by David Hewson
“I don’t want to hear.”
“Perhaps, but I wish to say it. Sometimes I wake up in the night, sweating. Sad old words from a sad old man, you might say. But it’s not fear that wakes me. It’s regret. It’s remembering.… It’s the regret that, when I die, those faces may be the last thing I ever see.”
“I lost my family!” The weapon rose and pointed directly at him.
“I lost my father. My uncle. The Germans murdered them in the reprisals. Some would say I helped kill them. Some say that still. Yet today I have a very good friend who is a Berliner, and both of us are much too old and sensible to mention any of this. He served during the war. He was a German. What do you expect?”
Her eyes flared with fury. She snatched a look at the door to the room beyond. “Do you ever stop to wonder how much blood is on their hands?” she demanded. “Blood in Europe. In the East. More blood than I could spill in a lifetime.”
Dario Sordi rarely lost his temper. Anger was, he felt, beneath someone of his age. Also, once lost, his temper proved difficult to rein in. At that moment he was dismayed to recognize a red ire rising in him.
“I never forget that,” he retorted. “Not for one second. It’s why I am here. I lived through a war that ripped apart this world of ours. I watched my father’s torn corpse dug out of the Ardeatine Caves by men with picks in their hands and tears in their eyes.” His arm came down; his long, bloodless finger jabbed at her through the bright golden air streaming from the palace windows. “You travel the world as if it’s a place of no consequence. You play with toys that kill men at the push of a button, miles away. It saves you looking into their eyes, I imagine. How brave. How noble! Do not, signora, seek to lecture me—”
“Shut up!” she screamed. “Shut up—”
Dario Sordi felt a fierce, sharp hurt in his temple as the gun stock slammed into his skull, and stumbled to the floor, shouting, swearing.
Perhaps he blacked out. He wasn’t sure. There was a moment when everything seemed to fade, when the bright, beautiful corridor in the Quirinale Palace disappeared for an instant, and in its place he found himself in a narrow cobbled Roman street in front of two uniformed men, found that he was staring at them from behind the eyes of another, younger body, one he had long forgotten — a child, he knew that, a boy who was pulling a weapon from the gray, grubby fabric of his threadbare school coat.
He could hear the dream voice of the German taunting him again.
So you’re a coward now, are you? A little late for us, isn’t it?
“It’s a little late for everyone,” Sordi found himself whispering, his eyes straying fearfully toward the mirrored door that led into the Salone dei Corazzieri.
It was open, and as his eyes began to focus on the frozen forms beyond the door bodies in their suits and cocktail gowns, he became aware that the soft, simple music of the orchestra had stumbled to an awkward and uncertain halt.
55
The offices of CESIS, the Executive Committee for Intelligence and Security Services, had not moved in forty years. The organization that liaised between the civilian and military arms of the Italian intelligence services, SISDE and SISMI respectively, occupied a six-story former outpost of the Vatican bureaucracy in the Via delle Quattro Fontane. It was a nondescript building that stretched from the busy straight road running past Borromini’s church to the narrow lane of the Via dei Giardini, which ran the length of the border wall of the Quirinale gardens. The offices possessed one spectacular attraction: a roof terrace with magnificent views of the city, all the way to the Vatican and, from the very edge, down into the verdant hectares of the presidential palace itself.
Elizabeth Murray had attended countless parties there, for intelligence-community weddings and retirements, and more private engagements too where attendance was tightly restricted to those in the higher echelons of this secretive world. She had little doubt that the place would now be put to good use, and was able to confirm this as her taxi, after a circuitous journey, dropped her at the very edge of the Quirinale security cordon, opposite the Palazzo Barberini, at the head of the Via Rasella.
There was a sniper on the roof, exactly where experience told her to look for one.
She had called ahead to check who was on duty and, after navigating the switchboard, using all the persuasion and name-dropping she could manage, was pleased with the eventual answer: Carlo Belfiore, a junior spook when she first met him, now a senior CESIS official.
