Chapter Seventeen

      Scagnetti and Bellomo tore through the second floor of the house, kicking open every door as they went. Bellomo was a couple of metres ahead when he held up a clenched fist and jerked his head towards the end of the corridor as if to say, ‘Wait. I hear something.’

      Up ahead in the shady corridor was a carved double doorway. The doors were open inwards a few inches, sunlight streaming into the room from the window beyond. The men listened. Behind the doors, a man’s voice was talking. He spoke in rapid Italian, something about Botticelli. The voice sounded tinny and reedy, and they realised it was coming from a TV speaker.

      ‘That just came on now,’ Scagnetti whispered. Bellomo nodded. As they listened, the sound stopped abruptly, as if whoever had turned it on by mistake was turning it off again in a hurry.

      The two gunmen kicked open the doors and raced into the room.

      Straight into a massive impact that knocked them sprawling backwards and their weapons spinning out of their hands.

      Ben rode the heavy oak table as it came swinging violently down from its perch over the double doors. The lengths of rubber hose he’d tied from two of its legs to the classroom’s ceiling beams brought it down in a perfect arc so that the thick tabletop rammed into the men’s bodies as they entered the room and laid them flat. It was as if they’d been hit by a train. He leaped off, landed nimbly on his feet, and stepped out of the way as the table swung back towards him.

      One of the men was out cold; the other was groaning and struggling to raise himself up off the floor. His face was bloodied. Ben remembered him as the one who’d murdered Marcello Peruzzi as calmly as stepping on a beetle. He picked up the fire axe from inside the door and placed its blunt nose against the man’s throat, pressing him back down.

      ‘What’s your name?’ he asked softly.

      ‘Go fuck yourself.’

      Ben put some more weight behind the axe blade, and the guy’s face turned a mottled purple. Blood dribbled downwards from the corners of his mouth where the table had smashed his lips against his teeth.

      ‘What’s your name?’ Ben said again.

      ‘Scagnetti.’

      ‘You’re in the wrong place, Scagnetti. You have a first name?’

      ‘Antonio.’

      ‘What about him?’

      ‘Bruno Bellomo.’ It came out as a groan as Ben leaned a little harder on the axe.

      ‘Who are you working for?’

      Scagnetti spat blood at him and snorted. Ben lifted the axe away from his throat. He took a grip on the smooth hickory handle and swung it down with a loud crash of steel on floorboards. Wood splintered. Blood flew, and with it the four severed fingers of Scagnetti’s left hand.

      ‘That’ll save you money on guitar lessons,’ Ben said.

      Scagnetti’s screams echoed down the corridor as he writhed and rolled in agony, his bleeding hand clamped hard under his right armpit.

      ‘I think you were just telling me who you work for,’ Ben said, crouching beside him with the axe handle against his shoulder.

      ‘The Russian,’ Scagnetti whimpered. ‘I don’t know his name. I swear.’

      Ben knew the look on the man’s face. It was the look of a guy who’d just realised exactly what he was dealing with: an enemy perfectly willing to take him apart, calmly, piece by piece. That was one scary moment, even for a cold killer like Antonio Scagnetti. In Ben’s experience, someone in that seriously rattled state of mind was willing to say anything to make the horror go away. The first thing out of their mouths was generally the truth.

      Ben stood up. ‘OK, Antonio, I believe you. You can save the rest for the cops. Time for a nap now.’ He swung the axe at Scagnetti’s head, side on so that the flat face of the blade whacked into his skull with a meaty thud. Certainly not hard enough to kill him, unlikely to cause permanent damage, but he’d have something to help take his mind off his sore hand for a while.

      Ben stepped over the unconscious body to the other guy, who was beginning to come to. Sweet dreams, Bruno. Crack.

      Putting aside the axe, Ben frisked the men and found two identical radio handsets. He tossed one aside and examined the other. It was a wide-band VHF Motorola, a complex pro-level device covered with knobs and switches. Ben made a mental note of the channel it was set to, then used its scanning facility to skip through multiple frequencies in search of a police channel. The Carabinieri, officially part of the Italian military, used encrypted frequencies that couldn’t be unscrambled on a civilian radio set, but after a minute or so of scanning through white noise and static, he hit on a channel that sounded like a Polizia Municipale control room. The Italian municipal cops were mainly a civilian force, limited to directing traffic, enforcing minor local laws, getting stuck kittens out of trees – but that was good enough right now.

      Or so he hoped. He kept his voice low and calm as he explained to the stunned operator on the other end that heavily armed robbers had taken control of the Academia Giordani near Aprilia, had taken hostages and were acting with lethal intent. He repeated that last part again, slowly and carefully.

      ‘This is not a hoax. People are being shot. You must alert the nearest Carabinieri station immediately and have as many rapid response units sent here as poss—’

      Ben was able to say no more before the signal dissolved into fuzz and static. He could only pray that the municipal cops would take it seriously and relay the alert to the Carabinieri. This was Italy. No telling how efficient their systems were. Until something happened, if anything did, he was on his own.

      Silvestri had been quick to snatch the computer keyboard away from Corsini, who was slumped in his chair weeping openly with shock and guilt. A moment later, the second security code had been entered and accepted by the computer. Then Anatoly thrust the keyboard towards Pietro De Crescenzo with a sneer.

      The count took a deep breath, looked at the Russian with bloodshot eyes, poised his long, thin fingers over the keys and typed in the third and last set of numbers to disarm the secondary security system. His hand shook over the enter key. By pressing it he was enabling this gang of ruthless thugs to walk away with every single piece of artwork in the gallery. A massive cross-section of five centuries of the pinnacle of human cultural achievement, delivered at a stroke into the hands of men like these. If he’d been made to launch nuclear missiles, he’d have felt no worse.

      He pressed the key. In his mind, its tiny click sounded like the crack of doom. He hung his head and closed his eyes. When he opened them, a new message had appeared on the computer screen: ‘SECURITY DEACTIVATED’

      ‘There,’ De Crescenzo groaned. ‘It’s done. Take