City of Fear

1

The garden of the Quirinale felt like a sun trap as the man in the silver armor strode down the shingle path. He was sweating profusely inside the ceremonial breastplate and woolen uniform.

Tight in his right hand he held the long, bloodied sword that had just taken the life of a man. In a few moments he would kill the president of Italy. And then? Be murdered himself. It was the fate of assassins throughout the ages, from Pausanius of Orestis, who had slaughtered Philip, the father of Alexander the Great, to Marat’s murderess, Charlotte Corday, and Kennedy’s nemesis, Lee Harvey Oswald.

The stabbing dagger, the sniper’s rifle … all these were mirrored weapons, reflecting on the man or woman who bore them, joining perpetrator and victim as twin sacrifices to destiny. It had always been this way, since men sought to rule over others, circumscribing their desires, hemming in the spans of their lives with the dull, rote strictures of convention. Petrakis had read much over the years, thinking, preparing, comparing himself to his peers. Actor John Wilkes Booth’s final performance before he put a bullet through the skull of Abraham Lincoln had been in Julius Caesar, although through some strange irony he had taken the part of Caesar’s friend and apologist, Mark Antony, not Brutus as history demanded.

As he approached the figure in the bower, seeing the old man’s gray, lined form bent deep over a book, Petrakis found himself murmuring a line Booth must have uttered a century and a half before.

“‘O mighty Caesar … dost thou lie so low? Are all thy conquests, glories, triumphs, spoils, shrunk to this little measure?’”

A pale, long face, with sad, tired eyes, looked up from the page. Petrakis, realizing he had spoken out loud, wondered why this death, among so many, would be the most difficult.

“I didn’t quite catch that,” Dario Sordi said in a calm, unwavering voice, his eyes, nevertheless, on the long, bloodied blade.

The uniformed officer came close, stopped, repeated the line, and held the sword over the elderly figure seated in the shadow of a statue of Hermes.

The president glanced around him and asked, “What conquests in particular, Andrea? What glories? What spoils? Temporary residence in a garden fit for a pope? I’m a pensioner in a very luxurious retirement home. Do you really not understand that?”

The weapon trembled in Petrakis’s hand. His palm felt sweaty. He couldn’t speak.

Voices rose behind him. A shout. A clamor.

There was a cigarette in Dario Sordi’s hand. It didn’t even shake.

“You should be afraid, old man.”

More dry laughter. “I’ve been hunted by Nazis.” The gray, drawn face glowered at him. Sordi drew on the cigarette and exhaled a cloud of smoke. “Played hide-and-seek with tobacco and the grape for more than half a century. Offended people — important people — who feel I am owed a lesson. Which is probably true.” A long, pale finger jabbed the evening air. “And now you wish me to cower before someone else’s puppet? A tool?”

That, at least, made it easier.

Petrakis found his mind ranging across so many things: memories, lost decades, languid days dodging NATO patrols beneath the Afghan sun, distant half-recalled moments in the damp darkness of an Etruscan tomb, talking to his father about life and the world, and how a man had to make his own way, not let another create a future for him.

Everything came from that place in the Maremma, from the whispered discovery of a paradise of the will sacrificed to the commonplace and mundane, the exigencies of politics. Andrea Petrakis knew this course was set for him at an early age, by birth, by his inheritance.

The memory of the tomb, with its ghostly painted figures on the wall, and the terrible, eternal specter of the Blue Demon, consuming them one by one, filled his head. This, more than anything else, he had learned over the decades: Freedom, of the kind enjoyed by the long-dead men and women still dancing beneath the gray Tarquinia earth more than two millennia on, was a mayfly, gloriously fleeting, made real only by its impermanence. Life and death were bedfellows, two sides of the same coin. To taste every breath, feel each beat of the heart, one had to know that both might be snatched away in an instant. His father had taught him that, long before the Afghans and the Arabs tried to reveal the same truth.

Andrea Petrakis remembered the lesson more keenly now, as the sand trickled through some unseen hourglass for Dario Sordi and his allotted assassin.

Out of the soft evening came a bright, sharp sound, like the ping of some taut yet invisible wire, snapping under pressure.

A piece of the statue of Hermes, its stone right foot, disintegrated in front of his eyes, shattering into pieces, as if exploding in anger.

Dario Sordi ducked back into the shadows, trying, at last, to hide.

2

“Behold,” said the man, in a cold, tired voice, the accent from the countryside perhaps. “I will make a covenant. For it is something dreadful I will do to you.”

Strong, firm hands ripped off the hood. Giovanni Batisti saw he was tethered to a plain office chair. At the periphery of his vision, he could make out that he was in a small, simple room with bare bleached floorboards and dust ghosts on the walls left by long-removed chests of drawers or ancient filing cabinets. The place smelled musty, damp, and abandoned. He could hear the distant lowing of traffic, muffled in some curious way, but still energized by the familiar rhythm of the city. Cars and trucks, buses and people, thousands of them, some from the police and the security services no doubt, searching as best they could, oblivious to his presence. There was no human sound close by, from an adjoining room or an apartment. Not a radio or a TV set. No voice save that of his captor.

“I would like to use the bathroom, please,” Batisti said quietly, keeping his eyes fixed on the stripped, cracked timber boards at his feet. “I will do as you say. You have my word.”

The silence, hours of it, had been the worst part. He’d expected a reprimand, might even have welcomed a beating, since all these things would have acknowledged his existence. Instead … he was left in limbo, in blindness, almost as if he were dead already. Nor was there any exchange he could hear between those involved. A brief meeting to discuss tactics. News. Perhaps a phone call in which he would be asked to confirm that he was still alive.

Even — and this was a forlorn hope, he knew — some small note of concern about his driver, Elena Majewska, everyone’s favorite, shot in the chest as the two vehicles blocked his government car in the narrow street of Via delle Quattro Fontane, at the junction with the road to the Quirinale. It was such a familiar Roman crossroads, next to Borromini’s fluid baroque masterpiece of San Carlino, a church he loved deeply and would visit often if he had time during his lunch break from the Interior Ministry building around the corner.

They could have snatched him that day from beneath Borromini’s dome, with its magnificent dove of peace, descending to earth from Heaven. He’d needed a desperate fifteen-minute respite from sessions with the Americans, the Russians, the British, the Germans.… Eight nations, eight voices, each different, each seeking its own outcome. The phrase that was always used about the G8—the “industrialized nations”—struck him as somewhat ironic as he listened to the endless bickering about diplomatic rights and protocols, about who should stand where and with whom. Had some interloper approached him during his brief recess that day, Batisti would have glanced at Borromini’s extraordinary interior one last time, then walked into his captor’s arms immediately. Anything but another session devoted to the rites and procedures of diplomatic life.

Then he remembered again, with a sudden, painful seizure of guilt, the driver. Did Elena — a young, pretty single mother who’d moved to Rome from Poland to find security and a better life — survive? If so, what could she tell the police? What was there to say about a swift and unexpected explosion of violence in the black sultry velvet of a Roman summer night? The attack had happened so quickly and with such brutish force that Batisti was still unsure how many men had been involved. Perhaps no more than three or four, to judge from the pair of vehicles blocking the way. The area was empty. He was without a bodyguard. An opposition politician drafted into the organization team was deemed not to need a bodyguard, even in the heightened security that preceded the summit. Not a single sentence was spoken as they dragged him from the rear seat, wrapped a blindfold tightly around his head, fired — three, four times? — into the front, then bundled him into the trunk of some large vehicle and drove a short distance to their destination.

Were they now issuing ransom demands? Did his wife, who was with her family in Milan, discussing a forthcoming family wedding, know what was happening?

There were no answers, only questions. Giovanni Batisti was forty-eight years old and felt as if he’d stepped back into a past that Italy hoped was behind it. The dismal seventies and eighties, the “Years of Lead.” A time when academics and lawyers and politicians were routinely kidnapped by the shadowy criminals of the Red Brigades and their partners in terrorism, held for ransom, tortured, then left bloodied and broken as some futile lesson to those in authority. Or dead. Like Aldo Moro, the former prime minister, seized in 1978, held captive for fifty-six days before being shot ten times in the chest and dumped in the trunk of a car in the Via Caetani.

“Look at me,” a voice from ahead of him ordered.

Batisti closed his eyes, kept them tightly shut. “I do not wish to compromise you, sir. I have a wife. Two sons. One is eight. One is ten. I love them. I wish you no harm. I wish no one any harm. These matters can and will be resolved through dialogue, one way or another. I believe that of everything. In this world, I have to.” He found his mouth was dry, his lips felt painful as he licked them. “If you know me, you know I am a man of the left. The causes you espouse are often the causes I have argued for. The methods—”

“What do you know of our causes?”

“I … I have some money,” Batisti stuttered. “Not of my own, you understand. My father. Perhaps if I might make a phone call?”

“This is not about money,” the voice said, and it sounded colder than ever. “Look at me or I will shoot you this instant.”

Batisti opened his eyes and stared straight ahead, across the bare, dreary room. The man seated opposite him was perhaps forty. Or a little older, his own age even. Professional-looking. Maybe an academic himself. Not a factory worker, not someone who had risen from poverty, pulled up by his own boot laces. There was a cultured timbre to his voice, one that spoke of education and a middle-class upbringing. A keen, incisive intelligence burned in his dark eyes. His face was leathery and tanned as if it had spent too long under a bright, burning sun. He would once have been handsome, but his craggy features were marred by a network of frown lines, on the forehead, at the edge of his broad, full-lipped mouth, which looked as if a smile had never crossed it in years. His long, unkempt hair seemed unnaturally gray and was wavy, shiny with some kind of grease. A mark of vanity. Like the black clothes, which were not inexpensive. Revolutionaries usually knew how to dress. The man opposite him had the scarred visage of a movie actor who had fallen on hard times. Something about him seemed distantly familiar, which seemed a terrible thought.

“Behold, I will make a covenant.…”

“I heard you the first time,” Batisti sighed.

“What does it mean?”

The politician briefly closed his eyes. “The Bible?” he guessed, tiring of this game. “One of the Old Testament horrors, I imagine. Like Leviticus. I have no time for such devils, I’m afraid. Who needs them?”

The man reached down to retrieve something, then placed the object on the table. It was Batisti’s own laptop computer, which had sat next to him in the back of the official car.

“Cave eleven at Qumran. The Temple Scroll. Not quite the Old Testament, but in much the same vein.”

“It’s a long time since I was a professor,” Batisti confessed. “The Dead Sea was never my field. Nor rituals. About sacrifice or anything else.”

“I’m aware of your field of expertise.”

“I was no expert. I was a child, looking for knowledge. It could have been anything.”

“And then you left the university for politics. For power.”

Batisti shook his head. This was unfair, ridiculous. “What power? I spend my day trying to turn the tide a little in the way of justice, as I see it. I earn no more now than I did then. Had I written the books I wanted to …”

Great, swirling stories, popular novels of the ancients, of heroism and dark deeds. He would never get round to them. He understood that.

“It’s a long time since I spoke to an academic. You were a professor of ancient history. Greek and Roman?”

Batisti nodded. “A middling one. An overoptimistic decoder of impossible mysteries. Nothing more. You kidnap me, you shoot my driver, in order to discuss history?”

The figure in black reached into his jacket and withdrew a short, bulky weapon. “A man with a gun may ask anything.”

Giovanni Batisti was astonished to discover that his fear was rapidly being consumed by a growing sense of outrage.

“I am a servant of the people. I have never sought to do anyone ill. I have voted and spoken against every policy, national and international, with which I disagree. My conscience is clear. Is yours?”

The man in black scowled. “You read too much Latin and too little English. ‘Thus conscience does make cowards of us all.’”

“I don’t imagine you brought me here to quote Shakespeare. What do you want?” Batisti demanded.

“In the first instance? I require the unlock code for this computer. After that, I wish to hear everything you know about the arrangements that will be made to guard the great gentlemen who are now in Rome to safeguard this glorious society of ours.” The man scratched his lank gray hair. “Or is that theirs? Excuse my ignorance. I’ve been out of things for a little while.”

“And after that you will kill me?”

The man seemed puzzled by the question.

“No, no, no. After that he will kill you.”

The man nodded toward the back of the room, then gestured for someone to come forward.

Giovanni Batisti watched and felt his blood freeze.

The newcomer must have sat silent throughout. Perhaps he was in the other car when they seized him at the crossroads.

He looked like a golden boy, a powerfully built youth, naked except for a crude loincloth. His skin was the color of a cinematic Mediterranean god. His hair was burnished yellow, long and curled like a cherub from Raphael. Bright blue paint was smeared roughly on his face and chest.

“We require a sign,” the man in black added, reaching into his pocket and taking out an egg. “My friend here is no ordinary man. He can foretell the future through the examination of the entrails and internal organs. This makes him a …” He stared at the ceiling, as if searching for the word.

“A haruspex,” Batisti murmured.

“Exactly,” the man agreed. “Should our act of divination be fruitful …”

The painted youth was staring at him, like a muscular halfwit. Batisti could see what appeared to be a butcher’s knife in his right hand.

On the table, a pale brown hen’s egg sat in a saucer with a scallop-shell edge.

The man with the gun said, in a clear, firm voice, “Ta Sacni!” Then he leaned forward and, in a mock whisper behind his hand, told Batisti, “This is more your field than mine. I think that means, ‘This is the sanctuary.’ Do tell me if we get anything wrong.”

The golden boy stepped forward and stood behind him. In his left hand was a small bottle of San Pellegrino mineral water. His eyes were very blue and open, as if he were drugged. He bent down, gazed at the egg, and then listened, rapt, captivated, as the man in black began to chant in a dry, passionless voice, “Aplu. Phoebos. Apollo. Delian. Pythian. Lord of Delphi. Guardian of the Sibyls. Or by whatever other name you wish to be called. I pray and beseech you that you may by your majesty be propitious and well disposed to me, for which I offer this egg. If I have worshipped you and still do worship you, you who taught mankind the art of prophecy, you who have inspired my divination, then come now and show your signs that I might know the will of the gods! I seek to understand the secret ways into the Palace of the Pope. Thui Srenar Tev.”

