then, Andrea was going to stare at the airport hotel room ceiling and wait. Feeling scared.
She could already be dead.
Val wrestled his mind back to blankness as he moored the small, inflatable motorboat to a huge vine that clung to the side of the ancient stonework bridge. The road that ran over it led to Novak’s crumbling eighteenth-century palace on the river. The McClouds had texted Rachel’s radio frequency to him, and her icon had come to rest here some hours before. Val had been unsurprised that the revenge orgy would take place at Novak’s favorite residence. The old man felt like an aristocrat here. It pumped up his vanity.
He knew the place well. He’d spent lonely years here, in the old days, once it was discovered that he had a knack for computers and technological devices. He’d made it his business back then to learn every detail about the ancient palace, having nothing better to do in his leisure time. The grounds were honeycombed with dungeons, wells, cisterns and drains, and he’d spent long hours studying antique floor plans he’d found in the library, hand-drafted in elegant cursive script. He’d wriggled through miles of culverts, tunnels and various other lightless, dripping holes, just out of curiosity. And since knowledge was power, his policy was to share what he learned only when his colleagues or employer had a pressing need to know it.
No one had ever asked.
He could only hope that no one else had made such a thorough study of the estate since then. It was unlikely. Crawling through dank, rat-infested eighteenth-century sewer pipes was the kind of thing only unbalanced teenagers did voluntarily.
And desperate, luckless bastards like himself, of course.
He opened the computer and checked Rachel’s icon. It remained stationary. The satellite photograph on his screen showed a bird’s-eye view of the place, which he remembered well. The icon blinked in what looked like one of the outbuildings, garages that used to be the stables. He slid the computer into his pack and climbed carefully out of the boat.
Keeping his mind focused on the task. Not letting it wander to what they might be doing to her right—
No. He picked his way over moss-slimed rocks, blanked out his mind with manufactured white noise.
In the flickering twilight dimness beneath the bridge, he shone the flashlight on the rusty iron grate bolted over the sewer hole in the wall. It dated back to the first World War, from the looks of it. He rattled the thing, examined the corroded bolts. He wouldn’t even need the welding equipment. A few wrenches with the crowbar—this one for Rachel, oof, this one for Tam—and ah, fuck. A fresh, hot wet spot in his shoulder. He’d ripped open the wound again. But the grate was loose.
She could be dead. Or worse.
He stepped savagely on the thought. Look straight ahead. Not productive, to think of it. Not useful to them.
Yes, and neither are you, testa di cazzo. He’d been buzzing around this problem for almost twenty-four hours like a fly around a turd. Endless precious hours wasted in inefficient, infuriating means of travel. No time to equip, no time to assemble a team or plan something brilliant. András had certainly had the use of a private plane waiting at the Naples airport. He’d probably gotten to Budapest during the night, and to Novak’s estate by the small hours of the morning with his prize. Hours for them to play with her if they’d wanted to. If Novak had been in a hurry.
Whereas Val himself had been forced to drive like a maniac to the Roma airport at Fiumicino and abandon the rental car in the taxi lane, door hanging open, keys in the ignition. He’d sprinted up to the ticketing area, waiting on line after line, trying desperately to find a seat on a commercial flight.
He was spoiled, by all the high budget shortcuts of PSS and the obscenely rich corporations and military operations that they serviced. Cristo, how did normal people survive the nightmarish frustration?
Normal people didn’t usually have their lovers chained under a torturer’s knife.
One last wrench, one last blaze of agony to take his mind off his troubles, and the grate came loose from the mouth of the sewer pipe. Thud, clang, and it rolled into the water with a sullen splash.
He clutched the flashlight in his teeth and scooped out armfuls of trash, twigs, leaves and sludge that had drifted down with the rainwater overflow for decades. It had lodged against the grate into a sludgy wall, making the opening too small for a man to crawl through.
He wished he had a team, but it took time to coordinate a team. The McClouds were fierce and competent and well meaning, but they were hours behind him, having to cross two continents and an ocean. He could not hope for help from them. By the time they followed their beacons to the source, whatever was going to happen would have long since happened. So be it.
He tightened his teeth on the pen flashlight and launched himself headfirst into the dark, wet hole. It was like crawling into his own grave.
Which did not bother him. He was not afraid of death. It was life without her that he could not face. The blankness of it, the dull, flat emptiness that he had mistaken for calm. Detachment.
Cold, slimy mud squelched between his fingers. He should have thought of rubber gloves, but he’d been too frantic to do more than procure the most basic things that occurred to him: backpack, boat, crowbar, welding gear, guns, ammunition. His black clothing was now covered with stinking mud. At least he wasn’t immersed in icy water. But then again, the evening was still young.
A couple hundred meters brought him to the main tunnel, a larger and still older one. Here he no longer had to crawl but only crouch, doubled over. He started to run, splashing through the dripping tunnel, the flashlight bobbing wildly between his teeth.
The tunnel was long, with various forks and twists. Overflow from old rainwater cisterns at several points on the estate all found their way here, and he had to dig into his ironclad long-term memory, concentrate and count to remember which one led where he meant to go. He gave thanks for Imre’s rigorous training.
He crawled, face first, through the last hundred meters of the overflow pipe. He barely fit inside it. His shoulders had not been quite as broad the last time he’d crawled through, years ago.
The space before him suddenly opened up into a black void. He stuck his head carefully out and peered up. The cistern had been out of use for a hundred and fifty years or so, the area above ground having been turned into a conservatory at some point in the middle of the nineteenth century. The greenhouse above remained, but in Val’s time of servitude, it had been abandoned, used largely as a storage room and weapons dump. Gabor Novak was not a man with any interest in nurturing life, be it animal or vegetable.
But the conservatory was inside the security perimeter.
The overflow hole was in the narrow upper shaft of the well. Three meters above his head had been the opening. Val had remembered there being a little light inside the well, shining down from the pattern of holes drilled in the iron plate covering the access.
He could barely make out those little holes. The fading light of evening did not penetrate them. Beneath him, the narrow tube of stonework yawned out wide into the huge antique rainwater cistern. Ten, twelve meters deep. Falling into it would be a very bad, slow, lonely death if one did not have the luck to break one’s neck outright.
He groped on the wall in the darkness for the corroded iron ladder steps bolted to the wall, hoping that whatever lay over the iron plate would not be too heavy for him to lift.
