Red Fox by Gerald Seymour Read Free Book Online

been at the toll gate for entry to an autostrada. Could be north on the Florence road, or west for L'Aquila and the Adriatic coast, or south for Naples. Could be any bloody direction, any road the animals wanted to use. He'd thought he'd been clever and superior in his intellect to make the calculations, and then came the wave of antipathy, carried on the wing. What did it matter which direction they took? It was a futile and petty exercise, because the control of his destiny was removed, turning him into a bloody vegetable. Anger surfaced for the first time, and spent itself straining against the ankle cords, striving to bite with his teeth against the tape across his mouth. It created a force and a power that struggled even as the tears rose and welled.
    In one convulsion, one final effort to win even the minimum of freedom for any of his limbs, he arched his back, forced his muscles.
    Couldn't shift. Couldn't move. Couldn't change anything.
    Pack it in, Geoffrey, you're being bloody pathetic.
    Once more?
    Forget it. They don't come with machine-guns and chloroform and then find, surprise, surprise, that they don't know how to tie knots.
    As he sagged back his head thumped on the floor above the reach and slight protection of the sacking and he lay still with the ache and the throb in his temples and the smell of the hood in his nose. Lay still because he could do nothing else.
    C H A P T E R T H R E E
    The immediate sense of survival was uppermost now in the mind of Giancarlo.
    It was the instinct of the stoat or the weasel that has lost its mate and must abandon its den, move on, but has no notion of where to go, only that it must creep stealthily away from the scene of its enemies' vengeance. He wanted to run, to outstrip the pedestrians who cluttered and barred the pavements, but his training won out. He did not hurry. He strolled, because he must blend, must forsake the identity bestowed on him by the P38.
    The noise and confusion and shouting of the beginning of a new day swamped him. The hooting of impatient motorists. The crashing intrusion of the alimentari shutters rising in their doorways and windows to display the cheese and hams and tins and bottles. The arguments that spilled from the bars. Confident, secure sounds, belonging and with a right to be there, swarming around Giancarlo. The boy tried to shut inside himself his concentration and avoid the cancer of these people that swept and surged past him. He belonged to no part of them.
    Since the NAP had drifted into existence in the early nineteen-seventies, coalesced from a meeting of minds and aspirations to an organization, it had derived its principal security from the cell system. Nothing new, nothing revolutionary in that; laid down by Mao and Ho and Guevara. Standard in the theoretical treatises. Separated in their cells the members had no need for the identity of other names, for the location of other safe houses.
    It was essential procedure, and when one was taken, then the wound to the movement could be swiftly cauterized. Franca was their cell leader. She alone knew the hidden places where am-munitions and materials were stored, the telephone numbers of the policy committee, and the lists of addresses. She had not shared with Enrico, much less with the boy, the probationer, because neither required such information.
    He could not go back to his previous fiat where he had lived with a girl and two boys as that had been closed and abandoned.
    He could not tour the cars and streets of Pietralata behind the Tiburtina station and ask for them by name; he wouldn't know where to begin, and who to ask. It made him shudder as he walked, the depths of the isolation in which the movement had so successfully cloaked him.
    Where among the streaming, scrambling crowds that passed on either side of him did he find the nod and handshake of recognition? It was frightening to the boy because without Franca he was truly alone. Storm clouds rising, sails full, rudder