Shout in the Dark Read Online Free PDF Page B

had hit him. "I was wearing
this." He indicated the balaclava in his hand. "At least I got one
thing right, Herr Kessel," he continued smugly. "I left the
note."
    Kessel felt as though Karl had stuck the
Göring dagger into him. "You did what? "
     
    " MARCO SARTINI! What are you doing here?"
    Marco turned in surprise to see a young
woman running towards him. He smiled as he recognized an old friend
from school -- his first serious girlfriend.
    " Natalia!"
    " Ciao ,
Marco." She hesitated for a moment and looked slightly embarrassed.
"Do I call you Marco, or Father Marco, now that you're a
priest?"
    Marco laughed. "I think we knew each other
well enough for you to go on calling me Marco."
    Natalia pointed a finger at him, but she
still managed to keep smiling. "Not that I've seen you since you
dumped me for that blonde from Campo de' Fiori."
    " Oh, yes, her." Marco tried to make it sound unimportant.
"I'd forgotten all about her. It must have been ten years ago. A
two week nightmare. I seemed to have a succession of blondes after
that, until I met Anna." Marco noticed that Natalia's left hand,
the one pointing the accusing finger, had no engagement or wedding
ring. She didn't sound as though the memory of being dumped for a
flashy blonde was too distressing.
    " A friend told me you'd been ordained," she continued. "I
wasn't sure she'd got it right."
    " I've changed."
    " I heard that as well. So were you here to be part of the
studio audience?"
    " I wanted to see the relic." Marco pointed to the pieces
still on the ground. "Is that it?" Suddenly he realized that a
camera team was converging on him. He looked at Natalia and
wondered if she had some connection with the News Room.
    " Is this man an eyewitness?" asked the man holding a
microphone. Marco recognized him as one of TV Roma's news
reporters.
    Natalia raised her eyebrows and smiled
sweetly. "Care to say a few words to the camera, Father Marco?"
    Marco felt trapped. He laughed. "I don't
think my bishop would want his new priest to be a television
star."
    Natalia smiled pleadingly. "For
me?"
     
    BY THE BUSHES across the street a small
movement disturbed the branches. A man with a Nikon F4 twisted the
telephoto lens into place and raised the camera to his eye. The
focus locked onto the subject 's head.
    " Well, well, look who it is." He fired off a burst of
exposures on the motor drive. "What are you doing here in Rome, you
bastard?"
    He fired the shutter again. What a stroke
of luck. Bruno Bastiani lowered the camera and placed it carefully
in the large camera bag at his feet. His half-brother, Enzo, wasn't
in Rome for sightseeing, that was for sure. Somehow he was mixed up
with the raid on TV Roma. But why?
    Bruno picked up his cell phone and dialed
a local number. "Riccardo? Listen, I'm outside TV Roma. There's one
hell of an incident going on, and my brother, Enzo, seems to be
mixed up in it."
    He put the phone down and reached for his
Nikon to take another burst of exposures. He picked up the phone
again to speak to Riccardo Fermi.
    " My bastard brother -- Enzo. He's calling himself Manfred
Kessel now. He's here at TV Roma with some young thug in a black
shirt."
    He dropped the phone and took a final
picture of the two men hurrying away. Throwing his camera case into
the back of his battered Lancia he followed on foot. Enzo and the
skinhead went as far as a cheap hotel off the Via Nazionale. He
waited while they went inside. Five minutes later he called the
hotel on his phone and checked that Enzo was one of the guests.
Tomorrow he would come back with a plausible reason for going in.
Ten minutes in Enzo's room would be enough. If he couldn't bug the
phone and bedroom in ten minutes, he had no right to call himself
an investigative journalist.
    " Welcome to our spider's web, Enzo. If you're still up to
your neck with the neo-Nazis, I'm going to kill you."
    Bruno Bastiani could feel only hatred for
the half-brother. How long was it since he'd last seen Enzo? Ten
years?