David Hewson (35 page)

"No,
Nic," she said firmly, "it's the truth. The man we're
looking for now was the leader of that team, on the military side anyway. William
F. Kaspar. And somehow what happened to him then is behind what's
happening now."

She
paused. "Do you mind if I smoke?"

"You
smoke?"

"Sometimes.
I have been known to have a boyfriend on occasion too. Are you shocked? What is
this? A monastery?"

"Not
always," he answered. "But no one--and I mean no
one--smokes in here. If you need a cigarette, do what everyone else
does--go outside."

She
looked at the door.

"Later,"
he added. "Please."

He
was thinking about what she said. Every military campaign had to be preceded by
some kind of covert activity. It still seemed light-years away from a bizarre
streak of killings more than a decade later.

"This
is all a long time ago, Emily."

She
shook her head vigorously. "Oh no. Only for those of us who were young
then. For the people who fought there it's like yesterday. That's
what wars are like, Nic. Haven't you talked to an old soldier? It's
the first thing you notice. It lives with them, day in, day out, often for the
rest of their lives. Usually it's the most important thing that ever
happens to them."

"This
is Italy. We don't have many old soldiers."

There
was a sharp intake of breath and a cold flash of those blue eyes. "OK,
OK. I represent the great imperial power and we're just brimming over
with soldiers. So take my word for it.
When It comes to war, memories
don't fade easily
. Especially for him..."

She
pointed to the name in the middle of the weird, rambling memo that was on the
screen. The one that said:
Subject: Babylon Sisters. Status: You have to
ask
?

He
read it, page by page, stumbling over the odd, colloquial language.

"William
F. Kaspar again," he said when he'd finished. "OK. I
didn't have time to chase the diplomat I mentioned. But I called the desk
about
him
. Honest. There's nothing."

"I'd
be amazed if there was. I didn't find out much myself. There are no
military records. Nothing personal out there. Just this one memo."

"This
is all about some big secret or something?"

"I
think so."

"Then
why's there still some evidence left? Just this one piece?"

"
I
don't know
!" Something about its provenance exasperated her
too. "Maybe it was a mistake," she suggested, and didn't look
him in the eye when she said it. "They happen. It
was
filed
under the wrong keywords."

Costa
was starting to convince himself she knew more than she was revealing at that
moment. But before he could pursue the point she was moving on, impatient to
get over her point.

"It
isn't just this memo, Nic. It's what's in here too. My dad
knew this guy. I vaguely remember him coming to our house. A big, noisy man,
all laughter and presents. Loud. And scary too. He was sort of the boss, I
think. You can hear it in the tone of this memo. He's the guy who's
leading this assignment, assembling the teams, taking them into action. My dad
with him."

Cases
went bad when they began to bite into your own private life. Nic knew that only
too well from his own experience.

"Are
you sure? That your father was a part of this?"

"Absolutely.
There's a whole chunk of 1991 when he wasn't around. I remember it
clearly. I'm an only child. They notice things like that. He was gone and
while he was away you could touch the atmosphere in that apartment the embassy
gave us. Everything felt so odd. I've tried to talk to my mom about it
and all she says is he was away somewhere, working."

"Maybe
he was."

"I
don't doubt it. Now I know where. And I know it did something to him,
too. When he came back he was... different. He'd changed. Something
had marked him. He wasn't..."

She
hesitated, determined to be precise about this last point.

"He
wasn't the same dad anymore. A part of him--the good part, all the
life and joy--had gone. He was cold and unhappy. It wasn't long and
he was gone too. Out of the house, talking to the divorce lawyers. There was
just my mom and me and a lot--I mean a
lot
--of bad
feeling."

"I'm
sorry."

Emily
Deacon was waving a hand at him in embarrassment. "OK, OK. I know what
you're thinking. This is just a run-of-the-mill family break-up I'm
trying to rationalize by blaming it on something else. First point: Bill Kaspar
murdered my dad. No arguments there. I knew that without a doubt when I looked
into his face and watched him trying to decide whether to kill me, too. Second
point: yes, I do want to know why, but it's not just for me. It's
for all of them. Whatever brought him to kill my dad was the same thing that
brought him to kill those others. Knowing that will solve this case for
everyone."

He
could see what she'd been through, getting scarred twice over. By the
change in her father when she was a kid and by his death a few months ago. Nonetheless
there was a strong, rational line in her argument. Emily Deacon could tough it
through the pain, or so she thought.

"We
need proof, Emily," he said.

She
fired up a Web browser, hammering in a flurry of words. "And you
don't just get it from hacking embassy computer systems. Sometimes
it's waiting out there on the Web. Take a look at this and see what you
think."

Costa
vaguely recognized what he was now looking at. It was a newsgroup, one of those
anonymous bulletin boards the surveillance people regularly browsed for raw
intelligence. There was a short message starting a thread with the title
"Babylon Sisters." The first entry, the one opening the discussion,
had been posted on 30 September.

Emily
Deacon stared at the screen and said without emotion, "I found this just
by looking on the Net. It's public and it's meant to be. Someone
put it there for a reason. The memo tells you what Babylon Sisters meant. It
was the code name for the operation. My guess is that Babylon was the closest
notable location to where they were headed. The name's from an old rock
song my dad liked. Maybe Kaspar had the same tastes. And here it is thirteen
years later. Think of the timing, Nic. This was posted three days after my dad
was murdered."

He
looked at the first message on the screen and hated what he saw, felt tainted
by the craziness of the language.

