Costa 08 - City of Fear (6 page)

He caught sight of Oliva with Rosa Prabakaran behind him. Her hand was already close to her jacket, feeling for the weapon there, just to make certain, the way any half-experienced officer did these days.

“I’m sure this is nothing at all,” Peroni told them. “I go first, all the same.”

Mirko Oliva looked a little surprised. “Shouldn’t we tell the control room before we go in?”

“I was about to say that,” Peroni lied.

Oliva pulled out his secure police phone. “What’s this street called?” he asked.

“It’s the Via Rasella,” Rosa Prabakaran said immediately.

The name jogged some distant memory in Peroni, but for the life of him he couldn’t remember what it was.

The interior stank of something worse than bad drains. Rats, he guessed. Dead ones. Peroni walked to the half-open door of the first downstairs room, gun in right hand. No one had been in this part of the building in years. Old machinery, half-finished chairs, and the skeleton of a table stood gathering dust. Oliva was at his shoulder, peering around inquisitively. Peroni took one step into the room, placed his large right foot into the grime on the floor, then dragged it backwards. The effort left a long, sweeping mark on the boards.

Oliva smiled and tipped an imaginary cap. Point taken. Rosa watched them both, as if she were in the company of children.

“We’re wasting time,” she complained.

“You mean in the house?” Peroni asked. “Or checking out the ground floor first?”

“Both, probably.”

She was a bad-tempered piece of work at times.

“If someone’s still here,” he said patiently, “they won’t be hiding where we expect them to hide. Now, will they?”

“If …”

Enough
, Peroni thought, and walked on with Mirko Oliva by his side, checking out the other rooms on the floor. Two were as barren as the first. The third was locked and looked as if it had been that way for years.

It was just one call among many, Peroni reminded himself. All the same, he did something he hadn’t done in years. In the absence of a key, he kicked hard at the door. The thing fell in on itself. In the dust and cobwebs lay a very old and very dirty toilet.

Rosa clapped her hands to a slow, sarcastic rhythm.

The second floor was more promising. There were marks in the dust in the main room.

“Squatters,” Rosa declared, coming back with some trash from the kitchen: an empty bag from a local bread shop, a discarded tuna can.

“Why’d they leave?” Oliva asked.

“That kind never stay anywhere more than a week.” There was an impatient scowl on her dark face. “They know we can arrest them if they hang around too long. Can’t we get this over and done with, Peroni? We’ve six more calls to make.”

“Carelessness is a privilege of youth,” he announced. “If we need prints off anything you’ve handled, forensic will call you many unpleasant names, Officer, and deservedly so.”

She took the point about the potential evidence and dumped it on the floorboards.

He stepped up the dusty, creaking bare steps leading to the story above. Three officers, two of them young, one a rank junior, the other
not as smart as she sometimes thought. The old cop checked himself. He was getting jittery in his dotage.

The odd smell that was just discernible when they entered the ground floor was becoming stronger. He glanced back and waved them to a standstill. Rosa was second, naturally, right behind him, setting out her rank above Mirko Oliva.

Peroni stood there, puzzled by the pungent, resinous odor. It reminded him of hippies and foreigners.

Then Rosa tugged at his arm and mouthed the word he was hunting for.

Incense
.

Joss sticks. The talismanic odor of freaks and squatters. Deadbeats from all over the world, breaking into empty houses, staying a week and then moving on. There were so many around, the police never bothered much anymore. Except when they got in the way.

He tried to extinguish the angry fire that was beginning to burn in his head. They were supposed to be looking for a family man who’d been kidnapped by murderous terrorists, not wasting their time on minutiae like this.

“Polizia!”
Peroni bellowed, and stormed up the remaining few steps, to find himself in a hot, stuffy room that stank of something physical. There was nothing in it but a cheap wooden dining table and a few chairs. And a man, who was seated, back to the door, head slumped forward, like someone who had fallen asleep while eating.

Flies too. Peroni had forgotten about the flies. They buzzed in and out of the windows in a black cloud, focusing on the slumped figure at the table, hesitantly, as if there was something there they didn’t understand, either.

He kept his gun in front of him. The stench of the incense returned, stranger somehow. It seemed to be coming from a pool of darkness in one corner, where the sunlight streaming through the open windows couldn’t reach.

“Polizia,”
Peroni said more quietly, and started to work his way around to the front of the hunched form.

“Boss,” Mirko Oliva said quietly.

“What?”

“He’s not moving.”

Peroni knew that. Knew too that, though he could only see the back of this figure in a dark, crumpled business suit, it was Giovanni Batisti, huddled over the table, face in his arms.

On the wall behind, someone had stuck up a poster, one so big that it looked as if it ought to have come out of one of the tourist shops around the corner near the Trevi Fountain, where you could pick up Raphael or Caravaggio, Da Vinci or some modern junk, for next to nothing.

He leaned forward, placed a gentle hand on the shoulder of the man at the table, and said, more out of hope than anything else,
“Signore.”

No sound, no stirring, not a sign of breath, a hint of life.

Peroni swore and looked at the poster again. It was a blown-up photograph, the kind of overimaginative thing you got in squats and communes. An ancient scrawl, like paint on plaster, depicting an evil-looking devil, teeth bared, eyes on fire, snakes writhing in his fists, skin painted a faded blue.

So many faint, unconnected memories were fighting for his attention at that moment. The knowledge that the Via Rasella meant something, and this hideous picture on the wall …

Letters, Roman numerals, had been scrawled—in blood, surely—next to the vile creature’s head.

III. I. CCLXIII
.

Mirko Oliva swept his hand through the cloud of flies in front of him, then stooped down to tap the still, prone man at the table, getting there before either Peroni or Rosa could stop him.

