On the Fifth Day (28 page)

icked. Were they being rerouted? He gathered his papers to

gether and stood up, but no one else on the train seemed concerned.

Not everything is about you, Thomas.
It was Kumi's voice in his head, the old reproof.
For all your causes, Thomas,
you're an arrogant son of a bitch. Always have been.
Not always.

They pulled out of the train yards, past the backs of balconied 204

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houses, through an industrial landscape of sidings and cement works sprouting shoots and silos. It was dawn, and in a few more minutes he could see flat meadows with yellow, daisylike flow

ers and clumps of poppies, vibrant in the half light. Then swal

lows and magpies, and fields with hedgerows, the rugged wildness left behind, this landscape tamer, more tropical and sprinkled with palms.

It was six o'clock when the train pulled into the Bari sta

tion, and the air was cool and scented with the sea. He found a taxi and asked for a hotel: any hotel. He didn't care if the dri

ver's brother ran it. He just wanted a place to rest for a few hours.

He registered at the Vittoria Parc Hotel under his own name because he hadn't thought to try to do otherwise, and because now such deception--and its attendant difficulties of passports and credit cards--seemed utterly beyond him. In his dark and spacious room, he sat on the edge of the bed, checked his watch and called Giovanni first, Deborah second. To both he said simply that he had not killed Pietro, that he was sorry for the trouble he had caused them, and that they should try to believe that he had not abused their trust. Before either of them could say whether they believed him, he hung up, promising to call again when things were clearer.

Clearer to whom?
he wondered.
Him? Them? The police?

The alarm set, Thomas lay down in the curtained room and finally let his mind go blank. In minutes he was asleep, Roberta's forgotten cell phone, still switched on, resting on the nightstand.

And as he slept, War, Pestilence, and Famine came for him. CHAPTER 55

When Thomas opened his eyes four hours later it took him more than a minute to remember where he was. The heavy drapes shut out the light so completely that it might have been night, though his stomach told him it was lunchtime. He show

ered, ate in the hotel restaurant and wondered how he would spend the afternoon. His plane for Frankfurt didn't leave till ten, one of the ways the airline kept its costs down. There was no point sitting in the airport for hours where he could easily be recognized if security had been alerted, and he didn't want to loiter in the hotel lobby either. If nothing else, he needed a change of clothes.

He checked out and ordered a hotel shuttle into the old town, arranging that it would pick him up after he'd had time to wander, get an early dinner, and take him to the airport. The woman at the desk was dressed like a flight attendant in the hotel's red and blue colors, wore horn-rimmed glasses, and spoke excellent English. She responded to his gratitude as if nothing could be less worthy of notice; Thomas wondered if he was being patronizing. He apologized for not speaking Ital

ian, and she shrugged this off too, barely looking at him, smil

ing only when the account was finally settled and she could hand him off to the driver.

The driver, who introduced himself in Italian as Claudio, wore a black suit and tie with an immaculately laundered white shirt, so that Thomas felt conspicuous in Pietro's castoffs. Claudio showed him to one of the hotel's identical navy-blue minivans with heavily tinted windows, and he took a seat in the back. They drove along a coast road lined with palms and elegant beachfront property facing a marina.

"Old town, yes?" said Claudio.

"That's right."

"
Castello?
"

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Thomas didn't even know there was a castle. He had read nothing about Bari.

"Sure," he said.

"I pick up you at seven o'clock,
vabbene
okay?"

"Yes."

"You have no bags?"

"No," said Thomas. "We can go directly to the airport."

"Okay," said Claudio, shrugging at this clearly eccentric behavior. "You go see church in old town?"

"I guess."

"Streets very . . ." he took both hands off the wheel to ges

ture
narrow,
"small. Very hard to attack. When Saracens came, they could not win here. Small streets. People shoot from windows. Shoot . . . ?"

"Arrows?"

"
Si.
Arrows."

"Is there much to see at the castle?"