Show me the signs now, Batisti translated in his head.

The youth spilled the water onto the table. The knife came down and split the egg in two.

The older one leaned over, sniffed, and said, “Looks like yolk and albumen to me. But what do I know? He’s the haruspex.”

“I cannot tell you what you want to know,” Batisti murmured. “You must appreciate that.”

“That is both very brave and extremely unfortunate. Though not entirely unexpected.”

The naked youth was running his fingers through the egg in the saucer. The man pushed his hand away. The creature obeyed, immediately, a sudden fearful and subservient look in his eye.

“I want the code for your computer,” the older one ordered. “You will give it to me. One way or another.”

Batisti said nothing, merely closed his eyes for a moment and wished he retained sufficient faith to pray.

“I’m more valuable to you alive than dead. Tell the authorities what you want. They will negotiate.”

“They didn’t negotiate for Aldo Moro. You think some junior political hack is worth more than a prime minister?” He seemed impatient, as if this were all a tedious game. “You’ve been out of the real world too long, Batisti. These people smile at you and pat your little head, caring nothing. These”—he dashed the saucer and the broken egg from the table—“toys are beneath us. Remember your Bible. ‘When I was a child, I used to speak like a child, think like a child, reason like a child; when I became a man, I did away with childish things. For now we see in a mirror dimly …’”

Batisti recalled little of his Catholic upbringing. It seemed distant, as if it had happened to someone else. This much of the verses he remembered, though.

“‘But faith, hope, love, abide these three,’” he said quietly. “‘And the greatest of these is love.’”

“Not so much of that about these days,” the silver-haired man replied mournfully. “Is there?”

Then he nodded at the golden boy by his side, waiting, tense and anxious, for something to begin.

3

The peals from the nearby clock tower cut through the muffled rumble of late-afternoon traffic. In his mind’s eye Gianni Peroni could imagine the slender white campanile that sat atop the great palace on the hill above them. The Italian tricolor fluttered at the summit, the blue European flag beneath, both accompanied, if the president was in residence, by his own personal standard on the other. All three flew at half-mast during times of national mourning. Perhaps that would happen soon, Peroni thought with regret.

At that moment he felt every day of his fifty-three years. His hefty muscular frame ached from the hours he’d spent on the cobbled streets of the centro storico, and his mind was numb from staring at so many blank faces regarding him with trepidation and a little fear. He knew he wasn’t the prettiest cop on the beat. The physical slashes that marked his cheeks like knife scars saw to that. No stranger opening the door to him could possibly guess that the appearance he gave — so rough, so intimidating — was nothing like the man himself, until he spoke, kindly, with a keen, bright diligence and genuine emotion.

This was a bad day in Rome, one that might so easily get worse. Peroni took a deep breath, thought about the next address on his list, and then heard the sonorous chimes of the president’s campanile swamped by the thunderous roar of a police Twin Huey flying in to hover low over the Quirinale hill.

Commissario Esposito’s briefing had made plain the seriousness of the situation, and the degree of the response. Nine of the twelve Polizia di Stato helicopters from the Pratica di Mare air base south of the city were in the air, circling endlessly. They had been joined by those of the Carabinieri, the secret services, and some of the more shadowy security agencies Peroni didn’t care to think about. The combined racket they made placed a low, shrill shriek in the perfect blue sky above the summer crowds of tourists and commuters struggling through the heat.

Over the years, Peroni had come to associate the racket of these machines with the state of the city’s temperament. Their volume rose and fell with the general mood in the dark, cobbled alleys of the centro storico and the quieter, more modern suburbs to which the average Roman retreated at the end of the working day. On that basis the city’s current frame of mind was uncertain, unhappy, and pregnant with foreboding. A junior minister in the Ministry of the Interior had been kidnapped, seized just after midnight by some band of unknown criminals. They had casually slaughtered his unfortunate female driver, a young single mother, at the wheel of his government car. Peroni had been on duty and was one of the first on the scene ten hours earlier. The heartbreaking sight of the unarmed woman’s bloodied, torn corpse still strapped in by her seat belt would haunt him for a while. There was, it seemed to him, little point in her murder, except to demonstrate its own brutality.

No ransom demand, or any other kind of communication, had been received by the authorities. Not a trace of the victim or his abductors had yet been found. But everyone knew who Giovanni Batisti was: a minor opposition politician dealing with the security of the meeting of G8 world leaders, a meeting due to begin, somewhat controversially, the following day in the center of the city itself. An officer of the state who possessed secrets useful to the enemy, whosoever they might be. The assumption, on the part of the police and everyone else, was immediate and unquestioned. This was terrorism, a prelude to something else, something worse.

Hundreds of men and women were now engaged in trying to understand what had happened in those few bloody minutes at the crossroads in the Via delle Quattro Fontane. Yet, in the end, much of the work fell to those who patiently tramped the historic streets of Rome. Helicopters and surveillance cameras, police officers bearing arms in the most visible of public streets, constant appeals to the public through the media … these things were fine for the cameras. When it came to the point at which good encountered evil, its discovery was usually down to a few individuals who might count themselves lucky, cursed, or just plain stupid, depending on the outcome of events.

The story broke too late for the morning newspapers, which of course made it all the more irresistible to the TV and radio stations. So, within the space of a morning, the pretty face of Elena Majewska and the kindly, scholarly features of Giovanni Batisti had become familiar icons throughout Rome, if not Italy, on TV screens, in the imaginations of ordinary people fearful about his fate and about that of the nation at large. The indignation of the city was apparent everywhere, in hushed conversations in cafes, and, more visibly, in the protest notices that had begun to appear in the windows of shops and private homes, on any spare space that could be found.

Peroni recalled the morning that terrorist bombs had devastated the center of London some years before. Within the space of a few hours, posters, rapidly printed at personal expense, distributed by volunteers, began appearing on the walls of the Italian capital, declaring, Adesso siamo tutti Londrinesi.

We are all Londoners now.

It felt that way. There was a communal howl of outrage, an instinctive reaction of shock and revulsion. Yet some inner sense of the city told him the response to Batisti’s abduction was more than a statement of solidarity born out of simple common decency. This strange and bloody act had finally breathed life into a subterranean sense of apprehension, one that had been quietly stirring for some time in the febrile, uncertain nature of the times.

Peroni had watched Commissario Esposito assemble an initial investigative team in the darkness early that morning, only to find, to his dismay if not surprise, that the area was soon swarming with other agencies: the Carabinieri; officers of SISDE, the civilian secret service, and of SISMI, their military counterparts. Foreigners too: Americans flashing badges, British men in suits, who never said a word at all, French, German, Russian …

Rome was bursting at the seams with spooks and security officers committed to guarding the leaders who were starting to assemble inside the Quirinale. A small army of these tenebrous individuals had found their way to the narrow crossroads of the Via delle Quattro Fontane.

It was almost, Peroni thought at the time, as if some of them had been expecting such a turn of events.

The entire area would be sealed off for another day at least, causing chaos for those trying to get to work in the presidential palace and the ministry buildings scattered around the neighborhood. In the tussle that ensued, Commissario Esposito had done his best to press the police case for a leading role in the investigation. Peroni had watched the most senior officer in the Questura as he fought to deal with a rapidly escalating confrontation that was slipping out of his hands. There was something quietly admirable in the commissario’s persistent yet polite professionalism toward the other agencies as they arrived. Nevertheless, it was an effort doomed to failure.

Once a case moved from simple criminality into the dark world of terrorism, Esposito knew, like every other ordinary serving man and woman in the Polizia di Stato, that he was merely a foot soldier destined to take orders, a tiny cog in a very different campaign, one that embraced much more than mere law enforcement. Whatever had happened to Giovanni Batisti, it would not be left to the police to take the lead in negotiating his release or trying to locate his killers, should the worst happen. The game had, very swiftly, moved on. The police would become pawns on a chessboard in which the pieces were shifted by unseen hands, playing to a gambit they might never explain. This was the way of such investigations, and what amazed Gianni Peroni, a police officer whose experience ran back to the days of the Red Brigades, was that they were forced to confront such challenges only rarely. Bombs had devastated London and Madrid. Aircraft had tumbled from the sky in America. But Rome had been lucky. It was important such good fortune lasted.

This was why he was now leading one of the many teams of police officers scouring the streets to follow up phone calls from people responding to the pleas put out by the authorities. It was the kind of routine, mindless drudgery that police officers performed much of the time: knocking on doors, asking questions, trying to judge the answers they got, expecting little, receiving nothing mostly. Every officer Commissario Esposito could get his hands on was out there, among them many men and women on holiday who had turned up determined to help. It was boring, necessary labor, and Peroni was glad he had good company for the job: Rosa Prabakaran, an experienced agente who was quickly turning into one of the most intelligent and reliable officers in the Questura team; and a genial trainee, Mirko Oliva, a bright young man from Turin newly transferred from uniform to plainclothes duties.

Only Oliva, starry-eyed still with the eagerness of youth, managed to look enthusiastic after five futile responses to calls that, for the most part, had been sparked by nothing more than the innocent presence of foreigners of Middle Eastern origin. Terrorism, for the masses, still meant something from outside Italy; their memories, it seemed to Peroni, were mercifully short at times.

Now the three of them were no more than a ten-minute walk from the point at which Batisti had been kidnapped. The address they’d been given lay in a dark narrow lane to one side of the Quirinale, running from the Barberini Palace to the busy tunnel that traveled beneath the palace gardens to emerge near the Trevi Fountain. Peroni could see a phalanx of buses fighting for space at the foot of the street so that they could discharge their cargoes of tourists.

“What are we looking for this time?” Oliva asked. He was twenty-three, stocky like a rugby player, with close-cropped black hair and bright blue eyes.

“You’re supposed to remember these things, Mirko,” Rosa Prabakaran scolded him. “Not keep relying on your colleagues.”

“Sorry. I wish we were doing something important.”

“This is important,” Peroni insisted. He looked at his notebook. “Or it might be.”

It was more than thirty years since Gianni Peroni joined the police, but he could still remember the impetuousness he’d felt in the early days.

Rosa Prabakaran was beyond that stage already. A slim, elegant young woman, born in Rome to Indian parents, she was dressed in a severe gray suit, the uniform of an ambitious young officer keen to take a step up to sovrintendente. Rosa was something of an enigma within the Questura: self-assured, striking, with a round, dark face, intelligent brown eyes, and — a deliberate sign, Peroni thought, of her heritage — the smallest of gold studs in her snub nose. She never mixed with her colleagues, never talked about anything personal, relationships least of all. When the work was there, she was always the last to leave. When she was off duty, no one had any idea what she did, or with whom.

“We had a phone call from someone called Moro,” Rosa told the young trainee, giving Peroni a meaningful look, one that said he ought to comment upon Oliva’s sluggishness one day. “He lives on the ground floor. He thinks he saw two suspicious-looking foreigners going up the stairs.”

“How does someone look ‘suspicious’?” Oliva wondered.

It seemed, to Peroni, a very good question

4

The man Peroni regarded as one of his closest friends was only a few hundred meters away at that moment, standing outside the Palazzo del Quirinale at the summit of the hill, almost dizzy with memories. Nic Costa was just starting to look his thirty years — slim, athletically built, dark-faced and handsome, his manner still diffident, with a quiet charm bordering on shyness, but sufficient professional steel to have gained him promotion to the rank of sovrintendente. As the three police officers waited for clearance into the presidential palace, Costa scarcely noticed Inspector Leo Falcone and the Questura commissario Vincenzo Esposito next to him. He’d been through the tightly guarded entrance of the Quirinale once before, as a child, when his father, Marco, a communist politician, had taken him on a private visit “to see how the enemy live.” The place had seemed huge and fascinating, like some magical fortress from a fairy tale, one guarded by the armored figures of the Corazzieri, the presidential guard, tall men with shining swords and glittering breastplates who seemed to tower above most visitors.

That privileged peek behind the palace’s towering stone façade was a quarter of a century before. The quiet, introverted child he was could never have imagined that one day he would return there as a police officer, in a frightened Rome, a city full of trepidation, a place he barely recognized.

But Falcone did, and so did Esposito. They were older, in their fifties, and their bleak, immobile faces spoke volumes. Something that was once thought dead had returned, and for those of a certain age it bore a terrible familiarity.

The impossibly lofty corazziere at the gate let them through, and the moment he was inside the palace Costa found himself recalling his puzzlement as a child over his father’s explanation of what a president did. This was not America. The Italian president was not the day-to-day head of government, an elected king in all but name. That job was given to the prime minister. But a republic required too a figurehead, an emblem of the state. History being what it was, the government had naturally decided that the place for such a man to live was the Quirinale, the very palace that was once occupied by the popes who ruled what was known as the Stati della Chiesa, the Republic of Saint Peter.

Foreigners seldom appreciated the complexities of politics in Rome. As the son of a communist politician, Costa had rarely been allowed to forget them. From the third century after Christ until 1861, when, in a brief interregnum, the pope became “the prisoner in the Vatican,” the papal hierarchy regarded itself as God’s government on earth. Only when Mussolini’s Lateran Treaty of 1929 gave the Catholic Church some formal recognition, and its own minuscule country set around Michelangelo’s magnificent dome across the river, did the rift between pope and secular politicians begin to heal.

These were the antecedents that Costa’s father had drummed into him from the earliest age, the story of the collapse of a once-supreme theological sovereign power and its replacement by a worldly, bickering, and equally corrupt parliamentary democracy that had never quite found its feet. Marco Costa had been born eight years after the Lateran Treaty was signed, into a nation dominated by fascism, one that would soon disintegrate into the bloodshed and poverty of war. This was all history, but Italian history, which meant that it was never as distant as one might sometimes have hoped, or completely forgotten.

Costa followed Esposito and Falcone up the broad stairs, exchanging glances, nothing more, with a group of Carabinieri officers on the way out. Very soon he found himself in a long, ornate room, with a carved-oak ceiling, tall, shuttered windows, elaborate gilt furniture, and so many paintings he didn’t know where to look.

