Pendergast [07] The Book of the Dead(160)

A few hundred meters up, Diogenes knew, the trail split. The left fork cut eastward and switchbacked to the summit crater up the broad cinder slopes of the Liscione. The right fork, the ancient Greek trail, continued westward, climbing the Bastimento and ending abruptly where it was cut by the Sciara del Fuoco.

She would be at least fifteen, twenty minutes behind him by now—he had been pushing himself to the utmost, climbing at maximum speed up the crumbling stone staircases and cobbled switchbacks. It was physically impossible for her to have kept up. That gave him time to think, to plan his next step—now that he had her where he wanted her.

He sat down on a crumbling wall. The obvious mode of attack would be an ambush from the almost impenetrable brush that crowded each side of the trail. It would be simple: he could hide himself in the ginestra at, say, one of the switchback turns, and shoot straight down the trail as she came up. But this plan had the great disadvantage of being the obvious one, a plan she would most certainly anticipate. And the brush was so thick he wondered if he could even push into it without leaving a ragged hole behind or, at the least, signs of damage visible to a keen eye—and she had a damnably keen eye.

On the other hand, she did not know the trail—could not know the trail. She had arrived at the island and come straight to his villa. No map could convey the steepness, the danger, the roughness of the trail. There was a spot ahead, just below the fork, where the trail ran close under a bluff of hardened lava, looped back around, and then topped the bluff. There were cliffs all around it—there was no way for her to get off the trail at that point. If he waited for her on the bluff above, she would have to pass almost directly underneath him. There was simply no other way for her to go. And because she did not know the trail, she could not anticipate that it doubled back over the bluff.

Yes. That would serve nicely.

He continued up the mountain and in another ten minutes had reached the final switchback and gained the top of the bluff. But as he looked around for a hiding place, he saw there was an even better position—indeed, it was nearly perfect. She would see the bluff as she approached and might anticipate a strike from it. But well before the bluff itself was another ambush point—in the deep shadows below it, half obscured by rocks—that looked to be far subtler; indeed, it was completely invisible from farther down the trail.

With an unutterable feeling of relief that it would soon be over, he carefully took up a position in the shadow of the switchback and prepared to wait. It was a perfect spot: the deep darkness of the night and the natural lines of the terrain making it appear there was no break at all in the rocks behind which he hid. Within fifteen minutes or so, she should appear. After he killed her, he would throw her body into the Sciara, where it would vanish forever. And he would once again be free.

The fifteen minutes that passed next were the longest of his life. As they ticked on into twenty, he became increasingly uneasy. Twenty-five minutes passed… thirty…

Diogenes found his mind racing with speculation. She could not possibly know that he was there. He was certain she could not have been alerted to his presence.

Something else might be wrong.

Was she too weak to have climbed this high up the mountain? He had assumed her hatred would carry her far past the point of normal exhaustion. But she was only human; she had to have a breaking point. She had been following him for days, hardly eating and sleeping. On top of that, she would have lost a fair amount of blood. To then climb almost three thousand vertical feet up an unknown and exceedingly dangerous trail at night… maybe she just couldn’t make it. Or perhaps she’d been hurt. The decrepit cobbled path was strewn with loose stones and eroded blocks, and the steepest parts—where the ancients had built stone staircases—were slick with rubble and missing many steps, a veritable death trap.

A death trap. It was entirely possible—indeed, even probable—that she had slipped and hurt herself; fallen and twisted an ankle; perhaps even been killed. Did she have a flashlight? He didn’t think so.

He checked his watch: thirty-five minutes had now passed. He wondered what to do. Of all the possibilities, the likeliest was that she had been hurt. He would go back down the trail and see for himself. If she was lying there with a broken ankle, or collapsed in exhaustion, killing her would be simple…

He paused. No, that would not do. That was, perhaps, her game plan: to make him believe she’d been hurt, to lure him back down—and then ambush him. A bitter smile passed across his face. That was it, wasn’t it? She was waiting him out, waiting for him to descend. But he would not fall into that trap. He would wait her out. Eventually her hatred would force her up the mountain.