Costa 08 - City of Fear (39 page)

“I don’t think so, sir. I’m a musician.…”

“What instrument?”

She hesitated. “Brass.”

“My late wife played the flute. Not very well, if I’m being honest. Is that brass too?”

She thought for a moment, then answered, “Of course.”

He came and stood closer to her. “The modern flute may be made of metal, but it’s still woodwind, or so I seem to recall. Any musician would know that. Although a reporter might not.” Sordi recalled the
single word of Spanish he’d heard when he tried to call Costa on the private phone, the one that was supposed to be their link alone. “Or someone who was simply a voice in the dark in Tarquinia.”

She pushed him back, firmly, with her right hand. Her face, which seemed initially full of a simple honesty, was contorted by anger. He fell against a radiator and found himself clutching at a curtain to stay upright. When he regained his balance, she was fumbling at the instrument case, releasing the catch. Inside there was a weapon, too large for a pistol, too small to be a conventional military rifle. These things had changed so much since the Second World War, and he had never had a great deal of interest in firearms even then.

The thing looked efficient and deadly.

Her trembling fingers snatched at the barrel, then the stock. The case fell to the floor. Her hand found the butt of the weapon, the trigger guard, and she started to grip it in a way that betrayed both skill and purpose.

The pistol, almost a child’s toy, was aimed his way, though not as directly as her determined gaze.

“This is the Quirinale Palace,” Dario Sordi told her. “At any moment, security people will interrupt our little discussion. They will not wait to ask questions, signora. They will see you with that thing and they will shoot you dead.”

“They’re all in there,” she retorted, nodding at the closed door into the Salone. “With the important people. Where you should be.”

“Important?” He frowned. “You flatter me, signora.”

The barrel moved slowly toward him, like the black nose of a hungry beast. He raised his hands—which was, he supposed, what she wanted.

Sordi caught their reflection in the nearby window: a tall, straight-backed old man who hated to see himself; a young, plain woman, her face distorted by fury and doubt.

He stepped closer.

The barrel swung straight back toward him, dashed forward, stabbed him in the chest. Not a painful blow. More of a prod. A threat.

“Why are you not afraid of me?” she asked, pointing the sleek black weapon toward him.

He laughed. There seemed nothing else to do. “I’m almost eighty years old,” Dario Sordi replied. “I’ve been smoking since the age of thirteen, and drinking wine, good and bad, rather longer than that. On occasion I argue so much my blood pressure attains levels my doctor believes physically impossible. If I live another five years or another five seconds, what does it matter?”

She was silent, listening.

“They used to make me read Horace when I was a schoolboy,” he continued. “I remember one line in particular …” It was the day of the Via Rasella, and he’d spent the morning poring over a copy of the Odes, struggling with the language.
“‘Sed omnes una manet nox.’
‘But the same night awaits us all.’ What exactly am I supposed to fear, signora? Such a small and commonplace creature as death …?”

He was glad there were no Corazzieri there. Glad he had the chance to try to talk to her.

“Latin’s the language of priests,” she hissed.

“Among others,” he agreed.

“When I go in there,” she told him, pointing with the gun at the glittering doorway, “don’t follow.”

“I may be just another citizen in the world beyond this place,” he told her. “But in the Quirinale, I go where I want.”

The barrel rose and pointed straight into his face. She didn’t speak.

He held up his hands higher, smiled, and said, “You asked me a question only a few hours ago. Were you happy with the answer?”

She shook her head, in doubt, not negation.

“These demons that pursue you must be hungry indeed,” Dario Sordi said.

“You don’t know my demons.”

“No,” the president admitted. “Not your present ones.” She refused to meet his gaze. “I know the ones to come, though. Here is something I never told anyone before—anyone except my wife, that is, and she’s gone.” He stiffened, feeling suddenly cold. “Their faces don’t die, signora. They never leave you. I can see those two young Germans I murdered even now. The surprise in their eyes. As if everything was a joke, even life itself.”

“I don’t want to hear.”

“Perhaps, but I wish to say it. Sometimes I wake up in the night, sweating. Sad old words from a sad old man, you might say. But it’s not fear that wakes me. It’s regret. It’s remembering.… It’s the regret that, when I die, those faces may be the last thing I ever see.”

“I lost my family!” The weapon rose and pointed directly at him.

“I lost my father. My uncle. The Germans murdered them in the reprisals. Some would say I helped kill them. Some say that still. Yet today I have a very good friend who is a Berliner, and both of us are much too old and sensible to mention any of this. He served during the war. He was a German. What do you expect?”

Her eyes flared with fury. She snatched a look at the door to the room beyond. “Do you ever stop to wonder how much blood is on their hands?” she demanded. “Blood in Europe. In the East. More blood than I could spill in a lifetime.”

Dario Sordi rarely lost his temper. Anger was, he felt, beneath someone of his age. Also, once lost, his temper proved difficult to rein in. At that moment he was dismayed to recognize a red ire rising in him.

“I never forget that,” he retorted. “Not for one second. It’s why I am here. I lived through a war that ripped apart this world of ours. I watched my father’s torn corpse dug out of the Ardeatine Caves by men with picks in their hands and tears in their eyes.” His arm came down; his long, bloodless finger jabbed at her through the bright golden air streaming from the palace windows. “You travel the world as if it’s a place of no consequence. You play with toys that kill men at the push of a button, miles away. It saves you looking into their eyes, I imagine. How brave. How noble! Do not, signora, seek to lecture me—”

“Shut up!” she screamed. “Shut up—”

Dario Sordi felt a fierce, sharp hurt in his temple as the gun stock slammed into his skull, and stumbled to the floor, shouting, swearing.

