A little more than an hour later …

Two men were dead, lying in spreading crimson pools, and the third was wheezing scarlet bubbles out of a couple of large calibre chest wounds.  Dreyfus smoothly took the empty clip out of the Beretta, put it in his pocket, and replaced it with a new one.  He slid the chamber back to load it and, trying to keep the fierce out of his voice, said, “Breathe, Emily.  Slowly.  It’s over.  Breathe.”

Emily, who was cowered half-hidden by a lounge chair with her arms covering her head was shaking so badly she thought she’d never breathe again.

Dreyfus waited.  There shouldn’t be anyone else in the house, but he wasn’t ready to take that on faith.  Just in case, he held the gun loosely on his arm for that nanosecond reaction time advantage.  The truth was Dreyfus Sinclair was not a very good shot.  On a static range, he could hit what he was aiming at – most times – but he was never going to win any prizes.  The reason he always walked away (so far) from deadly altercations is he didn’t hesitate.  And when you empty a 14 shot clip into anything that moves in a confined space, you’re not only going to hit something, you’re going to hit everything.  The three men on the floor were testament to that.

He kept his eyes on the far entryway, avoiding the big afternoon sunlight that slanted through the terrace windows.  The place was nice — wine and bread nostalgic Italian, probably built for a Mussolini grandee and, 80 years later, rented by the week or the month to rich tourists, minor film stars and, apparently, Albanian gangsters.  They were never going to get the blood stains off that lamp shade or out of the rugs.  It was an idle thought.  The man on the floor gurgled and died.  Dreyfus didn’t look down.

On the edge of his peripheral vision, he caught Emily unfolding and putting herself against the wall.  She pulled her knees up in front of her.  Her eyes were closed, and she was heave breathing against the rush of adrenaline sickness.  “Slowly,” he reminded her calmly.  “Deep breaths.”  Dreyfus glanced back to the terrace, but it really was over.  They needed to go.  It was always best to leave the scene of the crime quickly before the unexpected happened.  But they needed to wait — at least until Emily put some strength back into her trembling knees.  It wouldn’t take long.  Lady Perry-Turner was stiff upper lip resilient.  Dreyfus had seen this before and he knew enough to let her handle it.  They had time – not much – but time enough.  Dreyfus vaguely wondered why all Tuscan landscapes looked the same.  He had a vision of an army of paint-by-number artists turning them out in a warehouse west of Rome.  Was this one paint or a print?

“Did you kill them all?”

Emily wasn’t particularly bloodthirsty, but these men had been scaring the life out of her for the last three days.  No, they hadn’t touched her.  In fact, they’d been utter professionals and had barely even looked at her really, but Emily had been attacked by a group of men once before and she was under no illusion that she could effectively defend herself if they decided to be nasty.  And now that that unrelenting fear and tension had been released, it felt good to get a kick in.

“No, the two at the gate ran.  They’re halfway back to Florence by now.”

“Are we in trouble?”  Emily stretched her legs out.

With three men dead on the floor, it was a strange question.

“Not really.”  Dreyfus had already warned the Albanians, and he knew from experience that — as long as you didn’t start murdering family members — they were businessmen.  They would tally up their losses and get on with it.  Eight dead, two running and a burning truckload of transplantable organs and unfertilized eggs was a considerable loss.  They’d played their hand with Emily, but now that she was off the table, they were likely to want a truce.  Dreyfus wasn’t actually willing to let them off that easily, but he also knew his boss, Jonathan McCormick, was not going to let him beat on a potential client indefinitely.  So he’d already decided to give his information to the Italians and let them do the dirty work.

“But we need to go,” he said.

“Home?”

“Soon.  Grab whatever you don’t want to lose, and let’s go.”

“All I want is my jewelry.”

Dreyfus shrugged and put the Beretta back in its holster.  Emily slid up the wall.  She was still a little shaky but managed to navigate down the hall to the bedroom.  She opened her luggage, pulled out a couple of leather cases and put them in a shoulder bag.  She turned away, thought about it, turned back and found some underwear.  She balled them up and stuffed them into her bag. “With Sinclair, soon could mean anything,” she thought, and hurried back down the hallway. 

Behind the hotel, Dreyfus opened the car door.  Janet Miller had easily agreed to stay in the room all day and watch Italian TV.

“And no room service!  You’re not going to starve to death in 8 hours.  Eat the Pringles.”

