Costa 08 - City of Fear (13 page)

It was too good an opportunity to miss.

“I’ve an errand for you,” he told the African. “An important one.”

DARIO SORDI’S CD CONTAINED THE CONFIDENTIAL report of the commission into the Blue Demon incident, seventy-nine pages on disc, including a note declaring that Marco Costa, an original member of the investigation, had declined to sign the findings and resigned shortly before the remaining members reached their decidedly anodyne conclusions. His son Nic had read the entire document immediately after the president and his bodyguards left. It was four a.m. before Costa got any sleep. The intuition he’d recognized in Sacro e Profano—that time might be short in the days to come—would soon, he felt, be proved right.

But at least their new home was sufficiently distant from the Questura to give them time to think. Esposito had provided a large, five-room first-floor apartment in a former monastery overlooking the narrow street of San Giovanni in Laterano, close to the vast cathedral that was the seat of the Catholic Church before the construction of St. Peter’s centuries ago. Beyond the Lateran the city was a nightmare: traffic jams in every direction, train and bus cancellations, streets full of angry, scared people walking to work because there was no other way to get there. The headline in
Corriere della Sera
, over a photograph of a threatening watchtower in the Piazza Venezia, with an armed soldier at its summit, said everything:
La città eterna, assediata
. The eternal city, under siege. Radio talk shows carried caller after caller complaining about their plight, and its immediate cause: an unwanted summit at
which the aloof and distant presidents and prime ministers of foreign nations might take cocktails with one another in the Quirinale Palace. To Costa’s surprise and dismay, much of the fury seemed to be directed more at Dario Sordi, who had inherited the chaos, than at Ugo Campagnolo, the man who invited it. There was an intemperate, irrational aspect to the popular mood, one that was almost palpable on the street as he walked past the everyday shops and cafes from his parking place near the hospital.

The safe house occupied a wing of the block, reached by broad stairs that curled around a rickety cast-iron lift rising to the floors above. It wasn’t hard to imagine monks scurrying about the place, though—judging by the rows of strollers parked neatly in the lobby—most of the present occupants seemed to be ordinary families.

They had been joined by the newcomer that Dario Sordi had promised the previous day. Elizabeth Murray, born in London, raised in Italy, had been summoned from retirement to advise the small team Falcone headed. She had arrived in Rome only the evening before, from her farm in New Zealand, and looked a little the worse for the journey. A large, beaming woman, with a very English, weathered face, she might, in another incarnation, have been Peroni’s more aristocratic elder sister. She wore a khaki corduroy skirt over tan leather boots, and a blue denim shirt—winter clothing, she told them, since that was the season in the southern hemisphere. A shepherd’s crook that doubled as a walking stick stood next to the largest armchair in the apartment, which she more than occupied, casting envious glances from time to time at the neighboring desk where Teresa’s deputy, Silvio Di Capua, had taken control of the only two computers in the place.

Esposito appeared to be present only as a matter of principle. He seemed uncomfortable, and anxious to flee back to the Questura.

The
commissario
made terse introductions, then asked Costa to brief everyone on what he had learned overnight. It all came down to one word:
Gladio
. The roots of the organization that Dario Sordi believed was the genesis of the Blue Demon lay in the paranoia among the NATO alliance after the Second World War, when Europe appeared to be one more domino about to fall to expansionist Soviet Russia. Italy, Greece, Austria, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland … all were seen to be
countries that might, in the wrong circumstances, perhaps even by democratic vote, turn communist. To counter such an outcome, the U.S. and the UK, in concert with domestic politicians, formed secret networks of stay-behind undercover agents, often working in affairs of state, the civil service, or other areas of public life, all prepared to carry out whatever was necessary to stave off a Soviet threat.

Much of the groundwork for what would, in Italy, become Gladio was apparently in the hands of Allen Dulles, the founder of the CIA, which was the ultimate financier of most of these operations. In Germany, Dulles had helped form the Gehlen Organization. It was headed by a former Wehrmacht officer turned Cold War spymaster, building a secret group that would one day become a central unit of West Germany’s principal federal intelligence service. In Italy, there had been no such reining in of the Cold War spooks. The stay-behind men had been sought in some of the darkest corners of the fractious postwar state, among the neofascists of the Movimento Sociale Italiano, created by the supporters of Mussolini, and from members of the P2 Masonic Lodge that was to feature in so many Roman and Vatican scandals of the late twentieth century.

The commission had uncovered evidence that Gregor and Alyssa Petrakis, Andrea’s parents, far from being the hippies they appeared, had connections with Gladio’s equivalent in Greece,
Lochoi Oreinõn Katadromõn
, the Mountain Raiding Companies. In the early 1970s, the couple had moved from Athens to the Maremma at the urging of intelligence agents in the right-wing colonels’ junta. Renzo Frasca too did not appear to be the office bureaucrat painted by the American Rennick the day before. There was some unconfirmed evidence to suggest that Frasca had a role as a liaison officer with agents such as the Petrakises.

This, in itself, did not surprise Costa. The Cold War was a time for spooks of all kinds, usually conducting small, secret campaigns against one another in ways that, for someone of his age, seemed quite inexplicable. What shocked him was the report’s section on the methods and aims of Gladio. The men and women of that organization were not, as Dario Sordi seemed to hint, tasked with waiting for some threatened communist takeover before moving into action.

They were there to prevent such a change in the first place, by any means at their disposal.

