Return to Atlantis: A Novel (22 page)

Nina didn’t wait to see if her improvised smoke screen had worked. Instead she pursued Agnelli through the basilica. Even in her flight, the building’s sheer scale and magnificence were awe inspiring, the ceiling so high and
the supporting pillars so huge that people seemed nothing more than toy figures beneath them. Glorious statues and paintings flashed past, altars and monuments to saints and popes, but she couldn’t afford to give the antiquities more than the briefest glance as she fixed her gaze on the Italian ahead. The two running figures were drawing attention, but the commotion from the grottoes hadn’t yet reached the vast church, the worshippers bewildered rather than scared.

Agnelli reached the doors, swatting aside an attendant who tried to block his path. He ran out into the open. Nina hurdled the fallen man and followed, finding herself looking out across the huge expanse of St. Peter’s Square. The name was something of a misnomer; the western end in front of the basilica was a trapezoid, beyond it a great elliptical plaza, at the center of which was a towering Egyptian obelisk. The nearer part of the square was hemmed in by the walls of long galleries, but the plaza was in the embrace of towering colonnades to the north and south—through which could be reached the streets of Rome.

Agnelli was running for the southern colonnade, having knocked down a barrier to cut diagonally across the square instead of being channeled around its edge. She raced after him, startled tourists watching her. Some had cameras and phones raised.
Great
, she thought,
I’m going to be in the news again
 …

That was something to worry about later, after catching Agnelli. He was about thirty yards ahead, gaining a second wind now that escape was in sight. The Italian ran for another section of barrier. Much to Nina’s astonishment, the overweight youth successfully hurdled it with barely a break in his stride. Reaching it a few seconds later, she was forced to halt and scramble over the metal obstacle, losing precious time. By the time she cleared it, Agnelli had reached the colonnade and ducked between its great stone pillars.

She followed. When she regained sight of him, he was
on a wide street, the Piazza del Sant’Uffizio—outside Vatican territory, a gate to her right marking the boundary of the Holy See. The Italian looked about frantically, apparently expecting to see someone in particular. The person he had phoned must have arranged to rescue him.

“Agnelli!” she tried to shout, but it came out as a strangled croak. In her adrenalized state she hadn’t realized how tired she was becoming, but her muscles were now rebelling against their endocrinal manipulation. “Stop!”

If he heard her, he showed no sign. Instead the Italian kept running, himself showing growing fatigue that not even fear could overcome. He was still searching the street with increasing desperation—

Tires screeched. Nina leapt for the sidewalk as a glossy black Range Rover with darkened windows skidded around the corner behind her and swept down the street, engine roaring. Agnelli turned toward it, face filled with relief.

The Range Rover didn’t stop.

Its blocky nose hit him square-on, sending him flying into the air, broken limbs flailing. He smashed down on the tarmac in a heap—and the four-by-four drove right over him with a horrible crunch of bones. Pedestrians screamed and ran for cover as the big SUV made a skidding handbrake turn to power back the way it had come.

Straight at Nina.

She had stopped in horror at the sight of Agnelli being mowed down, but now she broke back into a sprint, terror overpowering her body’s protests. The only place that offered even the slightest protection was the doorway of a nearby building. She ran to it, grabbed the handle—

Locked!

Nina turned. The Range Rover was rushing at her, about to smear her along the wall—

It abruptly veered off and came to a squealing stop. Even though the windows were tinted, she could see figures inside. The passenger was apparently as surprised by the maneuver as she was. He remonstrated with the shadow in the driver’s seat, then opened the door and jumped out.

The man, blond, wearing an expensive suit and sunglasses, had a gunmetal automatic in his hand. He regarded Nina coldly and raised the pistol—

His chest erupted with bloody exit wounds as the Range Rover’s driver fired several shots into his back.

The man crumpled to the sidewalk, a crimson pool rapidly forming around him. Shocked, speechless, Nina tore her gaze from the corpse to see who had saved her.

It was the last person she had expected.

The driver was Sophia Blackwood.

