Whiplash Read Online Free PDF

T-shirt.
    Italian, maybe. A soccer team?
    No, some sort of slogan. Not in Italian. French, he thought.
    Maybe one of the cameras had seen it.
    Her face?
    Nuri pressed his memory but it wouldn’t yield an image. He turned in the direction of Piazza del Colosseo, the street at the end of Via dei Fori Imperiali. There was a truck there, selling water and other drinks. The alarms were still sounding in the Coliseum, but the people milling around didn’t know what was going on. Most thought there was some sort of fire, or a false alarm.
    Nuri quickened his pace, his stomach queasy but the rest of him feeling stronger. Adrenaline buzzed through his body, making his ears ring. He saw a woman with green pants eyeing him in front of the truck. He glanced at her shoes and saw that they were black. But she was wearing a red silk blouse, and her hair was long. The shooter’s had been short.
    A wig.
    He stared at her face. The woman turned abruptly, walking up the hill. Nuri glanced around, making sure there were no other likely suspects, then started to follow. But as he did, a girl nearby began to yell.
    “There he is! There he is!” she said in English, pointing and screaming. “There! There!”
    The girl had seen him in the ruins and thought that he had been the one shooting. Everyone nearby turned, and one of the men near Nuri reached to grab him. He pushed the man away, then saw a pair of policemen running toward him from the Coliseum.
    The last thing he wanted to do was end up in police custody. Nuri spun and ran across the street, dodging past a tourist bus to run into the Metro stop. Leaping over the turnstile, he ran toward the down escalator, pushing people aside and then squeezing past a pair of old women. His stomach felt as if it was going to explode.
    A train was just arriving. Nuri ran through the doors and found a seat, then closed his eyes as he waited for it to move again. The doors shut. The train lurched forward, then stopped. Nuri pushed his eyes closed further, worrying thatit wouldn’t start, afraid he’d been caught. But then the train began to move again.
    He leaned his head back against the window and contemplated his next move.
    Two stops later he got off at Termini, hoping it would be easier to blend into a crowd there if anyone was looking for him or following him. He decided he would find a hotel where he could see to his wounds and perhaps monitor the news. He walked up and around the piazza, down the block, then back, and finally across to Nationale. He chose one of the hotels a few blocks from the station that he had passed earlier.
    The desk clerk squinted at the disheveled man who stood before him. Most of their clientele, especially at this time of year, were Italians in Rome on business. The man before him looked too disheveled to pay the bill.
    Nuri gave him an American Express card for the reservation. The clerk made sure to check his signature on the register against the blurry script on the back. It matched, but that didn’t satisfy his doubts.
    “I need your passaporte ,” he said.
    It was a standard request in Italy, where technically visitors were required to be registered with the local police. Nuri hesitated, unsure whether to hand over his “regular” passport or the diplomatic one. He decided the diplomatic passport might raise too many questions, and gave the man the normal one.
    The clerk saw the hesitation as one more bad sign, and might have called his supervisor or even decided to claim they were full had not a large family come through the doors. Just in from Modena for a visit with an ailing grandmother, there were three children under six in the party, and the small lobby suddenly felt as if it were under assault. The clerk processed Nuri’s credit card, then promised to have his passport ready within the hour.
    “Your bags?”
    “The airline lost them,” said Nuri. “I’ll deal with it later.”
    Upstairs, he pulled off his top shirt and undid the vest,which