Silver

9

Dominico Neri was a sour-faced little man with the weight of the world on his slouched shoulders. He was cut from the typical Italian male cloth-interesting features rather than outright handsome, dark-skinned and narrow, his torso an inverted equilateral triangle of jutting ribs beneath a wrinkled cotton shirt. He sat across the table from Noah, sipping at a double-shot espresso in a stupidly small cup.

He looked like he hadn’t slept in a week. That disheveled look and the half-awake eyes no doubt made him painfully popular with the fairer sex, Noah thought. Neri looked like the kind of man who didn’t so much love them and leave them as he did the kind of man who skipped the whole love thing and went straight for the checkbook to pay the alimony. He stared at Noah. The scrutiny was almost uncomfortable.

That was hardly surprising, Neri was Carabinieri.

Rome was burdened by half a dozen levels of police, from traffic cops to jail cops and forestry police all the way to the normal beat cops. The Carabinieri were set aside from all of them. They were military police.

Only Neri’s eyes looked the part, Noah thought, studying the man back openly. If he’d been pushed to guess a career, he would have said journalist. The gun worn casually at his hip killed that career path, though.

“So,” Neri said, setting the espresso cup down on the cheap white saucer. The coffee left a near-black stain around the inside of the cup. Noah could only imagine what it was busy doing to the detective’s stomach lining. “You think this is all somehow linked to the suicide in Piazza San Pietro two days ago?”

Noah nodded.

News had begun to filter through from Berlin, so Neri was taking him more seriously than he would have even two hours ago. The threat had suddenly become credible, and this was Neri’s city. The Carabinieri man pinched the bottom of his nose, both fingers almost disappearing up his nostrils as he thought about what it meant to Rome.

“Forgive my bluntness, Mister Larkin, but an hour ago my office put in a call to your government. They deny that you are working on their behalf, which I admit does not surprise me. When has your government ever owned up to spying?”

“I am not a spy,” Noah said.

The Italian wasn’t listening to him and carried on as though presenting a case: “And yet despite the fact you have no verifiable credentials to back up your wild claims, you obviously know far too much about what happened in the piazza not to be some sort of intelligence officer. Either that, or you were more directly involved. So I ask myself this: were you involved? You do not look like a terrorist.” He grunted a soft chuckle at that. “Not that any of us know what a terrorist looks like, eh?”

“Indeed,” Noah said. He decided against saying anything more. Neri would come to the point, eventually.

Neri reached into his pocket and pulled out a battered tobacco tin. He opened it and took out the fixings for a thin licorice paper smoke, rolling it neatly between his fingers. It was a well practiced motion that needed no thought. Placing the cigarette between his lips he took out his lighter, sparked the wheel against the flint and inhaled with a slow, deep sigh of pleasure as he lit the cigarette. He drew a second lungful of smoke, letting it leak out through his nose before he carried on with his thought. “So then I think perhaps Mister Larkin is a well-known journalist where he comes from and he is here in Rome fishing for a story? It was a reasonable guess. Unfortunately none of the papers in your country appear to know who the hell you are. So not a journalist, not with your government, that leaves me in something of a quandary. What I am saying is, why shouldn’t I arrest you right here and now?”

“If you thought I was involved, you wouldn’t have come out to meet me in this rather overpriced cafe, would you?”

“Or perhaps the couple at the table over there are not a young couple in love but are actually my men. And the older gentleman over there, studying the newspaper so intently, perhaps he is actually one of mine waiting for the signal to take you in?”

Noah looked at the young couple. There was a Rough Guide on the table between them. The man was dressed like a fairly typical straight-out-of-university backpacker. His sneakers were a little too clean for someone who’d been slogging around Europe on an Inter-Rail ticket for a month, but otherwise he looked the part. The girl was pretty, blonde, and petite, all the things a younger Noah would have fallen for. They looked good together. They fit. He watched them talk for a moment. He couldn’t hear exactly what they were saying above the lunchtime noise of the cafe, but he could hear enough to know the guy had a fairly broad Mancunian accent and seemed to be spouting the usual bollocks a postgrad on vacation in Rome would. It wasn’t the kind of attention to detail he would have expected from an undercover policeman, so he felt relatively confident when he told Neri, “They aren’t. Ily, perhd know.”

