City of Fear

43

“You want what?” Bernie Stackler yelled into his phone.

The cafe in the Via dei Serpenti was empty except for a couple at the end of the room. The anonymous contact who’d promised to meet them there had never materialized. It was that kind of day.

The TV cameraman listened to his distant producer, then cupped his hand over the handset and turned to the reporter they’d given him, Julia Barnes.

“You know what this is? This is JP Two all over again. Getting jerked around Rome looking for fairy dust while these fat bastards in New York sit on their butts laughing like baboons.”

He’d hated the funeral of the pope. The Vatican’s security had got so heavy with the media that they’d ordered him and a female reporter to buy a high-def camcorder, dress up as tourists, pose as mourning Catholics, and sneak in past the guards. It worked, almost too well. They’d got right up to the bier, filmed mourners, talked to everyone, got material that was so close, so personal, the network balked at using some of it. Not that New York was happy. Dan Fillmore, the selfsame producer who was on duty now, had been on his case throughout, whining, “But where’s the … grief?”

Stackler hadn’t managed to get it across to the moron. A very old, very well-respected old man had died, after a long illness. People were sad. They weren’t desolate. It wasn’t Princess Di. The Rome that the foreign camera crews wanted—“a city in mourning”—didn’t exist outside the imagination of headline writers. Beyond the lines of sad, resigned Catholics bunched together in the streets around the Vatican, life went on pretty much as normal. The only way they could get “grief” was to pay for it, from anyone willing to act. Which was what Stackler resorted to in the end. Not that it would work now.

“What exactly is it you want?” he demanded, trying not to think of the smug smile he knew would be creasing Fillmore’s clean-shaven, executive baby face at that moment. It was so easy to be a desk man these days.

“You need me to tell you?”

“Yes, Dan. Frankly, I do. You see, I’m here. You’re there. I see what I see. I don’t see what you want me to see. So you be a little clearer and let me try to understand.”

“Incredible,” the voice on the line grunted. “I can’t believe I’m saying this. We want something exclusive, Bernie. Remember that word? Long time since you heard it, I guess.”

Stackler fought hard against his rising fury. “You do watch the material we send you, don’t you? All the stuff about how this is a ghost city now? How none of us can move anywhere for all the goddamned security? Three people died when they hit Ciampino. There may be more before the day is out. Plenty in the hospital. I could try and talk to some of them.…”

“Sick foreigners in a bed. That’s going to go down big.”

“They’re part of the story.”

“They’re extras. I want the stars. I want pictures of the First Lady looking scared. I want to feel her fear. I want—”

“Funnily enough, they’re not giving interviews right now.”

“We can’t air excuses, Bernie. Sadly. Just do the usual thing. Pay someone to get inside a neighboring building. Go on the roof. Get an overview of the palace or something — people walking the grounds.”

“No one is going to open their door to a stranger today.”

“Helicopter?”

“Oh, please.”

“You could at least try,” Fillmore whined.

Stackler thought of the armed officers with their automatic weapons wandering the streets. The guard posts. The way every rooftop was being watched.

“I am trying. I got a call from someone who said they could get me something. That’s what I’m waiting for.”

“Get you what?”

“If I knew that, I’d be there, not here, wouldn’t I?”

“A call?” The disembodied voice sounded skeptical.

“Someone phoned and said they’d meet us with a lead. No, I don’t know who. Occasionally life works that way. I leave my card in the strangest places.”

“Yeah. Normally ones with a liquor license. If your new friend doesn’t show, you’ve got to come up with something else. Find some viewpoint.”

He groaned. “That would be really smart, wouldn’t it? I stick a camera lens out from some building and get my ass shot off.”

“Oh, I understand.…” There was a long, sarcastic drawl in Stackler’s ear. “You want the safe jobs now. What would you prefer? The Emmys? Skateboarding dogs?”

“Ha, ha.”

Julia Barnes sighed, went over to the counter, and came back with two more coffees and some biscotti. She was as sick of the situation as he was.

“Let me get this straight,” said the voice in New York. “This is the biggest story in the world. Rome is paralyzed. You got some terrorist team carrying out stuff on a daily basis. No one’s coming out of their houses. No one’s allowed to walk down the street much anymore. And what you got to give me? Local color. Wallpaper. Empty street scenes. For Christ’s sake, Bernie. There’s nothing you’ve filed for the last two days I couldn’t have got off YouTube. Sometimes better.”

“Enough,” Stackler said, with what he felt was remarkable restraint. “We have media credentials. There’s one arranged photo shoot outside the palace, in the piazza. You get that. Then anything else we can find.”

“YouTube—”

“Kindly do not say that word in my presence ever again.”

“YouTube.”

Stackler blinked and was grateful several thousand miles separated him and Dan Fillmore.

“Listen,” he went on, trying to sound reasonable. “When I go to Iraq. Or Afghanistan. Or some other hellhole you wouldn’t dare set foot in, there I risk my ass for the corporation. In Rome …” It wasn’t right. He knew the city well. He loved the place, had even thought of moving there once upon a time, until he realized he’d never be able to earn a decent living. “Here, you don’t get that privilege. We’re going to play this the way I want. Cautious, meekly. It’s not right out there, and I can’t begin to tell you why.”

“Then I guess we’ll have to hope someone else has got the guts to do a professional job.”

Stackler could picture the man slamming down the phone at that moment. He’d done it so many times, on so many teams around the world.

Julia Barnes was holding out the cup of coffee. He didn’t want it. They’d drunk too much already, wandering the deserted streets, trying to talk their way in through the cordons. The Quirinale was just up the hill, blocked off from everything by closed roads, guard posts, and ranks of armed officers. Come eleven-thirty they’d be able to get through briefly for the media event — if it still happened. But it wouldn’t be anything great. Just a line of distant faces outside the palace, he guessed. It was that kind of assignment.

He nibbled at one of the biscotti and looked at her. “You know what I’d really like to do?”

“What?”

She was pretty. New to the network. Maybe thirty. Someone who’d worked her way up through the grind of little city outfits.

“This guy who phoned isn’t going to show. I say we do the photo call. Then afterwards we go get lunch at this restaurant I know in the ghetto. Artichokes and lamb. A bottle of white wine. An afternoon doze.”

He couldn’t not look at her when he said that.

“That would do my career a lot of good, wouldn’t it?” Julia Barnes said, looking at him as if he were slightly soft in the head.

They weren’t alone anymore. The other couple in the cafe had stood up and come over. For some reason Stackler glanced at the counter. The old man who’d served them was no longer there. Even this bright, clean city-center coffee bar seemed to have been emptied by the fog of fear that had descended on them all.

“We couldn’t help overhearing,” said the man, a handsome, middle-aged Italian about Stackler’s age, wearing sunglasses even inside. “You’re American media? You need a camera angle or something? On the Quirinale? If you go out back …”

“You bet,” Julia said right away, getting up. “You got one? We can pay.”

“Wait, wait, wait,” Stackler tried to say, but she was following them already, out to the door at the rear of the place. “Did you phone us or something? Was that you?”

“Phoned?” the man said. It was impossible to judge his expression. The shades …

Stackler didn’t mind. Not if it was easy. Not if it was safe.

He tried to think this through. He traveled so much, to so many different parts of the world. But he kept a mental picture of each in his head, a map he could use to find the best place to be. It was part of the job. The most important part sometimes.

The Via dei Serpenti, the street of the snakes, some stray thought told him, lay in Monti, downhill from the Quirinale Palace. There’d be views back to the Forum and over to the ruins of Trajan’s Markets. Not that they’d be of any use. But a clear line of sight uphill … He couldn’t imagine it.

The Italian couple stepped back and let him and Julia walk through the narrow door. Then the pair followed and closed it behind them.

There was another door, open — one that led to the cellar, down a long flight of old stone steps. At the bottom, visible under a single naked lightbulb, was the old man who’d served them when they came in. He was trussed up like a chicken, gagged, hands behind his back, frightened eyes staring at them behind a pair of wire-framed spectacles, one lens of which was broken.

Something cold pressed against Stackler’s neck.

He put up his hands, not daring to look, and said, “I got a wife and kids. Two daughters, four and two. Please don’t make them lose their daddy.” He thought of all the times he’d rehearsed this line, in Baghdad, in Pakistan, in Kabul. “You guys have got a point. We all know it.”

