The Babylon Idol

Chapter 60

After Ben had cleaned up his leg, disinfected the wound area and taped it up with a pressure bandage to stem the bleeding, Janssens helped him back to the truck. ‘I’d better drive,’ Janssens said. ‘Apart from not being able to work the clutch, that morphine’s going to knock you for six.’

‘Can you follow tyre tracks over this terrain?’

‘Not when they’re covered up with fresh snowfall,’ Janssens admitted.

‘Then I’d better stay awake, hadn’t I?’

They took off, chasing the faint tracks of Usberti’s truck. The snow was gradually easing off, but the wind was blowing harder and Ben guessed from the way Janssens started shivering again that the temperature had dropped still further. He couldn’t feel it, with the effects of the morphine elevating his body heat. The drug was kicking in full blast now. He had to keep blinking to stop himself from falling asleep. The nicotine rush from a few good, strong cigarettes would have been ideal, but Janssens didn’t smoke.

‘Talk to me,’ Ben said.

‘You want my life story? My name’s Marc Janssens. Son of a Belgian priest and an Italian schoolteacher. Hence, the fact I could pass myself off as Italian, as well as a man of the church.’

‘You told Bozza you were arresting him. You’re a cop?’

‘I prefer “undercover law enforcement agent”,’ Janssens replied.

‘What agency?’

‘A leading one.’

‘INTERPOL?’

Janssens took one hand off the wheel to make a vague gesture. ‘Whatever. You know, we’re all the same soup. Let’s just say I was sent into deep cover to infiltrate Usberti’s operation.’

‘To investigate what? He was cleared of all charges, years ago.’

‘Precisely,’ Janssens said. ‘Elements within the agency were unhappy with the way he got off the first time. There were suggestions that he used his power, money and contacts to leverage his way out of trouble, letting others take the fall for him.’

‘Like Fabrizio Severini.’

Janssens nodded. ‘But now we’ve got more than enough evidence to blow the case back wide open and put that piece of shit away for the rest of his life.’

‘If he lives that long,’ Ben said.

Janssens smiled. ‘So, have you puzzled it out yet?’

Ben looked at him, confused.

‘The letter,’ Janssens said.

‘It was you?’

‘No, the letter was for real. But it wasn’t God who gave Severini the word that Usberti was back in business. It was me. Personally, I thought the whole divine inspiration bit was too kooky. I was afraid it would put you off. But I couldn’t think of any other reason why a crazy old coot in jail might have the inside track on what Usberti was doing.’

‘Why contact me at all?’ Ben asked.

‘Three reasons,’ Janssens said. ‘First reason, you were the guy who did more than anyone else to nail him the first time round. If only he hadn’t managed to slip through the net in the end, it would have been all down to you.’

‘Not just me. Luc Simon did his bit, too.’

‘You can play it cool if you want. Second reason, as a result of the first, we knew you were Usberti’s top target and about to become involved anyway. Sadly, he made his moves against you and the others sooner than we anticipated.’

‘Meaning that you could have saved them,’ Ben said. ‘If you people had come to me sooner, all this could have been prevented. Father Pascal and Luc Simon would be alive now. Jeff wouldn’t have been shot.’

‘I know. I’m sorry. If you let me explain the third reason, you’ll understand why that couldn’t be helped.’

‘It had better be a good one.’

Janssens said, ‘When I said I worked for a big law enforcement agency, I was telling the truth. Thing is, I work for Europol. Now do you understand?’

Ben narrowed his eyes. ‘Europol are just an organising body with limited powers. In effect, you’re a paper tiger. You don’t have the authority to arrest criminals, or even to conduct criminal investigations inside Europe.’

‘You’re right. Technically, we’re strictly an intelligence agency, and obliged to delegate those powers to INTERPOL, a whole other and totally differently-structured organisation. Unless, that is, we decide to do things off our own bat.’

‘Which is what happened in this case?’

‘That would be one way of putting it,’ Janssens said.

