Pursuing the assailant into the enormous and empty cathedral Indiana made immediately for the stairwell. This wound up 463 concrete steps and besides his own heart beating he thought he could hear footsteps ahead of him. Closing the gap by taking the stairs two and three at a time he turned the tight wind of stairs to catch a glimpse of the source of the pounding noise; just a lowly security guard. He hadn't seen anything so Indy squeezed past to reach the ringed observatory just beneath the frescoed ceiling. Nobody was here except the painted angels so he scrambled further still to the final flight of steps. Bursting onto the roof he found himself dazzled by the morning daylight beaming onto the orange clay roofs a hundred metres below. When his pupils dilated he confirmed that he was the only one atop the cupola while Florence slowly woke below him. Due to the low density of pedestrians in the piazza below he was able to detect the culprit forcefully stealing a bicycle and setting off toward the Roman gate. Just as Indy was wondering how the escape from an enclosed dome had been possible with only one way down he discovered another way down - a rappelling rope was hooked on the lip of the gutter. Rather than risk it himself he descended the stairs in a hurry, pushing past the first of the paying tourists who were making their way up without any idea how close they had come to a madman.
Procuring a bike for himself (with a promise to return it) he had a pretty good idea of where the fleeing man was headed and set out to catch him. Snarled traffic in the city centre made the flexibility of the chosen means of transportation a decided benefit, allowing him to exit the city walls in short time. From there the ride became trickier as the climbing began immediately. In fact the first few uphill kilometres were nothing compared with what was to come. Ordinarily an avid cyclist Indiana could feel the rust in his legs from months off of his beloved bike due to extensive travel away from home on assignment in recent months.
After the first forty kilometres he began to feel his thighs burn on the extended climbs through the hills of Tuscany. There was no time to waste though so except short pauses to reconfirm his tracking information he forged onward. Not much later his reconnaissance instructed him to veer off the paved roads and into the forested trails. It became transparent almost immediately that the path was mountain-bike-only and the bike he had was decidedly not a mountain bike. Alas he had to work with the tools at hand and rumbled over the boulders and through the mud as best as he could. Near the river he lost the scent and was instructed to return to the original route. To his consternation this required him to redo a long climb he had completed prior to the sidebar. If that one hurt it was the seven continuous kilometres up into the Chianti mountains that followed which really took its toll; 10° and 12° inclines are no easy task.
Down the other side he was sure he would narrow the gap as he flew like gangbusters. Every muscle in his body tensed, down to his hands wrapped lightly on the handbrakes in case they were warranted, as gravity fed his velocity into and out of the winding turns. Vineyards were a leafy blur, insects met a sudden end on his face. The route led him through cute Tuscan villages but there were more important objectives at hand than sightseeing.
In the end all signs pointed back to Firenze; over 110km, not including the 90 minute offroad jaunt, seemingly all up hill but obviously breaking even as he began where he started. Not exactly where he had started though, for the pursuit ended dramatically in the Piazza del Michelangelo. As the sun burned out on the bridges and the dome where it had all begun nearly 11 hours earlier Indiana finally got his man.
