Sacred Cut

by David Hewson

  Yeah. That happened. Except you didn’t wait for January to come, did you? War was about planning, preparation. You placed a few markers to make sure the bets fell your way. At Christmas you slung two camouflaged Humvees underneath a couple of Black Hawks, loaded up two teams of “specialists” who’d been locked in training in a secluded villa out beyond Orvieto for weeks. Then you dropped the vehicles and the crew somewhere in the desert outside Babylon, pointed them to where the friendlies were supposed to be waiting and never said—never—that good and bad were relative in the desert, depended on which way the sun was shining, how many dollars you had stashed alongside the M16s, the rocket-propelled grenades, and the radios that could bring those same Black Hawks storming back to save you anytime you wanted.

  Remembering. Kaspar hated remembering. So he hit the other Google button, the one marked “groups,” the one that took you straight into crazy territory, all those anonymous Usenet pits where anyone was anyone, could say what they liked and always be out of reach, untraceable, faceless, nameless, flaming each other night and day all around the world, just wishing there was something you could put in a mail message that would harm the other person—physically, permanently—like a demon biting its way out of the screen.

  He liked these places more than anything. You could say your mind and no one ever got payback. You could type in “Desert Storm Babylon Bill Kaspar” and see … what?

  A list of episodes from some dumb science-fiction series spawned out of Star Trek. He’d tried it a million times when he first got free. It was always the same. Until this September in Beijing. Something had happened then. Something that had set him on his present path.

  Nothing ever got erased on the Net. The message, the solitary first in a thread marked “Babylon Sisters,” was still there.

  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?

  It was signed: WillFK@whitehouse.gov and, seeing it again, remembering the way it first goaded him in the Internet cafe on the other side of the world, Bill Kaspar thought he might go crazy, just pick up the fucking screen there and then and throw it across the empty room, stomp on it till there was nothing left but shattered plastic and glass.

  The Scarlet Beast was a generous beast. Honor his memory.

  They were saying he was dead now, that he’d been Dan Deacon, too. They lied, always, and maybe that was one good reason the voices wouldn’t go away.

  He closed his eyes, squeezed hard, tried to think, tried to remember, calm himself. He hadn’t risen to the bait in Beijing. He’d been too shocked to see it there. Now, increasingly, there was nothing to lose.

  He’d read the Bible during all that time in the wilderness, stuck in the stinking jail in Baghdad. The Bible was the only book they allowed him. It was a new experience. When he’d first got his orders, first seen that crazy code name for the unseen figure who created and bankrolled their little project, he hadn’t got the reference. The Book of Revelation provided it. The Scarlet Beast, the Whore of Babylon. She held a golden cup in her hand, filled with abominable things and the filth of her adulteries.

  Nine bodies in the ground now and the voices kept screaming at Bill Kaspar, telling him he still didn’t have a face he could believe in, a real name, anything.

  Thought you knew the guy, white boy? Or did you screw up there too?

  “Like fuck I did!” Kaspar yelled out loud, and stomped a big fist on the grimy desk, sending the Japanese teenager two seats along scurrying into the corner to find another machine.

  Unable to stop himself, he typed in a reply and knew immediately that this was what they wanted. Some spook just up the road or in Washington somewhere, some stupid little geek masquerading as the FBI, gawped at a screen, waiting for a fish to wriggle on the line.

  Lying fuckhead, treasonable, cowardly scum, he wrote. 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.

  You hunt. You get hunted. You wave to each other from across the canyon, wondering who gets to taste whose blood first. And when.

  He logged off, set the PC to reboot, ran a comb through his hair and took one last furtive look at himself in the reflection of the PC screen. Then he walked out through the side door, avoiding the front desk, out into the freezing street, thinking about distances, measuring the space between this tacky office block and the big building in the Via Veneto, spanning the icy air between them in discrete units in his head.

