Costa 08 - City of Fear (42 page)

“So?” the magistrate asked, smiling as if she were at a cocktail party. “May we proceed to the Questura? Or do you intend to shoot us all?”
She didn’t wait for an answer. Giulia Amato—the name rang a bell for Costa, one he dimly associated with tales of controversy and politics—turned to Peroni and said, “Take your prisoner inside.”

A gap opened among the throng of police officers and citizens. Peroni and Anna Ybarra walked through it, on toward the steps of the station. The figures in black stood and did nothing.

Costa waited with Prinzivalli until all the other police officers, along with Grimaldi and the woman magistrate, were inside. Then the gray-haired officer tapped the pasty-faced soldier on the shoulder and said, “This is a restricted area, sonny. You can’t park here. Now
move it!”

Signora Campitelli was wielding her loaf once more. Totti had found sufficient courage to start yelling abuse in all directions. The figures in black slunk back to their armored vehicles and started the engines noisily.

As they fled, Commissario Vincenzo Esposito stomped into the piazza, his face like thunder, marching across the cobblestones like a man possessed.

“Good day, sir,” Prinzivalli declared cheerily as he arrived.

The
commissario
stared at the departing troops. They were leaving to a flurry of merry abuse and a series of obscure and frequently obscene hand gestures from the largely elderly mob now milling around the square.

“A good day, Sovrintendente?” Esposito bellowed. “A good day? Is it?”

Prinzivalli was beaming from ear to ear as he watched the crowd bid the black vehicles farewell.

“Yes, sir,” he replied. “I do believe it is.”

BEN RENNICK—HE THOUGHT OF HIMSELF THIS WAY, HAD done for more than two decades—strode out of the Quirinale, back to Borromini’s church, where earlier he’d been confronted by the state police. He almost felt grateful to them for inadvertently suggesting the location. It was a good, private place for an important meeting.

Behind him in the palace all was well, or as well as he might have hoped in the circumstances. The guests were departing for the Vatican. The story Rennick had been aching to release was running everywhere. The emergency was over. A desperate attempt to murder the politicians of the G8 summit in the heart of the Quirinale had been prevented at the last moment, and the terrorist cell behind it destroyed.

Coverage of the events in the Salone dei Corazzieri would be easily controlled, with enough manipulation, enough pressure. The details of the story were already set. The Spanish woman had entered the room with an automatic weapon. She’d been disarmed by security guards after firing off a few wild shots, which happily caused no injuries. Intelligence information indicated that the leader of the Blue Demon group, Andrea Petrakis, had fled the city after the failure of the attack. All exit points would be subject to extra security in an attempt to locate him. There would be disruption to international travelers for some days to come. But a sense of normality would start to return to Rome that very afternoon, and by the following day the city would begin to resemble the place he had loved since the moment he first set eyes on it more
than two decades before. A place he felt guilty about despoiling, about using.

There were items to tidy. Eyewitness accounts of events in the Quirinale needed to be checked and corrected, where necessary. The crippled weapon the woman had used was, happily, in Palombo’s hands, where the fake shells and the crippling device that had jammed it could be quietly removed, if need be. A standardized version of the attack would soon be agreed upon and adhered to. Most of those in the Salone dei Corazzieri had witnessed little except a brief altercation, ending in shots. It would be easy to convince them of what they had seen. Even the loss of Anna Ybarra posed no great difficulties, since she knew nothing of what had gone on behind the scenes.

No opportunity for recrimination, no time for regrets
, the American told himself, and walked back into the darkness of the church, heading for the fluid shadows, the site they’d agreed on.

The building was empty. In the half-light of the nave, there was no sound at all, not even the distant murmur of the city.

Then something touched his arm and Ben Rennick almost leaped out of his own skin.

“Jesus …”

A soldier was there, close to him. A
corazziere
dressed in ornate regalia, a sword at his hip, a plumed helmet on his head.

