City of Fear

70

Costa was woken by the smell of tobacco smoke drifting into the bedroom from the patio outside. The acrid aroma mingled with the fragrance of jasmine blossom clinging to the wall of his country home off the Via Appia Antica.

A familiar stench. Black Russian. He got up, dressed slowly, thinking.

It was six days since the bloody events at the Quirinale. Normality, of a kind, had returned. An interim government was in power, awaiting elections that Ugo Campagnolo’s heirs, shadowy men of dubious provenance, were expected to win by a landslide. The prime minister had been accorded a state funeral, which Dario Sordi, looking frail for the first time, attended in silence. Afterwards the president had gone to the private ceremony for Fabio Ranieri, one that had attracted no publicity whatsoever, at the insistence of the dead Corazzieri captain’s family.

No one in Italy quite believed they had heard the full story. No one expected to. The Spanish woman, Anna Ybarra, remained in police custody, charged with attempted murder and numerous terrorist offenses, seemingly unable to shed any useful light on the men who had brought her to Italy. An attempt by the divided opposition to force an investigation into the affair had failed. After that, Dario Sordi had retired behind the shutters of the Quirinale Palace, refusing to appear in public. The natural Italian penchant for cynicism toward politicians had come into play too, filling the Web and the scurrilous tabloids with rumors and allegations. The identity of the final sniper remained a mystery. Only his location was known, through the discovery of a set of shell cases in the campanile of Il Torrino.

The previous afternoon Costa had passed the old, crumbling statue of Pasquino near the Piazza Navona and found the base plastered in fresh posters bearing a flurry of allegations about the political classes — a few about Sordi himself. There was a febrile mood in the air, along with a sense of guilty gratitude. Whatever had happened behind the ring of steel surrounding the Quirinale Palace, the crisis had passed. The status quo — awkward, imperfect, fragile — had returned. In a sense, the Blue Demon had won. No one questioned the present state of the nation. The average Roman lacked the energy, and saw no point in attempting to summon up the necessary courage.

Costa had read the scabrous messages on Pasquino on his way back from the Questura after some nameless official from the Ministry served suspension notices on all those who’d worked in the apartment in San Giovanni in Laterano, even Teresa and her hapless assistant Di Capua. Commissario Esposito was hanging on to his job by the skin of his teeth somehow. It was unclear what would happen next. An investigation would have proved too embarrassing for the Ministry. Some swift judgment — a loss of pay, demotion, perhaps, even ejection from the force — would be handed down to the police officers involved, probably in a matter of days.

This no longer concerned Nic. After they handed out the suspension notices, he had turned down Falcone’s offer of a consolation lunch with the others, walked into a stationer’s shop, bought a few sheets of notepaper and envelopes, then sat in the belly of the Pantheon, listening to the echoing voices of the visitors, entranced as always by the light falling through the oculus, the eye in the center of the dome, which dispatched a shaft of bright sun directly into what was once the hall of a pagan temple built by the emperor Hadrian. This was a building with memories for him, of a time when he’d felt some kind of hope and ambition, for himself and the world. A period of love too, something that had slipped between his fingers like dust almost as swiftly as it had arrived, unbidden, almost unwanted.

Beneath the great span of Hadrian’s sanctuary, he penned his resignation from the police force. It was a brief, unapologetic, practical note, which he delivered by hand to Prinzivalli, the desk officer on duty at the Questura, one hour later, asking that he pass it on to whoever was in charge at that moment.

He had no plans. Some part of him that had been slumbering for a decade or more whispered reminders of a dream he’d almost forgotten: taking a bicycle onto the ancient cobbles of the Appian Way, the old Roman road at the foot of his drive, which ran all the way from the capital to Brindisi in Apulia, moving from modern Italy into the lost past of fable. He’d never allowed himself that kind of freedom. There had always been cares and duties that got in the way as he slipped from a quiet, introverted childhood into the sudden demands of a family falling apart beneath the weight of controversy, illness, and death.

Costa made two cups of coffee and poured a couple of glasses of orange juice, then went outside. Elizabeth Murray was basking in the hot morning sun. She wore sunglasses, a blue checked cotton shirt, and a baggy pair of jeans. The cigarette went out the moment he appeared, ditched beneath the wooden table that had been used for outdoor meals for as long as he could remember. He saw, now, that the oak of the table was rotten, and perhaps had been for some time, without his noticing.

