City of Fear

52

Anna Ybarra had sat in the stable for what seemed like hours, staring at the phone’s little screen, waiting for the message. When it arrived, she found herself transfixed by the single word there, one that took her thoughts away from the judgmental, twisted figure on the crucifix looking down at her from the wall, pleading, accusing through the dusty air.

It was important to concentrate on two things only: the face of her husband, Josepe, and their little boy, Zeru. The three of them sitting on the thick grass in the hills on a hot summer’s day, when the acres of farmland below were rich with crops and animals. Walking to the shop in the village through freezing winter gales and the downpours of spring, the boy’s small gloved hand tight in hers.

Zeru growing from baby to toddler to little boy, with a bond, always — a special one — to her alone. It was as if some part of the umbilical cord remained, invisible yet real, a tie that only death could sever. Anna was a sensible, levelheaded woman. That day would come. But not, she always believed, for a long time. And not in the way it did — in the night, unexpected, full of noise and screaming and hatred.

She had never, not even in a nightmare, believed she might one day witness his tiny wooden coffin enter the hard ground alongside that of his father. Two still corpses hidden beneath soft white pine, the people she loved most snatched from life by a cruel, faceless fate, ignored by the embarrassed state that bore responsibility for their deaths.

Zeru meant sky. Anna and Josepe had picked the name together the very afternoon the doctor’s scan told them their child would be a boy. Zeru. A Basque name. One full of light and hope. A name that would last a lifetime.

Holding his tiny, fragile body in the hospital bed in San Sebastián, she had imagined him old, wrinkled, weather-beaten, still living on their family farm, long after she and Josepe had departed the world. Later, she would sometimes dream that she had seen him with children and grandchildren of his own, gathered around him, listening to his stories, of life, the Basque land of Hernani, and the much-loved family that went before.

At some point he would gesture to the sky — sometimes bright and sunny, noisy with birds, sometimes the night, illuminated by a scattering of stars.

“That is my name,” the dream Zeru Ybarra said, in a voice that was strong and kind. “That is me.”

The Euskaldunak, those who spoke the old, true language, would diminish in the decades to come. So Josepe said. Or perhaps that was his brother, the ETA man, talking, through him.

She wasn’t so sure. They had given their son a true name, a good name, one that had stood their little community and the broader family that the Spanish called the Vascos in good stead over the centuries.

A name helped give meaning to a life. Sometimes — not always — it offered the consolation that some things persist, the way the plainchant of a distant monastery might linger in the memory, long after it should have been forgotten.

In the darkness of a stable in the palace of a pope, she murmured, “Zeru …” and wondered, as the two syllables died in the air, whether there was a god anywhere to hear. Once, she’d believed that. But she’d believed many things. Most of them had turned out to be nothing more than cruel lies. Fantasies for the gullible.

Anna Ybarra did not look at the crucifix on the wall again. She picked up the saxophone case and opened it, checking and rechecking the weapon inside, just as the dark, silent, frightening men of the Taliban had taught her. Then she glanced at the instrument itself, gleaming gold, a complex machine, intricate with levers and strange, contorted workings, all to produce nothing more than a single musical note, one that a human being might utter through breath alone.

She took out the map Andrea Petrakis had given her. Even though she was inside the Quirinale complex, it was a long walk from the stable in the Via delle Scuderie back to the palace. Petrakis had stressed how important it was to take the right route, one that would avoid the guard posts as much as possible and take her into the staff quarters of the palace, then to the broad corridor alongside the Salone dei Corazzieri. The guests — presidents and prime ministers, spouses and civil servants — would be in that grand hall, he said, listening to music, sipping champagne. This was her moment, there for the taking.

Without looking back, she walked outside. There was a cobbled courtyard that cried out for horses and men in bright, anachronistic uniforms. It was empty. She scurried beneath the promenade at the edge of the square, staying in the dark, walking quickly, swinging the instrument case with her right arm, aware that her dress — dark velvet, more expensive than any she had ever worn — was so long she nearly tripped on it as she strode toward the palace.

Two more courtyards. Then the smell of cooking and the clatter of a kitchen. She checked her map. High on her right was the clock tower, its curious campanile reminiscent of Spain. Flags fluttered there. So many colors. So many different nations.

“Zeru, Josepe …” she whispered.

Another walkway beneath a vaulted ceiling, with arches to the side. On the far side of the patio, there was a small flight of stone steps up into the Quirinale proper. The corridor by the Salone dei Corazzieri lay only a few steps beyond.

The lilting tones of stringed instruments came to her over the din of kitchen sounds, arguments, plates and pans banging against one another, the half-remembered music of family. She could delay no more. With quick steps she walked out into the daylight.

“Signora, signora!”

It was a man’s voice. Strong and firm. Anna stopped.

A figure emerged from the shadows. He was tall and muscular, an image from a child’s picture book: gleaming silver and gold breastplate, a polished helmet with a mare’s-tail plume, high leather boots.

“Stop!” the officer bellowed as she walked on.

There was no alternative. She came to a halt in the middle of the patio, beneath the bright sun, conscious she was beginning to sweat a little.

He marched over to stand in the bell tower’s shadow, peering down into her face. It was impossible to see what he looked like.

“Papers,” he ordered.

“I’m a musician, sir,” she said, fumbling for the envelope Petrakis had given her.

“You’re late. The band’s started already.”

“It was difficult getting here. No buses. No transport.”

“It’s the same for everyone.” He examined the sheet of paper. It bore, she saw, the official seal of the president’s office. “I must see your ID.”

Her mind went blank. The only proof of identity she possessed was the press card of the American TV reporter.

“ID,” he insisted.

“I left it at home,” she said finally. “I thought … a letter from the president’s office was enough. I’m a musician. I’m late as it is. If I let them down again …”

She hated lying — and liars more than anything. Yet, when it was necessary, deceit seemed to come so easily.

“Please. They’ll fire me, and I need the money. Playing an instrument”—she held up the case—“is no way for a single mother to earn a living. Please …”

He sighed. “You’re not Italian.”

“Spanish. My husband’s Italian. Wherever he is.”

He waved the letter Petrakis had given her. “Don’t walk around Rome without an ID. It’s the law.”

“Thank you, thank you.”

He laughed. “Why anyone would rush to be in a room with those people is beyond me. Play well. What’s it they say?” He gestured with his arm, theatrically. “Music has charms to soothe the savage breast.”

“They’re the leaders of the world,” she replied primly.

“And we’re their subjects. Quite.”

A moment later, heart still beating wildly in her chest, she found herself in the long, broad corridor that Petrakis had described. Just to be sure, she checked her map once more. It was all as he had said. A palace more grand than anything she had ever seen. Tapestries hung from the walls like everyday drapes. Paintings decorated every spare inch. A line of open windows gave out onto the green gardens of the Quirinale that seemed to stretch forever, as if they were a private park made for a king.

The music grew louder as she walked, a light dance tune, the kind old people listened to, tapping their feet. It came, she knew, from the adjoining room, and was accompanied by the low murmur of voices.

She walked on toward the door he’d marked on the map, holding the instrument case firmly, feeling the handle grow slippery in her sweating fingers.

Zeru, Josepe …

Nothing can bring back the dead, she thought. But one might mark their memory in a way others would not forget.

The door she sought looked as if it had been carved from old gold. Mythical creatures, dragons and unicorns, danced the length of the frame. She could see her son’s face, clear in her memory.

Then a flash of recollection, cruel and relentless. It was the day they’d found a baby thrush in the garden, too young to fly, too weak to feed.

Josepe had quietly taken the creature to one side and, out of kindness, smothered it in an old blanket. Zeru had not witnessed this, had not been told, and yet, when he became aware of its disappearance, he knew somehow, understood intuitively what had happened, feeling the small creature’s agony somewhere in the recesses of his young heart. How he had sobbed!

What would he say now? her inner voice asked.

“Zeru was a little boy,” she answered softly, feeling tears prick her eyes. “A child is a child. What they know is a truth for them, a fairy tale. Not for the rest of us.”

She heard a sound behind her. Anna Ybarra’s blood ran cold.

Turning, her hands still tight on the instrument case, with the primed Uzi inside, she found herself facing a solitary figure she recognized. The old man from the podium. He was standing erect, amused, smoking a cigarette, slyly blowing the smoke out of the neighboring window.

“Another truant, I see, signora,” Dario Sordi, the president of Italy, remarked. “Enjoying the view when you should, by all rights, be playing. Unless I’m mistaken.”

At that point something clouded his eyes and she knew immediately what it was. Recognition. Astonishment. Yet not alarm, though she failed to understand why.

“Perhaps I am mistaken,” he added.

53

Teresa Lupo wondered what kind of spectacle they made, sitting on the steps of the little church near the Quirinale looking miserable as Hell. They bunched together on the hard stone, silent, watched by the sour-faced saints high on Borromoni’s curving façade. It wasn’t a thinking silence, either. That was what worried her most. For the last couple of days she’d started to consider herself a cop, not a pathologist, and this blank inactivity bothered her. Cops were meant to discover, to seize ideas out of thin air, then turn fancy into fact, something concrete, something one could act on. Not sit around waiting. Peroni hadn’t done this, not quite. He’d disappeared around the corner for some unannounced reason. A hunt for the restroom, she guessed. But the rest of them …

She turned to Falcone, whose long, tanned face was in his hands as he stared down at the empty street, and asked, “So what do we do now? Just sit here like tourists waiting for the bus to turn up?”

“Unless you have any better suggestions …” the inspector murmured.

“But it’s not supposed to be like this!”

“What is it supposed to be like?” Rosa wondered.

“We’re supposed to be finding things out. Working things out. Seeing some … rational link between what’s going on.”

“‘Rational link’?” Falcone mocked. “What an extraordinarily old-fashioned view of police work.”

“What else is there?”

His lean face wrinkled with distaste. “I sometimes wonder if you’ve taken a moment’s notice of anything I’ve tried to teach you over the years.”

“You? Teach me?”

“When it comes to … science”—he said the word as if it had a bad taste—“I value your advice immensely. Not that science is doing us many favors.”

“Leo!” She pointed in the direction of the Quirinale Palace. “Over there a bunch of faceless gray spooks are concocting some kind of fake terrorist incident. Here, in our city. All in the hope that the so-called perpetrator will then be allowed to return to the bandit lands of Afghanistan and lead those selfsame spooks straight to the evil bastards they’ve been chasing, with no success whatsoever, for years. Which seems pretty unlikely if you ask me, not that I’m an expert in such matters, thank God.”

“It would seem that way,” he agreed.

“People have died because of this nonsense. One of our own …”

“You heard the American’s apology for that. We were warned not to interfere.”

“These are criminal acts.”

He shrugged. “Would you like me to arrest someone?”

“Yes!”

“How? Esposito won’t countenance it. Palombo would overrule it if I tried. Besides, if they’re right …”

“The ends cannot justify the means,” she retorted.

He frowned. “It’s easy to say that, isn’t it? But what if you could turn back time? What if you could prevent New York City, Bali, all those other enormities? Just by torturing a single human being? A guilty man. A murderer who would murder thousands more if he could—”

“Doesn’t work, and you know it. You’d have to torture a thousand human beings, and most of them wouldn’t be guilty at all.”

“If you could have killed Hitler before he ordered Auschwitz?” Rosa asked.

“Any argument that requires the mention of Hitler in order to succeed is doomed from the start, as far as I’m concerned.”

Peroni was walking up the street, his hands filled with cones of gelati.

It was beautiful ice cream. Her favorite: pistachio. A thin green line of it had melted down his lapel and he hadn’t noticed. Teresa wiped it off with a tissue as he sat down next to her.

“Your job’s nothing like mine, is it?” she said.

“I never claimed it was,” Peroni answered, looking puzzled.

“Our occupation, such as it is,” Falcone cut in, “principally consists of assembling unseen shapes in a darkened room, then waiting for the arrival of daylight to see if any of them resemble, in some small way, what we expected.”

Peroni looked around at them and said, “Normally I would ask you to bring me up to date on things. But in this instance …”

She patted him on the knee, so hard he shut up. “I was simply coming to realize what a rotten police officer I’d make. Spending all this time running your hands through meaningless dust …”

Peroni considered this. Then he said, “I think you mean dust for which we have yet to find a meaning.”

Teresa laughed and then pecked him on the cheek, not minding that they saw. She loved this man, for all the right reasons. In a way, she loved all of them. They were a team. A family. A group of people bound to one another by invisible, powerful ties. This was one more reason why it hurt so much that there were no shapes to work with, no darkened room, no prospect of daylight. It was such a joy to see the spark in their faces the moment some glimmer of revelation appeared.

The pathologist finished her cone, got up, and stood beneath the grim stare of Borromini’s stone saints. She dialed Silvio Di Capua on her cell phone; it took him a second to answer, no more, and a minute to fill her in on his thinking.

“Where’s Elizabeth?” she asked.

“Gone out.”

“Gone out where?”

“She said she was meeting a friend. I’m a forensic scientist, not a bodyguard. Besides, she can look after—”

“Shut up, Silvio! I’m trying to think.”

“You called to tell me that?”

“No.” She remembered now. “I called to talk to Elizabeth.”

“Ask me.”

“You’re a man. You think the wrong way. Like me.”

“Intellectual cross-dressing can become very confusing, whether you’re watching or taking part.”

“Very clever.” She thought of the numerals. There had to be something in the numerals. “When you start a message with a number, it usually signifies either a time or a date,” she suggested.

“Been there, looked at that. It can’t be a date, not if it refers to the summit. The twelfth of the month is already past. And if it’s time …”

“It can’t be today, since we’re past midday. But it has to be.”

“Why?”

“Because the big men in the Quirinale Palace say so. Don’t ask for an explanation. You wouldn’t believe it.”

“Then it’s not a time and it’s not a date. So what is it? Can I pair it with the following numeral and make something?”

“You tell me,” she demanded.

“No. I can’t.”

“Thank you for that.”

“Non è niente.”

“They’re Roman numerals. Latin.”

“So?”

“So why do you assume that the number twelve would mean back then what it does now?”

“Twelve is twelve,” he said with a long, pained sigh. “Numbers are numbers. Gloriously immutable. That’s why we do what we do. That’s why the sky never falls.”

