Costa 08 - City of Fear (46 page)

Spooks
, Peroni thought. Another outpost of Luca Palombo’s Ministry of the Interior, this one with a roof terrace overlooking the palace gardens. A viewpoint that still had a dark figure at the corner, even though the emergency was supposed to be over. It was probably nothing.

One small thing made him uncomfortable. Peroni had brought a pair of binoculars with him. He wasn’t able to see the face of the sniper on the roof, only the long barrel of a rifle and a pair of strong arms on the perimeter wall. But there’d been a cloud of cigarette smoke rising from the space behind the rifle, and that didn’t ring true at all. He had no idea what secret-service officers did during the long, boring hours of waiting for an event that rarely materialized. But smoking out in the open air …

He looked at the entrance. The man behind it, a bored-looking, lean individual with black greasy hair and heavy spectacles, was already eyeing him. This was, Peroni decided, an invitation. So the big cop walked up to the glass door, took out his ID, pressed the bell, and said, very firmly, into the speakerphone, “I’m from the police. I need to speak to the duty officer immediately.”

“Do you have an appointment?” asked a tinny voice from the speaker on the wall.

“This isn’t that kind of business. Just call someone, will you?”

A brief argument ensued, and it was not one Peroni intended to lose. Eventually an individual who seemed boss class came and allowed him into the building. The newcomer looked like someone recently relieved of a burden. Balding, middle-aged, congenial, with his dark silk tie tugged down to hang around his flabby neck, he resembled a doctor more than the Ministry agent Peroni suspected him to be.

The man introduced himself as Carlo Belfiore and asked, “How can I help?”

“You’ve got an officer on the roof.”

“We
had
officers on the roof. The emergency is over. Didn’t you hear?”

“I heard. You still have someone up there. I saw him with my own eyes. Not his face. But I can see his rifle. And …” This still irked. “He was smoking.”

The man laughed. “No one smokes on government property. Except for Dario Sordi. And he’s not on my roof.”

“I know what I saw.”

Belfiore’s face clouded with puzzlement. He pulled out a phone and called someone, asking for the name of the officer who’d been assigned roof duty. Then he made another call, to the man himself, Peroni assumed. There was no reply.

Belfiore looked at the security guard. “You know Leone?”

“Good guy,” the doorman said promptly. “I see him at Roma games sometimes.”

“Does he smoke?” Peroni cut in.

He thought about it, then shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

Belfiore scratched his chin.

“I’m under orders,” Peroni lied. “Plus, I have the nastiest
ispettore
in Rome on my back and he doesn’t like secondhand news. I need to see this man up there for myself. I’m not leaving this building till I do.”

“Do you have any idea where you are?” Belfiore asked. The boss-class spook didn’t seem so congenial anymore.

“Not really.” Peroni pointed to the elevator. “Are we going up there, or what?”

“WHERE’S THE PRESIDENT?” COSTA ASKED.

They were striding down the corridor next to the Salone dei Corazzieri. The palace seemed deserted. There was no one anywhere, not on the security gates, not in the offices.

“Still in his apartment,” the first
corazziere
answered. “He doesn’t go out to the garden till six-thirty. You can set your watch by it. The agreement was we talk to Palombo. Stick to it. If Ranieri says otherwise …”

“You don’t even know where Ranieri is,” Rosa Prabakaran pointed out, and got a caustic glance from Falcone for her pains. Costa understood why. They were lucky to get this far. It could still, so easily, go wrong.

They rounded a corner past the
salone
and climbed a short set of winding marble stairs.

The men in uniform stopped outside a mahogany door at the summit and glanced at one another.

The senior officer rapped on the door with his knuckles and called out. Nothing. Then he shouted again, his rank and name, demanding that Palombo answer.

Rosa leaned forward, turned the handle, and pushed. Costa and Falcone took out their guns and edged in front of the
corazzieri
, who had no other weapon than their swords, still sheathed.

Behind them, one of the men in uniform murmured a low, shocked curse.

Automatically, Costa shoved his way to the front and entered the office, gun high, scanning the space ahead.

Luca Palombo sat motionless in a leather chair behind the desk, body thrown back at a crazy angle against the bright, sunny window. His chest was a sticky red mess of blood and gore, his head was bent forward, mouth gaping open, eyes shocked, dark, unfocused.

Falcone strode across the office and bent over the stricken figure. “Dead. Can’t have happened more than a few minutes ago. Who’s had access?”

“I told you I saw another
corazziere,”
the northern officer complained. “Everyone was supposed to be confined to barracks except us.”

The older one seemed lost, for words and for action.

Costa caught Falcone’s eye, motioned to him to move back from the desk. Then he turned around and met the eyes of the uniforms, raising a hand slightly.

At the end of the wall, by the purple velvet curtains, in an office surely made for the courtiers of a pope, was a narrow door, ajar only a few inches. In the reflection of the window, Costa could just make out the shape of a pair of shiny leather shoes, black, polished, the kind a soldier might wear, behind the polished wood.

