Costa 08 - City of Fear (40 page)

“I can find my own way. Remember, I worked here long enough.”

“Yes, yes,” he mumbled, eyes glued to the screen. A phone began to ring. He snatched at it, cupped the handset, looked at her, and said, “I’m sorry. This is important. Please. Call me this weekend, Elizabeth. Come for dinner. My wife would love that.”

Then he was talking, rapidly, eyeing her in a way she immediately understood. It was a private conversation, one she wasn’t supposed to hear.

Elizabeth Murray got up and walked out of her old office. The corridor was deserted. This was the executive part of the building, never a place for much in the way of visible activity.

A narrow set of stairs led to the roof terrace. She could remember walking up it, half-tipsy, so many years ago in the company of beloved colleagues, some gone, some dead on duty, a few in parts of the world where their bodies still rested, undiscovered. The fallen.

Behind an ancient door at the top of the stairs there was a small hut, like a sentry box, a place to store watering cans and gardening equipment for the handful of flowerpots one of the green-fingered intelligence specialists liked to keep there.

The bottom door was unlocked. This was a secure location. There was no need for locked doors.

Steadily, one step at a time, leaning on the stout shepherd’s crook she’d bought at a market in Dunedin, she ascended the stairs, opening the door to find herself inside the little cabin at the top.

A memory returned: drunken kisses exchanged with a young, pretty secretary toward the end of a retirement party. A rash moment, one that could have been costly. No one liked an officer who stood out from the ordinary, not in the intelligence services. No one was under any illusions about her preferences. It was simply bad form to display them.
Prudence, not prejudice. Sexual dysfunction, as it was then perceived, might lead to blackmail or worse.

The secretary had been very pretty, though, and her abrupt transfer to a more mundane department the following day was a loss Elizabeth Murray had privately regretted for some time.

The watering cans and gardening paraphernalia were still ranged along the shelving on the wall adjoining the exterior door. Next to them was a black nylon jacket of the kind worn by the more arcane security services.

In the right-hand pocket was a sealed plastic ID card. She held it to the light streaming from the cabin’s single tiny window and saw the crest of the Ministry of the Interior and a name:
Domenico Leone
. He was a senior civil servant in the ministry, it said, and nothing more.

She placed her large thumb over the photo so that only the crest was visible and a lazy man might think it referred to someone else altogether. Then she stepped out onto the terrace of the CESIS building, heading immediately for the Via dei Giardini side, where she had seen the sniper’s silhouette from the street.

A tall, stocky man was stretched out on the concrete there, in black combat uniform, vest, and cap. In his hands was a rifle with a telescopic sight.

“Domenico?” she shouted, holding the ID high, still obscuring the photo. “Domenico?”

She tried to remember what it was like to talk as a true Roman: with a short, guttural accent, and abbreviated diction.

“Si?”
the officer said, turning, puzzled. “I’m sorry, signora … I don’t know you.”

“No, you don’t. They brought me in from Milan. There’s a change of plan. Belfiore wants you to do something else. He needs you to report to his office now.”

He shuffled up to a crouch, took off the cap, and scratched his balding head.

“But the roof …”

“The gardens can go without sniper cover for five minutes, Officer. Have you seen anything?”

“No. But in the palace …” Another puzzled look. “I thought something was happening.”

“Champagne and canapés. Wouldn’t you need a drink, if you were going to spend the rest of the evening in the Vatican?”

Domenico Leone guffawed. “You bet,” he answered, then hauled himself to his feet and walked over to the open cabin door.

She walked with him. When he got there, something fell from Elizabeth Murray’s wrist. The officer said, “You’ve lost your watch.”

“Damned strap,” she muttered. “I must get it changed.”

She eased forward on the shepherd’s crook.

“No, no, signora. Please.”

He bent to retrieve it. She thought of all the training she’d done thirty years ago or more. How they’d practice on one another.

Then she brought down the shiny oak handle of her stick hard on his head. He stumbled to both knees. She fell on him, crooked her right arm around his neck, and brought her left in to pinch on the carotid and the jugular, squeezing them.

Leone went still in seconds, slumping to the ground. She picked up her watch and slipped it back on her wrist. It was a struggle to drag him inside. There, she stripped off his vest and cap. She found a ball of twine in the garden equipment. Carefully—there was no hurry, and he would be this way for a few hours—she bound his feet and hands, then gagged him with her scarf. Finally, to be sure, she wrapped several lengths of clothesline around his chest before strapping him tight against an old sink.

He was starting to wake by then, with fury in his eyes.

“Scusami,”
she said, then went outside and picked up his rifle.

Weapons were weapons. Back home in New Zealand, she was used to hunting the wild black razorback pig. The animal was a monster, wildly aggressive and capable of slaughtering a dozen or more lambs in a single night. The beast’s one saving grace was that it tasted good, which was another reason to shoot it.

Domenico Leone’s rifle was nothing like the .30-06 Springfield she used to kill feral boars. The thing was surely far more deadly. But it wasn’t hard to figure out how it worked.

She found the jacket hung on the peg behind the cabin door, put it
on, and then the protection vest over that. The cap fit if she tucked in her hair. There would be snipers on other rooftops. If they peered at her through binoculars, they’d see through the ruse. But the snipers were looking at the Quirinale and the surrounding streets, not at each other. Or so she hoped.

Elizabeth Murray went back to the corner of the terrace where he’d been stationed when she arrived. There was a low stool there and, on the wall, a black fabric-and-padding gun rest. The sniper rifle fitted neatly between the two mounts set at each side. She let it fall into place, then leaned down and began to adjust the telescopic sight.