“You’re missing my point.” Two points, actually, the more she thought about it. “Petrakis thinks he’s living in the past. Maybe part of the joke is that he writes that way too. What did the number twelve mean to Julius Caesar? Midday? Possibly. But they weren’t walking around with watches on their wrists, were they? I don’t know. Check it out.”

“Good one,” he agreed. “Will do.”

“And, also, check out the obvious.”

There was a pause on the line. The two of them had this discussion from time to time. About the way Silvio was an astonishingly learned and sharp individual, one so clever that occasionally he was unable to see something directly in front of his own face.

“The obvious?” he repeated, sounding a little scared.

“Even if we don’t know what the first number stands for,” Teresa said patiently, “this would signify that the second set possesses some separate meaning. Not a time. Not a date. Not … I don’t know. Perhaps just the same as the other numbers we’ve had to deal with.”

Somehow she could sense fear inside his silence.

“Silvio,” she asked testily. “You have looked, haven’t you? Shakespeare? The text Petrakis used for the other codes?”

“The other codes had three numbers,” he said hesitantly.

“So does this one, if the first number refers to something else. What is it?”

“II. I. CLXXIII.”

“Act Two. Scene One. Line one hundred and seventy-three. Possibly. Check out the time. Check out the verse. Get back to me as soon as you can.”

“On it,” he said hastily. “Anything else?”

There was nothing she could think of and she said so. The others were watching her. Peroni had a new blob of pistachio ice cream on his suit.

“Well?” Costa asked hopefully when she sat down beside them.

“Science,” she told him. “Boring old integers. Nothing you philosopher types need bother your clever heads about.”

54

“Dígame,” Dario Sordi murmured, looking at the young woman in the long velvet dress, a large closed instrument case in her hand, at the expression of fear and anticipation on her plain, intense face.

The corridor by the Salone dei Corazzieri was deserted. The room beyond, one he knew so well, every glittering inch engraved upon his memory, reverberated to the sound of music and the low chatter of voices in many languages. He had been glad to escape. Smoking was an enjoyable excuse, nothing more.

“Excuse me?” the young woman said.

“I was under the impression we’d met before,” Sordi answered before throwing his half-finished cigarette out of the window, into the gardens beyond.

“I don’t think so, sir. I’m a musician.…”

“What instrument?”

She hesitated. “Brass.”

“My late wife played the flute. Not very well, if I’m being honest. Is that brass too?”

She thought for a moment, then answered, “Of course.”

He came and stood closer to her. “The modern flute may be made of metal, but it’s still woodwind, or so I seem to recall. Any musician would know that. Although a reporter might not.” Sordi recalled the single word of Spanish he’d heard when he tried to call Costa on the private phone, the one that was supposed to be their link alone. “Or someone who was simply a voice in the dark in Tarquinia.”

She pushed him back, firmly, with her right hand. Her face, which seemed initially full of a simple honesty, was contorted by anger. He fell against a radiator and found himself clutching at a curtain to stay upright. When he regained his balance, she was fumbling at the instrument case, releasing the catch. Inside there was a weapon, too large for a pistol, too small to be a conventional military rifle. These things had changed so much since the Second World War, and he had never had a great deal of interest in firearms even then.

The thing looked efficient and deadly.

Her trembling fingers snatched at the barrel, then the stock. The case fell to the floor. Her hand found the butt of the weapon, the trigger guard, and she started to grip it in a way that betrayed both skill and purpose.

The pistol, almost a child’s toy, was aimed his way, though not as directly as her determined gaze.

“This is the Quirinale Palace,” Dario Sordi told her. “At any moment, security people will interrupt our little discussion. They will not wait to ask questions, signora. They will see you with that thing and they will shoot you dead.”

“They’re all in there,” she retorted, nodding at the closed door into the Salone. “With the important people. Where you should be.”

“Important?” He frowned. “You flatter me, signora.”

The barrel moved slowly toward him, like the black nose of a hungry beast. He raised his hands — which was, he supposed, what she wanted.

Sordi caught their reflection in the nearby window: a tall, straight-backed old man who hated to see himself; a young, plain woman, her face distorted by fury and doubt.

He stepped closer.

The barrel swung straight back toward him, dashed forward, stabbed him in the chest. Not a painful blow. More of a prod. A threat.

“Why are you not afraid of me?” she asked, pointing the sleek black weapon toward him.

He laughed. There seemed nothing else to do. “I’m almost eighty years old,” Dario Sordi replied. “I’ve been smoking since the age of thirteen, and drinking wine, good and bad, rather longer than that. On occasion I argue so much my blood pressure attains levels my doctor believes physically impossible. If I live another five years or another five seconds, what does it matter?”

She was silent, listening.

“They used to make me read Horace when I was a schoolboy,” he continued. “I remember one line in particular …” It was the day of the Via Rasella, and he’d spent the morning poring over a copy of the Odes, struggling with the language. “‘Sed omnes una manet nox.’ ‘But the same night awaits us all.’ What exactly am I supposed to fear, signora? Such a small and commonplace creature as death …?”

He was glad there were no Corazzieri there. Glad he had the chance to try to talk to her.

“Latin’s the language of priests,” she hissed.

“Among others,” he agreed.

“When I go in there,” she told him, pointing with the gun at the glittering doorway, “don’t follow.”

“I may be just another citizen in the world beyond this place,” he told her. “But in the Quirinale, I go where I want.”

The barrel rose and pointed straight into his face. She didn’t speak.

He held up his hands higher, smiled, and said, “You asked me a question only a few hours ago. Were you happy with the answer?”

She shook her head, in doubt, not negation.

“These demons that pursue you must be hungry indeed,” Dario Sordi said.

“You don’t know my demons.”

“No,” the president admitted. “Not your present ones.” She refused to meet his gaze. “I know the ones to come, though. Here is something I never told anyone before — anyone except my wife, that is, and she’s gone.” He stiffened, feeling suddenly cold. “Their faces don’t die, signora. They never leave you. I can see those two young Germans I murdered even now. The surprise in their eyes. As if everything was a joke, even life itself.”

“I don’t want to hear.”

“Perhaps, but I wish to say it. Sometimes I wake up in the night, sweating. Sad old words from a sad old man, you might say. But it’s not fear that wakes me. It’s regret. It’s remembering.… It’s the regret that, when I die, those faces may be the last thing I ever see.”

“I lost my family!” The weapon rose and pointed directly at him.

“I lost my father. My uncle. The Germans murdered them in the reprisals. Some would say I helped kill them. Some say that still. Yet today I have a very good friend who is a Berliner, and both of us are much too old and sensible to mention any of this. He served during the war. He was a German. What do you expect?”

Her eyes flared with fury. She snatched a look at the door to the room beyond. “Do you ever stop to wonder how much blood is on their hands?” she demanded. “Blood in Europe. In the East. More blood than I could spill in a lifetime.”

Dario Sordi rarely lost his temper. Anger was, he felt, beneath someone of his age. Also, once lost, his temper proved difficult to rein in. At that moment he was dismayed to recognize a red ire rising in him.

“I never forget that,” he retorted. “Not for one second. It’s why I am here. I lived through a war that ripped apart this world of ours. I watched my father’s torn corpse dug out of the Ardeatine Caves by men with picks in their hands and tears in their eyes.” His arm came down; his long, bloodless finger jabbed at her through the bright golden air streaming from the palace windows. “You travel the world as if it’s a place of no consequence. You play with toys that kill men at the push of a button, miles away. It saves you looking into their eyes, I imagine. How brave. How noble! Do not, signora, seek to lecture me—”

“Shut up!” she screamed. “Shut up—”

Dario Sordi felt a fierce, sharp hurt in his temple as the gun stock slammed into his skull, and stumbled to the floor, shouting, swearing.

Perhaps he blacked out. He wasn’t sure. There was a moment when everything seemed to fade, when the bright, beautiful corridor in the Quirinale Palace disappeared for an instant, and in its place he found himself in a narrow cobbled Roman street in front of two uniformed men, found that he was staring at them from behind the eyes of another, younger body, one he had long forgotten — a child, he knew that, a boy who was pulling a weapon from the gray, grubby fabric of his threadbare school coat.

He could hear the dream voice of the German taunting him again.

So you’re a coward now, are you? A little late for us, isn’t it?

“It’s a little late for everyone,” Sordi found himself whispering, his eyes straying fearfully toward the mirrored door that led into the Salone dei Corazzieri.

It was open, and as his eyes began to focus on the frozen forms beyond the door bodies in their suits and cocktail gowns, he became aware that the soft, simple music of the orchestra had stumbled to an awkward and uncertain halt.

55

The offices of CESIS, the Executive Committee for Intelligence and Security Services, had not moved in forty years. The organization that liaised between the civilian and military arms of the Italian intelligence services, SISDE and SISMI respectively, occupied a six-story former outpost of the Vatican bureaucracy in the Via delle Quattro Fontane. It was a nondescript building that stretched from the busy straight road running past Borromini’s church to the narrow lane of the Via dei Giardini, which ran the length of the border wall of the Quirinale gardens. The offices possessed one spectacular attraction: a roof terrace with magnificent views of the city, all the way to the Vatican and, from the very edge, down into the verdant hectares of the presidential palace itself.

Elizabeth Murray had attended countless parties there, for intelligence-community weddings and retirements, and more private engagements too where attendance was tightly restricted to those in the higher echelons of this secretive world. She had little doubt that the place would now be put to good use, and was able to confirm this as her taxi, after a circuitous journey, dropped her at the very edge of the Quirinale security cordon, opposite the Palazzo Barberini, at the head of the Via Rasella.

There was a sniper on the roof, exactly where experience told her to look for one.

She had called ahead to check who was on duty and, after navigating the switchboard, using all the persuasion and name-dropping she could manage, was pleased with the eventual answer: Carlo Belfiore, a junior spook when she first met him, now a senior CESIS official.

A good, honest man, like most of those she worked with. It didn’t surprise her to find Belfiore was in the office. It would have been impossible to persuade him to go home in circumstances such as these.

She waited on a hard leather bench in reception for five minutes until Belfiore arrived. He had less hair and more flesh, but the same broad, easy smile. They hugged, kissed. He looked at her cane and laughed and said, “We’re all getting older, aren’t we?”

“So what?” she wondered.

His smile slackened a little. “This is a busy time, Elizabeth. It’s wonderful to see you. But to be honest …”

“I’m sorry, Carlo. I should have given you some notice. If I’d known I’d find Rome like this … Who could have guessed the Blue Demon would rise from the grave?”

“Not me. That’s for sure.” He studied her. “You know more about them than anyone else.”

“Possibly …”

“Were you surprised?”

She thought for a moment and then said, “It never felt quite dead. Did it?”

He seemed disappointed by her reply. “Come. I have time for a coffee. And something to show you.”

Belfiore took out his security card and flashed it through the machine, ushering her through the gate before him. They hadn’t had toys like that two decades before. Then they got in the lift and rose to the fifth floor, the one she knew so well, and walked down a familiar corridor into a large office overlooking the Quirinale gardens.

She peered at the expanse of perfectly kept lawns, flower beds, and patches of shrubbery. On the palace roof opposite, there was a single black-clad figure with a rifle in its hands.

“You seem more relaxed than I expected,” she remarked.

“We’re nearly done for the day, thank God. It’s all in the news. I’m not breaking clearance. I wouldn’t. Not even for you. Soon our visitors move on to the Vatican. After that, we’re done. All those famous people become someone else’s problem. At eleven, when they want to go to bed, and then their people can take care of everything.” He smiled. “Tomorrow they go home and we can try to go back to normal. Try to find out what the hell has been going on here. Giovanni Batisti—”

“You knew him?” Elizabeth asked. The office was so different from how she remembered it, and dominated by technology: two computer screens, three telephones, a couple of cell phones on the desk too.

“I worked with Batisti on the preparations. A nice man. Missed his family like crazy. We do this for a living. He did it out of common decency. Look where it got him.”

“A tragedy. Do you like my old lair?”

Carlo Belfiore nodded. “But it was better with you in it. Queen Elizabeth the Third.”

“You never dared call me that to my face.”

“Of course not. But now I can. It was a compliment, you know. The way you remembered everything. Understood the links. The possibilities. You were a legend, Elizabeth. You are a legend.”

She laughed. “I’m a distant memory, Carlo, a name on a dusty plaque. And I was well aware of that nickname, by the way.”

He sat down. She took the chair opposite, facing the window and the empty expanse of the gardens beyond.

She stared into his genial, intelligent face.

“Can I help?” Elizabeth Murray asked.

“No,” Belfiore replied immediately, shaking his head. “I’m sorry. You have no clearance. Things have changed. Rules. Regulations. We are not as free as we once were.”

“You said I knew the Blue Demon better than anyone.”

“If we had the time …” He thought for a moment. “When the summit is over and the circus has moved on. There will be work to do. I could arrange a temporary attachment.” He looked embarrassed. “We have accommodations you could use. I heard you were running a farm or something. In New Zealand. On your own. There can’t be much money in that. Pensions …” He looked around the office. “One becomes so engrossed in the present that it’s easier to forget the future is just around the corner.”

“It is too,” she agreed. “That’s kind. And in the meantime?”

He frowned. “In the meantime you must enjoy Rome as best you can.” His eyes were watching the messages on his computer more than her. His face had turned somewhat paler. “You have to excuse me now. There’s something I must deal with. I’ll call for an officer to show you out.”

“I can find my own way. Remember, I worked here long enough.”

“Yes, yes,” he mumbled, eyes glued to the screen. A phone began to ring. He snatched at it, cupped the handset, looked at her, and said, “I’m sorry. This is important. Please. Call me this weekend, Elizabeth. Come for dinner. My wife would love that.”

Then he was talking, rapidly, eyeing her in a way she immediately understood. It was a private conversation, one she wasn’t supposed to hear.

Elizabeth Murray got up and walked out of her old office. The corridor was deserted. This was the executive part of the building, never a place for much in the way of visible activity.

A narrow set of stairs led to the roof terrace. She could remember walking up it, half-tipsy, so many years ago in the company of beloved colleagues, some gone, some dead on duty, a few in parts of the world where their bodies still rested, undiscovered. The fallen.