A good, honest man, like most of those she worked with. It didn’t surprise her to find Belfiore was in the office. It would have been impossible to persuade him to go home in circumstances such as these.
She waited on a hard leather bench in reception for five minutes until Belfiore arrived. He had less hair and more flesh, but the same broad, easy smile. They hugged, kissed. He looked at her cane and laughed and said, “We’re all getting older, aren’t we?”
“So what?” she wondered.
His smile slackened a little. “This is a busy time, Elizabeth. It’s wonderful to see you. But to be honest …”
“I’m sorry, Carlo. I should have given you some notice. If I’d known I’d find Rome like this … Who could have guessed the Blue Demon would rise from the grave?”
“Not me. That’s for sure.” He studied her. “You know more about them than anyone else.”
“Possibly …”
“Were you surprised?”
She thought for a moment and then said, “It never felt quite dead. Did it?”
He seemed disappointed by her reply. “Come. I have time for a coffee. And something to show you.”
Belfiore took out his security card and flashed it through the machine, ushering her through the gate before him. They hadn’t had toys like that two decades before. Then they got in the lift and rose to the fifth floor, the one she knew so well, and walked down a familiar corridor into a large office overlooking the Quirinale gardens.
She peered at the expanse of perfectly kept lawns, flower beds, and patches of shrubbery. On the palace roof opposite, there was a single black-clad figure with a rifle in its hands.
“You seem more relaxed than I expected,” she remarked.
“We’re nearly done for the day, thank God. It’s all in the news. I’m not breaking clearance. I wouldn’t. Not even for you. Soon our visitors move on to the Vatican. After that, we’re done. All those famous people become someone else’s problem. At eleven, when they want to go to bed, and then their people can take care of everything.” He smiled. “Tomorrow they go home and we can try to go back to normal. Try to find out what the hell has been going on here. Giovanni Batisti—”
“You knew him?” Elizabeth asked. The office was so different from how she remembered it, and dominated by technology: two computer screens, three telephones, a couple of cell phones on the desk too.
“I worked with Batisti on the preparations. A nice man. Missed his family like crazy. We do this for a living. He did it out of common decency. Look where it got him.”
“A tragedy. Do you like my old lair?”
Carlo Belfiore nodded. “But it was better with you in it. Queen Elizabeth the Third.”
“You never dared call me that to my face.”
“Of course not. But now I can. It was a compliment, you know. The way you remembered everything. Understood the links. The possibilities. You were a legend, Elizabeth. You are a legend.”
She laughed. “I’m a distant memory, Carlo, a name on a dusty plaque. And I was well aware of that nickname, by the way.”
He sat down. She took the chair opposite, facing the window and the empty expanse of the gardens beyond.
She stared into his genial, intelligent face.
“Can I help?” Elizabeth Murray asked.
“No,” Belfiore replied immediately, shaking his head. “I’m sorry. You have no clearance. Things have changed. Rules. Regulations. We are not as free as we once were.”
“You said I knew the Blue Demon better
than anyone.”
“If we had the time …” He thought for a moment. “When the summit is over and the circus has moved on. There will be work to do. I could arrange a temporary attachment.” He looked embarrassed. “We have accommodations you could use. I heard you were running a farm or something. In New Zealand. On your own. There can’t be much money in that. Pensions …” He looked around the office. “One becomes so engrossed in the present that it’s easier to forget the future is just around the corner.”
“It is too,” she agreed. “That’s kind. And in the meantime?”
He frowned. “In the meantime you must enjoy Rome as best you can.” His eyes were watching the messages on his computer more than her. His face had turned somewhat paler. “You have to excuse me now. There’s something I must deal with. I’ll call for an officer to show you out.”
“I can find my own way. Remember, I worked here long enough.”
