“And now, my good friends, one last illusion. Another volunteer, please.” His eyes ranged over the audience and settled on Webb. “You, sir!” he said, pointing dramatically. Forty pairs of eyes turned.
“Stay in your seat.” But the man in the velvet tuxedo grabbed Webb’s arm, laughing, and pulled him to his feet. The hit men hauled at his other arm. The audience laughed and clapped at the tug-of-war which was rapidly becoming bad-tempered. Webb shouted “Okay! I surrender!” and there was more applause as he picked his way between settees and climbed the steps. He slipped the book back in his pocket. From the stage Webb could just make out, beyond the footlights, Martini and the assassins forcing their way hastily towards the exit.
“Try to stay calm,” Mephisto murmured in English, and Webb’s heart jumped. “My friends,” the magician addressed the audience theatrically, “you see before you a man.” There was a snort from somewhere beyond the footlights and someone giggled. “There is one thing wrong with a man. And that is, he is not a woman. It is a fault which we in our world of illusion can put right. God created woman by removing a rib.” The blonde gripped Webb’s arm firmly as the magician leaned down and swiftly produced a bright orange chainsaw from under the table, trailing an electric cable. The audience roared.
“Do we dare to repeat God’s experiment?” Cries of Yes! Si! came from forty throats. The chainsaw burst into life. Mephisto produced a half-bottle of some spirit from an inside pocket and drank it in a single draught, the blonde jumping as the saw swung towards her. More laughter. “Now Doctor Mephisto is drunk enough. Let the surgery begin. Let us remove a rib from this man. I ask someone to inspect this box.” The saw waved erratically towards off-stage.
A box was wheeled on, and the velvet tuxedo man, keeping a weather eye on the buzzing chainsaw, tapped the walls, jumped up and down on the floor and declared that this was an okay box no nonsense. The blonde led Webb into the box and the door closed. He stood in pitch black. The sound of heavy chains being wrapped round and round the box came in magnified. The sound from the chainsaw rose in pitch and then there was the deafening racket of splintering wood. He backed into a corner before realizing that somehow the saw was not penetrating the box. There was another sound, a panel sliding at ground level. Light flooded in from the floor. A hand was beckoning urgently and Webb climbed down a short wooden ladder. A light-skinned man, dressed in blue overalls, put a finger to his mouth. Another one, with the face of a patrician Roman, was wearing the full uniform of a Colonel of the Carabinieri. He nodded curtly to a woman of about twenty-five, her eyes covered with a red Venetian mask and a sequined red cloak draped around her shoulders, and she climbed the short ladder unsteadily in red high-heeled shoes. Little bells tinkled around her midriff as she brushed past Webb.
“They’ll be waiting for me at the back,” Webb whispered, blinking in the light. “I saw them run out.”
“I know. The name’s Tony Beckenham, by the way, from Her Britannic Majesty’s Embassy. And this is Colonel Vannucci of the SDI, the Italian Security Service.”
“How do you even know about me?”
“Your American colleagues. And Walkinshaw’s people.”
“But how did you find me? Nobody could possibly have known where I was.”
“Nonsense. We just followed the manuscript trail. The old bat in the hills has been telling that story for the past fifty years.”
The colonel was looking agitated. “Mister Fish, this is not-ta time for talk. The danger is extreme. We recognize at least seven wanted criminals in the club. It is amazing good fortune for us. But they will kill you without a thought and shoot their way out. Until the squadra arrives I have only three people here and we cannot return fire in a public place.”
“What then?”
“Hide! Back on stage!”
“Beckenham, I want you to open up the Planetological Institute in the Via Galileo and I want a car standing by to take me there.”
“Don’t be a bloody fool.”
The sound of whistling and clapping penetrated through the stage floor. A wooden panel opened from above and a pair of long sequined legs in red high heels emerged, climbing unsteadily down the steps.
“Go, go!” Vannucci said, pushing Webb back to the ladder.
“I want to be in Oxford in three hours maximum. I don’t care if you have to charter a Jumbo.”
Vannucci was forcing Webb up the ladder.
“And I need a fast laptop computer on board. I left mine in the safe house.”
A scared look came over Beckenham as it dawned on him that Webb was serious. Vannucci was practically lifting the astronomer upwards.
“With a Linux interface,” Webb shouted down, disappearing.
“A what inner face?”
Inside the dark box again, Webb felt himself being trundled some yards, he guessed to just off-stage. The band started up on some sleepy tune, rose to a finale.
Footsteps approached. Webb fell against the side of the box as it was tilted up. It was wheeled for maybe ten yards and then a tremendous Crack! erupted within it. A man shouted, angry and frightened; a woman screamed; running footsteps.
Somebody kicking hard at the base of the box. Webb, drenched in sweat, took two feet to it and it burst open. Beckenham, the policeman and a woman in a black cocktail dress dragged him out and on to his feet. All three with guns and the woman, in addition, with an evening bag. A walrus-moustached janitor in a glass booth crouched, quivering, behind a chair, eyes wide with fear. It could have been a scene from a comedy.
Webb was about to speak when the woman grabbed him violently by the hair and hauled him down on to his knees. At the same instant a bullet smacked into a whitewashed wall next to his face; Webb actually glimpsed it, spinning and buzzing, on the rebound. Then the policeman was hauling open a red emergency exit door, and an alarm bell screamed into life, and Webb was being thrust into the narrow lane outside. He fell heavily.
The woman appeared, hauled Webb to his feet and pushed him ahead of her along the lane. Webb got the message and took off like a hare. He sprinted round a corner and almost collided with the young Tuscolo killers rushing out of the Werewolf Club. Webb dived to the ground. The hard cobbles knocked the breath out of him. From behind he heard two sharp bangs, and two bright yellow flashes briefly lit up the neon-strobed lane. The young ones fell like sacks. The lane emptied, people stampeding into the club or disappearing into doorways. The Tuscolo woman’s face was a foot from Webb’s. She had long black hair, her eyes were half-closed and quite lifeless, and something like porridge was oozing from a neat black hole in the centre of her forehead; the youth was clutching a long, thin knife, but he too was lifeless. The alarm was deafening in the narrow lane.
Webb got up and swayed, on the verge of fainting. The woman, about ten yards away, was calmly putting her high-heeled shoes back on. He said, “Can we get a move on here?” but his voice came out as an inaudible whisper.
Oxford, the Last Minutes
A squadra volante car whisked Vannucci, the woman and Webb across the city to the Istituto di Planetologia in four minutes. The doors were already open and a tousle-haired caretaker was engaged in an animated exchange with two Carabinieri, his hands waving dramatically. He unleashed a stream of Italian at Webb as the astronomer ran past, into the lighted building.
He ran up a flight of stairs and along a dark corridor towards Giovanni’s office. He had used a visitor’s password two years ago and there was no chance that it would still be valid; he would just have to rouse Giovanni at home. He tried his old username and password anyway and — joy! — it worked: the Linux window appeared.