The Lost Relic. Scott Mariani

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       Chapter Sixteen

      Every second that ticked by was a torment as Ben explored his new surroundings on the second floor. The room he was in might have been a plush bedroom at one time during the building’s history, with ornately carved ceiling beams and a magnificent double doorway. In its more recent past, the owners of the art academy had converted it into a classroom. A large oak table at the side of the room bore a slide projector and a portable TV hooked up to a VCR. Bookshelves were stacked high with books and old video cassettes with titles like Art of the Renaissance and Grand Masters of Florence. Rows of chairs faced the teacher’s desk, on which lay assorted pens and writing pads, a heavy paper punch, a roll of tape.

      Ben glanced out into the corridor, thinking hard and fast because he knew the gunmen were combing the building every moment he hesitated. He could almost hear their running steps closing in on him. He snatched the paper punch from the desk, weighing it in his hand and imagining its best use as a weapon.

      He desperately needed to gain some kind of advantage. Escape was an option – it was only a few minutes’ sprint back to the village he’d passed through earlier. If he could get to a phone, he could alert the Carabinieri; but he couldn’t stop thinking about what could happen to those people down there during the precious minutes he’d be gone.

      A few metres down the corridor, an antiquated fire hose on a big red metal reel the size of a tractor wheel was fixed to the wall. It looked as though it had been sitting there unused since the war. Next to it, held by steel clips behind a panel of dusty glass, was an old fire axe. Ben ran over to it, used the paper punch to break the glass and tore the axe away from the wall. The hickory shaft felt thick and solid in his hands.

      Now he really could hear footsteps. They were some way off, resonating through the empty building, but approaching fast.

      He propped the axe handle against the wall and tore a strip of cloth from the hem of his T-shirt. Sorry, Brooke. Snatching a long, pointed shard of broken glass from the floor, he wrapped the cloth around its base to create an improvised knife. With a hard spin of the reel, metres of pipe spilled like entrails over the floor. He used his makeshift blade to slash four lengths of the thick rubber, then spun the reel back the other way to wind up the trailing hose. Grabbing the axe again, he sprinted back towards the classroom.

      ‘Luigi,’ Count Pietro De Crescenzo repeated urgently. ‘Do what he says.’ Corsini seemed paralysed with indecision. His eyes bulged as he glanced back and forth between his colleagues, the gently stirring woman on the office floor and the submachine gun that Anatoly had pressed hard up against the back of her skull.

      ‘Too slow,’ Anatoly said. He touched off the trigger of the Steyr. De Crescenzo’s cry of protest was drowned out by the ripping blast of the three-shot burst.

      Corsini’s jaw gaped. Silvestri rocked back and forth in his chair, jamming his fist in his mouth to keep from screaming in horror. De Crescenzo stared in numb despair as the last twitches of the woman’s central nervous system made her limbs jerk and the smell of death and cordite filled the small room. Vomit erupted in his throat like hot lava and he threw up.

      Rocco Massi said calmly to Corsini, ‘We can keep doing this all day until you give us the code.’

      The fat man had had enough. There were tears in his eyes as he grabbed the remote computer keyboard and tapped in a series of numbers, swallowed hard, and hit the enter key.

      Anatoly nodded in satisfaction as the screen flashed up a ‘CODE VALID’ message. He pointed at Silvestri. ‘Now it’s your turn.’