Read Online Fellowship of Fear by Aaron Elkins - Free Book Online

where the shouting was coming from.
    It sounded like Italian. They were angry, perhaps swearing at each other. His eyes had adapted to the night, and he could see that there were three men. Two of them were gesticulating, appealing to the third: a tall, slender man who stood silent and immobile. The beams from the flashlights darted down from the bridge, playing over the land near where he had jumped. He would be hard to find, Gideon thought. The ground was rough and strewn with rocks, with a lot of bushes big enough to shield him. Unless they happened to search in the right place, he might be able to keep away from them until he made it back to the bank of the gully only twenty feet behind him. Once he scrambled up that, the ground would be flat and easy to run on, with trees to block him from sight until he could get to the little village a mile down the road.
    There were, however, two problems, both major. First, the terrain between himself and the bank, lying as it did in the shadow of the bridge, had no protective bushes; moreover, the ground was swampy, full of litter, and difficult to traverse, particularly in the dark. Second, he was crouched in one of the first places they would look once they climbed down from the bridge and saw that the supports at either end provided obvious cover. That is, if they climbed down. For the moment his best bet was to stay where he was until he had a better idea of what they had in mind.
    There was a sudden clattering on the pebbles a few feet behind him. Gideon twitched violently, banging his head hard enough against the concrete to see stars. Between the stars he caught a glimpse of a large hare that contemplated him with wide, shining eyes for a fraction of a second and then skittered away. At the same moment the beams swung down to where the hare had been, and there was a flurry of shots—Gideon could hear some of them thunk into the earth—while the lights played frantically over the area. They were shooting from almost directly above him. Gideon could see their pistols, three of them, held out over the side of the bridge, bouncing with the repercussions of the shots.
    They were trying to kill him. He had been reacting, not thinking, since the headlights had blinded him, and the thought came as a surprise. They weren’t trying to rob him, and they had no questions about "it," no silken cord to force information from him. They weren’t shouting at him to stop or to come out with his hands up. They weren’t shouting at all; they were just shooting at what they thought was him with guns that made very loud bangs.
    Gideon had never been around guns much—not at all, actually—and their loudness stunned him. He jumped at every shot, as he did in a theater when an actor fired a gun. When they stopped at last, after what could have been no more than half a minute, he found that he had his eyes screwed shut.
    He opened them to see the light beams sweeping over the gully and along the banks. The hare had apparently gotten away. That’s good, he thought. They had been shooting wildly, without ever focusing on or possibly even seeing their target. Now they were back to shouting at each other. He might just possibly have a chance.
    Except that he couldn’t think of anything to do. As soon as they had started firing, he had changed his mind about waiting them out. He wasn’t about to lie there meekly and let them kill him. But without a weapon, or even with one, he was no match for three armed assassins. As for escaping, the moment he moved from behind the support, they’d catch him with their flashlights and mow him down. All he could think of was to toss a rock or a rusty can as far as he could, to engage their attention, and then to run for the bank behind him.
    It was hard to get terribly enthusiastic about the idea. A rock or a can bouncing over the ground wasn’t likely to fool anyone. It would sound just like what it was, and they would have their beams on him and their