Costa 08 - City of Fear (48 page)

Duty followed a good man forever, from the first dawn of consciousness all the way to the grave.

Sordi watched the palace of the popes disintegrate before his eyes.
This is what they wanted all along
, he thought. Not blood, not vengeance, but anarchy over order, the sharp, bright fury of the moment victorious over the slow, pained progress he knew as civilization. It was the lesson Andrea Petrakis had learned from the Etruscans, and perhaps the man had a point.

The Blue Demon was everywhere and nowhere, eternal, invisible, waiting for its time to come.

The Way South

COSTA WAS WOKEN BY THE SMELL OF TOBACCO SMOKE drifting into the bedroom from the patio outside. The acrid aroma mingled with the fragrance of jasmine blossom clinging to the wall of his country home off the Via Appia Antica.

A familiar stench. Black Russian. He got up, dressed slowly, thinking.

It was six days since the bloody events at the Quirinale. Normality, of a kind, had returned. An interim government was in power, awaiting elections that Ugo Campagnolo’s heirs, shadowy men of dubious provenance, were expected to win by a landslide. The prime minister had been accorded a state funeral, which Dario Sordi, looking frail for the first time, attended in silence. Afterwards the president had gone to the private ceremony for Fabio Ranieri, one that had attracted no publicity whatsoever, at the insistence of the dead Corazzieri captain’s family.

No one in Italy quite believed they had heard the full story. No one expected to. The Spanish woman, Anna Ybarra, remained in police custody, charged with attempted murder and numerous terrorist offenses, seemingly unable to shed any useful light on the men who had brought her to Italy. An attempt by the divided opposition to force an investigation into the affair had failed. After that, Dario Sordi had retired behind the shutters of the Quirinale Palace, refusing to appear in public. The natural Italian penchant for cynicism toward politicians had come into play too, filling the Web and the scurrilous tabloids with rumors
and allegations. The identity of the final sniper remained a mystery. Only his location was known, through the discovery of a set of shell cases in the campanile of
Il Torrino
.

The previous afternoon Costa had passed the old, crumbling statue of Pasquino near the Piazza Navona and found the base plastered in fresh posters bearing a flurry of allegations about the political classes—a few about Sordi himself. There was a febrile mood in the air, along with a sense of guilty gratitude. Whatever had happened behind the ring of steel surrounding the Quirinale Palace, the crisis had passed. The status quo—awkward, imperfect, fragile—had returned. In a sense, the Blue Demon had won. No one questioned the present state of the nation. The average Roman lacked the energy, and saw no point in attempting to summon up the necessary courage.

Costa had read the scabrous messages on Pasquino on his way back from the Questura after some nameless official from the Ministry served suspension notices on all those who’d worked in the apartment in San Giovanni in Laterano, even Teresa and her hapless assistant Di Capua. Commissario Esposito was hanging on to his job by the skin of his teeth somehow. It was unclear what would happen next. An investigation would have proved too embarrassing for the Ministry. Some swift judgment—a loss of pay, demotion, perhaps, even ejection from the force—would be handed down to the police officers involved, probably in a matter of days.

This no longer concerned Nic. After they handed out the suspension notices, he had turned down Falcone’s offer of a consolation lunch with the others, walked into a stationer’s shop, bought a few sheets of notepaper and envelopes, then sat in the belly of the Pantheon, listening to the echoing voices of the visitors, entranced as always by the light falling through the oculus, the eye in the center of the dome, which dispatched a shaft of bright sun directly into what was once the hall of a pagan temple built by the emperor Hadrian. This was a building with memories for him, of a time when he’d felt some kind of hope and ambition, for himself and the world. A period of love too, something that had slipped between his fingers like dust almost as swiftly as it had arrived, unbidden, almost unwanted.

Beneath the great span of Hadrian’s sanctuary, he penned his resignation from the police force. It was a brief, unapologetic, practical note, which he delivered by hand to Prinzivalli, the desk officer on duty at the Questura, one hour later, asking that he pass it on to whoever was in charge at that moment.

He had no plans. Some part of him that had been slumbering for a decade or more whispered reminders of a dream he’d almost forgotten: taking a bicycle onto the ancient cobbles of the Appian Way, the old Roman road at the foot of his drive, which ran all the way from the capital to Brindisi in Apulia, moving from modern Italy into the lost past of fable. He’d never allowed himself that kind of freedom. There had always been cares and duties that got in the way as he slipped from a quiet, introverted childhood into the sudden demands of a family falling apart beneath the weight of controversy, illness, and death.

Costa made two cups of coffee and poured a couple of glasses of orange juice, then went outside. Elizabeth Murray was basking in the hot morning sun. She wore sunglasses, a blue checked cotton shirt, and a baggy pair of jeans. The cigarette went out the moment he appeared, ditched beneath the wooden table that had been used for outdoor meals for as long as he could remember. He saw, now, that the oak of the table was rotten, and perhaps had been for some time, without his noticing.

There was a black briefcase on the surface and a cell phone.

Elizabeth grabbed at her cup, took a swig, closed her eyes, and remarked, “You know, there’s nowhere else in the world where coffee tastes like this. Rome. It must be the water.”

