Alex watched transfixed, her horror so deep that she could barely assimilate what was happening. But she pinpointed the gunmen who had shot the boy and his mother.
Reflexively, she knelt down low into a firing position, partially concealed by the wall. In a fury, she fired at one of the men who had shot the boy and his mother.
She saw the weapon fly from the man’s hands. The man clutched his chest and went to a knee, stunned.
Alex had hit him in the middle of his gut. She turned her pistol toward the other gunman, who had suddenly realized they were under fire. Alex fired two shots at him. The first one spun him, the second one dropped him.
Then she heard another popping sound. Then a second. Father Martin lay motionless on the ground. His killer stood over him. Then he turned toward Alex.
Alex stood and, against all logic, in a blind rage, stepped out from cover. She held her Beretta forward, steadied it and fired twice. The first shot hit Father Martin’s killer in the upper chest, the second hit him full in the face. Then she heard a bullet whistle past her and smack into the stucco of the church.
She stepped back under cover. She knew the rest of the invading party would now come for her. Some of them would circle the church and try to come up behind her.
Before they could, she fled. She ran at full speed past her cottage and into heavy foliage beyond, a sickening horror still in her gut, but an instinct for survival pushing her onward. She reached the heavy foliage beyond the back of the church. She kept herself low as she ran in a zigzag pattern, pushing and pulling her way through the brush. Brambles and small branches struck at her bare legs, scratching her badly.
She kept going. Occasional shots came after her.
She stopped behind a tree. She could see slightly through a clearing. She needed to slow down her pursuers. She saw one gunman who had a teenage girl from the village by the arm. He was about forty yards away. Then she realized it was Paulina he was threatening.
Alex raised her Beretta. It was a risky shot, almost worthy of a sniper with a pistol, but she could hold her hands steady and shoot from cover.
She took the shot. She hit him full in the chest. She watched him reel backward and go down. She saw Paulina flee. Alex put a second bullet into him for good measure.
Alex knew that she would be followed. She ran deeper into the jungle. A barrage of bullets from automatic weapons ripped through the brush on different sides of her. One shot, the closest, tore into the bark of a tree about ten feet away.
But she knew they were firing wildly now. She kept herself low, her heart pounding, her adrenaline racing, her heart in her throat.
She didn’t return fire. Her only instinct was to get as far into the jungle as possible, change directions, and escape.
She kept moving. In the distance, she could hear them coming after her.
SEVENTY-ONE
Lt. Rizzo had had a horrid week.
First, Mimi, his favorite intern and Sailor Moon girl, had changed her course of studies at the university. Because of this, her schedule at the university had changed. She had signed up for a series of art and design courses that conflicted with her internship with the city police department. Hence, she had resigned her position with the Roman police. The irony of all this was that she and her new boyfriend, Enrico, were inseparable in their off hours.
An even worse disaster had occurred with Sophie. Rizzo might have known that no long-term good could come from her working at one of those chic designer clothing places on the via Condotti. Flouncing around in there each day, modeling the chic dresses, designer jeans, sheer blouses, and snug miniskirts, it was a matter of time before the wrong pair of male eyes settled upon her.
In this case, the wrong pair of eyes belonged to an American pop singer who went by the stage name of Billy-O. He was a guy in his thirties who had limited musical range but was a first-class piece of eye candy. His music producers in Los Angeles pushed him heavily and were currently getting him into some films. They had even hired a hack Hollywood TV writer to usher in a new script for him.
Thus Billy-O’s income resembled the GNP of a small hot country, even though he personally had more fun than a small hot country. In his public life, he played the part of a white working-class rocker-rapper up against the establishment, and his music matched that image. The truth was, he was a spoiled kid from the New York suburbs. Sammy Newman was his real name. He was a young man who dragged three broken marriages behind him, dozens of affairs, and a couple of attaché cases filled with lawsuits. But he still was one of the great lotharios of his generation. The man was a known bad boy; no one ever came out of a relationship with him better off than they’d gone in. But women couldn’t resist him. Sophie was his latest. They had met in the clothing shop, and now she had taken a few vacation days to spend a long weekend with il cretino, as Rizzo thought of him, in Monte Carlo.
So much for the lot of a career policeman when some Hollywood music Adonis rolled into Rome and started to flash a limitless bankroll.
All of this left Rizzo in a thoroughly rotten mood as summer finally arrived in Rome and the month of July progressed. It also gave him more than a bit of a rotten attitude. So when his captain phoned him on a Monday in the middle of the month and requested that he assemble all the papers and documents he had on the two abandoned murder cases, he met the request with a subservient growl. Rizzo was to assemble all his information and prepare for a meeting with some law-enforcement agents of another nation.
When he learned through the grapevine that the agents he would meet with were American, he pondered the possibilities and complications before him.
He wondered, in his best passive-aggressive manner, how he could make the most of what was obviously a wonderful opportunity.
He looked at the calendar. Two weeks till retirement. Well, he would do some administrative finagling and maybe push back retirement for another sixty days. There were some strings that needed to be pulled, some contacts who needed to take care of a few things. The Roman police were understaffed right now anyway. No one would mind much if he remained on to take care of some pressing open cases.
Mimi and Enrico, he mused to himself as he assembled everything on the four murders. Sophie and Billy-O. What was the world coming to?
SEVENTY-TWO
Alex lay perfectly still in the underbrush, feeling the insects in a cloud around her face, feeling the humidity of the jungle drench her clothing. She had maintained her position for several hours.
She lay low on her right side against a small embankment of rocks, a tangle of branches and leaves pulled over her to conceal her. Her bare legs extended into the tall grass for cover. She was dripping with sweat, lying on her side, listening carefully to hear if any of the enemy assassins were near. Twice they had passed within ten feet of her. She had kept her pistol raised and even had one of the men in her sights. But they hadn’t seen her. So she hadn’t betrayed her position by firing.
She tried to separate the sounds of the jungle from the sounds of human pursuers. She listened for voices. She heard none. She had put the weapon away. Then she heard movement somewhere.
She moved her hand to her weapon and again pulled the Beretta from her holster. She positioned the weapon close to her, leaning on one elbow, keeping both hands on the gun. Her heart started to race again. Almost every sound seemed like the enemy. Who were these people and why would they have attacked peaceful missionaries and an isolated village? Yet in the forefront of her mind, all she could think of was her own survival.