Behind an ancient door at the top of the stairs there was a small hut, like a sentry box, a place to store watering cans and gardening equipment for the handful of flowerpots one of the green-fingered intelligence specialists liked to keep there.

The bottom door was unlocked. This was a secure location. There was no need for locked doors.

Steadily, one step at a time, leaning on the stout shepherd’s crook she’d bought at a market in Dunedin, she ascended the stairs, opening the door to find herself inside the little cabin at the top.

A memory returned: drunken kisses exchanged with a young, pretty secretary toward the end of a retirement party. A rash moment, one that could have been costly. No one liked an officer who stood out from the ordinary, not in the intelligence services. No one was under any illusions about her preferences. It was simply bad form to display them. Prudence, not prejudice. Sexual dysfunction, as it was then perceived, might lead to blackmail or worse.

The secretary had been very pretty, though, and her abrupt transfer to a more mundane department the following day was a loss Elizabeth Murray had privately regretted for some time.

The watering cans and gardening paraphernalia were still ranged along the shelving on the wall adjoining the exterior door. Next to them was a black nylon jacket of the kind worn by the more arcane security services.

In the right-hand pocket was a sealed plastic ID card. She held it to the light streaming from the cabin’s single tiny window and saw the crest of the Ministry of the Interior and a name: Domenico Leone. He was a senior civil servant in the ministry, it said, and nothing more.

She placed her large thumb over the photo so that only the crest was visible and a lazy man might think it referred to someone else altogether. Then she stepped out onto the terrace of the CESIS building, heading immediately for the Via dei Giardini side, where she had seen the sniper’s silhouette from the street.

A tall, stocky man was stretched out on the concrete there, in black combat uniform, vest, and cap. In his hands was a rifle with a telescopic sight.

“Domenico?” she shouted, holding the ID high, still obscuring the photo. “Domenico?”

She tried to remember what it was like to talk as a true Roman: with a short, guttural accent, and abbreviated diction.

“Si?” the officer said, turning, puzzled. “I’m sorry, signora … I don’t know you.”

“No, you don’t. They brought me in from Milan. There’s a change of plan. Belfiore wants you to do something else. He needs you to report to his office now.”

He shuffled up to a crouch, took off the cap, and scratched his balding head.

“But the roof …”

“The gardens can go without sniper cover for five minutes, Officer. Have you seen anything?”

“No. But in the palace …” Another puzzled look. “I thought something was happening.”

“Champagne and canapés. Wouldn’t you need a drink, if you were going to spend the rest of the evening in the Vatican?”

Domenico Leone guffawed. “You bet,” he answered, then hauled himself to his feet and walked over to the open cabin door.

She walked with him. When he got there, something fell from Elizabeth Murray’s wrist. The officer said, “You’ve lost your watch.”

“Damned strap,” she muttered. “I must get it changed.”

She eased forward on the shepherd’s crook.

“No, no, signora. Please.”

He bent to retrieve it. She thought of all the training she’d done thirty years ago or more. How they’d practice on one another.

Then she brought down the shiny oak handle of her stick hard on his head. He stumbled to both knees. She fell on him, crooked her right arm around his neck, and brought her left in to pinch on the carotid and the jugular, squeezing them.

Leone went still in seconds, slumping to the ground. She picked up her watch and slipped it back on her wrist. It was a struggle to drag him inside. There, she stripped off his vest and cap. She found a ball of twine in the garden equipment. Carefully — there was no hurry, and he would be this way for a few hours — she bound his feet and hands, then gagged him with her scarf. Finally, to be sure, she wrapped several lengths of clothesline around his chest before strapping him tight against an old sink.

He was starting to wake by then, with fury in his eyes.

“Scusami,” she said, then went outside and picked up his rifle.

Weapons were weapons. Back home in New Zealand, she was used to hunting the wild black razorback pig. The animal was a monster, wildly aggressive and capable of slaughtering a dozen or more lambs in a single night. The beast’s one saving grace was that it tasted good, which was another reason to shoot it.

Domenico Leone’s rifle was nothing like the.30–06 Springfield she used to kill feral boars. The thing was surely far more deadly. But it wasn’t hard to figure out how it worked.

She found the jacket hung on the peg behind the cabin door, put it on, and then the protection vest over that. The cap fit if she tucked in her hair. There would be snipers on other rooftops. If they peered at her through binoculars, they’d see through the ruse. But the snipers were looking at the Quirinale and the surrounding streets, not at each other. Or so she hoped.

Elizabeth Murray went back to the corner of the terrace where he’d been stationed when she arrived. There was a low stool there and, on the wall, a black fabric-and-padding gun rest. The sniper rifle fitted neatly between the two mounts set at each side. She let it fall into place, then leaned down and began to adjust the telescopic sight.

It took a moment for her to juggle her bulky frame into the right position, one where the weapon felt comfortable. Then she bent down to the eyepiece. The crosshairs ranged the gardens of the Quirinale, from spectacular flower bed to leafy artificial glade, from classical statue to dainty, ornate pond.

Finally her sights settled on the stone bench beneath the wicker canopy, by the handsome young figure of Hermes.

It would be an easy, clean shot. She left the rifle idly poised against the rest and checked her watch, wondering how long she would have to wait.

56

Anna Ybarra pushed open the mirrored door, not knowing what to expect. A room full of strangers. A brief storm of violence before her own life was snuffed out. She thrust Dario Sordi’s questions from her mind. They were too close to her. They hurt.

With the little Uzi tight in her right arm, her finger on the trigger, she burst into the gilded hall and found herself stumbling noisily into a table laden with glasses and canapés, sending wine and little plates scattering onto the glossy floor.

The salone was full of paintings and gilt, with high, bright windows.

Beneath a forest of chandeliers sat an orchestra — the women, she could see, wearing long, dark velvet gowns identical to the one left for her in the stable in the Via delle Scuderie. They, like the men, had stopped playing. In front of them, in the main body of the hall, were figures in formal suits, women in elegant dresses that seemed unsuited for a hot Roman afternoon, all of them motionless and silent.

Every eye in the room was on her.

Some of these faces were familiar: politicians, men mainly, whose features appeared daily on television, in newspapers, everywhere, usually smiling, always in control.

Now they seemed smaller, more human. A few moved in front of the women by their sides, as if to block them from what was about to occur. One or two had begun to stride swiftly toward the back. From the corner of her eye, Anna could see others, anonymous figures emerging from the shadows, starting to stir into action, and she knew who they were, knew what they would do.

Only two things ran through her head, Zeru and Josepe — Zeru more than any — though the words of Dario Sordi continued to haunt her, and suddenly she knew she could never, as she’d intended, scream the names of her slaughtered child and dead husband at these elegant strangers as they stood frozen with fear.

None of them would understand. None of them would ever know.

The trigger of the Uzi fell beneath her finger, the way they’d taught her in the hot, primitive training camp on the wild stretch of the Helmand River where the NATO forces never dared to venture. Anna Ybarra gripped the Uzi and began a sweep of the bodies in front of her, not looking too closely at the suits and cocktail gowns, not thinking about what came next.

Her finger jerked the trigger. The weapon awoke. There was a sudden staccato burst of sound, and the Uzi leaped in her arms like a wild animal startled from a terrible dream.

Someone screamed. A woman. A man.

She arced the shuddering weapon once to the right, once to the left, and then it was silent.

Too soon, she thought. In Helmand it had lasted longer.

Desperately, she tried again. There was nothing. The magazine had jammed, perhaps. The thing was dead.

She let it drop from her fingers, to clatter on the shiny, polished floor of the Salone dei Corazzieri.

Dark, anonymous figures from the periphery of the hall were starting to close in. They held handguns the way the Taliban did — in a taut, outstretched arm, threatening death with a fierce, unwavering certainty.

Her hands fell to her sides. Tears stung her eyes, tears of fury at her own failure and her stupidity.

There was not a single casualty among the crowd in front of her. Men gripped women by their shoulders. Some of those who had retreated to the rear of the hall were beginning to return. One she recognized from the TV: a man who had been the first to flee — Ugo Campagnolo, the prime minister.

No one had died. No one had been hurt. Whatever bullets she’d managed to loose off before the weapon failed had simply vanished into thin air, as if they’d never existed at all.

Anna Ybarra thought of the Kenyan Joseph Priest and the fiasco at the Trevi Fountain. How he’d fought to do what Deniz Nesin had told him, only to find it didn’t work at all, not until Andrea Petrakis, unseen, had pushed the button.

Dead Joseph. Dead Deniz. Dead …

The armed men in suits were so near she could see the curling wires emerging from their earpieces. She raised her arms, realizing she was the spectacle now, the intended victim all along.

Quite deliberately she closed her eyes, wishing she could say something that held meaning, if only there was time, and the right words.

A hard and powerful blow sent her wheeling off balance, down to the polished floor. She opened her eyes, found herself thinking, automatically, that she ought to locate the source of the blinding pain.

A tall, stiff, commanding figure stood over her, and he was furious, bellowing — at the circling figures, at everyone, it seemed.

It was Dario Sordi, and he was shouting a name she didn’t recognize.

“Ranieri! Ranieri!”

The president’s hands reached down to grip her shoulders, tugging her torso toward him. She found herself reaching for his long legs, clinging to them, like a child seeking protection.

“Dammit. Ranieri!” Sordi yelled again, and finally a man in a blue suit forced his way through the line of figures with guns. Behind him came several officers in ceremonial uniform, shining breastplates, swords, plumed helmets.

There was another man too, one with a long, angry face.

This one pushed his way to the front, stared at Sordi, and said, “Sir …”

“Be quiet, Palombo. I’m in charge here. Ranieri—”

“Sir!” the angry one cut in. “You must leave this to my people.”

“Leave what, exactly?” the president roared. “An execution? Or rendition, as you call it, to some country beyond our control? I see no dead here. No danger …”

“We were lucky.”

“Good. The state police shall take this woman into their custody. They will decide what charges she must face. Corazzieri!”

The silver uniforms barged through the suits. Anna Ybarra let go of the old man’s legs, struggled to her feet, taking the hand of one of the soldiers, finding herself in their midst. The one who’d helped her up did not let go. She looked at him and saw the face of the officer she’d met, and deceived, in the courtyard outside. She glanced at the shining floor, feeling ashamed and confused and lost.

“I cannot allow this,” the one called Palombo declared. “I must insist—”

Sordi confronted him.

“You cannot allow? I am the president of Italy. This is the Quirinale Palace. These are the Corazzieri, and they do my bidding. Officers! Take this woman to my apartment to await the police. Allow in no one without my permission.”

“Mr. President—”

“Those are my orders.”

“Mr. President.” It was the one he’d called Ranieri who was speaking. “You’re bleeding.”

Sordi wiped his forehead with the arm of his jacket, then stared at the stain on his shirtsleeve. “Well, at least it shows I’m alive.

“Ladies, gentlemen,” Dario Sordi told the crowd. “I apologize for this interruption. We will get to the bottom of it, I promise. And I am grateful that the only injury is a scratch to an old man’s head. Now …” He glanced at the orchestra, and then the assembled crowd. “I think this event is at an end. Your transport leaves for the Vatican very soon, perhaps sooner than originally intended. I suggest you retire to your quarters here till then. My staff will be in touch. Please …”

The man in the blue suit took Anna’s arm. They left by the ornate gilt door through which she had entered, never expecting when she did so to live for a minute or more. In her head she could hear the sound of the plainchant in the quiet distant monastery she had visited as a child.

The words echoed in her head, her lips moved to match them.

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

The imposing figure of Dario Sordi caught up with them as they strode along the corridor, matching the younger men, step for step.

“Get this woman into the hands of Costa and his friends as soon as you can,” he ordered.

57

Five minutes later Falcone’s blue Lancia set off for the Quirinale. They left Teresa at the church. There was no room in the car, no time for arguments. She was to find her own way back to San Giovanni while the others extracted the woman from the Corazzieri. Afterwards they would attempt to get their captive safely into the maximum-security area in the basement of the Questura in the back streets behind the Pantheon.

Costa drove. Falcone somehow talked his way through the security cordons, then spent the rest of the journey on the phone. Peroni and Rosa sat in the back, silent, listening to the car radio. They pulled onto the pale cobbles of the Quirinale piazza to be greeted by a sea of armored limousines.

A group of officers in gleaming silver stepped outside the portico as they drew up. Falcone told Costa to deal with it, and quickly.

“Captain?”

Ranieri was at the head of his men. He moved to reveal a dark-skinned young woman in a long black velvet dress, in the midst of the corazzieri. She looked shell-shocked. Her eyes seemed bleary, as if she couldn’t decide whether to burst into tears.

“This woman is called Anna Ybarra. She is a Spanish citizen. She will confess to an attempted terrorist attack.” Ranieri nodded at the palace. “The president wishes you to charge her as soon as possible. Once she is inside our legal system, it will be difficult for anyone to take her out of it. This is important.”

“Is anyone hurt?” Costa asked.

“No,” Ranieri replied urgently. “Turn on the TV when you have the time. Palombo is about to brief the media. He can’t wait.” The tall officer coughed into his hand and stared at Costa. “Her gun jammed, it seems. The bullets didn’t work. Something like that. We will discover. Not that she was to know. Perhaps we were very lucky. Perhaps … We can discuss this later. You have little time.”

Costa glanced at the woman. She wouldn’t meet his eye. He knew why.

“We’ve met before,” he said, and led her to the rear of the car.

Falcone was still on the phone, talking, listening, issuing rapid instructions to someone on the other end.

Costa got behind the wheel and gunned the muscular engine.

“Esposito is at a liaison meeting with the Carabinieri,” the inspector revealed when he ended the call. “He’ll know what’s happening by now, but at least he isn’t in the Questura.” He reached beneath the dashboard, pulled out the blue light, opened the passenger window, and set it on the roof. “Let’s get there before he does.”

Costa wheeled the powerful Lancia around the cobbles, sending the limousine chauffeurs scattering, filling the Roman afternoon with the screech of a klaxon.

They roared down a deserted Via XXIV Maggio, into the roadblock near the Via dei Fori Imperiali. Falcone had the window down before they even got to the Carabinieri post there, screaming at the officers to open the barriers into the empty road by the scattered ruins of the Forum.

For once the men in dark blue didn’t argue. The street was open to them the moment the Lancia arrived. They were through, racing toward the Piazza Venezia.

