The Sacred Cut

Sabato

The weather was changing and not in the way any of them expected. The snow hadn’t turned to rain. Instead, it had gone away, for a while anyway, leaving the sky to the sun, a sun that was starting to remember how to shed a little warmth on the city. A thaw, perhaps a temporary one, was in progress and a trickle of grey slush and grubby water was beginning to make its way into the gutters as proof. It was still damn cold, though. A bitter, persistent wind was blowing in from the sea, a harsh taint of salt in its blustery folds, warning that the vicious snap of cold had yet to retreat entirely.

Falcone strode along the Via Cavour, thinking. The previous night, before he got the message about Peroni, he’d made some calls, discreetly posed a few questions that had been bugging him. Now, with a set of careful answers, all legalese, all full of it’s and buts, racing around in his head, he was facing some important decisions. He had fifteen minutes before the meeting he had demanded with Viale, which had been fixed for nine in the SISDE building around the corner. Moretti and Leapman would doubtless come along for the ride at Viale’s invitation. Falcone had yet to decide how to handle himself there. Two of his men had risked their lives the previous day. That gave him the right to throw around a little weight. Peroni’s injuries had proved less serious than they looked in the hospital at two that morning, when the doctors had stitched and dabbed at a face that had already taken more than its fair share of punishment. Afterwards Falcone had sat with the big cop, next to Teresa Lupo and the Kurdish girl, and agreed, without hesitation, to his first demand: that Laila be placed temporarily in the care of a social worker Peroni knew who lived at Ostia, that very night. Then the girl got up, kissed Peroni on the side of his cheek that didn’t bear a bruise or wound and went off with a plainclothes female officer, giving the three of them the chance to talk some more, to exchange suspicions and to wonder.

Peroni was looking to him for something. There were limits to being jerked around, even by the grey men. Falcone had spoken to Costa first thing that morning and knew he felt the same way too. The American woman had told Costa a long, interesting and highly speculative narrative that attempted to explain what was happening around them now in Rome. Then she’d gone missing, leaving her things in his house. Costa hadn’t a clue where.

Falcone had phoned Joel Leapman immediately to report the fact that Emily Deacon had vanished. It was the right thing to do. Her car was gone. He also wanted to judge the FBI agent’s reactions to the news. Leapman seemed genuinely puzzled. Concerned, even. It was one more weapon Falcone could use.

He’d recognized, too, the worry in Costa’s voice that morning. Deacon wasn’t a field officer. There were personal reasons why she might step out of line. But there were personal issues everywhere in this case. Peroni and Costa carried them because they-and Falcone-had been present when the unfortunate Mauro Sandri fell bleeding in the snow outside the Pantheon three nights before. For most cops that would simply be bad luck. For Nic and Peroni-and Falcone understood this was one reason that he defended the pair constantly-the photographer’s death was a challenge, an outrage, a tear in the fabric of society which demanded correction. This dogged resistance of theirs had led to Falcone trusting them with information and thoughts he was reluctant to share with others on the force. Ineluctably, events over the past eighteen months had made the three of them a team, a worryingly close and private one at times. Costa, in particular, had reminded Falcone why he’d become a cop in the first place: to make things better. Hooked up to Peroni, the pair had shaken Falcone out of his complacency, dared him to throw off the dead lassitude and cynicism that came with two decades as a policeman. Costa and Peroni asked big and awkward questions about what was right and what was wrong in a world where all the borders seemed to be breaking down. No wonder Viale hated them.

When Falcone turned the corner he saw them, standing together outside the anonymous grey SISDE building next to a Chinese restaurant, an odd couple who looked nothing like plainclothes cops. Peroni was shuffling backwards and forwards on his big feet, hugging himself in a thick winter coat, scanning the sky, which now bore fresh scratches of white, wispy clouds that could be the presentiment of more snow.

Costa wasn’t thinking about the weather. He was examining the fresh marks on his partner’s battered face, looking concerned.

Falcone walked up and peered into Gianni Peroni’s face himself. “I’ve seen worse. Think of the up side. You weren’t that good-looking beforehand.”

“I could sue for that,” Peroni replied. “I could call you up in front of the board and out you for the bitch of a boss you are.”

“Do that,” Falcone said, almost laughing. “I’ll get there one way or another soon enough.”

“Are you sure you wouldn’t rather be at home in bed, Gianni?” Nic asked.

“Don’t nanny me, Mr. Costa,” Peroni replied curtly. “Do you think a few cuts and bruises are going to keep me away from all the fun?”

Fun? It wasn’t that, not for any of them, Falcone thought. It never had been. Even when Peroni had been an inspector in vice, before his fall from grace, he was a man known for his seriousness.

“The funny thing is,” Falcone observed, “I’ve never known anyone to get beaten up so often. What’s your secret?”

“Working with you,” Peroni responded. “Until I was bounced down to your team of misfits, I never got beaten up at all. Not once in my adult life.”

“You want a transfer?”

“You know damn well what I want. I want my old job back. I want my old rank. I want men who drive me around. I want to deal with the admirable world of dope and prostitution because I tell you, Leo-sorry, sir-it’s much saner than your world.”

“Is that so?” Falcone replied, amused. “So how are you now? Did your friendly pathologist tend your wounds after I left?”

“I’ll live,” Peroni said with a smile. “But I’m getting heartily sick of this weather. And heartily sick of this case too.” He nodded at the sky. “I know you don’t run that crap, which I hate to say doesn’t look finished to me. But do you think we can do something with the second?”

Falcone sniffed and looked at Costa. “One way or another. Emily Deacon. Where is she?”

“I don’t know.” Costa shook his head. “She took the car. But her computer’s still in my house, which is odd. I’ve been calling and calling. Maybe Leapman…”

“I asked,” Falcone replied. “He sounded a little worried for once. You don’t imagine, for one moment, that she’s gone out and done something stupid, do you?”

“I don’t think so,” Costa replied, though he didn’t look too sure.

Peroni cast a grizzled glance at Falcone and moaned, “Families. Leapman should never have brought her in. What kind of an asshole is he?”

“The kind who knows exactly what he’s doing,” Falcone said firmly. “Nic, perhaps it’s best if you skip this meeting. It could be a little… career-damaging. You’ve got more ahead of you than us.”

Peroni’s jaw dropped. “What? What the fu-?” He put his hands together, praying. “Why me, Leo? Why me?”

“Put out a call for Deacon’s car,” Falcone continued, ignoring him. “Try some of the obvious places. Did you get me those printouts?”

Costa passed over the manila envelope.

Peroni scowled at the grey SISDE building. “Career-damaging, Leo? I’ve been there often enough already. And I don’t like these spooky people. They’re bad company. Let me wet-nurse Nic here, hold his hand. Or I could go to the Questura and make some calls, clean your desk, press your suits. Anything-”

“Or,” Falcone suggested mildly, “Nic could drop you off at home and let you get some rest. You’re not immortal, you know, Peroni. You got clobbered last night.”

“Yeah!” the big man barked back. “All the more reason for sticking with this, don’t you think?”

Falcone shrugged. “Your funeral, then. If you’re in, you’re coming into this meeting with me. I’d appreciate a witness. Some backup. Leapman will be there, I imagine. Commissario Moretti too, since they’ll need someone to take notes. Who knows? You might even enjoy yourself.”

Peroni groaned. “Oh, sweet Jesus… enjoy?”

Falcone was smiling again. A big, warm smile.

“So what are you going to do, sir?” Costa asked. “Is there anything the two of us ought to know about in advance?”

Leo Falcone grinned. He felt good for a change. He felt he was about to let something go, kick off the shackles more firmly than ever, straight in their faces, in a way they wouldn’t ever forget.

“I thought I might see how far a man can go before he gets himself fired,” he said brightly.

Cold, cold, cold.

… the old black voice said: Git off that fat ass, boy, and sort yourself out.

Bill Kaspar did as he was bidden. At nine a.m. he let himself out of the empty office that sat on the roof of the Castel Sant“ Angelo, walked past the sheets and scaffolding of the restoration work that had closed the place, then sauntered down the spiral stairs and out through a side door beyond the closed ticket office. The castle had shut up shop for the holidays. The builders had abandoned work because of the weather. There would be a trickle of dumb tourists who didn’t know this. They’d turn up puzzled at the front gate of Hadrian’s mausoleum, seated majestically on the banks of the Tiber, a position so regal the place had later become a papal palace and refuge joined to the Vatican by a narrow, elevated corridor down which the pope could flee to safety in extremis.

And, Kaspar knew, because he’d checked, those rubberneckers would never see a thing. Inside, the mausoleum was a vast, prolix tangle of chambers, tunnels and hallways, largely invisible from the street, where passersby saw little but the gaunt exterior walls and the statue of the archangel Michael triumphant at the summit, sword raised towards the Tiber. Tombs had little use for windows. What mattered, what ran through the building like a central, muscular nerve, was the spiral ramp that rose past the original crypt, where the emperor’s ashes once lay, up through grand halls and collections, empty staff quarters, kitchens and galleries, out to the roof.

It was a five-minute walk across the river to a hunting and fishing shop on the Lungotevere. There Kaspar spent most of his remaining money on two of the biggest, thickest winter coats he could find: khaki parkas with furred hoods you could pull tight round your face so no one could see a thing except your eyes. He kept his old black woollen jacket and carried his acquisitions back in a bag, working to marshal his thoughts in the way a man of his nature always did before a battle.

It had been a painful night. Talking to Emily Deacon, trying to work out what to do with her, how much faith he could place in what she told him, how easy it was to fill in the gaps. That had gone on for hours. Then, when he couldn’t take any more, he’d shut her away and finally fallen asleep, only for the mother of all nightmares to come roaring up from deep inside his psyche, tormenting him with all those sounds and memories he knew only too well.

Just the recollection of it now made him sit down on one of the granite stanchions stuck deep into the snow outside the Castel, sweating feverishly inside his black coat. The human mind was a cruel, relentless mechanism. Nothing could expunge those images-the raging squall of gunfire, the screams, the blood. The slaughter as they fought on the geometrical floor of the temple deep in the heart of the ziggurat, surrounded by that magical pattern, the same one he had held in his hands as he’d dragged the webbing around him, stupidly, as if it were some kind of disguise that could fool the vengeful wall of hate and pain closing in on all of them.

Kaspar looked at his watch and checked the date-23 December. Thirteen years ago to the day. Thirteen long, long years, during which he’d prayed for release constantly to any god he could remember. Time lost itself in that place. Between the beatings and the torture, between the endless, pointless interrogations, he’d fought to contain the memories deep inside himself because they, more than anything, could keep him alive. The baleful, accusing faces of those men and women who had died because he failed spoke to him, demanding justice. Bill Kaspar had little affection for life, even when he got out of the Baghdad jail and learned the harsh reality of what it meant to be “free.” This was about justice. That was all. Of silencing those angry interior voices that rose up to taunt him anytime, anywhere.

He thought again about the day ahead, tried to go through all the possibilities, all the ways in which he might fail again. Then he walked around the perimeter of the squat mausoleum, beached like a whale on a winter plain, found the side entrance, went inside and climbed the ramp all the long winding way up to the roof.

Emily Deacon was locked inside the women’s toilet belonging to the closed cafe. Kaspar liked to think of himself as a gentleman, in spite of appearances. He opened the door, stood back, gun in hand. It was damn cold up there and windy too. She came out, teeth chattering, skinny arms wrapped around herself, blinking at the brittle sunlight, staring up at the gleaming bronze statue of Michael, sword in hand, poised to strike, a fearsome, vengeful figure that dominated the skyline of this quarter of Rome.

Kaspar nodded at the winged giant. “Scary bastard, huh?”

She put a hand up to her eyes to shield out the sun, long blonde hair blowing around her face.

“Depends how you look at it,” she said. “He’s supposed to be sheathing his sword. It’s a symbol. The end of the plague or something. I forget.”

She was a smart kid. Not a bad kid at all. He used to be able to see that in people. Maybe a gift like that could come back.

“You listened a lot when you lived here. Was it your dad who did all the talking?”

“What’s it to you?”

He took hold of her arm, propelled her forcefully to the edge of the parapet, with its dizzying view down to the footbridge crossing the Tiber to the centro storico and beyond. The wind was more blustery here, so cold it hurt.

“Did your father teach you opera, Little Em?”

She was struggling. Her attempts to free herself were futile against his strength. “Don’t call me that.”

“O Scarpia, avanti a Dio!” he yelled, half sang, over the parapet in a loud, theatrical voice.

“Opera’s not my thing,” she said quietly.

“Really?” He felt he had the demeanour of a college professor just then. Maybe it was Steely Dan Deacon himself, those WASP New England genes bouncing up and down. “Informative, Emily. Do you mean to tell me you’ve never wanted to leap off the edge like that yourself? Never wanted to know what happens?”

“Not for one second. I’ve got too much to do.”

Kaspar shook Steely Dan’s voice out of his head. He didn’t believe Emily Deacon. There was something in her eyes-he’d seen it two nights before in the Campo. She hadn’t really given a damn then whether she lived or died. She was much more interested in seeing the thieving little kid, the light-fingered bitch who’d walked off with what memories he still possessed, get away scot-free. Emily Deacon didn’t get that from her dad.

“Like see me in hell?”

“That, among other things. Besides, it wasn’t about curiosity. Tosca knew what happened, didn’t she?” Emily Deacon asked. “I thought that was the point.”

“Yeah,” he agreed, relaxing his grip a little. “I guess that’s true. I used to like opera myself. A lot. But if you don’t hear it for years and years it kind of loses its touch.”

“It’s easy to lose touch, Kaspar.” She spoke with a quiet, blunt certainty. “Don’t you think it’s time to call it a day? I can do it for you. We could go straight to the Italians. You don’t need to say a word to the FBI at all. There’s enough for the Italians to hold you here for years, whatever Washington tries in the courts.”

She wasn’t going to back down, act timid, play the little kid. In a way he was pleased. She was Steely Dan’s daughter, with a twist.

“We’ve talked this through. No going back now.”

“What if you’re wrong?” she pressed. “What if you’ve screwed this up, too? And it really was just my dad and those other people all along?”

“Then they need to give me a little proof.”

Emily Deacon peered into his face. “Tell me, Kaspar. Was it something my dad told you? What do these people say?”

“Nothing,” he grunted. “How do you talk to a ghost?”

“I don’t believe it’s nothing.”

He didn’t like remembering. Dan Deacon had uttered those few words at the end, after Kaspar had tried so hard, with such vicious, constant brutality, to squeeze it out of him some other way. Yet sharing the words diminished their power somehow. So he told her instead about the Piazza Mattei, how Steely Dan Deacon had mentioned it twice, how he nearly thought the answer might lie there after all, but when he’d gone round there, tried to pound some truth out of the man who was living in the house, it turned out to be just an illusion.

This was important. Emily Deacon understood that too.

“What if it’s all an illusion?” she insisted. “Just some crazy voices in your head?”

The line between what was real and what was imaginary was tough to decipher sometimes. Kaspar could hang on to some truths, though. An ugly black Marine with half his face shot away. A brutal Ba’ath party torturer reaching for his sticks, taunting Kaspar for his stupidity. They were real. Too real.

The dark side of him, the part that had killed Monica Sawyer, wondered about throwing Emily Deacon over the wall there and then. The girl had Steely Dan in her veins all right. The incisive part that could look right through you.

“You thought the voices would go away when you killed that woman in the Pantheon. What did they call her? Laura Lee? She was the last, wasn’t she?”

“Names,” he murmured. “Don’t mean a damn thing in this business.”

“But then you murdered that other woman. You never meant to. And still you’re hearing the voices. What do they say, Kaspar? Shake it? Are they ever going to stop?”

“Kids,” he said quietly and looked out over the river, nailing the pattern inside his head again, because in those lines existed order, sanity, a kind of peace. Trinità dei Monti hung high in the distance, the Piazza del Popolo lay to the left and somewhere behind the bulk of the Palatine hill was the Colosseum, perfect in its place, a monument to martyrs everywhere. Something else too. When Kaspar stared ahead, squinted, remembered, he could see a tiny cabin set on the roof of a block across the river. A part of him changed there. He’d taken a life for no good reason. The journey had veered down a turning he’d never expected.

He grabbed Emily’s arm firmly again, pushed her down the stairs, over to the office, and kicked the door open.

The gear was on the floor. What lay in front of them was all he had left now, proof of his diminishing options.

“Did you listen to what I said to you last night?” he barked. “Or was that dope I gave you still messing with your head?”

