Century #4: Dragon of Seas by Pierdomenico Baccalario Read Free Book Online Page B

Watson. Mrs. Miller scans down the other information, alarmed.
    Then she empties out the drawer and the ones below it.
    What is Harvey doing with a fake passport? And what’s the meaning behind the young woman’s warning about that man called Nose? What kind of people is her son mixed up with?
    There’s another suspicious package: a private investigator’s kit. Micro-flashlights concealed in the most unimaginable objects. An all-purpose micro-screwdriver …
    The phone rings, making her shriek.
    “Hello?”
    They hang up.
    Mrs. Miller’s heart beats faster.
    The first thing that comes to her mind is to call her husband. The second … is that someone’s on the roof.
    Gun
, Harvey’s mother thinks instantly. But she knows perfectly well there’s no gun in the house.
    Again, noises on the roof.
    Wait
, Mrs. Miller tells herself, trying to muster up her courage. She looks at the pull-down ladder that leads up to the attic door.
Maybe the noise is just Harvey’s carrier pigeon. Maybe it’s hungry. It’s getting restless in its cage and I thought it was footsteps on the roof
.
    She climbs up the ladder and opens the door. Everything is dark, with the exception of a shaft of light coming in through the skylight. The woman gropes around for the light switch.
    Her hand gets caught in something.
    She screams.
    She flicks on the light.
    They’re just strings. Strings everywhere, with photographs of Elettra hanging from them.
    Mrs. Miller lays a hand on her chest. How foolish of her to be so frightened. They’re just pictures. And the girl is so pretty. Harvey is clearly very fond of her.
    The attic ceiling is so low that she’s forced to walk hunched over. Where on earth is the pigeon’s cage?
    Another noise, this time louder, from on top of the roof.
    She stares at the skylight, terrified. She moves toward it, trying to figure out where the noise—and she screams.
    There’s a man outside the dormer.
    An enormous man.
    Who kicks open the window.
    Letting a crow with a cloudy eye fly into the attic.
    Paris.
    A small group of people is staked out on Rue de l’Abreuvoir in Montmartre, the artists’ quarter. They’re sitting at a corner café called La Maison Rose and keeping tabs on the building across the street, which is covered with creeping ivy tinged a fiery autumnred. They’ve been sitting on the green plastic chairs for hours. And now their boss is asking for an update.
    “No one’s here,” one of them says over the phone. “No Mistral Blanchard.”
    He pulls the receiver away from his ear as a deafening shower of protests comes from the other end of the line.
    “Very well, Mademoiselle Cybel, I understand: she’ll turn up. All right,” he concludes. “We’ll wait for her.”
    Rome.
    The shadow of a long-haired woman sneaks along the southern boulevard by the Tiber before turning down the lane to Piazza in Piscinula. She’s careful not to be noticed and keeps close to the walls.
    It doesn’t take her long to spot the Domus Quintilia sign. Or to check whether the front door is locked.

I T ’ S COLD DOWN THERE .
    The basement is a maze of rooms, each one damper and more deserted than the last. Dark niches, flaking walls, furniture with open, empty drawers. Black-and-white photographs and old documents that the mice have begun to gnaw on.
    Elettra looks for a passageway leading to the spot below the well. To her surprise, it doesn’t take long to find it. It’s behind a massive wardrobe positioned at an awkward angle by the wall. There’s a gap between the wall and the heavy wood, and she needs to squeeze through it, ignoring the spiderwebs and the dust.
    The passageway leads into another room, its floor covered with rugs.
    The air isn’t as musty here. On one end, the metal doors to the elevator. On the other end, a little wooden door that leads who knows where. A lightbulb hangs from the wall.
    She’s below the courtyard of the Domus Quintilia.
    Elettra shivers. She shines her flashlight on