The telephone call from Jonathan McCormick had been a little more difficult.  He had been as vague as always but made his point clearly.  The Italians were not happy with the recent turn of events, and they wanted McCormick to restore the tranquility of their city.  Jonathon McCormick, for his part, assured them that he had no interest whatsoever in whatever was happening in Tuscany; however, as a gesture, he would reach out to his vacationing employee and see when he was coming home.  He also mentioned that it was never a good idea to mix one’s personal affairs with business and that he, Jonathon McCormick, was a businessman.  Dreyfus promised his boss that this would all be over soon and he would make certain that the Italians were pleased with the result.  Then he reloaded his Beretta, reminded Janet – “Nobody through that door, but me” — and left the hotel.

As Dreyfus got into the back seat, he saw a medium-sized Dolce & Gabbana bag and looked forward at the rear view mirror.  The driver was watching.

“Two keys of C-4,” he said and reached his hand over his shoulder.  It looked like he was holding a bunch of pencils.

“You’re a day late.”

The driver shrugged and didn’t comment.  Dreyfus reached forward for the pencils.

“Detonators.  Just break them with your thumb.  The blue line is five minutes and the red one is two.”

Dreyfus looked into the bag.  There were four neat rectangular bars, but what the hell was he going to do with nearly five pounds of high explosives now?  The warehouse job was over, and Jonathon McCormick had just told him to quit doing what he was doing and come home.

“These are your problem,” Dreyfus said, putting the detonators on the seat and making a mental note to rip a strip off Sydney about this.  The driver shrugged again and looked into the rear view expectantly.  Dreyfus handed him another paper napkin from his conversation with Martina Ciampi. “Do you know this place?”

The driver read the napkin.  “Yeah, I know it.  It’s about – uh — maybe,” he drew with his finger in the air, “thirty … forty minutes.”

“Alright, let’s go.”

Ten minutes later, as the traffic out of the city thickened, Dreyfus’ telephone rang.

What the hell?  It was Michael Elliott.

“Hello?”  It was tentative at best.

“How’s Italy?”

Dreyfus chuckled.  “Too much to see but the people are nice.  I’ll send you a postcard.”

“Do that.”

There was silence.

“And?” Dreyfus could hear Elliott smiling.

“And.  Rumour has it that you and your Duchess are running around Italia, masquerading as officers of the Crown.  Do you want to enlighten me?”

Dreyfus thought about it.  This was bizarre.

“Don’t believe everything you hear.”

“Oh, I don’t.  But apparently, there’s a stack of dead bodies with your name on them and I’m told the Federal Italian police are asking questions about the British Secret Service.  You better give me something.”

By the time Janet Miller woke up to the sunlight in her eyes and Dreyfus sitting in the window, drinking coffee, the unseen landscape of Firenze had changed.

“Coffee?”

“Give me a minute,” Janet said, swinging her legs off the bed. “Pour — and I’ll be right back.”

Across the river, in a high-ceilinged, old wood, 19^th century office building, Besnik Kovaci and his little brother were listening to their lawyers, trying to dam a tsunami of legal problems.  In the last two days, they had five dead bodies, four investigations, and now, an army of Federal police, putting everything from their financial accounts to their telephone records under a microscope.  Firenze carabinieri were one thing, but these people took their orders from Rome – beyond the reach of local bribery and intimidation.  The Kovaci brothers’ business operation – legal and illegal – was virtually shut down.  But the real problem was a forensic team at the warehouse fire had just discovered a number of charred human organs that didn’t belong to the two corpses at the scene — or to anybody else in the neighbourhood.

The brothers switched from Italian to Albanian.

“It’s him.”

“Of course it’s him.”

“We need to …”

“We need to what?  We know who his is, but we can’t find him.

“We have the woman.”

The older brother shrugged.  That hadn’t been a good idea.  The Brits liked their royals – a little too much,  actually.  But maybe – maybe, if they did it right — there might be some leverage there.  Besnik thought for a second.

“Do you remember, last year, the rockets, the Russian rockets?”

Esad looked at his brother, full of questions.

“Remember the man who wanted them?  The one who paid us?  He was British government.   MI5?  6?.  Something like that.  How did we contact him?”

Esad thought for a minute.  He remembered, but …

“Maybe he knows who …”

“He found us.  But his name was – uh — Elliott.  Michael Elliott.  And he had a telephone cut-out with Transportation.  In London.  The Ministry of Transportation, in London.  That’s where …”

“We need to find him.  He’ll know.  A man who can play with that kind of money – he’ll know.  He’ll know who this Sinclair goat fucker works for, and that’s who we negotiate with – his boss.  We’ll get his boss to call him off or, royal or not, hand the woman back in pieces.  We need to find the man Elliott and make a video of the woman.