The words sounded weak and stupid the moment he said them, and Stackler couldn’t avoid the fury he saw rising alongside the fear in Julia Barnes’s dark, attractive face.

“I want your money and your credentials,” the man said.

Stackler waved his arms higher and nodded. “Take anything you want.”

The contents of his jacket were gone in an instant. He waited, wondering. The barrel of the gun never moved.

“Little people,” the woman said obscurely, and somehow he felt it was a compliment.

A foot connected with his spine. He felt himself falling down the stairs, hands against his head, thinking of home.

When Bernie Stackler came to, he was trussed like the cafe guy next to him. Julia Barnes was in the same state. The solitary light came from a narrow line of glass at the rear, which surely only connected with a courtyard at the back of the building. But he didn’t feel too bad. A part of him wanted to laugh, to call Dan Fillmore in New York and boast, “See, kid. This kind of shit never happens to you.”

But they’d gagged him too, as they’d gagged his reporter. He shuffled upright and made himself as comfortable as he could.

44

There was no broken circle of noisy, angry vehicles backed up by the Colosseum, no choking line of traffic behind the bus and tram lines. Falcone found a parking space near the hospital in San Giovanni with ease. They walked to the apartment without passing a single living soul.

Silvio Di Capua had sent out for a change of clothes. Costa tossed him the SIM card from the phone, then he and Rosa went to sleep for a few hours, at Falcone’s insistence. When he got up, Silvio, Teresa, and Elizabeth Murray were already around the computer, chattering and pointing at the screen. Falcone was in the kitchen. Commissario Esposito was there with him, talking quietly as the two men sipped coffees. It could have been any ordinary surveillance scene, were it not for the state of the city outside.

Rosa came in, fresh from the bathroom, her hair still wet and wrapped in a towel. She looked older than a day before, Costa thought. There were signs of a new, unwanted wisdom and dark shadows beneath her eyes. He recalled the journey to the Maremma, Mirko Oliva amusing them all with his stories of a wild childhood on Monte Argentario, raising a rare sparkle in her serious face. He had wondered whether there might, one day, be something between the two young officers. Hoped so, if he were honest. She’d never had a relationship — not that anyone in the Questura knew of, at least, and it was a place with few secrets. Rosa Prabakaran deserved a little happiness in her life. The years she’d spent with the police had been far from easy.

“Take a look at this,” Teresa said.

Something popped out of the printer in front of her. He picked up the page and shared it with Rosa. It was a familiar item: a police report, this one dated from five years before. The name of Stefan Kyriakis sat at the top. The dead man he’d stumbled upon in the tomb of the Blue Demon was pictured in a standard Questura mug shot. With a rough mustache and an unpleasant, aggressive scowl, he wasn’t a pretty sight. The charges were ugly too: smuggling weapons from Corsica into Italy through the main port of Monte Argentario. Six pallets of automatic rifles, with accompanying ammunition.

“Porto San to Stefano,” Costa said. “That’s a fifteen-minute drive from Porto Ercole. It keeps coming back to the Maremma, doesn’t it?”

“What happened to him?” Commissario Esposito asked. He and Falcone had joined them silently. For once they didn’t look at loggerheads.

“He was charged with arms smuggling and beating up a couple of the officers who apprehended him,” Silvio Di Capua responded. “Never came to court. No reason given. The man doesn’t appear in our records ever again.”

The commissario scratched his head and stared at Falcone, as if looking for help. He was in full uniform. His face was gray and tired. It must have been a long night for everyone.

“So?” Esposito asked. “What about this phone lead you have?”

“A SIM card?” Silvio Di Capua said. “That’s a lead?”

“You can find out who he called,” Costa began.

“It’s a SIM card, Nic. The phone logs the calls. Not the card. All that keeps is the network, the number, and any texts. Of which there are none, by the way.”

Teresa gave him a filthy look. “We must be able to find out something.”

“I’ve passed on the details to a couple of phone geeks I know. If we’re lucky, we may be able to track down the account holder. That’s not strictly legal, by the way.…”

“Don’t tell me this,” Esposito warned him. “Do you have no answers at all?”

“We’ve got plenty of questions,” the inspector replied. “Why did those two carabinieri come up from Rome intent on killing those kids in the Petrakises’ shack?”

“You don’t know that,” Esposito grumbled.

Falcone shook his head. “What other explanation fits? They murdered those students, and the local officer who happened to be fool enough to go along with them. Nic and Rosa spoke to his brother. He saw the body in the morgue, even though they tried to keep it hidden. The bullet wound was in the back of the neck.”

“It’s not just him,” Teresa intervened. “There was the girl. Nadia Ambrosini.” She hammered at the computer until she found what she wanted: the photograph of the dead students after the attack. “Nadia is holding the gun. The story is that she shot the other two, then killed herself when she realized they were going to be captured. Why? She was a bank manager’s daughter. The director of the Villa Giulia knew her. She was an airhead. Into dope and disco. Not theatrical suicides. Come on”—she waved at the photo on the screen, her face the very picture of disgust—“a weapon in the hand? Please. This is posed. An act. A riddle. Like Giovanni Batisti, shot dead, then butchered to make it look as if he’s some kind of human sacrifice. Like …”

She picked up a piece of paper. It was a page from a police notepad, with Falcone’s writing and the Roman numerals. “Like these.” Teresa shook her head. “Twenty years ago Andrea Petrakis leaves a cryptic message about Julius Caesar after he’s butchered Renzo and Marie Frasca at the Villa Giulia. He does the same when he kills Batisti. And next to the body of this arms smuggler, who’s clearly just made some kind of delivery.” She stared at them. “Am I the only one thinking this?”

It had occurred to Costa too.

“It’s a message for the same person. Whoever was supposed to read it back then is still here to receive it now.”

He turned to Esposito and said, “We need to know the schedule for the summit. At least that might help us understand what they’re planning to attack.”

Commissario Esposito, a good man at heart, but a politician too, shook his head and stared at them glumly.

“They could be planning to attack anything. Besides, do you think I’d get an answer?”

“There are questions we need to put to some of those people,” Teresa told him.

Esposito picked up his car keys. He wanted out of this conversation. “We’re in the middle of a national emergency. Palombo is one of the most senior security officials involved. You want me to call him in for an interview in the Questura?”

“If that’s what it takes,” Rosa began. “Mirko—”

The commissario glared at her. “Do not dare to use the death of an officer in that fashion, Agente. I answer to those above me, and they answer to Luca Palombo, who has already decreed that Oliva’s death is a matter for the Carabinieri. Find me some facts that will allow me to question that position and I will drag the bastards responsible in front of a magistrate myself.” Then, more quietly, “But a set of numbers scrawled on a wall, a host of suppositions — these do not represent evidence, and on a day like this I will not waste time trying to pretend they do.”

He regarded each of them in turn. “Find me something of substance. If not, then Palombo will have his way and we will see what happens when this madness is over.”

“They buried it once,” Teresa cut in. “They’ll bury it again.”

“Some things are best buried,” Esposito replied. “It’s less painful that way.”

Then he took a theatrical look at his watch and declared, “I have a meeting at the Ministry in thirty minutes. We have nothing else to discuss here. If you find something, come first to me.”

They watched him leave.

Peroni leaped in. “I can try Cattaneo in America again.…”

“It’s four in the morning over there,” Teresa complained.

“I don’t care,” the big man replied.

Silvio Di Capua was printing out another page. “I’ve a name for the Frascas’ housekeeper. A woman. She must be elderly now. Lives in Testaccio. Is that any—”

“I’ll do it,” Costa said, and realized Rosa was watching him. “We’ll do it.”

“Good,” Falcone observed. “We’ll go through what we have and see if there’s something that’s been missed.”

Peroni was on the phone already. Di Capua and Elizabeth Murray were printing out more pages from the computer.

Costa went and located the clothes Silvio had got for them, cheap ones bought from a store around the corner, to save time and avoid any security people Palombo might have placed on their homes. He had jeans and a T-shirt. When Rosa came out from her room, she had on a simple lime-green skirt, shorter than anything he’d ever seen her wear, and a skimpy halter top. Big shades too, and a white plastic handbag.