“I listened,” she answered quietly. “Did you listen to me?”

“Every last word.” He hesitated. “So, Agent Deacon, do you want to stay alive or not?”

She laughed right in his face. “They won’t play, Kaspar. Joel Leapman doesn’t give a damn about me. Any more than he gave a damn about Laura Lee and the others. All he wants is you. He isn’t going to hand over anything in return for my hide.”

“You’re wrong.” He looked at her. She seemed very young all of a sudden. And a part of her was really scared, he was certain of it.

He took one of the parkas out of the bag and threw it at her. “This is as warm as I could find. You’re going to need it. And those…”

He pointed to the two waistcoats, green military vests bought the week before when the idea first came to him, now all prepared, a couple of lines of little yellow canisters running up and down the front.

“I made them myself, Little Em. And I am, as always, a master of these dark arts.”

The Lizard King, the Holy Owl, Grand Master of the Universe… All the names came back to mock him.

He smiled. She was the right about the voices. That insidious WASP intuition of hers made it easier. He didn’t give a fuck how she felt now.

“You think they’re gonna fit?” he asked.

Costa looked everywhere. The block in the Via Veneto. The places they’d visited when they were searching for Laila. He even managed to track down the Deacon family’s old address, a spacious apartment in Aventino now occupied by a polite Egyptian surgeon who’d no idea what had happened to his predecessors and had seen nothing at all of a young, blonde American woman.

Traffic found the car. The vehicle had been parked illegally on the Lungotevere near the Castel Sant“ Angelo, something that rang alarm bells straightaway. Emily wouldn’t have left it there willingly: it was partly blocking one of the busiest thoroughfares in Rome. The towaway squad had pounced on it at seven that morning and it was still unclaimed. They’d also found a stolen yellow Punto in the Via Punto in the Via Appia Antica. It was beginning to look like Emily had been abducted.

Costa wanted to talk this through with someone. Peroni preferably. Or even Falcone. Perhaps he would later that morning, but he wanted to talk to someone now. And it was obvious who. So he swung the jeep back to the Questura, parked awkwardly in the last slushy place outside the morgue building and walked inside.

The police headquarters was never still, never without activity, Costa thought. This was a kind of temple to death, a constantly manned staging post on the final journey for hundreds of unfortunates each year. His own late partner, Luca Rossi, had once lain on a slab here, tended to by Teresa Lupo. Someone else could have done the job. Luca was shot. Nothing special. No autopsy needed. They knew all along who’d killed him. They got him too. Costa had made sure of that himself, in his own way.

Luca’s death hadn’t deterred Teresa for a moment. That was what she did.

Nic glanced around the room. Silvio Di Capua was supervising one of the morgue monkeys cleaning up a dissection table. Teresa was nowhere to be seen.

Costa walked over to her assistant. “Silvio?”

They got on pretty well, considering Di Capua was scared witless of most cops he met. Costa made a point of treating him with respect and, in particular, never using the nickname “Monkboy.” In return Di Capua could, on occasion, be almost helpful.

“No,” Di Capua countered instantly.

“No what?”

“No to whatever it is you want me to do. I’m not breaking the rules again. I’m not doing this instead of doing that. There’s an order to the way we work here, Nic, and I’m determined we stick to it.”

Costa couldn’t stop himself from laughing. Silvio Di Capua really did sound as if he felt in charge.

“I was just looking for Teresa.”

“What do you want? Ask me.”

“It’s personal.”

The little man scowled. “Personal? Don’t you think we have rather too much of the personal around here? We’ve got work to do. We always have.”

Costa gave him the look he’d been learning from Gianni Peroni. He’d perfected it just enough for it to work on a minor pathologist with ideas above his station.

“She’s off duty actually,” Di Capua said, blushing. “Which means she’s in here, of course, getting through some paperwork. Try the clerk’s office. She’s kicked him out for the day.”

This was something new. Teresa was famous for her aversion to paperwork. Costa walked round to the tiny cubicle and found her tapping away at the computer. He got a wary glance the moment he walked in.

“Don’t tell me there’s more on the way, Nic. I have to catch up on a few things once in a while.”

He opened out his hands, slapped the pockets of his coat. “Search me. No new customers. Honest.”

“Is it important? I’ve got people screaming for budget figures. Now I’ve summoned the courage to try to put some together I’d really like to get this done.”

“It’s important.”

She pointed to the chair and said, “In that case, sit.”

“Thanks. So what do you think about Emily Deacon?”

The sudden question surprised her. “In what way?”

“What’s driving her?”

She pulled a face that said: Isn’t it obvious? “Family. The fact that it was her dad that died. What else? Does she look like an FBI agent to you?”

“Looks can be deceptive. Lots of people think I don’t look like a cop.”

She pushed the keyboard away from her. “That’s easy. You’re… a little shorter than most. You like art, don’t eat meat and rarely lose your temper. You could pass for a sane, intelligent human being most of the time. Is it any wonder you stick out like a sore thumb around this zoo?”

“You’re too kind.”

“I know. So why the questions about Emily Deacon?”

“She’s missing. Or, to put it another way, I don’t know where she is.”

“Are you supposed to?” she asked. “I mean, she’s a grown woman. What about that pig of a colleague of hers? Does he know?”

“No. It’s just…” He didn’t want to go into the details about the previous night. He wasn’t sure what to make of them himself. “She was at my place yesterday. This morning she was gone. No note. Nothing. Then her car’s found double-parked in town, which I don’t think is like her.”

“Ooh. ”Yesterday. This morning.“ Interesting.” Teresa Lupo was rubbing her hands with glee.

“I could be wrong,” he said, ignoring the invitation to go further. “After all, she went off on her own yesterday and had a pretty interesting time.”

“Sightseeing?”

“Digging up a few facts we weren’t supposed to know.”

A rueful thought said: Perhaps more than she told you.

“She’s a smart woman, Nic. Maybe she’s just out there looking for some more.”

“So why doesn’t she answer her phone? Why did she leave her computer at my place?”

“Ah. The arrogance of men. Could it be because she doesn’t want to hear from you? After all, the Leapman guy isn’t interested. And if you’re being honest, do you really want some rookie FBI agent hanging around all day long?”

He didn’t answer that.

“Oh,” Teresa said with a heavy sigh which indicated, Costa thought, that she perceived some personal interest on his part. “In that case let me simply say this: Emily Deacon strikes me as a very intelligent, very honest woman. Which, given the situation she’s in, may be part of her problem.” She paused, surprised, perhaps, by the thought that followed, and what prompted it. “Honesty’s a risky trait in this business, don’t you think?”

That was about Gianni Peroni. He couldn’t miss it.

“No,” he said with some conviction. “Honesty’s all we’ve got. And Gianni’s OK, if that’s what you mean. He saved that kid’s life last night.”

“I know. He was brave as hell. What else do you expect? But is that what saved them? I’m not so sure. Gianni said something about a message. Busy, busy, busy. Not one he understood, though.”

“All the same-”

She interrupted him. “All the same he’s doing fine because he’s kind of adopted that Kurdish kid. I know what’s in his head. He thinks some cousin of his will take her on full-time or something. Then she can get regular visits from Uncle Gianni. But he needs to break that habit, Nic. This is a tough world. You can’t hope to cure it with just love and honesty and putting away bad guys from time to time.”

“Why the hell not?” This was the kind of sentiment he got too often from Falcone.

“Because it breaks you in the end. It weakens you. I can see that happening with Gianni already. He’s guilty over his family. He’s… vulnerable. More than you think. He’s got to learn to bury some of this deep down inside, otherwise it’s just going to mess him up. I know. I love the man.”

From the sudden blush on her face it was obvious this had just slipped out. “By which I mean,” she corrected herself, “I think he’s a wonderful human being. All that caring. All that compassion. I wonder what the hell he’s doing in a job like this. Whether he can keep it up.”

She frowned. “I used to wonder that about you once upon a time. Now… You’ll make it. That’s good.”

“And Emily Deacon?” Costa asked. “What about her?”

“A part of me says she’d love to walk straight out of that job and sit in the corner of an old building somewhere, sketching away. Have you talked painting with her yet?”

“No,” he replied, a little offended.

“You will. A part of me says Emily is deeply, deeply pissed off about what happened to her father. So hung up over what happened, maybe, that she’d do anything to put it straight. Regardless of the consequences. Regardless of the pain it might cause her or anyone who gets in the way. Do you understand what I mean?”

Costa did. He’d known it all along. He just needed her to confirm it.

“What are you going to do?” she asked.

“Get a coffee. Wait for Falcone to call.”

She looked at her watch. “To hell with budgets. I hate numbers. Also I’m supposed to be off duty. Let’s make that two coffees.”

They walked out of the gloomy morgue building, then round the corner to the little cafe Teresa Lupo used. It wasn’t popular with cops. That was one reason why she liked the place. The ponytailed teenager behind the counter looked a little scared when she walked in. He usually did. That meant the coffee came quickly and was, as usual, wonderful.

As good as the Tazza d’Oro. Nic recalled Emily Deacon talking about her favourite cafe, then glanced at his cup and wondered whether he wouldn’t be better off going round there and checking it out.

Teresa Lupo’s hand fell on his arm. “Relax for a moment, Nic. You and Gianni aren’t the only cops in Rome.”

But it felt that way just then. Falcone had pulled them aside for some reason of his own, one he had yet to explain.

“Talk to me about Christmas,” Teresa said. “Tell me what it was like in a pagan household.”

Was that really what the house on the Appian Way was? Nic Costa knew he suffered from the same misapprehension as every kid. The childhood you got was the normal one. It was everyone else’s that was weird.

And a few memories did come back. Of food and laughter and singing. Of his father drinking too much wine and behaving, for once, as if there was no tomorrow, no great battle to be fought, nothing to do in the world except enjoy the company of the people around you, people who loved you and were loved in return.

“It was happy,” he answered.

She was already ordering her second macchiato. Teresa drank coffee as if it were water. “What more can anyone ask?” she wondered.

“Nothing,” he muttered.

His phone was ringing. Falcone had promised to call.

“Nic,” Emily Deacon said. She sounded distant, tired and scared.

“Emily. I’ve been looking-”

She interrupted him briskly. “Not now. I don’t have the time. You must listen really carefully. It’s important. You have to trust me. Please.”

“Of course.”

There was a pause on the line. He wondered how convinced she was.

“I’m with Kaspar,” she said finally. “I can bring him in, Nic. No more killings. No more bloodshed. But you’ve got to do what I say, however crazy it sounds. Otherwise-”

There was a noise at the other end of the line. Something physical, something like a scuffle.

“Otherwise, Nic,” barked a cold American voice, “you and Little Em don’t ever get to have fun.”

Costa listened. When the call was over, he found Teresa Lupo staring at him with that familiar look of tough, deliberate concern he’d come to recognize and appreciate.

She pushed back the empty coffee cup, looked around the empty cafe. “Like I said, Nic, I’m off duty. If there’s anything…”

Peroni looked at the men behind the desk, ran through the short yet precise brief Falcone had given him in the lift and wondered what a new career would be like. Maybe he could go back home and see if there was an opening for a pig farmer near Siena. Or ask the girl in Trastevere for a job doling out ice-cream cones. Anything would be better than facing more time with these three: Filippo Viale, smug as hell, with an expression on his face that said you could sit there forever and still not get the time of day; Joel Leapman, sullen and resentful; and Commissario Moretti, neat in his immaculate uniform, pen poised over a notepad, like a secretary hanging on someone else’s orders.

“You sure had a good argument there,” Leapman observed. “Don’t you think it’s time you worked on your personal skills?”

Peroni glanced at Falcone, thought what the hell, and said quite calmly, “I am tired. My head hurts. I’d rather be anywhere else in the world than this place right now. Can I just announce that if I hear one more smart-ass piece of bullshit the perpetrator goes straight”-he nodded at the grimy office window-“out there.”

Moretti sighed and glowered at Falcone.

“Sir?” the inspector asked cheerily.

“Keep your ape on a leash, Leo.” Moretti sighed again. “You asked for this meeting. Would you care to tell us why?”

“To clear the air.”

“And Emily Deacon,” Peroni said. “We’d like to know some more about her.”

The American grimaced. “I’ve already told you. I have no idea where she is.”

“Do you think Kaspar’s got her?” Peroni asked.

The three men opposite looked at each other.

“Who?” Leapman asked eventually.

“William F. Kaspar,” Falcone answered.

Peroni watched the expressions on their faces. Viale looked impassive. Moretti was baffled. Leapman looked as if that rare creature, someone he loved, had just died.

“Who?” the American asked again.

Falcone glanced at Peroni. The big man reached over the desk, grabbed Leapman by the throat, jerked him hard across the metal top, sending pens and a couple of phones scattering. Peroni held Leapman there, close enough to his face to give him a good view of his stitches and bruises. The FBI agent looked scared and shocked in equal measure. Viale still sat in his seat, smirking. Moretti was out of his chair, back against the wall, watching the scene playing out in front of him in horror, lost for what to do.

“Clearly that burger I shoved in your face didn’t make the point,” Peroni said quietly to Joel Leapman, who sweated and squirmed now in front of him. “We’ve had enough, my American friend. I’ve been beaten up because of your lies. I’ve watched a little child terrified for her life. We’ve got people putting themselves in harm’s way. Good people, Leapman. So it’s time now to cut the crap. Either we start to hear something resembling the truth from you or this little charade comes to an end this minute. We’re done playing dumb cops. Understand?”

Moretti finally found his voice. “You!” he yelled, pointing at Peroni. “Back off now! Falcone?”

“What?” the inspector snarled back. “Look at the state of the guy. Look at your own man, Moretti. It’s the least he’s owed.”

Then he patted Peroni on the shoulder and said quietly, “You can let him go, Gianni. Let’s listen to what he’s got to say.”

Peroni released his huge paw from Leapman’s throat and propelled the American back across the table.

“Viale?” Leapman’s snarl was full of threat. “Do something.”

The SISDE man opened his hands and smiled. “Tut, tut. This is my office, Leo. I don’t want anything untoward happening here. Let’s have a little calm. What’s the problem? This is just police work. Take orders. Do as you’re told.” He paused and glared at Peroni. “Get yourself some new minions too. That way you can keep your job.”

Falcone looked him up and down. “No, it isn’t.”

Viale looked puzzled. “Isn’t what?”

“Police work. And I’m not worried about my job, Filippo. Are you?”

“Don’t threaten me,” Viale murmured.

“I’m not. I’m just putting things straight. You see this…”

He pulled the orders from the Chigi Palace from his jacket pocket and dropped them on the table. “These have your name on them and Moretti’s too. That ought to worry both of you. A lot.”

Viale made a conciliatory gesture. “Leo…”

“Shut up and listen,” Falcone barked. “Although you people seem to have forgotten the fact, there is such a thing as a legal system in this country.”

“There’s also such a thing as protocol-” Viale began to say.

“Crap,” Falcone interrupted. “There’s right and there’s wrong. And this is very, very wrong. I checked. You can’t just write out a couple of blanket protection orders like parking tickets. There are rules. They need a judge’s signature, for one thing.”

Falcone pushed the papers over towards the SISDE man. “You don’t have that, Filippo. You’re just trying to fool me with some fancy letterhead and bluster, and hope I’d never notice.”

Moretti bristled inside his black uniform and stared at Viale. “Is that true?” he demanded.

“Paperwork,” the SISDE man said to Falcone, ignoring the commissario. “Bureaucracy. People don’t work that way these days, Leo. I don’t. I don’t have to. Surely you know that?”

“It’s the law,” Falcone said quietly. “You can’t pick and choose the parts you want. None of us can. Not even you. You know that too. That’s why you just put a few SISDE signatures on there, badgered Moretti to do the same, and never bothered with the judiciary at all. You couldn’t handle this case yourself. It’s just too damn public. You had to get us on your side and you had to break the rules to get there.”

Viale’s phoney friendliness finally failed him. The dead grey eyes surveyed the two cops on the other side of the desk. “Is that so?” he asked.

“Oh yes,” Falcone continued. “The only circumstance when an order like this gets judicial approval is if it’s a matter of national security. Our national security. Not that of another country. Though I don’t believe even that’s the case here. You’ve deliberately railroaded a genuine investigation into a case which involved the murder of an Italian citizen. You’ve jerked around the police, you’ve given a carte blanche to a foreign security service to work here unimpeded, all outside Italian law. And for what? So Leapman can pursue some kind of personal vendetta against an individual we have every right to arrest on our own account. I could throw you in a cell right now. I could pick up the phone and have you in front of a magistrate by lunchtime.”

