Costa glanced at the computer screen.
“Anywhere,” he answered. “If he’s still alive.”
The labyrinth enveloped them, held them captive in the stone belly of the hill. Ludo Torchia led the way, tugging Alessio’s slender arm. The others followed, stumbling, getting more and more confused and scared with each lurching step.
After a few minutes Guerino had tripped and fallen, cutting his hands, letting the cockerel loose into the gloom, where it flew, screeching, taunting them. Abati was glad of that, though it made Ludo Torchia furious. There were bigger issues to worry about than sacrificing some bird. They were lost, deep underground. And the one man who might save them, Giorgio Bramante, would surely be as furious as Ludo Torchia if he discovered what had happened.
Alessio. Alessio. Where are you?
By Alessio’s own account, it was now perhaps thirty minutes since his father had left him alone in the main vestibule at the entrance to the caves. What was Giorgio doing all this time? And why did it need to involve Alessio?
These weren’t questions Dino Abati had time to consider. He didn’t feel good. His head was throbbing where Torchia had struck him with the rock. There were lights, coloured lights, chafing at the edge of his vision. The seven of them were now fleeing into a deep, Stygian chasm, trying to illuminate it with their flashlights, hoping that somewhere, in this unknown skein of corridors, there lay some other way out to the world above, one that would help them all — perhaps Alessio too — escape Giorgio Bramante’s inevitable wrath.
They turned another blind corner, ran, half fell forwards, tumbling down a steep incline. A sudden rock face loomed up to greet them. Near the Mithraeum they’d been in relatively well managed territory, tunnels and small chambers carefully hewn out of the tufa. Here they were back in the original workings, so deep inside the hill Abati didn’t even want to think about it. The rough walls, the rocks strewn on the floor, the cramped, winding tunnels barely high enough for a man to stand upright… everything spoke of a crude, ancient mining operation, not the fabric of a subterranean temple for some cult that liked a little privacy. They were, surely, at the very periphery of the incisions that men had made into the heart of the Aventino. What lay around them was as uncertain, as unknown now, as it must have been to the slaves who had laboured here two millennia before, wondering whether the next tunnel would hold or collapse on them in a sudden, deadly torrent of stone. Or if a natural fault — there was water hereabouts, and that meant the hill itself was far from solid, even before the miners arrived with their pickaxes and shovels — lay in deadly wait around the corner.
The boy stumbled. A falsetto cry — young, uncomprehending — rang through the narrow corridors, fading, disappearing, rising, Abati hoped, to break into the open light of day and tell someone out there to look beyond that old, rusted gate by the Orange Garden and try to find what was happening within.
“You’re not hurt,” Torchia spat at the child, dragging him to his feet, scrabbling for the flashlight.
Alessio Bramante hung his head and swore, using the kind of word most of his age scarcely knew. Giorgio was an unusual father, Abati guessed.
“It’s a game, a game, a game, you miserable spoilt little bastard!” Torchia snarled.
The boy stood still and was silent, just stared at them all with his wide, round, intelligent eyes, the kind of stare that said I know you, I’ll remember you, there’ll be a price to pay for this.
“Ludo,” Abati said quietly, as calmly as he could. “This is not a good idea. We don’t know where we are. We don’t know how safe these caves might be. I understand places like this better than you, and I don’t feel safe down here, not without the proper equipment.” The flashing lights, the pounding in his head, were getting worse.
There was an exit to the left. They’d come past it in their rush. Another black hole to dive down. Another vain hope of avoiding discovery.
“No,” Torchia said bluntly.
“Giorgio is going to find out we’re here! Please!” Vignola objected. His fat face was wreathed in sweat. He didn’t look well at all.
“Let’s just go back now,” Abati said firmly. “If we meet Giorgio, at least we’re bringing him the kid. Let’s not make this any worse than it is.”
Torchia lunged at him, hands scrabbling at his throat, face in his, scary in the way that lunatics were scary, because they didn’t care what happened to them, or to anyone. Abati remembered the rock thudding into his head. That blow could have killed him. Just the memory of it made him dizzy.
“I got you ungrateful shits in here,” Torchia hissed. “I’ll get you out. That’s who I am.”
“Who you are?” Abati asked, lurching away from him, realising with some relief that he didn’t much care what happened to Ludo Torchia, or any of them, himself included, anymore. It had all gone too far for that. “Pater? Are you so screwed up that you believe all that nonsense? That all you need to do is get seven people down here, kill some stupid bird, and everything gets made right somehow?”
“You agreed!”
“I agreed to make sure you idiots didn’t come to any harm,” Abati retorted quietly, turning to go. “Now I want to see daylight again.”
Vignola’s hand touched his sleeve.
“Dino,” he pleaded softly. “Don’t leave us here.”
“Don’t leave us here, don’t leave us here…” Torchia was out of control, spittle flying from his mouth as he mocked Vignola’s words. “Of course he’s not leaving, are you, Dino? A soldier never leaves his battalion. You don’t let your comrades down.”
Abati shook his head. “You’re crazy,” he murmured. “This is real, Ludo. Not some playground adventure. We’re in trouble enough as it is.”
“Wrong. Even if Giorgio’s guessed someone’s here,” Torchia insisted, “how could he know it’s us? Answer me that.”
The flaw in his argument was so obvious. Dino Abati knew straightaway he wasn’t going to mention it, because that could only make things so much worse.
Then Vignola piped up again and Dino Abati wished he’d had the time to grab him by the scruff of his neck and force him to keep his overactive mouth shut.
“Even if he doesn’t know, the kid’s going to tell him, Ludo. Isn’t he?”
Costa had taken a good look at what else was going on in Rome the week Alessio Bramante vanished. It had not been an ordinary time.
“It all happened when NATO was in another terrible mess in Serbia, remember? That was one reason why the authorities told Bramante he couldn’t go public. There were enough contemporary ethnic massacres to deal with without bringing in the TV cameras to see some grisly Christian episode from the past.”
“I still don’t get it,” Emily said. “Would people really get that touchy about something that happened almost two thousand years ago?”