“Proceed twenty paces straight ahead.”
Nuri walked down the main corridor, passing the displays of ruined bits of columns, mortuary plaques, and statues. He went through an arched opening—vomitorium was the proper name — and came out onto the main aisle circling above the arena area. He walked forward, pretending to look at the ruins, but in fact scanning for Luo.
He couldn’t see him.
“Direct me,” he said.
“Reverse direction,” said the Voice.
Confused, Nuri followed the directions to a door just off the main corridor inside. The Voice told him to open the door and go down the stairs inside, but the door had an alarm on it, apparently not included in whatever schematic the computer had accessed.
Nuri reached into his pocket for his key chain. On the chain was a small card that looked like the sort of tag one held against a credit card reader when making a purchase; not coincidentally, it carried a Visa logo to reinforce that impression. Pressing his thumb firmly against the middle, he slid the card along the doorjamb, waiting to hear a buzz in his headset. As soon it buzzed, he pushed through, the alarm temporarily deactivated.
The corridor opened onto a darkened staircase. Nuri found a banister at the right and descended slowly, listening as he went.
“Turn left,” said the Voice, directing him down a tunnel-like corridor. A dim blue glow of natural light shone toward the far end, where it met another hallway at the right.
Nuri paused, considering whether he should proceed. While he wanted to know why Luo was here and who he was meeting with, being discovered following him would be counterproductive, and very possibly fatal.
Being detained by the museum security people wouldn’t be helpful either.
Nuri opened the book he’d bought, paging through until he found the Coliseum. He folded it open, and glancing at the illustrations, began walking forward through the corridor, pretending he was somehow following the book. He was in the center area of the Coliseum, the basement beneath the arena where animals and gladiators waited before the games. You didn’t have to be very superstitious to think the place was thick with ghosts.
He heard voices as he approached the first corner. He stopped, folded over the page in the book, then plunged forward, holding the tour guide out as if he were using it to relive an ancient scene of life and death.
There was no one there. The voices echoed against the thick stones of the massive structure. The sounds were odd and distorted; he couldn’t tell what the language was, let alone pick out individual words.
He started walking again. The corridor opened up—
“Direct me,” he told the Voice.
“Proceed forward twenty yards.”
Nuri took two steps, then stopped, considering how much distance he should keep from Luo, and whether he might not be better off circling around. The ruins were a maze of small rooms and alleyways; he could probably slip very close to him without being seen.
He turned and started down a small passage just behind him. Nearly two thousand years before, the passage had held the cages for lions brought back from Africa especially for the anniversary games held in honor of Rome’s founding. A winch and pulley located on the wall just behind him had been used to haul the cage up to the level just below the arena floor. There, its open third side allowed the animal to escape. Sensing freedom, the lion would trot up a ramp into the open air, confronting a pair of terrified Christians, who were promptly torn apart by the starving beast for the amusement of the crowd.
All of this was recounted in the book Nuri was holding in his hand, but he had no chance to contemplate it, or even read it. For as he walked down the passage, two gunshots, very close together, echoed loudly through the stone archways of the Coliseum’s basement. He spun and dropped to his right knee, watching as a figure ran past in the corridor.
All he caught was a fleeting glimpse. He rose, his instincts telling him he should follow. But as he took a step, another instinct took over; he jerked himself backward, diving around the low, ruined wall to his right. As he hit the ground, the shadow that had passed returned, pumping two shots in Nuri’s direction. The bullets missed, but their ricochets sprayed stone splinters and dust. There was a scream above, and another shot. Nuri dove through an opening on his right, rolling into a small room as the figure with the gun ran into the passage where he’d just been.
Nuri leaped to his feet and ran from the room. He turned left, running toward a stage that had been erected opposite the gladiators’ entrance to the arena.
The shooter followed. Nuri ducked to the right, into another small alley connecting the rows of rooms, flattening himself against the wall. The footsteps continued, then suddenly stopped.
Nuri looked up and saw a half-dozen tourists standing on the ruined steps opposite him, staring down in horror. He slipped to the ground and turned the corner, hoping to catch a glimpse of the gunman as he ran off.
He saw him, or rather, her — a young woman dressed in baggy green khaki slacks, with a wide top and a knit cap pulled over her head. She wasn’t running. She had stopped and was looking directly at him.
She started to pull the gun out from the holster beneath her shirt where she’d just tucked it.
Nuri jerked back into the corridor, about to run — only to realize that his escape was blocked off by a wall. He’d turned into a dead end.
2
At roughly the same time Nuri Lupo was scrambling in the dust of the Coliseum, Colonel Danny Freah was scrambling down the platform at the Alexandria stop of the Washington Metro, heading for the train that had just stopped and opened its doors.
The car was crowded. He slipped in next to a tall woman in a powder-blue pantsuit a few feet from the door, trying to squeeze himself into the tiny space as more passengers crammed in behind him. The doors slapped shut, then opened, then closed. The train started with a jerk, and he just barely kept himself from falling into his neighbors.
The people around him, all on their way to work, barely noticed him. The lone exception was a black woman about half his age, who thought he reminded her a little of her father, albeit a slightly younger version.
Danny, who had no children himself, might have been amused had he been able to eavesdrop on her thoughts. His own, however, were much more practical. It had been a while since he’d been in D.C., let alone since he used the Metro, and he wasn’t sure if he’d gotten on the right train.
“I can get to the Pentagon from here, right?” he said, looking at the woman in the powder-blue suit.
“You would have done better to figure that out before getting on the train, wouldn’t you?” she answered.
“Then I would have missed the train.”
“Wouldn’t you have been better off in the long run?”
“Maybe yes, maybe no. I have a fifty-fifty chance, right? Assuming I found the right line.”
The woman looked him up and down.
“Most colonels are not gamblers,” she said. “They tend to be conservative by nature.”
“There’s a difference between gambling and taking a calculated risk,” said Danny. “This is taking a calculated risk.”
“I suppose.”
Danny laughed. “Is it the right train?”
“I suppose.”
The train arrived in the sculpted concrete station a few minutes later. As the crowd divided itself toward the exits, Danny spotted several people in uniform and followed them toward the restricted entrance to the building. As the crowd narrowed, he found himself behind the woman in the powder-blue suit.
“So I guess this was the right stop,” he told her.