Trifariam, The Lost Codex (2012) (19 page)

The news pleased them no end. Traveling without having to use public transport would make it much more difficult for their stalkers.

“Here is the address of the airfield and the hangar number.” Albert handed James a folded-up piece of paper. “When you get there, tell them I sent you. I’ll call right away and inform them of the route they are to take.”

After bidding them farewell, the elderly man closed the door.

While they were waiting for the elevator, they heard mumbling coming from inside the apartment. It was Albert requesting that his private jet be prepared for immediate takeoff.

They waited on the landing for a couple of minutes, but the elevator wasn’t coming up. Something was wrong. They decided to go down the ten floors via the stairs, but as soon as they reached the fifth floor, James remembered that he had left the large white folio in the old man’s laboratory. He didn’t know if they would need it in the future, so after consulting his friends he decided to go back for it while they looked for taxi.

When he reached the door, something startled him. The door was ajar and, on the beautiful carpet with the
Flower of Life
design, lay Albert’s cane and house keys. The young man had a bad feeling about this. He picked up both items and went through the doorway making as little noise as possible. He crept towards the living room, guided by the distant mumbling which gradually turned into shouting as he drew closer. When he reached the half-open door, he felt as if his heart had stopped beating for a few seconds. Albert was on his knees with his hands tied behind his back and bleeding heavily from the mouth. He had been struck with one of the extremely expensive Picasso paintings that had been hanging in the living room. Right behind him, a well-built man was pointing a weapon directly at his head. It was Alpha 1.

Where could the other son of a bitch be?
he wondered as a few drops of cold sweat ran down his forehead and stung his eyes. He became very nervous and for a moment he had the feeling that Alpha 2 was behind him.

In the hallway, his friends were going down the last few steps which led to the doorman’s office. As they passed by, they couldn’t help but smile when they saw how he had fallen asleep on top of a copy of the
Washington Post
.

“Some doorman,” said Richard as he walked over to him intending to borrow one of the newspapers he had already read. “I wouldn’t hire him even - ”

Suddenly his body froze when he got closer to the window. He couldn’t move a muscle.

Mary, who was already opening the front door, hurried him up. “Come on Richard, we have to catch a cab.”

But he stood stock still. Mary frowned, puzzled.

“Is something the matter?”

Richard hadn’t moved an inch. He was expressionless with his eyes fixed on a pool of blood which was filling the doorman’s office. He slowly looked up towards his head and saw a small hole in the nape of his neck from which was still pouring a trickle of blood. They had shot him in the head.

“They’re here!”

On the tenth floor, James stood frozen behind the door, surveying the chilling scene. The assassin was trying to get information out of the old man in any way he could. It was the most macabre interrogation he had ever witnessed in his life, not even a sci-fi movie could match it.

“Stupid old fool! Tell me where they’re going or you’ll live to regret it!”

Alpha 1 threw the old man onto the sofa, roughly gripped his leg and plunged a four-inch knife into his knee. Albert’s screams further paralyzed James’ body, so stunned was he by their heinous cruelty.

Not a trace of mercy flashed across Alpha 1’s face. Not even the fact that his victim was an elderly man seemed to worry him.

“I’m not going to waste another second on you. Either you tell me what I want to know right now, or I’ll connect that knife in your knee up to 120-volt power supply and leave you plugged in until you die.”

Alpha 1 removed the sponge that Albert had stuffed in his mouth to stifle his screams. He thought that his threats had been more than enough for the old man to cooperate. However, after taking it out, Albert spat in his face while he hurled insults at him.

“You must be stupid, old man.” Alpha 1 raised his gun, aimed it at his forehead and quickly pulled the trigger.

They’re insane! I’ve got to get away!

James was frozen, but never in his wildest dreams could he have guessed what happened next. A folk tune began to sound very loudly from his pocket. He looked up and saw that the assassin was looking at him through the grille on the door. They’d found him. He closed it as quickly as he could, jamming Albert’s cane between the handle and the doorframe.

