The Vatican Secret: A totally gripping and explosive action thriller (A Marco Venetti Thriller Book 2) by Peter Hogenkamp

Author:Peter Hogenkamp [Hogenkamp, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781838888442
Publisher: Bookouture
Published: 2021-04-14T16:00:00+00:00

50

Anatoly Gerashchenko opened his eyes against their will and contemplated the hand that was shaking his shoulder with great vigor.

“Mikhail didn’t check in.”

His grogginess—a half-liter of Beluga Gold’s worth—dissipated into the air, which smelled of his bedmate’s expensive perfume.

“Did you call him?”

“Of course.”

“No answer?”

The man shook his clean-shaven head.

Gerashchenko rolled out of bed, crossed to the window, pried the blind open with an index finger grown thick from pulling the trigger of his Vektor pistol, and peered into the night. From his vantage point in the penthouse of the villa of Barone Borghi, he could barely see the wine cellars in the valley.

“Call him again, Vladimir.”

The woman in the bed rolled over, slid out from between the sheets, and disappeared into the next room with only the soft padding of her bare feet on the carpet. If it weren’t for the smell of her, which hung in the air like a shroud, and the bottle of Sangiovese on the end table—Gerashchenko hated wine—she might never have been there.

Vladimir extracted his cell from the pocket of his black jeans and hit redial. The ringtone purred, breaking the otherwise perfect quiet of the room, and the call went over to voicemail.

“I don’t like this,” Gerashchenko said.

Vladimir grunted his agreement, then lapsed into silence as he took up position at the window next to his boss. The ceiling fan whirred soundlessly in the dark overhead, causing the few small hairs on Gerashchenko’s head to flutter.

“We have to move the weapons.”

“Why?”

“Why?” Gerashchenko took his eyes off the warehouses long enough to wither Vladimir with a glare. “Why is Mikhail not answering the phone?”

“Perhaps he is sleeping?”

“If he is sleeping, I will kill him myself,” Gerashchenko replied, with more enthusiasm than he’d intended. “But he is not sleeping, and you and I both know that. He is dead, or as close to death as makes no difference, as are the Italians he hired.”

He picked up his own phone, which was lying on the bed next to his pillow, and glanced at it. There were no messages or missed calls. “I set a trap for the man who is hunting us, and that trap has been sprung, but I am starting to wonder if we’re the ones who have been snared.”

“Who do you think it is?”

“I believe it is the man I saw in the stairway of Haus Adler the night he killed Prince el-Rayad.”

“Who is he?”

“I don’t know his name, but that is irrelevant anyway. What I do know is that he is a killer, and he is working for the Vatican. I have seen many such men before, in a dozen different lands fighting for a dozen different countries. There is an unmistakable look about them, and this man had it. I feared that our location in South Tyrol became known when Petrov was killed in Portugal, so I put the old man there to direct our enemy to the building in Tuscany, where Mikhail was supposed to put an end to this problem for me… But now it looks like I will have to take care of it myself.

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