There was a black briefcase on the surface and a cell phone.

Elizabeth grabbed at her cup, took a swig, closed her eyes, and remarked, “You know, there’s nowhere else in the world where coffee tastes like this. Rome. It must be the water.”

“Why didn’t you tell us?” he asked. “That you knew what Petrakis’s message meant?”

She opened her eyes and squinted at the horizon: the ruins of tombs, the roofs of the nearby mansions, a fringe of trees waving in the soft morning breeze.

“What would you have done?” she asked.

“We could have talked to Ranieri.”

“You would never have got through. So who else? Palombo? Dario himself? You should read history more. These things don’t happen by accident. They’re conspired at. Plotted. Planned. They knew exactly what they were doing from the moment Andrea Petrakis left Afghanistan. Dario was isolated as soon as the G8 parties left for the Vatican. I know. I tried to call him myself. It was never going to work.”

She shrugged and a brief, self-deprecating smile creased her face. “So I did what you can’t. I took matters into my own hands.”

“You might have failed.”

“I might,” she agreed placidly. “I didn’t feel I had much of an option. It was obvious they’d try to attack Dario while he was in the garden. I know his little tea ceremony well. Where do you think the old boy gets those English biscuits he loves so much?” She frowned. “I was sure Petrakis would try to do the job himself. He had a theatrical streak to his nature, in case you didn’t notice. I reasoned that in those circumstances I could take him out. I would have too. I wasn’t trying to wound the bastard. I wanted him dead. So did Ugo Campagnolo, of course, though for entirely different reasons.”

“Petrakis wasn’t alone.”

“No. I’m old. Out of practice. Twenty years ago I might have seen the rifle poking out of Il Torrino. Not now. Sorry!”

“Peroni could have shot you.”

A look of puzzlement crossed her face. “Is life meant to be led without risk? I didn’t know that. Never occurred to me. How boring.”

She patted the briefcase. “Before I open up this thing, do you want to tell me what you think happened? Then we can compare notes.”

“I don’t know,” Costa said emphatically. “And the truth is, I don’t care anymore.”

The answer surprised her.

Elizabeth Murray gazed at him and there was something in her friendly, mannish face he couldn’t interpret. Sympathy? Reluctance? Some slow, subtle anger?

“But you do care, Nic,” she told him quietly. “I’m going to make sure of that, I’m afraid.”

She snapped open the case, reached inside, and lifted out some kind of report. The paper was yellowed with age, the words clearly typed, not printed from a modern machine.

“This is the submission your father produced for the Blue Demon commission. Twenty years ago, I suppressed it, with the backing of Dario Sordi, before any other member could see it. Or so we thought.”

“No, Elizabeth. You can’t do this. I won’t become involved.…”

“Nic!” She looked furious, and for the first time since they met he realized he could imagine her in the security services, an active participant in some live operation; could see her as Peroni had described, spread-eagled like a professional on the rooftop overlooking the Quirinale gardens. “May I ask you a personal question?”

“Can I stop you?”

“No.” She watched him intently. “Tell me. Your parents died of the selfsame cancer eleven years apart. An identical disease. Did that never strike you as a very unfortunate and unusual coincidence? Are you perpetually incurious? Or simply downright naïve?”

The bright morning seemed to pall, the vivid country colors leaching out of the fields and flowers and vines around them. He couldn’t hear the birds singing. It was impossible to think.

“What did you say?” he murmured, shaking his head.

“I’m going for a smoke. In what passes for your vineyard.” She threw the report at him. “Read this. Then we’ll talk.”

71

There was a voice inside the words on the fading pages, and it was that of his father: precise, impatient, penetrating, and angry. The submission ran to ten pages and described the relationship between Ugo Campagnolo, the Gladio team led by Renzo Frasca, Gregor Petrakis (the father of Andrea), the network’s placeman, and the three principal crime organizations in Italy: the Sicilian Cosa Nostra, the Camorra of Naples, and the ’Ndrangheta of Calabria.

Costa read the accusations his own father had put down on paper two decades before.