  The bug worked for half a kilometre, maybe more. It was made almost entirely from plastic, which was supposed to let it through any standard scanning system. The little battery was designed to keep it running for a week. By his reckoning the embassy ought to be just in range. To make sure, he crossed the empty road, watched a bus struggling over the slush, then walked a couple of hundred metres up the hill before taking out the earphone of the receiver and popping it in so that it looked as if he were listening to football on a little radio.

  He cast one short glance back towards Barberini. A couple of guys in dark coats were going into the Net cafe. Not the usual clientele.

  Morons. This was like playing with amateurs. Like playing with little Emily Deacon, who wasn’t that much changed, in some ways, from when she’d been a girl, shaking her long blonde hair to rock music in Steely Dan Deacon’s parlour a lifetime before, a little kid wondering why two grown men full of beer found her so funny.

  There was a cafe on the corner of a side street: standard coffee, two uncomfortable wooden seats by the window, just one customer, an old man spooning stained sugar into his mouth out of an empty cup. Bill Kaspar ordered an overpriced cappuccino and sat by the smeary glass, damp with condensation, looking out into the cold world beyond, listening. Bugs were unreliable. They’d never work from inside the embassy. There were devices to prevent that, networks of transmitters that sent out a constant blur of electronic noise to deafen anyone trying to intrude.

  But he was fishing too. In truth he was starting to get desperate. He’d tried every other avenue he could think of. The idea had occurred to him the previous night, just when he was beginning to realize who Emily Deacon was as she struggled against his iron grip, just as he was struggling against the voices, trying to convince them there was something better he could do with the girl than take her life.

  The bug was the size of a one-cent coin. As he’d wrestled her into submission under Giordano Bruno’s watching statue, he’d pushed the Velcro back into the underside of the collar on her thick black jacket, on the off chance, not knowing how he could use this opportunity or whether she’d be smart enough to pick it up anyway. It was worth a try.

  The earphone crackled. There was just static, the unintelligible rustling of a digital infinity, maybe one the embassy was putting out itself. It could be two thousand euros, the last real money he had, straight down the drain.

  Then, after thirty minutes, just when the man behind the counter was beginning to stare at his empty cup wondering when he’d buy another, he heard something else, the unmistakable sound of traffic heard from inside a car. Muffled horns, a car engine, the guttural echo of a bus rumbling up the Via Veneto.

  He signalled to the barman for another. And in his ear there came two voices: Emily Deacon and a man, a native Italian, so clear, so young and determined, he could almost picture a face emerging out of the hissing, fizzing jingle jangle of sound in his ear.

  “YOU CAN PULL in here, Nic. I need to go home and pick up a few things first.”

  She indicated an apartment block just up from the embassy. A fancy address. From her expression—Emily Deacon didn’t miss much—Costa was aware a look of surprise had crossed his face.

  “It’s a government apartment,” she told him, amused. “No, I can’t afford a place in the Via Veneto myself. Not on an FBI sala
ry.”

  She hesitated for a moment, then scribbled a number down on a notepad, ripped off the page and handed it to him. “If you want, call direct. On my mobile. It can be difficult getting through to the office. The apartment is the one with Clinton on the bell. Someone’s idea of a joke, I guess.”

  He watched a bus work gingerly past the car, navigating the soft, grey slush, then made a U-turn and parked a little way up from the embassy, just outside the block she’d pointed out.

  “You should get some sleep,” he suggested. “It was a long night.”

  “I did sleep. Remember?”

  “Ah, right.” It was easy to forget. She looked exhausted. Troubled, too. She’d listened silently to Falcone’s brusque interrogation. She was tough enough to take it, Costa didn’t doubt that. But something was bothering her and he had a feeling it wasn’t just a grilling from a pushy Italian cop.

  “What do you do next?” he asked.

  “Get some fresh clothes, take a shower and go into the office. What else is there?”

  Not much, he thought. For either of them. All the same it was worth making the protest. “Why? You can’t work all the time. There’s nothing new, is there? You saw the expression on Falcone’s face. He’s like a barometer. When things look up so does he.”