“Perhaps,” the Carabinieri man said, drawing slowly on the cigarette again. The smell of the licorice paper was sickly sweet. “But that still doesn’t tell me why I shouldn’t arrest you, Mister Larkin, now does it?”

Noah couldn’t argue with him. In his position Noah’s bullshit radar would have been firing off warning signals left, right and center. “Call me Noah. Mister Larkin was my father.”

“Perhaps later, if we become friends,” Neri said. “For now I will call you Mister Larkin, and you can pretend I am talking to your father if it helps.”

“Not really,” Noah said. “I work for an organization with ah, how shall I put it?”-he spread his hands slightly, as though looking for inspiration from above-“let’s say ‘concerns’ in various countries across the world. We have rather specialized interests and areas of expertise.”

“Go on,” Neri said, stubbing out the last of his cigarette in the dregs of his coffee and leaving the butt to soak in the tiny cup.

“Because of our interests we have a rather unique network of contacts, and because of our distance from the more political aspects of things, we can sometimes see links between things that others closer to the fact miss, or overlook.”

“So you are a spy.”

Noah shook his head. “I’m not. Nothing as glamorous. I work for Sir Charles Wyndham. Unofficially my group is known as the Forge Team. We’re all ex-military, so we have certain skills. Sir Charles likes to joke that we were forged in the crucible of battle. The old man isn’t particularly funny, but we humor him.”

“And what might you ‘officially’ be called?”

Noah thought about deflecting the question, but he needed this guy to trust him if he was going to get through the reams of Italian bureaucracy and get him face time with someone on the other side of the border walls of Vatican City. “Our official government designation, if that isn’t a contradiction in terms, is Ogmios.”

“So you do work for the British government? Is that what you are telling me, Mister Larkin?”

Noah shook his head. “No. We’re, hell, how do I put this? Okay, we’re outside the government. We’re off the books. If we were still military, we’d be deniable ops. It’s the same theory. We are out looking after our country’s interests overseas, but if we’re compromised, if we’re captured or become an embarrassment, we simply don’t exist. We’re a private concern which just so happens to be comprised of counterterrorist experts and ex-special forces.”

“Fascinating, and wholly unbelievable of course. Tell me, what, precisely, does this Forge Team do, then, that Her Majesty’s Government reserves the right to deny its existence?” Neri’s voice was leery, and it was obvious the real question he was asking here was: How the hell do you know what’s going on while we don’t?

“We’re in salvage,” Noah said.

“Interesting,” Neri mused, “and I would imagine wholly irrelevant.”

No flies on you, Noah thought. “You’d be surprised.”

“No,” Neri said without missing a beat, “I wouldn’t. What would surprise me would be the unguarded truth slipping out of your mouth when you weren’t paying attention.”

Noah almost laughed at that. Instead he gestured for the waitress to come over and ordered himself a light beer. She nodded and hurried away. He liked her eyes, the little he saw of them. They promised. There was nothing better than a pretty young thing who promised-and it didn’t matter what it was they promised. He looked back at Dominico Neri. He found himself liking this dour little detective with his doubting mind. He was Noah’s kind of guy.

“Now, tell me again why I should listen to you.”

Noah leaned forward. He said one word: “Berlin.”

That one word was enough. He had known it would be. Neri could bluster all he wanted. He could demand proof that Noah wasn’t up to his neck in this whole thing-the killer needing to put himself in the center of the show, needing to see, to feel a part of the fear his murders created. That was the common philosophy of crime fighting, thanks to Hollywood. He could demand Noah turn himself over into his custody while he ran the name Ogmios through their own networks, trying to verify the unverifiable, just to make Noah’s life difficult for the sake of making it din›

The number of dead was rising by the hour. There was a grossly inappropriate counter on the ticker on the silent screen behind Noah’s head that said BERLIN DEATH TOLL RISING and showed the number jumping in small increments as each new fatality was reported. Noah’s skin crawled. He didn’t want to contemplate where that ticker would finally settle, but wherever that was, it was going to be a number that simply stopped making sense. That much they all knew from Konstantin’s very first report from the city. Berlin was in trouble.