“Yes, yes,” he mumbled, eyes glued to the screen. A phone began to ring. He snatched at it, cupped the handset, looked at her, and said, “I’m sorry. This is important. Please. Call me this weekend, Elizabeth. Come for dinner. My wife would love that.”
Then he was talking, rapidly, eyeing her in a way she immediately understood. It was a private conversation, one she wasn’t supposed to hear.
Elizabeth Murray got up and walked out of her old office. The corridor was deserted. This was the executive part of the building, never a place for much in the way of visible activity.
A narrow set of stairs led to the roof terrace. She could remember walking up it, half-tipsy, so many years ago in the company of beloved colleagues, some gone, some dead on duty, a few in parts of the world where their bodies still rested, undiscovered. The fallen.
Behind an ancient door at the top of the stairs there was a small hut, like a sentry box, a place to store watering cans and gardening equipment for the handful of flowerpots one of the green-fingered intelligence specialists liked to keep there.
The bottom door was unlocked. This was a secure location. There was no need for locked doors.
Steadily, one step at a time, leaning on the stout shepherd’s crook she’d bought at a market in Dunedin, she ascended the stairs, opening the door to find herself inside the little cabin at the top.
A memory returned: drunken kisses exchanged with a young, pretty secretary toward the end of a retirement party. A rash moment, one that could have been costly. No one liked an officer who stood out from the ordinary, not in the intelligence services. No one was under any illusions about her preferences. It was simply bad form to display them. Prudence, not prejudice. Sexual dysfunction, as it was then perceived, might lead to blackmail or worse.
The secretary had been very pretty, though, and her abrupt transfer to a more mundane department the following day was a loss Elizabeth Murray had privately regretted for some time.
The watering cans and gardening paraphernalia were still ranged along the shelving on the wall adjoining the exterior door. Next to them was a black nylon jacket of the kind worn by the more arcane security services.
In the right-hand pocket was a sealed plastic ID card. She held it to the light streaming from the cabin’s single tiny window and saw the crest of the Ministry of the Interior and a name: Domenico Leone. He was a senior civil servant in the ministry, it said, and nothing more.
She placed her large thumb over the photo so that only the crest was visible and a lazy man might think it referred to someone else altogether. Then she stepped out onto the terrace of the CESIS building, heading immediately for the Via dei Giardini side, where she had seen the sniper’s silhouette from the street.
A tall, stocky man was stretched out on the concrete there, in black combat uniform, vest, and cap. In his hands was a rifle with a telescopic sight.
“Domenico?” she shouted, holding the ID high, still obscuring the photo. “Domenico?”
She tried to remember what it was like to talk as a true Roman: with a short, guttural accent, and abbreviated diction.
“Si?” the officer said, turning, puzzled. “I’m sorry, signora … I don’t know you.”
“No, you don’t. They brought me in from Milan. There’s a change of plan. Belfiore wants you to do something else. He needs you to report to his office now.”
He shuffled up to a crouch, took off the cap, and scratched his balding head.
“But the roof …”
“The gardens can go without sniper cover for five minutes, Officer. Have you seen anything?”
“No. But in the palace …” Another puzzled look. “I thought something was happening.”
“Champagne and canapés. Wouldn’t you need a drink, if you were going to spend the rest of the evening in the Vatican?”
Domenico Leone guffawed. “You bet,” he answered, then hauled himself to his feet and walked over to the open cabin door.
She walked with him. When he got there, something fell from Elizabeth Murray’s wrist. The officer said, “You’ve lost your watch.”
“Damned strap,” she muttered. “I must get it changed.”
She eased forward on the shepherd’s crook.
“No, no, signora. Please.”
He bent to retrieve it. She thought of all the training she’d done thirty years ago or more. How they’d practice on one another.
Then she brought down the shiny oak handle of her stick hard on his head. He stumbled to both knees. She fell on him, crooked her right arm around his neck, and brought her left in to pinch on the carotid and the jugular, squeezing them.
