Rules of Vengeance

He grimaced, acknowledging a new and discomfiting emotion. No longer did he think of Emma as his wife, or even his friend. The events of the past forty-eight hours cast her in a cold, objective light, and for once he allowed her actions to paint her as she truly was. The portrait was unflattering. He forced himself to stare at this mental picture, to memorize its violent features and to put a proper name to her. Not Lara. Or Eva. Or even Emma. Something far more damning.

She was the enemy. And she had to be stopped.

But then what?

Jonathan did not yet have an answer.

Rounding the next point, he angled the skiff into a half-moon bay. There was no beach, not even a jetty, just rugged vertical cliffs that descended 20 meters into the water. At several points staircases cut into the rock ascended from private docks. A succession of seaview residences was built on the bluffs above them. Some resembled palazzos, others were stark and modern, and a sad few were uncared-for and dilapidated.

Circling back, Jonathan guided the skiff toward a recess in the wall, where he dropped anchor. Gathering his money and his wallet, he stripped to his undershorts, bundled his wallet and clothing into a ball, and swam to the dock, an arm held high to keep his possessions dry.

Once on the dock, he gazed at the house 30 meters above him. It was a weathered single-story residence, metal slats concealing its windows, a lonely flagpole standing sentry. To his eye, it appeared vacant, if not abandoned. He threw on his clothes, then climbed the stairs. An empty swimming pool fronted the home. He circled it, jumped a low gate, and came to the garage. Windows high in the wall offered a view inside. The garage was empty. No car. No bicycles.

Jonathan jogged up the road. In the distance he could hear the roar of speeding cars. In a few minutes he reached the highway. He looked north and south.

He ran north.

It was a yellow Ducati 350-a ten-year-old bullet bike with fat tires and a sparkling chrome muffler-and it sat in the center of a jammed parking lot servicing a beachside restaurant called the Coney Island. Go figure, Jonathan thought to himself as he moved purposefully among the cars packed cheek by jowl on the steaming asphalt. In America, every other restaurant was named after an Italian city. He couldn’t count the number of Café Romas or Portofinos or Firenzes he’d been in. Now the Italians were getting into the act.

He walked directly to the bike and knelt down beside it. The car beside him was close enough to touch. No one in the restaurant could see him. Either the bike’s owner would come or he wouldn’t. It was that simple. Jonathan was done worrying about consequences.

Using his Swiss Army knife, he can-opened the cylindrical ignition housing clear of the chassis, then stripped the green and red wires that led to the spark plugs. A motorcycle’s ignition wasn’t like a car’s. On an older model like this one, the key simply completed the co

It was twelve-fifteen. The French border was five hundred eighty kilometers away. Jonathan slid into the fast lane, lowered his head, and gave the Ducati a little gas. The bike took off like a bat out of hell.

He pla

58

Kate Ford collapsed on a chair outside a sidewalk café. “Impossible,” she said, half to herself. “The man’s not a ghost. He can’t just have disappeared. He came here for a reason. He had to have spoken with someone.”

The lieutenant colonel of the carabinieri took a seat next to her. He was handsome and suave, but she suspected he liked the flashy uniform a bit more than the job that went with it. “We have looked everywhere,” he said, slumping his elegant shoulders.

“Not everywhere,” said Kate. “We missed a few blocks back up that way.”

“This is not a nice area,” he said. “More for sailors. Many bars. It is a rough place. We go afterward. First a coffee.”

Kate took off her jacket and fa

Four hours had passed since Ransom had given them the slip. In that time, no fewer than sixty police officers had canvassed the sixteen-square-block area surrounding the address where the ambulance had picked up Emma Ransom. The Italian police were tenacious to a fault. To her eye, they had not missed a single store, hotel, bar, or café. She couldn’t have hoped for more diligent police work in London. She wondered if Ransom had met with the same lack of success.

Reaching the top of the hill, she continued through the ever-narrower cobblestone streets, enjoying the shadows cast by the buildings lining her route. Many were old apartments, worn and unloved. She tried the doors but found them locked. A search of this area would require days, not hours. There were many bars, seedy establishments without names. So early in the day they, too, were locked. Kate stopped inside a small market and showed a picture of Jonathan Ransom, then a grainy photo of Emma taken in London. Time and again she was met with a stony glare.

Kate leaned against a wall and pulled off one of her shoes to massage an aching foot. She sighed. There was little more she could do herself. She would task out the search to the Italian police and wait. She was not optimistic. Memory disintegrated quickly, the sight of an unfamiliar face quickest of all. Replacing her shoe, she began the walk back to the shoreline. But as she did she caught a sign out of the corner of her eye. It hung from a doorway, maybe 30 meters down the alley. Hotel De La Ville.

She shook her head and kept walking. As suddenly she stopped, ashamed of her pessimism. With renewed purpose, she retraced her steps and pushed open the door to the hotel.

At the front desk, she showed the manager the pictures of Jonathan and Emma Ransom and asked if he had seen either of them. The man did not answer immediately, but Kate observed a good deal of activity taking place behind his coffee-brown eyes. “Do you speak English?” she asked.

“Certo,” he answered in Italian, as if insulted. “Of course.”

“You’ve seen them, yes?” she suggested.

The manager began shaking his head slowly back and forth. His hand cupped his chin as his mouth curled into an expression of disapproval.

“What is it?” she asked. “Do you know this man?”

“Not sure.”

Kate grasped his wrist. “Tell me the truth or I’ll have the carabinieri in here in ten seconds checking the working papers of your staff!”

“He was here this morning.”

Kate’s heart skipped a beat. She nodded, urging him to continue. “Yes…”

The manager slapped the picture down onto the desk. “He is her husband,” he said emphatically, as if correcting her from a misunderstanding. “He is not from France!”

The Aérospatiale Écureuil helicopter took off sixty minutes later from a police base in the hills above Civitavecchia. Kate adjusted the headphones and strapped herself tightly into the passenger seat. She gave the carabinieri a wave as the helicopter lifted into the air. Its nose dipped, the chopper banked over hard to the left, and in seconds they were skipping over the sea.

She looked at the pilot. “How long?”