“There’s nothing particularly secret about what I am going to tell you now, but bear with me.” The Italian nodded. “With each of the public suicides there was a message delivered to one of the national news agencies. In London the message was: There is a plague coming. For forty days and forty nights fear shall savage the streets. Those steeped in sin shall burn. The dying begins now. It was the same message in eleven of the thirteen cities where someone burned.” It was obvious the Italian knew the message off by heart. He wanted to hear something he didn’t know.

“And the other two? Where were they, Mister Larkin? Why were the messages different?”

“One was Berlin, the other was Rome.” He reached into his pocket for the piece of paper he had written the transcripts of the two calls down on. Noah smoothed it out and read through both short messages aloud. “In Berlin the message was: The Holy Father passed through a big city half in ruins and half trembling with halting step, afflicted with pain and sorrow, he prayed for the souls of the corpses he met on his way; having reached the top of the mountain, on his knees at the foot of the big cross he was killed by a group of soldiers. You might be familiar with it. It is a passage from the third secret of Fatima, I believe.”

Neri nodded.

“The message in Rome hit closer to home, and I’d take it as a direct threat to the Pope: Roman Pontiff beware of your approaching, of the city where two rivers water, your blood you will come to spit in that place, both you and yours when blooms the Rose. It’s one of the prophecies of Nostradamus.”

Neri nodded again. “That was the message, yes.” He let out a short sharp breath, then reached for his tobacco tin again. “I need to smoke,” he said. “I am an old Roman, not one of these new children of the city on their damned Piaggios, honking their horns every time they see a pretty gi. It helps me to think.”

“Knock yourself out,” Noah told him. “As to why the messages were different, we think they were telling us where they were going to hit first. And if we are right, Berlin today means Rome tomorrow.”

“Dio ci aiuti,” the Carabinieri breathed, part prayer, part absolute denial as he looked over Noah’s shoulder at the screen. Noah knew he was reading the numbers and imaging the same tragedy overlaid on his familiar streets. His hand trembled as he raised it to his lips and took a drag on the thin cigarette. It was a painfully human gesture, frail, frightened. This was outside of his philosophy. He was a man made for corruption, mafioso, narrow alleyways and the intrigue of an intimate death. Death with honor, as the old saying went. This faceless death was, for want of a better word, un-Italian. For that fraction of a second, when Neri let his guard down, Noah pitied him. He knew all too well the kind of hell that was coming to his city; he’d been shown it all across the television this afternoon. It didn’t take any imagination to switch the word Berlin for Rome.

Noah took a swallow on his Nasturo Azzurro. The beer was cold going down, which was just about all he asked of a beer. He wiped his lips and put the bottle back down on the table between them. He didn’t turn to look at the screen.

“How do we stop it, Noah?” Dominico Neri asked, using his given name for the first time.

He wished he knew.

“You came to me for a reason, so tell me, how do we stop it?”

He leaned forward, closing the gap between them. It was an intimate gesture, especially for a coffee-shop conversation. Noah didn’t want the wrong ears hearing what he was about to say, even if they couldn’t possibly know what he was talking about. The old adage of loose talk costing lives had never really been forgotten by the military services. “All of the victims were English,” he said instead of answering Neri’s impossible question. “We’ve got people looking into what, specifically, links them. Something has to. And we’ll find it. It’s what we do. And when we find it, we’ll find the people behind it.”

“But you won’t find them today, will you?” Neri said. It wasn’t a question. Not really. “Which means tomorrow…” his voice trailed off.

“Look at the messages,” he said. “Look at what they say. They’re a direct threat against one man, not against the city. It wn, not ae like it was in Berlin.” Noah didn’t know that was true, but as he said it he realized there was a certain logic to it.