The senior
corazziere
had caught sight of it too, and stared at him, mouthing the word
Us
.

Costa brought the gun up to eye level, glimpsed the drawn sword, and raised his eyebrows.

Not waiting for another word of protest, he moved forward, deliberately, slowly, until he was beyond the curtain. His left hand slammed the door open, his right held the gun tight and still, where he expected the man’s head to be.

There was a shout of pain as his effort collided with something physical on the other side. Dazzling sunlight streamed into the room. He could hear the
corazzieri
assembling behind him, prepared, alert; could hear too the gasp of surprise that greeted the figure cowering on the other side, who was shaking like a leaf, holding his shoulder as if in pain.

Ugo Campagnolo’s too-tanned features were wreathed in sweat. There was terror in his face.

“He’s gone?” the prime minister cried, his voice breaking.
“He’s gone?”

“Who?” Costa responded calmly.

“Him!” His eyes peered cautiously into the larger office, and at the dead man at the desk. “The monster!”

“You mean Andrea Petrakis?” Falcone asked.

“I mean … I mean …” His eyes, bright and beady, had begun to veer between fright and cunning.

“I was talking to Palombo. It was a private conversation. There was a knock on the door. So I stepped in here.”

They listened, and said nothing.

“I heard.” Campagnolo’s eyes grew bright with remembered terror. “I
heard.”

The man stank of fear and perspiration, yet even at that moment there was a sly expression on his face, one that spoke of an imminent attempt to control and defuse this situation.

“You must find this intruder. Not waste time in here. Those are my orders. Find him. You listen to me.”

Costa’s eyes strayed to the verdant palace terraces beyond the window.

In the distance, by the statue of Hermes, sat a familiar figure, hunched over a book, entirely focused on its pages, a white teacup held idly in his right hand.

A shape was slowly coming into view from the palace patio. A man in the silver uniform of a
corazziere
. In his right hand stood a long, shiny sword, half its length dark with blood.

THE MINISTRY MAN BELFIORE LED PERONI TO A SMALL, slow, rickety elevator. Together, they rose in silence to the top floor of the building. There was a narrow concrete staircase to the roof. The door at the top of the steps was closed. Locked, or so it seemed.

“This is more my line of work than yours,” the big cop told Belfiore. He set his shoulder to the old wood and pushed and heaved with all his weight. He’d taken down plenty of doors in his time and he knew this one wasn’t going to pose a problem. The lock was flimsy and easily buckled under the force of a couple of kicks. Someone had piled a stash of objects behind, blocking any entry. Twice Peroni heaved with his shoulder; he managed only to get the door back by the width of a hand.

He paused, thinking, then asked, “There’s no other way?”

“None,” Belfiore responded. “I’ll get help.”

There was a sound from the other side. A man’s voice, angry, muffled, yet somehow full of concern, even though there were no words.

“Dammit,” Peroni muttered.

He went at the door again with all his weight and force. This time it moved farther. Belfiore, who was a little slimmer, said, “Let me try.”

It was a squeeze, but he got his hand around and managed to dislodge whatever was on the other side.

Peroni burst through. He found himself surrounded by ancient garden objects and old junk. In the dark corner ahead lay a man in the
anonymous black clothing of the security services, a guise he’d seen too often these last few days in Rome. The man was bound and gagged.

Something else. A smell of tobacco on the air. Familiar. One that reminded him of what Teresa had told them when she called, speculating a little, as they all were, constantly.

“I’m not armed. Wait for my people,” Belfiore ordered.

“I don’t think so,” Peroni said, and strode out through the little cabin door onto the roof of the spooks’ building behind the Quirinale.

The figure was where he’d seen it from the street, in the far corner, overlooking the palace gardens. Stretched out, legs akimbo, heavy, stiff, but focused on the job. The rifle butt was hard against the shoulder, the sights up to the face.

Peroni used to smoke himself. Loved it. Only age and a newfound interest in his own health, which came from meeting Teresa Lupo, had made him quit. But a good smoker never forgot.

“Elizabeth!” he yelled, and took out his gun.

He was too far away to shoot. Even if he wanted to. Peroni hated guns, weapons of all kinds. There had to be another way.

“Elizabeth!” he repeated. Then, to himself, “Don’t make me shoot you. Please.”

The Englishwoman turned for a moment. She shook her head.

Then she huddled over the sniper’s rifle, intent on the distant target.

Peroni kept the gun by his side and walked across the roof.

He watched as Elizabeth Murray fired a single shot, the rifle kicking hard against her shoulder.

“A FOOL?” PETRAKIS FOUND HIMSELF SAYING AS HE STARED at the old man on the stone bench, amazed that still there was no fear in his pale, exaggerated face.

“You heard me, Andrea,” Dario Sordi said. “A foo—”

There was a sound like the crack of a whip. Petrakis watched as the foot of the statue of Hermes disintegrated into a gray cloud of dust.