He sprinted down the long corridor as fast as he could. Behind him, he heard Alpha 1’s repeated attempts to leave the room. Just then, with his suspicions aroused by the din, Alpha 2 emerged from the laboratory and startled James as he stood in the main doorway. Alpha 1 had managed to get out of the room and was also in the corridor. They shot at him but it was futile; they only managed to destroy all the Ming vases decorating the hallway.

He ran wildly down the stairs, taking four at a time. He had already reached the eighth floor when the assassins left the apartment and he managed to maintain that small head start until he reached the ground floor. He constantly clung to the wall in an attempt to hide and dodge the hail of bullets. Some of them flew incredibly close due to Alpha 1 often taking aim from the landing in order to fire from a better angle.

When he reached the landing with the janitor’s office, he jumped down the last eight steps onto the street just as his cellphone stopped ringing. Disoriented, his eyes searched desperately for his friends, hoping that they had already found a taxi.

“James, over here!” Mary gestured to him from the window of a car waiting on the opposite sidewalk. He crossed the road hoping that he wasn’t going to be mown down by the traffic and he got in as quickly as he could. “Let’s go! Start the car! Start the car!”

The taxi driver, shocked at the cries of the hysterical woman who had got in to the back seat, tried to ask her why she was screaming, but a couple of shots to one of the headlights were enough for the driver to put his foot down and the tires to screech away.

T
he taxi driver raced through the streets of Washington. In between corners, he glanced back at his three passengers through the rear-view mirror. Panic began to wash over him. Attacks on taxi drivers had become a daily occurrence of late, with many of them ending in tragedy. Organized gangs hailed a taxi, intending not only to neglect to pay the driver, but also rob him of all the money he had with him. The vast majority had installed a glass screen separating driver from passenger, along with a basic metal compartment where the passengers inserted the fare for the journey, securing the driver’s safety. Some drivers had gone so far as to install webcams in the rear compartment.

James had just taken his cellphone out of his pocket to check who had been responsible for that unfortunate call which had given him away to the assassins, triggering the frenzied chase which would later take place. He couldn’t contain his disbelief and shot Richard a menacing look as he showed him the handset. He was probably calling to warn him so he couldn’t blame him. He would have done the same thing.

“Who are you?” asked the taxi driver, feeling intimidated.

Richard was one step ahead of his friends and responded with uncharacteristic sarcasm. “I never knew it was compulsory in Washington to identify yourself before you got into a taxi.”

“The screen between us is reinforced. If you fire any bullets inside, they will probably rebound and injure you. One of my headlights is broken because of you. Either you tell me who you are or I drop you at the nearest police station, which luckily enough is two blocks away!”

James took over before his friend could get them into an even bigger mess. “Okay! We came to visit a friend. He’s a great art collector and he wanted to show us his latest acquisition. When we got out of the elevator, we found the door to his apartment open. Those two men and the rest of their cronies up there were trying to steal his whole private collection, which contains pieces which are priceless. When they saw us, they tried to kill us and they would have killed you, too - just like they did to our friend, and to his doorman.” James had shocked himself with his latest exaggerations of the truth, convincing as they were. “We called the police - I guess they’ll be arriving at the apartment about now. If we had stayed there, it would have been their word against ours. Don’t you realize that they’d lock us all up and get rid of us without any problem? We have to leave the country.”

The taxi driver took all of two seconds to analyze them carefully. He reckoned that they didn’t look like murderers. Besides, the ones who had started firing the shots were the other two, so he’d go as far as to say his three passengers were unarmed.

The guy’s right. If I hand them in to the police, they’ll probably kill them while they find out who the real guilty ones are
, he thought, making sure not to turn left along the road which would take them to the police station. “And the damage to my car… who’ll pay for that?”