"Not much. It police house now. But has art made here."

Thomas nodded to show he understood: a craft center. The castle was certainly impressive from the outside, a broad, low design with massive square turrets on the corners of the outer walls and a stone bridge over a drained moat. Inside the towers of the keep rose up, pale ocher with touches of rose.

"Beware of pickpockets," said Claudio, pulling the cab over in front of a streetfront cafe, "and call if you want to leave."

Thomas took the offered card and thanked him.

"You still have the signal?" said War.

"Yes," said Pestilence, still in her nun's habit. "He's down near the castle. Park here and we'll intercept."

"I think that's my call, don't you?" said War.

"Fine," said Pestilence, returning her gaze to the map she had picked up at the car rental office. "Wait. The signal is on the blink. Maybe he's gone inside somewhere."

"Great."

"No, it's back," she said. "There must be interference. If 207

O n t h e F i f t h D a y

the streets are narrow or there are a lot of tall buildings it could mess with the GPS transmission. So, fearless leader, what's the plan?"

"We'll split up."

"Brilliant," she muttered. "No wonder you're the general."

"Do I have to remind you what happened when you had him . . . ?"

"No," she interrupted, touching the tender side of her face where the volcanic steam had hit her.

"Okay," said War. "I'll keep the car and take it down to the coast road between the castle and the old town. You work your way down there from this side."

"What about him?"

She nodded to the backseat without turning around. She never looked at Famine when she could avoid it. Now he was crouched low in the seat, sharpening his knife with a leather strap.

"Keep an eye on the GPS," said War, over his shoulder, his eyes on the mirror. "If the target enters any buildings, follow him in and try to maintain visual contact till a kill opportunity presents itself. Got that?"

Famine showed his triangular teeth in a grimace.

"I asked if you got that?" said War.

"Yes," hissed Famine.

"He's a Goddamned liability," muttered Pestilence. "Espe

cially now. He attracts attention and we're no longer in the business of trying to frighten people. You got a real weapon as well as that damned knife?"

In answer Famine leaned forward, his pale bald head cran

ing around so that he was almost cheek to cheek with Pesti

lence. As she flinched away to the right, she found herself looking into the barrel of a large, black automatic that Famine was holding in his right hand. She pushed it away, and he snarled his pleasure, mouth open, tongue lolling.

"Save it for the fucking tourists," she said, turning away.

"Mind your language," snapped War.

CHAPTER 56

Thomas had bought jeans, a couple of shirts, a light jacket, and a few other essentials. He had changed in the store and dropped his castoffs in the Dumpster behind a restaurant be

fore wandering into the old town proper. In moments he was lost.

The Bari streets seemed to have been made in miniature. Often they were only eight feet wide, the houses rising up three or four stories high in a continual wall on each side. Buildings connected across the street with arches. There were no sidewalks and room for only the smallest cars. The streets wound unpredictably, turning sharply without warning, run

ning into junctions where four or five nearly identical streets slanted off at irregular angles, their destinations impossible to guess. Some of the buildings sprouted square towers so that even the skyline was too cluttered to reveal a sense of direc

tion. Washing billowed across the road, strung from windows over flower-decked shrines to saints. Trays of homemade gnocchi dried in the sun, and women with babies sat in door

ways, watching the world go by.

He passed under the sheer white walls of the imposing cathedral, but the only door was locked. He wandered along a street and found himself--surprisingly--back where he had started, on the road with the castle and the bay beyond. He was turning to walk away when he saw Brad Iverson getting out of a white Alfa Romeo parked only yards from where Claudio had dropped him off.

The impulse to call to him, remark on the coincidence, ask if he was there on business, lasted less than a second. Thomas ducked back into the shadows of the Strada Attolini and thought fast.

He's one of them. They've followed you here.
But how?

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O n t h e F i f t h D a y

He peered carefully around the corner. Iverson was hold

ing a phone, studying it, but not dialing.

