Sacred Cut

by David Hewson

  Emily stayed close. “The same thing I want, Thornton. Some answers. About what happened here in Rome, back in 1990. You do remember that, don’t you?”

  He shook his grey head in astonishment. “What? What are you talking about? Listen …”

  He looked at Leapman, then at Falcone, appealing to them. “This is the truth. I swear. One hour ago I’m at my desk in the embassy. I get some crazy e-mail from Emily here saying she was in big trouble with you guys somehow and I had to go to some place near the Corso right then.”

  Leapman scowled at him, then at Costa. “She was here an hour ago. She couldn’t possibly have sent that.”

  “It was internal!” Fielding screamed. “Came from her PC, goddammit! Made it sound like the world was falling in or something. Like it involved me, too.”

  “That’s because it does, Thornton,” Emily said quietly.

  “This is ridiculous,” he shouted.

  Leapman walked up to Fielding, interested. “What happened?”

  “I get there and some hulking lunatic in a uniform jumps me, drags me into an alley, puts this stuff on me, and says if I don’t wait where he says until some guy comes to fetch me I’m dead. And sticks that stinking tape over my mouth too. And that’s exactly where I stay until he”—Fielding pointed at Costa—“turns up.”

  Costa got a withering glance from Leapman and smiled wanly in return.

  “So what the hell is going on here, Joel?” Fielding demanded. “If this is one of those damn training exercises of yours—”

  “It’s no exercise,” Leapman responded. “You were here? In Rome?

  In ’90?”

  “Sure!” Fielding yelled. “It’s no secret. It’s no secret why I’m still here either. I’m the resident queer, remember? I didn’t get moved around back then because I was a security risk. I don’t get moved around now because I’m part of the furniture. Big deal.”

  “I didn’t know that,” Leapman said quietly.

  “Get this crap off of me!” Fielding screeched.

  Costa walked up, took a good look at him. “Can’t do that. Kaspar put it on you. He’s the only one who can take it off.”

  Fielding’s face screwed up in disbelief. “You bastards sent me out to meet that lunatic?”

  “Looks like it,” Leapman observed. “So where the hell is he now, Mr. Costa?”

  “Search me.” Costa shrugged. “I just took the phone call. Could be anywhere in the vicinity from what we understand. He said that, unless he got some answers, he’d start setting those things off in”—Costa looked at the watch again—“a little under ten minutes. If you believe him, that is. What do you think, Mr. Fielding? Do you think he’s really capable of that?”

  Fielding wasn’t playing this game. “I never met the man! Not till you tell me he just leapt out and put me in this crap. Joel—this isn’t going to look good on anyone’s record.”

  Emily Deacon reached forward and touched one of the wires on Fielding’s vest. He jumped back like a man who’d had a sudden shock.

  “He’ll do it, Thornton,” she insisted, “unless you talk. Now’s the time. We’re good listeners.”

  “About what?”

  “About the Babylon Sisters. About who was behind—”

  “Jesus, Emily! I told you. I did everything I could. Didn’t you read what was there? Didn’t you get the message? Do I have to spell it out for you?”

  “Yes,” she said quietly. “You do.”

  “Fine! All that crazy private army stuff was Kaspar and your old man’s idea. Dan was the boss. Kaspar was the soldier. Just a couple of old hippies with guns and a blank cheque from the CIA or someone. You wonder it all got screwed up?”

  “No!” She was adamant. “You showed me what you wanted to, Thornton, and for a reason. It was nothing to do with me. It all was about protecting yourself.”

  “This is insane. What the hell are you talking about?”

  “You!” she yelled. “You were pulling the strings then, you’re still pulling them now. I couldn’t figure out why there was just one document left on the system when you let me in. Was that an accident? Of course not. It was the document that pointed straight to my dad, not to you. That was why you put it there. For me to find.”

  “Joel? We need your men in here.” Fielding wasn’t budging. Costa thought of the minutes, ticking away, and wondered how long the unseen Kaspar would wait.