What came next seemed obvious, inevitable. Oliva touched Giovanni Batisti on the shoulder, gripped him, shook him. The politician’s body lurched forward. A buzzing, billowing mass of insects rose from inside the fabric.

The junior officer said something inaudible, clapped his hand to his mouth, then dashed for the open window. Rosa was calling for backup, forensics, everything she could think of. Her voice sounded harsh and brittle and frightened in the airless room where the only other sounds were the buzzing of flies and the distant muffled hum of traffic from the tunnel beneath the Quirinale.

“I’m too old for this,” Peroni muttered, and found he couldn’t stop himself thinking about the picture on the wall.

Oliva was still retching out the open window, heaving up his lunch into the street below.

“Get away from there!” Peroni yelled, angry all of a sudden.

From the dark corner opposite there emerged another young man, this one almost naked, his face painted blue, like the demon in the poster, his eyes wild with fear and anguish.

Words Peroni didn’t recognize were coming out of his throat. In his left hand he held a bloodied dagger. In his right two incense sticks burned, their sweet smoke curling upward to the ceiling, through the swarming cloud of insects.

PALOMBO TURNED OFF THE COMPUTER SCREEN.

“The same night Andrea Petrakis’s acolytes killed themselves in Tarquinia, five days after the murder of the Frascas, a witness saw a small motorboat being stolen from Porto Ercole, thirty minutes north. A young man and possibly someone else were on board. The theory was that Petrakis tried to reach Corsica with the Frasca child as some kind of hostage. He was an experienced sailor. His parents owned a boat. He had a student pilot license as well. He understood navigation, the weather. We never heard from him again, until now.”

“I remember something about a parliamentary commission,” Costa said. “My father was a member.” He looked at Sordi. “So were you, sir.”

The president nodded. “So I was. Parliament wanted to know whether this was yet one more political terrorist group to worry about, or simply something bizarre. Something inexplicable.”

“And?” Falcone persisted, when the man said no more.

“The consensus we reached, with which Marco Costa disagreed, as was his habit, determined that Andrea Petrakis was a lunatic heading his own strange cult, one he named after this image he found in a tomb in the Maremma. The Blue Demon amounted to nothing more than the man himself and his three dead followers. Petrakis managed to make these young people murderous through drugs and any other means he could find. Perhaps his parents found out and he killed them. That was as far as we got.”

“Until now,” Rennick interrupted, tapping the laptop’s keyboard, bringing the picture back to life. A map appeared. Southern Afghanistan, Helmand province.

The American indicated an area on the screen using a laser pointer.

“What you’re looking at is British-managed territory near the Afghan-Pakistan border. The most unstable sector in the region, which is saying something. It’s got everything. Ordinary decent people. Opium farmers. Bandits, Taliban, al-Qaeda. Cheek by jowl, indivisible, inseparable. Three weeks ago one of our teams carried out a raid on a suspect house. We found all kinds of material relating to Rome. Maps. Satellite images. Details of water and transport systems. Documents on the Quirinale hill. Whoever collected this material began on February 13 this year. The very day Prime Minister Campagnolo announced the G8 summit would take place here. Intelligence finally came up with this.…”

He punched up a fuzzy photograph of a clean-shaven man in Western dress. His hair was long and gray, dirty, wavy. He was wearing sunglasses and peering in the direction of the camera, as if suspicious.

“Everything referred to an operation that was code-named
Il Demone Azzurro
. We’ve never encountered any kind of document in Italian in situations like this before. It took a while before we were able to make the connections. Then we got a DNA match from the house. There was physical evidence on file from his parents. It’s Andrea Petrakis. No doubt about it.”

Falcone scratched his silver goatee and looked decidedly unimpressed.

“You’re saying a student wanted for murder twenty years ago fled the country and ended up working with Islamic terrorists in Afghanistan?” He sounded incredulous. “Why?”

“His motives are irrelevant at this point,” Palombo cut in. “Four men and one woman were spirited from Helmand into northern Pakistan in March. We have reason to believe that Petrakis is their leader. In April they reached Turkey. After that we lost them. Until last night.”

“If you’d shared this information with us earlier,” Commissario Esposito complained, “we might have been alert to the threat. Giovanni Batisti. That poor woman …”

“Batisti knew he was supposed to be careful,” the ministry official responded without emotion. “There was nothing sufficiently concrete to warrant anything more than a heightened alert. What would you have done, Commissario? What could any of us have achieved in the face of such a generalized and vague threat?”

“We can’t possibly know, can we?” Falcone demanded.

“If the combined forces of the Italian and American security agencies were powerless, Inspector,” Palombo replied icily, “I fail to see how the state police might have made a difference. The plain fact is that the Blue Demon is back with us in the shape of Andrea Petrakis. The security arrangements that were communicated to you previously have clearly been compromised. From this moment on we start afresh. In a few hours we begin building a physical ring of steel around the Quirinale Palace. A fence five meters high around the perimeter. No one comes in without accreditation. Fiumicino and Ciampino airports will close until the summit is over. No traffic will move in any of the nearby roads. We have been in touch with the Vatican authorities. As of this evening, all public buildings, including St. Peter’s, will close to visitors, until the emergency is over.”

The displeasure on Dario Sordi’s face was plain.

“We’ll have snipers on rooftops,” Palombo continued. “Armed officers in every part of the city from which some kind of attack—by mortar, by rifle, by chemical or any other means—might be launched. The immediate area outside the exclusion zone will be patrolled constantly, with spot checks on anyone in the vicinity.”

“This is a city of two and a half million people,” Falcone objected. “You can’t shut them out of the place they live.”