Thomas snatched the phone from his pocket, fumbled with it, and hit the off button. When he looked around the corner again, Iverson was moving about, eyes on the phone, as if try

ing to get a signal. Thomas ducked back into the street and started running into the heart of the old city as if a thousand Saracens were after him.

There were three of them, if the ghoul was one of them. There might be more, but three of them he would recognize. He could try to find a policeman, but that would get him into hot water of a different kind. He had to get to the airport. Unseen. He kept running down the Strada S. Chiara, just trying to put some distance between himself and the man who had called himself Brad as he had chatted affably about nothing at the Executive's breakfast buffet. But even as he maintained his lumbering rhinoceros run, he knew that he was losing his sense of direction, and he might well be rushing right into the arms of Roberta or--worse--her ghoulish colleague. He slowed to a breathless halt, looked around, and moved down a street toward what looked like a large open space where the white of the flagstone was set startlingly against the deep blue of the sky.

The piazza was the forecourt to another great pale church, the Basilica of St. Nicola, and one of its great wooden doors was ajar. Thomas crossed the open square and ducked inside. The church was clearly Norman, high-gabled and square without spire or dome, and had only a squat tower over the en

trance. It was cool inside, the nave largely the color of its stone, save for the dark columns and the high roof whose painted panels were framed with gilt. Thomas looked for somewhere unobtrusive to collect his thoughts and found a stairway down by the high altar signposted
Alla tomba del
santo.

To the tomb of the saint.

He descended hurriedly.

He found himself in a long shallow chamber that stretched 210

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beneath the sanctuary of the church above and was lined with pews. There was a pair of ornate side chapels and, in the center, a railed screen behind which lay a long stone sarcophagus lit by candles that sparkled on the gold ornamentation of the tomb. An elderly woman knelt at one of the chapels, but the place was otherwise deserted. Thomas edged into one of the pews and slid along, feeling the sweat he had not noticed before, lis

tening to the hammering of his heart. He needed a strategy, and quickly.

"I've lost his signal," said War into his phone. "He could be anywhere."

"Before it was intermittent," said Pestilence. "Now it's gone completely, which means either he's shut it off or he is inside something very solid."

"Like a church," War concluded. "Send Famine into each church he can find. Let him hunt."

"You sure?"

"Just let him do what he does."

"And if he starts taking out civilians?"

"There's a greater good here," said War. "From here on, Famine is off the leash."

CHAPTER 57

Famine didn't like moving around in daylight. He felt con

spicuous, vulnerable. He had built his identity as an assassin around darkness, because when it came right down to it, everyone was afraid of the dark, and when he was in it, they were right to be. The shaved head, the filed teeth, the overlong fingernails had all been extensions of a certain physical odd

ness that had always been there.

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And it wasn't just physical. He had embraced his strange

ness when the world had decided it didn't like what it saw, but what the world had seen wasn't ultimately about what he looked like. It was about the blankness in his eyes, the hollow

ness, the inability to care. It wasn't an animal lack of human

ity the world saw in those pale irises; quite the contrary, it was extremely human. It was an impulse to casual cruelty. He lived to make others afraid. He fed off their panic, their terror when they saw him coming, when they sensed what he might do to them. He lived for that. Needed it. It slaked his famine, an appetite no amount of blood could truly quench. This was not his kind of mission, this running about in the sun, armed with pistols, looking for the quick kill. But success in such things brought him more satisfying meals, longer, slower banquets of the macabre and the horrific. So for now he would do as he was asked, let them give him the orders as they always did, reliant as he was on their protection for his various indiscretions . . .

The phone bleeped once. Knight was signaling again. He wasn't far, right outside the Basilica of St. Nicola. The signal lasted no more than thirty seconds, flickered for almost as long, and then vanished again. He'd gone inside, and Famine, ever hungry, rejoiced in silence as he felt for the haft of the knife in his pocket.