The Pegasus Secret (16 page)

Lang searched ahead for a turnoff, even a space between paving and mountainside. There were none. Straight drop right, perpendicular rise left. Nowhere to go.

Tiny, cold feet of apprehension began to walk up Lang’s back. The truck got bigger in the mirrors.

The bike made a right-hand turn and entered a straightaway of perhaps two hundred yards. Its mirrors no longer reflected the entire truck. Lang could clearly see the prancing lion of Peugot on the grill. Over the hiss of the airstream, he could hear the truck driver shifting through higher gears.

The idiot had no intent of slowing down.

Taking his left hand from the handlebar, Lang tapped Gurt’s leg and pointed behind. He heard a German expletive over the roar of the truck’s engine. She squeezed him tighter.

The bike shuddered as its fiberglass rear fender shattered and Lang braced against the impact. The bastard intended to run them over! He opened the throttle to the stop.

How had they found him? How could they have possibly known he was driving a motorcycle to Orvieto? Lang shoved the questions from his mind. Right now, he needed to concentrate on keeping the Beamer on the pavement.

If he could beat the truck into the next curve, it would either have to slow down or be flung off the side of the mountain by centrifugal force. Too bad he wasn’t on a machine known for speed rather than comfort.

He sensed the massive bumper inches from the rear wheel again as he swung wide, the better to straighten the line through the curve. The bike’s speed pushed it to the outside, well across the center line. If something were on the other side of the blind turn, headed uphill, they would meet it head-on. A risk he had to take or be crushed.

They flashed through the shadow of the hill, relieved to finally hear the snort of air brakes as they reentered sunshine. They had gained a hundred feet or so.

Lang tested the throttle again, making sure it was still as open as it would go. The grip was wet with sweat and his hand slipped. He wished he had found a pair of gloves.

The mirrors were empty only for a second until the ugly snout of the truck poked around the turn like a beast seeking prey. Lang was trying to remember the trip up, how far he and Gurt were from the bottom. If they could make it to a flat road where the Peugeot would not have a downslope to add to its speed, even the BMW’s indifferent acceleration would leave the truck behind.

If.

The truck closed the gap again, its engine bellowing in triumph. The motorcycle simply could go no faster.

Gurt shifted. She had to know movement could destroy the balance of the bike, send them flying into space. Lang wanted to turn around and scream at her to be still but he couldn’t take even that brief second away from watching the road. Not at this pace.

He felt one arm clasp around his chest while Gurt seemed to be bending over. The Krausers. Christ, this was no time to be searching through the saddlebags for something she might have forgotten to bring!

Lang could see in the periphery of one mirror as she stood on the rear pegs and turned to face the truck, using the arm around Lang to sustain her balance. The interruption of the BMW’s airstream, the added resistance of her erect body, made the front end shimmy. Had Lang not needed to fight to maintain steering, he would have risked taking a hand off the bars to snatch her back onto her seat.

Not that it mattered. The grille of the truck looked like a chrome mouth about to open and devour them both. And there wasn’t a damn thing Lang could do.

One, then two pops were snatched away by the wind, muted both by helmet and rushing air. A blowout! Lang instantly anticipated the loss of control that came with losing a tire at high speed. Instead, there were three more sounds, a shallow noise like slow clapping. The BMW’s only wobble was from Gurt standing in the airstream.

A flick of his eyes from the road to the mirrors saw the truck rapidly receding, the sun a million diamonds on its crazed windshield. In near disbelief, he watched its swerving increase in ever larger curves until, amid a wail of protesting rubber, it launched itself over the side of the road like a huge rocket. It seemed to hang in emptiness before its nose pointed down and it was swallowed by space like the souls in the fresco. Lang thought he felt the road quiver with a series of impacts downhill.

Gurt sat back down and returned her arm to his waist. He detected a whiff of cordite before the wind devoured it, and he realized what had happened.

As the slope gentled, the road widened until it reached a verge wide enough for Lang to pull off and stop. He pulled out the BMW’s ignition key. Neither he nor Gurt moved or spoke, letting the heat from the cylinder heads seep through their leathers as the cooling machinery ticked.

Lang finally took off his helmet and turned to watch Gurt unbuckle hers. “I had forgotten you won the Agency’s shooting competition in eighty-seven. Pistol
and
rifle, if I recall.”

She smiled demurely as though he had complimented a new dress. “Eighty-eight and eighty-nine also. After that, I quit competing.”

“What happened to the gun?”

“Over the hillside along with the
Schweinhund
in the truck. When the police find the wreck, they are likely to start interrogating anyone in the area. There are bullet holes in the windscreen. I didn’t want to have a weapon on me.”

“The gun is clean?”

She was leaning forward, inspecting her makeup in the bike’s mirrors, more like a debutante than someone who had just made a shot James Bond wouldn’t have dared. “It is Agency-issue. My gloves prevented my fingers from printing on it or powder marks on my hands for paraffin to detect. I need only to also dispose of the extra clip in the Krausers.”

“Should we go back, see what happened to the driver?”

She turned from the mirror to ruefully regard the cracked fiberglass of the BMW’s rear fender. “And have the authorities show up while we’re poking around? I do not think they would listen to the explanations of an international fugitive.”

Lang thought about that. “There may be a clue as to who he is, was.”

“Perhaps if you take off your leathers, put them back in the bags, I will go back alone. If the police come, they will never connect a woman to such a shooting. They are, after all, Italian. They will think it was an attempted high-john.”

“Hijack.”

“Him, too. I will see if the driver has any identification. I will also make sure he is unable to tell anyone what happened.”

He watched her ride off. Kipling, he thought, must have known someone like Gurt when he wrote that “the female of the species is more deadly than the male.”

