The Dante Conspiracy (17 page)

esta
selva
selvaggia
e
aspra
e forte

che
nel
pensier
rinova
la
paura
!

‘That’s it,’ Massimo said softly. ‘That’s the start of the first
canto of the
Divina
Commedia
, where Dante finds himself in the
dark wood of error. I think I know how he felt.’

He was trembling slightly, like a man who suddenly discovers
that he’s won the lottery, which in a way he had.

Outside, they clearly heard the first of the approaching sirens,
and Perini knew they had one final matter to clear up.

He took out his mobile phone, selected the camera and took three
quick shots of Massimo looking down at the manuscript, making sure that both the
man’s face and the first page of the text was clearly visible in all three pictures.

‘What are you doing?’ Massimo asked.

‘Taking out a final insurance policy,’ Perini said. ‘We have
your signed agreement, Rudolf, and I’m quite sure that you’ll do what we’ve agreed,
but those pictures show you clearly with the relic, just in case you decide to change
your mind. Now, we’ll replace what we’ve found where we found it, in the chest,
and in a week or so we’ll come back here and tell you that in our own time we’ve
followed the trail suggested by the verses and that we believe Dante’s original
manuscript is hidden here, and then the three of us, and maybe some other member
of the staff here, will come down, examine the chest and find it.’

Lombardi folded the leather around the manuscript again, and
slid it back into the false bottom, replacing the panel which had concealed it.
Moments later, he’d also replaced ‘
Gaetani’s
bane’ in
the lid of the chest.

‘All done,’ he said.

‘And when we come back, it will be in the chest, won’t it, Rudolf?’
Perini said coldly. ‘We have the agreement and now we have the pictures of you with
it. I’d hate to think you might try a little freelance operation here, because wherever
you go, I promise we can find you.’

The director shook his head.

‘You have my word,’ he said, ‘and I have only one suggestion.
When you come back, I’ll redraft the agreement to give you fifteen per cent of the
relic’s
worth, not ten per cent, but on one condition.’

‘That we give you one third of the finder’s fee?’ Perini asked.

‘Exactly.’

‘Excellent news,’ Lombardi said. ‘I’m glad we’re all on the same
page, here, Rudolf. This will make us all very rich men.’

‘It’s been a pleasure doing business with you,’ Perini agreed,
and stepped over Stefan’s bloody corpse as he led the way out of the gallery.

If you enjoyed reading
The
Dante Conspiracy
you might like
Trade
Off
by Tom Kasey, also published by Endeavour Press.

Extract
from Trade
Off
by Tom Kasey

Prologue

Friday

When Kathy Morrell woke up, she was eight days short of her
twenty-seventh birthday and had exactly seventeen minutes of life remaining.

At first she thought it was the glare that had awoken her,
but she was wrong. Her first waking sensation had been the lights, banks of
them located high above her recumbent body, so brilliant that looking up at
them quite literally hurt her eyes. But although the lights were all she could
see and all she was aware of for the first few seconds after consciousness
returned, they weren’t what had interrupted her sleep.

Her return to wakefulness was due simply to chemistry, to a
change in the relative concentrations of the gases she was breathing, and had
been breathing continuously for just over four days. The oxygen and nitrous
oxide mixture had been carefully regulated by the automatic monitoring systems
to keep her deeply unconscious during her transportation to this, her final
destination. Around thirty minutes earlier, the system had begun to reduce the
concentration of nitrous oxide, with a corresponding increase in the proportion
of nitrogen, and her drugged brain had slowly returned to life.

For several minutes Kathy just lay still, tentatively
exploring her memory and wondering why on earth she felt so ravenously hungry.
The nitrous oxide had left her with a blinding headache which showed no
immediate signs of abating, and she guessed that if she tried to sit up or
stand the pain would probably knock her back down again. So she lay still,
collected her thoughts and tried to work out the answer to a single, very
simple, but very important question – just where the hell was she?

She dug back through her memories. She remembered dining
alone in the hotel restaurant, and the dark-haired man, also unaccompanied,
sitting at the adjoining table. She remembered his polite request, and her
casual acceptance of his company for coffee and liqueurs. They had talked,
exploring each other’s lives as her eyes studied his face, and the coffee cups
and the liqueur glasses were filled and refilled, and the restaurant emptied
around them.

Kathy remembered Richard’s tentative, almost shy, offer to
walk her up to her suite on the tenth floor, and the lingering embrace at the
door which had led them, with an inevitability which they had obviously both
recognized, through the doorway and straight into the bedroom, shedding clothes
and inhibitions on the way.

Richard had been good, very good, and she felt herself
moistening with the recollection. But that, she realized with a puzzled frown,
was the last thing she could recall. She had no memory of him leaving her
suite, and no memory of what she had done after they had lain close together in
the afterglow, no memory of anything after that.

Well, that wasn’t precisely correct, she realized. She
remembered snuggling up to him, remembered him stroking her long blonde hair,
remembered the cigarette he had offered her, and which she had taken.

She was going to give up, she’d told him, but there were
times – and without question that moment on that evening qualified as one of
them – when smoking a cigarette was simply the only possible thing to do.