At a vast ormolu table stood the president of Italy, Dario Sordi. Seated to his left was a familiar figure from occasional high-level meetings within the Questura, Luca Palombo, the tall, heavily built, gray-haired security chief of the Ministry of the Interior. Next to him was an individual Costa did not know, though something about the man’s dress, a standard, expensive dark blue suit, suggested he came from the same distant and occasionally shadowy world as Palombo. At the end of the table stood a screen displaying a blank white rectangle from the computer projector opposite.

A door in the corner of the room opened. Another familiar figure entered and Costa reminded himself that he did not normally move in circles like this. Ugo Campagnolo, the prime minister of Italy’s sixty-third government since the Second World War, heir, in the space of a few short years, to Prodi, Berlusconi, and, most recently, Walter Veltroni. Campagnolo was a man who had emerged from the constant bilious flux of national politics by both courting and coveting controversy. Smaller than he appeared in the media, a handsome, slender man, with the energized, upright figure of the waiter he once was, he entered at a brisk pace, his face locked in the rictus smile the nation knew from a million photo opportunities. His wavy dark hair was a little too perfect for a man in his late fifties, though the chiseled tanned features, this close, seemed to confirm his frequent claim that he, unlike some of his predecessors, had never taken advantage of the surgeon’s knife. Over the previous fifteen years, as the older grouping collapsed amid scandal and self-recrimination, Campagnolo had quietly built his own party, courting the moneyed classes with promises of fiscal laxity, and the proletariat by outflanking Berlusconi’s naked populism. The previous year, after the collapse of the brief Veltroni regime, Campagnolo had won power through the most slender of margins and some dubious political double-dealing, becoming prime minister only months after the previous center-left administration had placed Sordi in the presidency. The rifts between Campagnolo and Sordi began almost immediately. Scarcely a week went by without some new dispute appearing between the Quirinale and Campagnolo’s parliament. It was an uneasy and embittered standoff between a veteran politician who was widely admired but possessed little in the way of direct power, and a prime minister who was seen as a naked opportunist, without a conviction in his body, but with enough influence and cunning to win the popular vote against a fractured opposition.

Costa watched the prime minister take a chair next to the security man, Palombo, without uttering a word or casting a single glance in the president’s direction. Only days before, the papers had once again been full of the rifts between the two, over domestic and international issues and over Campagnolo’s decision to place the G8 summit in the heart of Rome itself, not in some country estate that might be guarded with ease and minimal disruption to everyday life.

They were very different men.

Costa felt he had known Sordi’s long, pale face, and its almost permanent expression of wry bemusement, forever. As a senator, Sordi had been a close friend of his father’s until some unexplained fracture divided them. Even before he moved into the Quirinale, Sordi was a legend in Italy. The man himself made a point of never mentioning his distant past, though it was well mapped out in the papers and the national psyche. As a schoolboy during the Second World War, he had joined the partisans fighting the German occupation. On March 23, 1944, a date engraved upon the memory of many a Roman family, Sordi had taken part in the infamous attack in the Via Rasella, a narrow street by the side of the Quirinale hill. Twenty SS men died and more than sixty were wounded. A truant from school, young Sordi had personally gunned down two Germans, or so the papers said. Somehow he had escaped the terrible vengeance subsequently ordered by the Nazis, in which 335 Italians — Jews, Gypsies, soldiers, police officers, waiters, shop workers, some partisans, a few ordinary Romans who were simply unlucky — were massacred in regulation groups of five. The Germans dumped their bodies in the caves of the Fosse Ardeatine, close to the isolated rural catacombs of Callisto and Domitilla, no more than a ten-minute walk from Costa’s home on the Via Appia Antica.

Sordi emerged from the war both a hero and an orphan; his father and an uncle were among those executed at the Fosse Ardeatine. Soon, the young partisan became a vocal member of the Communist Party, only to break with it in 1956 over Hungary. Thereafter he remained a committed deputy of the “soft” left, steadily working his way through the political process, gaining along the way a reputation for blunt honesty and indefatigable integrity, not least for his refusal to use his bravery as a teenage partisan to the slightest advantage in the polling booth.

The contrast with Campagnolo could hardly be greater. The prime minister exploited the Italian weakness for braggadocio and cheek. He was a buffoon of sorts, a political Punchinello, cynical, fundamentally unscrupulous, yet intelligent, persuasive, and battle-hardened, a man who, through the force of his personality, had swept aside the confusion and infighting of the previous coalition administration and replaced it with his own brand of draconian leadership.

Costa could never imagine Sordi indulging in the swagger and public posturing that had put Campagnolo in power. There had once been photos of the man who was to become president in the Costa home. Usually with Costa’s father, Marco, both raising wineglasses, cigarettes in their hands. Some more-sober pictures were taken at the caves where the victims of the Via Rasella reprisals were murdered. The two men always looked so different, his father seeming young almost to the last, while Sordi — with his bald head and fringe of gray hair — appeared to be set in permanent middle age. Then the friendship was gone, and all the young Costa recalled was that face looking down at him, smiling, its features almost cartoon-like, with a long beak of a nose, drooping ears, and wearily genial gray eyes. The “Bloodhound.” That was what his father called Sordi. Was this simply because he looked like one? Or because Sordi had a tireless dedication to the demands of realpolitik, which Marco, for whom theory was always easier than practice, found tedious?

In all likelihood, he would never know. The breach had occurred when he was too young to understand, or dare ask. Nevertheless, it was, he sensed, a separation that had caused both men pain.

Now, more than two decades later, he stood in front of Dario Sordi, president of Italy, and caught a pleasant twinkle in those kindly gray eyes.

“Ah, a face I have not seen in many years.”

Sordi stepped out from behind the table, reaching out with his long arms. “Esposito. A pleasure, always. And you must be Falcone. Welcome.” Tall and thin, straight-backed, tanned, with a carefully clipped silver goatee, Costa’s inspector nodded, seemingly unmoved by the president’s warmth. Sordi stopped in front of Costa. “Sovrintendente. So much changed, yet still I see the little boy I used to know. Your father would be proud, even if he would struggle to tell you so. Let me do that for him.”

Costa caught the look of amazement on the faces of his colleagues.

“I would like to think so, sir,” he answered quietly, aware that he was fighting to stifle his blushes.

“Know it,” Sordi replied, and returned to the table, beckoning them to sit. “Know this too. I wish to God your father were with us now. We could use men like him.” The president glanced at his watch. “What you will now hear must not be repeated outside, except to those you both trust and believe must know.”

He glanced at Campagnolo. “Prime Minister?”

“Are you asking me to comply also, Dario?” Campagnolo asked. “Even in the present circumstances, that seems a little impertinent.”

Sordi’s face betrayed no anger. “I was seeking your support, Ugo. If you wished to say a few words …?”

Campagnolo laughed and looked at them. “I’m like these people. An invited guest. Here to listen, Mr. President. Nothing more.”

Sordi paused, then declared, “You must understand, all of you, that we have entered extraordinary times. It is my hope and belief they will, with your assistance and a little good fortune, be brief. But until they are over, you must bear with us all. This morning I have signed orders that confirm I shall exercise directly my power as head of state and of the Supreme Defense Council, and as commander of the armed forces. Commissario Esposito, you will report to Palombo here, and he to me. The prime minister is aware of this situation and”—Sordi frowned, and looked a little regretful—“aware that he will accept it. The constitution is clear on this matter and I am exercising the rights and duties it gives me.”

“There are lawyers who would debate that,” Campagnolo cut in.

A flash of fury hardened the president’s features. “For the right money, there are lawyers who will debate anything, as you surely know better than anyone, Ugo. I am grateful that you accept this is one occasion when their … talents … are best avoided. We have little time and no room for uncertainty.”

He glanced at the prime minister. Something passed between them, and it was not animosity, more a recognition that they occupied different positions, ones that were, by their very nature, in conflict.

“As all Italy understands, a young employee of the state was brutally murdered last night and the unfortunate Giovanni Batisti taken by her killers,” Sordi went on. “For what reason, we can only guess. What you don’t know is that we were forewarned something like this would happen.” Sordi sighed. “The Blue Demon has returned.”

Costa happened to catch Esposito’s face at that moment. The expression there — shock, fear, and a sudden paleness in the commissario’s usually florid cheeks — was mirrored on Falcone’s lean brown features.

“Your father warned, and I never listened.” Dario Sordi pointed directly at Costa. “Though I doubt even he could have predicted this turn of events.”

5

The Blue Demon.

Costa hadn’t heard the name in years, except on TV programs about the tragic “Years of Lead,” when Italy had been gripped by terrorist outrages committed by a variety of outlaw bands, on the left and the right.

The Blue Demon was the oddest, the least understood of them all, even down to its name. An individual? An entity? No one knew, or even whether the entire episode was nothing more than a student prank or a myth gone wrong, some dark, violent fantasy originating in the old land of the Etruscans, in the bleak Maremma north of Rome.

Luca Palombo, the dour gray-haired spook of the Ministry of Interior, took them through the background to the present events, the bloody recent past that the young knew only dimly and the old preferred to forget. Carefully, with a civil servant’s measured, precise words, Palombo told of the beginning in 1969, before Costa was born, when sixteen people died in the savage bombing of the Banca Nazionale dell’Agricoltura in the Piazza Fontana, Milan. A year later a fascist coup failed in Rome. The leader, Junio Valerio Borghese, the “Black Prince,” a direct descendant of Pope Paul V, one of the first occupants of the Quirinale Palace, fled Italy, never to return. In 1972 the first police officer was assassinated, in response to the death of a student in custody. Within a fortnight three carabinieri were murdered. Steadily, from that moment on, violence supplanted politics. Then a sudden, cathartic agony, the murder of Aldo Moro, a mild, left-leaning Christian Democrat, cruelly kept captive for more than two months before being riddled with bullets beneath a blanket in the back of a car in a Rome suburb.

This was one atrocity too far. The nation rose up in horror at Moro’s murder. The authorities arrested and imprisoned everyone they suspected of complicity and, in some cases, nothing more than political sympathy. The wave of violence stuttered to a close as the prisons filled with men and women who regarded themselves as martyrs for a failed revolution.

“Finally, when we thought it was over,” Palombo continued, with a quiet, miserable disdain, “we met this.”

He touched the keyboard. A familiar building flashed onto the screen: the Villa Giulia in Rome, a former pope’s mansion close to the ancient Via Flaminia, now a museum so obscure that Costa had never set foot through the door.

“March the twenty-third, 1989,” Palombo noted, clicking through a series of photographs that might have been stills from some contemporary horror movie. “The nymphaeum.”

A classical pleasure garden, built in a stone grove hollowed out from the garden of the villa. In the foreground stood a monochrome mosaic of a marine creature, half man, half monster, riding triumphantly across the waves, a long flute held playfully to his lips, his serpent-like body snaking behind him. Beneath a balustrade supported by four pale stone nymphs etched with algae, green ferns cascading from adjoining rock niches, ran a narrow channel of water disappearing into caves on both sides, its sinuous path drawing the eye to a bare stone plinth set in a semicircular alcove.

The mind knew what to expect: some beautiful, freestanding statue of Venus or Diana, half-naked, enticing, an icon of beauty in a private pleasure ground built for a pope whose private life was very different from the severe countenance he maintained in public.

Instead there were two bodies, torn and mangled, contorted in a way that only death can achieve. A bloodied man and a woman, arms tentatively around one another, necks stretched awkwardly, upturned in agony. A scrawled, spray-painted message on the algaed stone behind them read, in letters two hands high: II. I. LXIII.

The victims in the nymphaeum of Villa Giulia wore only bloodstained underclothes. Their abdomens were terribly mutilated.

Costa didn’t want to look. Or remember. He was only ten years old when this savage murder filled the papers for days on end one hot summer. He could recall the way his father would snatch the morning editions off the table when they arrived, then destroy them. There had been photos in those papers. Costa was sure of it. But not like this.

“Signor Rennick?” Palombo continued, turning to the man by his side. “Please.”

The American was about the same age as the man from the Ministry of the Interior, with a narrow, dark face, and a head of very black hair that might have been dyed. From his seat, in good Italian, with an obvious American accent, he said, “Mr. President. Prime Minister.” The order of greeting was clearly deliberate. Campagnolo smiled. Dario Sordi scarcely noticed.

“The dead man’s name was Renzo Frasca, an Italian American,” Rennick went on. “Born in Sicily, moved with his family to Washington, D.C., when he was six years old. Dual nationality. Degree in English literature from Harvard. A good public servant. When the terrorists who called themselves the Blue Demon seized him, he was an undersecretary in the U.S. Embassy here. Nobody special.” He waited for a moment, then continued. “You understand what I’m saying here? They murdered a bean counter and his wife. Frasca dealt with minutiae. Trade agreements. Tariffs. Then one day …” He pointed at the screen, and the two bodies there. “This happens to him. I won’t bore you with the details of the autopsy. It’s worse than you could imagine. Frasca and his wife, Marie, were butchered. Thirty-two years old, both of them. They had a son, Danny. Three years old. From what the investigators could work out, the boy probably watched his parents die. We never found him.”

A new picture on the screen. A house in the middle-class suburb of Parioli, an area Costa recognized. Then interior shots: an elegant living room, the walls spattered with blood. It looked like an abattoir, worse than any murder scene he’d ever witnessed.

“It was a weekend. The Frascas were due to attend an embassy social function. Partway through that there was a message.”

“What do the numbers mean?” Costa asked.

The American glanced at Palombo. The Italian officer came in and said, “We never understood until it was too late. II. I. LXIII. Two. One. Sixty-three.” He shrugged. “We thought it was a reference to the Bible, not that we could make that work. It didn’t seem that important, in the end. It wasn’t …”

Sordi scowled. “Others made the connection for you,” the president interrupted. “These are act, scene, and line numbers from Julius Caesar, the Shakespeare play.”

He glanced at the ceiling, then recited:

The president’s sonorous voice echoed around the vast hall.

“‘We shall be called purgers, not murderers,’” the American murmured, in what Costa took to be another quotation from the play.

“They were murderers,” Sordi grumbled. “Nothing else. Killers delivering a promise of what was to come. A warning that we would spend a little time in shock and then wake up to the truth: There was a bloody insurrection in our midst, one started by these monsters.” His eyes blazed. “We believed we’d missed the last part.”