“You really do think they will move against His Holiness?” Neri asked, almost disbelieving. Only the television kept him from dismissing the idea as absurd. “Dear God, you do, don’t you?”

Noah nodded slowly.

“Don’t take this the wrong way, my friend, but I wish I’d never met you.”

“The feeling’s mutual,” Noah said, without the vaguest hint of amusement.

“I still don’t understand why you would come to me rather than NOCS.” The Nucleo Operativo Centrale di Sicurezza was the Italian police’s counterterrorism unit. They were as good as it got, HALO-trained and worked side by side with the FBI Hostage Rescue, the Israeli YAMAM, the German GSG-9, the Danes, the Dutch, and other special forces groups across Europe. He was right, they were the logical place for Noah to go with this sort of global threat. They were also the least likely to believe him, he thought, but he didn’t say that. They might have taken him seriously if he had the weight of Six backing him up, but he didn’t. He was as good as alone in this mess.

“I’m just a policeman,” Neri said, preparing to start on his third cigarette since he’d joined Noah at the table.“This is outside of my… hell, I don’t even know what to call it. I’m just a chain-smoking, womanizing Roman, my friend. I don’t wear my underwear on top of my trousers.” Noah caught the superhero in tights joke. For all his facetiousness Neri was right, the world could have done with a caped crusader right now. Instead it was going to have to make do with a chain-smoking, womanizing, Anglo-Italian alliance.

“What do you think I am?” he asked, instead.

The Roman laughed. It was a short, sharp grunt of a laugh, but it was a laugh just the same. “I have no idea what you are. That is part of the problem. And I have no idea what you want from me. You drop this bombshell in my lap and expect me to deal with it, knowing there’s nothing me or my people can do about it, not in time. You expect me to single-handedly protect the Pope? Do I look like the kind of man who would take a bullet for God’s Messenger? Look at me, Noah,”-Neri seemed happy enough to use his given name again. Noah guessed that meant they were friends now-“I’m not a hero, even without the tights. I do my job. I do it as well as I can without it stripping the humanity from my soul, but the years swimming in the filth of Rome have turned me cynical. I’m tired. I wake up tired, stiff. My bones are trying to tell me it is time to hand the city over to a younger man, and you’re preseting me with a secret that is only going to cause me a world of hurt. I don’t think I want to thank you for this. And do you know what the irony in all of this is?”

Noah shook his head. He didn’t have a clue.

“He’s not even in the city right now. He’s off on one of his holy pilgrimages somewhere.”

Noah looked at Neri. “Are you serious?”

“Does this look like the face of a man given to humor?”

It didn’t.

“Well that doesn’t change anything,” he said, trying to think through the precise implications of an absentee Pope. He hadn’t expected it to be a straightforward fix, but it wasn’t Day of the Jackal either. The original plan had been to make friendly with the locals, get the ear of the captain of the Swiss Guard, convince him of the seriousness of the threat, and get the Pope moved somewhere safe. The odds of their taking him seriously had always been slim at best. And while the religious types might stubbornly cling to the idea of God being their armor, the odds were that the Swiss Guard were a damn sight more practical. They’d be idiots not to take a threat on their man’s life seriously-at least until it was proven otherwise.

If the strike was against the Pope directly, his being out of the country would just move the locus of danger. They would be looking to get word to those closest to him, step up security and, more likely than not, arrange an evacuation to a safe house while the threat was neutralized. If it was against the Seat of the Catholic Church it didn’t matter if the Pope was in residence or not, the attack would go ahead. The manner of the attack itself would be the only real difference. To be sure one man died, the most effective way was something intimate: a sniper, poison, a car-bomb, something that could be aimed. To take out something as nebulous as the faith itself was moving back into the realm of spectacle. A bomb most likely. A series of bombs. Something big that was going to make a lot of very visible mess.

Noah was back to thinking about terror as a sort of performance art, all the world’s a stage and all that. It had to be visible, it had to be shocking and it had to shake the believers to the core. Seeing the rescuers picking through the rubble, desperately looking for survivors while all of their relics and their hopes burned would send a statement to the faithful. He said as much to Neri. The policeman nodded, thinking it through for himself.