  She was silent.

  “Sorry,” he said, cursing himself. “What I meant to say was, there’s nothing new as far as we’re aware. Maybe your friend in there is better informed.”

  She smiled and he saw it again: the years just fell off her. Being a pseudo-cop didn’t fit Emily Deacon. It was a deadweight on her slender shoulders, one she wouldn’t shirk, even though he didn’t doubt it had never been part of her plan.

  “Maybe he is,” she answered. “Maybe not. How many times do I need to explain this, Nic? Do you really think I’m going to find out?”

  “I don’t know.”

  The light blue eyes didn’t leave him for a moment. It was a kind of reproach. “You don’t?”

  “No. All I know is we’re getting bounced around like junior partners or something. And this is our town, Emily. You should remind the man in there of that sometime.”

  “I’m sure he’d listen.”

  “Someone has to,” he said firmly.

  She shook her head and ran a couple of fingers through her blonde locks.

  “Are you asking what I think you’re asking?”

  “I’m asking for some trust.”

  “I don’t know you.” It came out as a flat, plain statement. It was true too. “Do you go around trusting people you don’t know?”

  “All the time,” he replied. “It’s one of my many weaknesses.”

  “Then you’re a fool, Nic. I need to go now.”

  He peered out of the jeep window, which was clouding over with condensation in spite of the air-conditioning running full blast. She’d picked up her bag and was reaching for the door.

  Costa leaned over and put his hand on her arm. He needed to make this point. “Leapman refused to tell us why he knew it was worth coming to Rome before anything happened. Did he tell you?”

  “We’ve been through this,” she said with a weary sigh. “I’ve no idea. I just know what Leapman wants me to know.”

  “Emily. We told you about Margaret Kearney being a fake. We gave you that passport photo. Seems to me that’s a hell of a lot more than anyone in there”—he nodded towards the big grey building—“has been prepared to give us. And another thing …”

  What was the phrase the English used? “In for a penny, in for a pound.”

  “What are you doing here? Don’t you ever ask yourself that? Why you? A …”

  He didn’t even know what she was back in America.

  She came up with the answer for him. “Junior systems analyst.”

  “Exactly. Whatever the hell that means. It doesn’t sound like ideal training for chasing a serial killer around Rome.”

  “Look. I ask myself this all the time, Nic, and I don’t hear any answers. What am I supposed to do? Shout and scream at Leapman until he cracks? You’re not the only ones in the dark here. Leapman is his own man in that building. Half the embassy staff don’t know who he is and those that do daren’t talk to him.”

  “Well, that’s just wonderful—”

  “Yes, it is!”

  “OK,” he said, trying to bring down the temperature just a little. “Let me make a suggestion. Maybe this is nothing, Emily. Maybe not.”

  He waited. She had to ask.

  “Well?” The blue eyes wouldn’t let go.

  “It’s just this. We’ve been on a kind of alert over attacks on Americans since October. A man called Henry Anderton was attacked in the ghetto. Badly beaten up. Anderton lived, but he was lucky. There were a couple of uniform cops in the area who got involved. Whoever the guy was ran off. If our men hadn’t been there …”

  “I didn’t know that.” She was interested. He’d caught her attention.

  “What did Anderton do?”

  Costa pulled out his notebook and rifled through the pages. “I checked during the night. He was some kind of academic working over here on a project. A military historian. Does his name mean anything?”

  She shook her head. “Should it?”

  “I don’t know. I made a few more inquiries. I can’t find an academic anywhere called Henry Anderton. He was out of hospital after two days, gone to some private clinic, no one knows where.”

  “Keeps on happening.”

  “Quite.”

  He didn’t want to come right out and ask it. He wasn’t sure he was close enough to her yet. All the same …

  “Someone in there will know, Emily. It could help. Both of us.”