She followed him down the stairs. Outside, she glanced up and down the empty street and said, “We must look like the only two tourists left in Rome. Is this meant to be a disguise?”

Probably, he thought. The address Peroni had found was near the Via Marmorata, a short drive away. Silvio had found them a scooter too, and a pair of fluorescent crash helmets.

“Nic?”

He watched her fasten the helmet. “What is it?”

“I still don’t understand why we’re alive and Mirko’s dead.”

“Perhaps we were lucky. Petrakis got distracted. Or careless.”

“Careless?” she repeated, staring at him.

“Sorry. That was a stupid thing to say.”

“We’re missing something, and you know it.”

“We’re missing lots.”

She watched him get on the scooter. “These people don’t know what’s true, what’s real anymore.”

“We’re real,” Costa said, and brought the little machine to life.

She climbed on behind him, holding his waist tightly as they rode out into the Via San Giovanni in Laterano.

45

“Signora Barnes?”

The carabiniere at the barrier barely glanced at her press ID card, with its new photo carefully inserted beneath the plastic.

“Si?” Anna Ybarra said automatically as she stepped into the scanner arch erected to deal with the long line of media queuing for the brief press conference. She passed through without so much as a beep.

“Grazie,” the officer said, and waved her on to join the snaking queue of bodies working their way onto the piazza and the rectangular space marked out for them in front of the palace.

It was just as Andrea Petrakis had said. There were two ways in. The narrow Vicolo Mazzarino that led from the Via Nazionale, the route she’d taken. And, on the opposite side of the square, along the Via della Dataria, which led down the steep hill, toward the Trevi Fountain and the main shopping street of the Via Corso, the way she’d use to leave.

She was wearing the clothes Petrakis had provided, an outfit waiting for her in the trailer: a thin wool pin-striped suit in charcoal gray. The kind of clothes a TV reporter might want for work. He was prepared. Had been prepared. And he’d briefed her too. Quickly, thoroughly, professionally, as they’d dressed that bright, clear morning, in a field where rowdy blackbirds were trumpeting another sunny day on the outskirts of Rome.

The media event went the way he said. Five speeches, mostly in English, for the benefit of the international media. The first came from the Italian president, Sordi, an upright, distinguished-looking man with a pendulous, sad face and an air of gravity that was impossible to ignore. She had read about him on the little computer they provided in Afghanistan, discovered he had an interesting, intriguing past that was difficult to connect with the august, calm figure she saw on the podium outside the Quirinale Palace. Next came some politics from his own prime minister, the familiar theatrical figure she had seen so many times on the TV in Spain, younger, snappier, more lightweight, yet somehow more powerful.

The British leader then spoke, since his country held the current presidency of the European Union, and afterwards the American, and finally the Russian, the only one who needed an interpreter.

She stood there, mesmerized. All of these men talked of the same thing. Of their sorrow at happenings in Rome, their sympathy with the relatives of those who had lost their lives, the determination such acts instilled in them to fight the good fight, for as long as it was needed.

Anna Ybarra never thought she would be so close to those who ran the world. Close up, even separated by a barrier and a small army of soldiers, police officers, and plainclothes security personnel, they looked quite ordinary as they began to sweat beneath the keen summer sun. They sounded sincere. They looked grave and stern and serious. There was conviction in the air. She could feel it, touch it, see it acknowledged by the nods of the reporters around her, whose questions, when they were allowed, seemed sanitized and predictable, organized in advance, tame invitations to an answer waiting to be delivered.

It took no more than fifteen minutes. Then the leaders stood still, barely smiling, for the cameras. It was over, too quickly, before anyone had said anything that mattered.

She found it impossible to dismiss from her head some of the things she had read about Dario Sordi. These mattered, yet not a single professional journalist around her had thought fit to raise them. Or perhaps they were simply too scared.

Before she knew it, Anna Ybarra found herself pushing to the front of the crowd, a question rising in her head, one she had to voice, though she accepted it was not part of the plan, and that Andrea Petrakis, if they ever met again — and that she doubted somehow — might kill her for its utterance.

“Mr. President! Mr. President!”

They were turning to go back into the palace. It was a stupid thing to shout. There were so many presidents there at that moment, and she really only wanted to talk to one.

“Presidente Sordi?”

The tall, elderly figure on the podium turned, hesitating.

Without thinking, she exclaimed, “Dígame!”

He gazed in her direction. There was puzzlement in his eyes, and perhaps something else. Then he walked back to the microphone and asked, “Do I know you, signora?”

“No, sir,” she shouted, heart beating quickly, her mind full of fear that she had gone too far. “Not at all.”

“You have a question?”

“I wondered …” The reporters around her were staring. She was out of line, asking something that was unexpected, unwanted. The security guards were closing ranks between the barrier and the figures outside the palace. There was so little time.

Anna Ybarra held up her media badge for all to see and said, “Of all the men and women here, you alone know what it is like to be called a terrorist. You’ve killed men in the street for no other reason than their nationality. How is this different?”

Dario Sordi gazed across the bright space between them and shrugged, an ordinary, humble gesture.

“I killed soldiers in uniform, with rifles in their hands. Not ordinary men and women struggling to get by. It’s a small difference, though not an insignificant one, I think. This was many years ago, when we were a nation at war, occupied by the enemy, fighting for our own freedom.” He thought for a moment, then added, “For what it is worth, there is not a day goes by when I do not see the faces of the two human beings I murdered, do not remember the surprise I saw in their eyes. They did not expect their lives would come to an end at the hands of a child. As a fellow man I regret this constantly. As a former soldier”—his face grew longer—“I did my duty. But I repeat”—he waved a finger at her across the piazza—“that was in a time of combat, and this is not the case now, however much my colleagues here, with their so-called war on terror, may wish to disagree.”

She wanted to ask something else, but the words refused to form.

“Are you sure we’ve never spoken before?” Dario Sordi added, his old, gray eyes closing on her.

“That’s not possible, sir,” she answered, and slunk to the back of the crowd, disappearing into the huddle of bodies already marching toward the exit, chanting into cell phones, talking to their newsrooms, in Italy, elsewhere in Europe, and beyond. Some, she could hear, were starting to mention the comments she had elicited from Sordi, words that would never have been spoken if an interloper, an impostor, had not sought them.

Petrakis had taken her through the next part, bit by bit, using a map of the city. It was easy to follow his instructions, leaving by the steps on the palace side of the square. She found the alley he’d told her about, narrow and shadowy, partway down the hill. It ran for a short distance, then there was a right fork into the Via della Panetteria. To her right ran the old palace stables, and after a little way the street named after them, the Via della Scuderie, running beneath the Quirinale walls to the Via del Traforo, with its tunnel beneath the palace, the stopping point for buses visiting the Trevi Fountain.

Look for a stable door, he said, marked with a red paper circle, the kind a child might use at school.

It was one of many similar entrances, halfway along the narrow street. She checked up and down the road to make sure no one was looking. Then she turned the worn brass circular handle on the door and walked through.

The room beyond was vast and dark. Anna Ybarra took out the small flashlight he’d given her and found herself in what looked like a stable set into the barracks at the back of the Quirinale Palace: a bare stone chamber like the nave of some tiny country church, with a couple of saddles on the wall, and the brittle remains of an ancient carriage.

In the corner, beneath a broken cartwheel, she found what she was looking for. In a cheap suitcase lay another change of clothes: a long, flowing evening dress, floor-length, cut low at the front, and a pearl necklace. By its side was a large instrument case. It contained a shiny baritone saxophone the color of gold. The name Yamaha was stamped on the bell.

She took out the instrument, reached into its mouth, and removed the package hidden inside. Petrakis had briefed her on this too. It was the kind of weapon she could never have imagined until they took her to Afghanistan. Now she knew its name. Somehow his sources within the palace had provided a black Uzi Para Micro, a tiny machine pistol developed for Israeli special forces and counterterrorist units. The magazine was hidden in the accessory area of the case along with a slender shoulder stock. Petrakis, who had coached her through the task of learning about firearms, said it contained thirty-three shells. There would be no spares. The entire load of ammunition could be expended in under two seconds, if she wanted. This was a weapon for slaughter, not marksmanship.