Terror as spectacle. That was the one thing that bothered Noah about all of this. These attacks were causing terror, but to what end? What was the cause? What did these people hope to achieve beyond instilling fear in Europe? There should have been videos going viral on the Internet already. Someone out there should be claiming responsibility and telling the world what they wanted in return for ending the fear. That was the way it worked.

“Whichever way it goes, we need time,” Neri said. He left the second half of that sentence unsaid. “We can sweep the perimeter of the Vatican, but assuming they’ve not left us a nice rust bucket with a sign painted on the side that says ‘bomb,’ it’s going to take time. And if they’ve planted it across the border in the land of Great God Almighty, we’re shit out of luck.”

“They’ll listen to you, surely?” Noah said.

“This is Rome. They’ll stick their fingers in their ears and make like they can’t hear a damned thing we’re saying because they think they’re all invincible. They’re part of God’s Army. There’s nothing worse than the grand delusions of True Believers. They either think they’re immortal, or they are quite happy they’re off to a better place. As far as I can tell it doesn’t really matter to them if they’re heading there in a million little pieces.” Neri’s grin was lopsided.

“How long has this trip been planned?”

“No idea. But given the kind of performance a papal visit is, months, six, ten?” Neri shrugged.

Noah tried to think.

How would he approach it in their place?

He covered his entire face with his calloused palm.

“Think, think, think,” he grunted, running his hand up through his hair. He shook his head. From the very first calls nothing about this was how he would have done it. For a start he sure as hell wouldn’t have broadcast he was going after the Pope. That was stupid. You misdirect with smoke and mirrors, you don’t set up that Scooby Doo moment unless you really want to mutter “if it wasn’t for you meddling kids” as they lead you away in handcuffs. So what the hell was really going on here?

Out of Vatican City the papal bodyguards would naturally be on a state of heightened alertness-that much made sense. Anywheretside of the Holy See would have to be considered hostile territory in these conflicted days. So, best case scenario, the Pope had people around him willing, as Neri had so eloquently put it, to take that bullet. His daily routine would be less predictable, making it a more difficult hit. You’d need good information flow, someone on the inside feeding schedules to you with enough time to get there ahead of the entourage; otherwise, you wouldn’t have been able scout out possible vantage points. Noah closed his eyes. As the assassin you wanted to minimize the random elements, control what could be controlled. The kill was about being patient and methodical. Chance had to be removed from any equation.

In Basrah Noah had lain hidden in a blind for five days, pissing into the water bottles he’d drunk dry, defecating into the wraps that had held his rations. Noah had made the shot on the third day and watched them tear the desert apart looking in all the wrong places for him for another day, but it wasn’t until the day after they gave up looking for him that he walked out of the desert. When he tore down the blind he took it all with him. There wasn’t a single sign he had ever been there. He heard three of the Mahdi call him the ghost killer. He liked that. He had it tattooed onto his left arm when he got home-it was the only thing he brought out of Iraq with him.

That was the kind of patience an assassination demanded.

The natural-environment kill was easier. The target was at ease. They followed their habits. Habits were patterns.

So if it had been him, Noah would have wanted to walk the land. Study the set up. He would have wanted to be sure he knew where the target was coming from, exactly, and where it was leaving to. Each terrain had its own issues that needed to be contended with. The last thing you wanted was something as stupid as a stray beam of sunlight reflecting off the wrong pane of glass to make the shot any more difficult than it had to be.

Control the variables.

Every way he looked at it, Rome was the perfect location for an attempt on the Pope’s life.

“I’ve changed my mind,” Noah said, opening his eyes again. Neri looked at him expectantly. “There are just so many things wrong with this scenario. This can’t be about the Pope, not yet. This is about Rome, just like today was about Berlin. It has to be.”

