was the pebbly underground beach that he remembered. He felt the smoother surface, the little sliding rocks beneath his feet. Underwater, of course, but he remembered this spot because it had not been entirely lightless. A deep crack in La Roccia had created a narrow canyon that let in a gleam of indirect light from the outside. From some distance beyond, he could hear the waves crashing, and a dim glow filtered down. What had been three meters of pebbly wet beach at low tide was now a narrow, half-meter strip of jagged rock, the weird, stalactite-sprouting ceiling slanting down low to meet it. Too low to sit.
He shook violently from the cold. His torn knees and hands stung from the salt water. His face and hip stung and throbbed from blows he hadn’t noticed during the fight, and his shoulder—
His shoulder. He reached up to touch the scar from the bullet wound last year. He’d been examined and treated by doctors in PSS’s pay, after having infuriated Hegel and several others with his inconvenient scruples about child killing. Those doctors had been the ones to sew him up in that secret clinic in Bogotá.
The shoulder had been slightly inflamed ever since. He felt nothing out of the ordinary palpating it, although his fingers were numb. He’d thought the chronic pain in the scar was normal enough. It wasn’t the only old wound or scar he had that ached and throbbed. He didn’t heal as fast as he had ten years before.
So he’d assumed. Not anymore.
He could not leave this cave and go to Tam with that thing inside him. He could lead them away from her, but eventually they would catch up with him and overcome him. His resources were almost tapped out, whereas Novak’s were limitless.
And unfortunately for him, he had witnessed what András could do to a man to extract information. He had never forgotten the experience. Val could not hold out forever. Not against that.
The shoulder was his best and only guess. He had to do it here and now. He could think of no place where he would have more light, other than La Grotta’s tourist chamber. What a show that would be for the English and German visitors on the pleasure boats.
He would rather not be sitting nipple deep in ice cold saltwater for an operation like this, but there was no alternative. He freed his knife from the sheath Velcro’ed to his ankle. Not easy. His hands barely functioned. Getting off the waterlogged jacket and unbuttoning his shirt was the next challenge. His fingers felt thick, dead. He was lucky the wound was in front of his shoulder.
Luck? Hah. He was the only miserable fool on earth who could call a detail like that luck. The knife point shook over the scarred meat of his shoulder as he breathed deep, gathering the courage. Wasn’t this just the story of his fucking life. Forever contemplating the knife he had to stab himself with.
Self-pity would not help him. Nor would he warm up any more, waiting. He would only get colder until he was in shock.
So do it, testa di cazzo. Cut. Now.
His muscles jerked, driving the knife into what he desperately hoped was the right direction—the spot where the most pain was concentrated. He stifled the scream into a strangled moan. Tears streamed down his face. He locked his jaw into a grimace that threatened to loosen his teeth—and thought of Imre. That shard of glass, stabbing downward with such resolve. Imre’s courage. His gift.
Again. He prodded. Blood welled up, slippery and hot as it trickled down his arm. Salt burned in the wound. He prodded deeper, making a low, desperate sound in his throat.
Again. He dragged in a sobbing breath, changed the angle of the blade. Cut again.
This time he could not stifle the shout of pain. Faintness threatened. He dug around with the knife tip, willing his blood pressure to stabilize—and felt it. Yes. A tickety-click, of something non-organic, something that was not muscle, tendon, cartilage or bone.
He dug in with his fingers and felt the very tip of the thing. Hard and smooth. Then it slid away from his blunt fingertip. He needed tweezers, he needed light. He tried again, pressing down on the ragged, tormented flesh on either side of where it had been to force it out.
It popped out and almost dropped into the inky black water. His shaking hand grabbed at the air. It bounced four times. Amazingly, he caught it.
He rocked back and forth, gasping desperately for several minutes before he could bear to open his eyes and examine the thing.
A bloody little capsule, no larger than a pill. So small, made of plastic or ceramic. He puzzled for a split second about the power source. His own body’s electromagnetic field, perhaps.
He didn’t have the mental energy to wonder, wavering a breath away from vomiting or fainting. If he fainted, he would drown.
More decisions. He could drop the thing into the water here and be done with it. That would stall the search but not divert it. He needed to play for time, and the transmitter was the only card he had to play.
He stuck it into his pocket.
He had nothing to bandage the wound with, and he had to swim through the caves anyway, so he dragged his sodden shirt and jacket back on over his shuddering torso, almost screaming at the rasp of soggy, salty fabric against the wound. He could only hope that the salt would help disinfect it. He lurched forward into the cave.
What felt like hours of blundering and suffering followed. Finally, by pure chance, he saw the flickering glow of the light from the larger caves filtering in from the other side of the huge rock formation. He swam out into the lake, and found himself looking up at one of the boats that brought groups of tourists in to tour the scenic part of the Grotta. The boat slid by. A row of astonished faces stared down as the tour guide droned on in English. “…butterfly chamber, so called for the shape of the mineral formation in the center…”
“Would you look at that, Rhonda?” a fat, middle-aged man called out in English. “In January! Must be a German or a Swede.”
The tour guide looked over and gaped. “Ehi! Tu!” she shouted out. “Swimming is not allowed in La Grotta!”
It took several attempts to get the words out of his throat, he was shivering so hard. “Va benissimo,” he spluttered. “Believe me, signorina. I was just leaving.”
He was grateful when he finally crawled up onto the rocks at the entrance. He could barely move, but he couldn’t crouch there and just shiver and quake while passersby watched wide-eyed, and the transmitter betrayed him with RF bursts. He forced himself to trail behind a departing group, following them into the crowded port. Trying not to stagger and lurch like a zombie. Failing, for the most part.
San Vito was a tourist trap even in winter for the English and Germans and Scandinavians, for whom this nippy air was balmy and this watery sunshine practically tropical. He picked up his pace as he moved through the surging crowd, but did not allow himself to run. He was dead if he acted like prey. Nor could he look over his shoulder, up at La Roccia, although the effort not to was killing him. András or one of his men was almost certainly peering down with binoculars.
A ferry heading to a cluster of nearby islands was docked and loading, with a long file of vehicles in the chute to drive on. Val ducked through the line of cars and staggered alongside it, shoulders hunched, head down. Trying to look as unobtrusive as a dripping, bleeding, beaten up, hypothermic man at the point of going into shock could be.
Finally, he spotted a diversion. A small, three-wheeled agricultural utility vehicle driven by a grizzled old man. From the stink, it had held fish
