Costa 08 - City of Fear (19 page)

Somehow Deniz had managed to hook the cell phone to the computer screen. They saw the scene at the Trevi Fountain unfold in miniature, moment by moment. It felt wrong, like watching a bad homemade movie. Joseph working his way through the crowd, turning from a visible dark spot to little more than a pinprick and then disappearing, only to return. And still no explosion.

Had Joseph really thrown the remote into the fountain? She thought so, and so did the two men with her. Deniz sighed when they saw the movement of the Kenyan’s arm, a gesture that seemed to indicate, even through this shaky, indistinct medium, a sense of despair and surrender.

“Might have known,” the Turk muttered, and took a sip of his water.

“It didn’t work, did it?” Anna told him. She hadn’t liked the Kenyan much, hadn’t appreciated the way he stared at her, openly, lasciviously. He’d taken the risk, though, while they sat around drinking, swimming, waiting. “He tried. What else could he do?”

“He did try,” Petrakis agreed, then picked up his own phone.

“Who are those people?” she asked, pointing at the picture on the
computer. “In the crowd. There’s a man and woman there. They look interested in him.”

“It’s a fashion show,” Petrakis told her. “You’d expect security.”

“He spoke to them. They followed him. Why?”

“You just can’t get the staff …” the Italian murmured.

Then he keyed a short number into his phone and turned to smile at them, waiting, his finger over the button.

“Tell me what you think of Joseph,” he asked.

“He was a comrade,” she answered immediately. “One of us.”

“Really?” Petrakis said, mockingly.

She felt a red flare of anger in her head. “Why do you keep us in the dark, Andrea? How can we work together if we know nothing?”

“I’m a general. You’re a soldier. You know what you need to know. Now … Deniz?”

The Turk did something to the keyboard. The screen split into two windows. One was the shaky video of the Trevi Fountain. The other appeared to be a live newscast from the piazza of the Quirinale Palace. All the G8 leaders were lined up for the cameras, smiling, silent in the sun.

Petrakis’s finger hovered over the phone. “Watch.”

He pressed the key. After a long second the picture at the Trevi Fountain changed. A dust cloud began to boil, shakily, from beneath the group of statues at the back, obscuring everything. Then a violent crimson geyser gushed from the mist, raining down gory liquid and rubble on the gathering in the cobbled piazza, sending them shrieking into one another, turning a half-orderly crowd into a screaming, terrified mob.

A single drop of what appeared to be blood landed on the camera lens. Anna watched as it began to streak slowly downward, smearing everything a lurid shade of red. When the storm that had roared out from the Trevi subsided, the fountain was transformed.

Neptune lay in pieces, a stone corpse, facedown, ruined limbs torn asunder amidst a gushing scarlet stream. Everywhere the water had taken on a familiar, livid hue.

Sweat started to dampen her palms, a pain began to bite at her temples. In the window on the screen next to this terrible scene, they could see the world leaders, less than a kilometer away, on the hill, recoiling in
shock at the noise of the nearby blast. Their faces were bloodless, their eyes blank with anger and fear. Dark-suited men with coils emerging from their perfect, standard-issue haircuts were beginning to hurry them away from the podium, back into the palace behind.

Terror had arrived in Rome—not the private kind, reserved for the likes of the politician they had kidnapped in the dead of night, but a different sort of beast, one so bold and vicious it felt free to roam the city in the bright, clear light of a summer’s day.

She looked at the fountain again, fearing to see the injuries, knowing she had to look. Desperate shapes stumbled through the dust cloud, hands to heads, shrieking, blinded. A few bodies sprawled on the floor. Police officers had clapped handkerchiefs over their mouths and were trying to make their way into the howling mob to help. Yet, as the dust storm began to settle, it didn’t look like a massacre. The damage to the famous landmark seemed limited to missing stone limbs and cracked frozen waves at the feet of the figures where the bloodied water had burst upon the crowd.

Anna Ybarra watched carefully, trying to understand. It was as if someone had placed a blood clot in the Trevi’s thrashing, flowing vein, then punctured it, sending a pressurized burst of fake gore out onto the models and photographers and curious, gawping bystanders in the crowd.

It was a piece of theater, a visual political gesture, one that possessed a vicious, cruel streak of brilliance.

“Did you kill anyone?” she asked quietly.

“Probably not,” Petrakis said without looking at her. “That wasn’t the point.” He scowled at the screen, as if trying to clarify his thoughts. “I don’t want their fear clouded by hatred. Not yet.”

“You never really needed Joseph there, did you?” she asked quietly. For the first time, she feared him.

Andrea Petrakis watched the mayhem on the screen, amused by his handiwork.

“Of course I did,” he responded, casting her an icy, disappointed look. “Just not for the reason he thought.”

The explosion had been perfectly timed to match the appearance of the world leaders on the podium outside the Quirinale. She’d watched
Andrea give Joseph the Rolex that morning before he set off. The time was wrong, too fast. It had to be. The Nigerian had attempted to detonate the blast a good two minutes before the correct time. He was as much a part of the show as the fake blood and the hidden explosives.

