Spider - Michael Morley [101]
And then the nightmare started.
Only this time, it was different.
This time he was in the same room as the girl in the video. She was having convulsions again, her body jumping all over that strange table she was tied to. Jack put his hand on her chest to calm her down. He checked her face and she was still breathing. He loosened her chains and turned her on her side so she wouldn’t choke, then he got a blanket from somewhere and covered her up. Soon the room was filling with paramedics, cops and scene-of-crime officers. The paramedics gently lifted the girl on to a stretcher, quickly attached a saline drip and carried her out to an ambulance.
Jack felt good; she was going to be all right. He’d saved her. He looked around the room as the forensics team started snapping pictures, bagging and tagging evidence. He saw something on the floor. Something utterly shocking.
Jack woke up.
A thought hit his subconscious like a bolt of lightning.
In the dream he’d just had, he was reaching for the newspaper on the floor, the copy of USA Today, the copy dated the second of July.
Suddenly, Jack had the answer to the questions he’d posed himself in Tariq el Daher’s office.
Why wouldn’t her attacker film it himself with a hand-held camera, so he could get up close and personal?
The paper had been left to prove to anyone watching the first video after Tariq got it on the fifth of July that it was recent material. But when Tariq received new footage on the seventh, there was no new paper.
Why?
The answer was simple. Because he hadn’t been in that room since he left the paper in the video. Because from the second of July onwards, six days ago, he’d left the girl to starve to death and was remotely controlling the recording and delivery of the footage by Internet. Internet – the perfect tool of anonymous criminals.
But where was he now?
67
San Quirico D’Orcia, Tuscany
Dawn turned back the clock on San Quirico D’Orcia, making the village seem as unspoiled as the days its medieval founding fathers settled there.
Terry McLeod slipped unheard and unnoticed through the front door of La Casa Strada. None of the other guests was up and about and it would be a long time before Maria arrived, touched up her make-up and took her place behind the reception desk. McLeod had chosen rubber-soled shoes, so that his feet would not make a noise, even outside on the golden-coloured stone slabs that surrounded the hotel. He was dressed in loose green combat trousers, a brown T-shirt, a green jumper which he knew he would be removing as soon as the sun rose another foot in the sky and a brown cap to shield his eyes. On his back he carried a medium-sized green rucksack, packed with the ‘tools of his trade’ and some drinks and snacks that would sustain him while he patiently waited for the day’s events to unfold.
The streets were deserted but still told their stories of how history and contemporary life had agreed to get on. Against the brightly painted walls of centuries-old homes, lines of washing hung, heavy with white bedsheets, coloured shirts and greying underwear. Next to them, outside the glass-fronted cafés and restaurants, tables and chairs stood stacked, waiting for the pavements to be cleaned. The odd dropped ice-cream cone had left multi-coloured stains on the smooth stone flags. Bicycles stood propped next to doorways or down alleyways, never locked by townsfolk to whom theft was as unthinkable as bad local food or wine. A few streets away church bells chimed every half-hour – it was 7.00 a.m.
McLeod knew exactly where he was going. Over the past few days he’d located the precise spot for today’s event.
He headed south-east towards where Via Dante