Only a few pedestrians wandered across the bare cobbles, anxiously striding out of the way of the approaching police car with its siren blaring and light flashing.

Costa flung the Lancia into the main street of Vittorio Emanuele, found a further Carabinieri unit opening another barrier for them, one that would take them back into the traffic beyond Palombo’s ring of steel.

“Everyone’s very cooperative,” Peroni observed from the backseat.

Costa glanced in the mirror. The big cop and Rosa sat close on either side of the Ybarra woman, who seemed lost, as if none of this were quite real.

Peroni had a point. This had been so easy.

He forced a half-empty bus to the curb, then maneuvered his way to a side street that led into the Renaissance warren of alleys and lanes that made up the centro storico. The Piazza di San Michele Arcangelo was just blocks away. There, befuddled tourists who wandered into the piazza, from the Pantheon, the Piazza Navona, and all the other great sights, usually saw nothing special in the Polizia di Stato’s little square. Just a small shop, a tiny cafe, some offices, and a tall, grimy building surrounded by squad cars parked in a haphazard fashion in the street.

Costa passed Bernini’s comic stone elephant with an obelisk on its back, marooned in the Piazza della Minerva, and cut into the dark, narrow lane that led home.

They turned the corner, rounding the cafe run by Totti, a foulmouthed misanthrope whose only saving grace was the quality of his coffee and the cheapness of the cornetti.

“Oh …” Peroni said simply from the back as the Lancia slid screeching to a halt just twenty meters short of the Questura’s front door.

The entire piazza was packed with black armored vehicles. Dark-clad figures, hooded and bearing rifles, swarmed everywhere.

A group of them fell upon the Lancia, ripping open the doors. Costa felt himself seized by strong arms, hurled out into the street, onto the worn cobblestones he knew so well. Falcone was arguing. So was Rosa. Costa could hear their voices, angry and shrill, as he rolled upright to find himself facing the barrel of an automatic weapon.

There must have been twenty or more. They didn’t have badges or even an obvious sign of rank.

“Get up!” the one with the gun barked.

Costa did as he was told. There was a cry. It was Rosa. One of the men had pushed her back hard against the car. Falcone stepped forward, protesting. The inspector got a rifle butt in the gut for his pains and went quiet, clutching his stomach.

Peroni was still in the Lancia, his beefy arm around Anna Ybarra.

“We’re Roman police officers performing our legitimate duties!” Costa barked at the faceless figure in front of him. “I will have every one of your names, and tomorrow I will see you in court.”

There was laughter behind the black wool hood.

A small crowd was gathering. Totti was there, abandoning his cafe, never willing to miss a fight. Some shoppers. A couple of stray tourists and Signora Campitelli, an old woman who came in most weeks to complain of some imaginary misdemeanor. People were beginning to wander out from the station too: Prinzivalli, the uniform sovrintendente, was on the steps, arms folded, watching everything like a hawk. Next to him was the gruff and none-too-bright plainclothes officer Taccone, and Emilio Furillo, Teresa’s friend, a onetime cop who’d switched to Systems.

“Tell your gorilla we want the woman,” the soldier demanded, waving his rifle toward the car.

Color rose in Falcone’s lean face. He rubbed his stomach, looked at the man, and replied, “Don’t ever speak about one of my officers that way. You will—”

Armed men closed in on both sides of the Lancia’s open rear doors. Falcone and Rosa got pushed out of the way. The one who seemed to be in charge bellowed, very slowly, “Get. Out. Now.”

The little piazza filled with police officers and civilians. There was a mood Costa could feel. A pressure building. They’d lived with the ring of steel for too long, lived with seeing these faceless armed men in black everywhere, on rooftops, on street corners. The city had been stolen from the ordinary men and women to whom it belonged.

Peroni struggled out of the car, keeping his arm around the woman.

The hooded figure took an instinctive step back. With his huge frame and ugly, scarred face, the big cop could do that to people. Peroni looked calm, almost content. The rifles stopped him after he’d taken one step toward the Questura.

“She’s in our custody now,” the lead one told him.

Peroni shook his head. “No,” he said flatly. “This woman is the prisoner of the Polizia di Stato. On the orders of the president of Italy. No one takes her from me.”

“We’ve got orders too—” the man began.

“You?” Peroni interrupted, narrowing his eyes. “Who are you?” he asked. “A mask and a rifle? I don’t hand over my prisoner to a man who won’t show his face. Ever … Now get out of my way. We’ve work to do.”

The Spanish woman stayed tight under his right arm, her eyes on the weapons as they rose again.

“Gianni—” Costa began.

Something shattered the atmosphere. Signora Campitelli, the little old woman who pestered Prinzivalli and his colleagues on the front desk constantly, about lost cats and noisy teenagers, was moving, with a manic and angry intent Costa recognized only too well. The old lady elbowed her way through the crowd of black figures, dragging her ancient wicker cart behind her, crammed as usual with old clothes, litter she’d picked up from the pavement, and a couple of paper bags with bread and groceries from the store on the corner.

Behind her came the fat little grocer, who had a loaf in his hand, one he kept pressing toward her back while making whimpering noises. She forgot a lot of things.

“Not now, you old witch!” another soldier yelled, and that was it. She burst into life with a stream of vivid and ancient curses the like of which Costa hadn’t heard in a long time, epithets that mixed the sacrilegious with the scatological in a flowing, near-poetic stream that no mere foulmouthed teenager could ever achieve.

A shocked silence descended on the piazza. Signora Campitelli kept on walking, to the lead figure who’d been haranguing Peroni. With a surprising turn of speed, she was on him, lunging at his head.

The attack came so much out of the blue that the soldier was utterly lost. Before he could react, the old woman got both hands on him and managed to rip off the hood completely. Exposed to the bright Roman afternoon, he looked no more than twenty-five, with a somewhat weak, pale face and a head of curly dark hair.

Signora Campitelli turned and grabbed the loaf still being offered to her by the shopkeeper.

“No maschere a Roma,” she screeched, and fetched him a hard blow around the skull with the bread. “No masks in Rome!”

Peroni glanced across the crowded piazza, caught Costa’s eye, and winked.

“No maschere a Roma,” Costa shouted too.

Others began to take up the cry. The shopkeeper. Totti, the angry cafe owner. A couple of other pensioners tried to drag the hoods off two soldiers close to them.

The sovrintendente Prinzivalli pushed his way through the sea of bodies and got between Peroni and his prisoner, and the men in black. Furillo, the timid bureaucrat from Systems, did the same. He was immediately joined by Taccone. More officers began to stream out of the Questura into the crowd.

No maschere a Roma.

You could push the people of this city only so far, Costa thought. The limit had been reached. He joined the phalanx of bodies growing around Peroni and his charge, creating a living, shouting, almost joyous barrier between them and Palombo’s faceless minions.

Toni Grimaldi, the Machiavellian old Questura lawyer they all turned to when things got awkward, materialized in the mob. Next to him was a tall, elegant woman in a very fashionable light suit. She had chestnut hair, a little too bright to be real, piercing green eyes that were fixed on the young curly-haired officer Signora Campitelli had exposed, and the rather timeless look of many professional Italian women, one that made it impossible to guess her age.

“I’m the lawyer involved in this arrest,” Grimaldi announced. “This is the magistrate, Giulia Amato, who is handling the case. If you stand in our way for just one more second, I will personally”—his finger prodded the man’s bulletproof vest—“personally bring you to court on a charge of obstruction of justice.” He pushed the officer’s weapon to one side with his hand. “And that’s for starters.”

“So?” the magistrate asked, smiling as if she were at a cocktail party. “May we proceed to the Questura? Or do you intend to shoot us all?” She didn’t wait for an answer. Giulia Amato — the name rang a bell for Costa, one he dimly associated with tales of controversy and politics — turned to Peroni and said, “Take your prisoner inside.”

A gap opened among the throng of police officers and citizens. Peroni and Anna Ybarra walked through it, on toward the steps of the station. The figures in black stood and did nothing.

Costa waited with Prinzivalli until all the other police officers, along with Grimaldi and the woman magistrate, were inside. Then the gray-haired officer tapped the pasty-faced soldier on the shoulder and said, “This is a restricted area, sonny. You can’t park here. Now move it!”

Signora Campitelli was wielding her loaf once more. Totti had found sufficient courage to start yelling abuse in all directions. The figures in black slunk back to their armored vehicles and started the engines noisily.

As they fled, Commissario Vincenzo Esposito stomped into the piazza, his face like thunder, marching across the cobblestones like a man possessed.

“Good day, sir,” Prinzivalli declared cheerily as he arrived.

The commissario stared at the departing troops. They were leaving to a flurry of merry abuse and a series of obscure and frequently obscene hand gestures from the largely elderly mob now milling around the square.

“A good day, Sovrintendente?” Esposito bellowed. “A good day? Is it?”

Prinzivalli was beaming from ear to ear as he watched the crowd bid the black vehicles farewell.

“Yes, sir,” he replied. “I do believe it is.”

58

Ben Rennick — he thought of himself this way, had done for more than two decades — strode out of the Quirinale, back to Borromini’s church, where earlier he’d been confronted by the state police. He almost felt grateful to them for inadvertently suggesting the location. It was a good, private place for an important meeting.

Behind him in the palace all was well, or as well as he might have hoped in the circumstances. The guests were departing for the Vatican. The story Rennick had been aching to release was running everywhere. The emergency was over. A desperate attempt to murder the politicians of the G8 summit in the heart of the Quirinale had been prevented at the last moment, and the terrorist cell behind it destroyed.

Coverage of the events in the Salone dei Corazzieri would be easily controlled, with enough manipulation, enough pressure. The details of the story were already set. The Spanish woman had entered the room with an automatic weapon. She’d been disarmed by security guards after firing off a few wild shots, which happily caused no injuries. Intelligence information indicated that the leader of the Blue Demon group, Andrea Petrakis, had fled the city after the failure of the attack. All exit points would be subject to extra security in an attempt to locate him. There would be disruption to international travelers for some days to come. But a sense of normality would start to return to Rome that very afternoon, and by the following day the city would begin to resemble the place he had loved since the moment he first set eyes on it more than two decades before. A place he felt guilty about despoiling, about using.

There were items to tidy. Eyewitness accounts of events in the Quirinale needed to be checked and corrected, where necessary. The crippled weapon the woman had used was, happily, in Palombo’s hands, where the fake shells and the crippling device that had jammed it could be quietly removed, if need be. A standardized version of the attack would soon be agreed upon and adhered to. Most of those in the Salone dei Corazzieri had witnessed little except a brief altercation, ending in shots. It would be easy to convince them of what they had seen. Even the loss of Anna Ybarra posed no great difficulties, since she knew nothing of what had gone on behind the scenes.

No opportunity for recrimination, no time for regrets, the American told himself, and walked back into the darkness of the church, heading for the fluid shadows, the site they’d agreed on.

The building was empty. In the half-light of the nave, there was no sound at all, not even the distant murmur of the city.

Then something touched his arm and Ben Rennick almost leaped out of his own skin.

“Jesus …”

A soldier was there, close to him. A corazziere dressed in ornate regalia, a sword at his hip, a plumed helmet on his head.

“Who the hell …?” Rennick began, then stopped as he looked at the eyes beneath the shining metal. Dark, dead eyes. Familiar.

“Andrea?” he murmured.

The man removed his headgear, stood there, arms open, beaming like a teenager.

“Andrea!” Rennick repeated, and embraced him, trying to hide the shock he felt at seeing the man’s face for the first time in twenty years.

The lines, the tanned, leathery skin, hair desiccated by sun and worry — it was as if life itself had been slowly withdrawn from Andrea Petrakis. And in its place? A husk. A shell.

“Renzo.” His voice sounded different, not just older, but as if it belonged to another man.

“Renzo’s dead,” the American told him, stepping back a pace, taking another good look. “Don’t forget.”

“How could I? I killed him.”

“You did,” Rennick agreed. Twenty years was a long time, and neither of them had any idea what had filled that void in their separate lives. “I owe you an apology. When we put you with the Afghans. No one had any idea it would take this long.…” There hadn’t been many options at the time. After the deaths of the Petrakis couple, and the risk of exposure of the Gladio network, no one else in Europe could be trusted to take a young Italian who knew too much. “Or that they’d become the enemy. They were ours back then, Andrea. The mujahideen — we made them. If I’d guessed …”

Petrakis stopped smiling. “Please. Those people in Washington knew what they were doing. They put me in there because you needed someone on the inside.”

Rennick sighed and admitted, “Maybe you’re right. I was just a foot soldier. What you’ve become.” He looked him in the eye. “So you understand exactly how that works, huh? We’re always in the dark. If you’re right, it was someone else’s idea. I was just trying to save all our hides. If what had been going on became public …” He looked at the stranger in front of him. “We offered to get you out. You know that. All the same, you stayed. We’re grateful. It was brave. It was selfless.”

“What else was I supposed to do?” the man in the corazziere uniform asked. “Come back here under an assumed name? Pretend to be someone else? Why? Why should I do that?”

“What happened after your parents died was a kind of madness. People were panicking. Everything we’d been doing looked like it was going to unravel. I wanted you out of that. Me too. I wanted us clear so that we could sort things out later.” The American frowned. “I never knew there’d be so much blood along the way. Or that we’d be using a stay-behind man, still needing one, after all these years.”

“I left you a message,” Petrakis said. “I always leave you a message. Now you don’t want me to me finish the job, do you? Why is that?”

“You mean those crazy numbers? Jesus, Andrea. Why do you do that? I never understood the need for them back then. Now—”

“I like to leave my mark. Something that lingers. Pictures on a wall.”

Rennick laughed. “You mean like the Etruscans?”

His amusement didn’t seem to impress Petrakis.

“Like the Etruscans. I like to finish the job too,” the man in the uniform insisted.

“Well, I guess communication has not been our strong point in this venture. I never got your message. Maybe Palombo was too busy.” Maybe, Rennick thought. “This job is finished. Done. Over.”

He’d realized that as soon as he saw the final message, in the hands of a cop in this same church little more than an hour before. Rennick knew Julius Caesar almost by heart. He had guessed instantly what that coded riddle had to mean and confirmed it, to his alarm, when he got back to the palace. “How the hell did you get this idea in your head? Tell me.”