The
Scarlet Beast was a generous beast. Honor his memory. Fuck China. Fuck the
ziggurat. Let's get together again back in the old places, folks. Reunion
time for the class of "91. Just one spare place at the table. You coming
or not?

"You
get this kind of crap everywhere on the Net, Emily."

"Of
course. It's meant to sound like that. Whoever wrote that message
doesn't want it to mean anything to anyone but Bill Kaspar. They know
what Kaspar's like. They know that, from time to time, he's going
to walk up to a PC somewhere in the world, fire up a search engine and type in
two words: "Babylon Sisters." Sooner or later he's going to
hit on this. Sooner or later he's going to respond. Which he does. Read
the second message."

Nic
hit the key for the next window.

Lying
fuckhead, treasonable, cowardly scum. I've waited long enough now. "Bill
Kaspar" my ass. This is the real thing. Fear not. There will be a
reunion. And soon. Pray we don't meet.

The
reply was dated that morning, signed, simply, "[email protected]."

"It
could be Kaspar sending messages to himself," Costa suggested. The
language sounded like the kind of internal argument that might lurk inside the
brain of someone who could dismember a woman, park her head in front of the TV
to make a room look "normal," then smear the walls with her blood
in a strange, repeating pattern, over and over again. "He's crazy
enough."

"Why
wait more than three months before answering yourself? What's more,
consider this: at eleven this morning, just after Kaspar's reply got
posted, Leapman ordered a couple of the five security guys I never knew existed
out onto the street. Want to bet where they're looking? Net cafes, just
to see if he can't resist the bait second time round. You see
what's happening?"

He
could and he wondered if they appreciated how futile it was likely to be. The
city was full of places, large and small, where you could wander in off the
street and buy fifteen minutes online. Five men couldn't cover every last
Net cafe, moneychanger and bookshop in Rome.

"Would
Leapman write something like this?"

She
shook her head slowly, deliberately, and he couldn't stop himself
watching the way her soft blonde hair moved. "No need to. We have
specialists to do that. Someone from profiling maybe, who's got access to
files I don't possess. The syntax is very deliberate and direct. Maybe
Kaspar is a good ol" boy or something or maybe they just copied it from
that first memo I showed you. Though I doubt it. If they knew that was still
around on the system my guess is they'd have erased it."

There
were so many possibilities here. Costa wished his head were in better working
order to consider them, to separate speculation from fact.

"We
need to discuss this with someone. Your people. Mine. Maybe there's
something here. Or maybe we're just seeing what we want to see."

"Oh,
Nic." Her hand brushed his arm. There was a flash of a white smile. "You
really don't understand what we're dealing with, do you? My people
know
.
I think a good few of yours do, too."

Not
Falcone, though, Costa thought. He was sure of that. It just wasn't the
inspector's style.

"Finish
reading," she ordered quietly. "Leapman's man came back for a
third try."

He
scrolled down and read the third message, posted at noon, again from
"[email protected]."

Well
hang me high and stretch me wide. Just when you think you made somethin"
idiot-proof they come along and invent a better idiot. Can't keep those
fingers still, can you, Billy Boy? All this cuttin' has turned your mind,
brother. Call home, brother. Reel yourself in. Nothin" smells worse than
an old soldier gone bad. There's mercy waiting here if only you got the
sense to ask for it. Least that way you get to stay alive.

Oh
and by the by. What did Laura Lee ever do to you, man? She took a bullet in all
that mess back then. So how come she gets dead now and Little Em walks away
without a scratch? You turn weakling when there's a WASP around? Or are
you just going soft in your old age?

Costa
stared at the words on the screen. There couldn't be any other explanation.

"Little
Em..."

"That's
me," she said.

AS
GIANNI PERONI'S LUCK would have it, the same damn caretaker was on duty
and sporting the same bad, red-faced mood he'd owned the night Mauro
Sandri died.

The
grumpy old bastard spent his time alone at the booth by the door of the
Pantheon, checking his watch at regular intervals, wandering over to the centre
of the building now and then to sweep away the flecks of snow spiralling
lightly down through the oculus. Peroni had a seat in the shadows on the
opposite side of the chilly circular hall. The place was a wonderful sight,
timeless, even with the anachronistic illumination of the dim electric lights. The
distant part of him that remembered school history lessons half imagined an
ancient Roman emperor coming here, lord of his own realm, staring up through
that open eye, wondering what was looking back at him from the greater kingdom
of the heavens. Peroni felt more than a little awed by what he saw. It was wrong
that a place like this had been sullied by what happened two nights before. That
thought depressed him, that and the plain fact he was probably wasting his
time. After he'd left the cafe in Trastevere with such high hopes, Peroni
had driven the jeep across the river, parked discreetly in one of the side
turnings off Rinascimento and made his way to the monument, taking the
caretaker aside for a quiet talk when he arrived. There wasn't a single
sign he was in luck. Only a couple of people had walked through the door while
he'd been there, and both of them were searching--in vain--for
respite from the cold. The place would close in less than an hour. It was a
dumb idea, but it was the only idea he'd got.

Besides,
she'd so much time on him. She could have walked in, picked up anything
she'd left behind and walked back out into the premature wintry darkness
hours ago. But then what? Peroni clung to the belief Laila acted the way she
did because, after Teresa's invented story, the girl wanted to help him. She'd
have made contact somehow, surely. He tried to draw some encouragement, too,
from the fact the caretaker was adamant no lone, black-clad kid had been in. Given
how few visitors the place was getting in this extraordinary bout of ice and
snow, there ought to be some comfort in that.

His
mind was wandering when the caretaker ambled over, picking snowflakes off the
sleeve of his tatty uniform.