‘Meaning that this isn’t any kind of official investigation,’ Ben said. ‘You’re off the radar and in direct contravention of your own rules, just by being here.’

‘Yeah, right. Just like the CIA are technically prohibited from performing internal security functions within North America, but they say screw that and do it anyway. Wake up. The rule books were tossed a long time ago. When it suits them, at any rate.’

‘Go on.’

‘And so, a group of Europol agents, pissed off about the way Usberti got off the hook, took it upon ourselves to reopen the case privately.’

‘How big a group?’

‘Me, and four other guys. I was elected to be the undercover person, first because I can speak Italian fluently, second because I’m supposedly on medical leave, so I was free not to go into the office every day like the others.’

‘The back thing? I thought you were faking it. Like the glasses.’

‘Exaggerating it, as part of my cover. I damaged my spine in a motorcycle crash last year. But it’s a lot better now than it was. Thank you for asking.’

‘If you’re looking for sympathy, you can look somewhere else,’ Ben said.

‘Says the guy whose ass I just saved.’

‘Keep talking, Janssens.’

‘It took a long time to work my way inside his organisation and gain his trust, but I played my role well and it worked. Slowly, I began to understand what the devious scumbag was up to. He was planning to fake his own death, using a body double, a man called Gennaro Tucci who he found by chance in some small village in Umbria. They grabbed Tucci one night from his home, brought him back, imprisoned him and then slaughtered him.’

‘The body in the lake.’

‘These people are monsters. And now I really thought we had them. An open-and-shut murder case that my guys and I could simply hand over to the correct authorities.’ Janssens shook his head bitterly. ‘How wrong I was. That was when it all started falling apart. It seems Usberti still has one or two sympathisers in high places. The moment we filed our report, certain agency chiefs — we believe in collusion with certain EU ministers, although we can’t prove anything — came down on it like a ton of merde, buried the whole investigation and my team with it.’

‘Fired?’

‘Suspended indefinitely without pay pending an internal inquiry, which amounts to the same career death, whichever way you look at it. At least they could go home and be with their families, go fishing, find something else to do, or whatever. Not me. I was suddenly left hanging. I couldn’t depend on my colleagues’ backup any longer, and I couldn’t trust the department. It was like being stranded on a desert island, except this particular island was full of predators who’d torture me to death and put my head on a spike for the seagulls to peck if they suspected the slightest thing. I was desperate.’

‘So you decided to call in outside help,’ Ben said.

Janssens shrugged. ‘I didn’t know what else to do. I looked you up, found your training centre’s website and your address in France. Except how could I contact you directly? What if you didn’t believe me? It could have backfired on me, and I’d be dead. I had to find another way.’

‘By working Severini.’

‘It was all I could think of. When Usberti sent me on an errand to Brescia I managed to slip away long enough to drive to Milan and pay a visit to Bollati prison. Severini hadn’t had a visitor in years. He was glad to talk to someone. Even gladder when I told him we were this close to nailing his former employer once and for all. Nobody, and I mean nobody, hates Usberti as much as he does.’

‘I doubt that very much,’ Ben said.

‘He agreed to help me in whatever way he could. We composed the letter together, and it went into the prison’s outgoing mailbag the same day.’

Now it was clear why Janssens had looked so uneasy back in Turkey, when Ben had mentioned to Usberti that Severini had contacted him.

‘I was out of the country when the letter turned up at Le Val,’ Ben said. ‘If I’d received it a few days sooner—’

‘I assumed it was either that, or you’d just torn it up. Either way, it looked as though my plan had failed. My only consolation was that there was no possibility of it coming back on me.’

‘And my friends paid the price instead.’

Janssens was silent for a moment, gripping the steering wheel tightly and staring at the desert. Then he nodded and turned to look at Ben.

‘It’s true,’ Janssens said. ‘How can I tell you enough times that I’m sorry for all that’s happened? And what good are words, anyway? There’s only one thing to do now. We have to set things right. For them.’