  Emily Deacon stood directly beneath the oculus and allowed herself a glance through the eye above. “It’s about places, Thornton. That’s what Kasper’s been trying to work out for himself all along. Places like this. He and my dad used to meet here, talk things through. He told me so. But my dad was discussing that mission with someone else too. Someone in the Piazza Mattei, someone Kaspar never did get to know.”

  That scared him. Just a little. “What of it?”

  “That’s what my dad said to Kaspar. Before he died. The one thing. That he wished he’d never gone to see the man in the Piazza Mattei. Kaspar thought he’d found that man, too. He went back there a couple of months ago. He’d worked out there was a property in the square the spooks had been using for years and years. He attacked the guy living there, trying to get some information out of him. He didn’t kill him, though. This wasn’t his man. He was just after intelligence and the man had none. Kaspar didn’t kill just anyone. Not then.”

  “So?”

  “So he didn’t get his information. But we did. We know.”

  Fielding looked at her, astonished. “You’re taking the word of that lunatic? I’m here because of that?”

  “Yes,” she said quietly. “I am.”

  Then she put a hand to the front of her own vest, took hold of the tangle of coloured wires.

  Costa watched in horror. “Emily—”

  “I can show you why, Thornton,” she said, ripping at the wires on her chest, tearing them from the canisters in one rapid, bold movement.

  Fielding cowered, half crouching down on the floor. Nothing happened. She just stood there, making the point. Then she threw off the parka, let it fall to the floor and ripped down the zipper on the vest, got rid of that too.

  Friedricksen turned and fled for the shadows.

  “Get back here!” Leapman yelled at the man, then picked up the vest to look at it. He pulled out the detonator from one of the canisters, upending the contents so sand fell onto the floor in a steady stream. Cocking his head to one side, he took a closer look, scratched at the metal with his finger.

  “Fake,” Leapman said.

  “It’s a Coke can,” Emily said. “Painted yellow, reshaped with putty. Plus a little white spirit to give it the right smell and a detonator that’s as real as they come. Kaspar’s broke. He didn’t have enough for two sets.”

  “Neat,” Leapman conceded. Then he pointed at Fielding’s vest. “And this?”

  “Oh,” Emily said brightly, reaching down for the parka, taking something out of the pocket. “This is the real thing. Absolutely.”

  She grabbed Fielding by the scruff of his jacket. “This can blow us all to pieces, Thornton. And you know something?”

  Emily now held a small plastic device up in her hand, thumb on a button. “It’s not Bill Kaspar who gets to make that choice. It’s me. He trusted me with that. He trusted me with a dummy jacket. Who do you think I believe, Thornton?”

  “Emily,” Nic murmured, “this wasn’t part of the—”

  “It is now,” she said, circling Fielding, holding the remote in front of his ashen face. “Talk to me, Thornton. Or don’t. Because I really don’t care either way. Not anymore. You screwed my dad. He was a good man. You sold him and his people down the river, let them get there, and hoped—what?”

  He was nervous, Costa thought. Just not nervous enough.

  “You’ve got to do something here, Leapman,” Fielding pleaded. “This kid’s as crazy as her old man was.”

  “I guess,” she went on, ignoring his remark, “you hoped that, once they got there,
knew it was a case of give in or die, they’d all think the way you did. That this wasn’t their war, not really. All they had to do was put up their hands, go quietly. That was part of the deal. And when it was over—what? Some quiet, secret negotiation with Baghdad. A handover at the Syrian border. Everyone comes home. You disappear and get rich. No awkward questions. But Bill Kasper didn’t go quietly, did he?”

  “Sand?” he sneered. She was jabbing a finger into the dark and Fielding knew that. He was growing more confident. She was starting to realize it too. “And Coke cans? That’s what the big man’s up to these days?”

  “Proof,” she murmured. “That’s all anyone wants.”

  Thornton Fielding’s forehead glistened, shiny with sweat, shaking from side to side. “No, Emily. What they want is an end to this shit. That lunatic put away where he belongs. He killed your dad. You’re supposed to want that too.”

  Emily Deacon’s delicate fingers worked their way onto Fielding’s vest, found the topmost canister in the middle row beneath his chin.

