Private Rome

Chapter 20

I woke to find a message from Mo-bot telling me she’d arranged a meeting with the hacker named Valentina at Ostia, an outlying district of Rome, at midday. I took the opportunity of a free morning to visit the local boutiques that lined the ancient narrow streets stretching out from the bottom of the Spanish Steps. I desperately wanted to be home with Justine, but I’d made a commitment to Matteo and our new client Joseph Stadler and would have to see it through. I added to the small selection of clothes I’d brought with me for a short trip and by 10:30 a.m. was back in my room with enough shirts, trousers and suits for an extended stay.

I opted for a new navy blue linen suit, a white shirt and brown shoes, and caught a cab outside the hotel.

The driver, a scowling woman in her early fifties, wasn’t keen on visiting Ostia and while we drove through Rome to the coast told me it was not a good neighborhood. The sun was high and the foreshortened shadows harsh and stark against the dazzling light. Some of the buildings seemed to sparkle, their white marble shining beneath the bright sky, heightening the beauty of the ancient city. We drove with the windows open and the car filled with the smells of the city; coffee, pastries, sickly-sweet scents of over-ripe fruit and garbage, and every now and then the aroma of food being prepared for the lunchtime rush. Rome was not a peaceful place. Music blared from open vehicle windows and horns sounded anytime there was a delay in the smooth progress of the traffic, which was often.

Ostia was a rundown coastal town, nowadays almost linked to Rome by urban sprawl and regarded by many as one of the city’s suburbs. It had been developed at a time when function had trumped form, the buildings mostly practical but ugly. Uniform blocks of flats; drab modern storefronts; office buildings with mundane and unimaginative façades. The area was characterized in all the wrong ways by graffiti, grime, trash, abandoned vehicles. All spoke to the soul of Ostia, but it probably wasn’t the image most locals wanted to promote.

We made it to the seafront and stopped outside Caffè Babe, one of the area’s few upmarket haunts, shortly after noon. I paid the driver, crossed the busy boardwalk and went inside.

Caffè Babe was the kind of distressed-wood, exposed-wrought-ironwork, filament-lightbulbs joint I could easily imagine visiting in Greenwich Village, New York City, or Clerkenwell in London, but it seemed out of place in this part of Italy. The incongruity didn’t seem to bother its clientele and all thirty tables were occupied by groups of people busily eating and drinking, many of them while also working on laptops.

I approached the counter, which featured a glass cabinet displaying perfectly baked pastries. Their sweet smell mingled enticingly with the aroma of coffee.

“Sì?” said the barista, a woman in her twenties.

“Double espresso, please,” I replied. “And a chocolate twist.”

“Of course,” she said, setting to work on my order.

“I’m looking for Valentina,” I remarked, as she prepared my coffee.

“You shouldn’t snack between meals,” a woman said as she sidled up next to me.

She had short brown hair, piercings in her ears, nose and eyebrows, and tattoos covering her arms. They curled up her neck out of the back of her black T-shirt, and down her legs exposed beneath a pair of red shorts.

“Valentina?” I guessed.

“Mo-bot told me to keep an eye out for a square,” she replied, pointing to my suit. “At least it’s not gray.” She turned to the barista. “Isabella, bring his order back to us, per favore.”

She led me past the counter and through a door that took us further into the building.

“I bought the place five years ago,” Valentina explained. “I got tired of giving my money to other café owners and thought I could do a better job.”

She walked me along a corridor to a supply room. Here she stopped by a rack of sugar sacks and pressed a concealed button.

“The volume of Internet traffic among the customers provides great cover,” she said as the rack and wall behind it slid aside to reveal a hidden room full of screens and computer gear.

Isabella entered the room with my coffee and pastry. She seemed unfazed by the sight of the secret computer facility.

“Everyone who works here is in training,” Valentina remarked. “Magicians with coffee and computers. Thank you, Isabella.”

The barista nodded and withdrew. I carried my coffee into the computer cave.

Valentina sealed the room behind us and took a seat at one of half a dozen terminals. All around us there were racks of servers in Faraday cages, shelves laden with sensors, devices I couldn’t identify, and stacks of data drives.

“I looked you up, Mr. Morgan,” Valentina said as she woke her computer from sleep mode. “You’re a saint. One of the good guys.”

“I wouldn’t say that,” I replied. “I snack between meals.”

She chuckled.

“Maureen says you have a SIM card to investigate.”

I nodded and produced the dead gunman’s SIM.

Valentina placed it in a reader and opened a program on her computer.

“This isn’t much of a challenge,” she remarked.

“I’ll be sure to bring you something tougher next time,” I responded, and she smiled.

“The suit conceals so much spirit,” she said, before turning her attention to the screen. “There is one SMS message. The phone was never used for anything else.”

She opened Google Maps. “Looks like GPS coordinates and a time — 8 p.m.”

She pointed at a little red marker on her screen that showed a location: a courtyard in the heart of Rome.

“It’s in the Vatican,” she noted, and I looked at the screen and the overhead view of St Peter’s and wondered why an assassin would be given a location inside the spiritual center of the Eternal City.