“I thought you put it there,” Petrakis answered immediately. “Or maybe the Blue Demon did. Who knows?”

“There is no Blue Demon, Andrea. There never was. We invented all that stuff, remember? Your old man came up with the name when we were trying to put together one more lunatic bunch of terrorists to keep Gladio going. When he got killed, we just adopted it as a way of covering up what we’d been doing. If we hadn’t, everyone’s cover would have been blown. It was the only way—”

“He didn’t make it up,” Petrakis insisted.

“What?”

“He … didn’t … make … it … up. The Blue Demon’s real. I know.”

This was crazy. Petrakis was crazy.

“Listen to me, Andrea. This has gone far enough. The Etruscans, the tombs. The idea someone might fight for some dead race wiped out centuries ago. That was your father’s idea. It was one more operation we were going to run. Then, when he died …”

They had been grasping in the dark that week. Everything — the panic, the fear of the network’s discovery, the desperation — remained etched in his memory. Clutching at the idea of another fake terrorist gang, paid for by illicit Gladio money, seemed the only way out, even if it came at a frightful cost. The loss of innocent lives. The end of his own identity. A terrible exile.

“He didn’t make it up. So who really runs the Blue Demon, Renzo?”

The American sighed. “My name is Ben Rennick, not Renzo Frasca.”

“Who …?”

“Leave all this to me. I’ll deal with it. Your work here’s done. Excellently done.” He made a grateful gesture with his hands. “We’ve reminded people this is a dangerous world again. That they should place their trust in those who govern. Very soon they’ll believe you’ve managed to flee the country, gone for good. You’re free. You can be whoever you want.”

“Don’t patronize me.”

“I’m not. I’m trying to keep you safe. This has gone further than I intended. Giovanni Batisti …” Rennick shook his head. “I don’t understand why his death was necessary. Or the airport. That was never part of the plan.…”

“Nor was a bunch of cops prying into what I was doing in Tarquinia. In the tomb. I would have killed them all if you’d let me.”

“You should have phoned me when you were supposed to,” Rennick told him. “You should have called when you found those officers. We’re not murderers.”

“Are you sure about that?”

“Yes. Those cops stumbling onto you — it was an accident. These things happen.” He peered into Petrakis’s dark, dead eyes. “Like Stefan Kyriakis, I guess.”

“Kyriakis was a gun runner. A thief. He asked too many questions. He knew, Renzo. He would have sold us.…”

“He was one of ours. One of mine. It doesn’t matter now.”

“I was out there. In the field. You were behind a comfortable desk.”

“True,” Rennick agreed. He hesitated, trying to ensure Petrakis understood what he was saying. “I may — I do — regret some of the details of the last week, but there’s nothing here that can’t be dealt with. We’ve covered up worse in the past. Everything will work out so long as we stop now. I want no further actions.” He led the man deeper into the shadows, looking around them. “You can go wherever you want. I’ll see to the money. A new identity. A fresh start. Not Europe, I think. Maybe South America. Australia.”

“I like the East. Afghanistan.”

“Not an option.”

“It’s what you want, isn’t it? Their heads on a plate.”

“Not anymore. You’ve done enough. I won’t allow it. I can’t.”

Petrakis nodded as if he were listening. Rennick felt a moment of relief. “So my mission’s ended?”

“Finally,” the American agreed. “Yes.”

“I don’t get to lead you to the high command?”

“It wouldn’t work,” Rennick told him. “They’re not stupid. There’s not enough …”

The show at the Trevi Fountain. A dead politician. A handful of innocent civilian victims at the airport. A failed assassination attempt. If things hadn’t started to unravel, perhaps there was a chance. But not now. There was too much risk. And most of that would, he knew, come from the man in front of him.

“Not enough blood?” Andrea Petrakis’s eyes gleamed, interested.

“I guess you could put it that way. After today, the Blue Demon is history. It stays that way.”

Petrakis was shaking his head, looking crazy, saying, “No, no, no …”

“I’ll get you out of Rome tonight. Out of the country by morning. The farther, the better.”

“Easier if you just kill me.”

“Don’t say that,” the American snapped, aware his own voice was rising. Then, more softly, “Don’t even think it.”

“Easier if you slaughter me, the way you slaughtered my mother and father.”

Rennick blinked. “The Mafia murdered your parents. They wouldn’t stop their little sideline. Dope. That’s the truth. And you know it.”

The sham corazziere leaned forward. He seemed taller than Rennick remembered. “Don’t you see the problem, Renzo?”

“Please don’t call me that.…”

Something stirred above them: a stray pigeon that had flown in from the street, flapping between the darkness and the light.

A feather, pale and downy, floated down gently and landed on Rennick’s jacket. Petrakis brushed it aside with a flick of his hand.

“I’ve spent the last twenty years with the men who sold my father that junk in the first place. I’ve watched their children grow. I’ve eaten with their families. I’ve been one of them.”

He took Rennick by the arm, leaned into his ear, whispering, “They’re animals, Renzo. But, like animals, they only know the truth.”

“What truth would that be?”

“My parents, they did stop dealing dope. Both of them. Just as they were ordered. They did it because they were scared. Not of the people you think, either. They were scared because they found out who the Blue Demon really was. What this was really about.”

Rennick struggled to think, to remember. None of this had concerned him. He’d been told what had happened. By the Italians.

“The mob killed them for money,” he said. “What other reason could there be?”

“Knowledge.” Petrakis had come very close and placed a finger over his lips. “Please, Renzo. After all this time. No more lies. I just want to hear you say his name. Just once …”

The American shrugged his shoulders. He felt old and exhausted, and out of words. “You tell me,” he suggested.

Petrakis spoke.

Rennick looked at his watch and sighed. “We can talk about this later,” he insisted. “I need you to get out of that uniform, out of Rome. When this is over, let me buy you a beer. Somewhere warm and safe.”

“I don’t hear you denying it.”

He should never have come alone. He should have foreseen that Petrakis might have become detached from reality over the years.

“I’m not denying it, because it’s too ridiculous for words. Believe me.” He glanced at the door. “Believe—”

The words froze in his mouth. A pained sigh escaped his throat. A cold, stabbing agony was rising from his gut into his chest.

Rennick looked down, saw his hands fumbling for the source, recoiling when they found it.

Andrea Petrakis’s ceremonial sword was buried in his stomach, up to the hilt.

He was aware of blood rising past his lips in a salty flood, of a buzzing, screaming noise in his head. Petrakis leaned forward, pushed once more, then withdrew, taking the weapon with him in a sudden sweep that made the wounded man moan in agony.

In the shadows of Borromini’s church, Renzo Frasca, Ben Rennick — a man with two names — fell backwards, stumbling to his knees, clutching at the damp, growing pain in his belly, feeling the life pour out of his body.

The figure of a soldier stood above him, his helmeted head silhouetted against the bright circular dome, a static, descending dove at its center.

The American said something and didn’t even understand the words himself.

Petrakis stepped forward to wipe the bloodied blade against the stricken man’s jacket, one damp shiny side first, then the other.

“We shared so much once, Renzo,” he murmured. “Latin and Shakespeare. History and dreams. Smoke and mirrors.”

The American’s vision was narrowing. The agony was turning into something else, a dull, distant sensation.

A cold finger touched his trembling, murmuring lips. He could barely feel it, barely think in the swelling darkness that embraced him, falling all around from the bare stone folds of the church.

59

Teresa Lupo was halfway down the Via dei Serpenti, trying to make her way back to San Giovanni, when the shouting and cheering started. It came from a little cafe near the Piazza degli Zingari, a modest, friendly corner of Rome where she liked to drink coffee. It sounded as if Italy had won the World Cup once more.

She pushed her way through the crowd, thought of asking what had happened, then didn’t bother. Everyone was glued to the TV. Ugo Campagnolo was there on the screen, beaming, his face shiny with sweat, as if he’d run to the cameras, missing makeup on the way.

The prime minister had a message for the nation. The crisis was over. Rome was safe. One terrorist was dead, out in a field near the Via Appia Antica; another was in custody; and the third and final individual, Andrea Petrakis, the terrorist leader, was attempting to flee the country, pursued by the Carabinieri, stripped of his cohorts, unable to cause further damage.

Romans didn’t like Campagnolo. Wrong, Teresa reminded herself. Most of them positively hated the prime minister. Even so, she felt some grudging gratitude toward the man as he informed them their city was safe again, and that the strict security measures of the previous two days would soon be lifted.

Glasses were raised, beer and prosecco ordered. She caught the eye of an elderly man with a gray face and a salt-and-pepper mustache.

“You believe a word of that?” she demanded.

“I believe that bastard when he says we get our city back,” he answered. “He can’t take that away from us now, can he?”

He was probably right, though she wondered how Campagnolo and the security services could be so certain Petrakis was powerless on his own. This seemed presumptuous, she thought as she wandered back out into the street to the main drag of the Via Cavour. The roadblock near the Forum was being dismantled already. Normal life was returning. She darted into the road to stop a cab that someone farther up the street had already summoned. The driver looked at her with one arched eyebrow. Teresa flashed her police ID and said, “I’m doing this on Ugo Campagnolo’s orders. Take me to San Giovanni.”

Five minutes later, still feeling grumpy and out of sorts, she was outside the former monastery. The more she thought about it, Campagnolo’s victory announcement felt premature and artificial. The men and women in the cafe in Monti surely understood that. Their relief came from nothing more than hearing what they longed for, not any rational consideration of the available facts. Terrorism did that to people. It made them ignore the usual rules and rituals of everyday life. That was what gave men like Andrea Petrakis — and those who pulled their strings — their power.

The apartment appeared to be empty when she stomped inside, which did nothing to improve her mood.

“Silvio?” she yelled. “Silvio?”

He was in the main bedroom, his podgy form stretched out on the big double mattress, sleepy-eyed, a sandwich and a can of beer in his hands, eyes glued to the TV. It still featured a grinning, triumphant Campagnolo, with some pompous-looking Carabinieri ass by his side, and Luca Palombo in the background.

“Where’s Elizabeth?” she wanted to know.

He shrugged and took a bite of the sandwich, then mumbled, “Must be a long lunch. Anyway, why come back? It’s over. Says so on the TV.”

“I don’t recall saying it was over for you.”

“Who stepped on your bunions? There’s no work. There never was, really. We were just doing some secret stuff on Dario Sordi’s orders, weren’t we? Speculative. A little crazy.” He hesitated. “Very crazy. Infectiously crazy.”

She marched over, snatched the can from his hand, and would have had the sandwich too if he hadn’t managed to wrest it out of her reach. Instead she grabbed the remote and switched off the TV.

“May I remind you that we have one dead politician, his driver, Mirko, and those people at the airport. Do you hear Ugo Campagnolo even mention them?”

“Difficult to hear anything with the TV off.”

“Don’t be smart with me.”

She flung the TV remote at his head. The young pathologist ducked. These days he always looked more offended than scared when she lost her temper. She wasn’t sure whether this was progress or not.

“What, exactly, is bothering you?” he asked.

“Everything! Nothing! I don’t know.”

“That narrows it down.…”

Teresa took a swig of his beer and waited for him to say something else. He didn’t. This was not the anxious, gauche young man she’d hired seven years before. He’d matured. And along the way, he’d found infinitely more subtle ways to infuriate her.

“I haven’t done a damned thing to help any of them,” she moaned.

“We might as well have stayed in the Questura, doing as we were told.”

“We were doing as we were told.”

“Huh! Fishing in the dark. What do you mean, Elizabeth is still at lunch?”

“Went to meet a friend. I imagine she heard the news and decided it wasn’t worth coming back.”

Teresa didn’t like that idea at all. “Tell me about the numbers.”

“The numbers?”

“The Latin numerals. The ones you were working on.”

“They don’t matter now, do they?” He looked a little guilty.

“Why? Because Ugo Campagnolo says so?”

“I fell asleep. When I woke up …” He gestured at the dead eye of the TV. “Does it matter?”

“Who knows?” Teresa grabbed his arm and led him back into the main room and the computer and ordered, “Tell me what you have.”

He grumbled something wordless, then sat at the desk, scrabbled through his notes, screwed up his bland, pasty face, and announced, “Twelve didn’t mean midday. Noon. Not two thousand years ago when they didn’t have clocks. Things weren’t that simple. Time was not easily measured. Here’s a quote I found from Seneca. ‘Facilius inter philosophos quam inter horologia conveniet.’ ‘It’s easier to get agreement among philosophers than clocks.’”

“Was that the Elder or the Younger?”

“Um …”

He was turning a touch red, which she found satisfying.

“Oh, for God’s sake. I was only trying to remind you of the futility of quoting dead people. Are you going to tell me something useful, or what?”

“The time of day varied according to the season. So did the hours, which also varied in length.”

“Facts …”

“Facts.” He glanced at a sheet. “The number twelve cannot refer to a specific time. Only an hour. Which isn’t an hour, at least not in the way we know it.”

“What hour?”

“Hora duodecima. Which in the summer would run from approximately six-fifteen to half past seven in the evening.”

She thought about this. “So it doesn’t mean it’s in the past?”

“If you accept the premise that ‘it’ exists …”

For a moment she felt like slapping him. “Someone wrote it on the wall of the tomb of the Blue Demon. It was a message for someone. Between him and them, whoever they are. Mirko Oliva—”

“Point taken. No need to repeat it.”

“Isn’t there? Here you are, sitting on potentially important information. Then Ugo Campagnolo goes on TV, issues the all-clear, and you take a nap.”

“Twelve could indicate something might happen this evening, I guess,” he admitted. “If Petrakis has become some kind of one-man army.”

“Don’t push me. And the other numbers? I told you. If XII at the beginning does stand for a time this evening, it’s pretty obvious what the rest stands for, isn’t it? What did Petrakis paint on the walls of the nymphaeum at the Villa Giulia?”

He looked at her blankly. “Refresh my memory.”

“Silvio!” she roared, and was surprised to see his eyes turn damp and unfocused. He looked like he was going to cry.

“I’ve been staring at this stupid screen for eighteen, twenty hours a day,” he bleated. “I’m exhausted. I can’t stay awake. If I close my eyes, I see a computer screen. If I sleep, I get … bad dreams.” He stared at her, his face that of a guilty child. “Really bad dreams. I can’t think straight anymore. I’m sorry.”

