Costa 08 - City of Fear (12 page)

Rome was less than eighty kilometers away, accessible through a variety of means. The coastal highway was the swiftest and most perilous. He preferred the back roads, skirting all the main towns, then leading to what was once the Via Claudia, close to Bracciano and its great lake, northwest of the capital. The circuitous route took twice as long, but Petrakis had insisted they return that way the previous day. It was a sound precaution; by late afternoon random checks were in place on every main road. On the narrow country lanes they never saw so much as a police or Carabinieri car. There was a personal dimension too. The Via Claudia was built by Nero, stretching across the Alps into what was now Austria, a conduit through which to subdue the fractious tribes of Europe. Every time he followed in the footsteps of those distant legions, he was reminded of what Rome had always represented.

It was a cloudless sunny morning, hot even at eight. A single jet wheeled high overhead on the approach to Fiumicino or Ciampino. Not for much longer. He’d watched the TV avidly since rising at dawn, happy to hear his own name mentioned alongside a photofit cobbled up from a few old images, one that would help no one. The airports would close later that morning. Road restrictions were coming into force throughout the city. Rome would slowly become paralyzed by its own fear, watched over by menacing guard posts, snipers on balconies, secret-service officers mingling with the mute and angry people on the streets. The authorities were advising that only those with essential duties should report to work. Shop staff and office workers knew what that meant: They were supposed to stay at home and lose three or four days’ pay. The unions were threatening to strike, a response that seemed peculiarly Roman.

Andrea Petrakis completed his seventh length of the pool, then hiked himself up onto the tiled perimeter by the steps and looked back at the villa. They would be visible from the nearest house, a farm a kilometer away. That made him happy. He wanted to maintain the appearance they’d given since their arrival. In the local shops, buying bread and wine, outside in the garden, by the pool, they could have been any group of foreign friends on holiday. A middle-aged Italian with a ready smile, hair that—after some time in the bathroom the previous evening—was now cropped short and dyed a deep shade of brown. A tall, black African, in his twenties, athletic, who couldn’t stop listening to music on his headphones whenever he had the chance, dancing along to whatever he heard. A quiet, introspective dark-skinned man, foreign, perhaps, from the Middle East, with the distanced, almost arrogant air of a businessman.

And a woman. Anna Ybarra. Spanish, though she would doubtless regard herself as Basque. She had the muscular, full body of a peasant, long dark hair, and a guileless, compelling face, that of the Madonna in some medieval painting—plain, not beautiful, or pretty, yet impossible not to admire. A woman who would always attract attention, turn heads as she passed.

With her round, guileless eyes, which seemed to engage with the world and find only amazement, Anna Ybarra had an air of intriguing
innocence. She was twenty-seven but, at times, looked no more than a teenager. For all these reasons, he chose her above the other individuals trawled from the covert links they possessed around the world. Many had more talents, few more motivation. None looked less like a terrorist, and this, above all else, made her invaluable. The police and the secret services worked the way they knew, with precision and practice based on past experience. They would be looking for what their shared understanding told them to seek: a group of men hiding in the network of safe houses that the organization had acquired the length of Europe. The online news services were already talking of raids on suspected Muslim extremists in the grim immigrant suburbs of Rome, Milan, Turin, and beyond. This was what he hoped for, knowing that not one of those whom the police would arrest could breathe a word about what was happening, for the simplest of reasons: None knew. This was an operation that came from on high, like 9/11, Madrid, and the London bombs. No one could have expected it, because no one, outside the closest circle of those moving to and fro each evening on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, was aware that the plot existed.

He could imagine the men the Italians had rounded up, locked in some grim cell, being screamed at by interrogators, wondering if the Americans might intercede at any moment, whisk them away to a private jet and a short trip to a friendly foreign country where torture was an everyday occurrence. Rendition was supposed to be banned in Italy; the politicians had demanded that after one case had resulted in criminal prosecutions against some of those involved. But in reality …?

Petrakis had no idea whether it would happen or not, and he didn’t care. The pain and outrage would make the detention all the more galling, and there would be mistakes, as there always were, which the media would seize upon and scream from the rooftops as evidence of the new, draconian state.

