The Blue Demon

by David Hewson

  “Of course not.”

  “Good,” he said, getting up suddenly. “Let’s look at them.”

  Costa followed him back into the house. The library sprawled untidily across a set of shelves that spanned an entire wall in his father’s study.

  “Here,” Sordi said, finding two copies among the foreign novels jumbled together in a section closest to the window. “Have you read them?”

  They were by an English writer, Robert Graves. I, Claudius and Claudius the God.

  “Years ago, but I don’t remember them much,” Costa admitted. “History’s not to my taste.”

  “They’re about history only tangentially. In truth, they’re about us. The human animal. About society. How it works, or attempts to. How it fails when we forget our ties to one another. Read them again sometime, properly. Your father and I …”

  Sordi opened the covers of each, so that he could see. Inside was an identical inscription: To my dearest friend, Marco. From Dario, the turncoat.

  “We were still friends when I gave him these. Not for much longer, though. What came after—by which I mean the end of the commission looking into the Blue Demon case—perhaps it was inevitable we would drift apart.”

  He waved the books at Costa and placed them on Marco’s desk. “These were a gift I hoped might explain a little. Your father lived for his principles. He would rather die than compromise them. I …” Sordi grimaced. “A politician reaches a point in his life when he or she must decide. Do you wish to hold steadfast to your beliefs? Or do you become pragmatic and attempt to turn some small fraction of them into reality? I chose the latter, and look what it made me. A widower living in an isolated palace, with a slender grip on power and a prime minister who would send me off to an old people’s home if he could. King Lear of Rome. Perhaps your father was right. I betrayed what we once stood for.”

  “Dario …”

  “These are not idle ramblings. I tell you them for a reason. As your father would have understood only too well, what you heard today was the truth, but only a part of it. The rest remains misty, to me, anyway, though I have no doubt that inside that fog lies the crux of this matter.” He glanced at the door, as if to make sure no one was listening. “I must be very careful what I pass to you. They may try to trap me the obvious way, by handing on some information that is false or traceable. If that happens …” He sighed again. “Then my presidency is at an end.”

  Ranieri was at the door. In his hands was something small, dark, and dusty with wires attached.

  “You found that here? In my home?” Costa asked.

  “It was hidden in the living room, near the phone.”

  The Corazzieri captain was examining the thing as if searching for some kind of label. “Twenty years ago I could have told you the name. We used them a lot then. I wouldn’t worry too much. It’s long dead. Someone would have been listening in the road outside. Any nearby conversation, one half of a phone call, they’d hear the lot. It’s primitive compared with what they have today. That’s all we could find. There’s nothing recent.”

  “Take it as a compliment,” Sordi added. “I shouldn’t boast but, when I was elevated to the Quirinale, Ranieri here kindly swept my personal apartment near the Piazza Navona.” He took the bug and waved it, his face wryly gleeful, as it had been when Costa was a child. “I had three, and every last one of them alive!”

  “What’s going on?” Costa demanded, hearing the rising tension in his own voice.

  The president extinguished his cigarette in one of Marco’s old ashtrays, then nodded at Ranieri to leave. They returned outside to the table, where Sordi reached into his pocket and took out a silver compact disc in a transparent sleeve.

  “You’ll listen to what I have to tell you, Nic, then read what’s on this thing. In the morning, pass it on to your colleagues when you meet them. Yes, yes …” Costa was already protesting. “I know about what’s being planned. You shall be my conduit. Discreetly. Esposito agreed to this, a little reluctantly. He seems a good man, and not in Campagnolo’s power, as far as one may tell. Your friend Falcone too. I cannot deal with any of you directly. If I did, there would have to be records and minutes and formalities. That is not possible. Campagnolo and Palombo would have my hide if this became public. Our prime minister has a rare talent for delving into matters that don’t concern him.”

  “Politics are not my business.”