Anna Ybarra put on the evening dress, which fitted a little awkwardly around her strong shoulders. Then she cradled the Uzi, stock against her arm, practicing, trying to imagine what it would be like in the room he’d mentioned, the Salone dei Corazzieri. Standing on the platform with the musicians, pretending she was a last-minute replacement for someone who couldn’t show. Letting them play a few notes, then stepping off the stage, walking into the melee of dinner suits and glamorous dresses, wondering which way to arc the weapon in the single burst she’d be allowed.

Her head was full of questions. Too many.

She pulled out her phone, found his number, and sent him the single one-word message they’d agreed.

Inside.

Less than a minute later came his reply.

Wait.

She sat down on an old, rickety chair, next to the wrecked carriage. There was a single small, high window through which the bright summer day streamed, illuminating the dark, dusty interior of the stable. The shaft of light fell, almost deliberately she thought, on something that must have stood there for years: a crucifix attached to the side wall, a tortured bronze figure of the dying Christ, head bowed, awaiting release.

46

Letizia Russo’s home was a neat third-floor apartment in a block by the river in Testaccio. She was an unsmiling, pinch-faced woman, thin and birdlike, with a sharp, spinsterish manner.

They sat on an old-fashioned sofa. She watched them from an armchair in the window, the light falling so that the shadow of the curtain fell on her face.

“You do know why we’re here, signora?” Rosa asked.

“I can guess. What do you want of me?”

“Memories,” Costa answered.

“Is that all?”

“For now. We’re trying to picture what happened. It’s not easy.”

“No. It wasn’t.”

“The Frascas. What were they like?”

“Not the best family I’ve worked for. Not the worst. I was just the housekeeper. I came in and cleaned. Looked after the little boy from time to time. They were kind, after their fashion. I was”—she stabbed her skinny chest with a finger—“a servant. I never forgot that.”

“The boy …”

“Daniel was beautiful. I taught him to talk like a Roman. They didn’t like it. They said”—her voice changed accent, became hard—“we don’t want him speaking like some cabdriver. Huh! Daniel was as bright as a button. And now …” The sour look came back. “The papers say the poor boy was shot dead somewhere only the other day. That he killed someone and was soft in the head. Not my Daniel.”

“No,” Costa agreed. “Perhaps he wasn’t.”

Her expression never changed. She asked, “Then where is he?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. There’s so much we don’t understand. We’re trying.”

The old woman nodded at the window. There was scarcely any traffic running along the riverside road. On the Tiber itself he could see two high-speed Carabinieri launches racing toward the city, armed officers upright at the bows. Overhead the clatter of a helicopter flying low rattled the rooftops.

“Not doing much good, is it?”

“Would you prefer we did nothing?” Rosa asked tartly. “What happened on the day they were killed?”

The corners of Letizia Russo’s thin-lipped mouth turned down in a gesture of ignorance. “It was the weekend. I was visiting a relative in Civitavecchia. First I heard was on the news.”

Costa asked her the usual details. What she found in the apartment. What she was asked by the investigating officers. She listened, staring at him.

“Why don’t you know this, if you’re police?”

“Because it was twenty years ago and the investigating team then — they were from other agencies.”

“I didn’t get into the apartment for a week. By then they said these animals who called themselves the Blue Demon were dead or gone. Daniel too. When they finally let me in …” Another casual frown. “It looked the way it always did.”

Costa recalled the photographs they’d seen in the briefing in the Quirinale. “The blood on the walls …”

“I saw no blood.” She stopped, thinking. “They said they’d cleaned up before me.”

Rosa was staring at him. “Why would they do that?” she asked. “Daniel Frasca was still missing. Could they cover all the points?”

“Maybe,” he responded, unsure himself. “What was different, signora? About the apartment?”

“Nothing.” She hesitated. “Especially that room they said they’d cleaned. It was the way it always was. Signora Frasca was not the most house-proud of women. There were always things left for me to tidy away. Things another woman would have dealt with herself. Coffee cups. Danny’s toys.”

“Their friends?” he asked.

“There weren’t many. Not that I saw. A few Americans came around. English. All foreign. Mainly embassy business, I think. I never understood this. Signor Frasca spoke excellent Italian. He was Italian. By ancestry. I never knew him to have Roman friends. They were not the most sociable of couples. They adored Danny, I’ll say that for them.” Her face hardened. “Then one day they’re dead. Buried in America, the papers said. Not so much as a memorial service in Rome. I was only a housekeeper. This was none of my business, I imagine. All the same, I would have mourned, if anyone wanted it.”

Letizia Russo seemed to be struck by some stray thought.

“What is it?” Rosa asked.

“When people die, there are decisions you have to make.”

“Who gets what? Who does what?” Costa said. “Anyone who loses someone—”

“I asked if I could help,” the woman cut in. “I asked what might become of the Frascas’ things. Police. Carabinieri. You never think of such matters. This was a family. They had a home. Belongings. Items that would be precious to someone, some relative. Some of it — you would never have shipped everything all the way to America. So I asked for a memento.…” Her skinny hand waved through the air. “They cut me dead. The embassy would take care of everything. How? Daniel’s little paintings? He loved to draw. Who would want them? Who would pay to send them all the way across the ocean?” A low Roman curse escaped her bloodless lips. “I am not a thief! I asked for nothing that anyone might want. Many foreign families have employed me. Once the ambassador of Egypt, who has a beautiful house on the Aventino. No one has ever accused me of stealing something. It’s unthinkable. Always, when I finish service, I receive a gift. It’s tradition. If the family is dead …”

Costa tried to imagine the scene. “You wanted something to remember them by,” he said. “Nothing more.”

“Exactly! I played with young Danny. He loved me. No one else took any interest in what was in that apartment of theirs. What was a photograph? A simple family picture? They had plenty. All of them better than that thing they gave to the papers.”

“You took it,” Costa murmured, thinking. “They found out.”

“Just the photograph. And a vase too.”

She got up, walked over to the mantelpiece, and removed an old-fashioned piece of blue porcelain.

“Delft,” the woman said, stroking it. “Dutch. Not worth much. I checked. A week — maybe more — later, when Signor Frasca and his wife are on their way back to America in their coffins, there is a knock on the door. Four big men. Police or security, or something. I don’t remember. They treat me like I’m a criminal. They say, ‘Where is it? Where is it?’” She held up the vase. “I tell them. Here. Take it. They look at me like I’m an idiot. They don’t want that. Only the photograph. I ask you. Why?”

“What did it show?” he asked.

“It was a picture. A snap! The father, the mother, that lovely little boy. One day in the Forum. Smiling. Happy. A sunny day. Danny had a gelato. I can still see his face today. That little boy loved me.”

“Did you give it to them?”

She scowled. “I had no choice. They were threatening me with the courts. With prison! Me! All for a memento no one wanted.”

Rosa was looking at him, interested. “You didn’t keep a copy, I suppose?” she wanted to know.

“What am I? An idiot? They threatened me! Who wants to employ a housekeeper who steals? No one. Why should they?”

“The only photograph of the Frascas we’ve ever seen …” Costa began.

The old woman nodded. “The one in the newspapers. I saw it too. Did them no justice. Terrible old picture. Even I wouldn’t recognize them from that.” She blinked. “Or that other photograph. At the Villa Giulia. It’s a scandal. How can the newspapers print such things? Two human beings, butchered by that terrorist animal … that poor boy stolen away into slavery, or whatever.”

“What was Renzo Frasca like?” he asked again. “What did he do?”

“Talked on the telephone. Read books. Went to the theater.” She frowned. “A lot of meetings too. He traveled much. In Italy. Not abroad. The north mainly. I remember that.”

“Tarquinia?” Rosa asked, a little breathless.

“Somewhere north,” she agreed.

“What kind of books?”

“History. Roman history.” Letizia Russo thought for a moment, then added, “And the Etruscans. Like that Petrakis animal. He and his wife went to the Villa Giulia to see those statues there. They took me once, with Daniel. Disgusting! A child should never have seen such obscenities. But”—she shrugged—“Americans.”

Sometimes one found answers in the most unlikely of places. He had no idea why he asked the question. It was probably no more than desperation.

“Shakespeare …?”

“Hah! Shakespeare!” she shrieked. “Sometimes you’d think there was nothing else in the world but that man. Every time there was a play. A book. A movie …”

“Nic?” Rosa asked. “I don’t get it.”

“Me neither.”