The cold, blunt language of an internal government document made this clear. The aim of these covert groups was to achieve their purpose through “internal subversion” and a “strategy of tension.” In practice that meant illegal acts and support, where necessary, for terrorist movements that might sway the electorate against voting for a further swing to the left. The commission had interviewed some of those arrested from the Red Brigades trials in Italy and the Baader-Meinhof Gang in Germany. All of them alleged that they had been infiltrated by members of stay-behind teams bringing arms and funds. The names differed. In Belgium, the secret army was called the SDRA8; in Denmark, Absolon; and in Portugal, Aginter. But the intention was always the same: to counter any drift from the center by fomenting unease and uncertainty in the electorate, in an effort to convince the masses that a left-wing coup was imminent, and that safety lay in one direction only, the status quo.

Political allegiances meant less than hard cash and weaponry. Renegade Gladio members quietly helped the Marxist Red Brigades kidnap and murder. At the same time, they had also, Sordi’s report claimed, given money to Ordine Nuovo, the right-wing group behind the Piazza Fontana bomb in Milan in 1969 that killed sixteen people and began the cycle of extremist violence that gripped the country for the next two decades.

As he spoke, the older men—Commissario Esposito, Falcone, and Peroni—who had lived through those years as adults, listened in gloomy silence. Costa could see the growing astonishment on the faces of Mirko, Silvio, and Rosa. For them, these were distant fairy tales from another generation, rumors no one ever quite believed. Even Teresa, who would have been in her early teens when the Years of Lead came to a close, seemed shocked. No one spoke much when Costa was finished. There wasn’t a lot to say. The commission had been summarily shut down before it could reach any firm conclusion—just, Costa suspected, as it was finally beginning to turn up some hard evidence. The final paragraph of the report was a lukewarm conclusion that whatever
threat the Blue Demon had posed ended with the deaths of those involved, and the disappearance, and probable death, of Andrea Petrakis.

He finished and waited. Elizabeth Murray smiled, put up her hand, and said, “A confession. I wrote that rubbish. I was the commission secretary. They moved me there from Intelligence. Does that draft Dario gave you say who else was on the commission?”

“No.”

“Thought not. Only three you need know about. The rest are either dead or in their dotage. You Italians place great faith in the wisdom of age, don’t you? Charming in principle, but infuriating for those who come after. Three. Dario Sordi. Ugo Campagnolo. And your late father. Who was a perfect gentleman for the most part, but could be a real bastard when he felt like it.”

“What was the rush to close it down?” Esposito asked.

The Englishwoman laughed as if the question were ridiculous. “This was politics! Everyone had had enough. Except Marco Costa. It was …” She sighed, and her large shoulders heaved as she did so. “… like rummaging through your own dirty linen. And for what? However much we might have argued about who put that lunatic Andrea Petrakis up to his tricks, the truth was that we were agreed on one thing: It seemed as if it was all over. No reprisals followed for the deaths of those three students in the Maremma. No threats.”

“These allegations,” Costa said. “That the Petrakises were agents of Gladio. That Frasca somehow ran them, or paid for them.”

She screwed up her large, pale face in dissatisfaction. “I was never totally happy with that idea. Gregor and Alyssa were typical Greek fascists, utterly out of control. I doubt anyone could handle them effectively, least of all a junior spook from the U.S. Embassy. Why do you think the colonels sent them over here in the first place? They were sick of all the trouble they were causing in Athens. You won’t find it in the report, but we got a pretty good steer from the Greeks that both Petrakises faced arrest for murder if they were unwise enough to return home. The colonels were long gone by then. There were some half-decent people in the government. The Petrakises were involved in subverting naïve students, and didn’t stop short of a little brutality with
anyone who resisted. Some of those they talked to never came home for supper afterwards.”

She shook her head, as if puzzled by something. “Very much like those three idiots Andrea roped into his scheme, if you think about it. The Greeks didn’t mind taking Gregor and Alyssa back when they were dead, mind. I saw the grave for myself. They were buried together beneath the same stone in a little cemetery not far from the Plaka. I had a damned good lunch afterwards, and on expenses too.”

“The commission sent you to Athens?” Costa asked. “Why?”

“To talk to Greek Intelligence, of course. I told you. The colonels were gone. We were all good Europeans together. The new people let me see the files, some of them, anyway. The Petrakises were career criminals who worked as hired hands for anyone who paid them. When they weren’t doing the dirty work for LOK, they were busy robbing, stealing, buying and selling dope. Not a nice couple at all.”

Mirko Oliva sat on his chair, wide-eyed, speechless. Elizabeth Murray leaned forward and smiled at him.

“Yes, children. All of this happened, here, not long before you were born.”

“And Frasca?” Falcone wanted to know.

“The Americans stonewalled us,” she replied. “Just as they stonewalled you yesterday in the Quirinale. Frasca was Intelligence, probably CIA. A thoroughly decent government officer, from what I could gather. It’s possible, I say no more, that he was trying to dismantle the nonsense he’d inherited. This was the late eighties. The collapse of the Eastern Bloc was just around the corner. Anyone with half a brain could see that coming. The Cold War was in its death throes. Who needed a bunch of right-wing crazies running around Europe handing out guns and banknotes to any passing terrorist they could find? Just to keep out a Russian regime that was crumbling from within anyway, with that very nice man Gorbachev at the helm?”

She hesitated, thinking. “I suspect the smart money was already on the next threat coming from the east. From Afghanistan, Pakistan. Washington got the message first. Makes sense. They put the mujahideen through college in the first place. By the late eighties the CIA
had started cutting up Osama’s Company AmEx card. Dealing with thugs and terrorists in Europe didn’t matter anymore. That battle was won. It was only a question of waiting for the Berlin Wall to come down. Though that’s partly conjecture, which is entertaining, but ultimately futile. The truth is, I don’t know what Renzo Frasca did, exactly. Except he was no bean counter.”

“False flags,” Teresa murmured.

Elizabeth Murray smiled at her and nodded.