  A touch of color seeped into the president’s cheeks. “Is that why you think I came? To pursue some petty quarrel?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He leaned forward and peered into Costa’s face. “I came because you’re the son of a man I held in the highest esteem. I trusted Marco with my life. I assumed I could do the same with you. We face a grave threat. This Petrakis individual is in our country. He’s not alone and he’s intent on delivering a blow to the society he loathes, our society. A blow I fear may rank among anything this damaged world has seen these last ten years. The man is”—Sordi shook his head—“a monster. What kind one can only guess. Your father had ideas, but I was fool enough not to listen to them.”

  There was a sound from outside. A phone ringing, then Ranieri’s distant voice.

  “This much I do know, though, Nic. Andrea Petrakis is not alone, any more than he was twenty years ago. The very idea that three students and some professor could have concocted the abduction and murder of the Frascas is ridiculous. Furthermore, there was strong evidence that drug trafficking was involved. I am no police officer, but I surely understand this: If you deal in drugs, you must sell them to someone. Criminals, usually. Petrakis was not some solitary individual with a handful of acolytes. The fool was too young and too inexperienced to have done what he stood accused of. He was someone else’s pawn twenty years ago. Logic dictates that he still is today.”

  “Did you say that?” Costa asked. “In your report?”

  Sordi shook his head. “We couldn’t. We weren’t allowed. This is a tragedy that goes to the very heart of who we are. Romans. Italians. Frail human beings. When your father and I tried to get to the bottom of it, we were turned back at every opportunity. In the end, I gave up, and lost a dear friend as a result. Whoever set up Petrakis in the first place …”

  He lifted his glass, as if in a toast. “He, she, they … must have been here all along. While we thought the Years of Lead were gone. While we dreamed of a better future, in a world without hate or fear of poverty. Watching, waiting. In Rome, perhaps, or Milan or Florence. Or beyond. Secure, undetected, unsuspected by anyone. Andrea Petrakis was a creation of the Blue Demon, not the Devil himself.”

  Costa thought of the image on the wall in the poster they had seen, in the photo of the shack in the Maremma where the three students had died: the hideous face, the terrifying expression of hatred. The selfsame picture that had stood next to Giovanni Batisti’s mutilated corpse.

  “Do you know what Gladio was?” Sordi asked abruptly.

  The question came out of nowhere. A phrase came to Costa, from his schooldays.

  “‘Qui gladio ferit, gladio perit,’” he murmured. “‘He who strikes with the sword, perishes with the sword.’”

  “Latin is a beautiful language,” Sordi observed. “What we do with those words …” He tapped the disc. “You’ll find what answers we discovered before our commission was dissolved. There were some. Gladio was an organization. One designed to leave behind individuals dedicated to a secret purpose, a decent one in principle: to save us from Russia, from oblivion. Quiet men and women willing to bury their true identity, never to be noticed, never to speak of their purpose, not until they were needed. And then …” He glanced out at the vines, as if remembering something. “One way or another, it all went wrong. I can’t help but feel it was Gladio that killed those people twenty years ago, as much as anything else—certainly as much as Andrea Petrakis.”

  He reached over and poured himself some more wine. Another cigarette appeared. Costa wished he could stop the ol
d man from smoking.

  “It’s my belief that whoever created this myth we know as the Blue Demon was the one who remained behind. Now his time has come. When they seek to kill us this time, Nic, it won’t be with bombs and planes and distant, random acts of violence.” Dario Sordi gripped his fist and shook it in Costa’s face. “They will murder us face-to-face from within, the way they killed the Frascas. The way we killed in the war, in the Via Rasella. Do you think their choice of that place this afternoon was some coincidence?”

  “No,” Costa answered. “It was a message. For you.”

  “A warning that they feel they are in combat, just as we were when the Germans occupied Rome. You and your colleagues must put flesh on this ghost, Nic. Whoever it is. I ask that as your president and as the man who once made a small child laugh, here in this very house.”

  The old man looked weary at that moment, frail and perhaps a little daunted.

  “I’ll do what I can,” Costa assured him.