His phone was ringing. It was Silvio Di Capua and he had something.

“I take it back. What I told you about the SIM being useless,” the young pathologist said quickly.

“And …?”

“We traced the account to the Ministry of the Interior. It’s a spook phone. This magic little computer system we’ve got can log into the account records.”

“Give me the last five people he called,” Costa ordered, pulling out a pad and pen.

“Can’t do that, Nic. This is a new phone. Apart from your call to Falcone, it was only ever used for one other number.”

Di Capua read it out, said thanks, then cut the call.

The women were looking at him. He excused himself, went to the window, and dialed.

A voice he recognized answered.

“This is Sovrintendente Nic Costa. We have to meet in thirty minutes. In San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane. I think you know where.…”

Words of protest, of outrage.

“This is important, sir, or I wouldn’t be bothering you. We have uncovered something very disturbing about the Blue Demon. Something I feel you should know. Thirty minutes. Please …”

He finished the call. The two women were watching him. He wondered whether any of these connections could possibly make sense. Then he looked into Letizia Russo’s cold, sharp eyes and said, “I would like you to come with us, signora.”

“Why? Am I under arrest? For stealing a vase twenty years ago?”

“No. I simply need your help. Please. We will organize a car.”

“There are no cars. No one moves in Rome. Not now Dario Sordi has turned the city into a prison while he and his cronies drink champagne in the Quirinale Palace!”

“I’m sure that pains President Sordi as much as it does the rest of us, signora.”

“Don’t be ridiculous! Let me—”

“Your coat, please.”

There was a muttered curse, then she went into the next room.

Rosa stared at him and asked, “Where are we going?”

“To church.”

47

There were flowers on the meager remains of the Tempio del Divo Giulio: roses and chrysanthemums scattered over the dun pile of earth where, more than two millennia before, Mark Antony had read his notorious ovation for an assassinated dictator.

The noblest Roman of them all.

Great Caesar, Divine Caesar.

Now tourists from parts of the world that the tyrant could never have imagined ambled past the place where his bloodied corpse was reduced to ashes.

Not many today, though. Petrakis found himself virtually alone on this baking summer’s afternoon. The broad thoroughfare through the Forum, from the Piazza Venezia to the Colosseum, was as empty as a Sunday when the city closed the road to traffic. Carabinieri and all manner of police officers, local and state, wandered around the foot of Via Cavour and the narrow streets in front of the ruined Trajan’s Markets. Armed officers scanned the area from temporary watchtowers built of plain, ugly scaffolding. Hideous, loud signs had been erected at every possible entrance into the forbidden zone, the government’s much-vaunted “ring of steel,” all warning that no ordinary citizen was welcome beyond these points, and all who disobeyed would face instant arrest under the emergency legislation.

He sat, phone in hand, on a piece of ancient, displaced marble, staring at the spot where Caesar’s pyre had stood, amused by the scattering of fading blooms. There was always some stray bouquet there, thrown by a gullible visitor. Petrakis wished he could have been present when they deposited the flowers on the tyrant’s altar, wished he could have told them just a little of the true face of Rome. Of its brutality and hatred of anything, any race, it failed to understand or command. He closed his eyes and thought of the ranked exhibits in the Etruscan halls of the Villa Giulia: men and women locked in a joyful existence, fired by passion and pride, beholden to none, frightened of nothing. He’d wanted to be like that since he could first think, ached to feel that selfsame fire, that release from the daily ritual of routine. His father had promised such gifts and then been snatched from him. Nothing had ever come close.

And one day the Devil arrived. For the Etruscans, on the wall of a tomb in Tarquinia, a blue shape capering like a malicious fiend newly released from Hell, an arbiter, standing between life and death, bringing misery and torment to anything it might catch.

For him …

Petrakis knew the moment, had captured it forever. Bad news, the worst. An explanation, an urgent need for a solution. It took place in a nondescript office in Rome in a place he could no longer remember. There was a man in a suit, making promises Petrakis didn’t understand, sealing bargains that came with hidden conditions, invisible until they were triggered by the relentless, cruel tide of events.

He was the Devil of Faust, a sly, compelling creature, offering the world to all who would listen, in return for something that seemed so slight and insignificant.

He was the Blue Demon, the vicious, feasting animal that sought to conquer and devour everything.

He was Rome, all-powerful, all-commanding. Rome, the heartless monster before which everyone knelt in obeisance. Europe was a land of lost races, disappeared civilizations. The Etruscans were nothing more than exhibits in a museum, their tongue eradicated, their culture reduced to objects in glass cases. In this way the kingdom of Caesar grew to become the empire of the pope, spreading its ideology everywhere until it was the spirit of the age. From the drab site of a dead dictator’s funeral pyre to the Lincoln Memorial, from the altar of St. Peter’s to the Palace of Westminster, the despotism became insidious, ubiquitous.

Petrakis glanced in the direction of the Quirinale. The high priests of the religion now feasted and praised one another in the pope’s palace, behind the tower above the markets of Trajan, the one that the lying, cheating tour guides said was the viewpoint from which Nero had watched Rome burn.

In the wastelands of Afghanistan, trying to work his way to the al-Qaeda leadership, as the man in the suit had ordered all those years before, he’d seen something — a light, a beacon. One bright, cold day in September they had gathered around a portable TV set and watched in amazement as the Twin Towers fell in New York, pillars of the old world tumbling to the ground, to be replaced by fear and chaos, panic and uncertainty.

At that moment something in him had changed. He had seen through the Blue Demon’s lies, all of them; had known, for sure, that the empire that began with Rome was no longer beyond defeat. Helmand and the bandit lands on the Pakistan border had finally taught him to ride a horse like an Etruscan, to kill an enemy with a simple short dagger, to take what one wanted from life before the inevitable darkness fell, and with it oblivion. He never converted, he never pretended to. They accepted him for what he was: some kind of elemental force, created by events, by nature.

On that sharp September day those few years before, Andrea Petrakis metamorphosed into the man he had pretended to be for so many years, as easily, as naturally, as an insect emerging from the chrysalis, hungry, expectant, and ready.

There was a short, straight line from that instant to the present. He had watched it form, shaped it, directed it with all his might and vigor.

Petrakis stared at the phone, waiting for it to ring.

The call comes. He gets up, stretches, yawns under the hot sun, and spits, with all the phlegm and force he can muster, directly onto the roses that cover the place where Julius Caesar turned to ashes.

“You’ll have company soon,” Petrakis whispers, wondering if there is some kind of magic in the universe after all, whether Caesar’s shade might hear his words in some distant twilight realm where dead dictators muster, still pretending they are gods. And, if the bloodthirsty old bastard listens, whether he might understand.

48

Ben Rennick didn’t look pleased that he’d been dragged out of the Quirinale. He was wearing a lounge suit and a dark tie. There was a bulge beneath the right-hand side of his jacket. But he didn’t seem like the kind of man who would use a weapon easily. It was more of a badge, Costa thought.

“This had better be important,” the American said.

“It is,” Costa told him. “I would have broached it with Luca Palombo, but …” He stopped and looked at this man, wondering what was going on inside his head.

“But what?” Rennick wanted to know.

“But I don’t think it would be a good idea. Not yet.”

They were in Borromini’s church, San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane — San Carlino to the locals — just a few short steps away from the crossroads where Giovanni Batisti had been kidnapped and his driver, the young Polish woman, Elena Majewska, murdered. Costa had forgotten how beautiful this compact place of worship was. The interior seemed alive, organic somehow, a flowing mass of convex stone curves wrapped around a Greek-cross floor plan. It was a five-minute walk from the Quirinale Palace, but the closest point Costa could reach, given the security on the streets. Any nearer, even as far as the neighboring church of Sant’Andrea, by the architect’s bitter rival, Bernini, and the armed officers would have turned him back.

“You’re lucky being a foreigner,” Costa told him. They were alone. It seemed the best way. “I grew up around places like this. A Roman takes them for granted sometimes. This city has so much. Too much, perhaps.”

“I don’t have time for chitchat.”

“Yet you came,” Costa said, smiling. “Even though I’ve never seen you outside the Quirinale since we first met. Not even in the photo calls.” Rennick scowled and looked at his watch.

