I didn’t feel any pain yet, only a numbness in my right side, but I knew the pain would come. I lifted my head to see Stan’s grinning face looking down at me. He was holding my carbine. The German’s bullet had smashed the wooden stock and the impact had knocked me off my feet, but otherwise I was unharmed. He held out a hand to help me up and we walked slowly back up the road . . . where Walter Brohm waited.
XXXII
THE SOFT HISS of the rain filtering through the trees was the only sound apart from the scuff of boots on gravel as Jamie and Sarah made their way along the unpaved loggers’ road. Jamie quickly discovered that walking with the hood of his jacket raised reduced his peripheral vision to zero and his auditory perception by about 75 per cent. Any follower could have been wearing steel-shod boots and whistling the Dam Busters theme tune and he still wouldn’t have known until it was too late. He lowered the hood. Now the misty rain worked its way inside his shirt collar and trickled down his back where it turned the waistband of his boxer shorts into a chilly, sodden trial. Sarah followed his example and the rain quickly plastered her hair tight to her head and face, making her look like an extra from a low-budget zombie movie.
She caught his glance. ‘Don’t say a single word.’
Spruce trees grew tight to the flanks of the path, but their ordered ranks and the lack of thick undergrowth gave Jamie increasing hope that conditions might not be too difficult once they were forced to leave the road. They’d been walking for twenty minutes when the track took a sharp turn to the south.
He stopped. ‘We need to be further west.’ He pointed away from the road, into the trees.
‘Let me see the map again,’ Sarah said. He handed it over and she studied it, grimacing. She sniffed. ‘You’re right, but it’s going to be a lot harder going.’
He shrugged. ‘We don’t have any choice. We’ll stick to the track for another hundred metres; with luck there’ll be a spur that goes in the right direction. If not, we take to the trees. It might not be as bad as you think.’
It was much worse. They discovered that the cultivated, evenly spaced plantations by the trackside quickly gave way to wild woodland where fallen branches and rotting vegetation created natural traps designed to break a leg or turn an ankle. Worse, these were covered by a mass of bracken and nettles, and vicious waist-high brambles created impenetrable nests of coiled, inch-thick tentacles that might as well have been made of razor wire. Every step became a lottery, each wrong move a five-minute delay while the hooked thorns were disengaged from clothing and flesh and a new route was found. Within minutes of leaving the path Jamie had forgotten about the rain because he was sweating so much he might have been sitting in a bath.
With each hundred yards they covered his respect for Sarah Grant increased. She accepted every setback without complaint, her eyes narrowed and her face a mask of determination. A bramble had cut across her forehead and a thin line of blood tinted the rain running down her nose pink, but, if she noticed, she ignored it. Eventually, they stopped for a breather and she pushed a damp strand of hair from her eyes.
‘Boy, you sure know how to show a girl a good time, Saintclair.’
He laughed and offered her a bottle of water. ‘Some champagne, madam? You’ll find that life’s always an adventure when you’re with me.’ She accepted it, took a deep drink and handed it back.
‘What now?’
He picked up his rucksack. ‘More of the same.’
She nodded. ‘One thing has been bothering me since I’ve read the journal—’
His head came up sharply. ‘Did you hear something?’
She listened for a few seconds. ‘No. What do you think it was?’
He stared the way they’d come. ‘I don’t know. Just a noise. Back towards the road.’
They waited a few moments. Nothing. As they moved off Sarah continued her thesis. ‘From what I’ve read so far, Walter Brohm only makes vague hints that he has the Raphael, yet you seem pretty certain he did possess it. Certain enough, anyway, for us to be here. But even your grandfather thought Brohm could be making it all up.’
Jamie considered the question as he unhooked himself from another patch of brambles.
‘True, but he had his own reasons for thinking that. Brohm was trying to tempt him, bribe him even, but I like to think that Matthew Sinclair decided – at least then – that he wasn’t going to be bought. Matthew knew his art. He’d worked out that the painting was by the contemporary Leonardo feared most. Well, that was Raphael. Two popes, Julius and Leo, were among Raphael’s patrons. Leonardo was thirty years older and his powers were waning, Raphael’s were at their peak. He feared the younger man was about to eclipse his genius and, if he had lived, who knows he might have done just that.’