As we reached the foot of the staircase, we met the man with the beak coming into the main hallway. He froze at the sight of us, then reached for the pistol in his waistband. I leapt towards him and aimed a kick at the lower half of his legs – several of the dossiers that had been in my shirt fell to the floor, scattering in a spread at his feet. He stumbled on one of them, but then managed to throw out his hands and catch hold of Sarah by the waist as she made to run past him. She screamed and lashed out with her feet, catching him in the jaw. He was knocked to the ground, but she had also lost a few dossiers in the meantime, and started to lean down to pick them up.
‘Leave them!’ I shouted at her, and she nodded and started running for the open doorway. I kicked the man in the stomach to make sure he stayed down, then started to follow her. But the commotion had already alerted the others, and as I approached the door I saw Severn coming down the main staircase, with Barnes and Zimotti directly behind him.
I leapt through the doorway as the shot scraped the nearest wall. They would be with me in a second or two. I saw Sarah running down the driveway, heading for the Alfa Romeo. Good idea. I raced over to join her. The key was still in the ignition.
‘I’ll drive!’ I shouted, pressing the button to unlock the doors. They opened on their hinges and we jumped in. The machine growled as I started her up, and we tore through the gates. A shot fired behind us, wild. But they would come in the Lancias soon enough.
As I turned onto the street, Sarah cried out and I glanced across at her.
‘Drive on the right!’ she screamed.
Shit. I looked back at the road and pulled us onto the other side just as a heavy goods lorry came rumbling towards us.
Close call.
Sarah started looking frantically through the dossiers, throwing each one onto the car’s floor as soon as she had discarded it. I hoped to God we hadn’t left the crucial one behind.
My plan was to head straight for the centre of town, as fast as possible: the more people there were around, the harder it would be for them to shoot at us. I squeezed the throttle and the needle shot up, and kept climbing. We passed the Fontana delle Api, and then I turned sharply down Via Druso. The car took the corner beautifully, and part of my brain was involuntarily awed by the machine under my command. The other part was desperately trying to see the street ahead, control this beast and get away from our pursuers. One of the Lancias was already in my rear-view mirror, taking the turn. A bullet ricocheted off the bodywork, and I swerved into the centre of the road for a moment. I swerved back, and reached over to open the glove compartment. Perhaps Severn had left a gun in there, or a map – but there was nothing. I looked up just as a Fiat with an enormous exhaust swerved in front of me, and I jabbed at the horn manically until it got out of the way.
I took another hard turn, into Via dei Cerchi. The traffic was starting to thicken now – evidently not everyone had taken the long weekend off. The streets were packed with pedestrians milling about aimlessly: tourists and nuns and children slobbering ice cream. I realized it had been a tactical error to head this way, because even if it made our pursuers a little gun-shy, which I was now rather less sure of, it was slowing us down terribly.
We had to get out of the centre – but where to? By now Severn would have made sure that all the country’s ports, airports and customs posts had been given detailed descriptions of the two of us, and even if we travelled separately I didn’t fancy our chances. Ergo, we had to find a way of avoiding Italian customs. If we reached, say, Switzerland, we would then be able to fly to London with little trouble: even Severn’s powers didn’t stretch that far. Travel between Italy and Switzerland didn’t require visas, so if we ditched the car, split up and took the train we might be able to get through the checkpoints.
Switzerland it was, then straight to Haggard in London. But we needed proof first.
‘Any luck yet?’ I called out to Sarah.
‘Not yet!’
I saw a space in the traffic and turned down Via della Greca, taking us around the bank of the Tiber. The main train station was only a mile or so away, but I had to find a way through this bloody maze of a city to get back to it. A thought hit me: the conspirators might not have dared to commit the operational details of this to paper. The strategic document could be all we had, and we would have to figure it out from there. ‘Check the document we read in the embassy again,’ I told Sarah. ‘See if it mentions any other targets, or dates.’
She leaned down and started rummaging in the files at her feet. We came into a boulevard shaded with trees: Lungotevere dei Pierleoni, but that would take us into town, not away from it, so I took the next turn and pushed the pedal down again.
Sarah had now found the original document and was reading through it hurriedly. ‘How about this?’ she said. ‘“In some Western European countries, especially in the south, religious events should be considered for attacks, as they provide a large crowd, easily understood and revered symbolism, shock value and, in many cases, low security. As Communism is an atheist ideology, Moscow’s involvement would immediately be suspected . . .”’
A religious event – yes, that might make sense. Could that be it, rather than a ballet or a football match? I thought back to my meeting with Barchetti. ‘They know,’ he had whispered. And then, when I had asked him if his cover had blown, he had shaken his head: ‘About the attack in the dome.’ I had presumed he meant that Arte come Terrore knew they were the prime suspects for Farraday’s murder. But perhaps I’d been wrong. The sniper had stored his climbing ropes on the gallery at the base of St Paul’s dome, and used that as an escape route, but the attack itself had taken place down in the cathedral, not inside the cupola. A slip? Barchetti’s English hadn’t been perfect, but I didn’t think so. I bit my lip and cursed myself. I’d missed his real message – he hadn’t been talking about what had happened in London at all. He had wanted to tell Severn that Arte come Terrore already knew of the next attack, which was going to take place in another church entirely.
Sarah had gone quiet, still engrossed in the document.
‘What is it?’
‘Charles has written in the margins on this page,’ she said. ‘He’s circled the part where it talks about religious events and written…’ She squinted. ‘“4 May.”’
I looked across at her. ‘That’s today.’
Forget Switzerland. Forget Haggard. I swerved to the right, taking the turning back into the centre of town.
‘What the hell are you doing?’ shouted Sarah.
‘It’s going to happen here,’ I said. ‘In Rome. The Pope’s noon address in St Peter’s Square. They’ve placed a bomb in the dome. They’re going to kill the Pope.’
She went quiet, and the papers slipped from her grasp and onto the floor.