A series of mug shots appeared, two men, a girl, none of them much more than twenty. Happy, bright-eyed, smiling for the camera.

Rennick picked up his narrative.

“Students from the University of Viterbo, working at the Villa Giulia as part of their Etruscan studies course. From what your people put together afterwards, these three got hypnotized by their course leader, a junior academic named Andrea Petrakis. Born in Tarquinia, in the Maremma, to Greek parents who’d lived in the area for a decade or so. Petrakis was twenty-two years old when the Frascas were murdered. He was something of a prodigy. Got his university degree when he was seventeen. Seemed set to become an expert on Etruscan matters. Then …” Rennick grimaced. “The Etruscans originated from Greece. Perhaps Petrakis felt some bond with them. He seized upon their fate as a way of explaining how he felt about Italy at that time. Petrakis was very reticent for one who seems to have made such an impression on those around him. We have no background, no record of real relationships, except with those in his group. No girlfriends, boyfriends, nothing. His parents didn’t mix much, either. A reclusive family. All we have is this.”

It was a blurry photograph of an unsmiling young man with long, dark wavy hair. He was gazing into the camera with a fixed, aggressive expression, very much in control, standing next to the girl from the earlier photograph. A pretty kid, she was staring up at him with an expression that might have been adoration. Or, perhaps, condescension. It was difficult to tell.

“One picture,” Rennick went on. “They worshipped him for some reason. Maybe politics.”

“What kind of politics?” Costa asked.

“The politics of lunacy,” Campagnolo burst in. “These people from the seventies. All of them. Left, right … they were insane. We spent twenty years burying these madmen. Why are they back now?” He stabbed a finger at Sordi. “You take the risk here, Dario. On your head be it. You steal from me my power.”

“Only for a few days,” the president replied carefully. “In line with the constitution—”

“I am the elected leader of this country!” the prime minister roared. “They voted for me, old man. Not you.”

“The constitution …”

“Screw the constitution!” Compagnolo’s dark, beady eyes roved the room. “I have a long memory. Do not forget. Sordi cannot maintain this position for long. If any misfortune should happen, I shall ensure the blame goes where it should.”

“Ugo,” Sordi pleaded. “It’s important you understand this situation.”

The prime minister stiffened with disdain. “I do not need to understand that which I cannot control. Send me a memo.”

Then he got up, cast his eyes around the room, and marched out, the same way he’d entered.

“I apologize for that little scene,” Sordi said when the man was gone. “Palombo. Brief the prime minister in person, afterwards.”

Costa had barely noticed. He was still trying to understand what they’d been told.

“What did the Blue Demon want?” he asked.

“Revolution?” Rennick guessed. “A Marxist state? A fascist one? We don’t know, any more than we understand why they should name themselves after some strange Etruscan devil. They kidnapped the Frascas, killed them, and then a few days later …”

He touched the computer keyboard. “See for yourself.”

Another photo. Black-and-white. A remote, ramshackle two-story house in a bleak field. Carabinieri cars parked in the rough drive. Officers standing around looking lost and miserable.

Palombo took over.

“Five days after the Frascas were found dead, the Carabinieri got a phone call from someone at the Villa Giulia suggesting Petrakis was involved. The staff there hadn’t liked him. He hung around when he wasn’t wanted. They’d found him in the museum after hours.” He grimaced. “Rome sent two officers to the parents’ house. Both of them were dead, shot in bed. A good week before the Frascas. The couple were such recluses that no one knew, except Andrea, I guess.”

More photographs that seemed to be from the same landscape. A tiny shack in an uncultivated field strewn with tall weeds.

“They found material in the house that led them to an abandoned farm the parents owned two kilometers away. No road. No electricity. They weren’t expecting anything. There was a local carabiniere with them to help.”

Costa could recall the story from later reconstructions on TV crime shows. One dead officer. Three supposed extremists killed. The loss of the carabiniere was a national tragedy, a moment when the country’s heart skipped a beat, waiting to see if the nightmare of urban terror was about to return.

Palombo clicked the keyboard and brought up a picture of a small arsenal, scattered around a grubby stone floor: automatic rifles, revolvers, small handguns.

“These kids started shooting the moment they knew they were cornered. The local officer went down almost immediately. After that they turned their guns on themselves. They were all as high as kites. The place was full of drugs. LSD. Speed. Dope. Pure Afghan opium most of all — so much Petrakis had to be dealing it.”

The photograph changed to an interior one. Three bloodied corpses, faces down, arms outstretched. The pretty girl wasn’t pretty anymore. She had a revolver in her right hand.

“Nadia Ambrosini,” the Italian security man told them. “The daughter of a bank manager from Treviso. The ones from a middle-class background are always the worst. She shot the other two, then turned the gun on herself.”

Then one final image.

It was a poster on the wall of the shack, above a contorted corpse: a lithe and naked devil with a pale blue face. He wore an expression of pure hatred, his muscular arms outstretched, a writhing snake, fangs exposed, in each hand. Blood dripped from his sharp, spiky teeth. An enormous and unreal erection, more that of a beast than a man, rose from his loins. The photograph of Andrea Petrakis they saw earlier was stuck to the poster with tape, as if identifying him with the monster.

Below were the words, scrawled maniacally in tall capital letters, IL DEMONE AZZURRO.

The Blue Demon.

6

Peroni listened to the Quirinale Campanile start to chime the quarter-hour. The house was midway down the hill, next to a small restaurant with tables on the narrow pavement. The ground-floor windows were cloudy with dust, as if the place had been empty for years.

Mirko Oliva walked up, scrabbled at the glass with his elbow, and peered inside.

“This is no one’s home,” the young officer declared. “It’s a mess in there. Looks like they had the builders once upon a time.”

There were just two nameplates on the door. One was for a marquetry business, an enterprise Peroni felt sure had long departed, judging by the faded card and some newspaper clippings in the window praising the quality of its work. On the bell above was a single word in scrawled handwriting: Johnson.

Oliva peered at it. He glanced at them, serious suddenly. “Wasn’t there somebody famous called Moro too?”

“Once upon a time,” Peroni answered patiently.

“Well, if the Moro who called said he lived on the ground floor, he was lying.”

It was a three-story building. Peroni strode into the road to get a better view of the upper floors. The windows on each level looked much the same as those below: old, grimy, and opaque. Except the pair at the top.

He walked to the pavement opposite to make sure. Both sets of panes had been thrown wide open. There was something else odd. Rosa came to stand next to him. “What’s that?” she asked, staring upward.

A black swarm of insects was moving in and out of the window. A cloud of tiny bodies buzzing angrily, as if fighting over something.

“Flies,” Peroni murmured, then looked across the street.

The young agente was grinning at him. His finger was prodding at the old red paint on the door and finding little in the way of resistance. Beyond it, Peroni could just make out a dark, bare hallway.

Open, Mirko Oliva mouthed.

Peroni walked back, pushed the door open, and was greeted by the damp, fusty smell of rotting walls and bad drains. His fist stayed on both bell pushes as he edged into the property. There wasn’t a sound anywhere.

He caught sight of Oliva with Rosa Prabakaran behind him. Her hand was already close to her jacket, feeling for the weapon there, just to make certain, the way any half-experienced officer did these days.

“I’m sure this is nothing at all,” Peroni told them. “I go first, all the same.”

Mirko Oliva looked a little surprised. “Shouldn’t we tell the control room before we go in?”

“I was about to say that,” Peroni lied.

Oliva pulled out his secure police phone. “What’s this street called?” he asked.

“It’s the Via Rasella,” Rosa Prabakaran said immediately.

The name jogged some distant memory in Peroni, but for the life of him he couldn’t remember what it was.

The interior stank of something worse than bad drains. Rats, he guessed. Dead ones. Peroni walked to the half-open door of the first downstairs room, gun in right hand. No one had been in this part of the building in years. Old machinery, half-finished chairs, and the skeleton of a table stood gathering dust. Oliva was at his shoulder, peering around inquisitively. Peroni took one step into the room, placed his large right foot into the grime on the floor, then dragged it backwards. The effort left a long, sweeping mark on the boards.

Oliva smiled and tipped an imaginary cap. Point taken. Rosa watched them both, as if she were in the company of children.

“We’re wasting time,” she complained.

“You mean in the house?” Peroni asked. “Or checking out the ground floor first?”

“Both, probably.”

She was a bad-tempered piece of work at times.

“If someone’s still here,” he said patiently, “they won’t be hiding where we expect them to hide. Now, will they?”

“If …”

Enough, Peroni thought, and walked on with Mirko Oliva by his side, checking out the other rooms on the floor. Two were as barren as the first. The third was locked and looked as if it had been that way for years.

It was just one call among many, Peroni reminded himself. All the same, he did something he hadn’t done in years. In the absence of a key, he kicked hard at the door. The thing fell in on itself. In the dust and cobwebs lay a very old and very dirty toilet.

Rosa clapped her hands to a slow, sarcastic rhythm.

The second floor was more promising. There were marks in the dust in the main room.

“Squatters,” Rosa declared, coming back with some trash from the kitchen: an empty bag from a local bread shop, a discarded tuna can.

“Why’d they leave?” Oliva asked.

“That kind never stay anywhere more than a week.” There was an impatient scowl on her dark face. “They know we can arrest them if they hang around too long. Can’t we get this over and done with, Peroni? We’ve six more calls to make.”

“Carelessness is a privilege of youth,” he announced. “If we need prints off anything you’ve handled, forensic will call you many unpleasant names, Officer, and deservedly so.”

She took the point about the potential evidence and dumped it on the floorboards.

He stepped up the dusty, creaking bare steps leading to the story above. Three officers, two of them young, one a rank junior, the other not as smart as she sometimes thought. The old cop checked himself. He was getting jittery in his dotage.

The odd smell that was just discernible when they entered the ground floor was becoming stronger. He glanced back and waved them to a standstill. Rosa was second, naturally, right behind him, setting out her rank above Mirko Oliva.

Peroni stood there, puzzled by the pungent, resinous odor. It reminded him of hippies and foreigners.

Then Rosa tugged at his arm and mouthed the word he was hunting for.

Incense.

Joss sticks. The talismanic odor of freaks and squatters. Deadbeats from all over the world, breaking into empty houses, staying a week and then moving on. There were so many around, the police never bothered much anymore. Except when they got in the way.

He tried to extinguish the angry fire that was beginning to burn in his head. They were supposed to be looking for a family man who’d been kidnapped by murderous terrorists, not wasting their time on minutiae like this.

“Polizia!” Peroni bellowed, and stormed up the remaining few steps, to find himself in a hot, stuffy room that stank of something physical. There was nothing in it but a cheap wooden dining table and a few chairs. And a man, who was seated, back to the door, head slumped forward, like someone who had fallen asleep while eating.

Flies too. Peroni had forgotten about the flies. They buzzed in and out of the windows in a black cloud, focusing on the slumped figure at the table, hesitantly, as if there was something there they didn’t understand, either.

He kept his gun in front of him. The stench of the incense returned, stranger somehow. It seemed to be coming from a pool of darkness in one corner, where the sunlight streaming through the open windows couldn’t reach.

“Polizia,” Peroni said more quietly, and started to work his way around to the front of the hunched form.

“Boss,” Mirko Oliva said quietly.

“What?”

“He’s not moving.”

Peroni knew that. Knew too that, though he could only see the back of this figure in a dark, crumpled business suit, it was Giovanni Batisti, huddled over the table, face in his arms.

On the wall behind, someone had stuck up a poster, one so big that it looked as if it ought to have come out of one of the tourist shops around the corner near the Trevi Fountain, where you could pick up Raphael or Caravaggio, Da Vinci or some modern junk, for next to nothing.

He leaned forward, placed a gentle hand on the shoulder of the man at the table, and said, more out of hope than anything else, “Signore.”

No sound, no stirring, not a sign of breath, a hint of life.

Peroni swore and looked at the poster again. It was a blown-up photograph, the kind of overimaginative thing you got in squats and communes. An ancient scrawl, like paint on plaster, depicting an evil-looking devil, teeth bared, eyes on fire, snakes writhing in his fists, skin painted a faded blue.

So many faint, unconnected memories were fighting for his attention at that moment. The knowledge that the Via Rasella meant something, and this hideous picture on the wall …

Letters, Roman numerals, had been scrawled — in blood, surely — next to the vile creature’s head.

III. I. CCLXIII.

Mirko Oliva swept his hand through the cloud of flies in front of him, then stooped down to tap the still, prone man at the table, getting there before either Peroni or Rosa could stop him.

What came next seemed obvious, inevitable. Oliva touched Giovanni Batisti on the shoulder, gripped him, shook him. The politician’s body lurched forward. A buzzing, billowing mass of insects rose from inside the fabric.

The junior officer said something inaudible, clapped his hand to his mouth, then dashed for the open window. Rosa was calling for backup, forensics, everything she could think of. Her voice sounded harsh and brittle and frightened in the airless room where the only other sounds were the buzzing of flies and the distant muffled hum of traffic from the tunnel beneath the Quirinale.

“I’m too old for this,” Peroni muttered, and found he couldn’t stop himself thinking about the picture on the wall.

Oliva was still retching out the open window, heaving up his lunch into the street below.

“Get away from there!” Peroni yelled, angry all of a sudden.

From the dark corner opposite there emerged another young man, this one almost naked, his face painted blue, like the demon in the poster, his eyes wild with fear and anguish.

Words Peroni didn’t recognize were coming out of his throat. In his left hand he held a bloodied dagger. In his right two incense sticks burned, their sweet smoke curling upward to the ceiling, through the swarming cloud of insects.

7

Palombo turned off the computer screen.

“The same night Andrea Petrakis’s acolytes killed themselves in Tarquinia, five days after the murder of the Frascas, a witness saw a small motorboat being stolen from Porto Ercole, thirty minutes north. A young man and possibly someone else were on board. The theory was that Petrakis tried to reach Corsica with the Frasca child as some kind of hostage. He was an experienced sailor. His parents owned a boat. He had a student pilot license as well. He understood navigation, the weather. We never heard from him again, until now.”

