City of Fear

13

The villa overlooked the drab, flat coast running to the Tyrrhenian Sea, an untidy sprawl of industrial units and abandoned farmland not far from the main highway to Tuscany. It was a rich man’s rental, eight bedrooms, an extortionate five thousand dollars a week paid to a property agency in Tarquinia set on the bluff above. The name was a lie, resurrected in the 1920s to boast of the sleepy medieval town’s roots. Nothing hereabouts was quite what it seemed. The true home of the Etruscans was lost altogether, mere fragments, pot shards and fractured stones in a shallow valley in the hills. There, a disappeared race had turned to dust, leaving nothing but mausoleums, deep beneath the ochre earth, halls for feasting and revelry, physical joy, the life eternal, many pillaged to fill museums with vivid ceramics and statues depicting a culture built on strength and art and a stark carnal sensuality.

Andrea Petrakis could map each precious tomb in his head. The public site on the outskirts of Tarquinia where the tourists turned up in their buses to gaze in awe and a little fear at burial halls showing men and women dancing, singing, hunting, fighting, making love, two and a half millennia before. The secret places too, graves that were whispered about in order to keep out the curious and the greedy. From Cerveteri in the south to Grosseto, Orvieto, and beyond, they lay hidden beneath the parched ground, revealed only by the accident of the plow or the probing of some fortunate archaeologist, part of a lost world never to be fully rediscovered. Just a fraction of ancient Etruria had been retrieved, faded, distant hints of the Greek civilization that gave Rome everything — the olive and the grape, the Olympian gods, the makings of the Latin alphabet — receiving in return only oblivion. The lives captured in the wall paintings of their tombs — so vibrant, so real, so human — seemed nothing now but the distant, wasted dreams of the dead.

There was a long, oval pool at the front of the villa. A brief expanse of scrappy lawn was cut into the wilderness, filled with fake classical statuary and carefully tended topiary figures of gods and mythical beasts. Every time Petrakis looked at it, he wanted to laugh. The feature that did impress him was a narrow landing strip running east-west in the adjoining field, with a set of electric landing lights and a hangar by the side. He’d made sure they could use that, and that the gardener would be told to stay away for the duration of their visit. One week before, under cover of darkness, he had landed there from Corsica in a two-seater composite microlight, laden with materials that would have been dangerous to obtain in Italy by other means, and with the man who had provided them in the passenger seat. It had taken fifty minutes in the moonlight, navigating by GPS, skimming the sea to stay beneath the coastal radar, climbing to two thousand feet after the coast, then cutting the engine and gliding to land on the hard, dry grass line etched out by the landing lights. The machine now sat safe and hidden inside the hangar, ready for use another day.

Rome was less than eighty kilometers away, accessible through a variety of means. The coastal highway was the swiftest and most perilous. He preferred the back roads, skirting all the main towns, then leading to what was once the Via Claudia, close to Bracciano and its great lake, northwest of the capital. The circuitous route took twice as long, but Petrakis had insisted they return that way the previous day. It was a sound precaution; by late afternoon random checks were in place on every main road. On the narrow country lanes they never saw so much as a police or Carabinieri car. There was a personal dimension too. The Via Claudia was built by Nero, stretching across the Alps into what was now Austria, a conduit through which to subdue the fractious tribes of Europe. Every time he followed in the footsteps of those distant legions, he was reminded of what Rome had always represented.

It was a cloudless sunny morning, hot even at eight. A single jet wheeled high overhead on the approach to Fiumicino or Ciampino. Not for much longer. He’d watched the TV avidly since rising at dawn, happy to hear his own name mentioned alongside a photofit cobbled up from a few old images, one that would help no one. The airports would close later that morning. Road restrictions were coming into force throughout the city. Rome would slowly become paralyzed by its own fear, watched over by menacing guard posts, snipers on balconies, secret-service officers mingling with the mute and angry people on the streets. The authorities were advising that only those with essential duties should report to work. Shop staff and office workers knew what that meant: They were supposed to stay at home and lose three or four days’ pay. The unions were threatening to strike, a response that seemed peculiarly Roman.

Andrea Petrakis completed his seventh length of the pool, then hiked himself up onto the tiled perimeter by the steps and looked back at the villa. They would be visible from the nearest house, a farm a kilometer away. That made him happy. He wanted to maintain the appearance they’d given since their arrival. In the local shops, buying bread and wine, outside in the garden, by the pool, they could have been any group of foreign friends on holiday. A middle-aged Italian with a ready smile, hair that — after some time in the bathroom the previous evening — was now cropped short and dyed a deep shade of brown. A tall, black African, in his twenties, athletic, who couldn’t stop listening to music on his headphones whenever he had the chance, dancing along to whatever he heard. A quiet, introspective dark-skinned man, foreign, perhaps, from the Middle East, with the distanced, almost arrogant air of a businessman.

And a woman. Anna Ybarra. Spanish, though she would doubtless regard herself as Basque. She had the muscular, full body of a peasant, long dark hair, and a guileless, compelling face, that of the Madonna in some medieval painting — plain, not beautiful, or pretty, yet impossible not to admire. A woman who would always attract attention, turn heads as she passed.

With her round, guileless eyes, which seemed to engage with the world and find only amazement, Anna Ybarra had an air of intriguing innocence. She was twenty-seven but, at times, looked no more than a teenager. For all these reasons, he chose her above the other individuals trawled from the covert links they possessed around the world. Many had more talents, few more motivation. None looked less like a terrorist, and this, above all else, made her invaluable. The police and the secret services worked the way they knew, with precision and practice based on past experience. They would be looking for what their shared understanding told them to seek: a group of men hiding in the network of safe houses that the organization had acquired the length of Europe. The online news services were already talking of raids on suspected Muslim extremists in the grim immigrant suburbs of Rome, Milan, Turin, and beyond. This was what he hoped for, knowing that not one of those whom the police would arrest could breathe a word about what was happening, for the simplest of reasons: None knew. This was an operation that came from on high, like 9/11, Madrid, and the London bombs. No one could have expected it, because no one, outside the closest circle of those moving to and fro each evening on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, was aware that the plot existed.

He could imagine the men the Italians had rounded up, locked in some grim cell, being screamed at by interrogators, wondering if the Americans might intercede at any moment, whisk them away to a private jet and a short trip to a friendly foreign country where torture was an everyday occurrence. Rendition was supposed to be banned in Italy; the politicians had demanded that after one case had resulted in criminal prosecutions against some of those involved. But in reality …?

Petrakis had no idea whether it would happen or not, and he didn’t care. The pain and outrage would make the detention all the more galling, and there would be mistakes, as there always were, which the media would seize upon and scream from the rooftops as evidence of the new, draconian state.

Terror was about more than the visible act. It concerned the temperament of a nation, the breaking of its spirit, the destruction of anything it could use to cling to the certainties of the past.

By the side of the pool, he found his attention drifting to the woman once more. He had checked her story himself, every last detail. She had grown up in the Basque country, daughter of a simple country farmer. Married at nineteen. A mother at twenty-one. Five years later, in the midst of a police crackdown after ETA exploded a bomb at Madrid airport, killing three people, a covert anti-terror squad had stormed into the farmhouse she shared with her husband. It was a nighttime raid, badly handled. In the ensuing firefight he had died, and so had their little boy, who was just a week away from his fifth birthday. When the sun rose on their humble home outside the village of Hernani, near San Sebastián, it shed light on a terrible mistake. The police had entered the wrong house, thinking it belonged to her brother-in-law, an ETA sympathizer. Her husband had merely been trying to defend his family against a group of armed masked men who had hammered down the door and attacked them. He was no ETA member, not even a supporter. But soon afterwards, when she was allowed home from the hospital where she was treated for a minor gunshot wound to the abdomen, Anna Ybarra was. A volunteer demanding something special, something that would give her satisfaction.

The other two were different. Joseph Priest was a member of the Kenyan Mungiki gang, half terrorist, half criminal, someone who could be relied upon to kill without a thought and steal everything he could find from the corpses left behind. Money was Joseph’s god, though not as much as it was for the men who had sent him all the way from Nairobi.

Deniz Nesin grew up in the wild lands of eastern Turkey and was the brotherhood’s placeman in the team. A frontline soldier who’d trained suicide units in Afghanistan, Palestine, and Iraq, helped develop networks of supporters throughout the world, set up conduits through which cash and arms and technical equipment might be moved swiftly and securely. Never once getting caught, getting wounded, getting his face or alias out on the wires.

Petrakis liked him. Or, rather, he felt comfortable in his presence. The man was a type he had come to recognize and understand over the last two decades. A severe, dedicated fundamentalist through and through, never missing prayer, never far from his copy of a well-thumbed Koran, Deniz was meticulous, predictable, determined, and, when necessary, capable of instant and extreme violence. With these strengths came flaws and fallibilities. Deniz was a zealot surrounded by atheists. He had accepted Petrakis’s leadership because the proposal was too tempting to ignore. Still, he was unhappy in the company of strangers, and the presence of Anna Ybarra preyed upon him deeply, in part for her forthright character, but more for the reliance they had come to place on a woman.

It was of no consequence. This was Petrakis’s operation. She was his choice, as were they. He’d made his position plain to the people at the top, not in person because he wasn’t quite of sufficient stature to gain that privilege. But through video links and covert emails, exchanged with their shifting camps that flitted constantly, between Afghanistan and Pakistan, Petrakis had persuaded them, by the force of his argument and the strength of his position. Either the venture happened his way or it didn’t happen at all. They didn’t like the implicit threat in that statement. Still, they knew the truth in what he was saying. Italy would be on the alert for a conventional terrorist team, willing to lock up anyone who generated the slightest suspicion. In order to penetrate to the heart of Rome, new tactics were needed. No hijacked planes. No homemade bombs, crafted out of chemicals and fertilizer, left on commuter trains, detonated by a simple phone call.

What was required was terror on a different scale. An enormity that would send a message to the citizens of one of the most beautiful, ancient cities in the world: No one is exempt, no one is immune.

“Andrea!”

Anna’s curiously accented English drifted to him from the patio.

He turned to look. Deniz and Joseph were seated at the outdoor dining table. The African nursed a coffee. Deniz was playing with the satellite phone they’d had programmed onto an illicit frequency of one of the networks the Americans supposedly couldn’t crack. He wore a face like thunder.

Anna walked in front of the two of them wearing a swimsuit that was too old for her.

“What’s the water like?” she called.

“Wet,” Petrakis called back. “What do you expect?”

She laughed and uttered something in Spanish, a curse, probably a nasty one. He liked having this woman around. There’d been nothing in the way of real female company in Afghanistan. Just “wives” who materialized to fill the perceived need. Anna answered back. He hadn’t heard that kind of spirit in a female for a long time.

Deniz muttered something caustic in Arabic.

“If you want to insult me,” Anna retorted, standing in front of him, hands on her hips, “at least do it in a language I can understand.”

“Show some modesty,” he grumbled.

“After yesterday you want modesty?”

Joseph raised his coffee cup. “Good point.”

Deniz swore and went back to the phone. Anna shook her head, came over to the pool, dived in, swam a length underwater, then bobbed up next to Petrakis.

“What do we do today?” she asked him.

“Relax. Stop bugging Deniz.”