The Italian lawyers, who had been sitting quietly, were perplexed.  They couldn’t understand how a brief conversation, in whatever language, had changed the brothers from very worried to strangely confident.  But the truth was, they didn’t actually care because – privately — they were busy trying to make sure none of them was implicated in this mess.

At about the same time, Riccardo Ciampi had kissed his mother goodbye and was walking (strutting?) out to his car.  His morning had been even better than the day before.  Lotta and the kids had left for Rome, and momma had (mostly) kept quiet while he described the latest catastrophes to befall the Kovaci brothers.  According to the information he had, the British Secret Service had not only attacked and burned one of the Kovaci warehouses but had also demanded that the Italian government investigate these Balkan criminals – to the tune of an entire detachment of federal police. 

Martina, now that her son was gone, was not happy about any of it.  Yes, this Dreyfus Sinclair had rained hellfire and brimstone on her mortal enemies, but this was beyond anything she had anticipated.  What she thought was going to be a quiet little “let’s you and him fight” war was suddenly out of control.  Federal police!  Federal police didn’t understand local sensibilities.  They didn’t care whose doors they kicked in and didn’t apologize when they got it wrong.  Setting a Federal fire to the Kovaci brothers’ operation wasn’t good for business because there was a better than even chance that the House of Ciampi would get burned, as well.  She got up from the breakfast table and walked through to her late husband’s study.  She sat down at the desk, opened a drawer and picked up one of the two telephones.  She tapped a London number.  Jonathan McCormick had started this wildfire, and it was time for him to put a stop to it.   

On an open terrace in the Tuscan hills, Emily had just finished breakfast (still no orange juice) and was beginning to wonder if she should be worried.  This was Day Three, and the older woman who had always been there wasn’t there this morning.  Plus, one of the three men who had been keeping their distance was sitting where she could clearly see him, at the front door.  And below her, at the heavy iron gate to the road, there were two more men who hadn’t been there before.  That made five altogether, and even though Emily had faith in Dreyfus, she knew that, in the real world, faith didn’t actually move mountains.  So, sipping her cappuccino, she decided maybe she should worry a little bit and figure out how to make her own way home the minute it got dark.

Janet Miller was still in the bathroom at the hotel, quietly swearing to herself.

“Shit, shit, shit! This is all I need!”  She was angry at her body for betraying the stress.

A couple of minutes later, improvised, but reasonably confident, she sat down to drink her coffee.  She reached for her handbag, rummaged, felt what she was looking for and relaxed – a bit.

“How’s the arm?”

Dreyfus twisted it rapidly in the air.  “Better than new.  You did a good job.”

Janet took a mouthful of coffee.  It tasted wonderful.  “So, now what?”  She was still digesting most of what Dreyfus had told her the night before, and (from experience) didn’t really trust her hormones to be analytical.  So it was probably best not to bother the details and just get on.  Dreyfus had tried to cover the barest of the bare bones of the story, but — between the trauma and the alcohol — he wasn’t sure he hadn’t said too much.  He wasn’t going to make that mistake again.

“Why did Monica Montrose call Emily ‘Magpie’?”

Janet tilted her head at the odd question, then gave Dreyfus a short laugh.

‘It’s an old school nickname.  Em never did well at boarding school, and the second time we were together, she decided to change her name to Margaret Perry.  Just one of the girls.  Fresh start and all that.  One of the bullies – uh – Tina … Tina …”  Janet looked out the window, “Tina … oh, it doesn’t matter.  Anyway, she found out who Emily really was and started calling her Lady Magpie – Margaret Perry,” Janet moved her hand, “Magpie.  Our crowd all thought it was funny, and we used it, too.   Took the wind out of Tina’s sails, and the name stuck.”

Dreyfus smiled and gave Janet a slight nod.  He was still going to save it for the right time.

“Last night, you said you weren’t worried, but you didn’t tell me what’s going to happen.”

Dreyfus drank the last of his coffee and shrugged. “I’m going to go get Emily this afternoon.  All you have to do is stay here until we get back.”

“The Montroses are …”

“Things change.  The Montroses don’t need you anymore.  Maybe phone them if you like.  I don’t care.  But you need to stay here.  Don’t go out.  And don’t open the door to anyone but me.”

“Am I in trouble?”

“No, long as you stay here.  I’d just prefer to know where you are.  No loose ends.  Then when we get back, we’ll all go out and have a splashy dinner.”

Janet was about to mention that her suitcase and all her clothes were still at the Montrose’s when Dreyfus’ telephone hummed on the table.  He turned it over.  It was Jonathan McCormick.

“I have to take this.”

Janet raised her hand, lowered her eyes and moved her head.  She picked up her handbag and went back to the bathroom.