“Who the hell …?” Rennick began, then stopped as he looked at the eyes beneath the shining metal. Dark, dead eyes. Familiar.

“Andrea?” he murmured.

The man removed his headgear, stood there, arms open, beaming like a teenager.

“Andrea!” Rennick repeated, and embraced him, trying to hide the shock he felt at seeing the man’s face for the first time in twenty years.

The lines, the tanned, leathery skin, hair desiccated by sun and worry—it was as if life itself had been slowly withdrawn from Andrea Petrakis. And in its place? A husk. A shell.

“Renzo.” His voice sounded different, not just older, but as if it belonged to another man.

“Renzo’s dead,” the American told him, stepping back a pace, taking another good look. “Don’t forget.”

“How could I? I killed him.”

“You did,” Rennick agreed. Twenty years was a long time, and neither of them had any idea what had filled that void in their separate lives. “I owe you an apology. When we put you with the Afghans. No one had any idea it would take this long.…” There hadn’t been many options at the time. After the deaths of the Petrakis couple, and the risk of exposure of the Gladio network, no one else in Europe could be trusted to take a young Italian who knew too much. “Or that they’d become the enemy. They were ours back then, Andrea. The mujahideen—we made them. If I’d guessed …”

Petrakis stopped smiling. “Please. Those people in Washington knew what they were doing. They put me in there because you needed someone on the inside.”

Rennick sighed and admitted, “Maybe you’re right. I was just a foot soldier. What you’ve become.” He looked him in the eye. “So you understand exactly how that works, huh? We’re always in the dark. If you’re right, it was someone else’s idea. I was just trying to save all our hides. If what had been going on became public …” He looked at the stranger in front of him. “We offered to get you out. You know that. All the same, you stayed. We’re grateful. It was brave. It was selfless.”

“What else was I supposed to do?” the man in the
corazziere
uniform asked. “Come back here under an assumed name? Pretend to be someone else? Why? Why should I do that?”

“What happened after your parents died was a kind of madness. People were panicking. Everything we’d been doing looked like it was going to unravel. I wanted you out of that. Me too. I wanted us clear so that we could sort things out later.” The American frowned. “I never knew there’d be so much blood along the way. Or that we’d be using a stay-behind man, still needing one, after all these years.”

“I left you a message,” Petrakis said. “I always leave you a message. Now you don’t want me to me finish the job, do you? Why is that?”

“You mean those crazy numbers? Jesus, Andrea. Why do you do that? I never understood the need for them back then. Now—”

“I like to leave my mark. Something that lingers. Pictures on a wall.”

Rennick laughed. “You mean like the Etruscans?”

His amusement didn’t seem to impress Petrakis.

“Like the Etruscans. I like to finish the job too,” the man in the uniform insisted.

“Well, I guess communication has not been our strong point in this venture. I never got your message. Maybe Palombo was too busy.”
Maybe
, Rennick thought. “This job is finished. Done. Over.”

He’d realized that as soon as he saw the final message, in the hands of a cop in this same church little more than an hour before. Rennick knew
Julius Caesar
almost by heart. He had guessed instantly what that coded riddle had to mean and confirmed it, to his alarm, when he got back to the palace. “How the hell did you get this idea in your head? Tell me.”

“I thought you put it there,” Petrakis answered immediately. “Or maybe the Blue Demon did. Who knows?”

“There is no Blue Demon, Andrea. There never was. We invented all that stuff, remember? Your old man came up with the name when we were trying to put together one more lunatic bunch of terrorists to keep Gladio going. When he got killed, we just adopted it as a way of covering up what we’d been doing. If we hadn’t, everyone’s cover would have been blown. It was the only way—”

“He didn’t make it up,” Petrakis insisted.

“What?”

“He … didn’t … make … it … up. The Blue Demon’s real. I know.”

This was crazy. Petrakis was crazy.