The charge was simple: Gregor Petrakis and Ugo Campagnolo met through the covert Gladio organization, initially set up to provide a network of undercover agents in the event of a Soviet takeover of Italy. The Blue Demon was one of several fake terror groups envisaged by the two men as a way of meeting Gladio’s demand for a “strategy of tension.” But the pair soon discovered a mutual taste for illicit income. At the time, Campagnolo’s legitimate businesses were beginning to fail. He and Petrakis quietly made themselves small fortunes through the supply of hard drugs — not just in Tarquinia, but in Rome and Florence too — by using the Greek’s links with Afghan sources to channel heroin and marijuana directly to customers outside the usual networks controlled by the mobs.

Over time, Campagnolo came to understand the risk he was running by undercutting the gangs. His solution was to persuade the three normally independent crime organizations to pool their resources, to take over the Blue Demon’s drug network and use him and its resources as a conduit into the world of politics. Slowly, Campagnolo subverted the political ambitions of his NATO handlers and shifted his allegiance to the mobs in return for their support. The Blue Demon became a conspiracy, a consortium dedicated to a covert attempt to fund, shape, and control the political future of the nation, infiltrating its institutions, creating parties and groupings that would quietly work in the interests of organized crime.

Petrakis and his wife, idealists at heart, died when they realized what was happening and threatened to inform their original paymasters, the Americans and the British running the Gladio operation. Campagnolo’s response was to inform the consortium that Petrakis was still involved in direct drug trafficking on behalf of the Afghan gangs, against their express orders.

When the couple were murdered, Renzo Frasca, the U.S. handler for the couple’s work with Gladio, was panicked into inventing a solution that would prevent discovery of the network. Petrakis’s original plan for the Blue Demon as a terror group became the answer, and his son — a minor participant in his parents’ schemes — was talked into fronting the imaginary cell as a way of getting him out of the country safely and saving what reputation his parents had. The deaths of Frasca and his wife were faked. Those of three students whose only interest had been drugs, and of a hapless carabiniere, were all too real, props to lend the story a terrible credence.

And Ugo Campagnolo escaped, to rise and prosper through the world of Italian politics, the front man for the conglomerate of crime interests that took on the name that the late Gregor Petrakis had given his fledgling terror group: the Blue Demon.

Costa finished the report. His head was spinning. There was nothing there but supposition and hearsay. Not a single statement from a named witness or a piece of paper that could link Campagnolo’s companies to the Petrakises’ illicit operations.

Yet it was true, and he knew it. His father had been a careful, fair-minded man. He would never have put down on paper suspicions that were mere gossip and rumor.

These events had begun in Nic Costa’s childhood. Much of them passed him by. There were reasons: The headlines the Blue Demon generated in the media had come to an end once Andrea Petrakis disappeared. More personal grounds too. Not long afterwards his mother had become sick, falling into the debilitating illness that would take her life, slowly, day by day, as the rest of them watched, distraught and utterly impotent.

The words Elizabeth Murray had uttered brought back a thought that had dogged him for years: Why should they have been so unlucky? What savage quirk of fate meant that both his father and mother should fall victim to the same disease?

He was lost in his own memories. Only the smell of smoke told him, in the end, that she’d returned to sit at the old table again, where his family used to eat together, laughing mostly, even in the dark days.

72

“Why did you bury this?” Costa asked her.

“For his own good. Ugo Campagnolo was a member of the commission. Your father would have been serving his own death warrant had we allowed that report to be presented.”

“You could have done something.”

“Listen to yourself. You’re a cop. How many bent politicians do you have in Italy? How many have seen the inside of a jail cell these last thirty years? Besides, they’d covered their tracks so well. There was nothing we could do. It was impossible.… So we tried to keep Marco safe, in spite of himself. We had to make sure Campagnolo’s people never knew any of this report existed. It was too dangerous. For your father.” Her bright, serious eyes never left him. “For his family.”

He could hear the sound of a tractor working in the adjoining field, the distant voices of the farm laborers going about their work.

“Do you want me to continue?” she asked softly.

“She had cancer. They both did.”

He could picture them wasting away; he could recall so sharply the impotence he felt as he watched.

“I was out of the service by then,” she went on. “Marco kept on nagging people. He wouldn’t let it go. They were bound to find out in the end.”

She took more papers out of the briefcase.