She stared at him, her long hair slicked back against her head. It made her round, tanned face even more striking.

“I’m wearing a very ordinary swimsuit. This is not Afghanistan. He doesn’t get to stone me to death here.”

“We don’t need distractions.”

“Why do you never tell us anything?” she asked. “Who was that man who came here in your little plane? The Greek? Where is he?”

Deniz went back into the house, taking the satphone with him. Joseph had his eyes closed and was listening to some beat on his iPod, feet jogging, looking every inch the rich, idle tourist.

“I don’t know what rules you had in ETA,” Petrakis told her. “But here, I tell you what you need to know, when you need to know it.”

“I don’t know what rules they had, either. I wasn’t a part of ETA. That’s why you wanted me.”

She let her body float up to the surface, go rigid, then drifted across the rippling surface of the pool on her back. He watched her, couldn’t help it. Her figure reminded him of that girl from Treviso who’d died in his parents’ cottage.…

Andrea Petrakis found himself thinking of the parties they’d held in those final days, seeing them briefly in his head, remembering the touch of warm skin, the liquid sound of doped-up laughter, the furtive, anxious sex. There’d been no rules there, either.

Very briskly, with the swiftness of an athlete, Anna flipped over, disappeared beneath the surface, and came up by his legs.

“Deniz should think himself lucky,” she said. “The reason I’m wearing an old woman’s bathing suit is that I hate people seeing the scar. Where they shot me. Right …” She made a cutting gesture over her stomach. “… here.” She looked at him and asked, “Why did you kill the boy?”

“I had no choice. And he wasn’t a boy.”

She gave him a searching glance. “You could have let him live. He was soft in the head. Boy or man, he didn’t even know which day of the week it was.”

“Danny went to pieces.”

“Does that always happen the first time?” she asked. There was a cold, curious look in her eyes. He’d deliberately left her out of the seizure of Batisti. She lacked the experience, the training.

“It didn’t with me. It won’t with you.”

She frowned. “Can I ask you something? You’ll tell me the truth? Promise?”

“If it’s a question I can answer, then I will tell you. If not …”

“You meant to kill him all along, didn’t you? That was what he was for. A piece of the plan. Like all of us.” Her dark eyes never left him. “Me the innocent. Joseph the dumb one. Deniz”—she cast a cold glance at the house—“the bigot. Is that why you chose us?”

“I chose you because you wanted this, Anna.”

He checked his watch and looked north, along the stark stretch of Maremma coastline. It was only a ten-minute drive to the excavation where they’d uncovered the original Blue Demon, the place that had captivated him when he first saw it almost thirty years before. He felt he could stare at that face forever, with its eyes that burned like red-hot coals, full of malice toward everything that lived.

“Joseph,” he yelled.

The long, lean black figure took off the headphones and looked across at them, puzzled.

Petrakis thought of Rome and the tourist mecca not far from the Spanish Steps. Ugo Campagnolo had neglected to check his calendar when he booked the leaders of the world’s industrialized nations for their stay in the city. It was also Fashion Week, an annual ritual that would not walk away easily, whatever the pressure. That morning there would be an event for the world’s photographers. Models and the media. Anxious, gawping crowds, all packed around the Trevi Fountain, none of them more than a minute’s walk away from the Via Rasella.

It was too good an opportunity to miss.

“I’ve an errand for you,” he told the African. “An important one.”

14

Dario Sordi’s CD contained the confidential report of the commission into the Blue Demon incident, seventy-nine pages on disc, including a note declaring that Marco Costa, an original member of the investigation, had declined to sign the findings and resigned shortly before the remaining members reached their decidedly anodyne conclusions. His son Nic had read the entire document immediately after the president and his bodyguards left. It was four a.m. before Costa got any sleep. The intuition he’d recognized in Sacro e Profano — that time might be short in the days to come — would soon, he felt, be proved right.

But at least their new home was sufficiently distant from the Questura to give them time to think. Esposito had provided a large, five-room first-floor apartment in a former monastery overlooking the narrow street of San Giovanni in Laterano, close to the vast cathedral that was the seat of the Catholic Church before the construction of St. Peter’s centuries ago. Beyond the Lateran the city was a nightmare: traffic jams in every direction, train and bus cancellations, streets full of angry, scared people walking to work because there was no other way to get there. The headline in Corriere della Sera, over a photograph of a threatening watchtower in the Piazza Venezia, with an armed soldier at its summit, said everything: La città eterna, assediata. The eternal city, under siege. Radio talk shows carried caller after caller complaining about their plight, and its immediate cause: an unwanted summit at which the aloof and distant presidents and prime ministers of foreign nations might take cocktails with one another in the Quirinale Palace. To Costa’s surprise and dismay, much of the fury seemed to be directed more at Dario Sordi, who had inherited the chaos, than at Ugo Campagnolo, the man who invited it. There was an intemperate, irrational aspect to the popular mood, one that was almost palpable on the street as he walked past the everyday shops and cafes from his parking place near the hospital.

The safe house occupied a wing of the block, reached by broad stairs that curled around a rickety cast-iron lift rising to the floors above. It wasn’t hard to imagine monks scurrying about the place, though — judging by the rows of strollers parked neatly in the lobby — most of the present occupants seemed to be ordinary families.

They had been joined by the newcomer that Dario Sordi had promised the previous day. Elizabeth Murray, born in London, raised in Italy, had been summoned from retirement to advise the small team Falcone headed. She had arrived in Rome only the evening before, from her farm in New Zealand, and looked a little the worse for the journey. A large, beaming woman, with a very English, weathered face, she might, in another incarnation, have been Peroni’s more aristocratic elder sister. She wore a khaki corduroy skirt over tan leather boots, and a blue denim shirt — winter clothing, she told them, since that was the season in the southern hemisphere. A shepherd’s crook that doubled as a walking stick stood next to the largest armchair in the apartment, which she more than occupied, casting envious glances from time to time at the neighboring desk where Teresa’s deputy, Silvio Di Capua, had taken control of the only two computers in the place.

Esposito appeared to be present only as a matter of principle. He seemed uncomfortable, and anxious to flee back to the Questura.

The commissario made terse introductions, then asked Costa to brief everyone on what he had learned overnight. It all came down to one word: Gladio. The roots of the organization that Dario Sordi believed was the genesis of the Blue Demon lay in the paranoia among the NATO alliance after the Second World War, when Europe appeared to be one more domino about to fall to expansionist Soviet Russia. Italy, Greece, Austria, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland … all were seen to be countries that might, in the wrong circumstances, perhaps even by democratic vote, turn communist. To counter such an outcome, the U.S. and the UK, in concert with domestic politicians, formed secret networks of stay-behind undercover agents, often working in affairs of state, the civil service, or other areas of public life, all prepared to carry out whatever was necessary to stave off a Soviet threat.

Much of the groundwork for what would, in Italy, become Gladio was apparently in the hands of Allen Dulles, the founder of the CIA, which was the ultimate financier of most of these operations. In Germany, Dulles had helped form the Gehlen Organization. It was headed by a former Wehrmacht officer turned Cold War spymaster, building a secret group that would one day become a central unit of West Germany’s principal federal intelligence service. In Italy, there had been no such reining in of the Cold War spooks. The stay-behind men had been sought in some of the darkest corners of the fractious postwar state, among the neofascists of the Movimento Sociale Italiano, created by the supporters of Mussolini, and from members of the P2 Masonic Lodge that was to feature in so many Roman and Vatican scandals of the late twentieth century.

The commission had uncovered evidence that Gregor and Alyssa Petrakis, Andrea’s parents, far from being the hippies they appeared, had connections with Gladio’s equivalent in Greece, Lochoi Oreinõn Katadromõn, the Mountain Raiding Companies. In the early 1970s, the couple had moved from Athens to the Maremma at the urging of intelligence agents in the right-wing colonels’ junta. Renzo Frasca too did not appear to be the office bureaucrat painted by the American Rennick the day before. There was some unconfirmed evidence to suggest that Frasca had a role as a liaison officer with agents such as the Petrakises.

This, in itself, did not surprise Costa. The Cold War was a time for spooks of all kinds, usually conducting small, secret campaigns against one another in ways that, for someone of his age, seemed quite inexplicable. What shocked him was the report’s section on the methods and aims of Gladio. The men and women of that organization were not, as Dario Sordi seemed to hint, tasked with waiting for some threatened communist takeover before moving into action.

They were there to prevent such a change in the first place, by any means at their disposal.

The cold, blunt language of an internal government document made this clear. The aim of these covert groups was to achieve their purpose through “internal subversion” and a “strategy of tension.” In practice that meant illegal acts and support, where necessary, for terrorist movements that might sway the electorate against voting for a further swing to the left. The commission had interviewed some of those arrested from the Red Brigades trials in Italy and the Baader-Meinhof Gang in Germany. All of them alleged that they had been infiltrated by members of stay-behind teams bringing arms and funds. The names differed. In Belgium, the secret army was called the SDRA8; in Denmark, Absolon; and in Portugal, Aginter. But the intention was always the same: to counter any drift from the center by fomenting unease and uncertainty in the electorate, in an effort to convince the masses that a left-wing coup was imminent, and that safety lay in one direction only, the status quo.

Political allegiances meant less than hard cash and weaponry. Renegade Gladio members quietly helped the Marxist Red Brigades kidnap and murder. At the same time, they had also, Sordi’s report claimed, given money to Ordine Nuovo, the right-wing group behind the Piazza Fontana bomb in Milan in 1969 that killed sixteen people and began the cycle of extremist violence that gripped the country for the next two decades.

As he spoke, the older men — Commissario Esposito, Falcone, and Peroni — who had lived through those years as adults, listened in gloomy silence. Costa could see the growing astonishment on the faces of Mirko, Silvio, and Rosa. For them, these were distant fairy tales from another generation, rumors no one ever quite believed. Even Teresa, who would have been in her early teens when the Years of Lead came to a close, seemed shocked. No one spoke much when Costa was finished. There wasn’t a lot to say. The commission had been summarily shut down before it could reach any firm conclusion — just, Costa suspected, as it was finally beginning to turn up some hard evidence. The final paragraph of the report was a lukewarm conclusion that whatever threat the Blue Demon had posed ended with the deaths of those involved, and the disappearance, and probable death, of Andrea Petrakis.

He finished and waited. Elizabeth Murray smiled, put up her hand, and said, “A confession. I wrote that rubbish. I was the commission secretary. They moved me there from Intelligence. Does that draft Dario gave you say who else was on the commission?”

“No.”

“Thought not. Only three you need know about. The rest are either dead or in their dotage. You Italians place great faith in the wisdom of age, don’t you? Charming in principle, but infuriating for those who come after. Three. Dario Sordi. Ugo Campagnolo. And your late father. Who was a perfect gentleman for the most part, but could be a real bastard when he felt like it.”

“What was the rush to close it down?” Esposito asked.

The Englishwoman laughed as if the question were ridiculous. “This was politics! Everyone had had enough. Except Marco Costa. It was …” She sighed, and her large shoulders heaved as she did so. “… like rummaging through your own dirty linen. And for what? However much we might have argued about who put that lunatic Andrea Petrakis up to his tricks, the truth was that we were agreed on one thing: It seemed as if it was all over. No reprisals followed for the deaths of those three students in the Maremma. No threats.”