“I remember something about a parliamentary commission,” Costa said. “My father was a member.” He looked at Sordi. “So were you, sir.”

The president nodded. “So I was. Parliament wanted to know whether this was yet one more political terrorist group to worry about, or simply something bizarre. Something inexplicable.”

“And?” Falcone persisted, when the man said no more.

“The consensus we reached, with which Marco Costa disagreed, as was his habit, determined that Andrea Petrakis was a lunatic heading his own strange cult, one he named after this image he found in a tomb in the Maremma. The Blue Demon amounted to nothing more than the man himself and his three dead followers. Petrakis managed to make these young people murderous through drugs and any other means he could find. Perhaps his parents found out and he killed them. That was as far as we got.”

“Until now,” Rennick interrupted, tapping the laptop’s keyboard, bringing the picture back to life. A map appeared. Southern Afghanistan, Helmand province.

The American indicated an area on the screen using a laser pointer.

“What you’re looking at is British-managed territory near the Afghan-Pakistan border. The most unstable sector in the region, which is saying something. It’s got everything. Ordinary decent people. Opium farmers. Bandits, Taliban, al-Qaeda. Cheek by jowl, indivisible, inseparable. Three weeks ago one of our teams carried out a raid on a suspect house. We found all kinds of material relating to Rome. Maps. Satellite images. Details of water and transport systems. Documents on the Quirinale hill. Whoever collected this material began on February 13 this year. The very day Prime Minister Campagnolo announced the G8 summit would take place here. Intelligence finally came up with this.…”

He punched up a fuzzy photograph of a clean-shaven man in Western dress. His hair was long and gray, dirty, wavy. He was wearing sunglasses and peering in the direction of the camera, as if suspicious.

“Everything referred to an operation that was code-named Il Demone Azzurro. We’ve never encountered any kind of document in Italian in situations like this before. It took a while before we were able to make the connections. Then we got a DNA match from the house. There was physical evidence on file from his parents. It’s Andrea Petrakis. No doubt about it.”

Falcone scratched his silver goatee and looked decidedly unimpressed.

“You’re saying a student wanted for murder twenty years ago fled the country and ended up working with Islamic terrorists in Afghanistan?” He sounded incredulous. “Why?”

“His motives are irrelevant at this point,” Palombo cut in. “Four men and one woman were spirited from Helmand into northern Pakistan in March. We have reason to believe that Petrakis is their leader. In April they reached Turkey. After that we lost them. Until last night.”

“If you’d shared this information with us earlier,” Commissario Esposito complained, “we might have been alert to the threat. Giovanni Batisti. That poor woman …”

“Batisti knew he was supposed to be careful,” the ministry official responded without emotion. “There was nothing sufficiently concrete to warrant anything more than a heightened alert. What would you have done, Commissario? What could any of us have achieved in the face of such a generalized and vague threat?”

“We can’t possibly know, can we?” Falcone demanded.

“If the combined forces of the Italian and American security agencies were powerless, Inspector,” Palombo replied icily, “I fail to see how the state police might have made a difference. The plain fact is that the Blue Demon is back with us in the shape of Andrea Petrakis. The security arrangements that were communicated to you previously have clearly been compromised. From this moment on we start afresh. In a few hours we begin building a physical ring of steel around the Quirinale Palace. A fence five meters high around the perimeter. No one comes in without accreditation. Fiumicino and Ciampino airports will close until the summit is over. No traffic will move in any of the nearby roads. We have been in touch with the Vatican authorities. As of this evening, all public buildings, including St. Peter’s, will close to visitors, until the emergency is over.”

The displeasure on Dario Sordi’s face was plain.

“We’ll have snipers on rooftops,” Palombo continued. “Armed officers in every part of the city from which some kind of attack — by mortar, by rifle, by chemical or any other means — might be launched. The immediate area outside the exclusion zone will be patrolled constantly, with spot checks on anyone in the vicinity.”

“This is a city of two and a half million people,” Falcone objected. “You can’t shut them out of the place they live.”

“What choice do we have?” Palombo shot back.

“We?” the inspector demanded. “Who exactly is ‘we’?”

“For the most part, the elite services will be in charge. Carabinieri units. Special forces. You are to be the visible presence. Your hands will be full with traffic, crowd control, the rest.…”

Esposito shook his head. “Don’t you see how the public will interpret this?”

“Tell me,” Palombo demanded.

“They will think you’re erecting special protection for the summit. A degree of security that is not afforded to the ordinary citizens of Rome!”

“This is a security exercise. We leave the public relations to you. Our job is to defend the Quirinale.” Palombo’s hand pointed toward the long, elegant windows at the edge of the room. “Beyond that wire …”

The atmosphere in the grand hall went down a few degrees. There was silence until Dario Sordi observed, “I sympathize with our friends in the police, I must say. This is a disgrace. Campagnolo knew the risks when he chose to invite the world here, not some place in the country where all these great men could have talked day and night and heard nothing but the birds outside the window. I didn’t even know until the decision was made.” He frowned. “But …” Those wide arms, thrown open in despair again. “We must live with what we have. This is the reason why I am taking control. I never thought I would see fences erected around this place in order to keep out the ordinary citizens to whom it belongs. As Palombo says, there is no alternative. We must be swift, efficient and … careful.” The president shook his head. “I want no more deaths. Perhaps that is already wishful thinking. If so, let poor Batisti be the last.”

The three police officers on the other side of the table sat mute for a moment.

“You brought us here to tell us we’re crowd control and a brick wall against which the public may vent its fury?” Falcone asked.

“We summoned you so that you might be fully informed,” Palombo responded without emotion.

“A young woman was murdered on the streets of Rome last night,” Costa pointed out. “That’s a crime. Our crime.”

“It’s a crime indeed,” Palombo agreed. “And it will be investigated. By the Carabinieri. No arguments, please.” He waved his hand around the room. “If the Blue Demon should succeed in penetrating this place, can you imagine what damage they might do?”

“Palombo speaks the truth,” Dario Sordi said emphatically. “These leaders are our guests. Their security is our first responsibility. In this room …” His eyes fell to the paintings on the walls: portraits of foreigners, ambassadors, from the Far East and Arabia, Africa and beyond, all in the dress of the seventeenth century, looking down on proceedings as if amused and interested observers still. “… will sit the men who rule the world. If we fail them, we fail those they represent. And ourselves.”

The president gazed at the four of them. “I do not expect you to like what you’ve heard. These are difficult and dangerous times. Every one of us knows our details are on Batisti’s computer. My address is well known. Our colleagues, our friends from other nations …” Sordi shrugged and there was a trace of a smile on his exaggerated face. “For me, it’s odd to be under a death sentence again. The last was more than sixty years ago and came from the Germans, a race with whom I now dine, with all good grace and gratitude, as fellow European citizens I respect and admire.” His finger stabbed the table. “We can defeat this madness if we work together.”

It was a short, self-deprecating speech, and the rare mention of Sordi’s distant past was enough to silence them all.

“Good,” he announced. “Then I will leave you to your work. Nic?”

“Sir …?”

“I was abroad for your father’s funeral. I’ve never felt happy about that. Let me make some small amends now. Will you join me outside in the garden for a moment?”

Their eyes were on him, those of his colleagues, and of Palombo and the gray intelligence man from America. None expected this. None quite understood, any more than Costa himself.

8

“Get away from the window, Mirko,” Peroni ordered again, keeping his weapon trained on the strange creature that had emerged from the shadows. “Rosa?”

“Backup’s coming,” she said. Peroni stole a glance to his right. She had her gun on the semi-naked young man who was staring at them in silence from across the room, knife in one hand, incense in the other.

They could see something on his chest, a red, dappled stain. Blood, overlaying the blue dye there. Lots of it, and not his own.

“Put down the knife,” Peroni ordered.

The boy’s head moved from side to side as if he were trying to comprehend.

Mirko Oliva had sidled next to the older officer, his weapon up too.

“Put down the knife!” the young officer barked.

Nothing. Just the head, turning from side to side, and a look in the eye, one that said … not quite right.

“Who are you?” Peroni asked.

“I don’t think he understands what you’re saying,” Rosa said. “Listen!”

The young man was mumbling to himself, a constant, low drone of words. None of them recognizable.

“What language is that?”

“Drop the knife!” Oliva screamed, in English this time.

A baffled look, fearful. The blade twitched in his shaking hand.

“If he can’t understand us, Mirko,” Peroni muttered, “shouting doesn’t really help. Here’s an idea. Let’s stop waving our guns around, shall we? It’s making me nervous. All the kid has is a knife.”

“He’s used it, boss,” the young officer objected.

“So it would appear,” Peroni observed, and let his own weapon fall to his side, loose in his grip, then gave them the look. Rosa scowled and did the same. Oliva was the last.

The blue-painted youth shook his long golden hair, watching them. The knife descended slowly and came to rest next to his hip.

Peroni was a father himself, used to dealing with the young, to judging their moods, recognizing their fears and uncertainties. There was something very simple and childlike about this troubled individual. As if he’d spent his entire life in fear and servitude, cowering, waiting to be told what to do, what act to perform, always seeking approval, guidance. The bright, darting eyes, constantly looking for someone, some form of comfort, spoke of dependence. Captivity, even.

Peroni relaxed his fingers and let the service revolver slip from his grip and clatter noisily onto the floor.

He smiled, then extended his big, fleshy fist into the stab of sunlight falling through the windows and the cloud of black-winged insects swirling angrily there.

“Mi chiamo Gianni,” he said slowly, with confidence. Then again, in English, “My name is Gianni. Come ti chiami? What’s your name?”

A look of bafflement, a little less fear. The painted figure with the bloodied chest stared at Peroni’s huge hand, open toward him in a gesture that was more universal than words. He placed the knife carefully on the table across from Giovanni Batisti’s body, wiped his dirty, leathery fingers on his naked thighs, then stretched them tentatively into the dazzling shaft of yellow sunlight in the center of the room.

He was saying something too, not mumbling this time. It was clear and utterly incomprehensible.

Rosa was making a noise. Peroni took his attention away from the figure in front of him for a moment and asked, “What?”

“My dad’s got a friend who talks like that.”

The day got stranger. In the light, it was now clear the youth’s hair was an almost artificial shade of blond. Beneath the grime and the wrinkles of a harsh life he was European, surely.

“You’re telling me he’s talking Indian?”

“There’s no such language as Indian,” she replied drily. “He’s not talking Hindi, anyway.”

The young policewoman said something else and it struck a chord in the strange figure opposite them. A light went on in his eyes. The golden boy began babbling.

“It’s Pashto,” Rosa said. “From Pakistan. Afghanistan. And so is he.”

The three cops looked at one another.

“Add an interpreter to the list,” Peroni ordered. “Can you ask him anything?”

“I can ask his name.”

“Do it.”

She took one step forward until she was almost in the beam of golden light streaming through the window and pronounced, very slowly, very clearly, “Sta noom tse dai?”

The incense sticks fell from his hands. He smiled: white teeth, marked with decay, but there was something handsome, something strangely attractive, about him anyway.

“Sta noom tse dai?” Rosa repeated, holding out her hand this time, smiling too.

The others would be here soon, Peroni thought. An interpreter among them. They could clean up this mess, bring in Teresa and forensic, start on the long, detailed process demanded for homicide cases — one that would, he understood, result in this strange, damaged individual being charged with Giovanni Batisti’s murder, probably before the night was out.

Something still troubled him.

The painted figure finally stepped closer to the sun. This close, the blue dye was vivid, on his face and upper chest, and the blood was everywhere, on his hands, his torso.…

What made it worse was the smile. He was grinning, happy, ecstatic.

A word escaped his lips. Peroni shook his head and asked, “What?”

“Danny,” the creature repeated, with a triumphant joy, as if this were some rare privilege. “Danny.”

He lifted his reddened arms to the ceiling.

“Danny, Danny, Danny …”

The picture on the wall behind him caught Peroni’s eye again and he stared at the long, careful letters beside it.

He doubted this strange, crazed individual dancing into the sunlight could read or write at all.

Least of all in a strange, dusty room in the Via Rasella in a country that was surely foreign to him.

Peroni blinked, half remembering something about the name of this street.

The address had a reputation, a curse, one that went back to another bloody scene, another massacre, more than half a century earlier.

Perhaps that was why, unconsciously, he’d ordered Mirko Oliva to keep away from the window.

The old cop glanced outside.

He could see a single dark shape in a room in the house opposite. A man stood there, his face in shadow. There was something black and deadly in his arms, aimed in their direction.

9

The palace gardens seemed to stretch forever, a sprawling formal park of geometric paths running through vast lawns, ornate flower beds, and cool, dark groves of lush trees. It was hard to imagine the city beyond the high perimeter walls. Even the traffic noise seemed muted on this high green plateau above Rome’s bustling heart.

“What do you think our friends are saying back there?” Sordi asked as they strolled away from the building behind.

“I’ve no idea, sir.”

“Please, Nic. You were one week old when I first saw you. There was a time — you were very young, I’ll admit — when you called me Uncle Dario. You won’t recall …”

But something did come back, and it made Costa smile.

“I remember a very tall, very friendly and generous man who always brought me presents. He enjoyed …” it was impossible not to say this, “… making faces.”

Sordi laughed and stretched his long features into a comical expression, the kind an adult would use to amuse a child.

“When you look like this, you might as well use it. Your father didn’t call me the Bloodhound for nothing. Don’t worry. I’ve had to put up with a lot worse in my time.”

He sat down on a stone bench beneath a wicker canopy covered in roses, beckoning Costa to join him. A classical statue of an athlete, fastening his sandals against a rock, stood next to this shady spot.

Sordi gazed at the figure’s handsome young features. “This is my friend Hermes. A copy, of course. The original was found at Hadrian’s villa at Tivoli. He’s the protector of travelers, an important fellow. Look …” He drew Costa’s attention to the sandals. Two perfect tiny wings projected from the sides of both. “That’s how we know he’s a god. He’s a good listener, Hermes.”

A pair of corazzieri in blue uniforms watched them from the palace steps. Sordi pulled out a packet of cigarettes and lit one. His fingers were stained by decades of tobacco. The two that held the cigarette were the color of old leather.