Viale sniffed and considered this. “You’re a judge of what is and isn’t national security, are you?”

Falcone smiled. “Until someone proves me wrong I am. So, gentlemen, are you going to do that? Do we get to hear who William F. Kaspar actually is? Or…”

He left it there.

“Or what?” Moretti asked.

“Or do we arrest all three of you and haul you up in front of a public court for…” Falcone turned to Peroni. “How many did we have the last time we added them up?”

“Oh.” Peroni frowned, counting them off on his fingers, staring at the ceiling like a simpleton, pretending it was hard to remember. “Conspiracy. Wasting police time. Forgery of official documents. Illegal possession of weapons. Use of the electronic media to issue criminal threats. Breach of the death registration rules. Withholding information-”

“You dare threaten me, Falcone!” Viale raged. “Here! Do you have any idea what you’re doing?”

“I think so,” Falcone answered quietly. “And also we have these.”

He took the sheets of paper out of the envelope and threw them on the table. Leapman snatched them up and stared at them, aghast. They were copies Costa had made that morning of the material Emily Deacon found the day before: the Net conversations and, most damning of all, the memo from 1990. The one labelled “Babylon Sisters.”

“Where the hell did you get this?” Leapman murmured.

“From Emily Deacon,” Falcone replied. “And now she’s missing.”

“That little bitch sure knows a lot of things she’s not supposed to. I thought-”

“What?” Peroni snapped. “That she was just a dummy? Like the rest of us?”

“Yeah,” Leapman agreed with a sour face.

Peroni pointed a hefty finger in his direction. “Wrong again, smartass. And here’s another thought. What if she’s dead too? You don’t honestly think you can keep that under wraps, do you?”

It was remarkable. Leapman was thinking then, exchanging glances with Viale. Something was going on. Peroni risked just the briefest of glances with the man at his side. The twinkle in Falcone’s eyes told him he wasn’t wrong. The ruse had worked. They were through.

Leapman shook his head and muttered, “This is a mess. Such a mess.”

Moretti had put down his pen and turned a sickly shade of white. “You told me none of this would happen, Viale,” the commissario complained. “You said-”

Peroni took immense pleasure in breaking in. “Must be a hell of a pension you’ve built up over the years, Moretti. I was in that position once. Hurts like hell when they take it away from you. Mind you, jail too…”

Moretti closed his eyes briefly, then shot Peroni a look of pure hatred. “You ugly, sanctimonious bastard,” he hissed. “You don’t have to deal with these people, day in, day out. You don’t have to listen to them pushing and pushing, threatening, cajoling: ”Do this, do that.“ ”

“I thought that was what you got paid for,” Peroni replied, then added a final, “sir.”

“We don’t have time for this, gentlemen,” Falcone reminded them, glancing at his watch. “Where’s it going to be? Here, or in the Questura?”

Costa was getting desperate. The picture of the heartless ultimatum Kaspar had set was starting to damage his concentration. Teresa was doing what she loved: cruising the Questura for any titbits of information she could glean by badgering people who, by rights, shouldn’t even be talking to her. Nic had taken on the task of working the street. No one answered the bell at the address Emily had mentioned. He’d peered through the window, looking at the sparse furniture, the kind you got in a rented apartment, not a real home, and thought about breaking in. It was difficult to see what it could tell him about what had happened there thirteen years before. Then he’d hammered on six doors to no avail. Struggling to decide what to do next, he watched one of the Jewish bakers lugging flour through the doorway of his tiny store, smelled the fragrance of fresh bread on the cold December air and, against his own wishes, felt his stomach rumble. He needed to approach this with the same cold, deliberate dedication that Kaspar was showing he possessed. Either that or he could panic them all into another bloody disaster.

At the heart of the Piazza Mattei stood the little fountain of the tortoises. It was a modest creation by Roman standards, and possessed a comic touch that had amused Costa when he was a boy. Four naked youths, their feet on dolphins, were struggling to push four small tortoises into the basin at the summit of the fountain. It was ludicrous, almost surreal somehow. And today, he noted, the water was flowing.

He walked to the fountain and climbed over the low iron rail protecting the structure from the carelessness of motorists negotiating the narrow alleys of the ghetto. Then he dipped a finger into the snow at its foot, in the central basin. The ice was melting. He looked at the sky. The bitter cold still blanketed the city, but a change in the weather was imminent.

It had to be. Something in the human psyche lost sight of facts like these from time to time. When extraordinary events occurred, one adapted, almost came to regard them as normal, forgetting to allot them the perspective they merited. Rome would return to the way it was supposed to be in December. Planes would fly again, buses and trains would run almost on time. One way or another, the killings would cease. Chaos, by its very nature, was impermanent.

What mattered was bringing events to a close quietly, with as little damage as possible. Nic didn’t know if he could do that. Falcone was in his meeting, but once he emerged he’d be on the phone, asking questions. Would Costa have any answers? If he did, would he be inclined to share them with his boss?

And…

He had to ask himself. How much of the truth was Emily telling him? Ever since the previous night when he’d forced her to confront the idea that her father was the man behind Kaspar’s miserable fate in Iraq, he’d felt there was something she was concealing.

Teresa had looked up the report on the attack in the Piazza Mattei the previous October and tried, in vain, to find something new. The facts were plain, baffling and suspiciously scarce. The American professor had been staying temporarily at Number Thirteen as a houseguest, while conducting some academic research at the American embassy. He’d been assaulted in the square by the fountain. It was pure luck that a couple of cops were in the vicinity. No assailant had been apprehended. No motive could be found. It could be a blind alley…

Then Teresa had suggested she try to find something out about the property itself. After fifteen minutes-a period of time in which Costa, to his frustration, had gotten nowhere-she phoned back, ecstatic. The earliest deeds she could track showed Number Thirteen had been owned by the same private company based in Washington as far back as 1975. That, in itself, was unusual. Foreign owners rarely kept properties for that length of time. The firm wasn’t listed in the US phone book. It didn’t show in any of the financial records which she’d bullied some lowly minion in research into checking. Something stank, Teresa thought. Costa felt sure her instincts were correct. The tough part was turning instincts into hard fact. It was all going nowhere unless he could prise something out of the memory of someone who’d lived in the square for some time.

“What you do in circumstances like these,” Costa thought, trying to still those images running around his head, “is get yourself a coffee.”

He walked into the little cafe on the square, ordered a large macchiato and dumped a couple of extra shots of caffeine inside it from the coffee and sugar sludge parked on the bar in a bowl. Then, as he waited for the sudden caffeine jolt to hit, he tried to think what Falcone would have done in the circumstances.

The inspector had just a few mottos, all of them rarely heard, all of them apposite. One came to Costa at that moment. Curiosity is the basis of detection. Without it, a man learned nothing. Without it, you might as well be an accountant.

He tried to recall the substance of the reports he’d read over the last few days and set them against the conversation he’d had with Emily after Kaspar had handed the phone back to her. Then he finished his coffee and called over the middle-aged proprietor.

He should have figured this out earlier. The ghetto never changed. Places were handed down from generation to generation. He was just a short stroll from the commercial heart of the modern city, but this was a village, one where everyone knew everyone else. Rome was, in some ways, still a collection of individual communities living noisily cheek by jowl. It was what separated Rome from other capitals he had visited, cities that seemed metropolitan sprawls, with ill-defined borders and areas where not a soul lived at night.

“Who’s the oldest resident in the square?” Costa asked, flashing his card.

The man kept polishing a glass with a spotless cloth, thinking. “You mean the oldest who’s still got half a brain?”

Costa sighed. “Listen. I don’t have the time…”

The cloth came out of the glass and jabbed at a house on the other side of the square. “Sorvino. Number Twenty-one. Ground floor. Don’t say I told you.”

No one liked talking to the police. Not even cafe owners, who’d be the first to start screaming down the phone if someone walked off with an extra sachet of sugar.

“Thanks,” Costa murmured. He threw a couple of coins on the counter, then walked out into the cold morning air.

Number Twenty-one, thanks to the vagaries of house numbering in the ghetto, was four doors down from Thirteen. He pushed the bell marked “Sorvino.” A stiff-limbed little woman in a faded blue floral-pattern dress came to the door and peered at him through round, thick glasses. She was eighty, maybe more, at an age when it was difficult to tell. Short, but proudly erect, as if to say: to hell with the years. She took one look at the badge and nodded him into the living room. It was immaculate: crammed with polished antique furniture, a selection of framed photographs, and what seemed like hundreds of pieces of Jewish memorabilia.

“I was hoping to talk to someone with a memory,” he said urgently. “Someone who’s lived here a long time.”

“Is eighty-seven years long enough for you?”

“More than enough,” he replied, smiling, hoping he didn’t look too impatient.

She picked up a delicate porcelain cup, still half full. “Camomile tea. I recommend it for people of a nervous nature.”

“Thanks. I’ll remember that.”

“No you won’t. You’re young. You think you can live through anything. What are you looking for? It must be something important.”

“Very. Facts. Names.” He hesitated. “Names mainly. I’ve been knocking on doors. Getting nowhere.”

“The ghetto’s changing. You don’t see families the way you used to.”

“I want to know about Number Thirteen.”

“Ah.” She nodded and closed her eyes for a moment, thinking. “II Duce had a girl there during the war. German. Ilse, I think she was called. Not that he ever visited, you understand. He wouldn’t dirty his hands coming to meet the likes of us, now would he?”

Jews of her generation had a mixed attitude towards Mussolini. Until the later stage of his career, Il Duce had taken little interest in anti-Semitism. Costa could recall his father telling stories of how some Jews even joined the fascist party. Relatively limited numbers had been transported to the concentration camps. It was the old Roman story: nothing was ever quite black and white.

“What happened to the house after the war?”

She looked at him severely. “I’m not an estate agent.”

“I know that. I just wondered who lived there. You’re a kind woman, Signora, I’m sure. You would want to know your neighbours.”

“No more than they want to be known,” she said primly.

“Of course.”

“Soldiers,” she said with a shrug. “American soldiers, for a while anyway. Nice men. Officers. They had beautiful manners, not like Roman men. They were strangers. I was of assistance to them now and again. I like strangers to go away with fond memories of Rome. As any good citizen would.”

“Of course. And then?”

“You’re asking me who’s lived there for the last fifty years?”

“That would be useful.”

“Huh.”

It was never easy dealing with this generation. They resented something. That the world had changed. That they were getting older within it, powerless.

“Please try to think. A man was attacked there earlier this year. Do you remember?”

“I heard it! Fighting in the street! Here! Not since the war…” She frowned. “The world gets worse. Why don’t you do something about it?”

“I’m trying,” he replied.

“Not hard enough, it seems to me.”

It was a reasonable observation. “Perhaps. But I can’t…” He corrected himself. “None of us in the police can do that on our own. We need your help. Your support. Without that…”

She was a bright-eyed old bird. She didn’t miss a thing. “Yes?”

“Without that we’re just people who enforce the laws made by politicians. Regardless of what anyone thinks. Regardless of what’s right sometimes.”

“Oh my,” she said, smiling, revealing small teeth the colour of old porcelain, a little crooked. “A policeman with a conscience. How they must love you.”

“I don’t do this to be loved, Signora. Please. The house. Whose is it? Who’s lived there over the years?”

“Who owns it? Americans, I imagine. They look like government people to me. Government people who don’t want to say they’re government people. Not that I care. They keep it in good repair. What more can I say? They come. They go. Different ones. Not for long, usually. Just a few weeks, as if it were a hotel. Not long enough to get to know the likes of me. Pleasant men, mind. Always men, too, on their own.”

She was trying to remember something. Costa waited, knowing he couldn’t let this interview run and run, wondering whether there were any other avenues left open to him.

“And?”

“They were solitary creatures,” she said testily. “Not the kind you could talk to easily in the street.”

“All of them?”

“Most.”

“Do you remember any names? It’s possible this man who was attacked was mistaken for someone else.”

“So many,” she said, frowning.

Even the old ones didn’t try much these days. Costa took out his card and gave it to her, pointing out the mobile number.

“If you think of anything. I was probably mistaken in any case. If these men were only here for a short time… I was hoping there was someone who stayed there longer. Some years ago. A man, perhaps, who regarded it as his home.”

The old eyes sparkled. “There was one. Ten, fifteen years ago. I recall now. I think he stayed there for a year. Possibly more.”

“His name?”

“Even less talkative than most of them, from what I remember. Somewhat abrupt I thought, but perhaps that was just his manner.”

“His name?” he insisted.

She shook her head. “How could I possibly know that?”

Teresa had checked. If Number Thirteen was a normal rental property there would be residency records. None existed. It was a bolt-hole for one of the American agencies, surely. They would have a way around all the regulations ordinary citizens had to face.

“I may have a photograph, though,” she added brightly. “Would that help?” She nodded at the gleaming walnut sideboard next to him. It was covered in small, mounted pictures. She passed him one. “You know what time of year that is?”

It was winter. Men, women and children, all in heavy coats, stood in front of the fountain of the tortoises holding lit candles.

“No.”

“Shame on you! Have you never heard of Hanukkah? Why should the Catholics steal all the fun for Christmas?”

“I’m sorry. I’m not a Catholic.”

“How shocking,” she said with a laugh. “Still, I forgive you. We have a little tradition. Every year we take a photograph of ourselves. Just the people living here. By the fountain. Every year. I can show you ones when I was a young girl before the war.” Her eyes twinkled. “You wouldn’t recognize me. I wasn’t the old thing I am now.”

Costa’s brain was working overtime. “He was in the photograph? This American?”

“He didn’t want to be! The poor man was walking home just as we were lining up out there. We insisted. A little vino had been drunk, you understand. He didn’t have a choice.” She paused to let this point go home. “We can be very persuasive when we want to be, you know.”

“I can believe that. When?”

She frowned. “I really couldn’t say. I’ve so many photographs.”

“Possibly ten, fifteen years ago?”

She crossed the room, picked up a couple of photos, took off her glasses to peer at them, then returned with one in her frail hand and passed it to him. Costa scanned the faces there. He looked at the back. There was a year, scribbled in pencil: 1990.

Bingo.

“You want to know who Bill Kaspar is?”

Joel Leapman looked like a man speaking from personal experience, and there was something in his eyes-impending pleasure, or a hint of a nasty surprise around the corner-that Gianni Peroni really didn’t like.

“OK. I’ll tell you. Kind of a soldier. Kind of a spy. A mercenary. A go-between running shuttle between men who, like Kaspar, didn’t really exist either. One of the best. Take it from me. He was the sort of guy you’d follow anywhere, right into hell if that’s where he wanted to go. An American hero, we thought. Not that anyone would ever call him that out loud, you understand. And now we’re going to hang him out to dry. Life’s a bitch sometimes.”

Leapman’s tale confirmed just about everything Emily Deacon had discovered. Back in 1990, William F. Kaspar had been called to lead one of two covert teams into Iraq on an intelligence mission well behind hostile lines. The venture was a disaster. The day after they arrived to establish a forward base inside an ancient monument outside Babylon, the Republican Guard had attacked in force. Dan Deacon was out on patrol with his own team when it happened. Deacon radioed for assistance and was ordered not to engage. Forty-five minutes later, two Black Hawks, backed by fighter support, arrived on the scene. The ziggurat was a smoking shell. From what surveillance could see, Kaspar and his team were dead. Deacon’s crew managed to escape to a deserted farm two miles away, where a helicopter snatched them from the approaching enemy, though one female member was badly wounded along the way.

The mission didn’t exist. The combatants, as far as their relatives were concerned, remained incommunicado on private training exercises in the Gulf until, two months later, an army captain visited their homes with stories of dead heroes in the real conflict, which was now under way. There could be no medals, no public mourning. Not even a private Purple Heart. None of them was officially in the military. Dead spooks wear no honours.

Wars make noise. In the tumult of the conflict the loss of nine unknown, unseen individuals made little impact. Money went around to keep families and others quiet. The men and women who survived went back to their jobs, in the diplomatic and intelligence services, and in civilian life too. They kept their secrets, they got on with their lives. The battle was won. Saddam went home, leaving a trail of corpses in his wake, claiming victory. And Kuwait was free beneath the smoke of burning oil fields.

All in all, Leapman said, the verdict was that the war was half a job well done. There were people who thought they should have gone all the way into Saddam’s palaces in Baghdad. But that wasn’t part of the UN brief, and military people lived by UN briefs back then. The objective had been to recover Kuwait and hope that Saddam learned his lesson. They got part of what they wanted.