“Curiosity, I imagine,” Costa added. “Do you like the dome?” It was astonishing to witness how Borromini had placed so much ingenious, complex beauty in such a small place. Seemingly incongruous geometric shapes — hexagons and crosses, ovals and circles — interlocked to point the way to the centerpiece, a glass window depicting a pure-white dove, a symbol of peace, of redemption, crowned with a halo, about to descend to earth.

“Cute,” Rennick agreed. “So we have to go through this small talk. Fine. Didn’t Borromini commit suicide, if I remember right?”

“You know Rome well.”

“Well enough. Why am I here?”

“Did Palombo tell you what happened last night? Near Tarquinia?”

He nodded. The tall security-services officer looked gray and tired, as if he hadn’t slept much in a while. Miserable too.

“I’m sorry about your colleague. You shouldn’t have been there. You were told.”

“If I’d known one of my officers might die in front of my eyes …”

Rennick took his arm and led him into the fluid shadows of the columns to the left of the high altar. It felt as if they were inside the belly of a cold stone beast. There was no one else there, not even the usual church official.

In the half-light the American peered into his face and it occurred to Costa that, in different circumstances, he might enjoy getting to know this man. He seemed sincere and serious. The weight of the years had left its mark.

“Listen to me. These are difficult times.” Rennick spoke in a low, authoritative voice.

“I’d gathered that.”

“No. You haven’t. Not at all. In situations like this, smart people do as they’re told. Nothing more. Nothing less. No improvisation. No peeking. This is not the moment to be inquisitive, my friend. I know you’re close to Dario Sordi. Maybe he’s put some ideas in your head. Dismiss them, now. For your own sake and that of your colleagues. We’re in control here, as much as we can be. Anything you try on the side just muddies the waters, and that’s not helpful. That’s what leads to people getting hurt.”

“Did Giovanni Batisti confide in you?” Costa asked straight out.

Rennick’s narrow eyes screwed up in puzzlement. “What?”

“Did Batisti tell you that Sordi never believed Andrea Petrakis was behind the Blue Demon? That it was the creation of someone else, someone who never left for Afghanistan or anywhere? Someone who stayed behind: invisible, silent, waiting, the way Gladio operatives were supposed to? Maybe in Rome or somewhere else, a city, a job in which a man might hide out in the plain light of day.” He paused. “America, say.”

Costa touched Rennick’s arm and leaned in to speak, glancing at the door, nodding to the distant figure he saw there.

“Did you create the Blue Demon, Signor Rennick?”

The man closed his eyes for a moment as if the question pained him. “The Blue Demon’s a myth. A character from mythology. Andrea Petrakis used the name to cover his tracks, to make himself appear more than the simple bloody murderer he is. Don’t think the world’s more complicated than it is. And stay out of our way. In a couple of days everything will be normal. I guarantee it.”

“‘We shall be called purgers, not murderers,’” Costa recited, looking into his eyes, wondering what he saw there.

“What?”

“A line from Shakespeare. You mentioned it in the briefing with the president. I was impressed. Not many men can quote something as obscure as that. A specific play too, Julius Caesar, so easily …”

“You shouldn’t spend all your time in the company of cops.”

Costa pulled out a sheet of paper from his pocket. “This was scratched on the wall of the tomb in Tarquinia. Next to the corpse of a man called Stefan Kyriakis. Did you know him?”

“Never heard of the man.”

Rennick’s eyes wouldn’t leave the paper and the numbers there: XII. II. I. CLXXIII.

“Twelve, two, one, a hundred and seventy-three,” Costa said. “We thought it was Shakespeare too. But …” He shrugged. “There are too many numbers.” He watched Rennick’s face. “What does it mean?”

“I haven’t a clue. You’ve got to excuse me.…”

“Palombo didn’t tell you about these numbers, did he?”

“I … don’t have time for this,” Rennick said, shaking his head.

“Who did he tell?”

Rennick had turned to leave. Costa put a hand on his arm.

“One last question, sir. Why did Stefan Kyriakis, an arms dealer who supplied weapons to Andrea Petrakis, possess your phone number?”

“What?” Rennick murmured. “What?”

“How do you think I reached you? We have the SIM from his phone. Your number is on it. We have evidence that links you to him, directly. How is that possible, sir?”

The American remained immobile, unable to speak.

From the door opposite, open to the street, a woman was striding across the floor, her eyes on the tall figure standing in the light beneath Borromini’s dome. There was a stream of Roman epithets emerging from her mouth, the volume rising as she approached.

Rennick looked trained for these situations and was already reaching for his weapon. Costa leaped on the man, wrenching the pistol from his grasp, sending it rattling across the marble floor.

“Bastard!” Letizia Russo yelled, then raced up and slapped him hard around the face. “Bastard!”

The American didn’t say anything. For a moment he tried to laugh it off, then she slapped him again.

“I think you’ve mistaken me for someone else, signora,” Rennick muttered in perfect Italian.

“Bastard! I cried for you. For your wife. For that child I used to hug in my arms. They said you were dead. Murdered. And Danny gone …”

Falcone was leading the rest of them through the door: Peroni, Teresa, Rosa. They stood in front of Rennick, blocking the way. Costa relaxed his grip. The American was going nowhere.

“Signora Russo?” Falcone said.

The old woman stood erect and furious in front of the man.

“Si?”

“Do you recognize this man? If so, will you identify him for us, please?”

“Renzo Frasca!”

“Frasca died twenty years ago …” the American began.

“I worked for you!” she yelled. “I did your laundry. I changed your child’s diapers when you were too lazy to do it yourself.”

Rennick glared at the inspector. “Listen, I don’t have time for this nonsense and neither do you. The Frasca case is dead. There’s a headstone over a grave in Washington that bears their names. The DNA on that kid killed in the Via Rasella the other night—”

“You made up that report!” Teresa cried. “Give me the body. Let me run my own tests.”

He shook his head and murmured, “I can’t do that right now.”

Peroni took a photograph from his pocket and gave it to Letizia Russo. Costa caught a glance: a handsome young man with long blond hair.

“I have some good news, signora. This is what Danny looks like now. We got pictures from his Web page. Daniel Rennick is a student at Harvard. Bright kid, it seems. His subject is English literature, just as it was for his father.” The big agente leaned toward the American. “I don’t imagine he remembers a thing about Italy, does he? Just three years old when you switched identities. You can change a lot about yourself. But not a kid’s first name. Not if everyone called him Danny from the start.”

The Russo woman clung to the photograph, took one more look, then put it in her bag.

“Bastard!” she murmured, her eyes filling with tears, then turned on her heel and walked outside into the bright day.

“I’m an officer of the U.S. government, with diplomatic immunity,” the man they still knew as Rennick insisted. “I’ve got things to take care of today that you people can’t even begin to imagine. I am walking out of here now.…”

Costa grabbed his arms behind his back and slipped on the cuffs. Rennick began to howl with fury.

“Don’t make so much noise,” Falcone growled. “We can hold you on that phone number alone. Put him in the car and take him to the Questura.”

Peroni took hold of him and headed for the door.

“How long have we got?” Costa asked.

The inspector grimaced. “Palombo will hear the moment we get him in an interview room. Maybe before. If we have an hour before they spring him, we’ll be lucky.” He glanced at Peroni shuffling the American out into the daylight. “Did he know what the message meant? The numbers?”

“He said he didn’t.”

“Was he lying?”

“I don’t think he even knew there was a number. Or that Giovanni Batisti was set up.” He frowned. “Either that or he’s a well-trained liar. An hour? Is that all?”

The nave of the tiny church went dark. Black-clad figures were swamping the doorway, blocking the light. They wore masks and bore automatic weapons. He’d no idea who they were: some special police unit, Carabinieri, military. Or something else altogether.

Luca Palombo strode through the mass of bodies, his face red with fury.

“Apparently not,” Falcone murmured.

49

Silvio di Capua sat at the computer desk staring at the numbers on the page, on the screen, and now etched deep inside his head too.

XII. II. I. CLXXIII.

“You’ll go mad if you look at that any longer,” Elizabeth Murray told him. “How much sleep have you had over the last twenty-four hours?”

“Probably more than you.”

She patted the laptop computer and grinned. “I’m still enthralled by these things. We never had toys like this in my day. You are so lucky.”