“Faithful, loyal servants of the state, every one of them,” the president observed, glancing at the officers. “I don’t imagine anyone can hear us. Inside those walls …” His long features fell into a frown, his voice to a growl. “Every damned word in that place gets picked up by someone. I assume we may talk freely here. I have to.” His gray eyes stared at Costa. “As you may have gathered, Ugo Campagnolo is not pleased that I have intervened in this way. Were it practical, he would be in the courts right now trying to fight me to the last.”

“Why doesn’t he?”

“He’s an actor at heart, and actors always have a good sense of timing. It would take days to mount a challenge, and by then the summit would be over, his guests long gone, his moment on the world stage ruined by petulance. Campagnolo would risk everything if he went public with his displeasure, and he knows it. The man’s no fool. Now he has money, friends in the media, so many politicians in his grasp.…”

Costa remained silent.

“I’m sorry,” Sordi apologized. “I should not say such things to a police officer, for whom politics have no interest. But understand this …” He nodded back toward the palace. “You and your colleagues are the only ones with any sense of independence to pass through that room today. The rest, the foreigners, Palombo — they’re Campagnolo’s. It’s only understandable. I can take control for the duration of this emergency, no longer. They will have to deal with him when he has his hands on the reins of state once more. I don’t blame them for taking sides, any more than I would you, if you felt the same way.”

“I detest the man,” Costa said without thinking. “He’s made Italy a laughing stock.”

Sordi glanced at the Quirinale again and raised his eyebrows. “Careful, Nic. Even gardens may have ears. I take tea here, you know. Every evening. A habit I learned from a friend in London. Earl Grey tea, made with good Calabrian bergamot, and a very special kind of English cookie of which I’m fond. First sip when Il Torrino chimes six-thirty, at which point I pinch myself and continue to try to understand why the son of a laborer from Testaccio is sitting here, at the summit of the caput mundi. Old men live by habits, you know. It’s all we have left. You should indulge me with a visit sometime.”

Costa looked around at the manicured gardens, empty save for a workman tending to some shrubs near the northern wall. The Quirinale was a showcase for the state. The real work of government took place elsewhere, leaving the palace to Sordi and his guards.

“Why did you do it?” he asked. “Why couldn’t you work with him, instead of seizing control?”

“I was within my rights.…”

“I don’t doubt that, sir. But why?”

“For pity’s sake, call me Dario. I spent the first third of my life a communist and the remainder a socialist. These formalities are enough to send a man insane. Not from you, of all people, please, Nic.”

“I don’t understand.”

The president couldn’t take his eyes off the palace. Palombo had come out onto the steps, with the American and the Englishman. Some other men too. Then Campagnolo joined them, staring out into the garden, in their direction.

“Nor do I,” Sordi answered softly. “Or anyone outside the circle of Andrea Petrakis, perhaps. You still live in that beautiful house near the Via Appia Antica. I know. I had someone check. Are you there tonight? Alone?”

“Whenever I finish …”

“Be home by ten. Whatever happens. This would be a good time to be a criminal in Rome, don’t you think? Every law enforcement officer in the city seems to be chasing ghosts.”

Sordi turned so that his back was toward the palace, then spoke directly and rapidly, in a low, calm voice.

“The captain of the Corazzieri here is called Fabio Ranieri. Remember that name. He’s a fine officer and a decent human being. I know the regiment are technically Carabinieri, but you can trust them. Their loyalties, at least, I do not doubt. If you need to come to me for anything, you do it through Ranieri and him alone.”

He stood up, looked around the grounds, smiled very visibly, the way that politicians did when they knew they were being watched, and shook Costa firmly by the hand.

“Your father was a great friend of mine and an honest and frank colleague in the shameful world of politics,” the president said in a firm, loud voice. Then, turning again, in a whisper he added, “Ranieri and I shall visit you, with two men he trusts. Ten o’clock. Be there, Nic. I need friends about me now.”

“Of course …”

He stopped. Sordi’s pallid face had lost what little blood it seemed to possess. A noise was rising from somewhere beyond the walls, down the hill, past the narrow streets clinging to the lee of the Quirinale, tumbling toward the Trevi Fountain.

It was the distant clockwork rattle of a machine gun, and Nic could tell from Dario Sordi’s face that it was a sound the man had heard before.

10

“Danny, Danny, Danny …”

The golden boy had skipped forward into the sunlight, like some long-lost god newly sprung to life.

With that, a thunderous noise filled the room, and Peroni found himself screaming over it, bellowing at the two cops with him to get down on the floor, out of reach of the deadly, shattering eye of the window.

A deafening racket shook the building. Peroni watched a line of dust devils burst out of the ancient walls behind them as the tracer line of bullets bit into the brickwork.

Rosa was on the bare timber boards already. Mirko Oliva had begun messing with his gun, looking ready to race to the front of the room. Peroni grabbed him as the young officer began to move, punched him hard in the shoulder, then shoved him facedown to the floor, letting momentum do the rest.

He was still grappling with Mirko when they hit the ground so hard it made his old bones jar with the pain.

“I don’t want a dead hero on my hands,” the old cop grunted, pointing a fat finger in the trainee’s face.

The gunfire had halted. Rosa, sensibly, was sliding backwards to the door, phone in hand, chanting a quiet demand to whoever was on the other end.

“Boss …”

“Quiet, Mirko,” Peroni told him, trying to think.

The figure above them was talking in his strange foreign voice, and Peroni couldn’t dispel the thought: This is not a man; it is a child, weak, defenseless, scared, baffled, exposed in the bright shaft of golden sun.

A child covered in blue paint and stained with the blood of the man he’d just slaughtered.

“Peroni …”

There was a note in Rosa’s low cry.

He jerked his finger back toward the door and made sure Oliva saw too. Then he looked up.

The boy was wavering in the beam of light, arms outstretched, face a picture of tortured agony, standing in front of the table where Giovanni Batisti’s body lay torn and bloody against the old, bare wood, something outside of him that was meant to be in.

Peroni couldn’t see through the window. Maybe the gunman had gone. Maybe not. The golden boy belonged to him, to them. He had to. Was that why the man on the other side of the street relaxed his finger on the trigger, ceased spitting hot shells across the brief width of the Via Rasella in their direction?

“Get down,” Peroni called to the strange, upright creature in the sunlight, gesturing to the floor with his hands, hoping that would be enough.

He felt confused trying to weigh up the options. One thing, above all, seemed clear and significant.

They had left the golden boy behind. That said everything.

Those lost eyes, straying behind the sweaty, grimy blond curls, stayed on the window. Still, he kept murmuring, “Danny … Danny …”

Not moving a centimeter, arms stretched out like some cheap Jesus from an Easter street procession.

“I don’t have the words anymore,” Peroni murmured, and knew he had to finish this.

He shuffled up to a half crouch and wondered how strong the youth was, how easy it might be to drag him out of the target zone, back behind the relative safety of the antiquated building’s crumbling brickwork.

“Don’t you even dare, Peroni!” the young policewoman shrieked, with such force and vehemence he had to turn and look.

Rosa was in the doorway in front of Mirko Oliva, her foot almost in his face, as if she was ready to kick him back into place if necessary.

“Stay there,” Peroni ordered, wondering why he was taking instructions from some twenty-something female cop.

He was half on his feet when she fell on him, at a moment when his bulk was teetering off balance.

It was this, he thought later, that saved them both.

They fell, tumbling, back to the ground, and the roar of the gun was on them before they even touched the floor. Peroni grabbed her slender body and tugged and pushed the two of them across the bare, splintering boards to the far side of the room, close to the front wall, seeking the dark corner, a place that offered some kind of respite because it was clear, once they got there, where the slew of bullets raking the room was aimed: through the window, directly at the only thing that was in the light.

“Danny … Danny …”

It sounded like a plea, sounded shocked and scared and angry.

His tall, tanned body was caught in the ripple of fire, jerking like a puppet on a string. Livid wounds opened up in his bare, stained flesh.

“Danny … Danny …”

Mirko Oliva couldn’t take it anymore. He scrambled to the window, holding his gun high above his head, pointing into the street, and fired off every round he had, shooting blind out into the gap.

Peroni closed his eyes, praying no one in the adjoining buildings had walked into that.

Then he waited, keeping Rosa in place with an arm, not that she needed it. He found himself looking into her deep brown eyes, perhaps because he didn’t want to see what lay in the heart of the room at that moment. She was, he decided, a very smart, very private woman, one he was glad to have around, even if sometimes her presence made life deeply awkward and uncomfortable.

“Thanks,” he said, with the slightest of nods.

She didn’t say anything, just scowled, but not at him this time; at Oliva, who was trying to reload his weapon beneath the window, but was shaking so much the new shells were scattering over the floor.

“Mirko,” Peroni called to him. “Mirko?”

“Boss?” The young officer’s eyes were bright with shock and fear.

“It’s gone quiet, son. You should notice these things.”

Dead quiet, until that nearby bell tolled again, and Peroni remembered what they called the campanile on the Quirinale Palace. Il Torrino.

“S-s-sorry …” Oliva stuttered.

“It’s OK,” Peroni assured him. “Just stay still. There’s nothing …”

Outside he heard the sound of shouting followed by the revving of motorbike engines.

He glanced at Rosa and said, “You too.”

Before she could object, he’d scrambled across the floor to the window ledge and managed to peek out over it.

“Gianni!” she yelled at him.

Mirko Oliva was beneath the frame, staring back into the room, shaking, face pale, looking ready to throw up again.

“No problem,” Peroni told her. “We’re too high up, and the street’s too narrow.”

He clambered to his feet, got to the window, and leaned out as far as he dared.

The roar of two powerful motorbikes echoed off the walls, heading down toward the Trevi Fountain and the tunnel beneath the hill. He still couldn’t see the street, but at least there was something to pass on to Traffic and the CCTV people.

“Mirko …?”

The young officer got up, leaned over the open window frame, and threw up again, into the hot, bright day.

“Fortunately,” Peroni observed, “I doubt there’ll be anyone below just now.”

He sighed, then turned away. It was important to look, even though he knew what he was going to see.

Batisti’s corpse remained slumped over the table. His killer was in front of him, flat on the floor, eyes wide open, glassy, the inert body shredded by gunfire, the blue paint barely visible for blood.

A thought came to Peroni: He is the one they wanted to kill, more than anyone else, after he’d served his purpose.

It made no sense, but then, nothing did at that moment.

Something glittered at the dead man-child’s neck. Peroni bent down and, setting aside his squeamishness, reached for the object nestled in the grimy, bloodstained skin. It was a silver locket in the shape of a heart, worn and scratched, on an old and stained chain. When Peroni gently prised open the lid with fumbling, shaky fingers, he saw there a fading photograph of a beautiful young woman with long golden hair, curly tresses of it, much like those of the corpse that lay in front of him.

Memories were flooding back, distressing ones, of another case, one that was briefly in all the papers, on every police notice board until one final outburst of violence had brought it to a close.

Gianni Peroni stared at the features of the wild-eyed blue creature plastered to the wall and felt his heart grow cold.

Then he closed the locket and turned it over. On the back, barely visible after so many years in a wilderness he could only guess at, was the inscription, part English, part Italian.

To My Beautiful Marie on the Birth of Our Son, Daniel. 19 August 1986. Mia per sempre, Renzo.

11

A fierce, dry breeze arrived that afternoon. By evening the natives were complaining about the unseasonably hot weather, and much else besides. In the space of a few hours Rome had changed, become a tense, nervous city, jumpy at the sight of its own time-worn shadows. Armies of workmen had descended on the area around the Quirinale Palace, erecting tall, ugly fencing and security gates at every intersection. High, threatening guard posts were beginning to spread as far as the broad, open thoroughfare Mussolini had carved through the Forum, and in the open central square of the Piazza Venezia itself. The media had adopted Palombo’s terminology, calling it a “ring of steel” to protect the world leaders who were starting to arrive to attend the summit inside the palace. They forecast that the Quirinale hill and most of the area around it would become a forbidden zone for all but the most privileged of citizens, and few Romans or tourists would find life easy for several days to come.

Little of this appeared to concern police pathologist Teresa Lupo, who, thanks to her recent elevation to head of the forensic unit in Commissario Esposito’s Questura, had acquired a new smartphone — one that, for the moment, seemed more interesting than the present company. Costa watched her tapping frantically into her little gadget at their table in Sacro e Profano, a small church in a back street behind the Trevi Fountain that had been converted into a Calabrian restaurant and pizzeria. She had celebrated her thirty-seventh birthday three weeks before, though Costa felt she had scarcely aged in the six years he’d known her. Awkward, doggedly persistent, blessed with an acute intelligence that sometimes led her astray, she was, like Peroni and Falcone, one of his closest friends. Now that she and Peroni were an established couple, and his divorce had finally come through, there was speculation in the Questura that one day soon they would marry. Costa thought he would like that, that he could imagine the two of them together on the big day, both uneasy in new clothes, their big, shambling frames encased inside something they’d never wear again. There was an everyday honesty and devotion between the two of them, a friendship that embraced love too and made them a pleasure to be around, even when the work turned dark and relentless.

He took his attention away from Teresa, tapping away at the phone with her fat fingers, her pale, broad face entirely absorbed in the moment. Their table was on the upper level, where the church organ might once have sat. This gave them a grand view of the vast wood-fired oven that seemed to provide almost everything — pizzas, meat, fish, vegetables — the place produced, and wafted the occasional wisp of smoky aromatic oak up from the nave below.

He could scarcely believe they were eating out together so soon after the afternoon’s brutal events. When the sound of gunfire interrupted his bewildering conversation with Dario Sordi in the palace gardens, Costa had raced to the scene with Esposito and Falcone. It was easier to run than drive through the stationary snarl of Roman traffic. Whoever was responsible for the attack had been wise to rely on two wheels for their escape.

At least all three officers were safe, even if the news about Giovanni Batisti was as bad as anyone might have feared. Soon the narrow stretch of the street where the attack occurred had come to be swamped by other parties. Luca Palombo and his counterparts from America and elsewhere had arrived to take control. Not long after that, everyone in the Polizia di Stato came to understand their place in the pecking order.