He took a swig of the bottle of water he’d brought with him and stared at each of them in turn.

“You get all that for free,” Leapman said. “It’s history now, anyway, and who gives a shit? What comes next, though, is different. If this goes public, then everything goes way over our heads, gentlemen. It won’t be me or Viale here who’s screaming blue murder. It’ll be bureau chiefs and generals or worse and none of us wants that. Understood?”

Peroni found himself nodding automatically, as if he had a choice.

What happened next, Leapman said, was they realized Baghdad had got insight. Postwar, someone somewhere was helping Saddam.

“Helping him how?” Falcone demanded.

“Background,” Leapman answered. “It was a question of adding things up and working out what didn’t make sense. There were sanctions in place by then. Tough sanctions, ones that worked, as well as sanctions can, anyway. All the same, we knew Saddam was getting wind of things he shouldn’t. He understood some of our military hardware better than he ought. He took out three Iraqis we’d placed near him to keep an eye on what was going on. He had intelligence, stuff he wasn’t supposed to know. So we had to ask ourselves what was going on.”

“Kaspar?” Peroni wondered. “I thought you said he was a hero.”

“Yeah. I also said he was dead. Great cover twice over, huh? We went back and talked to people in Deacon’s team again. They were uncomfortable about it. I guess if you go through that kind of experience, you don’t want to think ill of your comrades. But a couple of them, Deacon included, had their suspicions. Or so they said after a lot of prompting. Don’t forget, at that stage we thought Kaspar was blown away along with the rest of his team. But maybe that was what we were supposed to believe. And all the while he was living the good life in some quiet palace out in the desert, counting his money, gradually spilling out every last thing he knew, while Saddam lapped it up. So if that’s true, what do you do?”

You didn’t have much in the way of options, Peroni thought. “You look for proof.”

“Exactly.”

Leapman nodded at Viale. “SISDE already had someone secreted inside Iraq. Dan Deacon came back to Rome for a couple of months and worked alongside Viale here to send in a new team, see if anyone was saying anything about an American on their side. Four officers went in. One came back. The others…”

Leapman shook his head. “I don’t even want to think what happened there. One report we got said Uday disposed of the poor bastards personally. You heard the stories about how he used to feed the lions?”

He let them digest that in silence.

“They weren’t fairy tales,” Leapman continued. “But they weren’t the full story either. Anyway, it was Deacon’s man who came back and he had some news. There was an American there. He was talking. And he was some big tough guy who seemed to know everything. Fitted Kaspar in every respect. Some hero, huh? And you know something? We couldn’t touch him. He was just going to sit there gossiping day and night until we came back another time. We were working with kid gloves then. It took all the persuasion we had to get that covert team in just to look for intelligence. We couldn’t be seen to be running heavier missions, maybe to capture him or take him out, because that would screw up any chance we had of rebuilding a coalition to finish the job. Not that that worked either. We were in a deep pile of shit and there was nothing we could do about it.”

“Still,” Peroni said, “you got there in the end.”

“Yes, we did!” Leapman barked back at him. “And one day you people might realize what a damn big favour we did you.”

Falcone shook his head. “You’re getting away from the subject, Leapman.”

“Yeah,” he grumbled. “None of you ever like that conversation. OK. So, come last spring, we get back to Iraq. And we say to some of our intelligence people, look out for this guy called Bill Kaspar. And when you find him, throw him in a cell somewhere, call home and leave him alone with us for a little while.”

Peroni had to ask. “Us being?”

“What’s it matter? What’s in a name?”

“It matters because you’re supposed to be FBI,” Falcone pointed out.

“Sue me,” Leapman grunted. “The point is this. Ten days into the war we find Bill Kaspar running like hell in some little town outside Baghdad. Our guys do just as they’re told. Lock him up and wait for a special team to come and take out the trash. And you know what he does?”

What men like that always did, Peroni thought.

“I can imagine,” he said.

“No.” Leapman shook his head vigorously. “You can’t. The men who picked him up were low-level grunts. They understood he was supposed to be a bad guy. They told him so. I know Bill Kaspar. He could’ve taken them out one by one if he’d wanted. What he did instead was go crazy. I mean angry crazy. Outraged. Some stupid sergeant knocked him around a little and told him he was a traitor. Kaspar went ballistic. He demanded to see the platoon commander, the guy above him, the regional commander, Dubya himself. Why? Because we’d got it all wrong. He hadn’t been sitting there in some Iraqi palace trading secrets for dough. The poor bastard had been in jail all along, probably getting tortured daily after a breakfast of dust and shit, not saying a word because that’s what Bill Kaspar is like.”

Leapman took a big deep breath before going on. “We got fooled and Kaspar knew it long before we did. He listens to this dumb sergeant for a couple of minutes, thinks it through, and then he’s out of there. Doesn’t even kill one of the grunts on the way, either, though a couple of them won’t walk too well for a while. And all we know is some lowly soldiers got a report from an American prisoner that doesn’t add up to much, then let the guy we wanted so badly escape out into the mess that was going on all over the place. We didn’t stand a chance of catching up with Kaspar after that. And for one good reason. He didn’t want to be caught.”

“He had no money,” Peroni objected. “No one to help him.”

“He’s Bill Kaspar!” Leapman yelled. “I keep telling you. Kaspar wrote the book on every last trick and scam you can pull in circumstances like that. You could parachute him onto Mars, come back six months later and he wouldn’t just be alive, he’d be sitting in a nice house with lobster on the table, fresh champagne on ice in a bucket and some goddamn hippie CD from the seventies on the stereo. Kaspar survives. He’s the best there is at it.”

“When did you know?” Falcone asked.

Leapman grimaced. “It took a while. We didn’t even realize Kaspar had made it to the US. We thought he’d hide out in Syria or somewhere. These people in Deacon’s team… most of them were civilians by this time. We didn’t put two and two together until those deaths in Virginia. By then there were just too many coincidences. All the same we still couldn’t work out what he was up to. As far as we were concerned, Bill Kaspar was a renegade, a wanted criminal. We couldn’t figure out what possible reason he’d have for risking his neck by coming home and killing these people. Then…”

He mulled over how far to go. “Then we realized that the only evidence we had against Kaspar came from Deacon’s man who’d gone on that covert mission a few years earlier. Nothing else corroborated the story. Certainly not the other three guys who never made it out of there. So we started taking a few peeks at the bank accounts of some of the others, the ones who did get out. They’d done their best to keep it hidden at first. I guess after time you get lazy. There’s a whole lot we don’t know. Was this arranged before Deacon and Kaspar went into Iraq? Did one or two of the team plan it and just face the rest with the choice when they all got there? Live and be a rich traitor or die and be an unsung hero? It’s all guesswork now. Operations like these don’t keep records for good reasons and everyone involved except Bill Kaspar is dead. But we were starting to firm up our suspicions by the time he made it to Dan Deacon in Beijing. After that, we were certain. Deacon had half a million dollars stashed away in a bank account in the Philippines. The moron never even spent a penny of it. Can you believe it?”

“The woman who died in the Pantheon?” Falcone asked.

“What about her?” Leapman asked.

“She knew. She must have known. You brought her here.”

“Yeah,” he snarled. “So we screwed up. I had five men watching her. How Kaspar got past them sure beats me.”

Falcone wasn’t letting go. “And she came here because…?”

“Because, Inspector, I didn’t give her any choice. She was a criminal. I could have snapped my fingers and she’d be gone for good anyway. She knew nothing. She got shot by accident after Deacon and Kaspar went in and scarcely knew what happened. So I gave her a chance to make up. Had it worked, she could have walked free.”

“Generous,” Peroni observed. “Why didn’t you just try talking to him direct?”

Leapman reached over the table and scattered Costa’s papers.

“We’ve been trying! What do you think all these messages are about? If I could just get him on the phone… I’d apologize. Then I’d tell him it’s time to end this crap and throw himself on our mercy. Except now…”

They waited. It had to come from him.

“Now he’s killed again,” Leapman muttered. “Which shouldn’t have happened. He’d killed everyone who’d gone into Iraq with him and betrayed him. The only one still standing is him. There’s no reason he should take out someone who had nothing to do with this. But Bill Kaspar always had a pretty old-fashioned view about patriotism. He came out of some Iraqi prison thinking he’d be home and free with everyone telling him he was a hero. Instead, he walked into all this crap. Us treating him as if he was a turncoat. If he feels his country’s abandoned him-written him off as a traitor-I suppose he thinks anything goes these days.”

“I suppose he’s right,” Peroni grumbled.

“Finally,” Leapman said, with a long, pained sigh, “we agree on something.”

Costa met Teresa where they’d arranged by phone, close to Largo Argentina, and briefed her on what he’d discovered. Then the two of them walked the short distance to the cafe where Emily had said she’d be waiting for them. He didn’t recognize her at first. She was standing at the counter of an empty Tazza d’Oro, close by the Pantheon, anonymous inside a too-big khaki winter parka with the hood still up. He nodded at her, got a couple of coffees, and the three of them retreated to a table.

Emily Deacon looked a little frightened, but a little excited too. Costa reached forward and gently pulled the hood down to her neckline, revealing her face. She managed the ghost of a smile and shook her long blonde hair automatically. It seemed lank and dirty.

Emily glanced at Teresa. “I thought perhaps it would be you and Gianni.”

“Gianni’s tied up,” Teresa said instantly. “I’m the best you’ve got.”

“No.” There was a flash of a smile. “I didn’t mean that. Sorry. You’ve got something out?”

Costa nodded at Teresa. “We think so. But put us in the picture first, Emily. What the hell happened last night? How did you find Kaspar?”

“I didn’t. He found me. You fell asleep.” She felt awkward with Teresa there, Costa guessed. “I went outside… I’m sorry. It’s the last thing I wanted, believe me. But maybe…” She bit her lip. “This could be the one chance we get. It’s important you understand the situation. Look.”

She flipped down the collar of the jacket and pointed to a tiny black plastic square. “It’s a mike. Kaspar’s listening somewhere. He can hear every word I say. He’ll be able to do that all the time until this is over, so please don’t get any smart ideas. And if the mike goes dead, so do I. Kaspar knows what he’s doing. You’ve both got to understand that. We can’t mess with him.”

Instinctively, Costa scanned the bar.

Emily put her hand to his chin and pulled his attention back to her. “He could be anywhere. Don’t even think about it. There’s a deal on the table, Nic. Let’s focus on that. We mustn’t screw it up.”

He nodded. “I understand.”

“Good.”

Teresa was staring at a mark on the other woman’s neck. “Are you hurt, Emily?” she asked.

“I must have faIlen,” she replied. “It’s nothing. Don’t worry about me.”

Then Costa gently pulled down the first few inches of the zipper on the front of the parka.

“No, Nic,” Emily ordered. She pulled his hand away, then jerked the zip back up. “Not here. Not now. That’s not what matters. Don’t think about that part. We don’t even get that far.”

Teresa said quietly, “That’s what we all want, Emily. But can we stop him?”

“Yes!”

“You’re sure?” Teresa reiterated.

“I’m sure!” she snapped. Then, more quietly, “And I’m not in a position to argue. OK?”

Costa found it hard to work out whether she was saying what she did for Kaspar’s benefit or because she really believed it.

“He killed your father, Emily,” Teresa pointed out. “He killed all those other people. How can we trust him?”

Emily Deacon frowned. “I know that. But he talked to me last night. We went over a lot of things. He had his reasons. He feels he had some justification. That there was no other way. I don’t agree with that for one moment. I don’t imagine he’d expect me to. But…”

Nic took out a pen from his jacket pocket, slipped it onto the table next to a napkin.

“He just wants to know justice-his definition of justice-has been done,” she finished, looking at the pen without moving to pick it up.

Then she scribbled two words on the paper.

You know?

Costa nodded and wrote a name next to the question.

She closed her eyes. She looked a little faint. Then she picked up the napkin, stared at the writing there, fixed him with those sharp, incisive blue eyes and mouthed, “Sure?”

Costa cupped his hand over the mike, leaned close into her left ear, smelled the trace of shampoo on her hair, a familiar scent, one from his own home, and murmured, “I’m sure he lived in an American-owned house in the Piazza Mattei in 1990. And that he was the only one there. Is that enough?”

Her cheek pressed into his, her lips briefly kissed his neck.

“Oh yes,” Emily whispered into his ear.

She took his hand off the mike, brushed her lips against his fingers and smiled broadly, just for a moment.

“If Kaspar wants justice,” Nic said, “all he’s got to do is walk into any Questura. That’s why we’re there.”

“He will. I promise.”

She scribbled out an address and a time, then gave it to Teresa.

“That’s where he wants the evidence delivered and when. No one but you two know that. He might want to test you. I’d be surprised if he didn’t. And”-she paused, making sure they understood this last point-“make it good evidence. Please.”

Nic Costa wanted a magic wand at that moment. Something that could just spirit them out of there, take away all the trappings of death and violence, put them back into a world that was whole and warm and human.

“What if something goes wrong?” he asked. “If there’s a delay… how do we get in touch with him?”

“No!” Her eyes were pleading with him. “He won’t buy that, Nic. He’s too smart. You do things his way. Or…”

Kaspar would be utterly inflexible, Costa understood this. He was offering to surrender. The terms would surely be his.

“I’ll call Falcone when I can get through,” he promised her. “I’ll make the arrangements.”

“And me?” Teresa asked.

Emily reached into her jacket, took out a plastic security swipe card, then scribbled an incomprehensible jumble of letters and numbers and an e-mail address on the napkin. “If you can talk your way into Leapman’s office, this will get you on the system. After that… You and Nic need to try and find some way to work this out together. I can’t…”

Maybe it was some kind of delayed shock. She rocked back onto her chair. Her face was white. She was on the verge of breaking. Costa could see it and he didn’t have the words to help.

Teresa Lupo intervened. She bent forward and put her arms around Emily’s slight shoulders. “Emily,” she whispered, “keep going. We can do this.”

Then Teresa was gone, not looking back, not wanting to see what Costa knew would be a difficult moment of intimacy.

The American’s hands felt his again, just the briefest touch. She was cold now, she was sweating.

“Make it work, Nic,” Emily Deacon told him softly. “This isn’t just for me.”

She leaned forward, kissed his cheek, her lips cold. Then she shuffled the hood around her head, disappeared into its bulk and, eyes firmly on the floor, walked away, out into the bright, biting morning, out towards the hulking presence of the ancient building around the corner.

Peroni listened with a growing sense of unease as Falcone forced them to focus on the message Kaspar had given him the previous night: proof.

Leapman was adamant, in a confident way that worried Peroni no end. “It was Dan Deacon. This was Deacon’s show all along. Kaspar’d know that if he had half a mind left.”

That wasn’t the point, Peroni thought, and surely they knew it. “Can you prove it?” he asked. “I looked into that man’s face last night and he’s going to take some convincing. I told you. He spoke with Deacon. I don’t think-”

“Deacon! Deacon!” Leapman yelled. “The bastard was a traitor! How the hell can anyone rely on a word Dan Deacon ever said?”

“The man was trying to save his life at the time. I don’t think people are very adept at lying in those situations.”

Leapman glowered at the SISDE man. “Tell him.”

Viale made that slight, amused gesture he used to put people down. “We lie anytime we damn well feel like. Welcome to our world. Best accept it.”

“What we accept,” Falcone said curtly, “is that Kaspar is making a direct threat, one he is doubtless determined to carry out, in this city.We’re under a duty to understand and respond to that. It’s important we know what we can offer him to get him to back down. Can you prove it was Deacon?”

“No,” Leapman replied. “If you want a straight answer.”

Peroni felt like grabbing the guy by the throat again. He seemed so detached from the problem. He looked as if he were turning down an expense account. “Why not? These things must cost millions of dollars. You’ve got to have accounts, records, something.”

The American actually laughed. Gianni Peroni found he had to make a conscious effort to stay in his seat.

“What planet are you people living on?” Leapman asked. “That’s the last thing any of us would want. These operations are specifically designed so that if they go wrong, the shit stays on the ground and doesn’t seep anywhere near the rest of us. That’s the only way they can succeed. Kaspar knows that as well as anyone. He invented half the rules. Asking for an audit trail now shows how deranged the guy is. He might as well ask us to go public and hang ourselves.”

“You’ve got-” Peroni persisted.