“I was in touch with Dario, discreetly. The idea that the crime gangs were deliberately infiltrating the political process — not just buying off individuals along the way — it terrified us. The mobs were weaker when they were rivals. If they came together, made a concerted attempt to infiltrate the process of government …” She stopped for a moment. “It doesn’t bear thinking about. When your father became sick, we sent some friends into his office. They were looking for bugs. They found some. They also found this.”

Costa stared at the report. It bore the letterhead of a private laboratory in Milan and a few paragraphs of text that seemed mired in scientific jargon. One thing he could understand: the recurring term radiation.

“These people have friends everywhere. Among them are some former secret-service agents in the former Eastern Bloc. They used junk like this long before it occurred to anyone else it might disguise a murder. What they put in the desk in your father’s office must have been there for months, if not years. Long-term, low-level exposure to radiation is extremely difficult to detect, unless you know that’s what you’re looking for.”

He got up and walked to the corner of the patio, scanned the drive. It was empty except for the small red Fiat in which she’d arrived. Costa wiped his eyes with his sleeve, then came and sat down.

“What about my mother?” he asked her.

She reached for another sheet of paper. He could see it was from the same company.

“When we realized what had happened — the similarity between her symptoms and his — we managed to get someone into her office in the university. Radiation lingers. There was still a faint trace there. The same kind.” The Englishwoman frowned. “I’m sorry. Maybe they warned your father. Maybe not.” She glanced at the farmhouse behind them. “They were bugging this place. You know that. You also know threats would have made no difference. The way your father was …”

“You could have told me.” Costa felt like screaming, like running away.

She sat still and silent, waiting for him to calm down. After a little while she asked, “Told you what? That we believed these people — Ugo Campagnolo among them — had your mother and father murdered, in the cruelest way imaginable, and there was nothing in the world we could do about it? We can’t link him to the radioactive material here. We can’t even prove an organization called the Blue Demon exists.” She hesitated. “Not yet.” Elizabeth Murray watched him closely, then asked, “Why do you think Andrea Petrakis came back?”

“Is this a test?”

“You could say that.”

“He was ordered back. They were worried about something.”

“Exactly.” Her eyes never left him. “A few of us have been quietly working on the Blue Demon for years. It’s not easy. I moved to New Zealand for a reason. To stay alive principally. In our favor, there is the simple matter of human nature. This is an awkward arrangement. The members have detested each other for decades. You can’t bury all that hatred overnight, even when the prize is an entire nation. Now that they’re winning, it’s worse. There are even more arguments to be had over how to divide up the spoils. Some of those who signed up find it deeply boring too, and much prefer the old ways. In the end they wind up marginalized. Left out of the loop. They don’t like that.”

“You have someone?” he asked. “An informer?”

“I wish it were that simple. Some months ago there was word that one of those involved was willing to turn himself in. We don’t know who. We don’t know why. We were told he would give us everything. Names, bank accounts. The structure of everything Campagnolo and those behind him worked to establish. If we could bring in this man alive … Keep him that way. Get into court. That’s a big if. Particularly now they know. They’d kill him without a thought, of course, the way they were content to shoot Ugo instead of Dario when they saw the endgame was falling apart. There’s no friendship among thieves.”

He remembered those few grim, bloody moments in the garden of the Quirinale.

“Who was the shooter?” he asked.

“Someone in the campanile. That’s all anyone knows. All they’re likely to know. The same goes for the bomb in the palace. It was in a room in the basement. My guess is someone placed it there after Palombo detained all Ranieri’s officers. I don’t see how it could have happened any other way. They weren’t trying to kill the G8 people. They weren’t that interested in assassinating Dario. They were making a statement. Trying to tell us they knew we were chasing them and they wouldn’t allow it. That was why they summoned Andrea Petrakis back from Afghanistan.”

A car stopped in the road at the end of the drive. She watched it for a moment, then said, “Rennick was fooled into thinking this was one last false-flag operation. He didn’t realize Andrea was seriously damaged goods by that stage, more damaged than even Luca Palombo appreciated. Andrea had come to believe all that nonsense his father invented about the Blue Demon. Except that for him it didn’t mean a bunch of murdering criminals. It meant … some bloody retribution against Rome, against Western society. He really believed he was some avenging angel from Hell.” She drained her coffee.

