As the car hurtled forward, Wulf released the man’s broken arm and dropped off the vehicle, rolling harmlessly as the sedan squealed around a corner.
She reached her feet a second after Wulf found his. Perhaps ninety seconds had passed since she’d asked about going to her hotel. Silence wrapped around them.
“You said—” Her chest heaved as she struggled to control her breathing and repress a scream. “You said people don’t track their own cars.”
“To quote a former boss, I misunderestimated.” Handling the abandoned pistol with his shirttail, he tossed it over a wall into dense shrubs, then towed her across the street. Ahead, several businesses and cafés lined an intersection.
As she moved faster than a walk, but not at a flat-out run, her senses sharpened. Her hearing became especially acute, until even a vehicle honking blocks away caused her to jump.
“Lots of cars in Rome,” Wulf muttered. “Don’t panic.”
“I’m not.” She slowed to match his pace as they reached the first shop. “I’m not panicked.” No, that would be calmer than the churning stomach and puppet-on-a-string jerkiness she felt in her shoulders and arms. She’d welcome mere panic.
Up the block, two men stared into a convenience store’s plate-glass window.
“Italians don’t wear loose jeans.” Wulf pulled her through the closest entrance and into a men’s clothing store. The middle-aged proprietor stared while Wulf spoke in rapid Italian.
As they followed the man’s gesture toward the rear, she glimpsed herself in a wall mirror. Her jaunty shirt had come untied, her hair had morphed from flowing to unkempt and her pants had turned splotchy with whitish-gray dust.
“We’re disappearing. Somewhere no one will follow.” Wulf dropped a ten-euro bill on a shelf next to the exit and grabbed a broom and a can of cleaning spray. In an alley too narrow for American garbage trucks, he stopped over a manhole cover, shoved the broom handle into an opening on the edge of the iron circle and pushed on the lever.
Understanding dawned, then disbelief. “A sewer?”
Wulf wondered exactly what would cause Theresa to stop arguing. Clearly he wasn’t going to find out today. “Yes.” Thor’s hammer, this drain needed to open right now, but in the last sixty years it had rusted shut tighter than his brother’s smile. “Find something. Help me.”
He heard scrabbling by a garbage bin, and within seconds she returned and shoved a second piece of wood, tapered as if it had been a chair leg, into another notch on the cover’s rim. Force and levers. Simple physics.
Veins popped in his forearms as they raised the iron circle an inch. He couldn’t break his promise to keep Theresa safe. His tongue pushed the back of his teeth, pushed with the rest of him, until he tasted blood.
With a noise like an armored vehicle scraping cement bollards, the lid popped free and skittered half off the hole, leaving him on his hands and knees next to a sickle-shaped opening.
“Hey!” a man shouted from the end of the alley. “I found them!” He spoke in English.
Uninvited guests had arrived for this shit barbecue.
Wulf jammed Theresa’s legs through the opening, trying to be more gentle than he was when he shoved a door ram home during an entry. But it was the same concept: Get in. Fast.
“Aiiyy—” She flailed, torso sliding after her legs, but he caught her arm and slowed her in time to keep her chin from bouncing on the edge of the hole. Her eyes, so wide with fear he could see the full circle of white, held on to him although the rest of her had sunk into the dark.
There was no bang, merely a thup, as a round hit and sent stone chips to shred his cheek and neck. These men also had suppressors.
“Now.” He loosened his grip and let her elbow, her wrist and finally her hand slip through his fingers, but he reminded himself that she wasn’t gone. She was safer.
Another round hit the cobblestones near his body, driving him headfirst into the sewer without time to be sure she’d stumbled clear.
“Are you okay?” She crouched between him and the crescent of light above, and one hand stroked his cheek. The illumination gilded her nose and cheeks with a halo as ethereal as a painted Madonna. “Wulf?”
“I’m...” The landing had knocked the wind out of him. Moving was a bitch, as if he’d dislocated his left shoulder, but he hadn’t crashed on top of her. “Good to go.” He couldn’t remember the last time a woman had cared about his injuries. Theresa’s fuss beat Cruz’s all to hell, and he wanted to let her coddle him, but they had to put distance between them and the men above. “I’ll take rear. Head downstream, left hand on the wall.”
He heard men above, indistinct but excited. “Don’t dawdle.”
“No chance of that.” Judging by the splashing, she was already moving.
“Cover your ears.” He reached under his jacket.
The face that popped into the opening above his head disintegrated with a direct round from his Mark 23. A hollow point at ten feet does that. After seeing their buddy pulped, it’d be a while before someone else dropped in, so he followed Theresa.
About seven feet high, the walls were close enough to touch without pulling his elbows off his sides and as solid as everything else the Roman Empire had built. While counting paces, he tried to recall subterranean diagrams of the neighborhood. Even though it was near his brother’s house, he hadn’t worked the tunnels in this area much after the fascists seized Ivar’s mansion. His brother had expected to lose their Italian properties once he committed to structuring sales of England’s war bonds, so the return of the house and castle in 1946 had been a bonus. Ivar had always possessed a knack for turning a profit while doing the right thing.
Wulf’s talent was fighting.
“Is it okay to talk?” Theresa’s question interrupted his memories.
“Sure. What’s the weather forecast up in front?”
“Partly damp with a chance of rats.”
Listening to her voice was like having a light even in the dark.
“So why doesn’t it stink down here?”
“This is a storm sewer, not a sanitary one.” The tunnel smelled no worse than a leaky basement—a fresh Christmas tree compared to Fort Bragg’s portable toilets in July.
“Then I’m glad it’s been dry.”
So was he. The puddles of water accumulated in the bottom were far better than the knee-deep torrents of the winter of 1942, when he’d lost two Allied agents to pneumonia.
Under another manhole, pencils of light poked through ventilation spots. Theresa paused, looking up. “How do we get out?”
Seeing her scan the dark for him, he moved into another thread of light, within arm’s reach. “With proper tools, it’s not hard to find a cover in a quiet alley or courtyard, hook into a rim hole and crank.”
“Tools?” Her voice rose.
“That’s our problem. Most lids are too high to exert sufficient force pushing from below with our bare hands, even if they weren’t rusted shut. There are places where street regrading has exposed the system.” Not that he knew if they’d been covered in the last seventy years. “Or we could revisit the Mouth of Truth. It might even bite you now.”
“What?” Her question echoed off the stones.
“The side sewers eventually connect to the main sewer, the Cloaca Maxima, which empties into the Tiber River near Ponte Palatino and the Mouth.”
“Wonderful.” Her laugh rose and fractured as it bounced off the walls and doubled to echo in his ears. “Exactly what I was hoping for. A do-over.”