“No!” Leapman snapped. “Listen. These were the rules Kaspar played by. He can’t buck them now. Deniability’s everything. No papers. No bank transactions. Nothing. Just a bunch of money going missing in some accounts in Washington, in ways no one’s ever going to notice.”

Commissario Moretti finally found his voice. “You heard what they said, Viale. I’ll go along with this so far, but I don’t want trouble here on the streets of Rome. That wasn’t part of the deal.”

“It’s a tough world out there,” Viale said softly, staring at the table. “We’ll cope.”

“Dammit!” Moretti screeched. “We do cope. We’re the police. We’re here for a reason.”

“You’re here because you’re convenient,” Viale reminded him nastily. “I’ve never met a cop who rolled over as easily as you did. Jesus. Leo here wouldn’t have fallen for a trick like that. He’d have checked. He did check. You…”

The grey man didn’t even attempt to disguise his contempt for the man in the uniform. “You’re just a stuffed-up buffoon with a pen and a few shiny buttons on your jacket. You’re useful to me, Bruno, but don’t overestimate your value. And don’t get in the habit of talking back.”

The commissario went silent, shaking his head. Shock, Peroni thought. And maybe even a little well-deserved shame.

“He’s going to contact us somehow,” Falcone insisted. “He’s going to want something.”

Viale reached over, took Moretti’s pen and notepad and made a couple of indecipherable scribbles. “Then we’ll give him it. I’m not having another innocent death here. I can put some documents together. Keep him occupied until we find him.”

Peroni wanted to scream. “Don’t you understand? This guy’s no fool. You can’t just slip him some phoney letters and hope he’ll swallow it. He’s wise to tricks like that.”

Leapman nodded. “He’s right. If you give him fake stuff it’ll only make him madder. Then what?”

Viale looked immensely pleased with himself. “Who said it was going to be fake, Joel?”

“What?” the American snarled.

“You heard.”

The SISDE man got up from the desk and walked over to the far side of the office where there was a set of heavy-duty, old-fashioned filing cabinets secured by combination locks. He flicked through some numbers on the nearest, slid open a drawer and retrieved a blue file.

Leapman uttered a low, bitter curse.

“Oh, please!” Viale was loving this. “This was your show. We were just housekeeping. And”-he waved the file at the American-“housekeepers keep records. I was just rereading them last night, Joel. To refresh my memory. We have a habit around here. We note down conversations afterwards. We like to make sure we remember what we can. You may have had lots of reasons to cut off everything at the source. We had just as many to keep a few reminders of what really happened. Just in case someone started pointing fingers in our direction later. We’re your allies. We’re not your lackeys. Or your fall guys. You didn’t really think we’d be willing to go down with the ship, if it came to that, did you?”

“Well, well, well,” Leapman spat back at him. “It’s the people on your own side who fuck you up the most.”

Viale withdrew a photo from the file and threw it on the desk. It was of a group of men and women in casual, semi-military uniform, working on a jeep. The shot looked unposed. None of them knew they were being photographed. The location was wild countryside, maybe Italy, maybe not.

Leapman glowered at the image in front of them. “What the hell were you doing taking that?”

Viale scattered some more photos on the desk, all of the same scene.

“Being prudent,” Viale answered, pointing at one picture. “Look at the date.”

It was printed on the bottom of the photo: 12 October 1990.

“This is before Kaspar even knew about the mission. And there’s Dan Deacon.”

“That just means Deacon was in on the deal,” Peroni objected. “Doesn’t mean he was running it.”

“Details, details.” Viale dismissed the idea with a wave of his hand. He patted the file. “Kaspar just needs something new to interest him and here it is. Some documents. Some photos. Something that points the finger straight at Deacon. While Kaspar’s looking at that… Can’t you see what I’m offering you?” Viale opened his arms, a gesture of generosity. “These men you have here? They’re good, aren’t they?”

“They’re good,” Leapman agreed.

“Then what more can you want?”

Peroni shook his head. It wasn’t supposed to work out this way. He looked at Falcone, who was watching Viale, idly stroking his silver goatee, not an iota of expression on his lean face.

“Am I really hearing this?” Peroni demanded. “Do you think we’re just going to stand to one side while you people run up a little assassination squad under our noses?”

Viale pulled a puzzled face. “What’s the alternative? He can’t go into a courtroom in Italy. That would be much too embarrassing all round. And I don’t just mean for present company either. You don’t think we’re our own masters in all this, do you? We’re just following orders too, from people who want results without having to bear the consequences. It’s an invidious position. It always is. The people who were involved in this are still around. You don’t honestly think you’d be allowed to bring down a minister? Or an entire government?”

Falcone looked at Leapman. “You can prosecute him. We could arrange extradition.”

“I wish,” the American replied.

“I thought he was a hero!” Peroni yelled. “He’s in this situation because you people screwed up!”

“True,” Leapman said with the merest expression of regret. “But the operative word there is ”was.“ Before he went really nuts I thought maybe we could just tuck him in a cabin in the woods someplace. Let him spend the day reading his books and taking potshots at the bears. But this latest killing… That woman was nothing to do with him or us. That changes the game for me. He’s an animal. A liability.”

Falcone stood up and said, simply, “No. This has gone far enough.”

“Sit down, Leo,” Viale sighed. “Let’s not be over-hasty.”

“This is not-”

“Sit down and hear me out,” the SISDE man bellowed. “Or I will, I swear, destroy every last vestige of your career this instant. And his too.” He stabbed a finger at the big cop.

Peroni leaned forward and gave him the scowl. “It’s rude to point,” he said.

Viale looked hard at him across the table, then lowered his extended finger. Falcone returned to his seat. The SISDE man nodded.

“You will both do what I say,” he ordered. “This… creature will get in touch with us before long. We will deal with that as we should. Two of Leapman’s men-”

“No, no, no!” Leapman objected. “Not enough. You haven’t been listening to what I said. You can’t deal with Bill Kaspar as if he were some kind of street hood.”

Viale wouldn’t budge. “Two’s all you get. This gets done discreetly or it doesn’t get done at all. I’ve seen the heavy-handed way your people work, Leapman, and I’m not going down because they’re trigger-happy. Take it or leave it. I will deal with the logistics. Falcone will deal with the practical side of things. He can use this goon here. And the other one. Costa. Best keep this between the three of you, Leo. No point in taking chances. Kaspar has to be made to meet someone to take delivery. Once that’s taken care of, then…”

Viale didn’t say any more.

Peroni undid his jacket, pulled his gun from the holster, rolled it onto the table, then flung his police ID on top. “I won’t be a part of this. Not for you, not for anyone.”

“You already are a part of it,” Viale spat back at him. “If you drag me or anyone else into a court, Peroni, I’ll tell them you knew all along. Same goes for you, Leo. Don’t threaten me, either of you. Ever.”

“Now, that,” Leo Falcone said thoughtfully, “is an interesting exercise in interagency liaison.”

Viale’s stony gaze was full of pure hatred. “You stuck-up prick. You think you’re so much better than the rest of us. Use your head, Leo. Did you never ask yourself why I took such a close interest in you in Al Pompiere the other night? You don’t really think you’re still in line for a job here, do you? You blew that years ago. I was just covering all bases. We met. We talked privately. We were seen.”

He nodded at Moretti. “It all happened with his permission.”

The commissario stared at his fingertips and remained silent.

“I seem to recall,” Viale continued, head cocked to one side as if he were remembering something real, “we discussed the ramifications of this case in full then. Don’t you, Leo? And I’d certainly have to mention that if I got asked in a courtroom.” He beamed at them. “After all, a man can’t lie under oath.”

Falcone thought about this for what seemed to Gianni Peroni an eternity. Finally, he turned to Moretti. “They’ll throw you to the dogs when this is over. You know that, don’t you? The moment it’s convenient. They can’t use you again, not after this. You’re tainted.”

“Don’t worry about me,” the commissario muttered. “Worry about yourself. And”-Peroni was smiling very hard at him-“your ape.”

Peroni could feel the doubt and the tension rising inside the man next to him. Falcone had been through civil wars inside the Questura many a time and usually came off best. This was altogether different.

“Leo…” Peroni began to say.

Falcone put a hand on his arm and said, “Not now.”

Filippo Viale smiled. Then he pushed Peroni’s gun and ID back across the table.

“You two can wait downstairs,” he said. “Call when you hear something.”

Around midday the caretaker looked up, saw Nic Costa walking towards the booth inside the great bronze doors of the Pantheon and emitted a long, low howl of grief.

Costa stopped in front of him and took out his ID card.

The florid, cracked face crumpled into an expression of intense distaste. “No! Why me? Why don’t you bastards turn up on someone else’s shift? I’ve been shot at. I’ve been beaten up and locked in a closet. Stay away. Please. I just do the menial stuff around here. I want a quiet life for a day or two.”

Nic Costa surveyed the vast, airy interior of the building. There were just five other people there. Four of them-two men, two women-were walking around the walls, idly staring up at the oculus, now letting a bright, blinding stream of white winter sunlight into the shadowy hall. The men seemed too young to be Bill Kaspar. Leapman had officers on the street, though. It was possible they’d gotten wind of the situation and had decided to get into position.

The fifth person, Emily Deacon, had, Costa presumed, done exactly as she was told. She’d pulled a light metal chair out of the congregation area and placed it on the circle that represented the epicentre of the building, the spot directly beneath the opening above. Now she sat there, hunched over, hugging herself in the lumpy parka, allowing him the occasional glance.

“We need to empty the building,” Costa said.

“Oh! Really?” the caretaker snarled. “What is it this time? Alien invasion? The plague?”

Costa was walking over towards Emily, the man following in his footsteps, emitting a stream of sarcastic bile.

He stopped and turned to face the caretaker. “It’s a bomb scare.”

“Oh yeah?” The man was furious. “Well, let me tell you, mister. We have procedures for bomb scares. I’ve done training. I know the rules. Someone calls me. Police cars turn up outside big-time making a lot of noise. Not one scrawny little cop who hasn’t got his ugly partner in tow this time…” He remembered something of the night before and added hastily, “Not that I’m complaining, you understand.”

Costa knelt in front of Emily. She sat underneath the bright white eye, hands on her lap, calm, expectant, the focus of the building’s powerful, living presence. He took her fingers in his and looked into her face.

“How are you?” he asked quietly.

“Ready.”

“Emily…”

She reached up, flicked open the collar, letting him see the mike. A reminder: somewhere close by Bill Kaspar was listening.

Besides, she knew what he was going to say. There could be other ways. They could try and sneak in a sniper. Or track down Kaspar before he had the chance to hit the trigger.

“I want to go through with this, Nic. I need to know.”

“Understood,” he said, stood up, reached forward, took her face in his hands, kissed her forehead, just for a moment.

The caretaker was standing beside them, tapping the stone floor with his right foot. The sound echoed round and round the hemisphere, bouncing back from every angle of its curves.

“So?” the man said petulantly. “Procedures? Where’s the rest of you, huh?”

Costa ran his hand to Emily’s neck, found the zip, pulled it gently down, carefully, carefully. She was taking shallow breaths, looking at him, not what he was revealing.

He’d got the zip halfway down when the caretaker saw. Strapped to Emily Deacon’s slight young chest was a military green vest loaded with bright yellow canisters, familiar shapes, joined to one another by a writhing loom of multicoloured wires.

“It’s a bomb,” Costa said again, hearing the man retreat in a flurry of hurried footsteps behind him. “Several, actually. I’ll clear the building myself. When it’s empty, lock the doors, go to your office and await my instructions.”

The other four visitors were French, two couples. Not Joel Leapman’s team, not unless they were unusually good at hiding who they were.

Nic Costa let them out of the building, took a good look around and wondered where and how William F. Kaspar had hidden himself in the tangled warren of alleys that made up this ancient quarter of Rome. Then he took a second chair out of the seating area, placed it next to Emily Deacon and began a long, long phone conversation with Leo Falcone.

Back in the grey building off the Via Cavour, Commissario Moretti squared the closure of the Pantheon on unspecified security grounds, then fled to the Questura pleading other appointments. Viale and Leapman went into a huddle on their own. No one seemed much surprised by the news Costa had imparted through Falcone. No one saw it as anything other than an opportunity to snatch Kaspar either. Peroni was genuinely appalled that the idea of Emily Deacon sitting with explosives strapped to her body, a deadline ticking over her head, one that expired in precisely ninety minutes, seemed peripheral somehow, an inconsequential fact in a larger, darker drama. Even to Leo Falcone, in a way. The game had moved on. It was now about closure and survival. A part of Peroni-not a part he liked-almost envied the way Moretti was able to duck out of the door, hide in his office and try to pretend this was just another ordinary day.

When Viale gave the order, they left the SISDE building in two cars. Falcone sat in the passenger seat of an unmarked police Fiat as Peroni drove through the slushy, empty streets. The others followed in a plain grey van with a couple of small antennae sprouting from its roof, a vehicle that to Gianni Peroni screamed “spook” to anyone with half a mind and a small measure of imagination.

Two of Leapman’s henchmen had materialized outside the building as they left, unbidden as far as Peroni could work out. They were anonymous-looking creatures, youngish, short hair, long dark winter coats, hands stuffed deep in their pockets.

Peroni thought about them as he drove. These men were trained in firearms and covert operations. It was what they did and, in spite of Viale’s doubts, Peroni was in no doubt they were extremely efficient at it. Whereas he was a cop, one who hated guns, hated the use of violence as a means of resolving an issue, saw bloodshed as the ultimate failure. As did Costa. And, Peroni hoped, Leo Falcone.

The dour inspector made another call, to Costa from what Peroni could make out. It wasn’t easy. Falcone had spent most of the time listening, then asking brief, cryptic questions.

When Falcone was done, Peroni navigated a couple of patches of grubby snow still staining the Piazza Venezia and decided he couldn’t keep quiet any longer. “You mind if I ask you something, Leo?”

“Is there an answer I can give that will stop you?” Falcone replied.

“No. What are we doing here? I mean, even if that SISDE bastard does have us trussed up like a Christmas turkey, what’s the point in making it all worse? If we’re screwed, we’re screwed. Why do it twice over? Why not make ourselves a few friends by throwing up our hands and letting someone else sort out this crapfest?”

Falcone rubbed his chin and stared at a pair of tourists wandering idly across the road, oblivious to the presence of traffic.

“Very good question,” he conceded after a while.

“Do I get a very good answer?”

“Maybe. Maybe not.”

The grey van was now a couple of hundred metres in front, disappearing towards the main drag of Vittorio Emanuele and the street which turned down to the Pantheon.

“They’re right in one respect,” Falcone told Peroni quietly. “Kaspar has to come off the street. You know that as well as I do.”

“Of course I know that!” It was as if Falcone was trying to be exasperating. And succeeding too. “It doesn’t mean we just rub him out. I mean… what kind of a world are we living in? I don’t want to act like I’m judge, jury and executioner. If I wanted that I’d move to South America or somewhere.”

“Pragmatism-”

“Bullshit!”

Falcone pointed to the grey van ahead of them. “Keep up. So what do you suggest we do?”

“OK! Here’s an idea. We go back to the Questura. We find some nice, powerful uniform one office above Moretti. There has to be someone there who will listen.”

“In the end,” Falcone agreed. “But then we don’t get Kaspar. Or they get him anyway and disappear off the face of the planet, leaving us to answer all the awkward questions. Plus, there’s the small matter of Agent Deacon. Who’s looking out for her now, do you think? Leapman?”

Peroni turned that one over in his head. Bombs were terrorism. Terrorism, inevitably, fell outside the Questura’s remit. Everything got handed on, to SISDE and some specialist guys, probably in the Carabinieri. It all took time, resources, intelligence. Everything they didn’t have.

Falcone observed, “You’ve gone uncharacteristically quiet all of a sudden.”

“Oh for Christ’s sake!” Peroni bellowed. “Stop kicking me in the teeth every time I come up with a suggestion. It’s no wonder you never stayed married. Always the fucking smart-ass, Leo. No one likes smartasses.”

It was an uncalled-for outburst. Falcone now sat in the passenger seat giving him that glacial stare Peroni knew so well.

“Sorry, sorry, sorry. I apologize. I’m a little tense. What do you think we should do? Short of rolling over and letting these bastards screw us any which way they feel like?”

Falcone let out a curt laugh. “It’s obvious, isn’t it? Your own partner understands. Judging by the conversation we just had, he understood straightaway.”