“These allegations,” Costa said. “That the Petrakises were agents of Gladio. That Frasca somehow ran them, or paid for them.”

She screwed up her large, pale face in dissatisfaction. “I was never totally happy with that idea. Gregor and Alyssa were typical Greek fascists, utterly out of control. I doubt anyone could handle them effectively, least of all a junior spook from the U.S. Embassy. Why do you think the colonels sent them over here in the first place? They were sick of all the trouble they were causing in Athens. You won’t find it in the report, but we got a pretty good steer from the Greeks that both Petrakises faced arrest for murder if they were unwise enough to return home. The colonels were long gone by then. There were some half-decent people in the government. The Petrakises were involved in subverting naïve students, and didn’t stop short of a little brutality with anyone who resisted. Some of those they talked to never came home for supper afterwards.”

She shook her head, as if puzzled by something. “Very much like those three idiots Andrea roped into his scheme, if you think about it. The Greeks didn’t mind taking Gregor and Alyssa back when they were dead, mind. I saw the grave for myself. They were buried together beneath the same stone in a little cemetery not far from the Plaka. I had a damned good lunch afterwards, and on expenses too.”

“The commission sent you to Athens?” Costa asked. “Why?”

“To talk to Greek Intelligence, of course. I told you. The colonels were gone. We were all good Europeans together. The new people let me see the files, some of them, anyway. The Petrakises were career criminals who worked as hired hands for anyone who paid them. When they weren’t doing the dirty work for LOK, they were busy robbing, stealing, buying and selling dope. Not a nice couple at all.”

Mirko Oliva sat on his chair, wide-eyed, speechless. Elizabeth Murray leaned forward and smiled at him.

“Yes, children. All of this happened, here, not long before you were born.”

“And Frasca?” Falcone wanted to know.

“The Americans stonewalled us,” she replied. “Just as they stonewalled you yesterday in the Quirinale. Frasca was Intelligence, probably CIA. A thoroughly decent government officer, from what I could gather. It’s possible, I say no more, that he was trying to dismantle the nonsense he’d inherited. This was the late eighties. The collapse of the Eastern Bloc was just around the corner. Anyone with half a brain could see that coming. The Cold War was in its death throes. Who needed a bunch of right-wing crazies running around Europe handing out guns and banknotes to any passing terrorist they could find? Just to keep out a Russian regime that was crumbling from within anyway, with that very nice man Gorbachev at the helm?”

She hesitated, thinking. “I suspect the smart money was already on the next threat coming from the east. From Afghanistan, Pakistan. Washington got the message first. Makes sense. They put the mujahideen through college in the first place. By the late eighties the CIA had started cutting up Osama’s Company AmEx card. Dealing with thugs and terrorists in Europe didn’t matter anymore. That battle was won. It was only a question of waiting for the Berlin Wall to come down. Though that’s partly conjecture, which is entertaining, but ultimately futile. The truth is, I don’t know what Renzo Frasca did, exactly. Except he was no bean counter.”

“False flags,” Teresa murmured.

Elizabeth Murray smiled at her and nodded.

15

“False flags” Elizabeth Murray agreed. “Gladio. All of those networks. That’s exactly what they were. They existed to convince the people who were shot and bombed, who’d lost family and friends, that they’d better sit tight and make sure nothing changes, because the wicked bogeymen were waiting round the corner with their balaclavas and Kalashnikovs.”

“This is outrageous,” Rosa complained, visibly upset. “You’re saying these atrocities were sanctioned. By the Americans? By our own politicians? That they killed people here in order to keep themselves in power?”

“No, no, no,” the Englishwoman said quickly. “It’s not that simple. ‘Sanctioned’ isn’t the right word. No one phoned back to Rome or Washington or wherever to get permission. They didn’t need to. They were spooks out in the wild, on their own, working by the rules they invented. But Gladio existed. Just a few years after this report was killed, your own prime minister, Giulio Andreotti, confirmed its existence to a rather more weighty parliamentary commission than ours. It makes for awkward reading, I know. Perhaps that’s why so many have forgotten what went on. False flags have been around for centuries. Japan invaded Manchuria by fabricating the politically expedient Mukden incident. Hitler set fire to the Reichstag to blame it on the Communists and seize power in Berlin. There are those who think the attack on the World Trade Center was a false-flag incident. The Madrid bombings. Pan Am 103. Are you starting to see the world you’ve entered?”

“Not exactly,” Peroni complained.

“It’s a hall of mirrors. The truth seems as likely, or as improbable, as the absurd. Personally, and I have no particular information to support this, I do not believe for one moment that the Twin Towers fell through the actions of anyone but the murdering bastards in al-Qaeda. Equally, I know for a fact that paid agents of NATO provisioned and guided the men who planted bombs that killed ordinary Italian citizens the length of this country during the seventies and eighties. The difficulty is …” For the first time, an expression of doubt crossed her face. “Why would any of them stay behind so long? Who, exactly, is the enemy?”

“Petrakis thinks he’s fighting what he always fought,” Costa pointed out. “Us. Rome. Society.”

“Andrea was someone’s plaything back then, and probably still is now,” she said, with absolute certainty. “An interesting man, even when he was young. But all this …” She waved at the window. “This is beyond him. Without a little help from his friends, he’d never be here. Didn’t Dario make this clear?”

Commissario Esposito held out his arms, exasperated. “We’re police officers, not spies. What are we supposed to do?”

She shrugged. “Find the answers that eluded us twenty years ago, perhaps? Or at least provide some insight. You’re not a part of the Great Game. That could be an asset. You may see something I’d miss.”

“If you couldn’t find the answers,” Esposito began, “what makes you think—?”

“I came here because Dario Sordi begged me, Commissario. He thought”—she grimaced—“perhaps there was something I’d overlooked. Or forgotten. And that you … I don’t know.”

She shook her head, got to her feet, took the stick, and hobbled to the window. Elizabeth Murray was older than he had first thought, Costa realized. And she wasn’t well, either.

The woman threw up the pane, took out an unusual packet of cigarettes, with a black cover bearing some heraldic emblem. She lit one and blew the smoke out into the hot, rank city air. The rumble of angry car horns drifted into the room.

Costa walked over and stood next to her. She was scanning the narrow street, up to the Lateran, down to the Colosseum.

“Old habits,” she muttered, holding up the cigarette. It had a gold tip and a dark body. “They’re called Russian Blacks.” She took another look out into the street. “Apologies if I appear paranoid. I did surveillance for a while. No one ever suspected. A batty Englishwoman. Why should they?”

“Who for?” he asked.

She turned and looked at him. An icy, deprecating stare.

“Sorry,” Costa said quickly. “Foolish of me to ask.”

“No one’s watching us anyway. At least as far as I can see. Perhaps they realize we’re chasing phantoms.”

Falcone bent down and leaned out of the window too, then waved away the cigarette smoke.

“What do you find most puzzling about this, signora?” the inspector wondered.

“That’s an extraordinary question,” she said, laughing. “Where do you start?”

“Sometimes with something you’ve dismissed already, because you feel you’ll never know the answer, and therefore it’s not worth pursuing.”

“You are an interesting bunch, aren’t you?” she mused, gazing at him. “I can see why Dario picked you.”

“And the answer?” Falcone persisted.

She frowned. “Why on earth would Andrea Petrakis take Frasca’s son in the first place? He was fleeing Italy, en route to God knows where. Who would want a three-year-old child in tow while he was on the run? As a hostage? Possibly. But why keep him for twenty years in that case? Just so that he could teach the poor bastard a little Etruscan handiwork with a knife, then bring him back to Rome and shoot him like some wild animal?”

“We’re sure it is Danny Frasca?” Teresa asked.

Peroni said, “He called himself Danny. He had that locket. He did that thing to Batisti, he spoke Indian—”

“He spoke Pashto mostly,” Rosa cut in.

Esposito waved her into silence. “Palombo says they have a confirmed DNA link with samples from the Frasca couple,” the commissario told them. “He was their son. There can be no doubt about it.”

“That was quick,” Teresa observed. “A DNA match from a sample twenty years old doesn’t normally turn up overnight.”

Elizabeth Murray nodded at her. “And a sample that matched what? The Frascas are buried outside Washington. Would you keep physical evidence all that time? For a closed investigation?”

“We would,” Esposito insisted. “So would the Carabinieri. This was their case.”

“Bodies,” Elizabeth muttered, then walked over to the computer, took Costa’s CD off the desk, and thrust it into the machine. “That bothered me back then.”

She shuffled through the report until she found the photographs of the shack in the Maremma, after it was stormed by the two remaining Carabinieri men.

“I only put three or four photos into the report, but we had twenty, thirty to go on. And real graves. Two young men, one young woman, dead. Grieving parents. I talked to them.”

“What did they say?” Costa asked. “About why their children did what they did?”

“The usual. Their kid could be a little wild. Easily led. But …” She was running through the report on the screen. “It was the disparity. They gave me just two photos of the Frascas. Two of the Petrakises. You can see them here.”

Teresa was at her elbow immediately.

“You’re the pathologist,” the Englishwoman said. “What do you think?”

“I think I don’t make snap judgments. Not without more information. Where are the autopsy reports? Where’s the rest of the paperwork?”

“It wasn’t in our brief. I had a couple of pages on each. They didn’t tell us anything.”

Teresa looked at her, wide-eyed. “A couple of pages?”

“The case was closed! We weren’t trying to reopen it.” The Englishwoman looked briefly guilty. “We were trying to understand why.”

Falcone harrumphed and said, “You can’t hope to find an answer without understanding the question. Are you telling us you saw no contemporary accounts of what actually happened in any of these places?”

“I was an intelligence officer,” Elizabeth Murray complained. “Not a cop. It was a dead case. The Carabinieri had solved it, hadn’t they?”

“With their customary zeal,” Falcone observed. “Nic. Go to the Maremma. Take Prabakaran and Oliva with you. Find someone there who remembers all this. Perhaps a local police officer from the time. We’ll see if we can track one down while you’re on your way. It would be interesting to know their version of events.”

The inspector turned to Esposito and Silvio Di Capua. “I need all the information you can find on both the Petrakises and the Frascas. Sir?”

Commissario Esposito shuffled on his feet, looking as if he couldn’t wait to flee back to the Questura. “What is it?” the senior officer asked miserably.

“I want your permission to ask for the Carabinieri files. And for the names and whereabouts of all the officers who dealt with the case twenty years ago.”

“Do you honestly believe none of this has occurred to them?” Esposito demanded.

Falcone’s tanned face was starting to turn a deep shade of red. “I have no idea what has or has not occurred to the Carabinieri over the last twenty-four hours. Nor are they likely to tell me if I call and ask. You have the power to do that. We need to know. If the president wants—”

“No!”

The force of Esposito’s voice was such that it echoed off the walls of the high-ceilinged room. Even Elizabeth Murray looked a little shocked.

“I don’t report to the president and neither do you, Falcone. Dario Sordi will be gone in a few years and we’ll still be here. Once this little adventure is over, we go back to being under the wing of the Ministry of the Interior. They’ll be here until we’re in the grave. Don’t make me regret indulging Sordi and his theories. They may turn out to be fantasy all along. There will be no approaches to Palombo or anyone else in the Quirinale.” He nodded at Di Capua at the computer. “Use the resources you have here, and nothing more. If they are insufficient, then pray that Palombo and the rest of them are doing their job. That is my final word on the matter.”

