Costa 08 - City of Fear (36 page)

“Would Andrea Petrakis—who hasn’t, as far as we know, been in Italy for twenty years—assume that someone would have that kind of information?” he asked.

“Unlikely.”

“So it’s not a phone number. It’s not a reference to a Shakespeare play. It’s not”—he took a long swig of tepid coffee on the desk—“anything.”

“Roman numerals,” she said. “The classics …”

“Virgil, Homer, Tacitus, Suetonius. There’s nothing that breaks down into the right subdivisions. The
Aeneid
—yes, it has a twelfth book. But no acts, no scenes, just line numbers, and they won’t work. Tacitus—there are books and chapters and line numbers, but no scenes, and not enough books, either. Suetonius—at least there we’ve got something obvious. The book is called
The Twelve Caesars
. But the twelfth Caesar is Domitian, and where would he come in?”

He flicked up a hidden window on the screen, one of so many he’d lost count.

“Section twenty-one might fit.”

Di Capua read out from the translation.

“‘He used to say that the lot of princes was most unhappy, since when they discovered a conspiracy, no one believed them unless they had been killed.’
And here, the following paragraph,
‘He was excessively lustful. His constant sexual intercourse he called bed-wrestling, as if it were a kind of exercise. It was reported that he depilated his concubines with his own hand and swam with common prostitutes.’
” The young pathologist sighed. “At least you have to say Ugo Campagnolo is conforming to type. But that’s as far as the connections go.”

“It’s a long time since I read
The Twelve Caesars,”
Elizabeth confessed. “What happened to Domitian?”

“Murdered by his own courtiers,” Di Capua told her. “Stabbed to death in his bedroom by a bunch of civil servants. You can see why Shakespeare never bothered with
him.”
He glanced at the screen. “Sounds as if he deserved it, though. Bloodthirsty bastard …”

“Weren’t they all? Let’s take this one step at a time. If these numbers are separate digits, why do you have to assume they all refer to the same thing?”

“Because …” he began. The answer was so stupid he couldn’t say it.
Because that is the only way they would make sense to someone who doesn’t know the secret
.

Anyone who had the key wouldn’t think that way. They could decode the answer easily, by splitting the different parts into some simple system they understood already.

“I’m an idiot,” Silvio Di Capua said softly. “These don’t refer to just one thing. It’s more than that. So the question is …” He thought about this. Time was growing short. “What do we have if we treat these as separate numbers, not some contiguous code?” he mused.

Elizabeth Murray pulled up her chair and stared at the screen. Di Capua felt happy in the presence of this woman. She was intelligent, methodical.

Suddenly she picked up the paperback edition of the collected works of Shakespeare he’d bought at the bookstore around the corner and flicked through a few pages. Then she shook her head, patted his shoulder, and said, “I can’t help you here, Silvio. Let me call my friend. She’s a classical scholar. Let me talk to her over lunch.”

“Enjoy it,” he muttered, hammering the keyboard. “I’ll be a while.”

A question occurred to him. What kind of sentence would begin with a number?

“Elizabeth …” he began to ask.

He swiveled around in the desk chair, but she was gone.

IT WAS IMPOSSIBLE TO GUESS THE NUMBER OF MASKED armed men crammed into the doorway of Borromini’s little church. Teresa Lupo was yelling. Falcone stood, unmoving, in front of Luca Palombo, the man from the Ministry of the Interior, Peroni and Rosa beside him. Rennick—Nic couldn’t think of him by any other name—was now secure in Costa’s grip, cuffed and not saying a word, listening to Palombo shout down the incandescent pathologist, then start to read the riot act.

Letizia Russo was nowhere to be seen. Perhaps she’d encountered these anonymous figures with rifles and feared the worst. Perhaps Palombo had already taken custody of the one witness who could testify to the American’s true identity.

The security man’s lecture was brief and caustic. When he was done reminding them that they had no place being where they were, Palombo turned to Costa and ordered, “Now release him.”

Falcone remained stock-still in front of their prisoner and said, very calmly, “We have a witness who has identified Signor Rennick as Renzo Frasca. We have reason to believe he was involved in the murder of the Petrakis couple twenty years ago.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Rennick barked.

“We have evidence that he had knowledge of the Blue Demon tomb, where a colleague of ours was murdered last night,” Falcone persisted.
“At the very least, we must take him in for questioning. It’s a matter of the law.”

“The law says he has a diplomatic passport,” Palombo shot back. “Along with that comes immunity.”

“It’s a passport issued under a false name. Sir,” Peroni snapped. “In my book that makes it invalid.”

“I wasn’t aware it was the job of some has-been
agente
in the state police to decide immigration policy. Release him. That’s an order.”

“We don’t take orders from you,” Falcone said.

The tall, lean spook turned away abruptly and made a phone call. They waited. He came back and handed over the handset.

The inspector’s face fell. “Sir,” he murmured, listening. Then: “You asked for evidence, Commissario. We have it. A positive ID of Signor Rennick as Renzo Frasca. His phone number on the person of the arms dealer killed in Tarquinia. These raise many, many questions. I cannot …”

They could hear the voice rising out of the phone, tinny and furious.

“You’re ordering me to release an identified suspect in a case involving several murders and terrorist acts, including the death of a police officer,” Falcone said with a stony face. “May I know why?”

A single scream emerged from the handset. Then nothing.

Falcone pocketed the phone. Palombo held out his hand toward the American.