The cigarette.
Kathy remembered
that Richard hadn’t joined her, hadn’t taken one for
himself
,
which had struck her as odd. Yes, she realized. The absolute last thing she had
any recollection of was lying back in her bed, smoking the stranger’s
cigarette.

At that moment, Kathy Morrell had a little over eight
minutes left to live.

She glanced carefully around her, moving her eyes only and
taking care to keep her head as immobile as possible. The one place she wasn’t,
she was absolutely certain, was in the queen-sized bed in her tenth-floor hotel
suite.

She was lying in what appeared to be a casket or box, almost
coffin-shaped. The inside was padded, the cover had a large glass faceplate
through which the lights above her still blazed, and she was lying on a thin
mattress or pad.

She noted without any real surprise that she was quite
naked. She had no recollection of dressing after her love-making with the
dark-haired stranger, so her nakedness was probably what she would have
expected. But where on earth was she?

She wondered if she had been taken ill, and was in a
hospital or clinic somewhere but, she rationalized, if that were the case her
surroundings would be quite different. She would have been on a gurney or in a
bed, surrounded by nurses and doctors and other medical staff. And, she added
to herself, she would be wearing something – a gown or nightdress or some other
garment – or maybe just covered with a sheet for modesty. She certainly
wouldn’t have been left lying naked in some kind of a box.

For the first time Kathy felt unease, and
began the slow process of sitting upright.
But she discovered
immediately that she couldn’t, because of restraints – padded fabric bands or
straps – positioned around her wrists and forehead. A few seconds of
exploration revealed other bands around her hips and ankles. She was locked in
the box, pinned to the base.

The box jerked suddenly and Kathy sensed movement. She also
became aware, almost subliminally, of a faint but definite vibration through
the floor of the casket. And then she relaxed, because she knew she must be in
a hospital. She’d seen patients being fed into CAT scanners and other equipment
before, on TV, and she was suddenly sure that she was undergoing some form of
test. She couldn’t imagine what for – she was almost never ill – and as soon as
they’d finished the examination she’d get the whole situation straightened out.

A couple of minutes later the box jerked again, and she felt
the vibration increase in intensity. Obviously they were getting ready to
position her in the scanner, or whatever the hell the machine was. Then she
noticed that the lid of the casket was lifting off, hoisted into the air by a
type of mechanical arm.

‘Hello,’ she called out.
‘Anyone there?’

There had to be someone in the room. Someone had to be
operating the machinery that she could hear.

‘Hey!
Anybody there?’
Kathy called
again.

The sounds she could hear were much louder. A piercing,
howling, almost-human scream suddenly cut through the air, and her body tensed
involuntarily, then relaxed slightly. A piece of machinery, she thought, and in
need of a good dose of lubrication.

She began to discern other sounds, and tried to fit them all
into a scenario that made sense. The hissing of something like a hydraulic
system was clear enough, and a strange grinding vibration that she felt through
the base of the casket almost more than she heard it. And loudest of all were
the screams from what she guessed were inadequately lubricated wheels.

‘Hey!’ she shouted again, but without any real conviction.
If there had been anyone there, they would have heard her the first time and
responded.

The casket jerked again and moved about six feet forward.
Kathy felt the fabric straps tighten about her body, and then the casket tilted
upwards, pivoting from the foot until it stopped at an angle of about
forty-five degrees to the horizontal. For the first time she had an
unobstructed view of the whole of the room in front of her.

Nothing that she saw made sense, not at first. The room was
about two storeys high, and as far as she could see lined entirely with steel.
Ranged on the ceiling were banks of lights, shining down. About five feet in
front of her was another casket, lying horizontal and empty, and beyond that
was something else.

Knowing is prerequisite to seeing. The human brain takes a
considerable time to identify any object which is totally unfamiliar, and adult
humans never expect to see anything that they haven’t seen before. That was why
Kathy just lay there staring and squinting into the glare for almost ten
seconds before she started to scream.

It looked like a machining table in a carpenter’s shop. A
flat bed of steel, about eight feet long and three feet wide, with equipment
she didn’t and couldn’t recognize positioned along one side of it. Directly
behind the equipment was what looked to Kathy like a booth, pretty much like a
cashier’s booth on the turnpike, with small glass
windows.

But it wasn’t the table, the equipment or the booth that
provoked her scream. It wasn’t even the viscous red splashes and smears that
covered most of the machinery and a good section of the floor around the table.
It was the pinkish-white object on the table, and what was happening to it. It
was the realization of what that object was, and of what was about to happen to
her.

That was why she screamed.

Chapter One

Tuesday

Helena, Western Montana

The small black alarm clock beside the bed emitted a series
of faint ticking sounds, then four loud and penetrating beeps. The fifth was
cut short as Steven Hunter’s hand slapped down on the protruding button, and
the room fell silent again. After a few seconds, Hunter
squinted
his eyes to focus on the digital read-out, groaned softly and switched on the
bedside light, then closed his eyes again. Three minutes later, he threw back
the covers and climbed out of bed.

Hunter padded silently across the room to the windows,
hauled back the drapes and peered out, blinking in the early morning sunlight.
The TV forecaster the previous evening had got it right, as usual. It was going
to be another hot day in another hot month.