Terror was about more than the visible act. It concerned the temperament of a nation, the breaking of its spirit, the destruction of anything it could use to cling to the certainties of the past.

By the side of the pool, he found his attention drifting to the woman once more. He had checked her story himself, every last detail. She had
grown up in the Basque country, daughter of a simple country farmer. Married at nineteen. A mother at twenty-one. Five years later, in the midst of a police crackdown after ETA exploded a bomb at Madrid airport, killing three people, a covert anti-terror squad had stormed into the farmhouse she shared with her husband. It was a nighttime raid, badly handled. In the ensuing firefight he had died, and so had their little boy, who was just a week away from his fifth birthday. When the sun rose on their humble home outside the village of Hernani, near San Sebastián, it shed light on a terrible mistake. The police had entered the wrong house, thinking it belonged to her brother-in-law, an ETA sympathizer. Her husband had merely been trying to defend his family against a group of armed masked men who had hammered down the door and attacked them. He was no ETA member, not even a supporter. But soon afterwards, when she was allowed home from the hospital where she was treated for a minor gunshot wound to the abdomen, Anna Ybarra was. A volunteer demanding something special, something that would give her satisfaction.

The other two were different. Joseph Priest was a member of the Kenyan Mungiki gang, half terrorist, half criminal, someone who could be relied upon to kill without a thought and steal everything he could find from the corpses left behind. Money was Joseph’s god, though not as much as it was for the men who had sent him all the way from Nairobi.

Deniz Nesin grew up in the wild lands of eastern Turkey and was the brotherhood’s placeman in the team. A frontline soldier who’d trained suicide units in Afghanistan, Palestine, and Iraq, helped develop networks of supporters throughout the world, set up conduits through which cash and arms and technical equipment might be moved swiftly and securely. Never once getting caught, getting wounded, getting his face or alias out on the wires.

Petrakis liked him. Or, rather, he felt comfortable in his presence. The man was a type he had come to recognize and understand over the last two decades. A severe, dedicated fundamentalist through and through, never missing prayer, never far from his copy of a well-thumbed Koran, Deniz was meticulous, predictable, determined, and, when necessary, capable of instant and extreme violence. With these
strengths came flaws and fallibilities. Deniz was a zealot surrounded by atheists. He had accepted Petrakis’s leadership because the proposal was too tempting to ignore. Still, he was unhappy in the company of strangers, and the presence of Anna Ybarra preyed upon him deeply, in part for her forthright character, but more for the reliance they had come to place on a woman.

It was of no consequence. This was Petrakis’s operation. She was his choice, as were they. He’d made his position plain to the people at the top, not in person because he wasn’t quite of sufficient stature to gain that privilege. But through video links and covert emails, exchanged with their shifting camps that flitted constantly, between Afghanistan and Pakistan, Petrakis had persuaded them, by the force of his argument and the strength of his position. Either the venture happened his way or it didn’t happen at all. They didn’t like the implicit threat in that statement. Still, they knew the truth in what he was saying. Italy would be on the alert for a conventional terrorist team, willing to lock up anyone who generated the slightest suspicion. In order to penetrate to the heart of Rome, new tactics were needed. No hijacked planes. No homemade bombs, crafted out of chemicals and fertilizer, left on commuter trains, detonated by a simple phone call.

What was required was terror on a different scale. An enormity that would send a message to the citizens of one of the most beautiful, ancient cities in the world: No one is exempt, no one is immune.

“Andrea!”

Anna’s curiously accented English drifted to him from the patio.

He turned to look. Deniz and Joseph were seated at the outdoor dining table. The African nursed a coffee. Deniz was playing with the satellite phone they’d had programmed onto an illicit frequency of one of the networks the Americans supposedly couldn’t crack. He wore a face like thunder.

Anna walked in front of the two of them wearing a swimsuit that was too old for her.

“What’s the water like?” she called.

“Wet,” Petrakis called back. “What do you expect?”

