"Nick, I can't feel my legs. Tell me I'm not paralyzed. Tell me."
She felt panic hovering. Fear. If she couldn't walk, what would she do? How would she function? Her passion for life was built around action, athletics, movement. Movement. Something she'd always taken for granted, never thought about.
"Your spinal cord wasn't hit, but it's bruised. That causes temporary paralysis."
"Temporary? This will go away?"
"Yes. They're optimistic." He paused. "For the short term, you can't walk. But it will heal. You have to believe that."
"How long? How long until I find out if it's permanent?"
"A month. Maybe less. As it heals, you'll get feeling back. You're in for some tough rehab, but it should all come back."
"If it heals."
"Yes."
"You forgot the vests." As she said it, she wished she could take the words back.
He looked down at the floor again.
"Yes," he said. "Yes, I did."
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
Ronnie, Nick and Lamont met Korov at the airport terminal in Florence. From there they would drive southwest toward Pisa and Foxworth's villa on the Arno. Ronnie watched Korov coming toward them across the terminal floor. The Russian wore a brown jacket, dark brown pants and shoes, a white shirt open at the collar. The collar on his shirt had wide points. He carried a cheap blue airline bag.
"Reminds me a lot of you," Ronnie said to Nick. "We could have used him, back in the day."
"Back in the day, he was probably helping people shoot at us."
"Yeah. Times change."
Korov came up to them. "So. We are a team again." He shook hands all around. "It is good to see you. Selena is not with you?"
Nick was tight lipped. "Hello, Arkady. Not this time. Let's get going."
Korov looked a question at Ronnie. He made a slight don't ask gesture with his head. They followed Nick out to the parking lot and their rented Alfa.
"I still say we should have got the Ferrari," Lamont said. "Always wanted to drive one of those."
"We would have needed three of them."
"Christ, Nick. Lighten up."
They tossed their bags in the trunk and got in the car. Lamont followed signs out of the airport and got on the E76 toward Pisa. Nick and Korov sat in back. Nick opened a folder with satellite photos of the villa and a road map of the region. Outside, the peaceful countryside rolled past.
Tuscany, one of the world's great destinations, the birthplace of the Italian Renaissance and some of the greatest art, literature, architecture and music in the world. It had been the home of the Medicis, of dukes and popes and kings. It was a land of good wine, good food, passion and beauty. It was also a land drenched in treachery and blood.
"We stay on this road until Pisa." Nick traced the route on the map. "At Pisa we go south toward the coast. Foxworth's place is right on the Arno, here, upriver from where it empties into the Ligurian Sea." He handed the photographs to Korov.
Korov studied the pictures. "Only one road in. Fortified. What's his security?"
"Foxworth has a dozen guards. Most of them are concentrated up top. They've got Uzis. The way the villa is built in tiers means we'd have to fight through them and down three levels. I want to come in from the river."
Nick showed him another set of photographs, taken from the river.
"This big stone landing is the river access. Behind it, there's a boathouse." He placed his finger on the photo. "We can either go up those steps on the outside or through the boathouse to get into the main building. We do it quiet, the guards up top won't know we're there. We grab Foxworth, get out and take him someplace where we won't be interrupted."
"The steps are exposed," Korov said. "They can fire from above. We wouldn't make it."
"That's why I'm thinking the boathouse is the best bet. There has to be an inside entrance to the villa."
"What about the gate to the boathouse?"
"Lamont will handle that. He'll go underwater and open it."
Lamont wove in and out through the traffic. The speedometer on the Alfa held at a steady 130kph, about 80 mph. Traffic was heavy and rules absent. The Italians all drove as if they were in the Grand Prix. Lamont passed a truck and dodged a battered red Fiat. The driver raised his finger in a universal sign.
"There must be alarms. Sensors." Korov shuffled the pictures.
"That's a problem," Nick said. "We don't have enough intel. We have to play it by ear."
"By ear?" Korov had a puzzled expression.
"An idiom, Arkady. Means we improvise. "
"You have a boat ready?"
"Waiting for us at Tyrrhenia, on the coast."
Harker had arranged everything. Someone was coming after dark and bringing the weapons and gear they'd need.
"And when we have the target?"
"We make like Napoleon." Nick smiled. "We head for the island of Elba. An isolated house. No one will be looking for us there, not at first. It will give us time. To talk."
Less than an hour later they reached the outskirts of Pisa and turned south. After a short while they turned off on a road to the shore. A house on the beach waited for them. It had two bedrooms, a kitchen and a living area with a sofa. Nick planned to hit the villa around three in the morning, when the guards would be bored and least alert.
"Better get some sleep," he said. "It's going to be a long night." He went into one of the bedrooms and closed the door.
Korov looked at the closed door, then at Ronnie and Lamont.
"What is wrong? Nick is not the same. Is there trouble?"
Ronnie told him about Mexico. "He thinks it's his fault about Selena. Problem is, he's partly right. It's eating him up inside."
"And he thinks this man Foxworth is responsible."
"Right."
"I don't think I would want to be this man," Korov said.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
It wasn't much fun, lying awake at three in the morning. The floor outside Selena's room was quiet. She'd asked the duty nurse to leave the door open. The open door was just enough to keep the demons at bay. It was quiet, this early in the morning. Sometimes someone passed outside. Sometimes she could hear voices from the nurse's station down the corridor, or a call over the hospital speakers for a doctor.
She didn't need to feel isolated and alone on top of everything else. It was bad enough that a catheter drained her body waste, bad enough that she still had no feeling in her legs.
The pain killers kept her awake. Her mind turned things over in a drugged half sleep. She couldn't get out of the bed by herself. Lying there with a night light throwing shadows on the pale walls, she had nothing to look at but the monitors and the steady spikes of her heart beating across the screen in digital green.
She'd demanded they cut back on the drugs. She hated the fuzzy feeling that came from the morphine or whatever they'd been pumping into her. She could push a button for a hit, if the pain got bad, but she kept her finger away. It was too easy to let herself drift in a monotonous, monochrome sea of disturbing thoughts and images.
The pain told her she was alive. She thought she'd felt a twinge in her foot, an hour or so ago. She might have imagined it.
She fought the thoughts, the fear she would never walk again. Never run. Never swim. Never jump from an airplane or go shopping without a wheelchair or just go to the damned bathroom like a human being.
Never feel the adrenaline rush that came when her finger was pressed against the trigger and people were trying to kill her. She didn't like the killing, but she couldn't lie to herself. She'd come to crave the adventure, the danger, the sense of being on the edge.