Costa 08 - City of Fear (27 page)

“Tarquinia,” Falcone told him. “They should be at the hotel by now. I told Nic to do nothing but ask questions. I
told
him …”

Teresa walked outside, muttering something about indecision and men.

It was still hot. The street was empty. There ought to have been late-night shoppers and couples going out for dinner, arm in arm, laughing. Instead, two
carabinieri
wandered past cradling automatic weapons, their chests enveloped in heavy bulletproof jackets. They stared hard at a pair of forlorn street musicians, one with an accordion, the other with a trumpet, who were counting their few coins in the light of the fashion store on the far side of the street.

Teresa dialed Nic’s number. The phone rang for a long time before the automatic answer-message kicked in. The same thing happened with Rosa Prabakaran’s phone, and Mirko Oliva’s.

“We can ask someone in Tarquinia to go looking,” Peroni suggested, suddenly at her side. Falcone stood beside him.

“Look where?” Falcone asked.

Teresa called Silvio Di Capua. They had an arrangement with the phone companies. When necessary they could try to track down the location of the cell from which a call was made. It was inexact. But it was something.

Peroni listened and when she was finished asked, “When will they be back with an answer?”

“An hour. Maybe more.” She stared at Falcone. “It’s going to take us longer than that to get there, isn’t it?”

He didn’t answer immediately. She knew why. Nic wasn’t supposed to be near Tarquinia.

“Are you going to tell our people in Tarquinia or not?” she asked.

“Tell them what?” Falcone demanded. “That we’ve had a single obscure text message from a young and inexperienced police officer who’s somewhere he doesn’t belong?”

Peroni shrugged. “It’s not like Nic to be out of touch like this. Or Rosa.”

“I know that,” Falcone replied, exasperated. “I also know what the cost will be to them if Palombo finds out where they’ve been. I don’t care about my career. Is it worth risking theirs for two words on a phone?”

“There’s only one way to find out, Leo,” Peroni said.

Falcone didn’t answer the big ugly cop. They followed as he strode to his Lancia on the other side of the Corso.

It was the worst journey out of Rome Teresa had ever known. The main route to the coast was closed. So was the Autostrada Azzurra, which should have been the obvious way north, past the airport’s silent runways.

Falcone fought and argued his way through traffic jams and road checks until they found the Via Aurelia, and followed it until they began to hug the shoreline, past the old Etruscan towns of Ladispoli and Cerveteri, and the choked modern port of Civitavecchia, which took almost an hour to navigate. It was as if everyone wanted to hide, to get home, get indoors, try to believe that safety lay in being outside Rome, behind the walls of one’s own house, joined to the world outside by nothing more than a TV set and a phone line.

Driving through these dead, empty towns and villages, Teresa felt as if she were entering a wasteland.

It was almost a comfort when, as they finally navigated Civitavecchia and the road turned inland, away from the sea, toward Tarquinia, a sign appeared that there was someone alive in the night.

They stopped at a rest area. Peroni needed it. From somewhere over the steady roll of the waves came the noise of an engine. A fishing boat trawling for a catch, she guessed, though it sounded louder than she might have expected, and more highly pitched, and the source of the noise seemed to come as much from the sky as the dark, shifting waters of the Tyrrhenian.

THE NIGHT REMINDED HIM OF THE EAST: BRIGHT AND clear, with a luminous moon stuck onto a sky punctured by a million starry pinpricks. The same sky he’d watched for two decades on the run, always waiting, always thinking. Of home and the Blue Demon, of his parents, and what had happened. Lives that had been diverted from their natural courses, turned by events toward unexpected, unforeseen paths.

For twenty years Andrea Petrakis had dreamed of his return to the place of his birth. Not Italy, but Etruria, a place of freedom, a land where one’s future was mapped out by the strength of human will, where everything was possible for those who dared. His father had taught him that it was his legacy, a destiny deep within the blood. He learned how the Greeks prefigured the Romans, establishing a world built on individual freedom, power from a man’s personal fortitude, not birth or position or luck. How the Greeks had crossed the Ionian Sea, colonized the south, the Magna Graecia of modern Sicily, Apulia, and Calabria, home to Pythagoras, an outpost of Athens in Italy. This was the base from which the men of Greece spread north, occupying the land from Naples to the Po, forging the Etruscan identity, bringing philosophy and art, politics and culture, to the primitive tribes that lived there, giving meaning to their little lives. Until Rome grew ever stronger and, in the Pyrrhic War, might defeated right. The Greeks fell everywhere, becoming little more than slaves to the newer, duller, more mundane civilization they had themselves created. Zeus was toppled by an
army of bureaucrats and mediocrities, men whose first response upon finding themselves in the foothills of Olympus was to pillage everything that went before.

When he was ten years old, he read Virgil’s paean to Arcadia, an homage to a lost pastoral Greek ideal written for a Roman emperor, Augustus, who himself rued the disappearance of the past. Virgil was an Etruscan too, they said, and Andrea Petrakis didn’t doubt it for a moment.

His father had first taken him to see the Blue Demon not long afterwards. The tomb hidden in the woods seemed like a sanctuary, somewhere holy. Even fleeing the NATO troops in Afghanistan, hiding out in the mountains, in fear for his life, Petrakis could never forget the fire burning in the eyes of the devil who tore apart the Etruscans as they danced and made love on their way to eternity. Or what the creature truly stood for, the real identity of the beast.

