No One Takes My Child

Chapter 7

At the front of the building, on the opposite side of the terrace to the hostages, three gunmen stood with Cardinal Alfredo Felici. The priest was bloodied and colorless and he was running his rosaries between his fingers. They had allowed him to keep those.

Through the glass door they could see the hostages being directed through the opposite doorway and onto the terrace. A gunman was standing there, his Kalashnikov trained on them, ordering them to walk forward and form a line along the balcony railing. Within three minutes the whole front of the Galleria Borghese’s terrace was lined with hostages. From where they were standing they could see the gardens stretched out before them, along with the numerous Italian police units, crowds of onlookers and international media. Freedom was so close, and yet unreachable. 

A nervous silence descended over the gardens.

The gunmen holding Cardinal Felici turned to their hostage. One spoke. ‘You, as a senior leader of the Roman Catholic Church, will stand on that railing and declare before the world that there is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is his prophet. You will announce it loud and so that everyone can hear you, and we will kill one hostage every ten seconds until you do. Your spot is in the middle of that line. Think of it like a firing squad.’

They opened the glass door in front of him.

‘Go.’ 

Inside the Gallery of Lanfranco, Rachel and Clay hid behind the right-hand statue. Across from them, behind a rain of bullets, Zoe cowered behind the other. She was down in the fetal position and trembling as though naked in the Arctic. Rachel felt tears on her face and wiped them with the back of her hand. Clay had tackled her, pushing her to the right, Zoe had instinctively gone to the left and now they were separated again. Her daughter was alone and terrified. 

Next to her, Clay was attempting to peer around the far corner of the statue. ‘He’s coming closer.’

‘Of course he is! Why did you pull me over this side? Why didn’t you go with her? Why didn’t you let me go with her?’ She was hitting him in frustration. 

‘If I hadn’t you’d be dead,’ Clay yelled over the mechanical thunder. ‘Now look, he’s walking down the center of the room toward us. Because we’ve split up, he’s going to have a problem once he gets close.’ 

Rachel looked at him with unbelieving eyes. ‘What you mean is, he’s going to have to choose.’ 

‘Whatever we do, we don’t do anything stupid.’

‘He’ll choose between us and Zoe, you bastard.’

‘The longer we don’t move, the more likely he is to make a mistake.’

‘I can’t let him get to Zoe. I won’t. I won’t.’ 

Clay looked her in the eyes. ‘If it’s any comfort, I think he’ll come after us first.’

 Large chunks of marble were falling from the statues above them. As Ahyad moved down the room, closer to them with every step, the angle of the bullets was becoming more acute. Clay pulled her across in the direction of the wall, just as a large piece of marble broke off from the corner next to her. 

‘Zoe!’ Rachel called. ‘Zoe!’

Her daughter had her head wedged down between her knees and her arms wrapped around herself, hiding her from the world. 

‘She’s not going to budge,’ Rachel yelled at Clay. ‘Whatever we do, we’re not going to be able to count on her to do anything.’

Clay just nodded. She could see him calculating something. They shifted over again as the spray of bullets gave them less and less of a place to hide. He peered back around the other corner and then turned to her. ‘OK, are you ready?’

‘For what?’

He grabbed her wrist and pulled her towards him.

‘What are you doing?’

‘We’re moving.’

He shifted around the corner of the marble block, away from the middle of the room, the gunman and Zoe. Rachel looked back at her daughter.

‘Zoe!’ Still nothing. Clay pulled her wrist and she relented, slipping around the corner of the marble
with him. 

In the center of the room Ahyad looked at the two statues, now only five or six feet away on either side. Large and small pieces of stone littered the floor; the sculptures were no longer recognizable. He knew it had been his duty to kill that woman when he’d first had the chance. Now his mistake was going to humiliate him in front of his more senior brothers. He knew that the girl was behind the statue to his right, and that the man and woman were hiding on the left. It was time to end this. Time to fix his mistakes.

He charged forward, spinning first to his left, the
AK-47 reverberating in his hands, pumping bullets out before him. 

Only there was no one there. 

Confused, his finger left the trigger. 

He spun to his right instead, and there in front of him was the teenage girl, huddled as though in the womb. 

Clay spun around the far side of the statue, leaving Rachel there. He hoped he was about to see what he’d imagined. Sure enough, the gunman was standing over Zoe and about to fire. Ahyad hadn’t thought about what was coming from behind him.

Clay drove his body into the small of the gunman’s back. The boy’s feet lifted from the floor with the force of the impact, the weapon leaving his hands. Clay let his own weight crush Ahyad as they hit the ground. The gun was within reach and in less than a second it was in his hands. He spun it around. The boy rolled over.

John Clay fired three shots into his face.