Costa 08 - City of Fear (28 page)

He said the first words that came into his hurting head. “Why are we still alive?”

“I don’t know,” she whispered. Then, as if she hated to say the words, she added, glancing backwards, to some unseen place behind him, “Mirko isn’t.”

Costa dragged himself upright, fighting the crashing stab of hurt the effort brought on. Someone had slugged him hard on the back of the skull. Someone …

Memories. A gun fired close to Rosa. Andrea Petrakis—a man who, they assumed, was working as part of a lone hit team—had taken an incoming phone call, one that had enraged him much more than the presence of three police officers invading his private lair. These things were important, though at that moment Costa lacked the energy and the intelligence to understand why.

He walked over to look at the motionless figure visible beneath the
intense, prurient moon. The young police officer’s corpse lay where Petrakis had shot him, stretched on the dry summer grass, arms akimbo, face bloodied and blank. In death he looked like a teenager.

Rosa was by Costa’s side. “They took the car. They took everything. What do we do?”

He looked up at the sky, thinking. “Are you all right?” he asked her.

“My head hurts.”

He stepped forward so that the silver light fell on her face and said, “Show me.”

She turned. He reached forward and touched a matted patch of fine hair behind one ear.

“Ouch!”

“Sorry. It’s not so bad. They …” He fought to remember those last moments. One recollection stood out. “I thought they’d shot you.”

“He fired into the ground. Then they struck me. I was too scared to do anything. I couldn’t even find the courage to run. Then …” Her voice broke. “Mirko … how could someone do that? As if he didn’t really matter?”

“He didn’t,” Costa answered. Mirko Oliva’s life carried no more meaning than that of the golden-haired young man whose body had been riddled with bullets in the Via Rasella. Petrakis had a mission. Nothing would stand in its way.

Yet, somehow, they had survived.

He checked his jacket. Nothing. No weapon. Not even a wallet. His police cell phone was gone. So was the tiny phone Dario Sordi had given him.

“Do we have anything else?” he asked Rosa.

“Just this.” She had a flashlight in her hand. “It was Mirko’s, I think. He must have dropped it.”

“Stay here.”

“You’re leaving me?” she asked, outraged.

“I’m going back into the tomb. Do you want to come? It may be a waste of time. Your choice.”

She didn’t blink. Rosa Prabakaran said, “I’ll come.”

The way seemed shorter the second time around. He didn’t look at the paintings on the wall, in the large chamber or the small. He walked on, feeling Rosa’s arm touching his for safety, for comfort.

When they got to the corpse slumped in the corner, in the room of the Blue Demon, the rats scurried away once more.

Costa bent to look at the man. He’d been shot through the mouth and the chest. It was the same kind of death that had been delivered to Mirko Oliva. Sudden, deliberate, unthinking. The dead man wore a cheap dark suit and a white shirt, now stained with gore, open at the collar.

Costa reached inside his jacket and recovered a wallet. There was a little money and an ID card. It said he was a Greek national called Stefan Kyriakis.

In the other pocket was a very new-looking cell phone. Costa glanced at Rosa as he pushed the On button.

“Wish us luck,” he said.

A light came on the screen. Almost immediately the low battery warning began to bleep.

Together, they got back up the wooden steps as quickly as they could. Beneath the Mediterranean moon, by the corpse of his young colleague, Costa found the weakest of signals.

He called Falcone. The inspector’s familiar, bad-tempered voice barked,
“Pronto.”

“Petrakis found us,” Costa said. “They killed Mirko Oliva.”

“And you?” Falcone demanded.

“We’ll live.”

“Where are you?”

Costa told him as best he could.

“This is not what I asked you …” Falcone began.

“I’m sorry. You need to alert Palombo. You need to bring in everyone you can. They’re here, Leo. Not Rome.
Here
. This is …” He thought of the Blue Demon in the earth beneath his feet. “… their home. Where they came from. What made them.”

He could hear talking in the background. Then Falcone said, “I somehow doubt that. We’ll be there in five minutes.”

“Five …?”

“Stay where you are. Don’t—”

The last milliamp of power in the phone he’d found on the corpse in the Blue Demon’s tomb expired. The thing fell silent in Costa’s fingers.

IT TOOK THEM LONGER THAN ANYONE EXPECTED TO locate the tomb in the parched grass knoll in the woods. An hour perhaps, even more. Costa found it difficult to speak when they arrived, but he answered the inspector’s questions evenly. Teresa had her arms around Rosa, who wept openly. Peroni stood over the young officer’s body, grim-faced, furious.

After listening to what Costa had to say, Falcone took a flashlight and went down into the tomb. The rest of them waited. Costa didn’t want to see that face on the wall again.

When the inspector came out again, he demanded, “Who is he?”

Costa took out the wallet and the ID card he’d found. “Stefan Kyriakis.”

“No, Nic,” Falcone insisted. “Who
is
he?” He looked close to losing control. “Who are any of them? The Blue Demon? Jesus …”

“I don’t understand,” Costa replied weakly.

He felt faint. He needed food. And sleep.

“We’re not supposed to,” Peroni interjected. “We’re not supposed to understand any of—”

He didn’t finish the sentence.

Something had arrived in the night sky, something so large it began to block out the moon. The thing wasn’t alone.

The air was rent by the slashing of vast rotor blades. Hulking black shapes descended around them, landing on the spare flat ground by the
road. Men swarmed from their bellies, bright, hard beams of light emerging from their heads, weapons tight in their arms.

