The guard saw me coming, but by the time he real-ised my intention, there was nothing to be done. He started to unsling his automatic rifle, thought better of it and jumped for his life as the Alfa ripped the bronze gates from their hinges and continued up the drive.
What happened next was very much the fortunes of war, the unexpected that decides who wins or loses. A Lambretta came round the bend of the drive, slowly, because the rider had obviously only just started. I braked instinctively, swung the wheel over with my one hand and slid broadside into the shrubbery in a wave of gravel.
The Lambretta too had skidded as the rider braked desperately, spinning in a circle so that the machine halted pointing the way it had come. It was one of the houseboys dressed in his best, obviously ready for an evening on the town. As I scrambled out of the Alfa, the Smith and Wesson ready in my left hand, I caught a glimpse of his white, terrified face and then he gunned the engine and roared out of sight, back towards the villa.
I could have had him with no trouble, but this wasn’t his affair and I let him go, even though it meant he would arouse the house, that Burke and Jaeger would know who it was. Perhaps the truth is that I wanted them to know. I didn’t get time to consider, because a couple of bullets pumped into the Alfa as the gate guard arrived and I ran for cover.
My right arm was hurting like hell, but the pain sharpened me, made me come alive again. It was rain-ing harder now and I crouched in the bushes and waited as I had waited in other places, other jungles than this, for the slightest rustle, the breaking of a twig.
By some process of association the Lagona opera-tion came back to me, when we had parachuted in and brought out the nuns from their beleagured mission. It had been a bad time, the beginning of the rains and thick bush all the way. And then I remembered, for some strange reason, that Burke had wanted to go in by armoured convoy. I’d been the one who suggested the drop and he’d objected because we would have no vehicles to come out in. But I had pointed out that we would have surprise on our side on our way back, fight-ing our way through them before they’d realised we’d even been in.
And in the end, he had agreed, as he always did, and at the first briefing it had somehow become his own idea. How many times had that happened? How many times right through to the Cammarata?
It had been staring me in the face for years and I had not seen it before, blinded by my belief in the man and I was aware of a strange release of tension, almost as if I had been set free from something, a kind of fierce joy surging through me.
/ am Stacey Wyatt and no one else. That thought echoed in my head as a twig snapped. Several things happened. Somewhere in the night a voice called up on the roof and I picked up a stone and tossed it into the bushes. My friend of the gate was no bargain whatever Hoffer had paid him. He jumped out of the shrubbery and fired several times where my stone had landed.
I shot him through the upper part of his right arm, he cried out and spun round, dropping his rifle. We faced each other in the rain, the statue of some Greek goddess behind him watching blindly. There was no fear in his eyes. Perhaps Hoffer had made a better bar-gain than he knew.
‘If you want to live, talk,’ I told him. ‘What hap-pened to Signorina Solazzo?’
‘She’s been locked in her room all day.’
‘And Ciccio? Is Ciccio with her?’
‘He has been.’ He shrugged. ‘I don’t know it’s noth-ing to do with me. She has the room with the gold door on the second floor.’ He gripped his arm tightly to arrest the flow of blood. ‘Ciccio told me you and the Frenchman were dead.’