Sociopath, killer—and Eddie’s first wife, from a time before her insane rage at the system that had bankrupted her father and wiped out her inheritance had seen her try to destroy the West’s economy by nuking Wall Street. The last time Nina saw her, Eddie had thrown her off the top of a waterfall.

Clearly, she could swim.

She had not survived the experience unscathed, though. Even through the shadows, Nina made out a long scar running down the left side of her face and neck. There was also something
different
about the rest of her features, a hard-to-define yet impossible-to-miss shifting of shapes and proportions. Plastic surgery?

Not that it mattered. Sophia held a gun in a black-gloved hand, its smoking muzzle now fixed on the American. Their eyes met, locked. Nina was frozen, knowing that the instant she moved, the raven-haired aristocrat would kill her.

She waited for the shot …

The gun flicked up, and Sophia dropped it almost casually onto the passenger seat. As the stunned Nina watched, she smiled, then raised a finger to her lips. The meaning of the gesture was unmistakable.

Shh. This is our little secret
.

Then she floored the accelerator, spinning the wheel to peel the Range Rover away. The door slammed shut as it turned, Nina’s last sight of Sophia that same unfathomable smile. It roared into the crowded streets of Rome, leaving Nina standing there, utterly lost, as police sirens rose in the distance.

T
he house overlooking the Potomac River had once been Victor Dalton’s vacation retreat. Since the divorce, it had become his home, and his ex-wife had made it very clear that he was lucky to have kept even that. A small part of him couldn’t really blame her for the angry separation—he had, after all, been caught on video in flagrante with a woman who was not only someone else’s wife at the time, but also turned out to be the mastermind behind a terrorist plot against the United States.

The rest of him, however, still burned with fury at the injustice. All his achievements as president had been obliterated from the public mind by that one lapse of judgment, and he had been hounded out of office. The holder of the most powerful position on the planet could not be a man whose defining moment was rated NC-17.

Sitting alone in his kitchen, Dalton clapped down his glass with a bang that echoed like a gunshot. As it faded, the thought occurred that his Secret Service bodyguards—even disgraced presidents were still entitled to protection for ten years after leaving office, though his team was considerably smaller than that of his more honored predecessors—probably wouldn’t
even bother to leave their surveillance trailer to investigate the noise. Though they were always stone-faced and professional in their duties, he was sure they mocked him behind his back.

He knew exactly who was to blame for his expulsion from power: Nina Wilde and Eddie Chase. He had personally awarded them the Presidential Medal of Freedom for their role in saving New York from nuclear attack—and they had repaid him by plastering the Sophia Blackwood video all over the Internet. Merely thinking about them made his jaw clench with involuntary anger.

And to make matters worse … they had somehow survived the events in Japan.

At least Takashi was dead. That was one small diamond in the mound of shit. The Group would endure his loss, of course, but it would cause them considerable disruption.

The Group
. Another silent snarl. They had helped put him into the White House, and could have kept him there; they possessed the influence to have swayed the media and other politicians back behind him. But instead they had left him to flounder in the Washington piranha tank.

Bastards! Well, they’d regret that decision. It was a shame he didn’t dare let them know that he had been a part of that payback … but he valued his freedom, and his life even more.

He swallowed the last slug of bourbon, then stood. It was approaching midnight, and the habit of late nights and early mornings developed in years of public office was hard to break, even with no work waiting for him the next day. He shook his head. Victor Dalton,
unemployed
! The word was like a personal insult. But nobody would touch him, even former friends who should by all rights have been offering him board seats and lucrative consultancy posts failing to return his calls. “Cocksuckers,” he muttered, heading upstairs.

In his bedroom, Dalton disrobed and went into the
adjoining bathroom. He was supposed to wear a panic button on a thong around his neck at all times, but the damn thing only got in the way while he was washing, so he put it with his watch on a shelf and pulled the curtain on the shower cubicle. A quick burst of hot water and creamy suds helped ease his tension a little. He toweled himself down before donning a bathrobe, then reached for the panic button.

It wasn’t there.