Richard, aware of the compromising situation in which they found themselves, took out a wad of bills from his pocket, opened the payment compartment and inserted a thousand dollars. “Here you go. That’s more than enough to repair the headlight and pay for our journey.”

The taxi driver had the upper hand and he knew it. Feeling proud of how he had dealt with the situation, he asked them, “Where do you want me to take you?”

Time went by slowly. James couldn’t forget a couple of things which had been worrying him since he discovered the assassins in Albert’s flat. One in particular was tearing him up the most:
How did they find out we were in Washington, and in that apartment in particular?

“What’s the matter, James? You’ve been quiet for a while.”

Clearly something was bothering him, so Mary tried to console him as he had done for her so many times before.

He couldn’t hold it in any longer. “How did they find out we were in Albert’s house?” They both looked at him, worried. They hadn’t even thought about it. “I’ve been thinking about it since we escaped and the only way would be if they tracked down our personal details from the airline. When we took the flight to Washington, we used our real names!”

“But that wouldn’t explain how they knew we were going to Albert’s house,” said Mary emphatically. “They wouldn’t have been able to follow us from the airport because we were the first to arrive in the city. What if they traced your location from your cellphones?”

“Impossible,” replied Richard. “When I met you at the Trevi Fountain, I bought two prepaid SIM cards with two new numbers. I paid in cash, so they can’t be traced back to us.”

Mary took a deep breath and turned to them nervously. “So… that only leaves…”

“What are you thinking?”

“The only possibility left is that they know our location via global positioning transmitters.”

James was shocked, he hadn’t entertained the possibility that they could have placed some kind of hidden transmitter on them. Without thinking twice, they rummaged through their bags looking for some kind of GPS hidden among their belongings. The professor’s bag was small and practically empty, so it was easy to see that nothing was amiss. However, as he turned to help Mary, he saw that she had turned white. In her hands she held a coat, the same one she had been wearing in Florence, but in her left hand was a small metal ball the size of a button, on which a red light was flashing intermittently.

“The bastards!” cried James indignantly. “Now I understand everything. I thought it was weird how two professional assassins were finding it so difficult to kill us, when it should have been so easy for them. They must have known that we’d have more chance of finding the object than them, and they’ve limited themselves to scaring us and letting us know that they were chasing us. That way they were able to put pressure on us and we would try even harder to find the answer to the riddle. They definitely took advantage of us panicking in the train station in Florence to fit that electronic device.”

“Christ, they could be following us from a distance!”

Mary quickly wound down the rear window of the taxi and threw the GPS receiver outside, smashing into the face of a derelict building. Not content with that, they both went through all their belongings again in case they found a second hidden transmitter. They didn’t.

After an hour and a half of traveling, they reached the airfield. It wasn’t very big; it only had a couple of runways alongside a large number of private hangars. They were all locked except for one. At that very moment, a private jet was emerging from it in order to complete all the necessary preparations prior to takeoff. The plane had a large design near the right wing which James recognized instantly. It was the
Flower of Life
, the very same one which appeared on the carpet in Albert’s house.

“There it is.”

The three of them quickly headed towards the aircraft. The door slowly opened when they got there, revealing the silhouette of a tall woman in uniform with her hair tied back.

“Good afternoon. You must be the three passengers who have come on behalf of Mr. Williams.”

Richard nodded.

The flight attendant invited them onto the plane.

Once inside, she showed them around and, needless to say, they loved it. It seemed more like another part of Albert’s living room than an airplane. The main cabin was huge; it had a walnut floor and the walls were adorned with paintings by artists who were less well-known, but by no means less significant. A couple of black leather sofas, a dining room whose oak table hid inside a pool table in perfect condition, and a gigantic bar where wine aficionados could delight their refined palates by indulging in one of the best vintages of the season - all of this would turn any business trip into one of leisure. To the rear of the plane, four small rooms with a luxurious bathroom completed the rest of the aircraft.