Spartan Gold

“No, don’t!”

Two more shots. Umberto screamed and rolled back into the car. “I’m hit!”

“Where?”

“The forearm! I’m okay,” he gasped.

“The hell with this,” Sam muttered. “Brace yourselves!”

He stood on the brakes for a two count, then punched the gas again. The SUV skidded, swerved, then slammed into the Lancia’s bumper. Sam had timed it well, accelerating just before the moment of impact. They pulled ahead of the SUV: twenty feet . . . thirty . . . four car lengths.

“Whoa!”

Abruptly, the trees disappeared from either side of them.

Remi popped her head up. “Oh, no!”

The Lancia’s wheels thumped over a berm and they were airborne. Open space loomed in the windshield. The Lancia landed again and bounced, the tires spraying gravel.

“Shoulder!” Remi called.

“I see it,” Sam replied and spun the wheel left. The Lancia went into a tail skid. He eased right, compensating, then straightened out. Out Remi’s window a boulder-strewn embankment dropped several hundred feet into a ravine.

Engine roaring, Kholkov’s SUV sailed over the berm and slammed onto the road.

“He’s not going to make it,” Remi said.

“Let’s hope.”

The SUV went into its own skid, but Kholkov overcompensated. The passenger-side rear tire crunched into the rocks along the shoulder and slipped over the edge. Carried by its own momentum, the rear third of the SUV’s chassis scraped over the dirt, edging inch by inch over the precipice until it stopped, partially suspended in space.

Sam took his foot off the accelerator and let the Lancia coast to a stop. Fifty feet behind them the SUV was seesawing at the road’s edge. Aside from the faint rhythmic groaning of stressed metal, all was quiet.

Remi sat up, looked around.

“Careful,” Sam whispered.

“Are we going to help them?” she asked.

A hand emerged from the darkened interior of the SUV and grasped a windshield wiper. A muzzle flashed from within the cab.

A bullet thunked into the Lancia’s bumper.

“The hell with them,” Sam said and stepped on the accelerator.

“That’s gratitude for you,” Remi said. “We could have bumped them into that ravine.”

“Something tells me we’re going to wish we did.”

CHAPTER 28

GRAND HÔTEL BEAUVAU VIEUX PORT, MARSEILLE, FRANCE

Even as Sam tipped the bellhop and shut the door behind him Remi was dialing the iPhone. Selma answered on the first ring. “Safe and sound, Mrs. Fargo?”

“Safe and sound,” Remi replied as she sat on the bed and kicked off her shoes. “Now will you tell me why we’re in Marseille?”

After leaving Kholkov and his mustachioed partner teetering on the precipice, they’d driven at the Lancia’s best speed to Nisporto. Umberto, his forearm wrapped in his own shirt, used the sat phone to alert his cousin to their arrival.

Nisporto, a village of a few hundred people, sat in the nook of a V-shaped cove ten miles up the coast from Portoferraio. When they arrived, Umberto’s wife, Teresa, and his cousins—all five of them—were waiting at the back door. While Teresa tended to Umberto’s wound, which had missed hitting any bones or arteries, the cousins bundled the now-conscious Bianco into the garage. The mother of the house, Umberto’s aunt Brunela, ushered Sam and Remi into the house and straight to the kitchen table, where she set about feeding them homemade pasta with onions, capers, olives, and red sauce. Thirty minutes later Umberto reappeared, his arm bandaged.

“We’ve put you in some danger,” Sam said.

“Nonsense. You’ve helped me redeem my honor. I think my father would have been proud.”

“I think he would, too,” Remi said, leaning over and kissing him on the cheek. “Thank you.”

Sam asked, “Do we want to know what you’re going to do with Bianco?”

“Here and in Corsica, he’s untouchable. On the mainland . . .” Umberto shrugged. “I’ll make some calls. I think with the right evidence, real or otherwise, the Carabinieri will be happy to embrace him. As for the other one, his partner . . . he’s a coward. We’ll be fine, my friends. Now, finish eating and we’ll see about getting you off the island.”

Knowing Bondaruk’s influence and Kholkov’s thoroughness made the Marina di Campo Airport too risky, they’d enlisted Umberto’s cousin Ermete, who ran a charter fishing boat, to ferry them back to Piombino on the Italian mainland. From there they’d returned to Florence, checked into the Palazzo Magnani Feroni, and called Selma, who’d directed them to e-mail her the photographed symbols from Laurent’s codebook then head straight to Marseille. The next morning they dropped the book itself into an overnight envelope for San Diego, then headed to the airport.

“Why all the mystery? Remi now asked Selma. Sam sat down on the bed and Remi put the phone on speaker.

“No mystery,” Selma replied. “I was hashing out some details, but I knew you’d want to be in Marseille one way or the other. By the way, Pete and Wendy are working on the symbols right now. It’s fascinating stuff, but the book’s condition is the big question—”

Sam said, “Selma.”

“Oh, sorry. Remember Wolfgang Müller, captain of the UM-77? I found him.”

“Him? You mean—”

“Yep, he’s still alive. Took a lot of legwork, but it turns out he was aboard the Lothringen when it was captured. After the war he was shipped back to Germany by way of Marseille. He got off the boat, but didn’t take the train home. He lives with his granddaughter. I’ve got their address. . . .”

The next morning they got up and walked to a café, Le Capri, a few blocks away on Rue Bailli de Suffren overlooking the Vieux Port, or Old Port, which was filled with sailboats of all shapes and sizes, their sails dancing in the offshore breeze. The bright morning sun glinted off the water. At the mouth of the port, rising from the north and south shorelines, were the forts of Saint Jean and Saint Nicholas. Above these on the hillsides stood the Abbaye de Saint Victor and the churches of Saint Vincent and Saint Catherine. Farther out, in the Bay of Marseille proper, lay the four-island archipelago of Frioul.

Sam and Remi had been to Marseille three times together, the last a few years earlier on their way to the Camargue up the coast. Every May some twenty thousand gypsies from western and eastern Europe gathered there to celebrate their gitane heritage.

They finished breakfast and hailed a taxi, giving the driver an address in the Panier, a cluster of medievalesque neighborhoods filled with tightly packed pastel-painted houses sandwiched between the town hall and the Vieille Charité. Wolfgang Müller lived in a two-story butter yellow, white-shuttered apartment on Rue de Cordelles. A blond woman in her mid twenties answered the door when they knocked.

“Bonjour,” Sam said.

“Bonjour.”

“Parlez-vous anglais?”

“Yes, I speak English.”

Sam introduced himself and Remi. “We’re looking for Monsieur Müller. Is he at home?”

“Yes, of course. May I ask what this is about?”

They’d already discussed this and decided honesty was the best course. Remi replied, “We’d like to talk to him about the UM-77 and the Lothringen.”

The woman cocked her head slightly, her eyes narrowing. Clearly her grandfather had told her about his time in the war. “One moment, please.” Leaving the door open, she walked down a hall and disappeared around the corner. They heard muffled voices for a minute, then she reappeared. “Please, come in. My name is Monique. This way, please.”

She led them into the front room, where they found Müller sitting in a rocking chair in front of a muted television tuned to France’s version of the Weather Cha