He stared at the shelf. His watch was exactly where he had left it, but the teardrop-shaped device was gone. No sign of it on the floor. Confusion growing, he returned to the bedroom, wondering if it had somehow fallen and bounced into there …

“Lookin’ for this?” said a voice.

Dalton froze in petrified shock. Eddie Chase, bearded and scruffy, sat casually in a chair, the panic button in one hand—and a silenced gun in the other.

It took a couple of seconds for Dalton to force out any words. “How—how did you get in here?” he croaked. “How did you get past the Secret Service?”

“By being bloody good at what I do.” There was dirt on the Englishman’s dark clothing: he had crept and crawled through the grounds to reach the house undetected. “Now sit on the bed, and keep your voice down. You give me any trouble, and I’ll put a bullet through your fucking head.”

Dalton moved to the bed, struggling to control his fear. “How did you get back into the country?” he asked as he sat, playing for time. “Interpol has you on a watch list—you should have set off every alarm in the airport when they took your fingerprints.”

Eddie smiled coldly. “US citizens don’t get fingerprinted.”

“You’re not a US citizen.”

“Amazing what you can do with a fake passport, innit? Now”—the smile vanished—“my turn to ask questions. Biggest one: What the fuck is going on?”

“That’s … rather too broad for me to answer.”

“You’ll manage.” The gun angled up toward Dalton’s face. “Scarber told me you were her boss, and that you set everything up in Japan. Why were you trying to kill me and Nina?”

“I have no idea what you’re—”

Eddie shifted the gun slightly and pulled the trigger. The flat
thump
of the bullet exiting the oversized suppressor was echoed by the sound of it blowing apart one of Dalton’s pillows in an explosion of goose down. The ex-president jumped in fright. “Next one won’t miss. Why were you trying to kill us?”

Shaking, Dalton stammered out a reply. “It—it should be obvious, shouldn’t it? Even to a grunt like you. I wanted you dead, Chase. You destroyed my life, you and your wife. I was the president of the United States, and what am I now? A laughingstock! An international joke! But,” he went on, some of his arrogance returning, “I’m not powerless. There are still some people who are loyal to me.”

“Like Scarber?”

“Yes. She left the CIA to work as my private operative. As soon as she heard what you were after, she told me. I knew you wouldn’t be able to resist the chance to clear your name.”

Eddie gave him a look of resigned annoyance. “Yeah, I thought that offer was too good to be true. So you set me and Nina up to settle old scores—but why was Takashi involved? What’s your problem with him?”

Dalton leaned forward conspiratorially. “Have you ever heard of …” He glanced about as if afraid of being overheard. “The Group?”

“Weren’t they Bob Dylan’s musicians?”

Now it was Dalton’s turn to express annoyance. “No, that was the Band. The Group is—how best to put it? The people
above
the people who run the world. They’re a cabal of exceptionally powerful and influential figures—businessmen, bankers—”

“Presidents?”

The gray-haired man snorted. “Only one US president
has ever been a member—and it wasn’t me, I might add. But nobody
gets
to be president without the Group’s approval.”

“They fix the elections?” said Eddie dubiously.

“They don’t need to. Anyone they don’t like is eliminated from the process long before then. All those scandals that come out of the woodwork during the primaries? The Group sees that they’re exposed, leaving only the candidates they approve of. From both parties.”

Eddie’s interest in American politics was limited, but even he was shocked by Dalton’s revelation. “Wait, so when you were president … you were working for these guys? They told you what to do?”

He shook his head. “It’s nothing that blatant. It’s more like they make … suggestions. Advise that one policy direction would be preferable to another. From their point of view, at least.”

“So what have they got to do with Takashi?”

“You haven’t worked that out?” Dalton said with a cutting laugh. “He was one of them!”

“You wanted him dead?”

“I want them
all
dead, to be honest. Those bastards could have saved my presidency. But instead they left me to twist in the wind, and that jackass Leo Cole took my job. That backstabbing son of a bitch.”

“So Takashi was one of them,” said Eddie, waving the gun to focus Dalton’s mind on the matter at hand. “Who are the others?”