Leone went still in seconds, slumping to the ground. She picked up her watch and slipped it back on her wrist. It was a struggle to drag him inside. There, she stripped off his vest and cap. She found a ball of twine in the garden equipment. Carefully — there was no hurry, and he would be this way for a few hours — she bound his feet and hands, then gagged him with her scarf. Finally, to be sure, she wrapped several lengths of clothesline around his chest before strapping him tight against an old sink.
He was starting to wake by then, with fury in his eyes.
“Scusami,” she said, then went outside and picked up his rifle.
Weapons were weapons. Back home in New Zealand, she was used to hunting the wild black razorback pig. The animal was a monster, wildly aggressive and capable of slaughtering a dozen or more lambs in a single night. The beast’s one saving grace was that it tasted good, which was another reason to shoot it.
Domenico Leone’s rifle was nothing like the.30–06 Springfield she used to kill feral boars. The thing was surely far more deadly. But it wasn’t hard to figure out how it worked.
She found the jacket hung on the peg behind the cabin door, put it on, and then the protection vest over that. The cap fit if she tucked in her hair. There would be snipers on other rooftops. If they peered at her through binoculars, they’d see through the ruse. But the snipers were looking at the Quirinale and the surrounding streets, not at each other. Or so she hoped.
Elizabeth Murray went back to the corner of the terrace where he’d been stationed when she arrived. There was a low stool there and, on the wall, a black fabric-and-padding gun rest. The sniper rifle fitted neatly between the two mounts set at each side. She let it fall into place, then leaned down and began to adjust the telescopic sight.
It took a moment for her to juggle her bulky frame into the right position, one where the weapon felt comfortable. Then she bent down to the eyepiece. The crosshairs ranged the gardens of the Quirinale, from spectacular flower bed to leafy artificial glade, from classical statue to dainty, ornate pond.
Finally her sights settled on the stone bench beneath the wicker canopy, by the handsome young figure of Hermes.
It would be an easy, clean shot. She left the rifle idly poised against the rest and checked her watch, wondering how long she would have to wait.
56
Anna Ybarra pushed open the mirrored door, not knowing what to expect. A room full of strangers. A brief st
orm of violence before her own life was snuffed out. She thrust Dario Sordi’s questions from her mind. They were too close to her. They hurt.
With the little Uzi tight in her right arm, her finger on the trigger, she burst into the gilded hall and found herself stumbling noisily into a table laden with glasses and canapés, sending wine and little plates scattering onto the glossy floor.
The salone was full of paintings and gilt, with high, bright windows.
Beneath a forest of chandeliers sat an orchestra — the women, she could see, wearing long, dark velvet gowns identical to the one left for her in the stable in the Via delle Scuderie. They, like the men, had stopped playing. In front of them, in the main body of the hall, were figures in formal suits, women in elegant dresses that seemed unsuited for a hot Roman afternoon, all of them motionless and silent.
Every eye in the room was on her.
Some of these faces were familiar: politicians, men mainly, whose features appeared daily on television, in newspapers, everywhere, usually smiling, always in control.
Now they seemed smaller, more human. A few moved in front of the women by their sides, as if to block them from what was about to occur. One or two had begun to stride swiftly toward the back. From the corner of her eye, Anna could see others, anonymous figures emerging from the shadows, starting to stir into action, and she knew who they were, knew what they would do.
Only two things ran through her head, Zeru and Josepe — Zeru more than any — though the words of Dario Sordi continued to haunt her, and suddenly she knew she could never, as she’d intended, scream the names of her slaughtered child and dead husband at these elegant strangers as they stood frozen with fear.
None of them would understand. None of them would ever know.
The trigger of the Uzi fell beneath her finger, the way they’d taught her in the hot, primitive training camp on the wild stretch of the Helmand River where the NATO forces never dared to venture. Anna Ybarra gripped the Uzi and began a sweep of the bodies in front of her, not looking too closely at the suits and cocktail gowns, not thinking about what came next.