“Fine,” she said quickly, and patted him on the shoulder before pulling up a seat and sitting down beside him. “The numbers on the wall at the Villa Giulia referred to Shakespeare. The play Julius Caesar. Act, scene, line.”

He murmured an apology, tapped the keyboard lightly, and brought up an online version of the play.

Di Capua scrolled down and she found herself recalling the last time she’d seen this dark, compelling drama onstage, at an open-air performance in the park of the Villa Borghese. The subject matter — conspiracy, murder, intrigue, assassination, all contained inside the shadowy, grubby, and depressingly eternal world of politics — came back to her.

“There,” Di Capua said quietly as he reached the right lines.

It was a planning scene from the play: Brutus, a good man, in his orchard, reluctantly considering the plot, and finally shaking hands with the conspirators.

She leaned forward and spoke the words out loud.

They looked at each other, then Teresa Lupo glanced at her watch. Five-thirty.

“Let me get this straight?” Di Capua asked. “What we have here is something written on the wall of the tomb in Tarquinia where Andrea Petrakis kept his munitions.”

“Alongside his friendly Blue Demon,” she reminded him.

“Quite.” His eyes were suddenly sharp and intelligent again. “And it’s a message. There for someone Petrakis knows will read it. Someone — a man, a woman — on the inside who’ll understand what it means.”

“He likes riddles and codes. He likes playing with people.”

“Elizabeth disappeared the moment I told her about those numbers,” Di Capua murmured. “I saw her flick through that Shakespeare book. Then she was gone. What was I doing? How could I—?”

“You were dog-tired,” she interrupted. “It takes energy to think the unthinkable.”

“Between six-fifteen and seven-thirty Petrakis is going to kill someone. A head of state,” Di Capua said. “And our trusted companion — who knows everything we’ve done, every thought we’ve had — is out there somewhere.” He hesitated before saying what was in his head. “She understands the message and she never told us. Was the message for her?”

“I don’t know.”

“So who the hell do we call?”

She gave him the look and said, “Now, that is a stupid question.”

Costa answered on the first ring.

“Don’t ask why, just give me a straight answer,” Teresa said immediately. “Where are all the big G8 people, the ones God talks to, between six-fifteen and seven-thirty this evening?”

“In the Vatican. Formal reception. There all night. Why?”

She felt like screaming. There was no way anyone from the state police force was going to get inside the private nation on the other side of the river.

“You might want to warn them to be careful. We’ve decoded those numbers on the wall of the tomb. They seem to say there’ll be some kind of assassination attempt at that time.”

There was a short silence, then Costa asked, “Against whom?”

“Whoever counts as the modern Julius Caesar, I guess. Take your pick. You’ve got eight to choose from, haven’t you? Ugo Campagnolo? Any of them.”

“I don’t think Campagnolo is with them. Things get tricky with events in the Vatican. Besides, no one can get in there, Teresa. Not even Andrea Petrakis. The Vatican security …”

“I know, I know. But I wanted to tell you.”

Di Capua was tapping her shoulder. He was wearing the smug expression he used when she’d made a mistake.

“What is it?” she snapped.

“Campagnolo is an elected politician. Julius Caesar was only appointed by the Senate. Strictly speaking, it’s a bad analogy.”

“Oh, don’t be so damned pedantic, Silvio! We don’t run the country like that these days.”

He didn’t say a word, just leaned on the table, placed a forefinger against his chubby cheek, and stared her in the eye as if to say, Really?

“Oh, my God,” she murmured. There was still someone appointed by the politicians alone. She should have seen it immediately. “Nic. This may not be what we were thinking. Where will Dario Sordi be tonight?”

There was a pause on the line, followed by a barely audible curse, a word she’d never heard him utter.

Then he replied, “Where he always is.”

60

Fabio Ranieri looked up from his desk in the Quirinale’s administrative wing. It was twenty to six. His immediate concerns — for the safety of the president’s guests — had been relieved by the transfer of the G8 parties and their followers to the Vatican. The aftermath of the attempt on their lives was now the business of the police. This was a rare moment of calm in a day he would long remember, for all the wrong reasons. The security of the palace had been breached. He had no idea how, nor was there likely to be much opportunity to investigate until late the following day when the summit visitors left for home, and the Quirinale would return to his full control once more.

The door opened. Palombo entered, followed by Carabinieri officers in full uniform. All were grim-faced.

“This isn’t going to be pleasant,” the Ministry of the Interior officer declared.

“It’s been that kind of day. Make it brief, please. I have work to do.”

“Not anymore. These men are taking you into custody. You will be held by the Carabinieri this evening. Tomorrow I will consider charges.”

Ranieri didn’t move. “Charges? What charges?”

“Obstruction of the security services in their legitimate duty. A breach of your secrecy obligations. A loose tongue, which may have cost us dear …”

“What in God’s name are you talking about?”

“You know.”

Ranieri had his hand on his phone. Palombo strode across the room and replaced the handset.

“I am formally relieving you of your duties, Captain. Your men have been confined to barracks, except for those on the gate. I don’t wish the Corazzieri’s failings to be any more apparent to the outside world than they already are.”

“This is a disgrace. You have no right to obstruct the security of the Quirinale Palace—”

“I have every right to question the actions of a man who allowed a terrorist to penetrate a room that held some of the most important politicians in the civilized world.”

“Allowed?”

Ranieri rose. He was still wearing his plain dark suit, but his height made him stand out as a corazziere. Involuntarily, Palombo retreated a step. The uniformed officers behind him didn’t move.

“There will be a full investigation into how that woman got into this palace, make no mistake,” Ranieri told them all. “I wish to know the answer to that as much as anyone. But this is our job. In this building, you will not interfere with the role of the Corazzieri. We have our duties and our rights—”

“Do you deny you’ve been in secret discussions with other parties about the security arrangements here?” Palombo interrupted. “Do you deny you made a covert visit to the house of an unauthorized individual two nights ago to discuss these things? That you have been making repeated contact with people outside the list of approved officials sanctioned by me?”

It was, Ranieri thought, impossible to avoid this. He’d always known it, and so had Dario Sordi.

“I do not answer to you for my actions,” he said.

“Oh, but you do. No denial, I see.”

“I confirm or repudiate nothing. I’ll come with you for this farce. My deputy shall act in my place.…”

There was a brief, curt moment of amusement on Palombo’s narrow, cold face. “Your deputy is confined to quarters, along with the rest of your officers. I act in your absence. I would advise you to admit to everything that has occurred these last few days. It will be easier in the end.”

“There has never been a moment when the Corazzieri have not guarded the Quirinale, not since we became a nation. How dare you!”

“Tradition is dead, man. If you think otherwise, you’re a fool.”

Palombo walked around the desk and went to the window, pulling the velvet curtain wider. There was a long, angled view of the palace gardens, over to the spot where the president liked to take his evening tea.

Ranieri followed Palombo’s icy gaze. He loved this room, loved being able to look out over the green space beyond and see the old man with his china cup and plate of cookies. The Corazzieri’s disposition within the palace and its quarters were, to him, a bulwark of safety and stability in an uncertain, fractured world. That was what hurt most about the afternoon’s events. Not the abortive attack itself, but the very fact that someone had wormed her way through all his careful safeguards and brought the bloody, cruel business of terror into this oasis of sanity.

Two officers in Carabinieri uniforms now stood on either side of him. Ranieri picked up his favorite pen from the desk, placed it in his jacket pocket, and walked toward the door. Palombo fell into his large leather office chair, swinging from side to side.

The Corazzieri captain turned and surveyed the man, this arrogant bureaucrat in an expensive suit. The smirk on Palombo’s face was designed to infuriate. It succeeded.

“If anything should happen while I’m away from here,” Ranieri warned, “I will hold you responsible. Personally, man to man. Not as a soldier.”

“You’ve spent too long in fancy dress, Ranieri. Your world is gone. It will never return. After what we’ve seen today, I will make sure the Corazzieri never again strut around this palace as if they own it. You can go back to being real soldiers, not toy ones. Detain him in a room somewhere until I decide where to take him,” he told his men.

“I will not allow—”

Two strong arms restrained him. Palombo sat there, leering. It was over, Ranieri realized. There was no way to protest or fight back.

The ring of Ranieri’s cell phone on the desk broke the silence. Palombo leaned forward and picked it up, peering at the screen. Then he hit the red button to reject the call.

“It’s private,” Ranieri insisted.

“It certainly is. No caller ID.” He pressed a few buttons. “No address book. Lots of calls, though. In and out.” He turned the thing off and pocketed it. “I’ll get my people to take a look at this later. Now take him away.”

61

It was getting cooler on the roof of the outpost of the CESIS offices overlooking the Quirinale gardens. Elizabeth Murray hugged her stolen protection jacket and checked her watch one more time. Just past six. Leone, the officer she’d slugged, was still in the little cabin on the roof, securely bound and gagged next to the watering cans and tubs of fertilizer. He wasn’t going anywhere. But perhaps he had people to meet, people who’d worry about where he was. Perhaps they even went through some kind of automated checkout procedure these days, some kind of smart card that logged you in and out and started to scream when something went wrong.

Machines, she thought. There were too many of them, and too few human beings. That was all the services seemed to rely on now. Computers and procedures. Rule books and protocols. It hadn’t been like this in the 1970s and 1980s. In those days, everything was more flexible, open to interpretation.

A lot easier to hide too.

That thought prompted her to go and check out Domenico Leone once more. Judging by the fierce look in the sniper’s eyes, he wasn’t getting any less livid as the hours went by. She pushed some more furniture against the door blocking the stairs from the floor below, then went back to her viewpoint at the edge of the roof.

It was time for one more dry run. She spread-eagled her large body over the concrete, legs akimbo, and brought the firearm up to her right shoulder. The sniper’s rifle felt steady in her arms. She squinted through the telescopic sight, scanning the grounds of the Quirinale gardens, across flower beds, ornate classical fountains, stretches of lush green lawn, and dark patches of shrubbery.

It was empty. She almost believed the palace was too. No one moved anywhere, not even in the windows.

Another minute passed and then, against all custom and practice, she took out a packet of cigarettes and lit one, sucking the smoke greedily.

Not that she was supposed to. The doctor back home had told her that repeatedly. An annoying little man.

Elizabeth Murray took a long, satisfying draw of the thing and blew a gray cloud out into the cooling evening air. Rome was just as beautiful as ever, she decided, watching the smoke disperse against a background of the palace roof and the city skyline beyond. It had been a mistake to leave.

Something drew her attention to the expanse of green in front of her. With the cigarette still in her mouth, she bent and peered through the scope again, scanning the palace gardens.

A tall, slightly stooped figure was walking the main path, a cup and plate held awkwardly in one hand, a book in the other.

She knew where he was going. The scope ranged the flower beds and fountains again; it found the marker she’d already set for herself.

It was a handsome old statue, somewhat weathered by decades out in the grubby Roman rain. But the wings on Hermes’s feet made good sighting points, and when she fiddled with the focus a little she could see the delicate stone feathers there, clear as day.

62

Costa slammed the phone back into the cradle. They were in Falcone’s office, trying to digest the warning from Teresa Lupo, trying to work out how to respond.

The inspector stood up. “You say Sordi is in the garden around six-thirty?”

“Usually. Same place. Creature of habit.”

“Habits can kill,” Peroni grumbled. “We’ve still got half an hour or so. How about I check the outside? There has to be some kind of vantage point on those gardens. Someone might get on the roof.”

“Check it out,” Falcone ordered. “Get two or three officers you can trust. Take a separate car. We’ll go straight to the Quirinale and see if we can argue our way in. Tell no one.”

Minutes later, they were back in the Lancia, trying to squeeze the big sedan out of the tangle of police vehicles swamping the cobblestones of the Piazza di San Michele Arcangelo.

There was a quick, sharp rap on the driver’s-side window.

It was Signora Campitelli, the old woman who’d scolded the security men earlier. She seemed insistent, so much so that she was blocking the only way out.

Costa wound down the glass. “Signora, can this wait? We’re in a hurry.”

“Showed those bastards, didn’t we? No maschere a Roma!”

Falcone was getting furious in the passenger seat, about to say something that might have persuaded her to stay where she was, out of nothing more than bloody-mindedness.

“We did indeed,” Costa said hastily. “Excuse us, please. We have to go show them again.”

“Hah!”

Her stick rose triumphantly toward the soft evening sky. She stepped back, still shouting, dragging her shopping cart sufficiently to one side to allow the wide car to squeeze through.

“May we now depart?” Falcone banged the blue light on the roof and activated the device.

The klaxon’s shriek echoed off the high terraces of the centro storico. The Lancia crisscrossed the warren of narrow streets, finally screeching into the broader thoroughfare of the Corso, where the shoppers were now wandering down the middle of the road, starting to revisit stores that had been empty or closed for days. The Piazza Venezia was returning to its normal state of chaos. Workmen were already dismantling one of the high checkpoint towers that Palombo’s men had erected earlier in the week.

It took little more than a minute to climb the Quirinale hill and abandon the car in the street next to the piazza.

The bell of Il Torrino was finishing its mark of the hour, the sixth peal dying over the hill.

There were two corazzieri in regal uniform on the gate, and a third in the pillar box. All looked as miserable as sin for some reason. Falcone marched up to the sentry in the cabin. Costa followed, ID card out. The inspector demanded to speak to Fabio Ranieri.

“Not available,” the man said, and nothing more.

“Ranieri is a friend of mine,” Costa added. “This is important. You must find him.”

“Not … available …”

“Then call the duty captain. I need to speak to him.”

One of the others came over, sensing trouble.

“Something wrong?” he asked, in a gruff northern voice.

“We need to see the duty officer now—” Falcone began.

“You can’t,” the corazziere in the box repeated. “That’s final. Come back tomorrow. Maybe by then someone can tell us what the hell’s going on here.…”

Costa elbowed his way past the sentry and picked up the phone.

“Cut that out!” the man yelled, slamming his fist hard on the handset. “What’s wrong with you people? Don’t you know who’s boss around here now?”

“Who?” Falcone asked.

The officer nodded in the direction of the Ministry of the Interior. “Those gray-faced bastards. Not us. Not anymore.”

