filthy pigs thought he was finished. They thought they had stopped him. How wrong, how oh-so-very wrong, they were. And how pitifully they would all squeal for his mercy when he was restored to his former power, one day.
One day.
But he knew that could never happen. Oh, he had the means to take his revenge, all right. He wasn’t broke, not yet, and he still commanded the loyalty of followers who would do whatever he asked. Neither his personal assistant Silvano Bellini nor his administrator Pierangelo Volpicelli were coarse or brutal men, but Usberti had made sure he surrounded himself with others who were exactly that: men such as Ennio Scorceletti, known simply to his associates as ‘the big man’, along with Renato Zenatello, Federico Casini, Aldo Groppione, Luca Iacono, Maurizio Starace and half a dozen others who lived in barrack-style accommodation on the estate, were uncompromisingly vicious thugs from a variety of criminal backgrounds. The hulking Scorceletti was a staunch Catholic who had beaten his estranged wife to death with a hammer after she left him for another woman. Zenatello, a former carabiniere, had done time in prison for his role in the murder of four Afghan immigrants. Convicted rapist Groppione had performed similar tricks against a Nigerian asylum seeker and his wife, killing them in their car outside Fermo with a hunting rifle. Iacono was a computer hacker by trade, who had proved his fealty to God by setting fire to a mosque in his home town of Naples.
The list went on.
For all of these men, the primary appeal of their employer’s brand of Christian fundamentalism was that they could vent as much hatred as they liked against homosexuals, Muslims, atheists, liberals and other filthy servants of Satan. They each loved nothing more than being sent on a vigilante mission of faith-inspired violence in the sure knowledge that they were consolidating their places in heaven. Some of them, like Scorceletti, had been recruited into the ranks of Gladius Domini back in the glory days, before the fall; if anything, Usberti’s topple from grace had only intensified the fierceness of their loyalty to him. He had only to give the order, and he could unleash all manner of bone-breaking, razor-slashing nastiness on those he dreamed of punishing.
So many sleepless nights he’d spent working out his vengeful plans, he knew exactly what form the punishment would take. But as much as he yearned to give the order, he knew that the moment he took any such action against his list of enemies, his involvement would be so transparently obvious to even the most obtuse law enforcement official that he’d be instantly whisked away to prison for the rest of his life. And however much he detested the scum who had brought him down, he wasn’t prepared to give up what little freedom and luxury remained to him.
Then how could he strike back at them? He couldn’t think of a solution. It would take a gift from the Lord above to make it happen. Every day he got down on his knees and prayed for Divine help in making his plans possible. Had he not been a loyal servant of God all his life? Didn’t he deserve just one break?
Usberti seldom ventured from the privacy of his sanctuary. That summer, however, he had taken a rare road trip to visit his last surviving relative, an uncle who lived in a luxury residential clinic for the elderly not far from Assisi in Umbria.
Usberti’s reasons for travelling four hundred kilometres to see the old man, on whom he hadn’t laid eyes in at least thirty years, were by no means sentimental: Fortunato Usberti was two months shy of his hundredth birthday, reportedly possessed barely an organ in functioning condition, had completely lost his marbles and was as rich as Croesus. His devoted nephew therefore felt obliged to rekindle the somewhat lapsed relationship between them, in the hope that the ailing Fortunato might consent to leaving him a little something when he shuffled off to a better place, which with any luck wouldn’t be too long away. This is what it’s come to, Usberti seethed on the journey south.
A double disappointment awaited him in Umbria. On arrival at the rest home he found his uncle disturbingly alive and plenty chipper enough to molest the nurses, while now so senile that he didn’t even know he had a nephew, let alone one he recognised. Usberti didn’t stay long. He got back in the Mercedes and instructed his driver to get him out of here. Soon afterwards, as they passed through a small village, Usberti spied a little church and felt the urge to go inside. Maybe the Lord would grant him some new miracle.
And that was exactly what the Lord did.
Usberti’s heart nearly stopped beating when he saw Gennaro Tucci walk into the coolness of the empty church. Then, of course, he didn’t know the man’s name or anything about him – except that this complete stranger could have been cloned from Usberti’s own flesh and blood. The resemblance was uncanny, quite stunning, although Usberti was the only one who seemed to spot it as the man barely glanced at him with a quick smile.
That was when the idea had come to him, in a flash. It was so simple, so blindingly obvious; and Usberti realised that God, in those mysterious ways of His, had provided His loyal servant with the perfect means to take his long-sought revenge.
The decision that followed was an easy one to make. Gennaro Tucci lived alone, a poor man with a simple life and few friends. That much had been easy to find out, and it was all Usberti needed to know.
Two days later, his men Casini, Zenatello and Scorceletti seized their victim at his home and brought him back to the Lake Como estate. There Gennaro was kept locked in a disused wine cellar for a week, while Usberti quickly and secretly, through a defunct company name, allocated a substantial part of his remaining fortune to the purchase of a small island off the Sicilian coast. The moment the sale went through, it was time to move briskly to the next phase. They brought the hapless prisoner up from the cellar, forced cognac down his throat until he was half unconscious, dressed him up in some of Usberti’s own clothes, then dragged him to the boathouse where the motor yacht was launched for the first time in years.
The rest was history. When the disfigured body was dragged from the water later that day, it was an open and shut case: death by misadventure. Nobody would lament the passing of the disgraced former archbishop, just as little was made of the disappearance of a retired, penniless carpenter from Umbria. Even if it had, nobody would ever connect the two.
And now Usberti, whisked off in the night to live in hiding on his island off the coast of Sicily, was ready to strike back at his enemies from a position of absolute safety, where nobody would suspect him, let alone come looking for him. Vengeance would be his, and it would be carried out from beyond the grave.
He couldn’t wait.
But what Massimiliano Usberti couldn’t possibly have known back then, six months ago, was that his revenge quest would lead him to a greater reward by far. A treasure he couldn’t have imagined in his wildest dreams of wealth and power.
Usberti was soon to make the discovery of his life.
As Ben drove away from Saint-Jean, he considered his priorities. The first of which was to understand who was doing this. Was someone else carrying out these attacks on Usberti’s behalf, or was Usberti alive? If he was alive, where was he?
If the situation had been different, Ben could have picked up the phone and talked to Luc Simon. Now that the one cop he trusted in the world was gone, he might have been thinking about driving east, over the Italian Alps, to pay an unscheduled visit to Usberti’s home estate. But that wasn’t his only or even his main priority, because there still remained one name on the hit-list to be ticked off. Ben had to find Anna Manzini and make sure she was safe.
He checked his email – still no reply to the message he’d posted via her author website. Looking again
