The Paris Betrayal by James Hannibal (the dot read aloud .txt) 📗

stone switchbacks descending to a sidewalk and a busy street. A light snow fell, making the cobblestone walk slippery. Ben pulled his coat tight and ventured off the curb into the chaos, dodging a scooter and offering a congenial wave in answer to the angry shouts of a taxi driver. On the other side, he joined the flow of pedestrians passing between the gate towers of an ancient wall. His target had crossed into the old city. Ben checked his watch, cognizant of the fact that while he pursued his quarry, the Italian cops were pursuing him.

Go far fast. Then go farther faster. Ben heard Colonel Hale in his head again.

In the mathematics of escape, time and distance have an exponential relationship. Move two or three hundred meters away from the crime scene in the first three minutes, while confusion reigns. In the next five, as hair and clothing descriptions are gathered and police radio nets go active, you need to be on a train or bus, putting kilometers between yourself and the scene.

Ben needed to talk to Massir, but hanging around in the city put him at risk of capture or exposure, and by extension, his whole team.

The echo, two streets ahead, shifted west. Ben did the same. He turned one street short and paralleled its course, quickening his steps. If he could move ahead and find a crossing alley, he could intercept.

Mistake.

No alley appeared. In a sector of Rome known for narrow passages and hidden courtyards, Ben had picked the one block without a single cross-through. Ahead, a cop wearing the black coat and wheel cap of the old city polizia looked his way, talking into his radio. By now, they’d recovered the sniper scope and broken tiles on the rooftop. They’d have questions Ben didn’t feel like answering. He averted his eyes and made an abrupt turn through the open doors of a basilica.

The blip kept going, moving out ahead of him on a street Ben couldn’t reach. He’d lost the courier, and it looked like he might lose Massir too.

3

Ben hurried down the marble colonnade beside the pews. A crack of light appeared at the far end—a door opening. He broke into a run and squeezed through, nodding to the entering priest. “Grazie, Padre.”

Confusion creased the priest’s brow. “Eh . . . Prego?”

Steps led down to a small piazza where pigeons fluttered Ben’s way. He jogged to a stop in a courtyard and checked his phone. Massir stopped too. But where? The blip covered the square’s opposite half. At close range, the echo reflected a signal too large for precision.

The locals coming out to snap pictures of the rare snowfall strengthened the numbers of the usual tourist crowd. Ben spotted a familiar jacket on a man facing away from him. The bald head, partially hidden beneath a new winter cap, turned left and right as if looking for a contact.

He closed in. Fifteen meters. Ten. Five. The Glock came out of its holster, held low.

The target wheeled around and stretched out a hand to a woman near Ben. “There you are. I thought I’d lost you.”

“Sorry,” she said. “I stopped to get a picture.”

The two embraced. The man kissed her on the cheek. Wrong guy.

Ben altered course and hid the Glock under his coat, coming to rest against a rounded wall in the courtyard’s northwest corner. The echo’s signal return surrounded him. It made no sense. Massir had to be right on top of him.

Right on top.

He turned to glance up at the rounded wall—red plaster, marred and broken, so much older than everything around it. He chuckled at himself. Coming upon it from the rear quarter, Ben hadn’t recognized the famous circular structure. The Pantheon. The upper level’s hidden corridor might be a great place for a meet. Massir had to be inside.

Three-story bronze doors led to a marble rotunda surrounded by angelic statues. A shaft of gray, littered with falling snow, shone through the open oculus at the dome’s peak. The tourists entering with Ben gaped up at the iconic hole, once a natural spotlight for the emperor. Ben’s gaze went straight to a set of wooden steps between the inner and outer walls, guarded by a velvet rope. He unclipped it and walked through as if he worked there. No one challenged him.

Red ropes always have a reason. The upper passage, created using an early version of concrete, had started to crumble since the last time Ben worked a job in Rome. He crawled through an obstacle course of scaffolding filling the tight space, built as much to hold the place together as to support the restoration. He reached an arch looking out across the interior, locked an arm over the scaffolding, and hung sideways in the planks and pipes, listening. Whispered voices hovered above the crowd, caught in the strange acoustics of the dome. One male—Massir. One female.

“Who are you,” Massir asked. “Where’s Hagen?”

“Jupiter sends his regards.”

“What is that? What are you doing?”

Ben saw them through a sister arch across the rotunda. The stray light from the oculus caught the Algerian’s face, but the woman remained in shadow. She pointed at Ben and vanished.

Massir stared back at him with a question in his eyes. After a moment, light dawned on his features and he patted his coat. He ripped off the echo and showed it to Ben with a defiant grin. Then he tossed it into the crowd and backed into the darkness.

Ben clambered over the scaffolding, making a racket, until he reached a stretch of new concrete and raced toward Massir’s position. Two-thirds of the way around, he found an exterior window with a ladder. He took a gamble.

The three-tiered roof behind the Pantheon offered short hops to the street below, where Ben spotted his quarry pushing his way through tourists crowding an alley. He ran along the lowest rooftop until it curved away, and leaped into the crowd. Two men softened his landing. He patted them both on the