He left, leaving a puzzled silence behind.

“Wonderful,” Teresa snapped. “He wants the job done so long as we don’t use anything obvious.”

Silvio Di Capua’s fingers were rattling the computer keyboard. Elizabeth Murray stumbled across on her stick to stand behind him, her eyes glued avidly to the screen.

“I suspect,” she observed, “you may have been picked precisely because the obvious isn’t going to get anyone anywhere. Don’t you?” Di Capua was still typing. “We never had toys like this in my day. What on earth are you looking at?”

“More than I expected,” Di Capua answered. “Who set us up with this system?”

“Esposito,” Falcone responded.

“Interesting.”

“Because …?” Teresa asked, sliding behind the pair of them to gaze at the monitor as it filled with records: names and numbers, dates and file names.

“I thought I was just going to get what we have back in the Questura. I was wrong.…” He grinned at them. Di Capua had matured lately. The geek ponytail was gone. He wore a suit most of the time. Rumor had it he had acquired a live-in girlfriend and taken to playing squash, which Teresa found deeply troubling on the rare occasions she thought about it. “We’re straight into the records system of both the Ministry of the Interior and the Carabinieri. In deep too. I don’t know where the shutters are going to come down, but I’ve never seen stuff like this before.”

“Can we have that in words I might understand?” Peroni asked.

Di Capua said, “Esposito may not want us to talk to Palombo directly. But we can read a lot of their reports. Quite high-level reports too.”

“Esposito fixed that?” Costa asked, surprised.

Di Capua shrugged. “Someone did.”

“Get in there quick before someone spots the hole,” Teresa ordered. She reached for a stool to sit next to him.

“No,” Falcone said. “Miss Murray and I will work here. You and Peroni can go to the Villa Giulia. See if you can track down anyone who remembers the Frasca incident. Or Andrea Petrakis.”

Teresa Lupo’s nose wrinkled. “Me? With him? Together? Like a team or something?”

Peroni looked just as horrified.

“Best get going,” the inspector added. “The traffic’s terrible out there.”

16

Joseph Priest didn’t argue when Petrakis said he had a job in Rome. Priest was determined to go back to Nairobi in one piece, and with increased authority in the Mungiki. Extortion, beatings, blackmail, robbery — these were habits he intended to confine to his past. His future lay in the upper ranks, among those who controlled the Mungiki army throughout Kenya and, increasingly, neighboring parts of Africa. The firm was growing, and with that came opportunities. There’d be plenty of money waiting for him when he got home, maybe enough to take a stake in some small tourist hotel on the beach in Mombasa. A step up the ladder. Something that set him apart from all the other slum kids trying to claw their way up in the world.

But the Mungiki had rules, and obedience was one of them. Priest had to return with the job done. Victorious. So he hung on every word Andrea Petrakis said, even the history, since, to an African — a man who didn’t take the ready supply of drinking water for granted — it seemed important. The Acqua Vergine was one of the city’s oldest supplies, one of its purest too, as the name suggested. It rose in the east, fed by rain from the Alban Hills, dividing into two channels, the Antica and the Nuova, which between them supplied, without artificial pumps or pressure, almost every important fountain in Rome, from the toothy dolphins in the Pantheon’s square to the grim-faced lions overlooking the Piazza del Popolo. Even in the twenty-first century, older members of the dwindling local population would fill their plastic bottles with the flow from these public fountains, Petrakis told Priest, flattered to drink from the same supply that had once slaked the thirst of emperors.

The Antica ran in a subterranean channel under the park of the Villa Borghese, through the gardens of the Villa Medici, winding beneath the busy cobbled streets around the Spanish Steps. Its journey from the quiet Lazio countryside ended at a spectacular mostra, an endpoint for the water system constructed for a pope emulating the architectural habits of the emperors he had succeeded.

Priest was getting a little weary of the history lesson by that stage, but his interest picked up when Petrakis did something very clever: namely, provide context. All this information, the young Kenyan discovered, had a point. The Italian needed him to understand how important the Acqua Vergine was to Rome, how its public display, in fountains and features, was a source of both pride and comfort for citizens beginning to stew in the summer heat, able to take a sip in the street, knowing the water would be fresh and good. History had a familiar face. The mostra where the Antica concluded its journey was the Trevi Fountain, a place Joseph Priest had visited himself, since it was a mandatory sight on the itinerary of any tourist, even a terrorist in disguise.

Two hours after he left Tarquinia, he found himself striding toward the street not far from the Via Rasella that he’d visited the previous week. A bunch of women’s bags was slung over his right shoulder. He was practicing his basic Italian in his head. To the people around, he must have looked like one more African hawker about to pester tourists in the city center. The narrow cobbled lanes were less crowded. The TV channels had made much of the murder of the Polish woman driver and her passenger, and the statement from the president about an imminent terrorist threat. Tourists were trying to scramble onto the last departures from Fiumicino and Ciampino before the flight ban slammed down. The mainline train stations were choked with travelers fighting for the few remaining seats. Hotels and restaurants were already wailing about the economic effect. The mayor had been on CNN, claiming no one need fear, that security was good and the necessary measures would not interfere with any holiday in Rome.

He hadn’t seemed convincing. The straggle of visitors walking cautiously through the city center looked less carefree than a week before. Some had no choice about being there. Petrakis had told him why. This wasn’t just a time for world leaders. The city was engaged in a Fashion Week spectacular too, one scheduled long before Ugo Campagnolo had invited the leaders of the G8 to the Quirinale Palace. It was an annual affair that attracted thousands of people in the rag trade, spawning a series of shows and catwalk events, some private, some public, all organized with the extravagant flair for publicity that went with the clothing business.

Security fences and guard posts seemed to be springing up everywhere, in the Piazza di Spagna and outside subway stations and public buildings. Armed uniformed police toting ugly black automatic weapons lounged on street corners, scrutinizing the passersby. But the fashionistas brought their own crowd. Bright and garish, loud and unmissable, untouched by the threat, or so they wished to believe.

The Trevi was swamped by a garrulous mob, all eyes on a line of brightly clad women stepping through lines of photographers held back by uniformed police. They pranced through the mob, then lined up to stand on the low wall that fronted the fountain, posing, pouting, stretching themselves into the curiously androgynous pose that models seemed to like. This was one of the most photographed scenes in the world and Priest was now a part of it, someone who would alter the way the place would be perceived from this point forward, forever.

Priest strode across the street, pushing his way through, head down. He paused to glance left, toward the Via Rasella, remembering what had happened there the previous day. He had helped scout that location with Petrakis. The Italian had been insistent for some reason; no other street would suffice for their first blow in Rome. Then he found a squat stone bollard on which he was able to perch, leaning against the wall, and turned to look at the place that Petrakis had chosen for their second act.

A single statue, the regal figure of Neptune, dominated the scene, erect before the pillars of some kind of palace, bestriding a fantastical scene of imaginary sea creatures, tritons and horses and serpents, frozen in stone, yet somehow full of motion. The waters of the Acqua Vergine emerged from some invisible outlets at the sea god’s feet as he rode, triumphant in a seashell chariot. The fountains burst forth with gusto, falling into a semicircular blue pool behind the line of models now posing for the cameras.

As he watched, the perimeter of the pool became entirely surrounded by models and cameramen, TV crews and eager members of the public. None took much notice of the water or the statuary with its great, sweeping figure of the god above them.

They think they’re more important, Joseph Priest thought.

As Andrea Petrakis had instructed, he took out the expensive camera phone, set it to video, checked the picture, dialed the number he’d been given, then stared at the lens, waiting for them to answer the call.

He could just make out three of them by the pool in a tiny frame on the screen. Through the shaky picture, Petrakis raised his glass. Beer, Priest realized, and couldn’t wait to taste one too. His mouth felt dry. He was more scared than he’d ever been since the first job that got him into the Mungiki, muscling protection money out of street traders in some dangerous Nairobi back street. Deniz Nesin was there, with what looked like a clear glass of Arabian tea in his hand, his face serious as always. Deniz had arranged all this camera stuff, and the rest. The man was happier around toys and gadgets than people.

The Turk leaned forward and said, the words audible even as Priest looked straight into the eye of the phone, “Do you remember what to do?”

“Yes, boss!” he replied, and tried to make some small salute.

Then the camera shifted position and he saw Anna Ybarra. She was still wearing the same dark swimsuit. He’d found it hard to dispel the image of her in the pool that morning. She wasn’t beautiful. Not really. But she had something that worked on him, and she knew it.

“Be careful,” Anna said in her husky English.

Priest grinned and pulled out the mounting apparatus Deniz had given him. It was black metal, fitted the phone perfectly, and had some kind of sticky adhesive base that was supposed to adhere to anything — brick, metal, plastic. There was a road sign by the bollard: Pedestrians Only. He fixed the phone in the mount, reached up, and attached both to the metal sign, pointing the lens toward the sea god and his strange retinue, human and stone, opposite. When it was seated firmly, he stretched up to adjust the focus and the frame, making sure the three of them back in Tarquinia would see everything, and could pass it on everywhere, over the Web, in seconds.

“Be careful …” he murmured, thinking of Anna Ybarra again.

The last time, after they checked out the empty houses in the Via Rasella, Petrakis had taken him to an ice cream shop just a few meters away, down a side street between the Trevi and the busy Via del Tritone. Priest decided he might buy something there afterwards, when the panic had taken hold and he was able to walk safely away, back to the rented Moto Guzzi Nevada parked in a back road behind the Villa Borghese.

He elbowed his way through the crowd, not looking at anyone — the cops, the photographers, the models. They were all so self-absorbed that no one noticed another African bag seller. Even the police, with their big, ugly guns, couldn’t take their eyes off the women in their bikinis and skimpy clothes, arching and angling on the wall in front of the Trevi Fountain.

The device lay hidden beneath Neptune’s feet, buried there somehow by Deniz Nesin two nights before. A bitter, cruel surprise slumbering under the rocks and the waters of the Acqua Vergine Antica. It was a brilliant plan, and one that had only a single drawback. Radio waves weren’t as subtle or insistent as water, Deniz said. Hard marble was almost impervious to their power, unless one found a way to get very close indeed.

The little remote control they’d given Priest needed to be within twenty meters of the sea god’s torso for its signal to reach the detonator and the explosive hidden beneath the stone. He hoped he had enough leeway to be around the corner from the statues when he hit the button.

There was no way he could return to Nairobi a failure. Joseph Priest knew he’d be as good as dead the moment he left the airport. He might as well have stayed in Rome, trying to sell cheap bags for real.

17

Teresa Lupo had worked alongside Peroni many times before, but not like this. Peroni was a cop, big, gruff, amiable, in spite of his brutish, damaged appearance. She was a forensic pathologist, fifteen years younger than him. He’d brought stability, love, and some genuine companionship into her life. Professionally, their jobs meshed but never competed, much like their shared private lives. That was, she thought, for the best.

They had to take the long route through the city, driving over to the Trastevere side and then on to the Vatican, before crossing the Tiber again in Flaminio. The centro storico was gridlocked because of Palombo’s security measures. Close to the Vatican, from the Castel Sant’Angelo to St. Peter’s, the scaffolding and guard posts were beginning to appear, and the streets seemed full of uniformed men nursing weapons.