“He was a leaky weapon, one that might go off anywhere. Rennick was willing to contemplate some small-scale display of terrorism in the heart of Rome, with a handful of casualties, just enough to keep the hoi polloi in its place, and maybe even send Andrea straight back into the arms of the leadership in Afghanistan. He didn’t tell his superiors. I know that. I checked. They would have stopped it the moment they heard. Those days are over. Besides, it was never going to happen. You understand why? Andrea said it himself. You heard him. He didn’t come here for the reason Rennick thought. He came here to kill the Blue Demon.”

Costa’s mind returned to those last moments of insanity in the palace gardens. Petrakis approaching Dario Sordi, his face full of fury and a passion for revenge. “Andrea had no idea what the Blue Demon really represented,” he said quietly. “For him it was the man who betrayed his parents.”

“Quite. So Palombo conveniently put none other than Dario Sordi in the frame, which happened to fit very neatly with the worldview Andrea had developed over the years. The lunatic craved a target, and when he had it, nothing was going to stop him. Not Renzo Frasca, not us, not you — certainly not that poor fool Giovanni Batisti, who opened his mouth to Palombo the moment Dario tried to sound him out.”

“Are you sure of this?” he asked.

“Ranieri had a wiretap on Palombo for a while. Palombo thought he could control Andrea. He didn’t realize Petrakis intended to destroy everything — and everyone — he associated with Rome. Dario. Palombo. Ugo too probably, if he’d got the chance. If you tell a man to pretend he’s a monster, place him among monsters, then demand that he act, in word and deed, like a monster, only a fool should be surprised if in the end he becomes a monster.”

Costa felt as if the world had turned upside down, rearranged itself into a form that was different, unrecognizable, yet one that made a terrible kind of sense. All the self-hate he’d recognized in his father over the years. All the pain and the internalized agony. It was, he now saw, a form of self-recrimination, the knowledge that his own dogged integrity had brought an untimely death upon his wife, and then, in a way Marco Costa probably regarded as a deserved form of retribution, upon himself too.

“Can you prove any of this?”

Her pale, very English face fell. “Not a thing. Sorry.”

“I need to think,” he said, and got up from the table.

She didn’t move. “There’s no time for thinking,” Elizabeth Murray observed, sounding a little cross. “Don’t you understand?”

“I’m sorry.…”

“Listen to me, Nic. I’ve been chasing the ghost of the Blue Demon for twenty years. I used to think it was Ugo Campagnolo himself. Now I wonder how I could ever have been so stupid. This is the dark side of Italy, the part that’s always there, as much as we try to pretend it doesn’t exist. They made Campagnolo prime minister and then they murdered him when they thought he might prove a liability. They will pack the government that replaces him with their own men, loyal to the organizations, not those who elect them. They’re inside the Carabinieri, the police force, the judiciary, the entire process of government. As every day passes they become more powerful, their influence more corrosive. This is my adopted country and I had to abandon it because these sons of bitches made me fear for my life. Did you hear what I said? This all happened because they think we may finally have them. And your response is going to be to walk away? Your name is Costa, isn’t it? Or were you adopted?”

“Don’t push me, please.”

She reached into the briefcase once more and removed something. Costa saw what it was: the resignation letter he’d handed to Prinzivalli at the Questura desk the day before.

“I gave that to a police officer.…”

“A damned good one too,” she interrupted. “He handed it straight to Leo. It never went any further. We’re not totally alone, you know. We have a few select friends. And this is your answer, is it? To hide your head in the sand. To flee. Just as Dario and I did twenty years ago, burying the evidence your father was insisting we expose. Looking the other way for no other reason than cowardice dressed as convenience.”

She faced him beneath the uncut, overflowing vines of the terrace.

“Marco was the only man alive who had the guts to stand up to these crooks. If some of us had shared his courage, perhaps he’d still be alive today. And your mother. Maybe this place”—she gestured toward the honey-colored house—“would feel like a home instead of a tomb.”

“That’s enough!”

His anger left her red-faced. “How many people know what you just heard, do you think? How many dare we trust?”

