First Thrills - Lee Child [69]
Now, in the swiftly darkening evening of the same day that he’d left Florence, and dressed in a low-key gray business suit, Matosian walked along the calm waters of the Serpentine in a deep fog. His destination: the shelter/pump house for the Italian Fountain at the north end of the park.
As he walked, something began to nag at the borders of his consciousness. Walking at this time in this weather, he wouldn’t normally expect to have any company on this gravel path. But his training let him hear things that others could not, and now he came to an abrupt full stop.
Sure enough, steps sounded behind him. They kept on for one or two steps before they, too, stopped. But that was enough for Matosian.
Side-stepping over to the grass, he waited until the steps began again. And another set of them, clearly several men, converging from in front of him as well. And then—he sensed rather that actually heard them—another set of footfalls registered from directly behind him on the grass.
They were closing in on him now from three directions, with the freezing waters of the Serpentine as his only escape.
Even now the shadows were beginning to appear out of the fog. Big men in trenchcoats. Matosian could take care of himself in any fight, but now he estimated a force of at least six men bent on taking him down.
And then he heard his name, in a female key. “Don,” the voice said. “Gato.”
He turned and saw her, frail and beautiful, yet somehow strong and competent, sitting on the metallic bench that bounded the gravel walk. With no time to reason it out, he went over to her. She had wrapped herself in a heavy scarf over her peacoat, and now she brought it up around his neck, and brought her lips to his. As her tongue probed his, he realized that she tasted of almonds.
His pursuers had by now converged on the path, thirty feet away from them. He could hear them talking as the kiss continued. And then, as a group, they began to come down toward the bench.
“Excuse me,” one of the men said, “have you seen . . . ?”
The woman broke their kiss and, holding Matosian’s face against her shoulder, snapped out in a rich Cockney accent. “Does it look like we’re looking out for somebody here, guvnor? Now piss off.”
And then she came back to the kiss.
After the men had gone, spreading out to find their quarry, the kiss finally ended. And now Matosian saw that tears filled her eyes. “Daphne,” she said. “The girl in Florence this morning? She was my sister.”
The pump house for the Italian Fountain did not get a lot of traffic. Matosian and Chloe—for that was the name of the woman who’d saved him with her kiss, Daphne’s almond-scented sister—had no trouble finding the door that was the match for the key he’d carried from Florence.
Once they were inside, Chloe turned to him. “What’s supposed to be hidden here?” she asked. “Daphne never told me before . . .” Her voice broke as the sentence trailed off.
Matosian took her in his arms. “It’s all right,” he said. “She felt no pain. They were professionals. As for what’s hidden here, we’ll find it. I’ll know it when I see it.” He flashed his laser penlight around the dark room. The pumps churned hundreds of gallons of water and most of the space was filled with pipes and plumbing. The light traced what looked like ancient graffiti on the walls, and suddenly Matosian came forward to examine the writing more carefully.
“This is it,” he announced. “It’s not graffiti, though they’ve done a good job of making it look like it.”
“What is it then?”
“Cyrillic. Early Bulgarian Cyrillic.”
“What does it say? Can you read it?”
“Yes, of course,” he answered abstractedly. Matosian could read sixteen different alphabets and was fluent in twenty-two languages. “It’s . . . just a minute. It’s nonsense. ‘Roses are pie, are is the area of a circle.’ ”
“ ‘Are is’? Is that what it really says?”
“There’s no doubt about the words,” Matosian said.
“Maybe it’s a code,” Chloe