The Umbrian Auto Strada
Thirty minutes later

Lang waited in one of the road stops that litter the
Auto Strada
. With its islands of gas pumps, cafeterias and bathrooms
reeking of disinfectant, it could just as well have been on the interstates of New York or on Florida’s Sunshine State Parkway. Why does America export only the tacky? Lang had a theory that someday all of Europe would look like Kansas or, worse, California. With that to look forward to, how could anybody be in favor of globalization?

He was thinking of something else that day, however. The cappuccino in front of him was simply his ticket of admission, the price to be paid for a seat at the bar. The caffeine provided a small high, lost in the tide of adrenaline that was just now beginning to ebb. How had he lived this long without the rush only danger gives? Even if his job at the Agency had never involved a life-or-death situation, a shoot-out, or a high-speed chase, it had been exciting to plan the smuggling of a defector across an armed border. Even guessing an opponent’s next move on the chessboard of Europe had its thrills before the red king and its pawns were swept from the table.

Now all he had to look forward to was verbal fencing in a courtroom, a competition as highly stylized as any Kabuki performance. At this moment, he missed the game more than he had ever anticipated. The fast-paced developments and the challenge had faded into a memory he suspected was tinted by nostalgia as he had pursued the crushing sameness of law school and practice. At the time, it had been more than an even swap: the certainty he would becoming home every evening in exchange for broken promises and a wife sick with worry when he could only tell her he would be gone for an undetermined period.

Dawn wasn’t here anymore and Lang was involved in a game with stakes higher than he would have chosen. Even the Reds, those world-threatening hoards of Godless communists, the Agency’s raison d’être, had not been fanatics.
At least, not the ones he had known. He had never heard of an opposing agent willing, let alone eager, to die for Marxism like a mujahideen ready to sacrifice all for Allah. They, the name Lang had unconsciously pasted on the unknown group, They were as zealous as any bomb-toting Arab terrorist. His would-be assassin had dashed across the room to jump, to meet whatever maker he contemplated, rather than risk capture. The driver of that truck could not have expected to survive the crash his speed made inevitable on that winding road. He had only hoped to take the two motorcyclists with him to whatever place he thought worth his life on earth.

For what?

To Lang, such fervor implied religion, a religious group, more likely a cult. History was replete with dismal examples: the Moslem cult of Assassins, from whom we take the word, who had greeted the Crusaders with nocturnal knives, the Hindu Thuggee, stealthy stranglers of the imperial English, Japanese kamikaze dying for their emperor-god.

Brother Marcenni’s explanation had given Lang an idea why They might want the picture, might kill to get it. All sorts of wealth could be hidden somewhere, Poussin’s painting the key to its location. But he’d never heard of martyrs for material riches. Men died for causes, for ideas, for vengeance. But for earthly wealth they would never possess?

But then, the old monk hadn’t said the picture was a map to pirates’ gold, buried treasure or the like, had he? But why else would a painting, one that did not even exactly copy the original, be worth killing for? Something of ideological value?

Like what, the holy grail?

There were some facts of which Lang was fairly certain. They wanted the painting and intended to eradicate anyone
who might have learned its secret. That secret had to do with the physical location of something of great value to Them. Lang was interested in what that something might be. It could lead him to whoever had killed Janet and Jeff. And tried to kill him. Now that he knew the painting might have a secret, he needed to find out who was guarding the truth the enigma concealed. And why.

He had a plan.

There was a hush in the crowded room as Gurt entered and took the vacant seat at the bar beside Lang. A six-foot Valkyrie in motorcycle leathers was apparently not a common sight. Oblivious to the eyes following her every breath, she lit a Marlboro and motioned to the man behind the bar, pointing to Lang’s cup. She also wanted cappuccino.

Lang would have bet that was the fastest service the barman had provided in weeks.

He grinned as the hum of conversation resumed. “You make quite an entrance.”

She took a deep drag from the cigarette, speaking through the haze of her own tobacco smoke. “They’ll get over it.”

He waited impatiently for her to tell what she had found. She waited until she tasted her coffee.

“Well?”

With her free hand, she reached into a pocket and held up a silver chain. From it dangled the same design Lang had seen in Atlanta, four triangles meeting in the center of a circle.

She let the pendant twirl on the chain. “No papers, no wallet, no identification other than this.”

“I take it he was . . . ?”

“As a herring.”

“Mackerel.”

“Why should one fish be more dead than another? The jewelry mean anything to you?”

“Same as the man who broke into my apartment in Atlanta had.”

She stubbed out her cigarette and put the circle on its chain back into a pocket of the leathers. “Would have been easier to have used a rifle than a truck. Any guess why he tried to run us under instead of taking an easy shot from behind a tree?”

Lang wasn’t eager to question the wisdom of the decision that had left Gurt and him alive, but he said, “Maybe there was some reason for us to die in a traffic accident.”

Gurt shrugged as though it was a matter of no consequence. “Dead is dead. And we aren’t. What’s next?”

“I need to get out of Italy, go to London.”

Lang saw an instant of uncertainty. There is no word for “go” in Gurt’s native tongue. Germans fly, walk, drive, etcetera. The means of transportation denotes going. One would not, for example,
gehen
, walk, to the United States but would
flugen
, fly.

“Not easy,” she said. “By now your picture will be in the hands of every police force in Europe.”

She was right. But Lang said, “Since the Common Market, no one guards borders anymore.” He signaled the barman for two more coffees. “If I could get on a plane at an airport that doesn’t have flights to or from places outside Europe, there would be no customs and immigration. I’d only have to worry about being recognized by an airport cop and a half-decent disguise would solve that problem.”