Costa 08 - City of Fear (49 page)

Petrakis and his wife, idealists at heart, died when they realized what was happening and threatened to inform their original paymasters, the Americans and the British running the Gladio operation. Campagnolo’s response was to inform the consortium that Petrakis was still involved in direct drug trafficking on behalf of the Afghan gangs, against their express orders.

When the couple were murdered, Renzo Frasca, the U.S. handler for the couple’s work with Gladio, was panicked into inventing a solution that would prevent discovery of the network. Petrakis’s original plan for the Blue Demon as a terror group became the answer, and his son—a minor participant in his parents’ schemes—was talked into fronting the imaginary cell as a way of getting him out of the country safely and saving what reputation his parents had. The deaths of Frasca and his wife were faked. Those of three students whose only interest had been drugs, and of a hapless
carabiniere
, were all too real, props to lend the story a terrible credence.

And Ugo Campagnolo escaped, to rise and prosper through the world of Italian politics, the front man for the conglomerate of crime interests that took on the name that the late Gregor Petrakis had given his fledgling terror group: the Blue Demon.

Costa finished the report. His head was spinning. There was nothing there but supposition and hearsay. Not a single statement from a named witness or a piece of paper that could link Campagnolo’s companies to the Petrakises’ illicit operations.

Yet it was true, and he knew it. His father had been a careful, fair-minded man. He would never have put down on paper suspicions that were mere gossip and rumor.

These events had begun in Nic Costa’s childhood. Much of them passed him by. There were reasons: The headlines the Blue Demon generated in the media had come to an end once Andrea Petrakis disappeared. More personal grounds too. Not long afterwards his mother had become sick, falling into the debilitating illness that would take her life, slowly, day by day, as the rest of them watched, distraught and utterly impotent.

The words Elizabeth Murray had uttered brought back a thought that had dogged him for years: Why should they have been so unlucky? What savage quirk of fate meant that both his father and mother should fall victim to the same disease?

He was lost in his own memories. Only the smell of smoke told him, in the end, that she’d returned to sit at the old table again, where his family used to eat together, laughing mostly, even in the dark days.

“WHY DID YOU BURY THIS?” COSTA ASKED HER.

“For his own good. Ugo Campagnolo was a member of the commission. Your father would have been serving his own death warrant had we allowed that report to be presented.”

“You could have done something.”

“Listen to yourself. You’re a cop. How many bent politicians do you have in Italy? How many have seen the inside of a jail cell these last thirty years? Besides, they’d covered their tracks so well. There was nothing we could do. It was impossible.… So we tried to keep Marco safe, in spite of himself. We had to make sure Campagnolo’s people never knew any of this report existed. It was too dangerous. For your father.” Her bright, serious eyes never left him. “For his family.”

He could hear the sound of a tractor working in the adjoining field, the distant voices of the farm laborers going about their work.

“Do you want me to continue?” she asked softly.

“She had cancer. They both did.”

He could picture them wasting away; he could recall so sharply the impotence he felt as he watched.

“I was out of the service by then,” she went on. “Marco kept on nagging people. He wouldn’t let it go. They were bound to find out in the end.”

She took more papers out of the briefcase.

“I was in touch with Dario, discreetly. The idea that the crime gangs
were deliberately infiltrating the political process—not just buying off individuals along the way—it terrified us. The mobs were weaker when they were rivals. If they came together, made a concerted attempt to infiltrate the process of government …” She stopped for a moment. “It doesn’t bear thinking about. When your father became sick, we sent some friends into his office. They were looking for bugs. They found some. They also found this.”

Costa stared at the report. It bore the letterhead of a private laboratory in Milan and a few paragraphs of text that seemed mired in scientific jargon. One thing he could understand: the recurring term
radiation
.

“These people have friends everywhere. Among them are some former secret-service agents in the former Eastern Bloc. They used junk like this long before it occurred to anyone else it might disguise a murder. What they put in the desk in your father’s office must have been there for months, if not years. Long-term, low-level exposure to radiation is extremely difficult to detect, unless you know that’s what you’re looking for.”

He got up and walked to the corner of the patio, scanned the drive. It was empty except for the small red Fiat in which she’d arrived. Costa wiped his eyes with his sleeve, then came and sat down.

“What about my mother?” he asked her.

She reached for another sheet of paper. He could see it was from the same company.

“When we realized what had happened—the similarity between her symptoms and his—we managed to get someone into her office in the university. Radiation lingers. There was still a faint trace there. The same kind.” The Englishwoman frowned. “I’m sorry. Maybe they warned your father. Maybe not.” She glanced at the farmhouse behind them. “They were bugging this place. You know that. You also know threats would have made no difference. The way your father was …”

“You could have told me.” Costa felt like screaming, like running away.

She sat still and silent, waiting for him to calm down. After a little while she asked, “Told you what? That we believed these people—Ugo Campagnolo among them—had your mother and father murdered, in
the cruelest way imaginable, and there was nothing in the world we could do about it? We can’t link him to the radioactive material here. We can’t even prove an organization called the Blue Demon exists.” She hesitated. “Not yet.” Elizabeth Murray watched him closely, then asked, “Why do you think Andrea Petrakis came back?”

“Is this a test?”

“You could say that.”

“He was ordered back. They were worried about something.”

“Exactly.” Her eyes never left him. “A few of us have been quietly working on the Blue Demon for years. It’s not easy. I moved to New Zealand for a reason. To stay alive principally. In our favor, there is the simple matter of human nature. This is an awkward arrangement. The members have detested each other for decades. You can’t bury all that hatred overnight, even when the prize is an entire nation. Now that they’re winning, it’s worse. There are even more arguments to be had over how to divide up the spoils. Some of those who signed up find it deeply boring too, and much prefer the old ways. In the end they wind up marginalized. Left out of the loop. They don’t like that.”