Perhaps he blacked out. He wasn’t sure. There was a moment when everything seemed to fade, when the bright, beautiful corridor in the Quirinale Palace disappeared for an instant, and in its place he found himself in a narrow cobbled Roman street in front of two uniformed men, found that he was staring at them from behind the eyes of
another, younger body, one he had long forgotten—a child, he knew that, a boy who was pulling a weapon from the gray, grubby fabric of his threadbare school coat.

He could hear the dream voice of the German taunting him again.

So you’re a coward now, are you? A little late for us, isn’t it?

“It’s a little late for everyone,” Sordi found himself whispering, his eyes straying fearfully toward the mirrored door that led into the Salone dei Corazzieri.

It was open, and as his eyes began to focus on the frozen forms beyond the door bodies in their suits and cocktail gowns, he became aware that the soft, simple music of the orchestra had stumbled to an awkward and uncertain halt.

THE OFFICES OF CESIS, THE EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE FOR Intelligence and Security Services, had not moved in forty years. The organization that liaised between the civilian and military arms of the Italian intelligence services, SISDE and SISMI respectively, occupied a six-story former outpost of the Vatican bureaucracy in the Via delle Quattro Fontane. It was a nondescript building that stretched from the busy straight road running past Borromini’s church to the narrow lane of the Via dei Giardini, which ran the length of the border wall of the Quirinale gardens. The offices possessed one spectacular attraction: a roof terrace with magnificent views of the city, all the way to the Vatican and, from the very edge, down into the verdant hectares of the presidential palace itself.

Elizabeth Murray had attended countless parties there, for intelligence-community weddings and retirements, and more private engagements too where attendance was tightly restricted to those in the higher echelons of this secretive world. She had little doubt that the place would now be put to good use, and was able to confirm this as her taxi, after a circuitous journey, dropped her at the very edge of the Quirinale security cordon, opposite the Palazzo Barberini, at the head of the Via Rasella.

There was a sniper on the roof, exactly where experience told her to look for one.

She had called ahead to check who was on duty and, after navigating the switchboard, using all the persuasion and name-dropping she could manage, was pleased with the eventual answer: Carlo Belfiore, a junior spook when she first met him, now a senior CESIS official.

A good, honest man, like most of those she worked with. It didn’t surprise her to find Belfiore was in the office. It would have been impossible to persuade him to go home in circumstances such as these.

She waited on a hard leather bench in reception for five minutes until Belfiore arrived. He had less hair and more flesh, but the same broad, easy smile. They hugged, kissed. He looked at her cane and laughed and said, “We’re all getting older, aren’t we?”

“So what?” she wondered.

His smile slackened a little. “This is a busy time, Elizabeth. It’s wonderful to see you. But to be honest …”

“I’m sorry, Carlo. I should have given you some notice. If I’d known I’d find Rome like this … Who could have guessed the Blue Demon would rise from the grave?”

“Not me. That’s for sure.” He studied her. “You know more about them than anyone else.”

“Possibly …”

“Were you surprised?”

She thought for a moment and then said, “It never felt quite dead. Did it?”

He seemed disappointed by her reply. “Come. I have time for a coffee. And something to show you.”

Belfiore took out his security card and flashed it through the machine, ushering her through the gate before him. They hadn’t had toys like that two decades before. Then they got in the lift and rose to the fifth floor, the one she knew so well, and walked down a familiar corridor into a large office overlooking the Quirinale gardens.

She peered at the expanse of perfectly kept lawns, flower beds, and patches of shrubbery. On the palace roof opposite, there was a single black-clad figure with a rifle in its hands.

“You seem more relaxed than I expected,” she remarked.

“We’re nearly done for the day, thank God. It’s all in the news. I’m not breaking clearance. I wouldn’t. Not even for you. Soon our visitors
move on to the Vatican. After that, we’re done. All those famous people become someone else’s problem. At eleven, when they want to go to bed, and then their people can take care of everything.” He smiled. “Tomorrow they go home and we can try to go back to normal. Try to find out what the hell has been going on here. Giovanni Batisti—”

“You knew him?” Elizabeth asked. The office was so different from how she remembered it, and dominated by technology: two computer screens, three telephones, a couple of cell phones on the desk too.

“I worked with Batisti on the preparations. A nice man. Missed his family like crazy. We do this for a living. He did it out of common decency. Look where it got him.”

“A tragedy. Do you like my old lair?”

Carlo Belfiore nodded. “But it was better with you in it. Queen Elizabeth the Third.”

“You never dared call me that to my face.”

“Of course not. But now I can. It was a compliment, you know. The way you remembered everything. Understood the links. The possibilities. You were a legend, Elizabeth. You
are
a legend.”

She laughed. “I’m a distant memory, Carlo, a name on a dusty plaque. And I was well aware of that nickname, by the way.”

He sat down. She took the chair opposite, facing the window and the empty expanse of the gardens beyond.

She stared into his genial, intelligent face.

“Can I help?” Elizabeth Murray asked.

“No,” Belfiore replied immediately, shaking his head. “I’m sorry. You have no clearance. Things have changed. Rules. Regulations. We are not as free as we once were.”

“You said I knew the Blue Demon better than anyone.”

“If we had the time …” He thought for a moment. “When the summit is over and the circus has moved on. There will be work to do. I could arrange a temporary attachment.” He looked embarrassed. “We have accommodations you could use. I heard you were running a farm or something. In New Zealand. On your own. There can’t be much money in that. Pensions …” He looked around the office. “One becomes so engrossed in the present that it’s easier to forget the future is just around the corner.”

“It is too,” she agreed. “That’s kind. And in the meantime?”

He frowned. “In the meantime you must enjoy Rome as best you can.” His eyes were watching the messages on his computer more than her. His face had turned somewhat paler. “You have to excuse me now. There’s something I must deal with. I’ll call for an officer to show you out.”