounded the corner and slowed to a normal pedestrian gait, blending in with the flow of people headed home from their offices or out to dinner with their families. A minute later, he heard car tires screeching as he ducked into a taxi. The cab pulled away as the Fiat Bravo braked in front of the alley.

He’d lost them.

A few minutes later, he threw some Euros at the driver and jumped out of the vehicle while it was stalled in traffic. He bought a prepaid disposable cell phone from a tobacco stand. Eddie walked into a crowded bar, ordered a beer from the girl behind the counter, and dialed the hotel. The staff was still buzzing about the man who’d climbed down the balconies, so it took him a few minutes to explain that gunmen had broken into his room. The reception-desk staffer promised to call the polizia . Eddie gave him his cell number.

Fifteen minutes later, Eddie’s beer gone, his phone chirped.

“Mr. Kwan?” That was the alias they’d used to book the suite.

“Yes.”

“Our desk manager entered your room with the police. There was a man in your suite named Jenner with a cut to the head,” the clerk said apologetically. “They would like you to return here to get your information, a statement, I think you call it. They have many questions about what took place and about an incident that happened nearby.”

“Of course, I’ll be happy to cooperate with the authorities. I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

“Thank you, Mr. Kwan.”

“Thank you.” Eddie dialed another number. When it was answered, he said, without preamble, “Tiny, file a flight plan out of the country. I’ll be there as quickly as I can.” He didn’t wait for the pilot’s reply before cutting the connection and dialing again. As he listened to the ringing over the line, he knew that there was no way Kovac would remain in the city—or in Italy, for that matter—so there was no reason for him to wait around for the police to pick him up.

“Hello.”

“Chairman, it’s Eddie. Kovac has kidnapped Max.”

A heartbeat passed before Juan responded. “What about his son, Kyle?”

“I think the little punk was in on it.”

CHAPTER 20

“HOLD ON ONE SECOND,” CABRILLO SAID, GETTING his mind around the situation.

He was alone in his cabin. His desk was strewn with paperwork that had gone ignored too long. He hit the intercom button for the communications station in the Op Center.

“Yes, Chairman,” the night-duty supervisor answered at once.

“What’s the status of Max Hanley’s radio ID chip?”

Each member of the Corporation had a locator microchip surgically embedded in the leg that beamed a faint signal to the constellation of communications satellites circling the globe. Powered by the nervous system, with an occasional transdermal boost of electricity like with a pacemaker, the devices allowed Juan to know where any member of his team was at all times.

“I’m not getting a signal. Hold on. Here we go. The computer says his transponder stopped working eleven minutes ago, about two miles from the hotel where he was staying with his son. Eddie’s is working fine. I show him in central Rome, about a quarter mile from the Colosseum.”

“Thank you.” Juan released the intercom and spoke into his desk telephone, a modern instrument disguised to look like a Bakelite phone from the 1930s. “Max’s transponder’s out.”

“I already figured it would be,” Eddie replied.

“That’s how they tracked you to Rome, isn’t it? Kyle Hanley was chipped when he was in Greece. And they took the precaution of sweeping Max in case we did the same thing.”

“They probably carved it out of his thigh, in whatever vehicle they used to make their getaway.”

“But even the best chips can only give you a rough approximation, they aren’t as powerful as GPS,” Juan said.

“That’s why I think Kyle helped them. When they ambushed us in the hotel’s elevator they brought Max and me back to the suite. Kyle didn’t look all that drugged to me. I think he came to during our flight from Crete and was faking it for the last part of our trip. He was left alone for a few minutes in one of the bedrooms while we spoke with Dr. Jenner. Supposedly, he was unconscious, but if he was awake he could have called Kovac, or someone else in the movement, and given them the name of the hotel and the room number.”