“Certo. Inglese?”

“Si.”

Adam Fletcher pulled out a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped the sweat from his brow as the young lady behind the counter at the Poste e Telegrafi stepped off her small stool to reach one of the blank telegram forms behind her. She picked up one of the green slips, laid it out neatly in front of her and poised her pen ready to start.

“Questo i testo di telegramma?” she paused “What text of telegram? ”

Adam felt as if the air was being ripped from his lungs as she looked up at him and smiled. What would he say? He had it all worked out in his head before entering through the door, but like the air from his lungs, words were now rushing out of his head. He excused himself from the counter and sat on the tiny bench in the room, the heat overwhelming him. While his peers would be counting down their final days before retirement in the luxury of an oak carved office in London, Adam had spent the last three weeks on a hunt that had started on the coasts of Cornwall and had become a race against a decrepit sea-going boat and the European rail system.

He had only been two days behind the boat when he had arrived at the port of Lisbon in a post-revolutionary Portugal. Some expensive information bought here, had informed him that the boat Ta Metut would head first to Morroco to resupply and then would be proceeding to Gibraltar – which Adam had hoped would be where he would make his intercept. Seven days he had waited and the ship had indeed come into the port, but had not docked, the Captain having chosen instead to anchor in deep water and send a small lighter ashore for whatever business it had.

Information had been harder to come by on the ship’s next move. A Corsican Merchant Captain had told him that these Berber pirate ships normally kept away from the French Algerian coast and the most likely next stopping ports would either be Civitavecchia or Napoli in Italy. After that the boat would only land at obscure ports in Asia Minor where westerners were not welcomed. It would end its journey in Syria and from there its cargo would be taken deep into Arabia. This was something Adam could not allow to happen – Isabella, the daughter of his best friend of thirty years, was a part of that cargo.

Having arrived in Civitavecchia two days previously, he had instructed his business partner to wire him more funds; he had known he would have to have help if he was to have any chance of rescuing her. He had spent the first night scouting the most run-down looking bars and brothels around the dock, but to no avail. He had in his mind a romantic notion of finding a British crew he would be able to rally to his cause in the name of righteousness; reality would be much different.

Along the main dock front had been a brothel with a bar that stretched out along the quay. He had been drinking there, watching the clientele in the hope of finding that crew when he had felt a blunt object being pressed into his lower back. A voice had whispered “Lira, Lira”. Adam had slowly gone to reach for his money, but as he did the look of his friend the morning after Isabella was kidnapped appeared his mind. It was the look of a man who had lost everything and it filled him with rage.

He had then clenched his fist and unleashed a punch that belonged to man half his age and twice his size, sending the vagrant flying backwards. In an area in which fights were an hourly occurrence, he had been surprised to find himself surrounded in response by several of the other bar patrons who branded knives.

Adam had got into a boxing stance – if he was to have gone down it wouldn’t of been without a fight. The stand-off had been broken just as quickly as it had started when the brothel’s Madam had pushed her way through to the vagrant and started screaming at him Italian. She had then made Adam sit down and started to scream at him.

An ex-navy Dutch fisherman Pauel had helped translate. The youth who had tried to attack Adam had been her son, and she had berated the boy, not for robbing her clients, but for having had the daylights knocked out of him by a man who was old enough to be his grandfather. She had then demanded to know Adam’s story and so he then told it, not just to her but to the entire bar.

He had spoken of his friend having found love later in life, and had described how the man had lost his wife in childbirth; how he had brought up a beautiful daughter he doted; how the child had taught him to love the world again. He had told of their holiday in Cornwall when the Berber pirates had come in the middle of the night and kidnapped the fourteen-year-old girl. Adam had spoken of how he could not bear to look at his friend the next morning, then how he had for the last three weeks been trying to get to the boat.

By the time dawn had come, Adam had had all the assistance in place that he would need to take on the pirates, including the Madam’s son. Pauel had warned him that half of those who had taken his money in the promise of help would not turn up, but Adam had been sure that even half would be twice as much as he’d need. Pauel had also offered his boat and crew (for a price, of course) in case the chase needed to go further.

This had been four hours ago; Adam got to his feet and walked back over to the counter. The Ta Metut was due to arrive this evening.

“Signoria, erm, testo…” he watched as the young lady picked up the pen, he cleared his throat and continued ” H…O…P…E…”