CHATEAU TICINO
CAMPIONE D’ITALIA, SWITZERLAND
TYLER’S TESLA MODEL X peeled off down the ridge before Talia even managed to locate the garage. She vowed he would never slip away from her again and used the next hour or so to familiarize herself with the chateau’s layout—five floors, ten bedrooms, every one of them a suite.
The Eastern Orthodox iconography she had noticed the night before made up the bulk of his art collection, along with a few scriptures. Talia had little trouble translating one faded tapestry inscribed with calligraphic Cyrillic. Ask, and it shall be given you. Seek, and ye shall find. Knock, and it shall be opened unto you. She almost laughed. Talia planned to do some seeking of her own, into Tyler’s past. And what would she find? Nothing holy, she was sure.
Tyler returned shortly after noon, but said nothing. Talia left him alone while she and Eddie worked on their list of thieves. Their options were narrow—a wheelman who could fly a hybrid rocket-jet, a cat burglar, and a chemist with the knowledge and experience necessary to work on the edge of space. When she could no longer stomach the images floating through the Dark Web, she went downstairs. The scent of rosemary and juniper drew her into the kitchen.
“Mr. Tyler was in here ten minutes ago.” Conrad held a copper pot over the flames of the stove. Talia hadn’t asked the question, but it had been on the tip of her tongue. Conrad dialed back the heat and let the pot simmer. “He asked me to save him a plate for a late supper. I haven’t heard from him since.”
“He didn’t mention a meeting of some kind?”
“I am afraid not, miss.”
Talia dropped her arms. “Right. Why would he talk to either of us about a key step in our life-and-death mission? That would be silly.”
“You’ll have to forgive him, miss. Mr. Tyler makes a good show of things, but he spent a large portion of his life alone. There are times when the nuances of person-to-person interactions elude him.”
Talia could relate, but Conrad’s choice of words struck her. “I’ll have to forgive him?”
“Well you should.” Raising an eyebrow, Conrad gestured with a wooden spoon toward a painting on the wall behind her, one of Tyler’s scriptures. She recognized the text as the Lord’s Prayer, but it did not end with the bit about forgiving debts. There were two more verses.
FOR IF YOU FORGIVE OTHERS WHEN THEY SIN AGAINST YOU, YOUR HEAVENLY FATHER WILL ALSO FORGIVE YOU.
BUT IF YOU DO NOT FORGIVE OTHERS THEIR SINS, YOUR FATHER WILL NOT FORGIVE YOURS.
Talia had never known that such sentiments followed the famous prayer. She frowned, reading the last verse out loud. “Sounds a little harsh for your loving God,” she said, turning back to Conrad. “What happened to all the grace?”
“Oh, grace abounds.” Conrad shifted his pot again, stirring with a deliberate hand as if the wooden spoon were his brush and the sauce his masterpiece. “But I think those verses remind us that clinging to unforgiveness is the same as clinging to any other habitual sin.”
Unforgiveness? As Talia opened her mouth to respond, she heard the garage door opening. “Tyler,” she said to herself. She had told herself she wouldn’t let him slip away again. “Save me some dinner, Conrad. I have to go.”
“I thought you might. I’ll set a plate aside for both of you. Because nothing adds to the full flavor of a homemade cacciatore like the radiological bombardment only a microwave can provide.”
“Thanks.” She pecked his cheek on her way to the back stair.
“Take the Alfa,” he called after her. “Seeing you arrive in it will annoy him to no end. Keys are on the wall behind the door!”
None of the specialized vehicles Talia had encountered during her time at the Farm compared to the Alfa in terms of sheer brute power. She nearly drove it off a cliff thirty seconds after she left the garage. With the lightest touch of the gas pedal, the thing lurched like a bulldog at the end of its leash. But thanks to that power, she caught up to the Tesla in short order. Talia killed her lights and let Tyler lead her around the lake. He parked a short way down a grassy hill from San Pietro, the village church.
Talia watched as he made his way up the hill, coasted the Alfa in behind the Tesla, and then got out and followed.