He wished he found her words cheering. “Teresa thinks we’re in danger of relying on this stuff too much. That one day the cops will sit back every time there’s a crime, look at us, and say, ‘Fetch the DNA, link the criminal records.’ Then go out to lunch. And if we don’t have an answer …”

There’d been a case not long before where all standard DNA techniques had been snatched from them, albeit briefly. It was not an experience he wanted to live through again.

“Data is data,” she observed. “It’s what you do with it that counts.”

Elizabeth was a little behind the game. She’d gone out for an hour that morning, to take a break, see an old friend, remember Rome, a city she’d lived in for twenty years, she said, and scarcely visited after retirement. She didn’t know about Peroni’s fruitless attempt to get more information out of Cattaneo in America.

The others had left by the time she returned. This seemed to surprise her. “Where’s everyone else gone?” she asked.

He thought of the way they’d bustled out with barely a word. “Some wild-goose chase, I guess. I was working on these numbers. Or trying to. Nic thought he might have something worthwhile.”

“To do with what?”

“Probably nothing. Guesswork. I deal in detail, not hypothesis. I don’t do all that faux cop stuff. I like looking at numbers, at facts, at words and pictures. Not”—this thought came from nowhere and he knew it ought to shock him—“at people.”

“People commit crimes, Silvio.”

“And they rarely get caught unless you come up with a case that’s based on the kind of facts people like me dig up. Evidence. Numbers …”

Numbers were solid, indisputable, unchanging, even if they were open to interpretation. XII. II. I. CLXXIII. Twelve, two, one, a hundred and seventy-three … or 1221173. There were any number of ways the figures scratched on the wall of the Blue Demon’s tomb might be read.

“Did they look hopeful?” Elizabeth asked.

“What?” he murmured, distracted.

“Falcone and the others. When they left?”

“I didn’t really notice.” Di Capua stared at the screen. “It can’t be Shakespeare, can it?”

He’d been through every play there was. The works were divided into acts, scenes, and lines. There was no fourth element, and nothing that could be interpreted as the number twelve. Even Julius Caesar ran to just five acts. So the initial idea that had struck him — using the first number for the act, and the final one for a particular word — hadn’t worked at all. He’d wasted two hours on that.

“A phone number?” she guessed.

“All we have is what Falcone scrawled down on a piece of paper in an underground tomb. We don’t know if there was punctuation between the numbers, spaces, anything else. Or if he got it down correctly in the first place. It would be easy to make mistakes.”

But eight digits — a phone number? He’d liked the idea, until he researched it.

“I can’t find any phone number system in Italy that fits that pattern. It could only be the number itself, anyway, without a country or city code. So that presumes that whoever got to read the message would know the location.”

He looked at her. She didn’t seem tired at all. Sitting on the office chair next to him, Elizabeth Murray looked bright and interested in her check country shirt and moleskin trousers, holding on to her walking stick like a shepherdess making an occasional visit to the city.

“Would Andrea Petrakis — who hasn’t, as far as we know, been in Italy for twenty years — assume that someone would have that kind of information?” he asked.

“Unlikely.”

“So it’s not a phone number. It’s not a reference to a Shakespeare play. It’s not”—he took a long swig of tepid coffee on the desk—“anything.”

“Roman numerals,” she said. “The classics …”

“Virgil, Homer, Tacitus, Suetonius. There’s nothing that breaks down into the right subdivisions. The Aeneid—yes, it has a twelfth book. But no acts, no scenes, just line numbers, and they won’t work. Tacitus — there are books and chapters and line numbers, but no scenes, and not enough books, either. Suetonius — at least there we’ve got something obvious. The book is called The Twelve Caesars. But the twelfth Caesar is Domitian, and where would he come in?”

He flicked up a hidden window on the screen, one of so many he’d lost count.

“Section twenty-one might fit.”

Di Capua read out from the translation.

The young pathologist sighed. “At least you have to say Ugo Campagnolo is conforming to type. But that’s as far as the connections go.”

“It’s a long time since I read The Twelve Caesars,” Elizabeth confessed. “What happened to Domitian?”

“Murdered by his own courtiers,” Di Capua told her. “Stabbed to death in his bedroom by a bunch of civil servants. You can see why Shakespeare never bothered with him.” He glanced at the screen. “Sounds as if he deserved it, though. Bloodthirsty bastard …”

“Weren’t they all? Let’s take this one step at a time. If these numbers are separate digits, why do you have to assume they all refer to the same thing?”

“Because …” he began. The answer was so stupid he couldn’t say it. Because that is the only way they would make sense to someone who doesn’t know the secret.

Anyone who had the key wouldn’t think that way. They could decode the answer easily, by splitting the different parts into some simple system they understood already.

“I’m an idiot,” Silvio Di Capua said softly. “These don’t refer to just one thing. It’s more than that. So the question is …” He thought about this. Time was growing short. “What do we have if we treat these as separate numbers, not some contiguous code?” he mused.

Elizabeth Murray pulled up her chair and stared at the screen. Di Capua felt happy in the presence of this woman. She was intelligent, methodical.

Suddenly she picked up the paperback edition of the collected works of Shakespeare he’d bought at the bookstore around the corner and flicked through a few pages. Then she shook her head, patted his shoulder, and said, “I can’t help you here, Silvio. Let me call my friend. She’s a classical scholar. Let me talk to her over lunch.”

“Enjoy it,” he muttered, hammering the keyboard. “I’ll be a while.”

A question occurred to him. What kind of sentence would begin with a number?

“Elizabeth …” he began to ask.

He swiveled around in the desk chair, but she was gone.

50

It was impossible to guess the number of masked armed men crammed into the doorway of Borromini’s little church. Teresa Lupo was yelling. Falcone stood, unmoving, in front of Luca Palombo, the man from the Ministry of the Interior, Peroni and Rosa beside him. Rennick — Nic couldn’t think of him by any other name — was now secure in Costa’s grip, cuffed and not saying a word, listening to Palombo shout down the incandescent pathologist, then start to read the riot act.

Letizia Russo was nowhere to be seen. Perhaps she’d encountered these anonymous figures with rifles and feared the worst. Perhaps Palombo had already taken custody of the one witness who could testify to the American’s true identity.

The security man’s lecture was brief and caustic. When he was done reminding them that they had no place being where they were, Palombo turned to Costa and ordered, “Now release him.”

Falcone remained stock-still in front of their prisoner and said, very calmly, “We have a witness who has identified Signor Rennick as Renzo Frasca. We have reason to believe he was involved in the murder of the Petrakis couple twenty years ago.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Rennick barked.

“We have evidence that he had knowledge of the Blue Demon tomb, where a colleague of ours was murdered last night,” Falcone persisted. “At the very least, we must take him in for questioning. It’s a matter of the law.”

“The law says he has a diplomatic passport,” Palombo shot back. “Along with that comes immunity.”

“It’s a passport issued under a false name. Sir,” Peroni snapped. “In my book that makes it invalid.”

“I wasn’t aware it was the job of some has-been agente in the state police to decide immigration policy. Release him. That’s an order.”

“We don’t take orders from you,” Falcone said.

The tall, lean spook turned away abruptly and made a phone call. They waited. He came back and handed over the handset.

The inspector’s face fell. “Sir,” he murmured, listening. Then: “You asked for evidence, Commissario. We have it. A positive ID of Signor Rennick as Renzo Frasca. His phone number on the person of the arms dealer killed in Tarquinia. These raise many, many questions. I cannot …”

They could hear the voice rising out of the phone, tinny and furious.

“You’re ordering me to release an identified suspect in a case involving several murders and terrorist acts, including the death of a police officer,” Falcone said with a stony face. “May I know why?”

A single scream emerged from the handset. Then nothing.

Falcone pocketed the phone. Palombo held out his hand toward the American.

“Allow me to say this one thing first,” Falcone pleaded, looking him straight in the eye. “I understand your position, Palombo. This is a crisis. We are simply police officers who do what they see as their duty, without access to all the facts. There are ramifications here we do not understand, nor should we. This man”—he indicated Rennick—“is an impostor. He is at the very heart of your operations. He knows as much as, or more than, Giovanni Batisti, who was seized just a few meters from here, by an individual that I suspect Rennick — or Frasca, you choose — must know personally.”

“Speculation, Inspector.” Palombo’s sigh was bored.