Teresa, with a small group led by her assistant Silvio Di Capua, managed to spend almost fifteen minutes in the room where Batisti and the corpse of his apparent killer were found. Then they were ejected by a team from the Carabinieri, under Palombo’s direction.

Peroni, Rosa, and Mirko Oliva had been interviewed for almost two hours, with Commissario Esposito in attendance. After that they had been sent out into the street, where the two younger officers disappeared into a nearby bar, shell-shocked and, it seemed to Costa, rather closer to one another than they had been previously. The rest of them returned to the Questura, where the atmosphere was unreal, as if they had entered a lull before some unpredictable storm.

After a few desultory attempts to work their way back into the investigation, efforts that Commissario Esposito rapidly stamped upon, Leo Falcone suggested dinner. The invitation came as such a surprise that no one objected. Strictly speaking, their shift was over — Peroni should have gone off duty hours before. They were all tired, yet aware of an unspent nervous energy, a need to talk. Costa was astonished to discover that he was rather hungry too. Or rather, some inner voice appeared to be urging him to eat soon, because it might be a while before he had another chance to sit down again with friends in a decent restaurant.

A waiter came over with a trolley piled high with plates of fish and vegetables and a small bowl of the scorching pepper sauce Costa always associated with Calabria.

“That’s very kind,” Peroni told him, “but we didn’t order this.”

His battered, homely face still looked a little pale. Costa had been inside that upper room, seen what was in there. The big ugly cop was never good around blood.

Falcone, never one to be squeamish, was already prodding gently at the choicer dishes with his fork, judging the food with the studied and detached care with which he measured those around him. It was a very good restaurant.

The waiter leaned down and in a lowered voice said, “We know who you are. We’ve seen the inspector here before. It was all on the TV. We heard it.”

“Heard what?” Falcone asked as he picked at what looked like tuna and swordfish, already forking pieces onto his plate.

“That you’re … off the case,” the waiter said with a theatrical flourish, visibly pleased with his own ability to produce what he thought of as cop-speak. “So you come here. You eat, you think. All those stuck-up bastards in the Carabinieri, the government. They think they own the world.”

He put down the bottle of wine, which was still, to Peroni’s visible concern, unopened.

“They close the streets. They build a wall around the Quirinale. Where are we living? Rome or Berlin in the 1950s? And when some ordinary guy in the police sticks his neck on the line, what do they do? Sit in their offices until the shooting stops, then come and take it all away from you like they know best.”

“We’ve still got Traffic,” Peroni said brightly. “Didn’t they mention that?”

“No.”

“You should never believe what you hear in the media,” Falcone suggested, then placed a long finger on the side of his nose and winked.

The waiter mouthed, “Ah …” and made the same gesture. Peroni, getting desperate, held up the wine bottle, which the waiter uncorked, pouring four full glasses. The rich, aromatic smell of Pugliese primitivo mingled with the smoke from the oven downstairs.

“Haruspicy,” Teresa declared, finally looking up from the phone after the waiter disappeared.

“It’s not on the menu,” Peroni pointed out.

“I’m not talking about food, you fool! It’s what was going on back there. In that room. In the Via Rasella. Or so they’d like us to think.”

Peroni’s fork dangled over some cold meat. A look of foreboding crossed his big, bucolic face. She glanced at him and added, “Let’s get this out of the way before we eat, shall we?”

“Oh, wonderful,” he groaned. “If you insist …”

“This is exactly what Leo and Nic were told about in the Quirinale. The Blue Demon. Terrorism with an Etruscan flavor. No surprises. Well, not many.”

She held out her phone. There was a photo of some ancient, dark metal object in a museum. Costa craned forward, along with the others, in order to see better. It looked like a very odd ornament, one with a distinct and organic shape.

“The Liver of Piacenza,” Teresa announced.

“Liver?” Peroni asked weakly. “As in …?”

“As in liver. Batisti was mutilated in a very specific fashion. Silvio managed to get me some old news reports about the Frascas’ murder. It looks as if they were injured in much the same way. It was a ritual. Not quite disembowelment, but …” She winced, from lack of facts, not something squeamish. “A haruspex divined the future by looking at the liver of a slaughtered animal. The Liver of Piacenza was used to train people to read what they found. It divides the organ into specific areas that may or may not relate to stellar constellations. There were light surface knife marks on Giovanni Batisti that mirror those used on the Piacenza object. To make them look like the work of an Etruscan haruspex.”

Peroni’s fork halted halfway to his mouth. “Do we need to know this?” he moaned.

“Of course,” she insisted. “We’re meant to. Someone doesn’t inflict an injury on a dead man without a reason.”

They stared at her.

“A dead man?” Costa asked.

“It was all theater. Batisti was killed by a bullet through the back of the head. Then they butchered him in a very specific way to make it look like haruspicy.” She pointed to the photo. “I can’t think of any other explanation. Why else would you partially remove a man’s liver and run a knife over it to make a pattern based on some ancient form of divination? There was an egg in a saucer on the table too. That was another Etruscan form of fortune-telling.”

“Why on earth …?” Falcone began.

“I told you. It was a message,” Teresa interrupted. “A positive ID for our benefit. Like that poster of the Blue Demon on the wall. Like the Roman numerals. It was Andrea Petrakis leaving his calling card. A boast, if you like. Petrakis wants to make sure we know it was him, and that he hasn’t forgotten his beloved Etruscans.”

“And they were who exactly?” Peroni asked, bemused.

“The people here before us. That was their tough luck. Rome wiped them out. An entire civilization. It was a long time ago. This was ancient history for Julius Caesar, for pity’s sake. But not for Andrea Petrakis. The Liver of Piacenza was a training tool for a haruspex, like a model skeleton for a modern physician. Historians like Petrakis drool over it because it’s one of the few examples of the Etruscan language. The only other of any substance is in Zagreb, on the remains of a mummy’s shroud. It was made out of linen that was covered in Etruscan script. Rites, rituals, prayers. They call it the Liber Linteus.”

“Linteus means linen, doesn’t it?” Costa asked.

“Who says a Latin education is wasted? Exactly. Andrea Petrakis would know all about this. The theory that went around after the Blue Demon murdered the Frasca couple was that Petrakis regarded himself as the leader of some kind of nationalist liberation movement. A lunatic looking for a revival of the Etruscan nation, who were, like him, originally Greek. Before Rome came along, the Etruscans controlled most of Italy, from the Po in the north as far as Salento in the south. The Liber Linteus is the only book of theirs that survives. The Romans burned the rest. If you think of yourself as Etruscan, you can understand why you might feel a little oppressed. I guess.”

The pizzas arrived and Peroni asked, “Does the fact we’re talking history mean that the liver part is done with?”

“Pretty much,” she replied, nodding. “Petrakis was a junior professor in Etruscan studies at an age when most kids would still be working on a postgrad degree. A world-class obsessive. Maybe, in his own crazy head, it makes sense to kill people like this.”

Costa shook his head. “I don’t see it. He’s an intelligent man. Who’d believe in a separatist movement based around a civilization that was destroyed more than two thousand years ago?”

“You can never apply logic to terrorism,” Falcone suggested.

“I’m not sure about that,” Costa insisted. “This man was capable enough to escape from Italy, then hide away in Afghanistan for two decades. To deal with weapons. Money. Why would he take to pretending to read the future through butchering another human being, the way some primitive tribe did?”

Teresa Lupo frowned at him with the disappointed expression of a teacher failed by a bright pupil. Now that she and Peroni had settled into a relationship that seemed more close, and happy, than many marriages, she was beginning to resemble the big man. The same love of food was visible in their stout, healthy frames, and a similarly skeptical approach to the world in their pale, engaged faces.

“He didn’t,” she told him. “First, the Etruscans didn’t indulge in human sacrifice. They would have been horrified by the very idea. Their priests slaughtered animals, not men.”

She skimmed her fingers over the phone and brought up new photos. Costa stared at pastoral scenes of dancing and celebrations, tall, elegant women, bearded, handsome men. Then more, these photos vividly sexual in nature.

“The Estruscans weren’t brutal primitives just emerging from the Iron Age, either. More like colonizing Greek hippies. The Romans thought them degenerate and debauched. Uncontrollable hedonists who did what they wanted, when they wanted, to anyone they chose.”

“And then?” Peroni asked, interested now that the conversation had moved on.

“Then along came Rome. The Estruscans got assimilated. We beat them at war, looked at their culture, adopted what we liked, and destroyed the rest. The Etruscans were the victims of what we think of as civilization. Organized society, materialism, greed, pursued by a single-minded and fierce warlike state. Us. The Romans marched north and eradicated their language, their customs … everything. It says here that sophisticated ancient Romans were bemoaning the death of Etruscan culture as early as the first century A.D. They looked on it as a lost golden age, a kind of paradise, one they’d destroyed themselves.”

Peroni put down his knife and fork. “That boy. The one we think killed Batisti …”

“Batisti was shot,” Falcone reminded him.

“Fine, fine.” Peroni’s large, bloodless face contorted in puzzlement. “The boy was dressed up as if he was in some kind of ceremony. That knife he had. The blood on him. Maybe he believed he was the Blue Demon. Whatever that was.”

“A figure from Etruscan mythology,” Teresa interjected. More taps at the phone, yet another set of photos, one of them recognizable from the briefing in the Quirinale. “There are plenty of their burial sites north of here, near Viterbo, Grosseto, Tarquinia, in the Maremma. The early ones depict a paradise that’s almost Christian. A happy afterlife, parents meeting with their children. Our idea of Heaven. Then this.”

She brought up the most vivid of the pictures: the long-bearded blue face, the eyes that burned, fangs dripping blood.…

“I know that face,” Peroni said.

“We all do, Gianni. It’s Satan. The bringer of damnation. Before the Blue Demon came along, the Etruscans inhabited a world that was either good or nothing. After this charming gentleman turned up, the place possessed evil. Someone had devoured the apple or opened Pandora’s box. Or perhaps he was just a gift the Romans brought to make all those pleasure-loving Etruscans feel the weight of human guilt. The Devil was in the room and he wasn’t going to leave. If you look at the wall paintings, you get the picture. The Blue Demon stands between the living and Paradise. He decides who gets to live happily ever after, and who goes into a new place he’s invented. Somewhere called Hell. Good name for a terrorist group, don’t you think? Or its leader. No one was ever sure which it was supposed to be. There were only four in the cell anyway, as far as anyone knew. Maybe it didn’t matter.”

“I remember that case,” Peroni said miserably. “I was a young agente. It was all so … inexplicable. A decent family destroyed. Those kids in Tarquinia too. And all for what?”

“Still,” Falcone declared, “it’s not our business, is it?” He picked up a piece of ham in his fingers and stared at the others. There was some kind of challenge in his expression. “You heard Luca Palombo. We need to think about traffic. Crowds. Public relations.”

The lines of command had been made crystal clear on their return, in a series of further communications between the control room in the Quirinale Palace and the Questura. The investigation into the death of Giovanni Batisti would be the responsibility of the Carabinieri and the secret-service team assembled around the man from the Ministry of the Interior. The state police would focus on security for the coming summit, ensuring that the strict limitations on traffic and pedestrian movement in the street would be made clear to the public and maintained throughout.

“Police work is our business,” Costa grumbled. “If I wanted to be a security guard …”

Falcone called for the waiter and asked for some more water. The carafe came, he waited for the man to go back down the stairs, then he poured himself a glass and raised it.

“I’m very glad we didn’t lose any friends today,” he said. “Let’s drink to that.”

“An Etruscan toast,” Teresa observed, watching him. “We all lose friends in the end.”

“Really? You have a feel for these things, you know. And no evidence to look at, no forensic leads to work upon.”

“Stinking body snatchers …” she hissed.

He put down his glass and smiled at her. “There’s no reason why you couldn’t spend a day out of the office tomorrow. Go to the Villa Giulia. Ask a few questions about Andrea Petrakis and what happened there twenty years ago. The Frascas were that boy’s parents. It would be curious if the son murdered Giovanni Batisti in the same way Andrea Petrakis dealt with his own mother and father. Symmetrical.” The smile disappeared. “The older I get, the more I hate symmetry. It’s so … unnatural.”

“Leo,” Peroni scolded him. “That’s police work.”

“The Villa Giulia is a museum. Anyone can go there and ask as many questions as they like.”

“It’s police work, and you know it. We’re not supposed to be involved.”

“That’s not entirely correct,” Falcone responded, staring at the table.

“I knew there was a reason you invited us out for a meal. Is this on expenses?”

“Certainly not. I’m paying. We’re merely being”—an expansive wave of his long arm—“released from conventional duties for the duration.”

“On whose orders?” Costa asked.

“Esposito’s, as far as the Questura’s concerned.”

Some ideas were starting to clear in Costa’s head. “This is Dario Sordi’s doing, isn’t it?”

“I’m not answering that question,” the inspector replied. “We have an office set aside. Don’t bother reporting to work tomorrow. As far as they’re concerned, we’re on a training course. All four of us. Along with Teresa’s deputy and your young officers. Prabakaran and Oliva.”

He wrote down an address twice on the napkin, ripped it in half, and passed over the pieces. “That makes seven in all, with an eighth, who’ll join us tomorrow.”

“The Via di San Giovanni in Laterano,” Peroni murmured, reading Falcone’s scribble. “I know this place. It’s that apartment in the old monastery, isn’t it? The safe house?”

“It’s police property that is currently going unused. Seems a shame to waste it. We will have facilities. Whatever we require.”

Peroni picked at his pizza in silence.

Teresa looked mildly excited. “And I’m allowed into this monastery?”

“Very much so.”

“In order to do what, exactly?” Costa asked.

“Whatever we like. Let’s sleep on it. Things will be clearer in the morning. Without files, or evidence, or—”

“We’re in the middle of a turf war between Dario Sordi and that devil Campagnolo,” Peroni said, interrupting. “I’d stake money on the angels losing this one, Leo. Don’t put anyone else’s neck on the line.”

The lean inspector stroked his beard and stayed silent.