A voice barked through a bullhorn.

Get down on the ground. Arms outstretched. Don’t move
.

Falcone didn’t budge an inch. He glared into their bright beams as if he could stare them down with a single glance.

“We’d best do as they say, Leo,” Costa murmured, and put a firm hand on his inspector’s arm, pushing him down to the hard, dry earth.

IN THE SNATCHED SECONDS AVAILABLE TO ANDREA PETRAKIS between tumbling out of the microlight and opening his ram-chute, he was able to orient himself and aim squarely for the target area: the large patch of open grassland next to the tomb of Cecilia Metella.

He’d briefed Deniz Nesin and Anna Ybarra thoroughly. Their flashlights were clearly visible, sweeping to make two arcs that met at the safest, flattest point of the zone. Petrakis scarcely needed them. The moon was so bright it was like descending under floodlights. His chute opened with perfect precision at four hundred feet above the ground. Petrakis gripped the stays, taking the strain as the deployment fought the wind beneath the fabric and briefly dragged him upward once again.

For a few delicious moments he found himself suspended in the hot summer air, seemingly free of the perpetual drag of gravity. The lights of Ciampino glittered beyond the line of lamps on the highway. A bird—an owl, perhaps—squawked somewhere near his head, as if resenting the intrusion of man into its private world.

Then, slowly, he began to fall earthward, into the heart of the ranging beams of light below.

The glittering horizon was still visible when the tiny plane, loaded with explosive, hit the apron of the airport. Just a little more than a kilometer away, the sky burst into flame. It was as if some deadly hothouse flower had suddenly shot blooming from the earth, Petrakis thought.

He watched and laughed and clung to the chute stays all the way down. It was a gamble. Everything was. There was no way of knowing the precise alignment of the aircraft parked outside the terminal, no certain scheme to ensure one was hit. The little plane could as easily crash into bare asphalt, causing minor damage and a little inconvenience. Yet, watching the searing orange petals of gasoline fire rise into the night sky of Ciampino, he knew immediately this had not occurred. Guided by the amateurish autopilot, the microlight had hit home like a makeshift guided missile, finding the enemy, igniting the combustible fuel in the belly of some grounded leviathan on the apron.

The noise of the explosion came after the beautiful angry flames. Then another, and a third.

At that point the horizon disappeared and Petrakis found himself fighting to regain control of his descent. The ground loomed up, with a shocking swiftness. He bent his legs, crouching for impact. Their lights pinned him to the sky, blinding him. He rolled. The earth slammed into his shoulder, sending him tumbling, spinning like a child’s top.

He wondered if something might break. If the whole escapade might come to nothing more than a fractured bone.

Then the world ceased turning. He found himself on his back, staring up at the sky, the ram-chute wrapped around him like a clumsy shroud. His entire body hurt. But as he gingerly tried to move his limbs, he realized it was a familiar pain, that of nothing more than a bad fall.

By the time the two of them arrived—out of breath, panting, looking at him in amazement—he was on his feet. The sky above the gently sloping hill that led to Ciampino was now a livid line of orange and red. They could hear the secondary explosions bursting in the unseen distance. The stench of burning gasoline was faintly noticeable over the scents of the Appian Way: grass and wild herbs.

“Brother,” Deniz Nesin said, and came forward to embrace him.

Anna Ybarra just stood there.

“Congratulations,” she said quietly.

“Congratulations? Congratulations?” Deniz was ecstatic. He raised his arms to the glowing sky. “This is a wonder, brother. We have struck them deep in the heart. We have brought them the fruits of
jihad
. They
know fear now. They know terror. They know what we have endured all these years.” He thumped his chest with his fist. “We—all of us.”

Petrakis laughed and wondered what was really happening at the airport, how much damage he had truly caused.

“It was just a plane and some explosive, Deniz. None of them were there. No presidents. No politicians. They’re all in Rome. If we have killed anyone, it was a few cleaners and security guards. A mechanic, perhaps, and a couple of cops.”

Cops. The memory of what had happened in the tomb of the Blue Demon refused to leave him. From that moment forward he would, he knew, have to improvise everything on his own. To take unexpected risks, and not listen to them anymore. To decide, swiftly, without compunction, which path to take.

“It’s a beginning,” Deniz told him. “A great one. See …” He indicated the bright orange sky behind them. The smell of burning fuel was beginning to overwhelm everything else, and behind it they could hear the crackling of distant fires and the wailing of sirens. “Tomorrow we bring them something better. Tomorrow—”

“They knew,” Petrakis cut in. “How else did the cops get there?”

Anna Ybarra and Deniz Nesin didn’t answer. Petrakis felt a flicker of anger.

“The Kenyan,” Deniz said. “The bastard must have told them.”

Petrakis shuffled off the parachute. “Joseph never knew about the tomb, Deniz. Only you and I did. We took delivery of the explosives there. Remember?”

The woman stepped back, looking at the ground.

There was an expression on the Turk’s face Petrakis had seen only once before. The day in Helmand he had, out of nothing more than pure curiosity, pushed them too far in training.

“What are you saying?” Deniz demanded. “The Kenyan could have followed us. And so,” he nodded at the woman, “could she. Anyone might have seen …”

Petrakis took him by the arm. “All this is true. And yet …”

He put his hand inside his light summer jacket. The weapon was there, in its holster. “I must ask myself, Deniz. Are these things possible?”