“Allow me to say this one thing first,” Falcone pleaded, looking him straight in the eye. “I understand your position, Palombo. This is a crisis. We are simply police officers who do what they see as their duty, without access to all the facts. There are ramifications here we do not understand, nor should we. This man”—he indicated Rennick—“is an impostor. He is at the very heart of your operations. He knows as much as, or more than, Giovanni Batisti, who was seized just a few meters from here, by an individual that I suspect Rennick—or Frasca, you choose—must know personally.”

“Speculation, Inspector.” Palombo’s sigh was bored.

“Of course it’s
speculation
, you moron!” Teresa yelled. “That’s why we need him to come down to the Questura to answer some questions.”

Palombo gestured toward Costa. “You will release Signor Rennick into my custody. Your own
commissario
has told you the same thing. Capitano?”

One of the masked figures came closer, his weapon half raised.

“Oh, brother!” Teresa shrieked, pointing a finger in his face. “What brave boys! You don’t dare show your faces out in the daylight. A bigger bunch of brainless, dickless idiots—”

Falcone intervened, moving between her and Palombo. “Let me deal with this. Nic?”

Costa got the message. He unlocked the cuffs. Rennick shook himself free. The man, to his credit, looked guilty. Upset. Apologetic, even.

“I intend to see you again before you leave Italy,” Costa told him. “When you’re without your friends.”

“Don’t jump to conclusions,” the American said.

“I’ll pass that on to Mirko Oliva’s parents when we’re allowed to tell them their son is dead.…”

Palombo had his hand on Rennick’s arm. The American removed the Italian’s long fingers, as if he felt some distaste at their touch.

“None of us here”—Rennick nodded at the soldiers and Palombo—“means you or Italy any harm. You’ll see.”

Costa looked at him, wondering how he could have been so stupid. He recalled Elizabeth Murray’s stories of a world shaped by the dying days of the Cold War. Letizia Russo had painted a picture of a tight little family that seldom went out of the house, never made friends, kept itself separate, and would one day make an astonishing sacrifice for no obvious reason. There was, he understood suddenly, only one possible explanation for that.

“You’ve been waiting for this moment for twenty years or more, haven’t you? These acts are the price you expect us to pay for some greater benefit that ordinary men and women cannot see. Elena Majewska. Giovanni Batisti. Mirko Oliva … What’s that neat little euphemism you use? Collateral damage?”

Palombo marched in between them and barked, “Enough!”

“No!” Rennick cried.

The two men faced up to each other. It was the Italian who backed down.

“These officers have lost a colleague,” Rennick told Palombo. “They deserve something. They deserve more than we can give them.”

He ordered the men at the doorway to leave. Luca Palombo stood where he was.

“I’m no happier with these deaths than you are, nor do I understand why they occurred,” the American said, shaking his head. “But how many people died on 9/11? In Madrid? Bali? London? Thousands. Perhaps thousands more in the future, unless we win this war.”

“Ben,” Palombo murmured. “This isn’t necessary.…”

“Yes it is,” Rennick insisted. “Imagine we could place a spy right there, in with them. Not in the training camps. Not with the middlemen. I mean at the very top, a place we’ve never penetrated before. Imagine we could fake some event that persuaded them they could trust someone who was ours. Take him straight into their lair. You know their names. We all do. You know we’ve been trying to find them for years, and we never will, not without some traitor in their midst. A man who has their absolute confidence because of what he’s done.”

“For that you’ll sacrifice Rome?” Rosa asked him.

“For that I’d sacrifice my life. And the lives of others too. We all pay a price, one way or another. This is the way it is. It’s not pretty or tidy or safe, and that’s why we told you to stay away. For your own good. There will be one more attack. It will be spectacular. It will not cost a single innocent life. Sometime tomorrow”—he glanced outside, toward the empty street—“things will start to return to normal. Here, anyway. I promise that. And in a little while, a month perhaps, a year … we will find them, the men we’ve been looking for all these years. The seed we plant here will bear fruit.”

“Twenty years is a long time to be undercover, isn’t it?” Teresa asked. “Twenty years among people you’re supposed to hate. Have you never heard of the Stockholm syndrome? How do you know Andrea Petrakis is still yours?”

Palombo pointed at Costa and Rosa. “It’s thanks to this man you two are still alive. Do you think that was just an accident?”

“You were lucky,” Rennick said bluntly. “I was worried when he didn’t call in. I’m sorry I didn’t get there soon enough for your friend. I tried to tell you. This is a field operation: Step into it at your own risk.
We’re done. We’re going now. No more questions. No more answers. Good day.”

But Palombo lingered as he left.

“Do not repeat one word of what you heard here to anyone,” he told them. “I will deal with you people later.”

They watched the two men join the masked officers in the street, climbing into their armored black vans. The vehicles passed through the barricade and headed toward the tightly guarded piazza of the Quirinale Palace.

EARLY AFTERNOON. ON A NORMAL DAY, MEN AND WOMEN flocked from their offices, walking to a favorite cafe or restaurant to sit down with a coffee and a
panino
, a plate of pasta, a dish of meat and vegetables from some neighborhood
tavola calda
, to discuss football and politics, work and the cost of living. New friendships and enmities began, old ones blossomed, faded, and ended. Everywhere, from the drab commercial streets of Parioli to the tourist quarters of the Campo dei Fiori and the little alleys of the ghetto, there was life, with its awkward idiosyncrasies, its argumentative logic and irregular serendipity.