“Listen to me, Andrea. This has gone far enough. The Etruscans, the tombs. The idea someone might fight for some dead race wiped out centuries ago. That was your father’s idea. It was one more operation we were going to run. Then, when he died …”

They had been grasping in the dark that week. Everything—the panic, the fear of the network’s discovery, the desperation—remained etched in his memory. Clutching at the idea of another fake terrorist gang, paid for by illicit Gladio money, seemed the only way out, even if it came at a frightful cost. The loss of innocent lives. The end of his own identity. A terrible exile.

“He didn’t make it up. So who really runs the Blue Demon, Renzo?”

The American sighed. “My name is Ben Rennick, not Renzo Frasca.”

“Who …?”

“Leave all this to me. I’ll deal with it. Your work here’s done. Excellently done.” He made a grateful gesture with his hands. “We’ve reminded people this is a dangerous world again. That they should place their trust in those who govern. Very soon they’ll believe you’ve managed to flee the country, gone for good. You’re free. You can be whoever you want.”

“Don’t patronize me.”

“I’m not. I’m trying to keep you safe. This has gone further than I intended. Giovanni Batisti …” Rennick shook his head. “I don’t understand why his death was necessary. Or the airport. That was never part of the plan.…”

“Nor was a bunch of cops prying into what I was doing in Tarquinia. In the tomb. I would have killed them all if you’d let me.”

“You should have phoned me when you were supposed to,” Rennick told him. “You should have called when you found those officers. We’re not murderers.”

“Are you sure about that?”

“Yes. Those cops stumbling onto you—it was an accident. These things happen.” He peered into Petrakis’s dark, dead eyes. “Like Stefan Kyriakis, I guess.”

“Kyriakis was a gun runner. A thief. He asked too many questions. He
knew
, Renzo. He would have sold us.…”

“He was one of ours. One of mine. It doesn’t matter now.”

“I was out there. In the field. You were behind a comfortable desk.”

“True,” Rennick agreed. He hesitated, trying to ensure Petrakis understood what he was saying. “I may—I do—regret some of the details of the last week, but there’s nothing here that can’t be dealt with. We’ve covered up worse in the past. Everything will work out so long as we stop now. I want no further actions.” He led the man deeper into the shadows, looking around them. “You can go wherever you want. I’ll see to the money. A new identity. A fresh start. Not Europe, I think. Maybe South America. Australia.”

“I like the East. Afghanistan.”

“Not an option.”

“It’s what you want, isn’t it? Their heads on a plate.”

“Not anymore. You’ve done enough. I won’t allow it. I can’t.”

Petrakis nodded as if he were listening. Rennick felt a moment of relief. “So my mission’s ended?”

“Finally,” the American agreed. “Yes.”

“I don’t get to lead you to the high command?”

“It wouldn’t work,” Rennick told him. “They’re not stupid. There’s not enough …”

The show at the Trevi Fountain. A dead politician. A handful of innocent civilian victims at the airport. A failed assassination attempt. If things hadn’t started to unravel, perhaps there was a chance. But not now. There was too much risk. And most of that would, he knew, come from the man in front of him.

“Not enough blood?” Andrea Petrakis’s eyes gleamed, interested.

“I guess you could put it that way. After today, the Blue Demon is history. It stays that way.”

Petrakis was shaking his head, looking crazy, saying, “No, no, no …”

“I’ll get you out of Rome tonight. Out of the country by morning. The farther, the better.”

“Easier if you just kill me.”

“Don’t say that,” the American snapped, aware his own voice was rising. Then, more softly, “Don’t even think it.”

“Easier if you slaughter me, the way you slaughtered my mother and father.”

Rennick blinked. “The Mafia murdered your parents. They wouldn’t stop their little sideline. Dope. That’s the truth. And you know it.”

The sham
corazziere
leaned forward. He seemed taller than Rennick remembered. “Don’t you see the problem, Renzo?”

“Please don’t call me that.…”