“There were numbers on the wall,” Costa said. “Roman numerals. Beneath the poster of the Blue Demon.”

“Oh, yes,” Teresa remembered. “It seems to me that Petrakis is crazy in the highly intelligent and complicated way only an educated man can be. He adores games and codes and riddles, and the opportunity to show off his erudition. This is the same key as with the dead Frasca couple. Different numbers, though. III. I. CCLXIII. Three. One. Two hundred and sixty-three.”

Peroni looked at the two of them and shrugged.

“Shakespeare?” Costa suggested.

“Congratulations,” Teresa said, beaming. “It’s the same schema. Act, scene, line. From Julius Caesar.” They waited. She watched them as she spoke:

Falcone pushed back his glass and said, “San Giovanni in Laterano. Tomorrow. Eight o’clock.”

12

They were already in the drive of the farmhouse off the Via Appia Antica. The president, two bodyguards, and Capitano Fabio Ranieri of the Corazzieri. Costa had checked out the regiment with Peroni. As Sordi said, they were formally under the control of the Carabinieri, though with effective autonomy. No one in the Questura had much experience in dealing with the Quirinale’s equivalent of the Swiss Guards. They were regarded as dedicated soldiers committed to a single duty, the protection of the head of state. For this reason their presence beyond the palace was limited, without the contacts — official and informal — that took place in the occasionally uneasy relationship between the Polizia di Stato and the Carabinieri.

Ranieri was out of the car first as Costa arrived. The officer was a massive man around Peroni’s age, taller than Dario Sordi himself, broad-shouldered in a black suit, with close-cropped dark hair and alert, searching eyes.

“Capitano …” Costa began.

“This isn’t a formal visit,” the Corazzieri captain interjected. “Call me Ranieri. The president does not wish news of your meeting to become public knowledge. I expect—”

“Yes, yes, yes,” Sordi said, patting the man on the back. “Nic — Ranieri. Ranieri — Nic. Or Costa, if you prefer. For myself, I cannot think of him as a surname, but then …” He stopped beneath the porch light and gazed at the low stone villa that had been the Costa family home for almost forty years. “… I have memories.”

He pointed to the long field leading back to the road. “I helped your father plant those grapes. Before you were born, Nic. It was backbreaking work, for which I was repaid with terrible wine. Did it get any better over the years?”

“Not much.”

“I thought that might be so.” He held up a bottle. “From the Quirinale cellars. Brunello. A glass now? Or would you prefer to keep it as a gift?”

“Neither,” Costa said, and opened the door.

Sordi sighed. “Then I shall take a drop alone. Let’s go out to the patio,” the president suggested. “These men have work to do.”

When they reached the old wooden table, he handed Costa a small cell phone.

“If you need me, call Ranieri using this thing. Do not use any landline or cell, personal or police.” He frowned. “I’m sorry. I must sound paranoid to you. But I would not assume an indirect conversation through any other medium is secure. Campagnolo is beside himself with rage. He has many friends in the security services. We must be prudent.”

This was not what Costa wished to hear.

“I can’t get involved in some vendetta between you and the prime minister.”

Sordi eyed him, half-amused. “You really think that’s what this is about? Personalities?”

“I don’t know. But …”

“Ugo Campagnolo is a highly flawed politician who feels, with some justification, that he’s been sidelined. I make no apologies for that. He should never have invited the summit to the heart of Rome in the first place. I cannot allow the man to take responsibility for the mess he’s created. He’s too keen to shake hands with the mighty to see the true picture, the genuine threat we face. I have a duty and I will fulfill it. As far as the main issue here — the Blue Demon — he’s a minor nuisance, nothing more. I would like him to remain that way.”

There was a noise from behind. Ranieri and his men were in the house.

“They’re looking for bugs,” Sordi explained. “Purely a precaution.”

“Bugs?” Costa asked, astonished.

“Bugs,” the president of Italy repeated, then pulled a corkscrew out of his jacket pocket and began to tug at the dusty bottle of Brunello. “Now, fetch a couple of glasses.”

Costa went back into the house. Ranieri’s men were wandering around the living room, headphones on, some kind of electronic equipment in their hands.

When he returned, Sordi had a cigarette in his mouth. He raised the bottle to the harsh outdoor lights, three bare bulbs, an ugly feature that Costa’s late wife, Emily, had nagged him to fix.

“This should have been opened hours ago. I’m wasting the state’s wine collection. Don’t tell.”

He looked at the glasses. Costa’s was already filled with orange juice.

“Oh, well,” the president sighed, and served himself an immodest measure. “I haven’t been here in a while. Did you throw out your father’s books?”

“Of course not.”

“Good,” he said, getting up suddenly. “Let’s look at them.”

Costa followed him back into the house. The library sprawled untidily across a set of shelves that spanned an entire wall in his father’s study.

“Here,” Sordi said, finding two copies among the foreign novels jumbled together in a section closest to the window. “Have you read them?”

They were by an English writer, Robert Graves. I, Claudius and Claudius the God.

“Years ago, but I don’t remember them much,” Costa admitted. “History’s not to my taste.”

“They’re about history only tangentially. In truth, they’re about us. The human animal. About society. How it works, or attempts to. How it fails when we forget our ties to one another. Read them again sometime, properly. Your father and I …”

Sordi opened the covers of each, so that he could see. Inside was an identical inscription: To my dearest friend, Marco. From Dario, the turncoat.

“We were still friends when I gave him these. Not for much longer, though. What came after — by which I mean the end of the commission looking into the Blue Demon case — perhaps it was inevitable we would drift apart.”

He waved the books at Costa and placed them on Marco’s desk. “These were a gift I hoped might explain a little. Your father lived for his principles. He would rather die than compromise them. I …” Sordi grimaced. “A politician reaches a point in his life when he or she must decide. Do you wish to hold steadfast to your beliefs? Or do you become pragmatic and attempt to turn some small fraction of them into reality? I chose the latter, and look what it made me. A widower living in an isolated palace, with a slender grip on power and a prime minister who would send me off to an old people’s home if he could. King Lear of Rome. Perhaps your father was right. I betrayed what we once stood for.”

“Dario …”

“These are not idle ramblings. I tell you them for a reason. As your father would have understood only too well, what you heard today was the truth, but only a part of it. The rest remains misty, to me, anyway, though I have no doubt that inside that fog lies the crux of this matter.” He glanced at the door, as if to make sure no one was listening. “I must be very careful what I pass to you. They may try to trap me the obvious way, by handing on some information that is false or traceable. If that happens …” He sighed again. “Then my presidency is at an end.”

Ranieri was at the door. In his hands was something small, dark, and dusty with wires attached.

“You found that here? In my home?” Costa asked.

“It was hidden in the living room, near the phone.”

The Corazzieri captain was examining the thing as if searching for some kind of label. “Twenty years ago I could have told you the name. We used them a lot then. I wouldn’t worry too much. It’s long dead. Someone would have been listening in the road outside. Any nearby conversation, one half of a phone call, they’d hear the lot. It’s primitive compared with what they have today. That’s all we could find. There’s nothing recent.”

“Take it as a compliment,” Sordi added. “I shouldn’t boast but, when I was elevated to the Quirinale, Ranieri here kindly swept my personal apartment near the Piazza Navona.” He took the bug and waved it, his face wryly gleeful, as it had been when Costa was a child. “I had three, and every last one of them alive!”

“What’s going on?” Costa demanded, hearing the rising tension in his own voice.

The president extinguished his cigarette in one of Marco’s old ashtrays, then nodded at Ranieri to leave. They returned outside to the table, where Sordi reached into his pocket and took out a silver compact disc in a transparent sleeve.

“You’ll listen to what I have to tell you, Nic, then read what’s on this thing. In the morning, pass it on to your colleagues when you meet them. Yes, yes …” Costa was already protesting. “I know about what’s being planned. You shall be my conduit. Discreetly. Esposito agreed to this, a little reluctantly. He seems a good man, and not in Campagnolo’s power, as far as one may tell. Your friend Falcone too. I cannot deal with any of you directly. If I did, there would have to be records and minutes and formalities. That is not possible. Campagnolo and Palombo would have my hide if this became public. Our prime minister has a rare talent for delving into matters that don’t concern him.”

“Politics are not my business.”

A touch of color seeped into the president’s cheeks. “Is that why you think I came? To pursue some petty quarrel?”

“I don’t know.”

He leaned forward and peered into Costa’s face. “I came because you’re the son of a man I held in the highest esteem. I trusted Marco with my life. I assumed I could do the same with you. We face a grave threat. This Petrakis individual is in our country. He’s not alone and he’s intent on delivering a blow to the society he loathes, our society. A blow I fear may rank among anything this damaged world has seen these last ten years. The man is”—Sordi shook his head—“a monster. What kind one can only guess. Your father had ideas, but I was fool enough not to listen to them.”

There was a sound from outside. A phone ringing, then Ranieri’s distant voice.

“This much I do know, though, Nic. Andrea Petrakis is not alone, any more than he was twenty years ago. The very idea that three students and some professor could have concocted the abduction and murder of the Frascas is ridiculous. Furthermore, there was strong evidence that drug trafficking was involved. I am no police officer, but I surely understand this: If you deal in drugs, you must sell them to someone. Criminals, usually. Petrakis was not some solitary individual with a handful of acolytes. The fool was too young and too inexperienced to have done what he stood accused of. He was someone else’s pawn twenty years ago. Logic dictates that he still is today.”

“Did you say that?” Costa asked. “In your report?”

Sordi shook his head. “We couldn’t. We weren’t allowed. This is a tragedy that goes to the very heart of who we are. Romans. Italians. Frail human beings. When your father and I tried to get to the bottom of it, we were turned back at every opportunity. In the end, I gave up, and lost a dear friend as a result. Whoever set up Petrakis in the first place …”

He lifted his glass, as if in a toast. “He, she, they … must have been here all along. While we thought the Years of Lead were gone. While we dreamed of a better future, in a world without hate or fear of poverty. Watching, waiting. In Rome, perhaps, or Milan or Florence. Or beyond. Secure, undetected, unsuspected by anyone. Andrea Petrakis was a creation of the Blue Demon, not the Devil himself.”

Costa thought of the image on the wall in the poster they had seen, in the photo of the shack in the Maremma where the three students had died: the hideous face, the terrifying expression of hatred. The selfsame picture that had stood next to Giovanni Batisti’s mutilated corpse.

“Do you know what Gladio was?” Sordi asked abruptly.

The question came out of nowhere. A phrase came to Costa, from his schooldays.

“‘Qui gladio ferit, gladio perit,’” he murmured. “‘He who strikes with the sword, perishes with the sword.’”

“Latin is a beautiful language,” Sordi observed. “What we do with those words …” He tapped the disc. “You’ll find what answers we discovered before our commission was dissolved. There were some. Gladio was an organization. One designed to leave behind individuals dedicated to a secret purpose, a decent one in principle: to save us from Russia, from oblivion. Quiet men and women willing to bury their true identity, never to be noticed, never to speak of their purpose, not until they were needed. And then …” He glanced out at the vines, as if remembering something. “One way or another, it all went wrong. I can’t help but feel it was Gladio that killed those people twenty years ago, as much as anything else — certainly as much as Andrea Petrakis.”

He reached over and poured himself some more wine. Another cigarette appeared. Costa wished he could stop the old man from smoking.

“It’s my belief that whoever created this myth we know as the Blue Demon was the one who remained behind. Now his time has come. When they seek to kill us this time, Nic, it won’t be with bombs and planes and distant, random acts of violence.” Dario Sordi gripped his fist and shook it in Costa’s face. “They will murder us face-to-face from within, the way they killed the Frascas. The way we killed in the war, in the Via Rasella. Do you think their choice of that place this afternoon was some coincidence?”

“No,” Costa answered. “It was a message. For you.”

“A warning that they feel they are in combat, just as we were when the Germans occupied Rome. You and your colleagues must put flesh on this ghost, Nic. Whoever it is. I ask that as your president and as the man who once made a small child laugh, here in this very house.”

The old man looked weary at that moment, frail and perhaps a little daunted.

“I’ll do what I can,” Costa assured him.

Sordi’s hand went briefly to his arm, and a smile crossed the president’s face. “I know that. I shall send you a friend tomorrow. One with some special knowledge of the Blue Demon. And of Gladio too.” He glanced at the bottle on the table, thought better of it. “The one we seek could be anyone, Nic. A man, a woman, a modest, anonymous individual”—Sordi shrugged—“running some little cafe in the city, perhaps, or delivering the mail.” His eyes gleamed. “One of you. Or a cabal of several. In the Carabinieri. The secret services. Among those of us who pretend we are your masters. It demands courage and intelligence to devote one’s entire life to appearing to be someone else. With that comes a very ruthless ambition. Be wary. Do not breathe a word of this to anyone beyond those you trust.”

“Of course.”

The president hesitated. A note of uncertainty, perhaps regret, entered his voice. “I have selfish reasons to say this. You’re the second person to whom I have confided my thoughts.”

Dario Sordi grasped the bottle of Brunello, poured himself a dash more, took an urgent, desperate sip. He stared at Costa, an expression approaching guilt on his tired, pale face.

“The first was Giovanni Batisti a week ago, when the intelligence reports first began to find their way to my desk. It was idiotic of me to tell him, but …” His arms spread wide in a gesture of despair.

“Make no mistake, Nic. This is a lonely job. Mostly I pin medals on decent men and women, attend funerals and civic events. There are few people to whom I may turn in confidence. Giovanni Batisti was an honest man. I asked him merely to consider my concerns and keep them to himself. Whether he did … You understand what I’m saying? You must not discount the possibility that he was indiscreet. It’s possible the Blue Demon is rather closer to us than we might suspect.”

Nic Costa tried to find the right words. Dario Sordi was a kindly figure from his childhood, one who had always seemed so confident, so self-assured. At that moment he appeared lost and in need of comfort.

“Leo Falcone is the best police officer I have ever worked with. If anyone can find this individual—”

“Yes, yes,” Sordi interrupted, smiling. “What I was trying to say was more personal. I have one death on my conscience already. I do not wish anyone to add to that burden, least of all you.”