Peroni thought his head might explode. He took one hand off the steering wheel and waved a fist towards Falcone’s face. “Yeah. That’s because you and Nic come out of the same mould, except neither of you recognizes it. The one marked ”sneaky bastard, handle with care, will bite when you least expect it.“ Whereas I-”

“You’re just an old vice cop who got busted down to the ranks for one transgression of a minor and personal nature.”

“Quite,” Peroni replied and wondered why there was such a wheedling tone in his voice. “Enlighten me, Leo. My head hurts.”

Falcone glanced at him. Just for a second something in his expression bore a slight resemblance to sympathy. “It’s simple,” he said. “People like Leapman and Viale, they get their power from just one thing.”

“Which is?”

“They play outside the rules. They think they’re immune from them. They do that for a good reason, too. The people they deal with-terrorists, others doing the same job-take the same view. They’re all willing to do things most human beings, through matters of breeding and responsibility and taste, would find repugnant.”

“So…?”

“So if we want to win, Gianni, we have to do the same. Let’s face it. Given the squeeze they’ve got on us, what’s the alternative?”

“I wish I hadn’t asked that,” Peroni grumbled. “I wish I’d just stayed ignorant instead. Me and my big mouth.”

“You and your big mouth. There’s just one problem.”

Peroni blinked. “Just the one? Are you sure?”

“We don’t have the people. I’m in. You and Costa too.”

“Wait-”

“Shush, Gianni. Let’s not play games now. There isn’t time. I couldn’t call anyone else even if I wanted to. Moretti would know and then it really would be over.”

“Yeah…” Peroni found himself uttering a brief, mirthless guffaw.

“And who’d be crazy enough to dump their career alongside ours anyway? Tell me that. Who?”

Falcone had leaned back in his seat now, eyes closed, calm and cool as they come.

“Just a crazy person, I guess,” he said and flicked a sideways glance in Gianni Peroni’s direction, one that, to Peroni’s astonishment, made the big cop feel more miserable than ever.

The taller of Joel Leapman’s spooks was called Friedricksen. He had the face of a blond-haired teenager and a mature, muscle-bound body that spoke of long painful workouts in the gym. Costa stood next to Peroni and Falcone and watched Friedricksen step around the seated figure of Emily Deacon, poking at parts of her zipped-up parka with a pencil, bending down, sniffing, moving carefully on. Peroni wished they’d had one of the old guard from the city bomb-disposal squad there. They looked like professionals. This guy had all the conviction of someone who’d taken the classes and then moved on to aerobics.

Then Emily herself muttered a low curse and pulled down the front of the jacket, exposing the two lines of yellow metallic shapes there and the nest of brightly coloured wires running between them.

“Holy fucking shit!” Friedricksen barked and leapt back a couple of feet in shock. “Do you know what they are? Do you have any idea what this crazy bastard’s messing with?”

Emily let out a long, bored sigh and stared at her boss. “My, Joel, I am so disappointed you didn’t introduce me to your goons. They fill one with such confidence.”

Leapman glowered at the man. “You’re supposed to know munitions, Friedricksen. Talk.”

“I do,” the spook complained.

“What is it?” Peroni asked. “Dynamite or something?”

The young American pulled one of those sarcastic faces that always improved Peroni’s mood. “Yeah. Sure. The sort you get in the cartoons. Bang. Bang. This stuff’s like nothing on earth. You wouldn’t get it on a Palestinian. The wiring, maybe. Though that looks a hell of a lot more professional. More complicated too. It’s these…”

Gingerly, he pointed to the metal canisters.

“Unbelievable,” he groaned, shaking his head all the time. “I couldn’t get hold of them. No way, man.”

“So give us a clue,” Costa suggested.

“They’re BLU-97s. Bomblets. You read all that stuff about unexploded munitions in Iraq and Afghanistan blowing up little kids who pick them up because they’re bright, shiny and yellow? These are those babies. Jesus…”

He worked up the courage to get a little closer. “They come with a parachute cap that lets them down slowly from the main container. Looks like your guy’s taken them off and put in some kind of electronic detonator stub instead. What a lunatic. That thing’s got PBXN-107 inside, which makes dynamite look like Play-Doh. You got three hundred or so preformed fragments built into the case. These bombs are made for piercing armour, not anti-personnel stuff.”

Now Peroni thought about it, the bombs strapped to the khaki vest did look remarkably like soft-drink cans. No wonder kids picked them up.

“Eight,” the American said. “If he detonates them now, we’re all ground beef. Probably enough force in the blast to bring down this creepy hole too.”

Filippo Viale, who had been staying a safe distance behind everyone throughout, came further to the front. He stared at the young woman in the chair and asked, “Disposal?”

“Yeah! Right!” The idiot actually laughed. “Get some guy with an X-ray machine, a week to spare and a death wish and you might just stand an outside chance.”

Viale bent down in front of Emily Deacon, peering into her face like a teacher staring at a recalcitrant child. “What did he say to you, exactly?”

“Who the hell are you?” she asked.

Viale didn’t even blink. “Someone who might be able to save your life. What did he say?”

“Exactly? He said he was giving me precisely ninety minutes from noon. Then he’d push the button. He’s got this mike thing…”

She flipped the collar and showed them the mike.

“He’s got plenty of range,” Costa said. “He could be listening to us from as far away as the Campo or the Corso. Somewhere”-he thought about what she’d told him-“busy.”

“Why do you say that?” Falcone asked.

Emily answered. “He’s got another one of these vests. I saw it. He’s not fooling. He’s wearing the damn thing himself. He said he planned to go somewhere where there are lots of other people. Perhaps a department store. A cafe, I don’t know. The idea is that if you’re dumb enough to try to track him down he can take out dozens of people. He just presses a couple of buttons and I’m gone, so’s he and anyone near either of us.”

Leapman emitted a short, dry laugh. “Jesus. I said he was the best.”

“Comforting,” Costa observed, then he looked at his watch. Kaspar had set the time frame they had to work with. It was too tight to contain any room to manoeuvre. He knew precisely what he was doing. “We’ve got just over an hour. So what are we going to do?”

Viale nodded at the mike on her collar. “He’s listening to this? Every word?”

“That,” Emily said with an icy sarcasm, “is the whole point.”

Joel Leapman pushed in front of Viale and announced, “Let me deal with him.

“Listen to me, Kaspar,” the American said in a loud, clear voice. “This shit has to come to an end. We’ve got some documents you can look at. We can prove you’ve got the people you wanted.”

Viale reached into his leather briefcase, pulled out the blue folder and waved it at Leapman as a reminder.

“We’ve got it with us right now,” Leapman continued. “All you’ve got to do is come and collect. Then you can take off your jacket, put your hands up and come catch a plane home, because I am not wasting any more time on you, man. Maybe we do owe you an apology. Maybe you’ll get one and we can keep you safe somewhere nice and private, in spite of everything. You’ve got to see these things we have for you here and put an end to all this. It doesn’t leave any room for doubt. But you have to pick it up yourself. This is all deep, deep stuff and I am not letting it out of my sight, not for one second.”

“Won’t work,” Emily Deacon said quietly. “What kind of idiot do you think he is? He won’t walk straight in here just on a promise.”

“He has to!” Leapman insisted. “I can’t have a bunch of secret files going astray in a foreign city just because he says so.”

“Kaspar gave you his word!” Emily yelled. “Give him some proof and this is all over!”

Leapman threw his arms up in the air and started yelling, so loudly his cold, metallic voice rang around the circular hall, rebounded from each shady corner. “His word? His word? Fuck his word. The guy’s a loon. A loose, out-of-control maniac. I don’t give a damn-”

Costa walked over and grabbed him loosely by the collar, forcing him to be quiet.

Then Emily Deacon was screaming, writhing on the chair, not knowing whether to move or stay still. A noise was coming from her jacket, a noise that was making her stiffen with shock and anticipation. There were seven men in the hall at that moment. Leapman and his team scurried for their lives, disappearing into the shadows, Viale trying to keep up with them. Nic Costa looked at his two colleagues. Then he walked over to Emily Deacon, found the hidden pocket on the jacket’s front. Something was vibrating beneath the fabric, making a wild, electronic noise, a butchered kind of music, a short refrain that rang a bell somewhere in his head.

Wagner’s “The Ride of the Valkyries.” All reduced to a series of beeps on a piece of silicon.

Costa lowered the zipper and removed the phone.

“Jesus, Nic,” Emily whispered. “I never knew that was there.”

He touched her blonde hair, just for a moment, and murmured, “He’s improvising. So should we.”

Then he looked at the handset, working out the buttons, hit the one for speakerphone and placed it on the chair Filippo Viale had so hastily vacated seconds before.

“Mr. Kaspar,” Costa said evenly, “it’s now a little under twenty minutes to one. By the timetable you set, we have just forty minutes or so to resolve this matter. Best we make this a conference call, don’t you think?”

Twenty-five minutes before, after briefly calling in at the morgue to pick up some props, Teresa Lupo had taken a taxi to the Via Veneto, then used her police ID to talk herself into reception at the US embassy. She’d checked her notes. She remembered the officer who’d been sent round to clean up after the death in the Pantheon, the one who forgot to take the clothes. In her book, dumb acts denoted dumb people. So she looked up his name from her scribbles and told the security officer at the desk in reception she needed an urgent audience with Cy Morrison that very moment. The uniforms on the door had scarcely looked at the box she was carrying. A bunch of clothes in plastic evidence bags didn’t seem to make much impact on their security scanners.

Morrison, a weary man in his mid-thirties, came out straightaway. He looked overworked and more than a little grumpy. “What can I do for you?”

She held out the box, placed it on the counter and smiled. “Your nice Agent Leapman needs these. He wants them in his office. Now.”

He really didn’t look the brightest of buttons. Or the kind to argue too much. “I tried to call him earlier,” he said. “Agent Leapman’s not here at the moment. I don’t think Agent Deacon’s in the office either. I’ll make sure Leapman gets them.”

“You don’t remember me, do you?”

“Should I?”

“The Pantheon. Two days ago. You came to pick up the body.”

He swore under his breath. “Oh. That.”

“You forgot something.”

“Miss-”

She flashed the police ID at him. “Doctor.”

“Doctor Lupo. I will take these things and make sure they go to the proper place.”

“Yes, well, you won’t mind if I make sure.”

“What?”

She sighed, as if she were trying to keep her patience. “You left them in the Pantheon, Morrison. I had Joel Leapman screaming down the phone at me this morning as if it were my fault or something.”

“What?” he asked again.

“You came to pick up the body, didn’t you?”

“Yeah! Which we did. Hell, I’m not running some damn funeral-home service here. We shouldn’t be doing this kind of stuff anyway.”

She tapped her shoe on the shiny reception floor. “You took the body. You left her stuff. You wouldn’t be fit to run a funeral home. If it wasn’t for me, these things could have been lost for good. Not that I’m getting any credit for it. Do you wonder Joel Leapman’s going berserk over this?”

The woman behind the counter was starting to stare now. She had a little “serve you right” smile on her face. Joel Leapman couldn’t be that popular around here, Teresa thought. But maybe Cy Morrison wasn’t either.

Morrison walked a little way away from the desk to get a touch of privacy. “Listen,” he said in a low, furious voice, “I’m not interested in what Joel Leapman thinks. I don’t work for him. I’m damned if I’m supposed to clean up whatever mess he leaves behind either. Just give me the things and it’s done.”

“No,” Teresa snapped. “I’m not having him screaming at me because you fouled up again. I want to see them in there. If they turn up missing again he’s going to go ballistic again and I don’t want that coming in my direction.”

“Dammit!” Morrison yelled. “Since when did you get the right to give orders here?”

She took out Emily’s security card and waved it in his face, keeping the photo side away from him, hoping, hoping. “Since Joel Leapman told me to go see ”that moron Morrison,“ gave me this and told me not to let go of this stuff until I saw it safely on his desk with my own eyes. Now, do you want to accompany me there? Or should I just find my own way? God knows,” she lied, “I’ve seen enough of that place and that man these past few days.”

Cy Morrison peered at the security card. Someone like Joel Leapman wouldn’t give these things out lightly, Teresa guessed. It had to mean something. Still, Morrison ought to at the very least check the photo, and some inner reminder of that seemed to be just beginning to work its way into his consciousness.

“Plus,” she improvised, wondering if she was going to foul up here, and what trying to talk your way into a secure office in the US embassy meant for your career, “he needs these urgently.”

Teresa Lupo dug deep into the bottom of the box and retrieved one of the bags she’d taken from the apartment the previous day.

“This was yesterday’s woman,” she said. “You heard about that? Turns out she was American too. Maybe I’ll be calling you to pick up her corpse before long. She was decapitated,” Teresa said, getting his attention on the bag. “While wearing this nightdress.”

The scarlet garment lay in a large evidence bag, the bloodstains black and stiff beneath the plastic. Morrison eyed the bag sideways. He looked queasy.

“Of course if you want to take responsibility yourself…” he managed, “I’d just have to tell Leapman you’d done that, you understand. So if it went missing, if anything got tampered with, damaged, lost, altered in any way which meant it couldn’t be used in a court of law…”

Scaring men was fun sometimes, she thought. A skill to be cultivated.

“You do know about rules of evidence, don’t you?” she demanded. “You do understand what happens if this doesn’t get handled in exactly the right way? If one thumbprint goes in the wrong place?”

“Frankly,” Morrison muttered briskly, “I don’t give a shit. If the guy gave you his card, go wherever the hell you want. And find your own damn way out too.”

With that he stormed off, in the opposite direction, away from the office she wanted, the one just round the corner and down the hall.

Teresa Lupo whistled a little tune as she walked there. Then she ran Emily Deacon’s ID through the security slot, waited for the lock to retreat and walked in.

She’d been thinking this through all the way there, phrasing the right message, tweaking the nuances. She’d had an uncle who took her hunting once, when she was a kid. She’d hated the entire experience. All except for the dog. The wonderful dog who was as lovable as they came but could flush out a single pheasant in a field of corn just by scenting where the bird lived and emitting a single bark in its direction.

A minute. That was all it would take to type a simple e-mail, swiped with Emily’s ID card to authenticate it as genuine, mark the message as urgent as hell, hit Send and stand back to see what happened.

She hammered the keyboard with her fat, clumsy fingers.

“Now run, you bastard,” Teresa Lupo said to herself and hoped to God this made a difference. Those hard canisters she felt as she hugged Emily Deacon’s scared, skinny body kept popping pictures into her head of what they could deliver on her cold, shining table if anything went wrong.

“That was a piece of cake,” Teresa Lupo whispered to herself. “You should do this more often.”

The box lay on Leapman’s desk now. Rightfully most of the contents belonged to him. But not the nightdress from the apartment. She had just brought that along as a last resort, for effect. And that was evidence of her own, something she could need for a crime that remained in the jurisdiction of the state police.

“Wasted on these people,” she sniffed. “All of it.”

They’ll know, too, she thought. When the dust settled, Leapman would be able to look at that odd box on his desk, retrace her steps, work out how this was done.

“What the hell?” Teresa Lupo murmured, then picked up the evidence packet with the blackened, stained silk shift, dropped it in her bag, went out and called a cab for the centro storico.

“Look around you, gentlemen. Enjoy the view.”

Costa had placed the phone on the empty chair next to Emily. Now they crowded close to it, listening to Bill Kaspar’s voice crackling out of the speaker, clear and determined.

“Can you imagine being in a hellhole like that, watching your buddies going down one by one, clinging to a piece of webbing as if it could keep out the fire? All because some asshole you thought you could trust wants a cut of the action?”

“We get the point,” Leapman grumbled.

There was a pause. “OK. I hear you. The man from the Agency. Or wherever. Right?”

Viale made a gesture to Leapman: Pursue this.

“Listen, Kaspar,” Leapman continued. “It doesn’t matter who I am. All I want to do is make sure you understand something. We know what happened. Washington’s got no doubts. Not anymore.”

“You think you know-” the tinny voice interrupted.

“You got screwed! Live with it! You’re not the first. So you and your people went down there. That’s tough. In war you get casualties.”

Kaspar waited before answering. It was a scary moment. “We were ”casualties“?”

“You and lots of others. Except they let it go. I don’t know. I don’t get…”

Leapman was struggling. Viale sat down and stared at him, disappointed.

“You don’t get the symmetry,” Kaspar said calmly. “Understandable. I guess you needed to be there.”

Leapman fought to get a grip on himself, glanced at Emily, then said, “Look. Dan Deacon fooled us all. You, me, Washington, everyone. We never even began to guess until a good way through all this. I’m sorry. Is that what you want to hear?”