  “Don’t move, Thornton,” she said softly. “I wouldn’t want to choose the wrong wire. The rest are wired in parallel and will blow if I tamper with them. Kaspar only showed me this once.”

  He was rigid, uncertain whether this was a bluff or not. She flicked off a set of wires, delicately removed the canister from its webbing holster.

  “He thought you might need convincing,” she said, then flipped the detonator, starting a small, livid spark at its head, and flung it into the darkness near the doors.

  Fielding blinked at her. Leapman and Viale were already flattened on the floor. Emily Deacon placed her arms around Fielding, held him tightly.

  “Remember when you danced with me?” she asked. “When I was just a kid? We’d go round and round, circles and circles, like a couple of human compasses describing pretty patterns on the floor. People like patterns, Thornton. Patterns make you feel comfortable. They make you think the world’s more than just a mess of chaos.”

  A hot, fiery blast roared from somewhere close to the bronze slabs, began to occupy the interior of the building, sending a deafening, screaming roar echoing around the hemisphere. From somewhere outside came the wailing sound of a siren. She clung to him tightly, keeping the two of them upright, struggling against the heat and force of the explosion.

  “That’s what Kaspar’s been looking for,” she said, holding the remote to his cheek, finger on the button, the two of them describing a slow, lazy circle on the stone floor. “Something that restores some order. And maybe it’s not there at all. Maybe I should press this and make us nothing. No more memories. No more guilt. No more hate. Does that sound appealing to you?”

  Fielding was silent, eyes screwed tight, fighting to control himself.

  “He was my father, Thornton. He thought you were his friend. I remember you in our house. I remember …”

  This recollection had some force, it was obvious in her eyes. “I remember you hated that music of his. You used to bring those big band tunes, dance tunes, little me, big you, all those years ago. And you murdered him. Long before Kaspar got there. Somehow I knew he had died back then. I just never wanted to see it.”

  He put his hands on her shoulders, stared into her face, shook her, hard. “Dan took the money too, Emily! No one made him. No one made any of them, not on his team. If that fool Kaspar hadn’t started shooting, they’d all have been in and out of there and no one the wiser. One team rich, smart and in on the deal. The other poor and heroes and still with their consciences. It’s a dirty world. You’re telling me you never noticed?”

  Costa saw the sudden grief in her face. The way her finger tightened on the button.

  “I don’t believe you,” Emily Deacon insisted. Fielding pushed her away. She didn’t protest.

  “Then why did he come back and say nothing?” he asked. “Why didn’t he come back and start asking some questions about what went wrong?”

  “He didn’t know!” she screeched.

  Fielding gripped her shoulders again, peered into her face with glistening eyes. “You’re too smart to believe that,” he said after a while.

  “Aren’t you?”

  Emily said nothing. She just stood there, shaking her head, staring at him, furious.

  “Think about it,” Fielding continued. “Dan did nothing because he was on the payroll, Emily. Everyone on his team was. Before they even went in. Not that it was the money. In the beginning anyway. The others, yes. Not him. Not me.”

  “Then what, Fielding?” she wondered. “You’re telling me this was all some moral decision too?”

  Thornton Fielding looked, for a moment, as if he’d forgotten the deadly armament strapped to his body. He was mad with her, furious she didn’t get it.

  “You’re so young,” he spat at her. “You really have no idea.”

  “Tell me.”

  He closed his eyes for a moment, shook his head, clutched the deadly vest to him. “Dan and I had been working together off and on for years. Since Nicaragua. We’d spent all that time throwing all manner of dirty shit at dirty situations. And you know what? It never cured a damn thing. We were just so sick of being part of that machine, deciding who was right, who was wrong. Sick of the fact that so many of yesterday’s friends turned out to be tomorrow’s bad guys. Your dad had this huge sense of duty, but duty has to be earned somehow by the people above you or you start to question it. His got used up in the end. We both felt that way. And that’s the real killer.”

  He looked at Leapman, and there was disgust in his face. “In that kind of situation either you become like him—an automaton who does what he’s told and doesn’t think twice—or you become the enemy. There is no in between. We’d taken the money, but the truth is we’d have done it for free. We didn’t want the war to spread. There were all these lunatics saying it had to go on, all the way to Baghdad. As if we were a liberating army, bringing peace and joy and freedom to the world. Babylon Sisters wasn’t about Kuwait. It was about being there as a forward base once the hawks back home persuaded Bush to go all the way. You get me?”