“You have someone?” he asked. “An informer?”

“I wish it were that simple. Some months ago there was word that one of those involved was willing to turn himself in. We don’t know who. We don’t know why. We were told he would give us everything. Names, bank accounts. The structure of everything Campagnolo and those behind him worked to establish. If we could bring in this man alive … Keep him that way. Get into court. That’s a big if. Particularly now they know. They’d kill him without a thought, of course, the way they were content to shoot Ugo instead of Dario when they saw the endgame was falling apart. There’s no friendship among thieves.”

He remembered those few grim, bloody moments in the garden of the Quirinale.

“Who was the shooter?” he asked.

“Someone in the campanile. That’s all anyone knows. All they’re likely to know. The same goes for the bomb in the palace. It was in a room in the basement. My guess is someone placed it there after Palombo detained all Ranieri’s officers. I don’t see how it could have happened any other way. They weren’t trying to kill the G8 people. They
weren’t that interested in assassinating Dario. They were making a statement. Trying to tell us they knew we were chasing them and they wouldn’t allow it. That was why they summoned Andrea Petrakis back from Afghanistan.”

A car stopped in the road at the end of the drive. She watched it for a moment, then said, “Rennick was fooled into thinking this was one last false-flag operation. He didn’t realize Andrea was seriously damaged goods by that stage, more damaged than even Luca Palombo appreciated. Andrea had come to believe all that nonsense his father invented about the Blue Demon. Except that for him it didn’t mean a bunch of murdering criminals. It meant … some bloody retribution against Rome, against Western society. He really believed he was some avenging angel from Hell.” She drained her coffee.

“He was a leaky weapon, one that might go off anywhere. Rennick was willing to contemplate some small-scale display of terrorism in the heart of Rome, with a handful of casualties, just enough to keep the hoi polloi in its place, and maybe even send Andrea straight back into the arms of the leadership in Afghanistan. He didn’t tell his superiors. I know that. I checked. They would have stopped it the moment they heard. Those days are over. Besides, it was never going to happen. You understand why? Andrea said it himself. You heard him. He didn’t come here for the reason Rennick thought. He came here to kill the Blue Demon.”

Costa’s mind returned to those last moments of insanity in the palace gardens. Petrakis approaching Dario Sordi, his face full of fury and a passion for revenge. “Andrea had no idea what the Blue Demon really represented,” he said quietly. “For him it was the man who betrayed his parents.”

“Quite. So Palombo conveniently put none other than Dario Sordi in the frame, which happened to fit very neatly with the worldview Andrea had developed over the years. The lunatic craved a target, and when he had it, nothing was going to stop him. Not Renzo Frasca, not us, not you—certainly not that poor fool Giovanni Batisti, who opened his mouth to Palombo the moment Dario tried to sound him out.”

“Are you sure of this?” he asked.

“Ranieri had a wiretap on Palombo for a while. Palombo thought he
could control Andrea. He didn’t realize Petrakis intended to destroy everything—and everyone—he associated with Rome. Dario. Palombo. Ugo too probably, if he’d got the chance. If you tell a man to pretend he’s a monster, place him among monsters, then demand that he act, in word and deed, like a monster, only a fool should be surprised if in the end he becomes a monster.”

Costa felt as if the world had turned upside down, rearranged itself into a form that was different, unrecognizable, yet one that made a terrible kind of sense. All the self-hate he’d recognized in his father over the years. All the pain and the internalized agony. It was, he now saw, a form of self-recrimination, the knowledge that his own dogged integrity had brought an untimely death upon his wife, and then, in a way Marco Costa probably regarded as a deserved form of retribution, upon himself too.

“Can you prove any of this?”

Her pale, very English face fell. “Not a thing. Sorry.”

“I need to think,” he said, and got up from the table.

She didn’t move. “There’s no time for thinking,” Elizabeth Murray observed, sounding a little cross. “Don’t you understand?”

“I’m sorry.…”

“Listen to me, Nic. I’ve been chasing the ghost of the Blue Demon for twenty years. I used to think it was Ugo Campagnolo himself. Now I wonder how I could ever have been so stupid. This is the dark side of Italy, the part that’s always there, as much as we try to pretend it doesn’t exist. They made Campagnolo prime minister and then they murdered him when they thought he might prove a liability. They will pack the government that replaces him with their own men, loyal to the organizations, not those who elect them. They’re inside the Carabinieri, the police force, the judiciary, the entire process of government. As every day passes they become more powerful, their influence more corrosive. This is my adopted country and I had to abandon it because these sons of bitches made me fear for my life. Did you hear what I said?
This all happened because they think we may finally have them
. And your response is going to be to walk away? Your name is Costa, isn’t it? Or were you adopted?”

“Don’t push me, please.”

She reached into the briefcase once more and removed something. Costa saw what it was: the resignation letter he’d handed to Prinzivalli at the Questura desk the day before.

“I gave that to a police officer.…”

“A damned good one too,” she interrupted. “He handed it straight to Leo. It never went any further. We’re not totally alone, you know. We have a few select friends. And this is your answer, is it? To hide your head in the sand. To flee. Just as Dario and I did twenty years ago, burying the evidence your father was insisting we expose. Looking the other way for no other reason than cowardice dressed as convenience.”

She faced him beneath the uncut, overflowing vines of the terrace.