The Villa Giulia was a former papal residence near the Viale delle Belle Arti and the National Gallery of Modern Art. The place was a compact palace, grandiose but a little faded, its frescoed colonnades in need of some restoration. The grounds were well tended and possessed the kind of follies she associated with the Vatican hierarchy when it was at leisure: fake temples and a balustraded structure in faded gray stone. That could only be the nymphaeum, the artificial cave harking back to pagan times where, two decades before, the mutilated bodies of Renzo Frasca and his wife had been found.

The museum director was named Pietro Conti. He was short, frail, and elderly, beyond retirement age, she thought, with pallid, blotchy skin, perhaps indicative of illness, and a pinched, grizzled face bearing a meager salt-and-pepper mustache. Conti greeted them in his office, a capacious, sun-filled room. He listened to Peroni’s brief explanation for their visit, then said, “Ask away.”

“You were here?” Teresa asked. “You knew Andrea Petrakis?”

“Briefly.”

The man volunteered nothing else.

“What was he like?” Peroni asked.

Conti shrugged. “All this was a long time ago. You read the reports, surely. You’re police officers. Why ask me?”

“You’ve seen the news. You know Petrakis has returned. We need to try to understand this man. To comprehend why he’s come back, now. In this … frame of mind.”

“Don’t ask me about his frame of mind. I never understood it then. Why should I today? Andrea Petrakis was arrogant, willful, disrespectful of authority. Obsessive about everything that interested him, which seemed to be Etruscans principally, and Shakespeare for some reason, which I suspect gives you a clue to his view of history.”

“What clue?” Peroni wondered.

“That he saw everything in dramatic terms,” Conti replied, as if the answer were obvious. “Ordinary lives didn’t interest him. Only great ones, or those he regarded as great. This is dreadful arrogance for any historian. Politicians merely steer the ship. Real people, ordinary people, row it. I found Andrea lacking in insight, though highly intelligent. The people in Viterbo had given him some kind of junior professorship, which was a mistake. He believed he understood the subject matter rather better than was the case.” Conti frowned. “That young man was spoiled, which is never good for one so inexperienced and with such admiration for himself. Where he got this crazy idea …” The director waved his fragile right hand in the air. It seemed so thin Teresa wondered if it might break.

“What crazy idea?” she asked.

“That he possessed some kind of empathy with the Etruscans. That they were not simply a lost race suitable for study, but a kind of metaphor one might use to explain the modern world. He had Greek blood. He thought this gave him some special insight. But …”

Conti glanced out of the window. “If you’d told me he was capable of such things … Those poor young idiots in the Maremma. I taught them. The girl, Nadia Ambrosini, was very pretty, if somewhat vapid and lacking in academic focus.” He pointed a short, wrinkled finger at them. “I was merely a curator then. Had I thought anything untoward was in the cards …”

“You would have acted, sir,” Peroni assured him. “No one foresaw what would happen. You’ve no need to feel any guilt.”

“Easy for you to say,” Conti responded. “When they come here as students, they’re in our charge. We’re responsible for them. We have to be, since so often they refuse to be responsible for themselves.”

“Why did the other students worship him?” Peroni asked.

Pietro Conti looked puzzled. “Who said they did?”

“They followed him. He was the leader of their group. They went to that place of his parents’, near Tarquinia. There were photographs.…”

“You shouldn’t believe everything you see in the gutter press. I read those stories too. How Andrea was some sort of Svengali. I assumed they were the fantasies of a desperate reporter. You think otherwise?”

Peroni said, “Possibly.”

“Well, I can’t say I noticed. I rather felt the students were laughing at him most of the time. Or using him. The girl in particular. Female students can be like that. Cruel.”

Teresa found herself glancing at Peroni, reassured to see he found this just as baffling.

“But they went to that place in the country,” she pointed out. “They died there.”

“Yes,” the director agreed. “They did.” He wriggled uncomfortably in his seat, as if steeling himself to say something unpleasant. “Look. I was never asked this before. I find it odd that I am going over this subject now, twenty years after those three children were put in their graves.” He cleared his throat. “Andrea Petrakis was a very clever, very unusual, and rather unpleasant young man. One of his talents was that he knew how to provide his peers with whatever they wanted. A place where they could go and … ‘hang out,’ was the phrase back then, I believe.”

“Hang out?” she asked.

Conti glared at her. “Oh, please. I’m no fool. They used to talk about it, quite openly. They were little more than provincial children, most of whom had fled very traditional Catholic upbringings. Andrea offered them a place where they could do whatever they liked. If they adored him — and I have my doubts about that — it was for purely practical purposes. He provided them with what they sought, which is the easiest way anyone can win popularity with the young.”

Teresa tried to work this out. “You’re saying they didn’t even like him?”

“I’m saying …” He tried to find the right words. “They were two parties who knowingly exploited one another. Petrakis fed their needs. He provided them with drugs. Many drugs. We had officers in the Carabinieri crawling over this place afterwards. Quite why such mundane crimes were of interest to them, in the light of what happened to that unfortunate American couple, is something I’ll never understand.”

“You mean Petrakis was their dealer?” she asked.

“Precisely. In return, they indulged his strange ideas about the Etruscans, and gave him rather a lot of money too, I imagine.”

“Is that what drove them?” she asked. “Not politics, but dope?” The briefing from the Quirinale was either plainly inaccurate or deliberately misleading.

“I never heard a word of politics discussed in those circles. I would have welcomed it if I had. They all seemed remarkably … dull, to be honest with you. Except for Andrea.”

“That’s what these kids wanted? The chance to behave the way they never could at home with Mamma around? To be hippies, like the Etruscans?”

Pietro Conti regarded her contemptuously and asked, “What?”

“Hippies,” she repeated, feeling uncomfortable beneath the heat of his gaze. “Or so I read.…”

He adopted a pose — fingers tented, head to one side — of the indignant academic.

“Where did you read this? In some history book for infants? The Etruscans owned half of Italy for more than two hundred years. They provided at least three kings of Rome. This was a proud and independent warrior nation that showed its enemies no mercy whatsoever.” He nodded at the door. “You should see some of the exhibits we have. They had a society, a culture, that didn’t fit in with our ideas on morals. But they were no … hippies.” He shrugged. “And in the end they were defeated. Now, because all that Rome has left us is a few tombs and some rather risqué objects, we regard an entire civilization as some fey lost race of aesthetes. Poets bearing olive branches, too delicate for this rough world of ours.”

The old man folded his arms. “Andrea Petrakis was a decent scholar. He certainly knew enough to reject such nonsense. You’ll have to do better with your theories than that, my dear.”

“Sorry,” she muttered, stung.

Peroni came to her rescue. “Can we see where the Frasca couple were found?”

A practical, straightforward question, she realized. Unlike her, Peroni was a cop, someone who thought in straight lines. Sometimes it was the best way to be.

“If you must,” Pietro Conti groaned, and struggled out of his chair. “But before we leave the subject, I will tell you one thing.”

They waited.

“Licentious, weak, self-obsessed, flawed — a people waiting on oblivion, almost inviting it,” the museum director went on. “Should anyone fit that description, it’s us, surely. If an old man like me can see that, so can a younger one as bright as Andrea Petrakis. He gave those foolish children what they wanted. The place in Tarquinia. Their”—his mouth wrinkled with disgust—“fun. But he knew it was a weakness and he hated them for that. Hated us too. I saw that in his eyes. Now, let me show you our nymphaeum, such as it is.”

18

The device Deniz had given him looked like the remote from a video camera. Small, black, plastic, it sat in Joseph Priest’s hand, wriggling in his sweaty grip. There weren’t just models and photographers and a small crowd of gaping locals and tourists crowded round the Trevi Fountain. There were carabinieri too, as if they knew — or at least suspected — something might happen.

The Kenyan let slip a quiet curse and told himself not to be so stupid. It was a famous place. There’d be pickpockets and street people, hassling, looking for a purse or a camera to steal. Of course the cops would be there. Except that these cops held weapons, modern automatic rifles, the kind the Mungiki never managed to get, even in Nairobi. They weren’t watching the half-naked women on the perimeter wall fronting the fountain’s foaming waters anymore. They were scanning the crowd, peering hard at anyone they felt deserved it.

Priest was as close to Neptune as he could get. He could have thrown Deniz’s little remote and hit the sea god on the chest, if only that would work. He didn’t give the idea more than a passing thought. Weeks of training in rough itinerant camps on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border had left him in no doubt about the nature of the people he’d joined. Bad luck wasn’t going to serve as an excuse.

One of the carabinieri, a thickset man with sunglasses, no more than two strides away, was staring at him, cradling a black rifle in his arms.

Priest surreptitiously stuffed the detonator control back into his pocket and smiled, the big, open grin he imagined he ought to use. Then he removed a counterfeit designer bag from his shoulder, dangled it in front of the man, laughing, trying not to tremble.

“Special cop discount,” he said, aware of the tremor in his voice. “What you think? Huh?”

“I think you should go somewhere else. You know the rules.”

Priest nodded. He didn’t understand the first thing about being a street hawker.

“Cigarette, boss?” he asked, raising his fingers to his mouth.

“No. You got a hearing problem?”

He laughed, cupped his hand to his ear, and shuffled off into the crowd, trying to think. The cop’s eyes were surely boring into his back still. Priest knew he couldn’t wander too far. Deniz’s little control wouldn’t be able to talk to its partner, buried beneath all that contorted stone, in whatever ancient supply system fed the teeming waters of the Acqua Vergine into its mostra at the Trevi.

He bumped into someone, apologized, tried to smile again, and found himself looking into the face of a very pretty, very pale woman. She wore a gray business suit with a black leather handbag over her left shoulder and stared at him as if he’d come from another planet.

“I can sell you a nicer bag than that,” he said in English, looking her in the eye. “Something a little brighter.”

“Beat it,” she shot back.

American.

He held up the same one he’d shown the cop. “For you, a really good price. You’re like me. You got a Third World currency now. And … yeah …”

He grinned. She was a looker. Much more so than Anna Ybarra.

To his surprise she didn’t swear at him. She simply turned back to watch the models jigging away to some music from a system set beside the fountain. There was a big man by her side. She spoke to him. The way the guy nodded in tune to her words told Joseph Priest the man was hers to control.

He had a dark suit, close-cropped dark hair, sunglasses. White shirt and tie. Muscular, with a tanned face and a thin-lipped mouth that seemed to run in a near-straight horizontal line from one side of his face to the other.

Joseph Priest really didn’t like this guy.

“Scusi,” he murmured, then pushed his way through the mob until he turned the corner into the narrow street leading back to Tritone.

A quick glance back confirmed what he’d hoped for. The video phone was still there, high on the sign behind the crowd. Andrea, Deniz, and Anna were probably watching everything from the patio of the villa outside Tarquinia, relaxed, laughing maybe, while he risked his neck, alone, without so much as a weapon to help him, since Andrea said that would only increase the danger.

“Always the same,” Priest muttered to himself. “Give the black guy the shit job.”

He closed his eyes for a moment, breathed deeply, wondered how big an explosion Deniz had planned, and whether the Turk had been truthful about his chances of escaping its effects.