Something caught his attention and dragged him back to the present. The headlights of a car flickered through the blackness below his little plane as it cruised a precise two hundred and fifty feet above the dark, gleaming waters north of Civitavecchia. Petrakis responded immediately; he gunned the Rotax to feed some power into a sharp turn to the right.

The port was busy. There would be radar and shipping, the coast guard and other, more shadowy security services. In Afghanistan he had sought intelligence during the planning stages, when he was determined that every eventuality must be considered, every possible twist in the scheme dealt with. It was easy in the modern world,
their
world, to discover the facts. They could scarcely resist boasting about them, on the Web, through sites he could find with a satellite connection on his laptop, even in a poppy farmer’s tent in the Helmand Valley. Marine ground-radar scanned up to a hundred feet above the sea. The active aviation systems of Fiumicino and Ciampino would detect anything above five hundred, whether it carried a transponder or not. There was a slender gap of invisibility between the two, a layer of darkness into which his tiny microlight could flit undetected.

With his flimsy machine he was able to take off and land from a short, hidden country strip, to evade their radar, to fly slowly down the coastline, south toward Rome, cruising at a modest sixty knots, the
craft trimmed out and kept straight and level by the cheap, simple autopilot.

On the passenger seat and in the small space in the rear of the cockpit lay as much explosive from the Etruscan tomb as the weight and balance limits of the plane would allow. Strapped to his back, bulky and uncomfortable, was a two-thousand-dollar BASE ram-air parachute secured from a specialist supplier in Milan, delivered to the villa the week before.

Petrakis had undergone illicit training in BASE jumping at a small airfield near Karachi. A rogue member of the Pakistani air force had taken him aloft three times to teach him the technique, on each occasion reducing the height from which they exited the jump plane. This was no ordinary system. The rectangular chute was designed to cope with low-altitude jumps that were impossible for the conventional skydiver.

There was no room for error, no secondary canopy that could be deployed in the event of failure. These were the devices that BASE jumpers used to leap from buildings and cliff tops. They could function in a descent of five hundred feet or less, a distance a man in free fall would cover in fewer than six seconds.

He thought of the Blue Demon, and the legacy in his blood. Then Petrakis placed his hand on his back and felt the straps there.

The moon was bright and serene, its rippled reflection lying on the surface of the gentle waves as if beached there. Petrakis watched as the mouth of the Tiber approached.

There was not a plane in the sky. The city of Fiumicino, twenty-five kilometers inland, marked by a halo of light, was cut off.

He followed the coast as it turned southeast, marking fifteen kilometers, still at the same height, waiting for the moment. Once he had passed the long, straight road of Via Cristoforo Colombo, named after one more Italian pirate, he was clear. This was the final route from the nearest shore back to Rome. There was nothing after that but flat, empty farmland, all the way to the second airport, Ciampino, where Air Force One and the private jets of most of the visiting G8 leaders sat on the asphalt.

When the marker beeped on the GPS, he turned, setting the final
destination of the plane: the apron at Ciampino, directly in front of the terminal building. Latitude 41°48’4.76″N, longitude 12°35’21.49″E. He pictured the destination in his head as he locked the cheap autopilot to the handheld GPS unit.

The modern world was, he decided, like ancient Rome in many ways. It invented the means of its own destruction, in the name of science and knowledge and prosperity, blinded to the threat of its own arrogance. Twenty years before, when he’d learned to fly in a battered old Cessna 152, nothing like this existed. No power on earth would have allowed him to penetrate to the inner sanctum of the state in the way he now planned.

Five kilometers short of Ciampino, the airfield clearly visible ahead, outlined by runway lights, Andrea Petrakis unfastened his pilot’s harness. He took out his second GPS unit, a tiny handheld model meant for walkers. It had long since seized the position. He waited for the waypoint he’d agreed upon with Deniz Nesin and Anna Ybarra before they left Tarquinia: the long, perfectly straight line of the old Appian Way, running almost parallel to Ciampino’s runway, just a kilometer short of the field.

He looked down. A car was there, where it was supposed to be. He watched as it flashed its headlights close to the circular tower of the tomb of Cecilia Metella, the monument’s silhouette clear in the moonlit night.

Petrakis brought the plane up to six hundred feet, aware that at any moment, somewhere in the control room of Ciampino, an air traffic control officer would notice a blip on the radar screen.

It was too late for them to do anything. Even if a military fighter was in the area, it would now have little more than a minute in which to act. No jet could maneuver onto a previously unseen target in such time. They worked the way they had always worked, on the basis that the opposing parties fought by the same rules.

He’d calculated the glide path, the rate of descent. He knew the simple autopilot was working as intended. The laws of physics applied to everyone, equally. Petrakis trimmed the plane down into a steady, accelerating descent—one that would soon rise to a hundred knots or more—checked that the autopilot was locked on the GPS coordinates, then ripped open the flimsy door of the plane and half fell, half leaped out into the black fury of the night.

THERE WAS A VOICE SOMEWHERE. FEMALE, TREMULOUS, familiar. It spoke his name. Marooned somewhere between wakefulness and dream, he wanted to turn toward the source of the sound.

“Nic …” it said more insistently.

A hand shook his shoulder. Costa found himself being turned upright. He didn’t know where he was. Then the memories flooded back, full of pain and despair. Rosa Prabakaran was staring at him, bleary-eyed, exhausted, frightened.