The thought hadn’t occurred to him. “I’ve no idea. There must be some kind of specialist group.…”

She laughed at him. “Where? To do what? Are you hearing what I’m telling you? Twenty years ago, when these people raised Ugo Campagnolo out of the gutter and put him into power, they were the conspiracy. Today the conspiracy is us. A handful of people who hardly dare pass the time of day with a stranger. Why do you think I told you so little in San Giovanni? I didn’t know for one second whether one of you would run back to Palombo and tell him every word.” She threw the envelope on the table. “Well, I know now. We have a meeting this afternoon. If you want to come, bring a suitcase and some things. I don’t know when you’ll see this place again. But”—she nodded at the house—“if you want to stay here and watch the grass grow, then good day. You’re no use to us.”

There was so much to take in and, staring into her big, friendly face, so little time to think.

Costa found himself wondering what his father would have done in such circumstances, and knew the answer immediately, almost as if he’d heard the old man’s cracked, gravelly voice in his ear once more.

He picked up the envelope and tore it to shreds. The Englishwoman watched him, expressionless.

“I have one more favor to ask,” Elizabeth Murray said. “Dario’s in my car. He doesn’t know whether you want to see him or not. This has been eating at him for years, Nic. Talk to him. The last week … Ranieri’s death — this has all taken its toll on the man. He needs you.”

73

Dario Sordi emerged from the car at the gate with the tall figure of Leo Falcone by his side. The old man waved at the police inspector to stay back as he began to walk slowly toward the house.

The two men — young and old — met halfway, next to the bench seat they’d installed when Marco Costa’s illness made it difficult for him to walk. Sordi looked grateful for the chance to sit. He seemed so much more frail than a week before. It was the first time Costa had ever seen doubt, and perhaps a little fear, in his eyes, and he felt guilty for being in some way responsible for the change.

“I’m sorry. I am so very sorry,” Sordi said in a faltering voice, one that betrayed his age. “I apologize that I lacked the courage to tell you to your face. Forgive me.…”

“Dario, there’s nothing to forgive.”

“I wish I could believe that. I’ve always tried to think the best of people, Nic. I hoped, I believed for a while, that Campagnolo and the men behind him would be satisfied with what they had. It is a nation, after all. Few own such a jewel as Italy. Few get it handed to them by the weakness and petty divisions of their opponents.” He shook his head, as if fighting to clear his thoughts. “But I was a fool. There’s no compromise to be made with thieves. For an atheist, your father had an extraordinary knowledge of religion, you know. He quoted Augustine at me on this subject once, and I never forgot what he said about”—his mouth became narrow, almost cruel—“kleptocracies: ‘If justice is taken away, then what are states but gangs of robbers? And what are gangs of robbers themselves but little states?’”

Sordi looked him in the eye.

“This is not ordinary politics. Far from it. This is criminality posing as democracy. The men behind the Blue Demon are quietly seizing every institution, carving up the proceeds between them, hoping to make sure this nation will remain theirs for generations. My God … I was born into a nightmare like that. I don’t wish to die in one.” His voice broke, his hand shook as he pointed at the house in the field behind them.

“I wish I could have saved your father and mother,” Dario Sordi whispered. “And poor Ranieri. I wish so much …”

Costa reached out and embraced him, holding his stiff, bony body firmly, in a way he never could with his own father. Sordi’s chin, bristly and dry, brushed against his cheek. Then the old man pulled back and gazed away for a moment, ashamed of his tears.

“No one could save my father, Dario. He lived as he wanted to. That was who he was. We all knew that. None of us could have changed him one iota. Perhaps now …”

He stopped himself. There was a stray thought rising in his head — that perhaps Marco Costa’s spirit did live on somewhere.

There was a sound. Elizabeth Murray was walking up the drive, looking like a mountain shepherdess who’d lost her way.

Then he heard something from the road. Two more cars were moving slowly toward them. He could see Gianni Peroni at the wheel of the first, with Teresa Lupo by his side and Silvio Di Capua in the back. Rosa Prabakaran, her face pretty and serious, was driving the second. In the passenger seat next to her was the magistrate Giulia Amato.

Peroni drew up by the gate and winked at him. “Hop in,” the big cop told him.

“Goodbye, Dario. Take care,” Costa said quickly, and strode to Peroni’s vehicle. He opened the door for Elizabeth Murray, helping her onto the seat, passing over her crook, before returning to climb in the other side.

They set off to the south, away from Rome. He reminded himself that, for the last few days, he’d been fantasizing about a journey such as this. Down the Via Appia Antica, to an unknown destination, a different Italy, a land he knew only by reputation, not experience.

It seemed he was going there.