There’d be lots of flying masonry, he guessed. Lots of smoke and noise and damaged bodies. Getting away didn’t worry him. In Nairobi and Mombasa, he’d crawled out of any number of violent encounters, sometimes right under the nose of the law.

What he didn’t want was to get hurt by his own actions. There’d been some fighting in Afghanistan, a quick escape in the night when the British got too close to where they were staying. A couple of people died in that, and it hadn’t been the other side’s soldiers who killed them, but some crazed Taliban kids, firing off their rifles wildly at anything that moved. To lose your life that way seemed so … unfair.

He leaned up against the wall that ran to the side of the fountain. Neptune’s street show was now a good ten strides away. The stone seemed so solid it ought to survive anything. Joseph Priest checked round, made sure no one was watching, looked up, and did his best to nod discreetly to the phone set high on the wall beyond the models and the bored, rude cops. He wondered if the three of them would notice, whether they were even looking at anything except the heaving sea of bodies that lay just a few seconds away from some bloody oblivion.

They made a strange team. This wasn’t the kind of work Priest enjoyed. Not that he had any choice in the matter.

Timing was essential, Andrea had said. Eleven-thirty exactly, because at that moment the big men of the G8 would be posing for the cameras on the piazza outside the Quirinale Palace, kicking off the summit for the privileged pack of photographers allowed into their secure and private lair to record the event.

He watched the second hand on the fake Rolex that Andrea had given him that morning as it ticked around.

It didn’t seem quite right to pray at that moment. So he took a deep breath and then, his legs stiff from expectancy, sweat starting to prick his brow, pulled out the control once more and thrust his strong dark thumb onto the button.

19

They walked through galleries of objects that amazed her: glazed ceramics, statues, jewelry. Scenes of a vanished past, of war and love, feasting and mythical creatures, some in agony, some coupled together in strange, unreal forms of ecstasy. The Villa Giulia was a world within itself, one she could hardly believe she had missed in all her years in Rome. Then they were outside, striding through the grounds to the place where Renzo and Marie Frasca’s bodies had been left like store dummies posed for posterity.

The nymphaeum didn’t seem to have changed much in twenty years. All it lacked was two horribly disfigured corpses stretched out on the plinth beneath the gaze of the four stone muses supporting the balustrade above.

The place had been dug out of the dank Roman earth and it smelled of damp and algae. Lily pads choked the narrow stream that ran in a winding channel behind the empty platform. Ferns and moss tumbled from the alcoves. The mosaic in front, a sea triton playing the pipes, was grimy with dust and dirt from the feet of tourists wandering around this small subterranean folly, one that, close up, lacked the grandeur and taste Teresa Lupo had come to associate with the imperial-era grottoes that it sought to imitate. There were no mythical fairy creatures here. Only the ghost of a monster.

Peroni turned and looked at the staircase, thinking in the plain, logical way cops did, one she wished she might, one day, emulate.

“Two corpses,” he said. “Adults. Hard work dragging them in from the street, down those stairs. One man alone—”

“Could not do it,” Pietro Conti agreed. “That is, I think, obvious.”

“Did you come here, the weekend it happened?” she asked.

He shook his head. “The museum was closed to the public for some much-needed building work. I was in Cambridge. A small conference organized by the Fitzwilliam. But …” He shrugged. “I heard enough on my return. By then it was all over.”

“Is there anyone left who was around when it happened?”

“There’s a caretaker. Gatti. Ordinarily he would have been in the apartment. But the place was closed for renovation. There seemed no need.” He pulled out a cell phone and called for the man. “Andrea Petrakis had a key to the main areas. It was his right. He was a junior professor. The people in Viterbo said so.”

Peroni pulled out his pad and looked at the notes there. “They were murdered at their home in Parioli, almost two kilometers from here. He had to transport them by car, drag them in from the street, take them down those stairs, leave his message.…”

“Shakespeare, as it turned out,” Conti grumbled. “It took a lot of cleaning to get rid of that. Nor do I feel it’s the act that a professor, even a junior one, ought to countenance. Spray-painting on the walls of a museum.” He glanced at them. “Andrea was rather fond of tricks and riddles and codes. That play in particular. I think it mirrored his view of the world. The wrong people were in control, you see. Caesar, the dictator posing as a democrat. The heroes were those who would depose him, and instead they found themselves cast as villains. And in the end they would lose.” He sniffed and looked around him at the grimy stones. “As did everyone concerned, I rather thought.”

“Shakespeare,” Teresa repeated, thinking. “Why write a message like that in the first place?”

A burly middle-aged man was striding down the steps. Gatti, the caretaker, looked like a wrestler. He wore a grimy T-shirt and faded jeans, and had a round, bristly bucolic face, ruddy from sun or labor or drink.

“Angelo …” Conti said, standing back as the man arrived. He had a powerful smell of sweat about him, and an expression of surly bafflement. “These people are from the police. They would like to know what you remember of the Petrakis incident.”

“Why?”

Peroni gazed into his face. “You must have read the papers.”

“Better things to do.”

Conti retreated a little farther and commented, “Reading is not to Angelo’s taste.” A fiery glance came from the hefty workman. “Nor,” the director added hastily, “need it be.”

“Twenty years ago …” Teresa began.

“Two dead people there,” Gatti grunted, pointing at the empty flat stone beneath the four grimy nymphs.

“Did you see them?” Peroni asked him.

“Yes.” Nothing more. This was going to be hard work. Teresa felt her temper rising, then bit her tongue. Peroni was so much better in these situations.

“Tell me what happened, Angelo,” the big cop said quietly. “I know these things are upsetting and we shouldn’t be here asking, after all this time. But we’ve no choice.” He eyed Conti, in a way Gatti couldn’t miss. “We’ve got bosses too. They’re all the same.”

The man laughed a little at that. Angelo Gatti was smarter than he wanted to appear.

“I saw what you saw. Exactly what you saw. Two dead people. Lots of blood. Some words on a wall for me to clean up.”

“Nothing else?” Peroni persisted.

“What? To clean up? No. Nothing else. They’d done that. All those cops and people in suits. The photographers. You know what I thought when I got here?”

He wanted to be asked.

“What did you think?” Peroni said.

“I thought there was a wedding going on. So many people with cameras. So many suits and uniforms. No one looking happy. Just like every wedding I ever went to.”

Teresa couldn’t help herself. “What did you see?”

“I told you! The same as everyone else. A bunch of pictures in the paper. I bought one that time. Seemed only right. Only way to find out what was going on. All the bosses”—he glanced at Conti—“were at the seaside or somewhere. The Carabinieri didn’t want the likes of me around. Went crazy the moment I appeared”—he nodded toward the steps that led to the terrace above—“up there. As if they belonged here. Not me.”

“The bodies …”

“Saw them in the paper. Just like you.”

“Just in the paper? Not here?” Peroni asked. “You’re sure of that? Absolutely?”

“Sure I’m sure. All I saw was a lot of men in suits looking like they were going about their business. Then there was me. Up there. Getting marched off like I’d broken the law or something. Americans. Italians.”

Peroni wasn’t listening to the man’s complaints. He was focusing on detail.

“Let me get this straight,” he said. “There were two murder victims found here. You’re telling me none of you saw them? No one from the museum at all?”

“The people we deal with have been dead rather longer than a few hours,” Pietro Conti replied rather pompously. “Why would we want to be involved? He only came because he heard something was going on. Isn’t that right?”

Peroni watched the squat, muscular man. “Where did you hear that, Angelo? That something had happened here?”

“Cafe in Flaminio. Someone saw all the cars turning up. I got curious. I’m the caretaker. Job means what it says.”

Teresa took Peroni to one side. “We’re wasting our time here,” she told him. “These two know nothing. We need to get Silvio and Elizabeth Murray to trawl through the documents and see what they can find.”

“Computers,” Peroni muttered. He glanced at the subterranean hollow around them. “Something odd happened here. We’re not going to find out what it was from some idiotic machine.”

Her voice rose. “So what’s the point if no one remembers a thing?”

The caretaker from the Maremma heard and bridled. He jerked a stubby finger in Teresa Lupo’s direction. “I remember lots. Not my fault it’s not what you want to hear.”

“Angelo has a very good memory,” Pietro Conti added. “That’s one reason I thought he might be able to help. As much as anyone, anyway. We weren’t involved. None of us were. The Carabinieri and all those gentlemen who came with them. They didn’t want us around. It’s understandable, isn’t it? What did we have to offer, other than the name of Andrea Petrakis?”

“And who gave them that?” Teresa demanded.

The two men exchanged an uneasy glance.

“Not us,” Conti answered eventually. “They had it already. These people were remarkably unpleasant. They took over this place as if they owned it. None of us felt much minded to pose awkward questions.…”

“I asked them,” Gatti announced. “The Carabinieri told me to mind my own business.”

“This was our business,” Conti cut in. “Petrakis was attached to the museum. I’ve no idea where they got his name from. If they’d been asking about drugs, possibly. But not in relation to something of this nature. It wouldn’t have occurred to me. He simply seemed to be one more arrogant young man, not a murderer.”

“The Carabinieri,” Peroni growled. He gazed at Gatti. Teresa could imagine these two in a bar somewhere, groaning about the state of the world over beer and panini. “I don’t suppose any of them gave you their names, did they?”

The caretaker shook his grizzled head. “You think they’d have told the likes of me who they were?”

“You could have asked,” Teresa said with a sigh.

“I could have. But I didn’t. They told me to get lost and I wasn’t in the mood to argue. Who wants to see a couple of dead bodies, anyway? What’s the point?”

“Thanks,” Peroni began to say, and started to turn away from beneath the gaze of the four stone nymphs who had been watching their conversation, as if quietly amused.

“I said they never gave me their names,” Gatti added. “Doesn’t mean I don’t know.”

The big cop stopped and stared at him.

“One of them, anyway. Saw him on the TV. Only yesterday. Same long, miserable face as he had back then, when he was young and throwing his weight around. Big man now. Important.”

“Saw who? Where?”

“The carabiniere who kicked me out of here when I came looking. He was at the Quirinale Palace when Sordi was laying down the law to us all, about where we can go, what we can do. Two steps behind that cunning old bastard he was, pulling his strings too these days, I guess.”

“Who?” she insisted.

“The TV said he was important. Something to do with security … They called him Palombo.”

20

The Trevi fountain didn’t look any different. Nothing had happened. Still, he felt everyone was looking at him. The three of them in their nice, comfortable villa outside Tarquinia most of all.

Joseph Priest put his head down, slipped the detonator back into his pocket, wiped his sweaty hands on his jeans, took the thing out, and tried again. Twice.

What was it Deniz said? If at first you don’t succeed … get closer.

Which was a very easy statement from someone sitting on a rich man’s patio miles away, laughing at all this down a phone line.

He tried to imagine what it would be like to be free and penniless in Italy. He could do better than sell cheap bags. He could steal and bully, wriggle his way into any number of scams. Except that he would be just one more penniless black African among the tide of clandestini trying to scrape a living off the street. Even if he managed to escape the wrath of the Mungiki forever — and that he somehow doubted — Joseph Priest wondered what he might achieve in a world where, at the age of twenty-eight, he had to begin again from scratch, just as he had as a nine-year-old beggar in Kibera, Nairobi’s slum, the biggest in Africa they said, almost as if it were a matter of pride.