“We’re state police officers,” Costa told him. “We’ve been investigating the Blue Demon on the personal orders of President Sordi. We now believe there will be an attempt on Sordi’s life, within the next half hour.”

The three tall figures in silver breastplates looked at one another. One officer took off his helmet and said uneasily, “You’d better not be jerking us around.”

“Andrea Petrakis is planning an attack within these walls,” Costa insisted. “Very soon. With help from someone on the inside. Someone let that woman in this afternoon, didn’t they? I don’t think it was one of the Corazzieri.”

“No. I don’t think it was.” The officer stared at the oldest of the three. “Ranieri’s in custody somewhere and every last corazziere apart from us is sitting on their backside in the barracks till someone lets them out.”

The higher-ranking officer didn’t look them in the eye when he said, “You heard our orders.”

“Your orders are to guard the president, aren’t they?” Costa persisted, trying to push a button that might work. “Who’s doing that now?”

“We are,” the talkative one said immediately. “Three of us. Plus a bunch of waiters and a few goons from the Ministry. It’s a tomb in there. I’ve never seen anything like it. That Palombo bastard has taken over Ranieri’s office as if he owns it. God knows who else is in the building. Except”—he thought for a moment—“some other corazziere I spotted wandering down in that direction a couple of minutes ago.”

He turned to the senior officer again. “Something is wrong, and you know it.”

“If you’re mistaken about this …” the senior corazziere told Costa.

“Take us to Palombo now,” Falcone cut in. “Free Ranieri. We’ll bear the responsibility.”

The senior officer didn’t even move.

Then the younger officer cursed softly. He stepped into the cabin and grabbed a set of keys.

“For God’s sake. If he won’t do it, I will. Follow me.”

63

A good book, a cup of Earl Grey tea, a plate of English cookies. These familiar items seemed, to Dario Sordi, comforting signs of a world beginning to find some kind of equilibrium. The president sat in his usual shady spot in the deserted Quirinale garden, content, almost at ease.

It was earlier than his usual time, but the palace was unusually empty save for a few servants. He’d spent the last forty-five minutes alone in his apartment making discreet phone calls to men and women who mattered. Politicians and judges, allies, the uncommitted, even an occasional foe. It was important they heard the truth about the Ybarra woman from him, and understood his insistence that she be dealt with inside the Italian judicial system, investigated by the police and no others.

There would be arguments. There always were. This was the world of politics, and he was only the president — not, as Ugo Campagnolo constantly reminded the media, a politician elected by the masses. Nevertheless, Sordi felt, as he ended the final call, that he might win this particular battle. The Questura’s rapid decision to bring in the combative Giulia Amato as investigating magistrate had been a wise move. The woman was not the type to be diverted by a quiet threat from some party hack and the promise of preferment. Even with his growing ranks of supporters placed in the political hierarchy and the law enforcement agencies, Campagnolo would be hard-pressed to seize Anna Ybarra from the grip of the police and the magistrate.

He found himself staring at the expressionless face of Hermes. The handsome young god always seemed distracted, a little fey, as he stretched down to tie the ribbon on his marble sandal.

“Do you have any messages for me, I wonder?” Sordi asked aloud.

There was silence, punctuated only by the distant rumble of a jet wheeling high overhead, something he hadn’t heard in a while.

“Another Etruscan in our midst,” the president murmured, recalling a little of his school-days mythology. His native city had inherited the past, for good and bad. History always emerged like an orphan, anonymous, unclaimed, impossible to control. Like the Blue Demon itself. Alone now, able to think clearly for the first time in days, Sordi felt he could finally begin to understand a little of the original inspiration for that terrifying image on the subterranean tomb in the Maremma, and the effect it had on the impressionable Andrea Petrakis. For the doomed Etruscans — for Petrakis too — the Blue Demon was Rome, with her rapacious, insatiable hunger for domination, for territory and power, at any human cost. That ruthless greed, a burning desire to own and rule, was one more gift his ancestors had handed down to the modern Western world, alongside more noble ideals about law and charity and God. Which of them was now uppermost? Sordi didn’t wish to consider this question too closely. His answer might tally too easily with that of a confused and embittered individual like Andrea Petrakis. The Etruscans, with their worldly, hedonistic attitude to life, had invented for themselves a bright and fleeting paradise, one that had been stolen from them, then destroyed by the men from the south who brought guilt and responsibility, democracy and order, into an enclosed, interior society built on nothing more than a lust for the immediacy of existence.

This endless argument was, in a sense, the very same squabble Sordi had pursued with Nic’s father, Marco, over the years — one that had, in the end, driven two dear friends apart. Should a human being choose the dull, dead round of pragmatism and responsibility over the brief and brilliant spark of individual satisfaction, the ecstasy of the moment? Was a life that spanned eight decades of duty and routine and service really more worthy than some briefer interlude that lit the sky with fireworks and then vanished, leaving the stage to others dazzled by the intensity of its departure?

He waved the book in his hands at the mute statue. “If you could read, my friend, you’d know these choices are made for us. By nature, not intellect.” Sordi frowned. “They always have been. They always will be.”

It was the visit to Marco’s son that had prompted him to pick up his own copy of Graves’s I, Claudius again. There’d been little time for reading of late. Besides, he knew the work so well that he was able to turn directly to the parts he loved most, skipping over the author’s occasional historical peregrinations.

His bookmark stood at chapter 34, a few pages from the end. Gone was the flowery language and philosophy. This was a plain retelling of the climax of this first part of Claudius’s story. How a man regarded by most as a stammering, slobbering cripple — an idiot, worthy only of ridicule — could rise to the emperor’s throne, against his own most fervent wishes.

Sordi wondered if he loved this story so much because, in some ways, it mirrored his own. Claudius was a republican, a believer in democracy, not the dictatorship of the imperial family. He’d spent years in the wilderness before being thrust into power by a quirk of fate, only to find that the demands of being head of state circumscribed and made impractical the very principles he held so dear as a powerless ordinary citizen.

The president recalled the old copy he’d found in Marco Costa’s library, a gift to his former ally, a kind of apology. And the inscription.

From Dario, the turncoat.

Was this what he’d become? Through compromise and pragmatism, a traitor to his own beliefs?

Claudius had come to feel that way toward the end of his life, when the intrigue around him reached a feverish intensity. Graves, basing his story for the most part on the account of the emperor’s reign given by Suetonius, had him murdered at the hands of his own wife, Agrippina, acting in concert with her son, Nero, the emperor’s chosen successor. The author’s fictional but all-too-realistic Claudius went to his fate with his eyes wide open, praying that his own end, and the accession of the monstrous tyrant Nero, would finally bring about what he had failed to achieve in his lifetime: the ruin of the tyrannical imperial family, the restoration of Rome to republican democracy.

Politicians, much more than ordinary men and women, agonized long and hard over what they might leave behind after their deaths, perhaps because they realized only too well their failings in life. Claudius’s modern successors were little different. They too often came to count their legacies for the most part in blood. Tiberius Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus spilled more than his fair share in his sixty-four years. Yet would Claudius have created such a lost and malevolent creature as Andrea Petrakis? Sordi was reminded once more of the old saw: What we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history. The constant battle between liberty and security, democracy and the need to safeguard a broken and imperfect state, seemed as real and as undecided now as it was when a frightened, uncertain cripple of the royal family cowered in an anteroom of Nero’s palace on the Palatine, another Roman hill, a short distance away across the Forum, two thousand years before.

He opened the book and found the page, feeling both a little distracted and disturbed by these thoughts. The tale of Claudius’s conversion, from terrified bystander to reluctant emperor, was so amusingly written that he could read it again and again. But there was a prerequisite to its denouement. Before the new king could be crowned, the old one had to die.

64

There were buildings in Rome that a wise police officer never asked about. The high, anonymous block at the back of the Quirinale was just such a one. There was no sign on the door, just a fancy high-tech entrance with a man in a dark uniform beyond the glass and a trickle of nondescript people going home for the evening.

Spooks, Peroni thought. Another outpost of Luca Palombo’s Ministry of the Interior, this one with a roof terrace overlooking the palace gardens. A viewpoint that still had a dark figure at the corner, even though the emergency was supposed to be over. It was probably nothing.

One small thing made him uncomfortable. Peroni had brought a pair of binoculars with him. He wasn’t able to see the face of the sniper on the roof, only the long barrel of a rifle and a pair of strong arms on the perimeter wall. But there’d been a cloud of cigarette smoke rising from the space behind the rifle, and that didn’t ring true at all. He had no idea what secret-service officers did during the long, boring hours of waiting for an event that rarely materialized. But smoking out in the open air …

He looked at the entrance. The man behind it, a bored-looking, lean individual with black greasy hair and heavy spectacles, was already eyeing him. This was, Peroni decided, an invitation. So the big cop walked up to the glass door, took out his ID, pressed the bell, and said, very firmly, into the speakerphone, “I’m from the police. I need to speak to the duty officer immediately.”

“Do you have an appointment?” asked a tinny voice from the speaker on the wall.

“This isn’t that kind of business. Just call someone, will you?”

A brief argument ensued, and it was not one Peroni intended to lose. Eventually an individual who seemed boss class came and allowed him into the building. The newcomer looked like someone recently relieved of a burden. Balding, middle-aged, congenial, with his dark silk tie tugged down to hang around his flabby neck, he resembled a doctor more than the Ministry agent Peroni suspected him to be.

The man introduced himself as Carlo Belfiore and asked, “How can I help?”

“You’ve got an officer on the roof.”

“We had officers on the roof. The emergency is over. Didn’t you hear?”

“I heard. You still have someone up there. I saw him with my own eyes. Not his face. But I can see his rifle. And …” This still irked. “He was smoking.”

The man laughed. “No one smokes on government property. Except for Dario Sordi. And he’s not on my roof.”

“I know what I saw.”

Belfiore’s face clouded with puzzlement. He pulled out a phone and called someone, asking for the name of the officer who’d been assigned roof duty. Then he made another call, to the man himself, Peroni assumed. There was no reply.

Belfiore looked at the security guard. “You know Leone?”

“Good guy,” the doorman said promptly. “I see him at Roma games sometimes.”

“Does he smoke?” Peroni cut in.

He thought about it, then shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

Belfiore scratched his chin.

“I’m under orders,” Peroni lied. “Plus, I have the nastiest ispettore in Rome on my back and he doesn’t like secondhand news. I need to see this man up there for myself. I’m not leaving this building till I do.”

“Do you have any idea where you are?” Belfiore asked. The boss-class spook didn’t seem so congenial anymore.

“Not really.” Peroni pointed to the elevator. “Are we going up there, or what?”

65

“Where’s the president?” Costa asked.

They were striding down the corridor next to the Salone dei Corazzieri. The palace seemed deserted. There was no one anywhere, not on the security gates, not in the offices.

“Still in his apartment,” the first corazziere answered. “He doesn’t go out to the garden till six-thirty. You can set your watch by it. The agreement was we talk to Palombo. Stick to it. If Ranieri says otherwise …”

“You don’t even know where Ranieri is,” Rosa Prabakaran pointed out, and got a caustic glance from Falcone for her pains. Costa understood why. They were lucky to get this far. It could still, so easily, go wrong.

They rounded a corner past the salone and climbed a short set of winding marble stairs.

The men in uniform stopped outside a mahogany door at the summit and glanced at one another.

The senior officer rapped on the door with his knuckles and called out. Nothing. Then he shouted again, his rank and name, demanding that Palombo answer.

Rosa leaned forward, turned the handle, and pushed. Costa and Falcone took out their guns and edged in front of the corazzieri, who had no other weapon than their swords, still sheathed.

Behind them, one of the men in uniform murmured a low, shocked curse.

Automatically, Costa shoved his way to the front and entered the office, gun high, scanning the space ahead.

Luca Palombo sat motionless in a leather chair behind the desk, body thrown back at a crazy angle against the bright, sunny window. His chest was a sticky red mess of blood and gore, his head was bent forward, mouth gaping open, eyes shocked, dark, unfocused.

Falcone strode across the office and bent over the stricken figure. “Dead. Can’t have happened more than a few minutes ago. Who’s had access?”

“I told you I saw another corazziere,” the northern officer complained. “Everyone was supposed to be confined to barracks except us.”

The older one seemed lost, for words and for action.

Costa caught Falcone’s eye, motioned to him to move back from the desk. Then he turned around and met the eyes of the uniforms, raising a hand slightly.

At the end of the wall, by the purple velvet curtains, in an office surely made for the courtiers of a pope, was a narrow door, ajar only a few inches. In the reflection of the window, Costa could just make out the shape of a pair of shiny leather shoes, black, polished, the kind a soldier might wear, behind the polished wood.

The senior corazziere had caught sight of it too, and stared at him, mouthing the word Us.

Costa brought the gun up to eye level, glimpsed the drawn sword, and raised his eyebrows.

Not waiting for another word of protest, he moved forward, deliberately, slowly, until he was beyond the curtain. His left hand slammed the door open, his right held the gun tight and still, where he expected the man’s head to be.

There was a shout of pain as his effort collided with something physical on the other side. Dazzling sunlight streamed into the room. He could hear the corazzieri assembling behind him, prepared, alert; could hear too the gasp of surprise that greeted the figure cowering on the other side, who was shaking like a leaf, holding his shoulder as if in pain.

Ugo Campagnolo’s too-tanned features were wreathed in sweat. There was terror in his face.

“He’s gone?” the prime minister cried, his voice breaking. “He’s gone?”

“Who?” Costa responded calmly.

“Him!” His eyes peered cautiously into the larger office, and at the dead man at the desk. “The monster!”

“You mean Andrea Petrakis?” Falcone asked.

“I mean … I mean …” His eyes, bright and beady, had begun to veer between fright and cunning.

“I was talking to Palombo. It was a private conversation. There was a knock on the door. So I stepped in here.”

They listened, and said nothing.

“I heard.” Campagnolo’s eyes grew bright with remembered terror. “I heard.”

The man stank of fear and perspiration, yet even at that moment there was a sly expression on his face, one that spoke of an imminent attempt to control and defuse this situation.

“You must find this intruder. Not waste time in here. Those are my orders. Find him. You listen to me.”

Costa’s eyes strayed to the verdant palace terraces beyond the window.