The voice on the phone-hidden somewhere they could only guess at-sighed. “Ignorance-such a rotten excuse. Being smart’s not about when or where you’re born, you know. It’s about who you are. That’s history, man. The guy who built that place you’re in-he was called Hadrian, a little history for you there. He could fight battles. Run empires. Think about life. He could sit right where you are now and imagine a whole cosmos in his head.”

Leapman blinked hard, looked at Viale and made the “crazy” sign with his right index finger.

“I slept above his mausoleum last night,” Kaspar continued. “I thought I’d dream about him. I didn’t. It was just the same damn shit I always hear. Which doesn’t make sense, since they’re all supposed to be dead now. You follow?”

“So we’re going through all this because of your dreams, Kaspar?” Leapman asked. “Are you listening to yourself? That’s how crazy people sound. That’s what-”

The voice from the tinny speaker cranked up several decibels. “Crazy! CRAZY! This seem crazy to you?”

There was a sudden, unexpected noise behind them. Something coming out of Emily Deacon’s jacket and not a phone this time, a pop, like the report of a small gun, and she was screaming again, terrified to move, terrified to stay still. A bright spark, alive and fiery, was worming its way out of the uppermost yellow canister on the vest.

The men were scattering again. Costa took a good look at the jacket, walked over, tried to hold her still, wrapped a handkerchief around his fist and jabbed at the burning object. It came out, stinging his fingers. He threw it to the floor, where it fizzled ominously.

“Don’t play games,” Costa barked at the phone. “She didn’t deserve that.”

“You don’t know what you deserve!” Kaspar yelled back. “You don’t have a clue.”

Costa wasn’t listening. He was back with Emily, hand to her head, noting the tears in her eyes, the look of terror there.

“I’m sorry,” she gasped. “I’m so sorry.”

Kaspar’s laugh rattled out of the phone. “Good! Are you people learning something here? Improvisation’s everything. A man needs tricks up his sleeve. What you got there was the demo. A little firecracker to keep you on your toes, folks. Still leaves me with seven real ones, though. Plus the set I got here, somewhere you’d never guess, full of lots of people who surely wouldn’t want to die without knowing what Christmas presents they’ve got. Ask your munitions moron to stick his nose round Little Em’s vest. This is real, people. Don’t ever forget that.”

“This is real,” Emily Deacon murmured to no one, head down.

Viale, Leapman and the two Americans were slinking back to the centre of the hall now, looking somewhat ashamed.

Costa scowled at them, picked up the phone, turned off the speaker and held the handset to his ear, ignoring Leapman’s protests. “My name’s Nic Costa. Rome police. Tell me what you want, Kaspar, and I’ll tell you if they can give it to you.”

A pause on the end of the line. A wry, amused laugh, and Costa knew somehow: he was dealing with someone very smart. “Finally. Mr. Costa. Are we talking privately, son?”

The voice in his ear had changed. The person behind it sounded closer. More human. And just a little apprehensive too.

“Yes,” Costa replied and listened, very carefully, as he watched Gianni Peroni restrain the furious Leapman from grabbing the phone.

“I like that. So you think you can convince them to let you out of that place with something?”

“Yes,” Costa said, and tried to sound convincing.

“Good. I’m impressed.”

“Meaning?”

That laugh again. “Meaning we’re halfway there already. ”Cos I got something for you.“

Then the line went dead. Nothing, not a single background noise, a half-heard word from a third party, gave Costa a clue about where Kaspar was really located.

Leapman was shaking with fury. Peroni released him. The American pointed at Falcone and spat, “That was not part of the deal!”

“You were losing it,” Falcone said coldly. “If you’d gone much further she’d be dead, and the rest of us too, probably. Save your thanks for later.”

“You-”

“Shut up! Shut up!” Emily Deacon looked ready to break. She was hugging herself inside the deadly parka, gently rocking backwards and forwards, tears streaming down her cheeks.

“For God’s sake,” she pleaded, “either give him what he wants, or just get the hell out of here so he doesn’t kill the rest of you too.”

To Costa’s amazement, that did, at least, give the FBI man pause for thought.

“What does he want?” Leapman demanded.

“Just what he asked for last night,” Costa explained quietly. “Proof.”

“Great,” Leapman grunted. “And in return?”

Costa phrased this very carefully. “In return, he swears he’ll give himself up. He’ll take off the vests, disarm them both-”

“What?” Viale looked livid. “We’re supposed to take that on trust? I want him in my sight before he gets a damn thing. I’m not waiting on a promise.”

Costa caught Emily’s eye. He wanted her to know there was still hope, still room to make things right. “I guess he’s thinking much the same way. He wants me to take him the evidence you’ve got. He’ll check it out. If it’s real. Then-”

“Where’s the delivery?” Falcone asked.

“I don’t know,” Costa lied. “He said he’d phone along the way. And don’t try to follow me. If he sees that, sees anything that suggests we’re trying to trick him, it’s all over.”

Costa watched them turn this over in their heads. He knew what defeat looked like.

“He’s set this up so we don’t have a lot of choices,” he argued. “He’s not stupid enough to walk in here to collect. I don’t think we’re in a position to get round him either. Do you?”

Leapman stared at the stone floor in despair. “Jesus,” he moaned. “The bastard’s still running rings around us.”

Costa risked a hopeful glance in Emily’s direction. “Let me do it,” he urged. “What’s there to lose? He’s adamant. If he gets the documents you promised, he comes back with me and he’s all yours. He said he’d ”surrender.“ That was the word he used.”

A military word, Costa thought. One that would strike a chord with a man like Joel Leapman.

“Do we have any other options?” Falcone wondered. “Is any part of this negotiable?”

Costa shook his head. “Absolutely not. I wouldn’t even know how to phone him back. He blocked the number.”

“Bill Kaspar,” Leapman sighed. “What a guy.” He looked Costa straight in the face. “This place is a church or something, right?”

“Among other things.”

“Really.”

Leapman walked over to Viale, held out his hand, then, when the SISDE officer didn’t move an inch, took the blue folder from under his arm.

“This is mine,” Leapman said, handing him the thing. “I read it on the way here. There’s no one in there but Dan Deacon. If that doesn’t convince him Deacon was to blame, then nothing will. You go run your errand, Costa. We stay here and pray.”

The sky was having second thoughts. It was still bright, but there was a hint of hazy ice seeping into the blue. More snow, Costa thought. Not for a few hours, but it was on the way, a final random throw of the dice for this extraordinary Christmas.

He walked out of the shadow of the Pantheon doors, waited as Peroni closed the vast bronze slab behind him, then strode down the steps into the piazza, close to where Mauro Sandri had fallen three nights before. So much in such a short space of time. This must have been what it was like for Kaspar in Iraq. Constant movement, constant threats. That experience shaped the man now, made him what he was. Obsessed with detail and planning, tied to the symmetry of the complex web he’d spun around all of them, weaving his way through its intricacies with an extraordinary, lethal dexterity.

Teresa Lupo sat outside a cafe. She looked at him and tugged her thick coat around her, then sipped at a cup of something that steamed in the cold, dry air.

Costa stopped by her table and scanned the square. It was almost deserted.

“Did it work?” she asked.

“I believe it did,” he answered. “And one day you’re going to have to tell me how.”

“Just some predictable pleas and threats.” She sighed. “I’m not really cut out for this, Nic.”

Just for a moment he smiled. “You could have fooled me. Here.” He threw the file on the table. “Keep it safe.”

She glanced at the folder, opened it, flicked through the sheaf of papers, each with the SISDE log on top, each marked “secret.”

“Oh my,” she said softly. “Are we in deep now?”

“Keep the faith,” Costa said and walked on, to the far side of the square, and waited a good two minutes.

Then the phone rang and he heard Kaspar’s now familiar voice.

“You got good people, Costa. I like this. So where are you going?”

“Piazza Sant” Ignazio,“ Costa said.

“Good. I guess you really are who you say you are. But just to be safe I’ll send you someplace else-”

“Time!” Costa yelled.

“Walk fast, brother. Via Metastasio. You know it?”

“Of course!”

“Good. Look for someone dressed just like Little Em. Big parka, hood tight up to the face. I’m not taking any chances.”

“Sure.”

The line didn’t go dead. “You didn’t ask.”

“Ask what?” Costa wondered.

“Whether I’d really stick to the deal.”

“What’s the point?” Costa asked. “You’re going to do what you’re going to do, aren’t you?”

“Of course, Mr. Costa,” Kaspar said, laughing.

It was just a sound on the cold, thin wind. But Nic Costa could have sworn that Kaspar had let his guard down at that instant. Some real snatch of his voice had carried into the square from nearby. If only…

He pushed the idea from his head. He wasn’t up to taking on William F. Kaspar. None of them were.

“I’m sorry I interrupted you last night,” the voice said. “She’s an interesting kid. Much more so than her dad.”

“If she dies, Kaspar…”

The man seemed offended. “If she dies, I’d say you’ve really fouled up. Now go.”

Nic Costa strode rapidly through the narrow back streets, hands thrust deep into his pockets, thrashing through the slush.

He looked at his watch. There were twenty minutes left before the deadline ran out. Fifteen, by the time he got back. Hopefully accompanied.

Trying to kick the doubts out of his head, to convince himself there really was no other way, Costa looked ahead.

He was there, just as promised. Wrapped tightly in a parka that was identical to Emily’s, bulky underneath with the same kind of deadly gear.

Nic Costa walked up and said, “Let’s go.”

There wasn’t an answer. He hadn’t expected one. There wasn’t even an expression Costa could read. The hood was pulled tightly over his head, so that all the world could see was a couple of bright, intense slits for eyes, so narrow it was hard to gauge whether there was any expression there at all.

The two of them set off down the street in silence, walked into the square and ascended the low steps in front of the Pantheon, where Costa called to Leo Falcone and waited for the bronze gates to open.

Twenty metres away, shivering from the increasing cold, Teresa Lupo gulped down the last of her cappuccino, watched them go inside and pulled out a phone. She had to think about the number. It wasn’t one an employee of the state police was used to dialling.

They took an age to answer.

“Typical,” Teresa whispered to herself.

Then a jaded male voice came on the line. “Carabinieri.”

Even on the phone they sounded like pricks. “I don’t know if I’m calling the right number, Officer,” she said, trying to act as stupid as possible.

“What do you want?” the bored voice sighed.

“You see, the problem is, I could be imagining this. But I swear I just saw a policeman-a state policeman-getting frog-marched into the Pantheon by some man with a gun in his hand. And the place is closed too. All shut up. When it should be open. That’s not right, now, is it?”

“You saw what?”

She couldn’t believe she had to repeat herself. At least the idiot went quiet when she did, adding a very few details for verisimilitude along the way.

“The thing is,” she added, “it was a police officer. I suppose I shouldn’t be calling you really. I suppose I ought to call them.”

Some slow-burning spark of intelligence began to glow on the other end of the line.

“We’ll deal with it,” the man said. “The Pantheon?”

“Exactly.”

“And your name?”

She took a good look around her, pulled the phone away from her face, made a bunch of the most disgusting noises she could think of straight down into the mouthpiece.

“Sorry,” she shrieked, holding the thing away from her face, “you’re breaking up on me now…”

And hit the off button. They had ways of tracing you, even when you withheld your number. Besides, Teresa reasoned, she didn’t need the phone anymore. She just had to wait until those big bronze doors opened.

“Hate waiting,” she murmured, then dashed back into the cafe for another cappuccino before returning to her cold and solitary chair by the cheery stone dolphins.

It was Leapman by the doors, trying not to look triumphant. Costa came in behind the figure in the huge parka, watched him shuffle to the centre of the room, heard the huge door close behind them.

“Nice work,” the American murmured, thumping Costa on the back, then striding to catch up with the parka.

“You’re welcome,” Costa replied and stealthily slipped his hand into his pocket, retrieved the pistol, holding it low and hidden by his waist.

The jacketed figure came to a halt in front of the group in the centre of the building: Viale and the two Americans, now joined on either side by Falcone and Peroni.

“Bill Kaspar,” Leapman murmured, no mean measure of respect in his voice. “What a man. You just walk right in here, bold as brass, like you promised. You read that stuff, huh? You happy now? I hope so, Kaspar. Because we’ve been waiting for this moment a long, long time.”

Leapman’s hand came up to the parka hood, a big service revolver in it.

“So you just unwire yourself and the infant here. No tricks. Nothing. We’ve kept to our part of the deal. Indulge us in a discussion and then we’ll be taking you home.”

The only part of the man that was moving was his head, swaying from side to side, as if he were trying to shake something away.

“It’s not as simple as that.”

Leapman blinked, lowered the gun for a moment, turned and glowered at Emily Deacon as if her words were some impudent intrusion into his day. “What?”

“She said,” Costa muttered into his ear, letting the barrel of his own weapon slide with some deliberate menace onto Leapman’s cheek, “it’s not as simple as that. I’m taking your weapon, Agent Leapman.” He glanced at the others. “And the rest of you.”

“What the-?” Leapman yelled, letting the pistol fall into Costa’s grip even as he did so. “Jesus, Falcone-”

To the American’s fury, Falcone and Peroni were relieving his agents of their guns too, with a careful, professional attention that didn’t brook any resistance.

Falcone pocketed Friedricksen’s piece and watched Peroni do the same for his partner. “You’re making too much noise, Leapman,” Falcone replied. “Stop yelling and start listening.”

Then he looked at Viale. “You?”

The SISDE man was flushed with outrage, even under the grey afternoon light. His gloved hands waved at them in anger. “This is insane. What on earth do you think you’re doing?”

He pulled out his phone and started stabbing at the keys.

“Peroni!” Falcone ordered.

The big man was over in two strides, relieving Viale of the phone.

“Check him,” Falcone barked. “He probably thinks he’s too far up the damn ladder to carry a gun but I’d like to know.”

Viale held his arms loose at his side as Peroni gave him a none-too-delicate frisk. “You three are really at the end of the road, you know. You can’t fuck with people like me, Falcone. I’ll crucify you, I swear it.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Peroni grumbled. “Clean,” he announced. “I guess he expects others to do his dirty work for him. Foul mouth, though. If I hear much more, I’ll have to do something about that.”

“As good as dead!” Viale yelled. “All of you!”

Peroni stood very close in front of him and looked down into the SISDE man’s apoplectic face and said, very slowly, in that tone Costa instantly recognized, the one that could silence the meanest street hood: “Now be a good boy and shut the fuck up.”

“Later,” Viale spat, but fell silent. Peroni pushed him up to the silent, resentful Americans.

“So, Miss Deacon?” Falcone said. “Where do we go from here?”

“Straight to the point.” She got up, faced the figure in the parka, and tugged down the hood, exposing the shaking head, then ripped the fat slice of shiny metallic duct tape straight from the man’s lower face.

Thornton Fielding screamed with pain, shot his fingers to his mouth, pulled them away, astonished, then stared at the small assembly of people in front of him as if he’d just woken up from a bad dream, only to find himself slap bang in the middle of another one.

“Is this some kind of a joke?” Fielding yelled. He was looking in horror at the vest strapped to his chest, with its yellow canisters and loom of wires. “Are you serious, Leapman? What the hell is this? Get it off of me. Now!”

Nic Costa was watching the expression on Leapman’s face all along, wondering. There was nothing there but shock and surprise. Leapman screwed up his eyes and turned to Falcone. “What is he doing here?”

“Talking,” Costa said, intervening. “If he wants to stay alive.”

Emily came up to close to Fielding, looked at his jacket, then at hers. “These are BLU-97 bomblets, Thornton. Adapted for the task, specially for the two of us. I watched Kaspar do it this morning. A cap detonator in each. Wired to a remote only he controls. He knows what he’s doing. Also”-she flipped the mike on her collar-“he can hear everything we say.” She nodded at Leapman. “If he doesn’t like what they do, I get to be the martyr. If he doesn’t like what he’s hearing from you-bang, it’s you. Or maybe both of us. Who knows?”

There was a cast of stark terror in Fielding’s eyes. “Sweet Jesus, what does that lunatic want from me?”

Emily stayed close. “The same thing I want, Thornton. Some answers. About what happened here in Rome, back in 1990. You do remember that, don’t you?”

He shook his grey head in astonishment. “What? What are you talking about? Listen…”

He looked at Leapman, then at Falcone, appealing to them. “This is the truth. I swear. One hour ago I’m at my desk in the embassy. I get some crazy e-mail from Emily here saying she was in big trouble with you guys somehow and I had to go to some place near the Corso right then.”