“Deniz, Deniz,” Priest murmured, taking a couple of strides nearer the fountain, checking his watch, seeing he was now a minute late, and the second hand seemed to have picked up speed. “You’d better not be kidding me, my man.”

He dried his fingers once again, took a deep breath, and pushed the button. Then again. One more step forward. A third try.

Nothing happened. The only phone they gave him was on the wall opposite, recording his failure. He’d no way of calling them, telling them the truth.

It just doesn’t work. I tried. Really. I did.

Maybe the batteries had gone flat. Maybe the ancient stone beneath Neptune’s feet was so thick, the twenty-first century couldn’t penetrate it. Or the waters of some imperial-era aqueduct had seeped their way into the electronics the Turk had managed to smuggle into the fountain system a few nights before.

The bomb didn’t work and it never would.

Joseph Priest knew that, somehow. Just to prove it to himself, he barged back through the crowd, elbowing everyone out of his way, a cop at one point, even, and the American woman — the looker, the one who’d told him to beat it just a few minutes earlier.

He got to the edge of the fountain and found himself giggling for some reason. Priest pulled out the remote, leaned over the stone wall, grinned at the people round him. Goggle-eyed teenagers, fashion professionals. Photographers. A few tourists too. He pumped the button repeatedly. It was dead. As dead as they ought to be.

He looked at the young girl next to him, grinned, and said, “I guess it’s your lucky day.”

Then he threw Deniz Nesin’s little black toy into the foaming waters of the Trevi Fountain, where it sank beneath the surface to join a glittering collection of coins.

He turned. The American woman and the big guy with the sunglasses were there, up close, staring at him.

She threw back her head. Her hair was blond going on red. Long and soft.

“Sadly,” she said, “I don’t think it’s yours, Joseph.”

He managed to elbow the young kid next to him hard in the ribs, and the way she recoiled from the blow, shrieking in pain and shock, at least gave him a body in the way.

Running was never a problem. He’d been doing that most of his life. But when he got to the edge of the crowd, going back the way he came, toward the ice cream place he’d never revisit, he was shocked to see they were following him, with weapons in their hands. They were close and all they were looking at was him.

Joseph Priest felt, at that moment, scared, and a fool. He dumped the bags, dumped everything in his pockets, all those items that might incriminate him, then took to his heels and ran, wondering where he could hide now, knowing there was no way home.

21

“Am I the only one who finds it remarkable that Luca Palombo was there twenty years ago too?” Teresa Lupo wondered. They were back in the apartment, with Falcone, Silvio, and the Englishwoman, and Teresa was astonished to discover no one seemed much interested in what she and Peroni had found out at the Villa Giulia.

“I’m sorry, I thought you knew already,” Elizabeth Murray told the pathologist. “Of course Palombo was part of the investigation. He was a senior Carabinieri officer. It was pretty obvious to everyone he was going places. If a man like that hadn’t been part of the Blue Demon case, that would have been odd.” She studied them, a large, exhausted figure clutching her walking stick, immobile in one of the threadbare chairs. “Well, wouldn’t it?”

“It would have been very odd,” Falcone agreed. “You really must try to avoid seeing conspiracies in everything, Teresa.”

“Then why didn’t he tell you at the briefing yesterday?” Peroni asked.

“Because it wasn’t relevant,” Elizabeth replied. “Is that all you found out at the Villa Giulia? I’m sorry. I could have saved you the journey. I was rather hoping …”

“No, it’s not all,” Teresa snapped.

“Well?” Falcone asked when she said nothing more.

“It’s the fact that all we can see about this case is what people choose to put in front of us. There’s no …” She struggled for the right word. “… no dust. No traces left behind. No stray pieces anywhere, not a single witness, not a photograph that hasn’t come out of Palombo’s album. Not even one member of staff at the museum who saw a thing.”

“There were renovations,” Elizabeth Murray reminded her. “The place was closed to the public. It was the weekend, so there were no academic staff there.”

“The caretaker turned up not long after they found the bodies,” Peroni cut in. “He didn’t look the sort to keep his nose out of anything.”

Teresa felt grateful for his intervention. She could tell what they were thinking, the Englishwoman and Falcone. That she wasn’t a cop. That she was out of her depth, flinching at shadows no one else could see.

“They kept the caretaker away from the bodies,” Teresa added.

“We always keep civilians away from the bodies,” Silvio Di Capua said from the computer, then shut up when she glared at him.

“I’m telling you,” Teresa insisted, “something about this is just plain wrong. Two dead people in a museum. No one sees anything. No one has a story to tell. Not a report on file anywhere. How do you explain that, Silvio?”

“It was a long time ago,” he said. “From what I can tell, the Carabinieri don’t have anything on their present system from then. Unless it’s live, of course. Why should they? We wouldn’t.”

“Are you serious?” she shrieked. “Eight people died. For a week or so everyone thought Italy was back in the terror years again. Someone murdered the Frascas. The Petrakis couple. Those three kids in the farmhouse near Tarquinia. The carabiniere. And you’re telling me there’s nothing anywhere on their system, on ours, on the ministry’s …?”

“You’re judging them on the basis of how we work now,” Di Capua declared. “Twenty years ago they used different standards, different methodologies. Trying to fathom what they were doing — it’s the same kind of thing Petrakis was trying to work out as a historian. Looking at fragments, hoping to decode them.”

Peroni came to her aid again. “At least he had some fragments. It’s very unusual to have nothing at all. Don’t you think?” He frowned. “Leo? We could approach Palombo and ask for some background. There’s got to be some sly way of doing it without letting him know what’s going on here. Just a request for information. I can handle it. I just act dumb and ask for some clarification. He’d never know.…”

Falcone shook his head. He looked tired, Teresa thought. His tanned features were gaunt, his silver beard less than perfectly trimmed. They were locked out of the heart of the operation, stranded in a strange, cold place none of them quite understood. The inspector was never beneath a little intrigue. But he wanted to be the perpetrator of intrigue, not its victim.

“And what would you ask for? If it was of any use, Palombo would know why we were asking. Then we’d compromise ourselves, Commissario Esposito, the president himself. You know our orders. We can’t approach anyone in the team at the Quirinale, not under any circumstances. I will not break that promise, or allow any of you to do so, either. We can’t take the risk.”

Teresa slammed her fists down on the table. Silvio Di Capua’s machine jumped.

“I don’t believe this! So how are we supposed to pass the day, Leo? We can’t talk to anyone. We can’t access any contemporary reports except some ancient inquiry that got buried before it could get anywhere.”

A thought struck her. She looked at Elizabeth Murray. “Who did kill your report?”

“No one killed it,” the Englishwoman insisted. “It seemed pointless. Everyone concurred. Except for Marco Costa, as I said.”

Falcone was staring at her. “These things don’t just die of their own accord. Someone must have planted the idea.”

She looked a little out of sorts. The discomfort didn’t sit well on her.

“Who?” Peroni insisted.

“It was just gossip. I was just the secretary. They kept me out of the room when they wanted to talk privately. But …” She glanced at Teresa, who was unable to read the woman’s expression. Relief or resentment? It was impossible to tell. “Marco told me it was Campagnolo who kept pressing for the commission to be concluded. He was very insistent. He had powerful friends, even back then.”

“So that’s two people you met yesterday who were directly involved in the Frasca case and never bothered to mention it.”

“Rome is a small place …” Falcone began.

“So I can see. Silvio. Did you look up that detail on the boy?”

Falcone seemed bemused. “What detail?”

“Show him,” she ordered.

Di Capua pulled up the photo she’d taken with her phone in the bloody room in the house in the Via Rasella. Danny Frasca dead on the floor, a bloody mess. The assistant pathologist zoomed in on a patch of skin on the upper chest.

“Palombo’s people snatched the body away from me before I could look properly.” Teresa stared at the screen, and the conviction kept growing. “Except for a convenient locket round the neck, what evidence is there that this is the son of Renzo and Marie Frasca?”

“DNA,” Elizabeth Murray told her. “The best evidence there is.”

Silvio Di Capua glanced at his boss as if he were beginning to understand where this was going. “That’s not evidence,” he pointed out. “It’s hearsay. Palombo told us it was a fact. He hasn’t shown us any DNA report. I can’t find one on the system, either, and it ought to be there.”

“There’s a tattoo of a rose on his shoulder,” Teresa went on. “Judging by the appearance, I’d say it was old. So old that I’d hazard a guess it was put there when he was a young boy.”

Peroni said, “The Frascas wouldn’t do that to their own child. No one would.”

Di Capua shook his head. “Not many people would. I did a little research, though. The only place I can see that it’s done is in Russia. Among the criminal classes. The tattoo was a sign of their lineage.” He looked at them. “The rose meant ‘This is the child of a Mafia member.’”

No one spoke for a moment. Then Teresa said, “Afghanistan was under Russian occupation from 1979 until 1988, when they retreated. It wasn’t a rout. In the beginning there was some loose Russian support for the Najibullah government in Kabul, but pretty soon Russia was falling apart. By 1991 Moscow had problems of its own. There were Russians still there, though. In Kabul as advisors. As criminals too, helping run the opium trade. When the Taliban arrived in 1996 …”

She fell quiet, remembering. The return of the Blue Demon had sent her back to her own computer the night before, to revive her memories of this tumultuous time, a period not so long ago when the world seemed to shift on its own axis.

“The first thing they did was torture, castrate, and then hang Najibullah from a lamppost in the center of town. After that they rounded up everyone they didn’t like and the killings began. Any Russian criminals who got left behind wouldn’t have lasted five minutes. A young boy with a tattoo … who knows? They might have kept him in case he was useful later.”

“This is far-fetched,” Elizabeth protested, though with little conviction.

“As far-fetched as the idea Petrakis took the Frasca boy all the way to Afghanistan in the first place? And then back again? You were the one who said that didn’t make sense. Not that picking up some local Russian orphan and returning him to Rome as Danny Frasca makes sense, either. Particularly”—Teresa felt her head begin to spin—“if Petrakis needs the covert support of some Ministry of Interior hack to make the trick work. I don’t know if this is crazy or not, and I can’t find out. We don’t have forensic. We don’t have access to the body. Or Palombo’s report. It’s almost as if they exiled us out here as a joke. They know we can’t make any progress trapped in this place. We don’t have the resources. We can’t prove or disprove anything.”

This was Falcone’s call. It had to be.

“You could call Esposito,” Peroni suggested to Falcone. “Tell him this is some setup.”

“He sent us here,” Di Capua reminded them. “Or Dario Sordi did. Or … who?”

Unconsciously, Teresa realized, they were all looking at Elizabeth Murray.

“Sorry,” the Englishwoman said, with a shrug. “All I got was a call asking me to come out of retirement. I did warn you. This world is a hall of mirrors.”

“We stay, we work, we talk to people,” Falcone insisted. “We’re not sidelined. Nic’s out there. Let’s find some more names for him to chase. What about the three carabinieri who went to the farmhouse in Tarquinia? Who were they?”

Di Capua’s fingers began to clatter the keyboard again. “The one who died was called Lorenzo Bartoli. The other two were Ettore Rufo and Beppe Cattaneo.”