“Of course it’s speculation, you moron!” Teresa yelled. “That’s why we need him to come down to the Questura to answer some questions.”

Palombo gestured toward Costa. “You will release Signor Rennick into my custody. Your own commissario has told you the same thing. Capitano?”

One of the masked figures came closer, his weapon half raised.

“Oh, brother!” Teresa shrieked, pointing a finger in his face. “What brave boys! You don’t dare show your faces out in the daylight. A bigger bunch of brainless, dickless idiots—”

Falcone intervened, moving between her and Palombo. “Let me deal with this. Nic?”

Costa got the message. He unlocked the cuffs. Rennick shook himself free. The man, to his credit, looked guilty. Upset. Apologetic, even.

“I intend to see you again before you leave Italy,” Costa told him. “When you’re without your friends.”

“Don’t jump to conclusions,” the American said.

“I’ll pass that on to Mirko Oliva’s parents when we’re allowed to tell them their son is dead.…”

Palombo had his hand on Rennick’s arm. The American removed the Italian’s long fingers, as if he felt some distaste at their touch.

“None of us here”—Rennick nodded at the soldiers and Palombo—“means you or Italy any harm. You’ll see.”

Costa looked at him, wondering how he could have been so stupid. He recalled Elizabeth Murray’s stories of a world shaped by the dying days of the Cold War. Letizia Russo had painted a picture of a tight little family that seldom went out of the house, never made friends, kept itself separate, and would one day make an astonishing sacrifice for no obvious reason. There was, he understood suddenly, only one possible explanation for that.

“You’ve been waiting for this moment for twenty years or more, haven’t you? These acts are the price you expect us to pay for some greater benefit that ordinary men and women cannot see. Elena Majewska. Giovanni Batisti. Mirko Oliva … What’s that neat little euphemism you use? Collateral damage?”

Palombo marched in between them and barked, “Enough!”

“No!” Rennick cried.

The two men faced up to each other. It was the Italian who backed down.

“These officers have lost a colleague,” Rennick told Palombo. “They deserve something. They deserve more than we can give them.”

He ordered the men at the doorway to leave. Luca Palombo stood where he was.

“I’m no happier with these deaths than you are, nor do I understand why they occurred,” the American said, shaking his head. “But how many people died on 9/11? In Madrid? Bali? London? Thousands. Perhaps thousands more in the future, unless we win this war.”

“Ben,” Palombo murmured. “This isn’t necessary.…”

“Yes it is,” Rennick insisted. “Imagine we could place a spy right there, in with them. Not in the training camps. Not with the middlemen. I mean at the very top, a place we’ve never penetrated before. Imagine we could fake some event that persuaded them they could trust someone who was ours. Take him straight into their lair. You know their names. We all do. You know we’ve been trying to find them for years, and we never will, not without some traitor in their midst. A man who has their absolute confidence because of what he’s done.”

“For that you’ll sacrifice Rome?” Rosa asked him.

“For that I’d sacrifice my life. And the lives of others too. We all pay a price, one way or another. This is the way it is. It’s not pretty or tidy or safe, and that’s why we told you to stay away. For your own good. There will be one more attack. It will be spectacular. It will not cost a single innocent life. Sometime tomorrow”—he glanced outside, toward the empty street—“things will start to return to normal. Here, anyway. I promise that. And in a little while, a month perhaps, a year … we will find them, the men we’ve been looking for all these years. The seed we plant here will bear fruit.”

“Twenty years is a long time to be undercover, isn’t it?” Teresa asked. “Twenty years among people you’re supposed to hate. Have you never heard of the Stockholm syndrome? How do you know Andrea Petrakis is still yours?”

Palombo pointed at Costa and Rosa. “It’s thanks to this man you two are still alive. Do you think that was just an accident?”

“You were lucky,” Rennick said bluntly. “I was worried when he didn’t call in. I’m sorry I didn’t get there soon enough for your friend. I tried to tell you. This is a field operation: Step into it at your own risk. We’re done. We’re going now. No more questions. No more answers. Good day.”

But Palombo lingered as he left.

“Do not repeat one word of what you heard here to anyone,” he told them. “I will deal with you people later.”

They watched the two men join the masked officers in the street, climbing into their armored black vans. The vehicles passed through the barricade and headed toward the tightly guarded piazza of the Quirinale Palace.

51

Early afternoon. On a normal day, men and women flocked from their offices, walking to a favorite cafe or restaurant to sit down with a coffee and a panino, a plate of pasta, a dish of meat and vegetables from some neighborhood tavola calda, to discuss football and politics, work and the cost of living. New friendships and enmities began, old ones blossomed, faded, and ended. Everywhere, from the drab commercial streets of Parioli to the tourist quarters of the Campo dei Fiori and the little alleys of the ghetto, there was life, with its awkward idiosyncrasies, its argumentative logic and irregular serendipity.

But this wasn’t a normal day. The church bells tolled over a city that was apprehensive and, in its heart, quietly mutinous. No lovers walked hand in hand through the quiet green park that hid the subterranean remains of Nero’s Golden House. No students chattered happily on the steps of Ignatius Loyola’s Collegio Romano in the centro storico. Among young and old, rich and poor, there was a sense of resentment, a growing loathing, of the criminals who had created this timidity, the politicians whose arrogance had invited their presence, and the masked, black-clad figures who had usurped their familiar police officers in blue — men and women who, though flawed, fallible, and somewhat weather-beaten much of the time, were somehow all the more reassuring for that.

Rome held its breath in anticipation of what might happen in its midst. For the oldest of them, those who remembered the forties, the atmosphere was bleakly reminiscent of the war, the German occupation, the mood of foreboding that preceded a cathartic outburst of violence by one party against another, turning everyday streets into bloody battlegrounds.

A normal day …

In a quiet field by the tomb of Cecilia Metella, daughter-in-law of Crassus, who was in turn both nemesis to Spartacus and patron to a lowly politician named Julius Caesar, a family from Ciampino, ignoring the smell of burned avgas still drifting from the nearby airport, sit down for a picnic, only to find that their dog, a Dalmatian cross, makes a discovery that means their bread and cheese and sausage go uneaten, and their bottle of cheap, weak Frascati wine untouched during the long hours it takes for the police to make their way to the Via Appia Antica.

A normal day …

Deep in the underside of the Quirinale Palace, in a stable built for the soldiers of a pope, a young Spanish woman, widowed and made childless by tragedy and misfortune, feels she can hear the minutes tick audibly by as she awaits the appointed moment, unable to take her eyes off the crucifix on the wall, or to extinguish from her mind the memories of a Basque plainchant in the Franciscan sanctuary of Aranzazu near her distant home, and its words, translated to her as a schoolchild by the parish priest who organized the visit.

Ne irascaris Domine, ne ultra memineris iniquitatis.

Be not angry, O Lord, and remember no longer our iniquity.

A normal day …

In the Forum, hidden in the shadows of the towering ruins of the Basilica of Maxentius and Constantine, Andrea Petrakis meets a ghost from the past, and finds there are no words to say after such a passage of time and circumstance. When his visitor departs, he has something to covet. He opens the large, expensive suitcase the visitor has brought and studies the items there, the key that unlocks the final door.

It is the uniform of a serving cuirassier, a member of the Corazzieri. The tenuta di gran gala, reserved for the most serious of occasions: white trousers and gauntlets, knee-high leather boots, and a black jacket with epaulettes. The helmet is gleaming gold with a criniera mane of dark horsehair and a high, vivid red fabric flash on the left side. The breastplate is silver, etched with gold emblems, held at the shoulder and waist by leather straps.

Inside too lies a fine sword, the height of a man almost, encased in a silver scabbard.

Eyes gleaming, Andrea Petrakis unsheathes the weapon and runs the inside of his index finger along the blade. A thin line of blood appears instantly on his skin. His fingers slip inside the boots to feel the padding, which will take his height close enough to the regulation 190 centimeters required of each corazziere. He licks the blood from his hand and thinks of the afternoon ahead.

Then he places everything back into the suitcase, picks it up, and, when the time is right, steps out into the deserted Via dei Fori Imperiali, close to the guard posts at the foot of Trajan’s Markets.

The route back to the Quirinale is still open to pedestrians, some of the way at least. He takes out his phone and, with steady fingers, sends a text.

A single word.