Petrakis turned to Deniz Nesin. “You can email that to the right people? Al Jazeera. The BBC. CNN.”

“In a moment …” the Turk replied.

“And they won’t be able to trace it from here?”

Deniz gazed at him, offended by the question, and said nothing.

“What about Joseph?” she demanded. “If he talks …”

Petrakis wasn’t even listening.

SOMETHING HAPPENED JUST AFTER HE STARTED TO RUN, something loud and shocking and deadly. Joseph Priest wanted to turn to the pair pursuing him and scream:
It wasn’t me
.

The soft, dull roar of an explosion had sent flocks of grubby pigeons scattering into the bright blue sky, shaking the windows of the stores he ran past, putting fear on the faces of the men and women he bumped into as he fled. Within seconds a cacophony of sirens began to rise from the streets around the Trevi Fountain. Joseph Priest raced as quickly as he could in the opposite direction, determined to find sanctuary somewhere, anywhere.

Another narrow cobbled alley. Another line of fashion shops and stores selling cosmetics. Huge photos of beautiful women, smiling down at him, their flawless suntanned flesh seemingly so real, so exposed he felt he could reach out and touch the soft, stray cloud of gentle down on their forearms.

As he fell deeper into the fashion area of the city, becoming ever more lost with every step, he began to feel he was drowning in the modern world he had, for so long, coveted. He stumbled, panting, through the streets that ran from the Spanish Steps to the Corso, a tangle of medieval alleys that had metamorphosed into temples for shoppers who’d pay more for a tiny scrap of denim, manufactured in some distant Third World sweatshop, than he could dream of earning in a month. A universe of brands and trademarks consumed him from every angle,
totemic symbols of a materialism he had craved for as long as he could remember. The faces of international supermodels and sportsmen grinned down at his flight from the clothes stores in the Via Condotti and beyond, as he fought to lose the scary couple who’d picked him out at the Trevi Fountain and known his name all along.

This was not his world, he thought, gasping for breath, too afraid to look behind him for fear of what he might see.

He dashed past an ancient statue, reclining in a fountain, green and algaed, surrounded by water that still bore the clear, untainted sheen of the Acqua Vergine, upstream perhaps of whatever strange device Deniz had placed in the flow near the Trevi. He glanced at the sign on the wall—the Via dei Greci—and realized he understood enough Italian to know what it meant.
The Street of the Greeks
.

The face of Andrea Petrakis popped unbidden into his head, bigger and scarier than the gigantic soccer players and beautiful women leering at him from the storefronts.

Priest dashed into a dark side alley.

A sharp, agonizing pain began to stab at his stomach. He doubled over. As his head went down he realized he’d blundered into a dead end. The cul-de-sac was full of public trash receptacles, green and blue, overflowing with trash. A few meters away stood the grimy, smoke-stained wall that must have marked the rear of some building in the adjoining alley.

He took three hoarse breaths, then looked up, half knowing what he’d see.

They were out of breath too. And angry. The woman more than the man. Her face was shiny with sweat.

There was nowhere to run, even if he had the strength.

Joseph Priest knew when he was beaten. He raised his hands in the air, closed his eyes briefly, tried to collect his thoughts, then opened them. He said, “I got no gun. Nothing.”

They had, though. Two small pistols low at their sides, and they were walking toward him.

“You listening to me?” Priest shoved his arms as high as he could stretch.

From somewhere nearby came the sound of another siren, its tone
descending the scale as the source disappeared down some unseen street.

“No gun,” Priest emphasized. “No nothing. You understand?”

They stopped in front of him and he knew for sure now: She was the boss.

The burly man looked at her, as if waiting for some kind of instruction.

“Listen,” Priest began to plead. “I can tell you where they are. I can tell you what they’ve got. What they plan to do. Everything.”

Not a word, not an emotion.

“E-e-everything,” he stuttered. “They’re crazy. Animals. Lunatics.”

Very slowly, to show there was no ill intent, no concealed weapon, he lowered his left hand, placed it on his heart, and looked the woman in the eye.

“I swear, lady. Whatever you want, it’s yours. The Mungiki made me do these things. I hate those bastards.” He glanced out at the street. “I can take you to these people. To Andrea Petrakis, right now. You never get a problem again. Not from Joe Priest.”

It was as good a performance as he’d ever given. He felt proud of it. The hefty man with the gun was still watching him, hesitating. But the woman …

There was something here Joe didn’t understand.

She flashed her eyes at the figure beside her and said, “Do it.”

Then she turned on her heel.

Joseph Priest, who wished he’d had time to tell them this was his real name, looked up at the guy and found he had to shield his eyes against the light because the sun was that dazzling, that insistent.

“Do what …?” he began to ask, until he realized it was a stupid question, and that he knew the answer already.

The Tomb

THEY WERE PASSING CIVITAVECCHIA WHEN FALCONE called with the lead. Costa turned off the radio to take it. Aldo Bartoli, the brother of the dead
carabiniere
, was still at work, Falcone told him. Aldo was unwilling to discuss the case with a stranger over the phone, but agreeable to a personal approach on the understanding that his name would not be attached to any report.