She laughed and uttered something in Spanish, a curse, probably a nasty one. He liked having this woman around. There’d been nothing in
the way of real female company in Afghanistan. Just “wives” who materialized to fill the perceived need. Anna answered back. He hadn’t heard that kind of spirit in a female for a long time.

Deniz muttered something caustic in Arabic.

“If you want to insult me,” Anna retorted, standing in front of him, hands on her hips, “at least do it in a language I can understand.”

“Show some modesty,” he grumbled.

“After yesterday you want modesty?”

Joseph raised his coffee cup. “Good point.”

Deniz swore and went back to the phone. Anna shook her head, came over to the pool, dived in, swam a length underwater, then bobbed up next to Petrakis.

“What do we do today?” she asked him.

“Relax. Stop bugging Deniz.”

She stared at him, her long hair slicked back against her head. It made her round, tanned face even more striking.

“I’m wearing a very ordinary swimsuit. This is not Afghanistan. He doesn’t get to stone me to death here.”

“We don’t need distractions.”

“Why do you never tell us anything?” she asked. “Who was that man who came here in your little plane? The Greek? Where is he?”

Deniz went back into the house, taking the satphone with him. Joseph had his eyes closed and was listening to some beat on his iPod, feet jogging, looking every inch the rich, idle tourist.

“I don’t know what rules you had in ETA,” Petrakis told her. “But here, I tell you what you need to know, when you need to know it.”

“I don’t know what rules they had, either. I wasn’t a part of ETA. That’s why you wanted me.”

She let her body float up to the surface, go rigid, then drifted across the rippling surface of the pool on her back. He watched her, couldn’t help it. Her figure reminded him of that girl from Treviso who’d died in his parents’ cottage.…

Andrea Petrakis found himself thinking of the parties they’d held in those final days, seeing them briefly in his head, remembering the touch of warm skin, the liquid sound of doped-up laughter, the furtive, anxious sex. There’d been no rules there, either.

Very briskly, with the swiftness of an athlete, Anna flipped over, disappeared beneath the surface, and came up by his legs.

“Deniz should think himself lucky,” she said. “The reason I’m wearing an old woman’s bathing suit is that I hate people seeing the scar. Where they shot me. Right …” She made a cutting gesture over her stomach. “… here.” She looked at him and asked, “Why did you kill the boy?”

“I had no choice. And he wasn’t a boy.”

She gave him a searching glance. “You could have let him live. He was soft in the head. Boy or man, he didn’t even know which day of the week it was.”

“Danny went to pieces.”

“Does that always happen the first time?” she asked. There was a cold, curious look in her eyes. He’d deliberately left her out of the seizure of Batisti. She lacked the experience, the training.

“It didn’t with me. It won’t with you.”

She frowned. “Can I ask you something? You’ll tell me the truth? Promise?”

“If it’s a question I can answer, then I will tell you. If not …”

“You meant to kill him all along, didn’t you? That was what he was for. A piece of the plan. Like all of us.” Her dark eyes never left him. “Me the innocent. Joseph the dumb one. Deniz”—she cast a cold glance at the house—“the bigot. Is that why you chose us?”

“I chose you because you wanted this, Anna.”

He checked his watch and looked north, along the stark stretch of Maremma coastline. It was only a ten-minute drive to the excavation where they’d uncovered the original Blue Demon, the place that had captivated him when he first saw it almost thirty years before. He felt he could stare at that face forever, with its eyes that burned like red-hot coals, full of malice toward everything that lived.

“Joseph,” he yelled.

The long, lean black figure took off the headphones and looked across at them, puzzled.

Petrakis thought of Rome and the tourist mecca not far from the Spanish Steps. Ugo Campagnolo had neglected to check his calendar when he booked the leaders of the world’s industrialized nations for
their stay in the city. It was also Fashion Week, an annual ritual that would not walk away easily, whatever the pressure. That morning there would be an event for the world’s photographers. Models and the media. Anxious, gawping crowds, all packed around the Trevi Fountain, none of them more than a minute’s walk away from the Via Rasella.