The spotlights illuminating the church steeple did little for the graveyard behind, where she was certain Tyler had gone. He and his mystery date might have easily hidden behind any of the statues and weathered monuments—mere silhouettes in the night—but that did not strike Talia as Tyler’s style. And as she explored, she found a stone path that brought her through the graves to a little round structure set into the rear wall. An iron gate barred the entrance. She gave it a tug. Locked.
In a moment of uncertainty, Talia wondered if she had gone the wrong way, but a faint orange glow illuminating a spiral staircase beyond the gate told her different. She dropped to a knee and pulled a flat pouch from the rear pocket of her slacks. Lock-picking had been a mandatory class at the Farm. She hadn’t been the best in her class. But she had been close.
The lock clicked. With a quiet creak of the gate, Talia slipped through, hunching under the uncomfortable gaze of a chipped and scarred Virgin Mary.
No one challenged her in the stairwell. And she found no guards waiting in the narrow passage at the bottom—only a single lantern and jumbled bones crammed into niches too small for any full-grown human. Groundwater seeped in, falling with an echoing drip drip into scattered puddles on the floor. Twenty meters to her right, a few of these reflected the light of another lantern hanging in an intersecting passage. She pulled her Glock and kept moving.
One by one, like bread crumbs, the lanterns led her deeper into the labyrinth. The passages branched and split at random, filled to capacity with the dead. Around one corner she might find a row of crumbling stone coffins, lids broken as if the occupants were trying to escape; around the next, a shiny new granite monolith adorned with fresh flowers. At each turn, though, another flicker led her onward.
At any moment, Talia expected to hear Tyler’s voice or footfalls. But the minutes passed in silence. She rested her back against the wall to think. Something cold and wet had pressed into her shoulder. Talia lurched away from it and spun, only to see human heads pushing out of the stone, faces contorted in pain. Red rivulets ran down their cheeks like tears of blood.
It took all her self-control not to scream.
“Stone,” she whispered to herself. “They’re made of stone.” The groundwater, tinted by minerals as it passed through the hill, dripped onto the faces, bringing them to life. The pounding of Talia’s heartbeat settled, and she turned to put her eyes on the passage where they belonged. What would drive anyone to leave such terrifying markers? Sixteenth-century Catholics were messed up.
She had hardly finished the thought when a shadow flitted through her peripheral vision, sending her heart rate up again. Something had run across the passage at the next intersection, and she couldn’t write it off as macabre artwork. Sculptures didn’t move.
Following that ghost would lead her away from the nearest lantern.
Glasses, a voice that seemed set apart from her own subconscious told her.
She felt for her pocket and found them. Without a connection to Eddie, the Faux-kleys had no guidance arrows or video, but the enhanced optics still worked. The blue lenses did not banish the shadows entirely, but they pushed them back, giving her an edge, confidence.
She hurried to the corner where she had seen the figure and listened, and was rewarded with the gentle splash of a sole touching down in a puddle.
Talia rushed after the sound, and at the next turn, she caught a glimpse of a black suit. She was catching up. She risked a whispered call. “Tyler!”
Her quarry abandoned stealth and ducked into a branching passage.
Talia ran after him, barely keeping him in sight, even with the glasses.
The light in the passage dimmed to near black and then grew again, rapidly. Seconds later both raced out into an underground cathedral with a domed ceiling. Lanterns hung from carved pillars at one end, illuminating a crucifix bounded by weeping cherubs. A broken sarcophagus lay at the foot of the cross. The man ahead of her broke into a sprint, making a bid for one of the many tunnels leading away.
She couldn’t let him return to the maze. “Tyler, stop!”
The man jogged to a halt and turned.
Talia stopped too, several meters away, and raised her Glock. “You’re . . . not Tyler.”
He was young, much younger than Tyler—almost a boy. The boy raised his hands, but he did not look scared, nor even concerned. He smiled and said something in Italian, tilting his head to Talia’s right. At the same time, she heard the ratcheting click of a handgun being cocked.
Another young man in a matching black suit emerged from one of the tunnels, leveling a Beretta. A third came in from her left, also armed. And slow, deliberate footsteps at her back told Talia a fourth had entered from the same tunnel she had run through moments before.
The voice of the fourth, however, was not that of a young man. “Lower your weapon, signorina,” he said in a heavy Italian accent, “before someone gets hurt.”