“Why didn’t you tell us?” he asked. “That you knew what Petrakis’s message meant?”

She opened her eyes and squinted at the horizon: the ruins of tombs, the roofs of the nearby mansions, a fringe of trees waving in the soft morning breeze.

“What would you have done?” she asked.

“We could have talked to Ranieri.”

“You would never have got through. So who else? Palombo? Dario himself? You should read history more. These things don’t happen
by accident. They’re conspired at. Plotted. Planned. They knew exactly what they were doing from the moment Andrea Petrakis left Afghanistan. Dario was isolated as soon as the G8 parties left for the Vatican. I know. I tried to call him myself. It was never going to work.”

She shrugged and a brief, self-deprecating smile creased her face. “So I did what you can’t. I took matters into my own hands.”

“You might have failed.”

“I might,” she agreed placidly. “I didn’t feel I had much of an option. It was obvious they’d try to attack Dario while he was in the garden. I know his little tea ceremony well. Where do you think the old boy gets those English biscuits he loves so much?” She frowned. “I was sure Petrakis would try to do the job himself. He had a theatrical streak to his nature, in case you didn’t notice. I reasoned that in those circumstances I could take him out. I would have too. I wasn’t trying to wound the bastard. I wanted him dead. So did Ugo Campagnolo, of course, though for entirely different reasons.”

“Petrakis wasn’t alone.”

“No. I’m old. Out of practice. Twenty years ago I might have seen the rifle poking out of
Il Torrino
. Not now. Sorry!”

“Peroni could have shot you.”

A look of puzzlement crossed her face. “Is life meant to be led without risk? I didn’t know that. Never occurred to me. How boring.”

She patted the briefcase. “Before I open up this thing, do you want to tell me what you think happened? Then we can compare notes.”

“I don’t know,” Costa said emphatically. “And the truth is, I don’t care anymore.”

The answer surprised her.

Elizabeth Murray gazed at him and there was something in her friendly, mannish face he couldn’t interpret. Sympathy? Reluctance? Some slow, subtle anger?

“But you do care, Nic,” she told him quietly. “I’m going to make sure of that, I’m afraid.”

She snapped open the case, reached inside, and lifted out some kind of report. The paper was yellowed with age, the words clearly typed, not printed from a modern machine.

“This is the submission your father produced for the Blue Demon
commission. Twenty years ago, I suppressed it, with the backing of Dario Sordi, before any other member could see it. Or so we thought.”

“No, Elizabeth. You can’t do this. I won’t become involved.…”

“Nic!” She looked furious, and for the first time since they met he realized he could imagine her in the security services, an active participant in some live operation; could see her as Peroni had described, spread-eagled like a professional on the rooftop overlooking the Quirinale gardens. “May I ask you a personal question?”

“Can I stop you?”

“No.” She watched him intently. “Tell me. Your parents died of the selfsame cancer eleven years apart. An identical disease. Did that never strike you as a very unfortunate and unusual coincidence? Are you perpetually incurious? Or simply downright naïve?”

The bright morning seemed to pall, the vivid country colors leaching out of the fields and flowers and vines around them. He couldn’t hear the birds singing. It was impossible to think.

“What did you say?” he murmured, shaking his head.

“I’m going for a smoke. In what passes for your vineyard.” She threw the report at him. “Read this. Then we’ll talk.”

THERE WAS A VOICE INSIDE THE WORDS ON THE FADING pages, and it was that of his father: precise, impatient, penetrating, and angry. The submission ran to ten pages and described the relationship between Ugo Campagnolo, the Gladio team led by Renzo Frasca, Gregor Petrakis (the father of Andrea), the network’s placeman, and the three principal crime organizations in Italy: the Sicilian Cosa Nostra, the Camorra of Naples, and the ’Ndrangheta of Calabria.

Costa read the accusations his own father had put down on paper two decades before.

The charge was simple: Gregor Petrakis and Ugo Campagnolo met through the covert Gladio organization, initially set up to provide a network of undercover agents in the event of a Soviet takeover of Italy. The Blue Demon was one of several fake terror groups envisaged by the two men as a way of meeting Gladio’s demand for a “strategy of tension.” But the pair soon discovered a mutual taste for illicit income. At the time, Campagnolo’s legitimate businesses were beginning to fail. He and Petrakis quietly made themselves small fortunes through the supply of hard drugs—not just in Tarquinia, but in Rome and Florence too—by using the Greek’s links with Afghan sources to channel heroin and marijuana directly to customers outside the usual networks controlled by the mobs.

Over time, Campagnolo came to understand the risk he was running by undercutting the gangs. His solution was to persuade the three
normally independent crime organizations to pool their resources, to take over the Blue Demon’s drug network and use him and its resources as a conduit into the world of politics. Slowly, Campagnolo subverted the political ambitions of his NATO handlers and shifted his allegiance to the mobs in return for their support. The Blue Demon became a conspiracy, a consortium dedicated to a covert attempt to fund, shape, and control the political future of the nation, infiltrating its institutions, creating parties and groupings that would quietly work in the interests of organized crime.