In the distance, by the statue of Hermes, sat a familiar figure, hunched over a book, entirely focused on its pages, a white teacup held idly in his right hand.

A shape was slowly coming into view from the palace patio. A man in the silver uniform of a corazziere. In his right hand stood a long, shiny sword, half its length dark with blood.

66

The ministry man Belfiore led Peroni to a small, slow, rickety elevator. Together, they rose in silence to the top floor of the building. There was a narrow concrete staircase to the roof. The door at the top of the steps was closed. Locked, or so it seemed.

“This is more my line of work than yours,” the big cop told Belfiore. He set his shoulder to the old wood and pushed and heaved with all his weight. He’d taken down plenty of doors in his time and he knew this one wasn’t going to pose a problem. The lock was flimsy and easily buckled under the force of a couple of kicks. Someone had piled a stash of objects behind, blocking any entry. Twice Peroni heaved with his shoulder; he managed only to get the door back by the width of a hand.

He paused, thinking, then asked, “There’s no other way?”

“None,” Belfiore responded. “I’ll get help.”

There was a sound from the other side. A man’s voice, angry, muffled, yet somehow full of concern, even though there were no words.

“Dammit,” Peroni muttered.

He went at the door again with all his weight and force. This time it moved farther. Belfiore, who was a little slimmer, said, “Let me try.”

It was a squeeze, but he got his hand around and managed to dislodge whatever was on the other side.

Peroni burst through. He found himself surrounded by ancient garden objects and old junk. In the dark corner ahead lay a man in the anonymous black clothing of the security services, a guise he’d seen too often these last few days in Rome. The man was bound and gagged.

Something else. A smell of tobacco on the air. Familiar. One that reminded him of what Teresa had told them when she called, speculating a little, as they all were, constantly.

“I’m not armed. Wait for my people,” Belfiore ordered.

“I don’t think so,” Peroni said, and strode out through the little cabin door onto the roof of the spooks’ building behind the Quirinale.

The figure was where he’d seen it from the street, in the far corner, overlooking the palace gardens. Stretched out, legs akimbo, heavy, stiff, but focused on the job. The rifle butt was hard against the shoulder, the sights up to the face.

Peroni used to smoke himself. Loved it. Only age and a newfound interest in his own health, which came from meeting Teresa Lupo, had made him quit. But a good smoker never forgot.

“Elizabeth!” he yelled, and took out his gun.

He was too far away to shoot. Even if he wanted to. Peroni hated guns, weapons of all kinds. There had to be another way.

“Elizabeth!” he repeated. Then, to himself, “Don’t make me shoot you. Please.”

The Englishwoman turned for a moment. She shook her head.

Then she huddled over the sniper’s rifle, intent on the distant target.

Peroni kept the gun by his side and walked across the roof.

He watched as Elizabeth Murray fired a single shot, the rifle kicking hard against her shoulder.

67

“A fool?” Petrakis found himself saying as he stared at the old man on the stone bench, amazed that still there was no fear in his pale, exaggerated face.

“You heard me, Andrea,” Dario Sordi said. “A foo—”

There was a sound like the crack of a whip. Petrakis watched as the foot of the statue of Hermes disintegrated into a gray cloud of dust.

The man in the corazziere uniform raised his bloodstained sword, aware that somehow the time available to him was fast vanishing. It never occurred to Andrea Petrakis that the second shot might be aimed at him. The force of its impact sent him reeling back on himself, deafened by the arrival of the sniper’s bullet, shuddering from its shock.

The pain was odd, a revelation. It felt as if some kind of vast celestial hammer had beaten on his shoulder, iron against iron. His entire body ached. Blood was beginning to spurt through the ragged hole the shell had made in the shining carapace covering his left shoulder and, unseen, in the flesh beneath.

As the agony grew, he fought to retain his balance and found himself staggering backwards, struggling to stay upright, wishing for a moment in the shadow, a brief pause to think, to find himself again.

There was something he needed to say.

68

Peroni wanted to scream, to swear, to leap on the prone Englishwoman with her deadly rifle, shrieking: Why, why, why?

Wanted to know why too he hadn’t done what duty demanded. Shot her straight out in cold blood.

There were people at his back now, a commotion. Violence loomed, that curt, dark confrontation he’d come to know too well.

Then, as he got to her, the sniper’s rifle barked again and she let loose a squeal of satisfaction.

He was cursing, pointing his pistol at the long, corpulent form on the concrete roof, ready to fire. But Elizabeth Murray rolled over, dropped the black rifle, held her big hands wide open, looked him in the face — and grinned.

Peroni kept his gun aimed straight at her face, unable to think of a sensible thing to say.

“Oh, don’t look so cross, Gianni,” she said, still beaming. “A couple of minutes earlier and you could have got us all into real trouble, my boy.”

The weapon wavered in his hand. She stretched out her right arm.

“Now. Will you help an old lady up? Please? I really am past these games, you know.”

69

It was as if they were in a movie. Events shifted rapidly, frame by frame. The first shot splintered the foot of the statue beside Dario Sordi, raising a cloud of fragments and dust. As Andrea Petrakis struggled to finish the final act of what he surely regarded as the purpose of his life, a second crack rent the air. This time the outcome was different: the clatter of metal meeting metal, of a powerful, violent impact shattering the evening calm.

The man in the ornate uniform jumped back, a look of agonized astonishment on his face. It was only at that moment that Dario Sordi realized they were no longer alone. Beyond Petrakis, Nic Costa was sprinting down the path from the palace, pistol in hand, starting to cry in a voice full of righteous anger, one that reminded the old man of his friend, the young officer’s father. Behind him came a group of corazzieri, swarming into the gardens.

Dario Sordi looked at his assailant again. The shot had entered the breastplate somewhere near Petrakis’s left shoulder. There was a dark hole torn in the shiny metal there, and blood pumping through. The glistening sword hung loose in the man’s right hand, ineffective. His eyes were glassy with pain and shock. He was stumbling, attempting to head back toward the palace, making hurt, whimpering noises, as if pain were a stranger to him except in its infliction.

Sordi stood up.

“Take this man into custody,” he ordered, slightly ashamed of the note of triumph in his voice. He added, more quietly, “And …”

What?

“Thank you,” the old politician muttered, mainly to himself. He felt a little giddy, heard more words escape his lips unbidden. “I’m safe now.”

That grim day in the Via Rasella was rising again in his memory. In his mind’s eye he was seeing the faces of the two Germans, the speaking one from his recurring nightmare brighter than the other.

Safety was what everyone sought in the end. A private place to call their own. Shelter from the storm. The young never quite appreciated this. To them the world was a place to be fought for, to be won. For some, like Andrea Petrakis, it would remain that way forever, which was a very personal and dangerous tragedy. Age never softened their sharp ambitions, diminished their appetite, whispered the great secret: that life was brief and fragile, a gift to be cherished, not thrown away on a whim or some obsession.

Costa got to him first, face anxious, eyes still raking the rooftops. Corazzieri crowded around like some ancient Roman phalanx in silver, a growing human shield of tall men, one that Fabio Ranieri joined, out of breath, uncharacteristically wild-eyed.

“There’s someone else out there,” Costa told Sordi urgently. “We need to get you inside immediately.”

The old man found it difficult to hear, to understand. He couldn’t take his eyes off the other figure, the one clutching the bloodied sword, who’d now staggered to the steps in front of the cool, shady terrace, with its long evening shadows, only to turn back, mouth open — eyes too — in shock at his own injury and failure. Sordi wondered which was the greater suffering: the wound or the sudden, brusque collapse of his mission. Wondered too how he might have felt all those years ago in the Via Rasella, if matters had turned out differently.

He shook his gray head, hoping to clear his thoughts. There was time to work, to prepare. Time perhaps, finally, to discover something tantamount to the truth of the Blue Demon.

“Don’t you see what this means?” Sordi said. “We have someone. Alive. A witness. I want Falcone. I want …”

The lean inspector was there already. Sordi realized he should have expected no less.

“Deal with him,” the president ordered, pointing at Petrakis, half in the darkness of the terrace, leaning against a column, hurt and lost. “As you dealt with the Spanish woman. This one can tell you something. Everything. We shall have answers, important ones. Do this now, please. Quickly. No need to inform Palombo for the moment.”

But no one moved.

“He’s got a gun,” someone said.

Sordi looked. It seemed impossible. The wounded man in the silver breastplate leaking blood had somehow exchanged the sword for another weapon. A black pistol. It trembled in his blood-spattered right hand, as if it had found its way there without the man’s knowing.

Andrea Petrakis stared straight at him across the verdant space that separated them and shouted, “I know who you are!”

“I know who I am too, young man,” Dario Sordi whispered, watching him prepare to move.

Petrakis snatched off his plumed helmet, stumbled down the path toward them, the revolver rising, repeating over and over, “I know, I know, I know …”

Behind him stood a second figure. A familiar one.

Ugo Campagnolo stepped out into the sunlight. There was a gun in his hand too. A small weapon, almost insignificant. Sordi watched aghast, knowing what he was about to see.

Campagnolo walked up to the side of the man in the corazziere’s uniform, extended a shaking arm, then pumped a single bullet into his bare head. Petrakis fell down to the lawn on one knee, screaming. They watched as his assailant took aim and fired again.

The shot man leaped sideways, as if hit by some electric shock. His broken frame tumbled to the ground, arms outstretched, unmoving.

Dario Sordi shook himself free of his guards and stormed across the perfect green grass of the Quirinale. There was a scarlet fury in his brain, one he knew and hated.

“Give my officers the gun,” the president ordered. “The police will need it as evidence. This is too far. Even for you.”

“Evidence?” There was a wild look in the prime minister’s eyes.

“The gun,” Costa demanded, then walked up and removed the revolver from Campagnolo’s trembling hands.

“Evidence?” Campagnolo asked again, more quietly.

He took one step forward, his features rigid with hatred and anger, and stared into the president’s long, pale face.

“I saved you, Dario. Don’t you realize, you old fool? He had a weapon—”

“Which came from where?” Sordi interjected.

“He had a weapon. He’d have used it.”

Ugo Campagnolo looked at each of them in turn.

“I saved the president today. You all saw it. You’re witnesses.”

He raised himself up on his heels and brushed down the front of his jacket, as if it were covered in dirt.

“Soon you shall hear about it too. In the papers. On the TV. One call is all it takes. Soon …”

His voice froze. He faltered, confused by the expressions on the faces of the men watching him. Unseen by Campagnolo, something had traveled toward him. A bright red mark, like a scarlet beauty spot on a movie actress from another era, had briefly brushed across the prime minister’s sweating temple, then disappeared, as if dashing away in search of another target.

Sordi looked down. The livid spot, some sighting aid from a twenty-first-century weapon hidden away on a distant rooftop, had ranged across the grass to climb his arm. It began moving steadily toward his head.

Ranieri yelled something. Sordi found himself surrounded by a pushing, arguing phalanx of bodies, men dragging him to the ground, trying to cover his frame with theirs. He glimpsed Costa’s anxious face. Then Ranieri’s. A shot rang out. A man’s pained shriek rent the air. Then another.

“My God …” Sordi cried, and found himself swamped again by the crush around him. Still afraid?

It was an old dead voice. German. Clearly audible in the crush of struggling men around.

There was a time to stand up, he thought. A time to face the Devil.

Sordi pushed and yelled and screamed and fought his way against their good intentions. Finally, his fury and what little strength he possessed had some effect. He scrambled to his feet to see three silver-clad corazzieri bent over the motionless frame of Fabio Ranieri. One man straightened. There were tears in his eyes.

Sordi tore himself away from the broken form of the Corazzieri captain and turned to look at the bright blue sky and the buildings around them.

“Bastards!” he screamed. “Do you think I fear you now?” He pounded his chest with his fist, looking for something, anything, seeing only the skyline of Rome, its ancient buildings and church towers, a horizon imprinted on his memory since he was a child. “Do you really think that after all these long, bloody years …?”

“Dario.” Costa stood beside him. “You must—”

The red dot returned and ran up the young police officer’s sleeve. Sordi elbowed him out of the way and let the deadly bead fall on him, bellowing, “Take me. Take me if you dare!”

He waited. Nothing.

Then a low, worried sound came from the officers still crouched by the unmoving Ranieri. Sordi followed the direction of their gaze. The sighting point had moved on; it was now traveling along Ugo Campagnolo’s right arm. The prime minister saw it too, shrieked and stupidly tried to rub it off with his hand. The scarlet mark rose to his brown, stocky neck, higher to his cheek, then stopped above his right eye.

Campagnolo howled with fear, clutched at his face with his hands. The single sniper shot, one that caught him straight in the head, threw him backwards.

Sordi turned to one side and looked at this cherished oasis of green in the heart of an overcrowded, overburdened city. The still Roman evening was broken by the urgent, hurt cries of the men around him.

Il Torrino began to toll the half hour. On the third stroke, the sonorous tones of its chimes were drowned out by another noise, a deep baritone bellowing like the roar of some subterranean monster shaking itself awake. They all turned toward the building, staring. A black and yellow storm cloud was beginning to tear through the palace behind them, right to left, a rolling ball of thunder that picked up debris, stone and fabric and canvas in its maw, and burst out of the porticoed arcade like a fiery tsunami shrieking as it traveled, tearing down columns, turning this side of the palace — a view Dario Sordi had come to love — to rubble and chaos.

The final resonant chimes of the campanile were faintly audible as the noise of the blast abated. They were replaced by the harsh mechanical chatter of a million alarm bells strewn somewhere inside the shattered Quirinale. Sordi watched the flames start to recede and the garden edge of the building begin to crumble and collapse into a tumult of disorder. The corazzieri left the broken, shattered body of their leader and began to stumble mindlessly toward the place they were sworn to protect.

Duty followed a good man forever, from the first dawn of consciousness all the way to the grave.

Sordi watched the palace of the popes disintegrate before his eyes. This is what they wanted all along, he thought. Not blood, not vengeance, but anarchy over order, the sharp, bright fury of the moment victorious over the slow, pained progress he knew as civilization. It was the lesson Andrea Petrakis had learned from the Etruscans, and perhaps the man had a point.

The Blue Demon was everywhere and nowhere, eternal, invisible, waiting for its time to come.