“I’m fine, baby.”
“She’s still breathing,” says the man. “Here.”
He slides a knife across the floorboards towards me. I cut the bindings as Lorenzo tilts his head back and looks up at me with relief and confusion.
“What happened?” he asks, rubbing his wrists.
“He’s helping us,” I say before nodding at the body on the floor. “And I think Mrs Bellacci might be making her presence known. Can you get her to stand down?”
“My phone is in the bedroom. I’ll try messaging her.”
“Go then. Fast and low.”
While Lorenzo scrambles across the floor on all fours and heads towards the bedroom, I survey the room more carefully this time. I need to secure the space in case Mrs Bellacci did not see us enter.
“We’ve not much time,” calls the man, tending to his fallen colleague. “Mila calls in on the hour, every hour. This is a priority covert op. They’ll send another team if we don’t check in. I suggest we secure Mila, then you’ll have to do the same to me.”
I head to the broken window and pull the cord to close the thick curtains. Once I’m done, I help drag the woman towards the bedroom with the twin beds, where the blinds are still closed. Apart from the shoulder wound, which I ensured was a clean through-and-through, she has a nasty gash on the side of her head and is spattered with fragments of blood and other body matter from her dead colleague.
“She’ll recover,” says the man, pushing the hair from her face. “I must say, you’ve got a well-chosen location here. Even our drones would have had difficulty finding you.”
“How did you find us?” I ask as we arrange the woman’s body on the floor.
“Tracker on your motorbike.”
“Fuck. How the hell did you manage that?”
“Mila said we got lucky,” he says. I can see from the way he handles her with tenderness that there’s more than a professional relationship between them. Once he’s finished, he perches on the edge of a bed. “Your pal was identified by one of our operatives working around Tuscany. Spotted the two of you going into a coffee bar in a place called San Vincenzo. She said she parked up to take photos of you and the bike for confirmation, and while you were inside, she took the initiative to plant the tracker.”
I remember the trip to the coast well, an opportunity to step outside Eagle House with my new look as Aksel. Had we been careless that day or just unlucky?
“How much time do we have?” I ask.
“Fifteen to twenty minutes. I suggest you pack a bag and leave the bike. Finding the device might take too long. Is there a car you can use?”
“Not that I know of, but we’ll think of something.” I pull one of our rucksacks into the bed and begin removing clothes from a drawer. “Let me wait for Lorenzo to finish up. He may have some ideas. Are you working undercover?”
“No.”
“You’re a double agent?”
“No.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I work for the Russian foreign intelligence services. Honestly, Five, had you not been here today, I would have followed orders. To bring your friend in or take him down. Him and his markswoman partner have caused us one embarrassment after another. We’ve got tough enough adversaries from the big players. The Kremlin views Italy as little more than a mouse. Except for those two. Three times they’ve shown us up, and the heads of the SVR do not take kindly to that sort of upstaging. But when I saw you in the photograph, even with the dye job, Irecognised you instantly. And then I saw you swimming. That’s why I did what I had to.”
“Do they know about us—?”
“Nobody knows. That part of my life is buried. And that’s the way it’s going to stay.”
“You said we trained together?”
“A lifetime ago. You were—are—a Knight. I was only a Pawn. P2, they called me, one of the poor wee buggers being groomed to eventually replace you. Bloody impossible task. They encouraged us to learn with you, to train with you, to emulate you. We considered you gods.”
“At the Hartfield Institute?”
“You remember?”