“But the quatrain the suicide called in?” Neri said. “Roman Pontiff beware of your approaching, of the city where two rivers water, your blood you will come to spit in that place, both you and yours when blooms the Rose.” He quoted te piece perfectly. Noah wondered how many times the Roman had read those four lines of prophecy in the last forty-eight hours.

“It’s the smoke and mirrors part,” Noah said, sure he was right. It was the only thing that made sense. He had let himself become distracted with everything else. “Gets us barking up trees, it has to be. You said it yourself, the Pope isn’t here. These guys are meticulous. They have to be to have orchestrated thirteen to-the-minute suicides in thirteen cities, and then duplicate the feat in the U-Bahn today. There’s no way they’d make such a blatantly amateurish mistake as to not know exactly where His Holiness is right down to the bloody minute. Think about it,”-he shook his head, something approaching admiration in his voice-“the message might have been about the Pope, but we keep forgetting that so was the one in Berlin. Those were the long-term threat; the fact that they were different earmarked Berlin and Rome as targets.

Forty days of terror they promised, and at the end of it all of our gods will die-Christian, Muslim, bloody Norse, it doesn’t matter.” Noah grunted. “The clock’s ticking. Tomorrow they will strike against Rome. I don’t know where, I don’t know when, but I am prepared to bet my bloody life on the fact it will be spectacular. And in thirty-eight days they’ll make their move on the Pope. Right now they’re in the blind, waiting,” he said, thinking back to Basrah.

“You paint a bleak picture,” Neri said. “Assuming you are right, what do you want from my people?”

“This is your city. Where would you hit? What would you do? Think about it. Whoever it is, they’re in Rome right now. They will have been here for a while, going over the minutia of their strike, dry runs, timing every twist and turn and exhausting every eventuality, because that’s what these people are like. Someone has seen them. Someone knows who they are. Nothing goes unseen in a city this size. You need people out on the streets, asking the right questions. These people will look Italian. They’ll sound Italian. They’ll have normal lives that they’ve worked for years to secure. They could be married, have kids in good Roman schools. They’re playing a long game.”

Neri screwed up his already battered face, as though understanding for the first time that anyone from the young couple with the tourist guide to the old man with the paper to the waitress with her promising eyes, or the guy in the street wrestling with a hot, overly tired toddler could be their terrorist. You couldn’t tell just by looking at them, you couldn’t read their thoughts. They were just like everyone else, perfectly so, cultivated to be so.

“And with that, I think it’s time for me to go haunt my countryman’s ghost.” Noah pushed back his chair and made to stand. Neri stubbed out the dog-end of his latest cigarette.

“The victim rented a garret in one of the poorer parts of the city proper under the name Nick Simmonds. No doubt you already have the address. You seem very well connected for someone who doesn’t work for your government,” Neri said wryly, “but there’s nothing there. The place was empty when we got there. And not just empty. It had been thoroughly disinfected and every last trace of Nick Simmonds removed. There was absolutely nothing left of a personal nature. Nothing to say he had ever lived there. Not so much as a strand of hair to run against his DNA.”

That gelled with what Konstantin had found in Berlin. That similarity in itself made this garret in the poor quarter worth following up.

“His work?” Noah asked. He knew that Simmonds had been interning with the Vatican archivist, but beyond that it was anyone’s guess.

“I’ve got one of my team trying to make inroads over there,”-he nodded across St. Peter’s Square toward the dome of the basilica-“but between you and me, I suspect Dante was writing about that place when he designed his Purgatory.”

“That good?”

“Trust me,” Neri said, reaching for his tobacco tin yet again. “It’s enough to make a guy like me believe in the Devil.” He nodded to the older man reading his newspaper. The man returned the gesture and folded the broadsheet neatly before paying his bill and leaving the table. Smiling wryly, Neri nodded toward the young couple who, likewise, put away their Rough Guide and settled their bill, leaving a generous tip as they vacated the table.

“They were your people?”

“They were.”

“Trusting soul, aren’t you?” Noah said.

“This is Rome, Noah,” Dominico Neri said with an almost friendly smile. “You can’t trust anybody. Faces of angels, morals of devils.”