  She was listening, struggling to take all this in.

  “Emily,” he pleaded, “you have to understand. No one needed to get hurt. Dan had arranged for us to get our guys taken, along with him. They’d all be freed, unharmed, later and no one would be the wiser. A straightforward deal. Except …” He sighed, hung his head, stared at the stone floor. “We didn’t bring Bill Kaspar in. Dan and I talked about it but in the end we just didn’t have the guts. We thought he and the rest of them would lie down once they saw what they were up against. We didn’t think he’d feel the urge to make nine people dead heroes. So Dan and his crew had to watch a bloodbath, knowing they couldn’t do a damn thing to stop what was going on. And then—”

  “Then what?” Emily asked, livid.

  “Then you find yourself facing painful choices. It wasn’t Dan’s fault. Not mine. Not Kaspar’s, really. It was just a stupid idea that began as a good one. A couple of tired spooks dragging out some peacenik idealism we thought might stop the world from tilting even further out of balance. Stupid. Dumb as they come, and when those Iraqis came back to each and every one us after the war, kept calling, kept asking for more, threatening to expose us if we didn’t go along with them, we found out exactly how dumb.”

  She was shaking her head. “Dad wouldn’t—”

  “He did!” Fielding cried. “We all did. There wasn’t any alternative. It was either go along with what they wanted or see every last one of us in jail or worse. Until Kaspar got out, of course. And you know the funny thing?”

  There was a sudden look of bitter hatred on his face. “By then it didn’t matter. If Bill Kaspar hadn’t come a-hunting, all of this would have just slipped out of sight. Except,” he added sourly, “when you started waking up in the middle of the night sweating from the memories.”

  There was activity beyond the big doors. Brisk, bossy Carabinieri voices.

&n
bsp; Fielding nodded at the button and took several steps back. “So you want to press that, Little Em? If it makes you feel good, go ahead.”

  “Oh, Thornton,” she said immediately. “It will make me feel so very, very good.”

  Emily Deacon hit the button and Thornton Fielding’s vest lit up like a string of firecrackers. Costa was over to her in a flash, trying to drag her down to the cold, hard floor.

  She fought him, watching Fielding all the time. “Don’t worry,” she murmured. “Kaspar’s broke. It’s just Coke cans, sand and a few detonators. And a little fertilizer for the one I got to throw. You’d be amazed what I’ve learned over the last couple of hours.”

  Thornton Fielding did a fiery little jig around the heart of the building then, when the detonators fizzled, fell to the ground in a crumpled, sobbing heap.

  Nic Costa looked into Emily’s face and a part of him was convinced he knew what she saw at that moment. An image from a different time. A young girl dancing with her father’s best friend, not knowing what darkness lay beyond the bright white room in which every happy memory seemed to exist, and how difficult it was to see into the mind of another human being, even one you thought you knew and loved.

  “Nic,” she said with a sudden, bright efficiency. “Inspector Falcone. Gianni. Are you ready?”

  “Of course,” Falcone replied, then grimaced at the dejected figure of Thornton Fielding crawling underneath the grey eye of the oculus. “I think,” he said to Leapman, “that belongs to you.”

  There was an expression on Falcone’s face Costa didn’t recognize. Finally, he put a name to it: astonishment.

  They followed her to the bronze slab doors, helped her pull the right one back on its ancient hinges. A flood of policemen poured into the hall, asking questions, waving guns, shrinking back as Falcone barked at them about this being a state police show.

  “Come with me,” Emily said.

  Costa and Peroni walked behind her over to the office. She took out a key, unlocked the door and let them in.

  There was a well-built, craggy-faced man there, in a caretaker’s uniform that was one size too small for him. He was leaning back in a chair, feet on the desk next to a mobile phone and a small radio, laid out in a precise line parallel with the edge of the surface. An old and dusty copy of Dante’s Inferno lay in front of him, open at the page.