  Sordi’s hand went briefly to his arm, and a smile crossed the president’s face. “I know that. I shall send you a friend tomorrow. One with some special knowledge of the Blue Demon. And of Gladio too.” He glanced at the bottle on the table, thought better of it. “The one we seek could be anyone, Nic. A man, a woman, a modest, anonymous individual”—Sordi shrugged—“running some little cafe in the city, perhaps, or delivering the mail.” His eyes gleamed. “One of you. Or a cabal of several. In the Carabinieri. The secret services. Among those of us who pretend we are your masters. It demands courage and intelligence to devote one’s entire life to appearing to be someone else. With that comes a very ruthless ambition. Be wary. Do not breathe a word of this to anyone beyond those you trust.”

  “Of course.”

  The president hesitated. A note of uncertainty, perhaps regret, entered his voice. “I have selfish reasons to say this. You’re the second person to whom I have confided my thoughts.”

  Dario Sordi grasped the bottle of Brunello, poured himself a dash more, took an urgent, desperate sip. He stared at Costa, an expression approaching guilt on his tired, pale face.

  “The first was Giovanni Batisti a week ago, when the intelligence reports first began to find their way to my desk. It was idiotic of me to tell him, but …” His arms spread wide in a gesture of despair.

  “Make no mistake, Nic. This is a lonely job. Mostly I pin medals on decent men and women, attend funerals and civic events. There are few people to whom I may turn in confidence. Giovanni Batisti was an honest man. I asked him merely to consider my concerns and keep them to himself. Whether he did … You understand what I’m saying? You must not discount the possibility that he was indiscreet. It’s possible the Blue Demon is rather closer to us than we might suspect.”

  Nic Costa tried to find the right words. Dario Sordi was a kindly figure from his childhood, one who had always seemed so confident, so self-assured. At that moment he appeared lost and in need of comfort.

  “Leo Falcone is the best police officer I have ever worked with. If anyone can find this individual—”

  “Yes, yes,” Sordi interrupted, smiling. “What I was trying to say was more personal. I have one death on my conscience already. I do not wish anyone to add to that burden, least of all you.”

  PART TWO

  False Flags

  I am vero Italia novis cladibus vel post longam saeculorum seriem repetitis adflicta.… Corrupti in dominos servi, in patronos liberti; et quibus deerat inimicus per amicos oppressi.

  Now too Italy was beset by new disasters, or those which it had not witnessed for many years.… Slaves were bribed to turn against their masters, freedmen to betray their patrons; and, if a man had no enemies, he was destroyed by his friends.

  —Tacitus, The Histories, Book I

  13

  THE VILLA OVERLOOKED THE DRAB, FLAT COAST RUNNING to the Tyrrhenian Sea, an untidy sprawl of industrial units and abandoned farmland not far from the main highway to Tuscany. It was a rich man’s rental, eight bedrooms, an extortionate five thousand dollars a week paid to a property agency in Tarquinia set on the bluff above. The name was a lie, resurrected in the 1920s to boast of the sleepy medieval town’s roots. Nothing hereabouts was quite what it seemed. The true home of the Etruscans was lost altogether, mere fragments, pot shards and fractured stones in a shallow valley in the hills. There, a disappeared race had turned to dust, leaving nothing but mausoleums, deep beneath the ochre earth, halls for feasting and revelry, physical joy, the life eternal, many pillaged to fill museums with vivid ceramics and statues depicting a culture built on strength and art and a stark carnal sensuality.

  Andrea Petrakis could map each precious tomb in his head. The public site on the outskirts of Tarquinia where the tourists turned up in their buses to gaze in awe and a little fear at burial halls showing men and women dancing, singing, hunting, fighting, making love, two and a half millennia before. The secret places too, graves that were whispered about in order to keep out the curious and the greedy. From Cerveteri in the south to Grosseto, Orvieto, and beyond, they lay hidden beneath the parched ground, revealed only by the accident of the plow or the probing of some fortunate archaeologist, part of a lost world never to be fully rediscovered. Just a fraction of ancient Etruria had been retrieved, faded, distant hints of the Greek civilization that gave Rome everything—the olive and the grape, the Olympian gods, the makings of the Latin alphabet—receiving in return only oblivion. The lives captured in the wall paintings of their tombs—so vibrant, so real, so human—seemed nothing now but the distant, wasted dreams of the dead.

