The tightly constricted crawl space conjured up images of Skarov embracing him and squeezing and squeezing until the last breath was gone from his body. Just as Ivanov feared he would not be able to squeeze through, he felt Franco’s hands grip his shoulders with the strength of iron claws, pulling him forward until he popped out of the confined space like a cork. Tumbling down a curved slope of old worn cobblestones, he fetched up in a puddle of decomposing meat and vegetable matter.
“We are below the markets here,” Franco said in a low voice. For an instant, Ivanov latched onto the hope that they had somehow passed beneath the Wall and into the NATO-controlled part of the city. Or at least underneath it. But Furedi quickly killed that hope.
“Not the People’s Market. My people’s market.” The mafia scout was grinning, as though he had just told one of the funnier jokes Ivanov should expect to hear in his life.
Ah, thought the Russian, a black market. An actual undeclared marketplace, where food and medicine and other goods smuggled in from the free south by the Trimbole family could be sold for massive profits, or sometimes simply distributed to secure the loyalty of those whose hunger had been eased. There was a reason the OSS preferred to work through operators like Franco and his kind on this side of the Wall. This was their world and their people. They were always going to be the A-Team here.
Looking around them, Ivanov found himself in a stone chamber no bigger than a child’s bedroom. Steel grates barred three gaping holes underfoot. They looked like ancient wells, with iron bars rather than surrounding walls to prevent anyone’s falling in. His eyes watered with the stench of rotting food. It was difficult, with the combat goggles set to infrared, to pick out individual items from the septic sludge under the tread of his boots. But here and there he could see a lettuce leaf hanging limp over an iron bar, crushed eggshells, or the splintered bones of what looked like a leg of lamb. Looking upward, Ivanov discerned the outline of what appeared to be two large steel plates just above them, close enough to reach out and touch.
“A storeroom up there,” explained Franco. “We smuggle supplies in there and other places. We give the people a good price. Good for us and good for them. Good enough that they look after us. Especially now. Come.”
Ivanov followed him to a set of steel rungs buried in the rock face. They climbed quickly. Franco used his shoulders at the top of the improvised stepladder to force open a heavy wooden shutter. Ivanov had not seen it in the gloom. They crawled up and out into a room that was obviously at street level. Windows, opaque with dust, admitted the last dying filaments of daylight. The Russian could smell faint traces of coffee, cured meat, and cheese, but the room was as bare as the abandoned church in which they had holed up earlier. Franco secured the wooden cellar door with a thick iron latch. It had obviously been left open for him, and Ivanov began to wonder at just how much pre-op planning La Cosa Nostra had done for what was supposed to be a simple contract job. An escort mission.
“Follow quickly now, Russian. Your friends will not be far behind.”
The temptation to assure Furedi that they were not his friends was strong, but Ivanov held his tongue. His fate was now almost completely in the hands of this gaunt-looking stranger with iron-gray hair.
Franco tapped on a metal pipe by the only door, a coded sequence of some sort, and Ivanov shook his head as he recognized a ship’s speaking tube. Franco lifted the hinged metal cap at the end of the tube and blew into it as if he were playing a trumpet. Listening with the intensity of a safecracker, he had an answer in a few short, harsh words in the local language. An argument of sorts ensued, but it seemed that Ivanov’s guide had the better of it, given his satisfied nod when he flipped down the cap again.
“We wait. Not long. They send help.”
Ivanov said nothing, taking the opportunity to rearm himself from his small backpack, a precaution that Franco was happy to follow. The Italian took out a handgun and fixed a suppressor. As the mission principal, Ivanov enjoyed the privilege of carrying the big artillery. He had chosen an MP5K-PDW over the more commonly used reengineered Uzis preferred by other operatives. Heavy firepower in a tight, compact package; a simple fold of the stock had made his passage through the Roman underground much easier and more secure.
Pausing for a moment to clear away any filth and muck that might interfere with his weapon’s operation, he covered the tunnel they’d just exited with the suppressed muzzle, prepared to provide a proper welcome to any interlopers. Tweaked by the OSS Field Operations shop for the reliability normally found in an AK-47, Ivanov’s MP5 could generate a cyclic rate of fire of 800-plus rounds per minute, easily emptying the drum mag’s 100 rounds in less than 20 seconds. With a muzzle velocity of 375 meters per second, anyone who attempted to follow them would find a stiff wall of copper-jacketed hollow points ready to persuade them otherwise.
“Nice gun,” Franco commented. “My capo has two just like it.”
“I do not doubt that,” Ivanov said quietly.
They stood in silence for another five minutes, listening for the approach of Furedi’s allies, who would presumably appear from the street. And listening even more intently for the NKVD to come bursting up from below.
A soft knock at the door-another coded cadence by the sound of it-and Franco admitted two men dressed in dark, threadbare civilian suits. Like Furedi, both were middle-aged, with sunken cheeks and eyes with all the light burned from them.
It didn’t feel like a setup, but Ivanov was careful to keep all three grouped within a tight firing arc. For their part, they did nothing to arouse suspicion, such as separating and approaching him from different directions. Still, he kept the safety thumbed off while the Italians conducted an urgent council of war in low, hurried tones.
“It is settled. We go back now,” Franco announced when they were done.
“Where? To do what?” Ivanov asked. He was willing to defer to this man’s judgment in matters of navigation, especially under fire, but picking a fight with the NKVD, and with Skarov in particular, was shading into the realm of strategic decisions that were well beyond the guide’s responsibility.
“To kill them,” replied one of the new arrivals. He was the slightly older of the two, Ivanov thought: a little taller, somewhat sturdier too. He didn’t have quite the harrowed and hungry look of Franco and the junior man. He looked well fed and well used to being obeyed.
“I am all for the killing of NKVD,” said Ivanov. “It is what I live for. But you will not live for long if you go back down there now looking for a fight. You will fight and you will lose.”
The three Romans exchanged a guarded look as though they thought themselves in the presence of a dangerous fool.
“Perhaps,” said the man he now took to be their leader. “But we agreed to help you because you were sent to us as a man who has killed many Communists. This is good. You have brought more Communists for us to kill. Also good. They are below our feet right now-we are watching them. So let us do what you were sent to do. Let us kill them all.”
Dusk was quickly gathering outside on the quiet streets. A gloomy darkness pooled around them as Ivanov tried to reason with the mafioso.
“Today I did not come here to kill Communists,” he began. “And you know that. Today I came to talk to a woman called Anna, the woman of an important Party man, to learn something from him. That did not happen, and I don’t know why. I don’t know whether he is alive or dead, but that man remains the reason I came under the Wall.”
“We are the reason you came under the Wall,” said the mafioso. “We gave you Franco because our friends the Americans told us it would help to kill more Communists. You cannot speak to this man you were looking for now. But that does not matter. Providence has set another goal before us. We must go now. While we still know where they are.”