It took a moment for her to juggle her bulky frame into the right position, one where the weapon felt comfortable. Then she bent down to the eyepiece. The crosshairs ranged the gardens of the Quirinale, from spectacular flower bed to leafy artificial glade, from classical statue to dainty, ornate pond.

Finally her sights settled on the stone bench beneath the wicker canopy, by the handsome young figure of Hermes.

It would be an easy, clean shot. She left the rifle idly poised against the rest and checked her watch, wondering how long she would have to wait.

ANNA YBARRA PUSHED OPEN THE MIRRORED DOOR, not knowing what to expect. A room full of strangers. A brief storm of violence before her own life was snuffed out. She thrust Dario Sordi’s questions from her mind. They were too close to her. They hurt.

With the little Uzi tight in her right arm, her finger on the trigger, she burst into the gilded hall and found herself stumbling noisily into a table laden with glasses and canapés, sending wine and little plates scattering onto the glossy floor.

The
salone
was full of paintings and gilt, with high, bright windows.

Beneath a forest of chandeliers sat an orchestra—the women, she could see, wearing long, dark velvet gowns identical to the one left for her in the stable in the Via delle Scuderie. They, like the men, had stopped playing. In front of them, in the main body of the hall, were figures in formal suits, women in elegant dresses that seemed unsuited for a hot Roman afternoon, all of them motionless and silent.

Every eye in the room was on her.

Some of these faces were familiar: politicians, men mainly, whose features appeared daily on television, in newspapers, everywhere, usually smiling, always in control.

Now they seemed smaller, more human. A few moved in front of the women by their sides, as if to block them from what was about to occur. One or two had begun to stride swiftly toward the back. From the corner of her eye, Anna could see others, anonymous figures emerging
from the shadows, starting to stir into action, and she knew who they were, knew what they would do.

Only two things ran through her head, Zeru and Josepe—Zeru more than any—though the words of Dario Sordi continued to haunt her, and suddenly she knew she could never, as she’d intended, scream the names of her slaughtered child and dead husband at these elegant strangers as they stood frozen with fear.

None of them would understand. None of them would ever know.

The trigger of the Uzi fell beneath her finger, the way they’d taught her in the hot, primitive training camp on the wild stretch of the Helmand River where the NATO forces never dared to venture. Anna Ybarra gripped the Uzi and began a sweep of the bodies in front of her, not looking too closely at the suits and cocktail gowns, not thinking about what came next.

Her finger jerked the trigger. The weapon awoke. There was a sudden staccato burst of sound, and the Uzi leaped in her arms like a wild animal startled from a terrible dream.

Someone screamed. A woman. A man.

She arced the shuddering weapon once to the right, once to the left, and then it was silent.

Too soon
, she thought. In Helmand it had lasted longer.

Desperately, she tried again. There was nothing. The magazine had jammed, perhaps. The thing was dead.

She let it drop from her fingers, to clatter on the shiny, polished floor of the Salone dei Corazzieri.

Dark, anonymous figures from the periphery of the hall were starting to close in. They held handguns the way the Taliban did—in a taut, outstretched arm, threatening death with a fierce, unwavering certainty.

Her hands fell to her sides. Tears stung her eyes, tears of fury at her own failure and her stupidity.

There was not a single casualty among the crowd in front of her. Men gripped women by their shoulders. Some of those who had retreated to the rear of the hall were beginning to return. One she recognized from the TV: a man who had been the first to flee—Ugo Campagnolo, the prime minister.

No one had died. No one had been hurt. Whatever bullets she’d
managed to loose off before the weapon failed had simply vanished into thin air, as if they’d never existed at all.

Anna Ybarra thought of the Kenyan Joseph Priest and the fiasco at the Trevi Fountain. How he’d fought to do what Deniz Nesin had told him, only to find it didn’t work at all, not until Andrea Petrakis, unseen, had pushed the button.

Dead Joseph. Dead Deniz. Dead …

The armed men in suits were so near she could see the curling wires emerging from their earpieces. She raised her arms, realizing she was the spectacle now, the intended victim all along.

Quite deliberately she closed her eyes, wishing she could say something that held meaning, if only there was time, and the right words.

A hard and powerful blow sent her wheeling off balance, down to the polished floor. She opened her eyes, found herself thinking, automatically, that she ought to locate the source of the blinding pain.

A tall, stiff, commanding figure stood over her, and he was furious, bellowing—at the circling figures, at everyone, it seemed.

It was Dario Sordi, and he was shouting a name she didn’t recognize.

“Ranieri!
Ranieri!”

The president’s hands reached down to grip her shoulders, tugging her torso toward him. She found herself reaching for his long legs, clinging to them, like a child seeking protection.

“Dammit. Ranieri!” Sordi yelled again, and finally a man in a blue suit forced his way through the line of figures with guns. Behind him came several officers in ceremonial uniform, shining breastplates, swords, plumed helmets.

There was another man too, one with a long, angry face.

This one pushed his way to the front, stared at Sordi, and said, “Sir …”

“Be quiet, Palombo. I’m in charge here. Ranieri—”

“Sir!”
the angry one cut in. “You must leave this to my people.”

“Leave what, exactly?” the president roared. “An execution? Or
rendition
, as you call it, to some country beyond our control? I see no dead here. No danger …”

“We were lucky.”

“Good. The state police shall take this woman into their custody. They will decide what charges she must face.
Corazzieri!”

The silver uniforms barged through the suits. Anna Ybarra let go of the old man’s legs, struggled to her feet, taking the hand of one of the soldiers, finding herself in their midst. The one who’d helped her up did not let go. She looked at him and saw the face of the officer she’d met, and deceived, in the courtyard outside. She glanced at the shining floor, feeling ashamed and confused and lost.