  She sighed, folded her arms. “This isn’t about my father, Nic. Don’t try and use that. I want this guy caught for all of them. More than anything I want him caught because that’s my job now. It’s what I’m supposed to do, like it or not.”

  He shrugged. “Sorry.”

  She didn’t move.

  “Will you at least think about it?” he asked.

  A flash of fury again. “What? Smuggling information out of the confidential files of the US embassy? They fire you for that, I believe.”

  “Would that be so bad?”

  “You mean because I’m lousy at this anyway?” Delicate territory. “I meant because … I don’t think you enjoy this kind of work.”

  “Perhaps I don’t. But they also send you to jail. I don’t imagine I’d enjoy that either.”

  He couldn’t stifle a brief laugh.

  “What’s so funny?” she demanded.

  “I had that kind of conflict myself once. Did all the wrong things. Which were, in my view, all the right things.”

  “What happened?”

  “Long story. You can hear it sometime if you want. Anyway I’m still here, aren’t I?”

  “Oh yes,” she murmured. “You’re here. You and that partner of yours. But no one’s going to miss either of you.”

  It hung on a knife edge. He could so easily ruin things.

  “Henry Anderton,” she repeated.

  “I can write it down,” he said, reaching for the pad.

  She snatched it away. “That would be really smart. Are you at home this evening? Six or seven onwards?”

  “Could be.”

  “Do me a favour too.” She started scribbling something on the notepad. “Look up this name. Everywhere you can find. Tonight we can compare notes. And … Damn!”

  There was a shape by the car. Costa felt his spine stiffen, saw images from the previous two nights flash through his head and reached for his gun.

  The jeep door opened. Agent Leapman stood there, staring in at them, looking even more pissed off than usual.

  “What is this? The kindergarten run?” Leapman demanded. “You should’ve been at your desk an hour ago, Deacon.”

  Behind her back, Emily’s hand, small, firm and warm, thrust itself briefly into Costa’s, pushing the screwe
d-up page from the pad into his palm. Their fingers entwined, just briefly.

  Leapman didn’t see a thing. He was too busy making an impression.

  “Go sit in there and look busy, will you, Deacon?” the FBI man snarled. “I got things to do.”

  She pulled her hand free, reclaimed her bag and started to get out of the car.

  “Can’t I come along?”

  “What’s the point?” Leapman’s back was turned to her already; he wasn’t even bothering to watch. “Go write a report. File something. Defrag a hard drive. Whatever …”

  Costa watched them go their separate ways. She didn’t look back. A part of him resented that. Another knew better. Falcone had said it. Perhaps he’d seen this coming all along.

  “Dangerous games,” Nic Costa murmured to himself, then opened the piece of paper and read the name: Bill Kaspar.

  From across the road, seated on a hard wooden chair in a tiny cafe, someone else watched them too, watched Emily Deacon flash a card at the gate, then walk past the security guard, straight through the door, into a sea of bright, unintelligible noise.

  GIANNI PERONI was good with the girl. No, Teresa Lupo corrected herself, he was amazing. He built a bond with her in a way Teresa couldn’t hope to comprehend, able to communicate an emotion—sympathy, disappointment, expectation—with just a look, able to see too that Laila had a need for what he could provide. Reassurance. And sometimes just attention. It wasn’t easy. It wasn’t all plain sailing. Each time Laila got tired, Peroni backed off. He knew just when to stop pushing.

  And the kid wanted to be on her own a lot. Or at least that’s what she pretended. It was an act, though. After a while—ten, fifteen minutes—she’d drift back to Peroni, nudge him with an elbow, ask some pointless question. Her Italian was heavily accented but much better than they’d first thought. She was quick-witted too. Teresa could see a glint of keen intelligence in her dark eyes, though much of the time it was marred by the stain of suspicion every street kid seemed to own. They were never quite happy, even in their own company. Something, some cataclysm, hunger, disaster, an encounter with the cops, was always waiting around the corner.