Chapter 13
VERONA, ITALY
THE twitchy feeling between Rapp’s shoulder blades had been growing more pronounced over the last hour.
The feeling he had when he was being followed.
Though he hadn’t seen direct evidence of a surveillance team, his subconscious felt differently.
His gut was by no means infallible, but Rapp had learned to trust his instincts.
As with all human beings, the primeval part of his brain was sharply attuned to subliminal cues.
Subtle changes in lighting or sound, events that seemed random but weren’t, movements or occurrences that felt familiar.
Most people chalked this déjà vu up to benign sources like an overactive imagination, too little sleep, or even boredom.
Not Rapp.
Hurley had drilled many painful lessons into his Orion team initiates, but none so important as this—despite thousands of years of pretending otherwise, human beings were still predators.
This was why he took the sense that he was being followed seriously even though he had yet to see the same person twice across more than one location.
After switching streets and conducting a slow but deliberate direction reversal didn’t ease the itch between his shoulder blades, Rapp was left with a decision: continue to execute an increasingly aggressive SDR in the hopes of shaking his still-unseen observers or set an ambush of his own.
He decided to go on the offensive.
In this regard, Rapp’s days spent seemingly wandering through Verona’s streets paid dividends. In addition to committing large sections of the city to memory, he’d also marked several locations from which he could turn the tables on a surveillance team.
One of those locations was the San Cosimo Archaeological Area.
The archaeological dig contained portions of the city’s old Roman walls, and the site dated back to the first century BC.
Better still from Rapp’s perspective, it was open to the public.
After purchasing a ticket, Rapp ducked down the staircase and entered the catacombs.
He wasn’t a fan of allowing a surveillance team to corner him.
As the Alamo had demonstrated, last stands might make for great stories, but they rarely worked out in the defenders’ favor.
Rapp had a plan, though, and it didn’t involve a last stand.
He didn’t much care for ruins. He appreciated history, but he wasn’t a student of antiquity.
The pile of old stones and stacks of crumbling bricks represented the debris of an empire that had long since been relegated to the pages of dusty books.
But this wasn’t to say the narrow winding walkways and decaying masonry weren’t without value.
The archaeological dig was an excellent venue in which to get a glimpse of his tail.
A tour group had entered the ruins ahead of Rapp and it was easy enough to tag along in the dim lighting.
The guide, a twentysomething man, was probably a graduate student.
His ragamuffin appearance, work boots, and faded cargo pants suggested that he’d just arrived home after spending the summer excavating pyramids in Egypt.
In reality, Rapp bet he attended the local university and his dreams of becoming Indiana Jones were slowly fading.
His English delivery of the facts surrounding the dig was easy enough to understand, but was sorely lacking in enthusiasm.
He also didn’t seem to care or know how many paying customers were in his group.
Rapp had slipped into the back of the crowd and then drifted away after the tourists ventured deeper into the catacombs.
The dig was still in the process of being excavated, though whether this delay was intentional or just a reflection of the slowness at which every construction project progressed in Italy Rapp didn’t know.
All he cared about was the multiple half-cleared entrances and exits from the warren of passageways.
Only one exit was easily passable, and Rapp thought this had more to do with commerce than safety.
A single entry and exit ensured that no one experienced the wonders of ancient Verona without first paying the entrance fee.
This suited his purposes perfectly.
After listening to the tour group’s footfalls fade, Rapp stooped into a crumbling passageway that was partially excavated, squatted on his heels, and settled in.
Without the murmur of background voices, the ambient environment became more apparent.
The persistent sound of dripping water explained the musty smell permeating the chamber.
The rasp made by small claws scratching against ancient bricks suggested that there were some visitors who had entered without paying, but for the most part, the dig was shrouded in a companionable silence.
Until the clatter of loose shale broke the stillness.
Rapp closed his eyes, listening.
Entering the dig had been a gamble. Aside from the potential of getting cornered in the rubble, Rapp could have found himself wasting away the afternoon for nothing.
An experienced surveillance team might set up on the dig’s entrance and exit and wait out their target, knowing that he would have to surface at some point.
This was the most conservative approach in that it protected the team members from being made.
But this protection came at a cost.
If Rapp was meeting someone in the dig’s confines, the watchers wouldn’t know.
And there was also the possibility that Rapp could use one of the unexcavated tunnels to escape from the warren without the team noticing.
A more aggressive team leader would order one of his operatives into the dig to confirm that Rapp was still present and attempt to identify whoever he was meeting.
This would burn the operative who ventured underground, but a large-enough countersurveillance team could rotate someone else into the role of eye.
It’s what Rapp would have done had the roles been reversed.
A scuff of shoe leather on stone sounded from Rapp’s right.
He opened his eyes, but kept his focus left to ensure his pursuer didn’t detect the whites of his eyes in the darkness.
Besides, in the semi-dark environment his peripheral vision would be better at detecting motion.
The surveillance team member should be coming from the right, but Rapp didn’t expect him to just stride down the path.
The operative would lurk in the darkness for a bit, playing the same game of chicken from the opposite side of the tunnel.
For a long moment Rapp didn’t see anything.
He was just beginning to think that the earlier sound might have been an echo from the tour group when he registered motion.
Human-sized motion.