“Cattaneo?” Peroni asked.

“That’s right,” Di Capua answered. “The dead man came from Tarquinia. The other two from Rome. Cattaneo …”

Peroni scowled. “Cattaneo was a crook. We found him with half his face shot off in a car out near Fiumicino ten years or so ago. I was on the case. The guy was as crooked as they come. Some Sicilian drug gang had him on the payroll. We had word he worked as a hit man for them from time to time. Cattaneo liked that kind of job. Never did find who killed the bastard, but there were plenty of people with good reason.”

Falcone nodded and said, “I remember.”

“What the hell were two carabinieri from Rome doing out there in Tarquinia?” Peroni asked. “They’ve enough local people on the ground. Elizabeth?”

“I don’t know. I never asked. It didn’t seem—”

“Relevant,” Peroni interrupted. “You got anything on Ettore Rufo? The name means nothing to me.”

Di Capua pointed at the screen. “He took early retirement one year after the case. No trace of him on any of the systems after that.”

“Find the man,” Falcone ordered. “Find me …”

“Behold!” Di Capua cried, and turned to them with a broad grin on his face, flourishing his chubby hand at the monitor. “Bartoli’s older brother was in the Carabinieri too. He quit two months after his brother died. The system says he’s now a coastguardsman in some place called Porto Ercole. Where’s that?”

“North of Tarquinia. Just over the Tuscan border. Nic can get there.”

“We’re not supposed to go into Tuscany without permission,” Peroni pointed out.

“No,” Falcone agreed serenely. “We’re not.”

22

Anna Ybarra sat in silence next to the two men huddled over the laptop computer in the villa’s dining room, trying to understand what was happening. It seemed impossible to her. There was nothing like this in the little village of Hernani. Nothing at all.

Somehow Deniz had managed to hook the cell phone to the computer screen. They saw the scene at the Trevi Fountain unfold in miniature, moment by moment. It felt wrong, like watching a bad homemade movie. Joseph working his way through the crowd, turning from a visible dark spot to little more than a pinprick and then disappearing, only to return. And still no explosion.

Had Joseph really thrown the remote into the fountain? She thought so, and so did the two men with her. Deniz sighed when they saw the movement of the Kenyan’s arm, a gesture that seemed to indicate, even through this shaky, indistinct medium, a sense of despair and surrender.

“Might have known,” the Turk muttered, and took a sip of his water.

“It didn’t work, did it?” Anna told him. She hadn’t liked the Kenyan much, hadn’t appreciated the way he stared at her, openly, lasciviously. He’d taken the risk, though, while they sat around drinking, swimming, waiting. “He tried. What else could he do?”

“He did try,” Petrakis agreed, then picked up his own phone.

“Who are those people?” she asked, pointing at the picture on the computer. “In the crowd. There’s a man and woman there. They look interested in him.”

“It’s a fashion show,” Petrakis told her. “You’d expect security.”

“He spoke to them. They followed him. Why?”

“You just can’t get the staff …” the Italian murmured.

Then he keyed a short number into his phone and turned to smile at them, waiting, his finger over the button.

“Tell me what you think of Joseph,” he asked.

“He was a comrade,” she answered immediately. “One of us.”

“Really?” Petrakis said, mockingly.

She felt a red flare of anger in her head. “Why do you keep us in the dark, Andrea? How can we work together if we know nothing?”

“I’m a general. You’re a soldier. You know what you need to know. Now … Deniz?”

The Turk did something to the keyboard. The screen split into two windows. One was the shaky video of the Trevi Fountain. The other appeared to be a live newscast from the piazza of the Quirinale Palace. All the G8 leaders were lined up for the cameras, smiling, silent in the sun.

Petrakis’s finger hovered over the phone. “Watch.”

He pressed the key. After a long second the picture at the Trevi Fountain changed. A dust cloud began to boil, shakily, from beneath the group of statues at the back, obscuring everything. Then a violent crimson geyser gushed from the mist, raining down gory liquid and rubble on the gathering in the cobbled piazza, sending them shrieking into one another, turning a half-orderly crowd into a screaming, terrified mob.

A single drop of what appeared to be blood landed on the camera lens. Anna watched as it began to streak slowly downward, smearing everything a lurid shade of red. When the storm that had roared out from the Trevi subsided, the fountain was transformed.

Neptune lay in pieces, a stone corpse, facedown, ruined limbs torn asunder amidst a gushing scarlet stream. Everywhere the water had taken on a familiar, livid hue.

Sweat started to dampen her palms, a pain began to bite at her temples. In the window on the screen next to this terrible scene, they could see the world leaders, less than a kilometer away, on the hill, recoiling in shock at the noise of the nearby blast. Their faces were bloodless, their eyes blank with anger and fear. Dark-suited men with coils emerging from their perfect, standard-issue haircuts were beginning to hurry them away from the podium, back into the palace behind.

Terror had arrived in Rome — not the private kind, reserved for the likes of the politician they had kidnapped in the dead of night, but a different sort of beast, one so bold and vicious it felt free to roam the city in the bright, clear light of a summer’s day.

She looked at the fountain again, fearing to see the injuries, knowing she had to look. Desperate shapes stumbled through the dust cloud, hands to heads, shrieking, blinded. A few bodies sprawled on the floor. Police officers had clapped handkerchiefs over their mouths and were trying to make their way into the howling mob to help. Yet, as the dust storm began to settle, it didn’t look like a massacre. The damage to the famous landmark seemed limited to missing stone limbs and cracked frozen waves at the feet of the figures where the bloodied water had burst upon the crowd.

Anna Ybarra watched carefully, trying to understand. It was as if someone had placed a blood clot in the Trevi’s thrashing, flowing vein, then punctured it, sending a pressurized burst of fake gore out onto the models and photographers and curious, gawping bystanders in the crowd.

It was a piece of theater, a visual political gesture, one that possessed a vicious, cruel streak of brilliance.

“Did you kill anyone?” she asked quietly.

“Probably not,” Petrakis said without looking at her. “That wasn’t the point.” He scowled at the screen, as if trying to clarify his thoughts. “I don’t want their fear clouded by hatred. Not yet.”

“You never really needed Joseph there, did you?” she asked quietly. For the first time, she feared him.

Andrea Petrakis watched the mayhem on the screen, amused by his handiwork.

“Of course I did,” he responded, casting her an icy, disappointed look. “Just not for the reason he thought.”

The explosion had been perfectly timed to match the appearance of the world leaders on the podium outside the Quirinale. She’d watched Andrea give Joseph the Rolex that morning before he set off. The time was wrong, too fast. It had to be. The Nigerian had attempted to detonate the blast a good two minutes before the correct time. He was as much a part of the show as the fake blood and the hidden explosives.

Petrakis turned to Deniz Nesin. “You can email that to the right people? Al Jazeera. The BBC. CNN.”

“In a moment …” the Turk replied.

“And they won’t be able to trace it from here?”

Deniz gazed at him, offended by the question, and said nothing.

“What about Joseph?” she demanded. “If he talks …”

Petrakis wasn’t even listening.

23

Something happened just after he started to run, something loud and shocking and deadly. Joseph Priest wanted to turn to the pair pursuing him and scream: It wasn’t me.

The soft, dull roar of an explosion had sent flocks of grubby pigeons scattering into the bright blue sky, shaking the windows of the stores he ran past, putting fear on the faces of the men and women he bumped into as he fled. Within seconds a cacophony of sirens began to rise from the streets around the Trevi Fountain. Joseph Priest raced as quickly as he could in the opposite direction, determined to find sanctuary somewhere, anywhere.

Another narrow cobbled alley. Another line of fashion shops and stores selling cosmetics. Huge photos of beautiful women, smiling down at him, their flawless suntanned flesh seemingly so real, so exposed he felt he could reach out and touch the soft, stray cloud of gentle down on their forearms.

As he fell deeper into the fashion area of the city, becoming ever more lost with every step, he began to feel he was drowning in the modern world he had, for so long, coveted. He stumbled, panting, through the streets that ran from the Spanish Steps to the Corso, a tangle of medieval alleys that had metamorphosed into temples for shoppers who’d pay more for a tiny scrap of denim, manufactured in some distant Third World sweatshop, than he could dream of earning in a month. A universe of brands and trademarks consumed him from every angle, totemic symbols of a materialism he had craved for as long as he could remember. The faces of international supermodels and sportsmen grinned down at his flight from the clothes stores in the Via Condotti and beyond, as he fought to lose the scary couple who’d picked him out at the Trevi Fountain and known his name all along.

This was not his world, he thought, gasping for breath, too afraid to look behind him for fear of what he might see.

He dashed past an ancient statue, reclining in a fountain, green and algaed, surrounded by water that still bore the clear, untainted sheen of the Acqua Vergine, upstream perhaps of whatever strange device Deniz had placed in the flow near the Trevi. He glanced at the sign on the wall — the Via dei Greci — and realized he understood enough Italian to know what it meant. The Street of the Greeks.

The face of Andrea Petrakis popped unbidden into his head, bigger and scarier than the gigantic soccer players and beautiful women leering at him from the storefronts.

Priest dashed into a dark side alley.

A sharp, agonizing pain began to stab at his stomach. He doubled over. As his head went down he realized he’d blundered into a dead end. The cul-de-sac was full of public trash receptacles, green and blue, overflowing with trash. A few meters away stood the grimy, smoke-stained wall that must have marked the rear of some building in the adjoining alley.

He took three hoarse breaths, then looked up, half knowing what he’d see.

They were out of breath too. And angry. The woman more than the man. Her face was shiny with sweat.

There was nowhere to run, even if he had the strength.

Joseph Priest knew when he was beaten. He raised his hands in the air, closed his eyes briefly, tried to collect his thoughts, then opened them. He said, “I got no gun. Nothing.”

They had, though. Two small pistols low at their sides, and they were walking toward him.

“You listening to me?” Priest shoved his arms as high as he could stretch.

From somewhere nearby came the sound of another siren, its tone descending the scale as the source disappeared down some unseen street.

“No gun,” Priest emphasized. “No nothing. You understand?”

They stopped in front of him and he knew for sure now: She was the boss.

The burly man looked at her, as if waiting for some kind of instruction.

“Listen,” Priest began to plead. “I can tell you where they are. I can tell you what they’ve got. What they plan to do. Everything.”

Not a word, not an emotion.

“E-e-everything,” he stuttered. “They’re crazy. Animals. Lunatics.”

Very slowly, to show there was no ill intent, no concealed weapon, he lowered his left hand, placed it on his heart, and looked the woman in the eye.

“I swear, lady. Whatever you want, it’s yours. The Mungiki made me do these things. I hate those bastards.” He glanced out at the street. “I can take you to these people. To Andrea Petrakis, right now. You never get a problem again. Not from Joe Priest.”

It was as good a performance as he’d ever given. He felt proud of it. The hefty man with the gun was still watching him, hesitating. But the woman …

There was something here Joe didn’t understand.

She flashed her eyes at the figure beside her and said, “Do it.”

Then she turned on her heel.

Joseph Priest, who wished he’d had time to tell them this was his real name, looked up at the guy and found he had to shield his eyes against the light because the sun was that dazzling, that insistent.

“Do what …?” he began to ask, until he realized it was a stupid question, and that he knew the answer already.