Leapman scowled at him, then at Costa. “She was here an hour ago. She couldn’t possibly have sent that.”

“It was internal!” Fielding screamed. “Came from her PC, goddammit! Made it sound like the world was falling in or something. Like it involved me, too.”

“That’s because it does, Thornton,” Emily said quietly.

“This is ridiculous,” he shouted.

Leapman walked up to Fielding, interested. “What happened?”

“I get there and some hulking lunatic in a uniform jumps me, drags me into an alley, puts this stuff on me, and says if I don’t wait where he says until some guy comes to fetch me I’m dead. And sticks that stinking tape over my mouth too. And that’s exactly where I stay until he”-Fielding pointed at Costa-“turns up.”

Costa got a withering glance from Leapman and smiled wanly in return.

“So what the hell is going on here, Joel?” Fielding demanded. “If this is one of those damn training exercises of yours-”

“It’s no exercise,” Leapman responded. “You were here? In Rome? In ”90?“

“Sure!” Fielding yelled. “It’s no secret. It’s no secret why I’m still here either. I’m the resident queer, remember? I didn’t get moved around back then because I was a security risk. I don’t get moved around now because I’m part of the furniture. Big deal.”

“I didn’t know that,” Leapman said quietly.

“Get this crap off of me!” Fielding screeched.

Costa walked up, took a good look at him. “Can’t do that. Kaspar put it on you. He’s the only one who can take it off.”

Fielding’s face screwed up in disbelief. “You bastards sent me out to meet that lunatic?”

“Looks like it,” Leapman observed. “So where the hell is he now, Mr. Costa?”

“Search me.” Costa shrugged. “I just took the phone call. Could be anywhere in the vicinity from what we understand. He said that, unless he got some answers, he’d start setting those things off in”-Costa looked at the watch again-“a little under ten minutes. If you believe him, that is. What do you think, Mr. Fielding? Do you think he’s really capable of that?”

Fielding wasn’t playing this game. “I never met the man! Not till you tell me he just leapt out and put me in this crap. Joel-this isn’t going to look good on anyone’s record.”

Emily Deacon reached forward and touched one of the wires on Fielding’s vest. He jumped back like a man who’d had a sudden shock.

“He’ll do it, Thornton,” she insisted, “unless you talk. Now’s the time. We’re good listeners.”

“About what?”

“About the Babylon Sisters. About who was behind-”

“Jesus, Emily! I told you. I did everything I could. Didn’t you read what was there? Didn’t you get the message? Do I have to spell it out for you?”

“Yes,” she said quietly. “You do.”

“Fine! All that crazy private army stuff was Kaspar and your old man’s idea. Dan was the boss. Kaspar was the soldier. Just a couple of old hippies with guns and a blank cheque from the CIA or someone. You wonder it all got screwed up?”

“No!” She was adamant. “You showed me what you wanted to, Thornton, and for a reason. It was nothing to do with me. It all was about protecting yourself.”

“This is insane. What the hell are you talking about?”

“You!” she yelled. “You were pulling the strings then, you’re still pulling them now. I couldn’t figure out why there was just one document left on the system when you let me in. Was that an accident? Of course not. It was the document that pointed straight to my dad, not to you. That was why you put it there. For me to find.”

“Joel? We need your men in here.” Fielding wasn’t budging. Costa thought of the minutes, ticking away, and wondered how long the unseen Kaspar would wait.

Emily Deacon stood directly beneath the oculus and allowed herself a glance through the eye above. “It’s about places, Thornton. That’s what Kasper’s been trying to work out for himself all along. Places like this. He and my dad used to meet here, talk things through. He told me so. But my dad was discussing that mission with someone else too. Someone in the Piazza Mattei, someone Kaspar never did get to know.”

That scared him. Just a little. “What of it?”

“That’s what my dad said to Kaspar. Before he died. The one thing. That he wished he’d never gone to see the man in the Piazza Mattei. Kaspar thought he’d found that man, too. He went back there a couple of months ago. He’d worked out there was a property in the square the spooks had been using for years and years. He attacked the guy living there, trying to get some information out of him. He didn’t kill him, though. This wasn’t his man. He was just after intelligence and the man had none. Kaspar didn’t kill just anyone. Not then.”

“So?”

“So he didn’t get his information. But we did. We know.”

Fielding looked at her, astonished. “You’re taking the word of that lunatic? I’m here because of that?”

“Yes,” she said quietly. “I am.”

Then she put a hand to the front of her own vest, took hold of the tangle of coloured wires.

Costa watched in horror. “Emily-”

“I can show you why, Thornton,” she said, ripping at the wires on her chest, tearing them from the canisters in one rapid, bold movement.

Fielding cowered, half crouching down on the floor. Nothing happened. She just stood there, making the point. Then she threw off the parka, let it fall to the floor and ripped down the zipper on the vest, got rid of that too.

Friedricksen turned and fled for the shadows.

“Get back here!” Leapman yelled at the man, then picked up the vest to look at it. He pulled out the detonator from one of the canisters, upending the contents so sand fell onto the floor in a steady stream. Cocking his head to one side, he took a closer look, scratched at the metal with his finger.

“Fake,” Leapman said.

“It’s a Coke can,” Emily said. “Painted yellow, reshaped with putty. Plus a little white spirit to give it the right smell and a detonator that’s as real as they come. Kaspar’s broke. He didn’t have enough for two sets.”

“Neat,” Leapman conceded. Then he pointed at Fielding’s vest. “And this?”

“Oh,” Emily said brightly, reaching down for the parka, taking something out of the pocket. “This is the real thing. Absolutely.”

She grabbed Fielding by the scruff of his jacket. “This can blow us all to pieces, Thornton. And you know something?”

Emily now held a small plastic device up in her hand, thumb on a button. “It’s not Bill Kaspar who gets to make that choice. It’s me. He trusted me with that. He trusted me with a dummy jacket. Who do you think I believe, Thornton?”

“Emily,” Nic murmured, “this wasn’t part of the-”

“It is now,” she said, circling Fielding, holding the remote in front of his ashen face. “Talk to me, Thornton. Or don’t. Because I really don’t care either way. Not anymore. You screwed my dad. He was a good man. You sold him and his people down the river, let them get there, and hoped-what?”

He was nervous, Costa thought. Just not nervous enough.

“You’ve got to do something here, Leapman,” Fielding pleaded. “This kid’s as crazy as her old man was.”

“I guess,” she went on, ignoring his remark, “you hoped that, once they got there, knew it was a case of give in or die, they’d all think the way you did. That this wasn’t their war, not really. All they had to do was put up their hands, go quietly. That was part of the deal. And when it was over-what? Some quiet, secret negotiation with Baghdad. A hand-over at the Syrian border. Everyone comes home. You disappear and get rich. No awkward questions. But Bill Kasper didn’t go quietly, did he?”

“Sand?” he sneered. She was jabbing a finger into the dark and Fielding knew that. He was growing more confident. She was starting to realize it too. “And Coke cans? That’s what the big man’s up to these days?”

“Proof,” she murmured. “That’s all anyone wants.”

Thornton Fielding’s forehead glistened, shiny with sweat, shaking from side to side. “No, Emily. What they want is an end to this shit. That lunatic put away where he belongs. He killed your dad. You’re supposed to want that too.”

Emily Deacon’s delicate fingers worked their way onto Fielding’s vest, found the topmost canister in the middle row beneath his chin.

“Don’t move, Thornton,” she said softly. “I wouldn’t want to choose the wrong wire. The rest are wired in parallel and will blow if I tamper with them. Kaspar only showed me this once.”

He was rigid, uncertain whether this was a bluff or not. She flicked off a set of wires, delicately removed the canister from its webbing holster.

“He thought you might need convincing,” she said, then flipped the detonator, starting a small, livid spark at its head, and flung it into the darkness near the doors.

Fielding blinked at her. Leapman and Viale were already flattened on the floor. Emily Deacon placed her arms around Fielding, held him tightly.

“Remember when you danced with me?” she asked. “When I was just a kid? We’d go round and round, circles and circles, like a couple of human compasses describing pretty patterns on the floor. People like patterns, Thornton. Patterns make you feel comfortable. They make you think the world’s more than just a mess of chaos.”

A hot, fiery blast roared from somewhere close to the bronze slabs, began to occupy the interior of the building, sending a deafening, screaming roar echoing around the hemisphere. From somewhere outside came the wailing sound of a siren. She clung to him tightly, keeping the two of them upright, struggling against the heat and force of the explosion.

“That’s what Kaspar’s been looking for,” she said, holding the remote to his cheek, finger on the button, the two of them describing a slow, lazy circle on the stone floor. “Something that restores some order. And maybe it’s not there at all. Maybe I should press this and make us nothing. No more memories. No more guilt. No more hate. Does that sound appealing to you?”

Fielding was silent, eyes screwed tight, fighting to control himself.

“He was my father, Thornton. He thought you were his friend. I remember you in our house. I remember…”

This recollection had some force, it was obvious in her eyes. “I remember you hated that music of his. You used to bring those big band tunes, dance tunes, little me, big you, all those years ago. And you murdered him. Long before Kaspar got there. Somehow I knew he had died back then. I just never wanted to see it.”

He put his hands on her shoulders, stared into her face, shook her, hard. “Dan took the money too, Emily! No one made him. No one made any of them, not on his team. If that fool Kaspar hadn’t started shooting, they’d all have been in and out of there and no one the wiser. One team rich, smart and in on the deal. The other poor and heroes and still with their consciences. It’s a dirty world. You’re telling me you never noticed?”

Costa saw the sudden grief in her face. The way her finger tightened on the button.

“I don’t believe you,” Emily Deacon insisted.

Fielding pushed her away. She didn’t protest.

“Then why did he come back and say nothing?” he asked. “Why didn’t he come back and start asking some questions about what went wrong?”

“He didn’t know!” she screeched.

Fielding gripped her shoulders again, peered into her face with glistening eyes. “You’re too smart to believe that,” he said after a while. “Aren’t you?”

Emily said nothing. She just stood there, shaking her head, staring at him, furious.

“Think about it,” Fielding continued. “Dan did nothing because he was on the payroll, Emily. Everyone on his team was. Before they even went in. Not that it was the money. In the beginning anyway. The others, yes. Not him. Not me.”

“Then what, Fielding?” she wondered. “You’re telling me this was all some moral decision too?”

Thornton Fielding looked, for a moment, as if he’d forgotten the deadly armament strapped to his body. He was mad with her, furious she didn’t get it.

“You’re so young,” he spat at her. “You really have no idea.”

“Tell me.”

He closed his eyes for a moment, shook his head, clutched the deadly vest to him. “Dan and I had been working together off and on for years. Since Nicaragua. We’d spent all that time throwing all manner of dirty shit at dirty situations. And you know what? It never cured a damn thing. We were just so sick of being part of that machine, deciding who was right, who was wrong. Sick of the fact that so many of yesterday’s friends turned out to be tomorrow’s bad guys. Your dad had this huge sense of duty, but duty has to be earned somehow by the people above you or you start to question it. His got used up in the end. We both felt that way. And that’s the real killer.”

He looked at Leapman, and there was disgust in his face. “In that kind of situation either you become like him-an automaton who does what he’s told and doesn’t think twice-or you become the enemy. There is no in between. We’d taken the money, but the truth is we’d have done it for free. We didn’t want the war to spread. There were all these lunatics saying it had to go on, all the way to Baghdad. As if we were a liberating army, bringing peace and joy and freedom to the world. Babylon Sisters wasn’t about Kuwait. It was about being there as a forward base once the hawks back home persuaded Bush to go all the way. You get me?”

She was listening, struggling to take all this in.

“Emily,” he pleaded, “you have to understand. No one needed to get hurt. Dan had arranged for us to get our guys taken, along with him. They’d all be freed, unharmed, later and no one would be the wiser. A straightforward deal. Except…” He sighed, hung his head, stared at the stone floor. “We didn’t bring Bill Kaspar in. Dan and I talked about it but in the end we just didn’t have the guts. We thought he and the rest of them would lie down once they saw what they were up against. We didn’t think he’d feel the urge to make nine people dead heroes. So Dan and his crew had to watch a bloodbath, knowing they couldn’t do a damn thing to stop what was going on. And then-”

“Then what?” Emily asked, livid.

“Then you find yourself facing painful choices. It wasn’t Dan’s fault. Not mine. Not Kaspar’s, really. It was just a stupid idea that began as a good one. A couple of tired spooks dragging out some peacenik idealism we thought might stop the world from tilting even further out of balance. Stupid. Dumb as they come, and when those Iraqis came back to each and every one us after the war, kept calling, kept asking for more, threatening to expose us if we didn’t go along with them, we found out exactly how dumb.”

She was shaking her head. “Dad wouldn’t-”

“He did!” Fielding cried. “We all did. There wasn’t any alternative. It was either go along with what they wanted or see every last one of us in jail or worse. Until Kaspar got out, of course. And you know the funny thing?”

There was a sudden look of bitter hatred on his face. “By then it didn’t matter. If Bill Kaspar hadn’t come a-hunting, all of this would have just slipped out of sight. Except,” he added sourly, “when you started waking up in the middle of the night sweating from the memories.”

There was activity beyond the big doors. Brisk, bossy Carabinieri voices.

Fielding nodded at the button and took several steps back. “So you want to press that, Little Em? If it makes you feel good, go ahead.”

“Oh, Thornton,” she said immediately. “It will make me feel so very, very good.”

Emily Deacon hit the button and Thornton Fielding’s vest lit up like a string of firecrackers. Costa was over to her in a flash, trying to drag her down to the cold, hard floor.

She fought him, watching Fielding all the time. “Don’t worry,” she murmured. “Kaspar’s broke. It’s just Coke cans, sand and a few detonators. And a little fertilizer for the one I got to throw. You’d be amazed what I’ve learned over the last couple of hours.”

Thornton Fielding did a fiery little jig around the heart of the building then, when the detonators fizzled, fell to the ground in a crumpled, sobbing heap.

Nic Costa looked into Emily’s face and a part of him was convinced he knew what she saw at that moment. An image from a different time. A young girl dancing with her father’s best friend, not knowing what darkness lay beyond the bright white room in which every happy memory seemed to exist, and how difficult it was to see into the mind of another human being, even one you thought you knew and loved.

“Nic,” she said with a sudden, bright efficiency. “Inspector Falcone. Gianni. Are you ready?”

“Of course,” Falcone replied, then grimaced at the dejected figure of Thornton Fielding crawling underneath the grey eye of the oculus. “I think,” he said to Leapman, “that belongs to you.”

There was an expression on Falcone’s face Costa didn’t recognize. Finally, he put a name to it: astonishment.

They followed her to the bronze slab doors, helped her pull the right one back on its ancient hinges. A flood of policemen poured into the hall, asking questions, waving guns, shrinking back as Falcone barked at them about this being a state police show.

“Come with me,” Emily said.

Costa and Peroni walked behind her over to the office. She took out a key, unlocked the door and let them in.

There was a well-built, craggy-faced man there, in a caretaker’s uniform that was one size too small for him. He was leaning back in a chair, feet on the desk next to a mobile phone and a small radio, laid out in a precise line parallel with the edge of the surface. An old and dusty copy of Dante’s Inferno lay in front of him, open at the page.

William F. Kaspar took out the radio earpiece, looked at the three of them, nodded to Emily and said, “As I always say, improvisation is the key to everything, Agent Deacon. Nice job. I’m proud of you.”

He waved the book at them. “Mind if I keep this? I found it in here and, to be honest, I don’t think it’s one of his.”

He pointed to a figure bundled into the corner, gagged, hands tied behind his back, wearing a grubby vest and underpants. Peroni recognized the florid-faced caretaker and stifled a laugh.

“Let me tell you,” Kaspar continued, “this guy is a world-class shirker. Plus he has potty mouth you wouldn’t believe. Beats me how they let him look after a place like this.”

Falcone pushed open the door of the side entrance. There were no Carabinieri there. Only a fresh, light scattering of snow coming down through the growing darkness.

Costa waved a pair of handcuffs in the air. Emily Deacon forced her way in front of him and peered at Kaspar.

“How are things?” she asked him.

He stared through the open interior door, back into the great circular hall, looking as if he were saying good-bye. Then he peered closely at the objects on the table. The book. The radio. The phone. All set in a line.

“Quiet,” Bill Kaspar said, and shuffled the items in front of him, making a random pattern, like three dominoes rattling aimlessly around a board. “Quieter than they’ve been in a long time.”