  There was a long, oval pool at the front of the villa. A brief expanse of scrappy lawn was cut into the wilderness, filled with fake classical statuary and carefully tended topiary figures of gods and mythical beasts. Every time Petrakis looked at it, he wanted to laugh. The feature that did impress him was a narrow landing strip running east-west in the adjoining field, with a set of electric landing lights and a hangar by the side. He’d made sure they could use that, and that the gardener would be told to stay away for the duration of their visit. One week before, under cover of darkness, he had landed there from Corsica in a two-seater composite microlight, laden with materials that would have been dangerous to obtain in Italy by other means, and with the man who had provided them in the passenger seat. It had taken fifty minutes in the moonlight, navigating by GPS, skimming the sea to stay beneath the coastal radar, climbing to two thousand feet after the coast, then cutting the engine and gliding to land on the hard, dry grass line etched out by the landing lights. The machine now sat safe and hidden inside the hangar, ready for use another day.

  Rome was less than eighty kilometers away, accessible through a variety of means. The coastal highway was the swiftest and most perilous. He preferred the back roads, skirting all the main towns, then leading to what was once the Via Claudia, close to Bracciano and its great lake, northwest of the capital. The circuitous route took twice as long, but Petrakis had insisted they return that way the previous day. It was a sound precaution; by late afternoon random checks were in place on every main road. On the narrow country lanes they never saw so much as a police or Carabinieri car. There was a personal dimension too. The Via Claudia was built by Nero, stretching across the Alps into what was now Austria, a conduit through which to subdue the fractious tribes of Europe. Every time he followed in the footsteps of those distant legions, he was reminded of what Rome had always represented.

  It was a cloudless sunny morning, hot even at eight. A single jet wheeled high overhead on the approach to Fiumicino or Ciampino. Not for much longer. He’d watched the TV avidly since rising at dawn, happy to hear his own name mentioned alongside a photofit cobbled up from a few old images, one that would help no one. The airports would close later that morning. Road restrictions were coming into force throughout the city. Rome would slowly become paralyzed by its own fear, watched over by menacing guard posts, snipers on balconies, secret-service officers mingling with the mut
e and angry people on the streets. The authorities were advising that only those with essential duties should report to work. Shop staff and office workers knew what that meant: They were supposed to stay at home and lose three or four days’ pay. The unions were threatening to strike, a response that seemed peculiarly Roman.

  Andrea Petrakis completed his seventh length of the pool, then hiked himself up onto the tiled perimeter by the steps and looked back at the villa. They would be visible from the nearest house, a farm a kilometer away. That made him happy. He wanted to maintain the appearance they’d given since their arrival. In the local shops, buying bread and wine, outside in the garden, by the pool, they could have been any group of foreign friends on holiday. A middle-aged Italian with a ready smile, hair that—after some time in the bathroom the previous evening—was now cropped short and dyed a deep shade of brown. A tall, black African, in his twenties, athletic, who couldn’t stop listening to music on his headphones whenever he had the chance, dancing along to whatever he heard. A quiet, introspective dark-skinned man, foreign, perhaps, from the Middle East, with the distanced, almost arrogant air of a businessman.

  And a woman. Anna Ybarra. Spanish, though she would doubtless regard herself as Basque. She had the muscular, full body of a peasant, long dark hair, and a guileless, compelling face, that of the Madonna in some medieval painting—plain, not beautiful, or pretty, yet impossible not to admire. A woman who would always attract attention, turn heads as she passed.

  With her round, guileless eyes, which seemed to engage with the world and find only amazement, Anna Ybarra had an air of intriguing innocence. She was twenty-seven but, at times, looked no more than a teenager. For all these reasons, he chose her above the other individuals trawled from the covert links they possessed around the world. Many had more talents, few more motivation. None looked less like a terrorist, and this, above all else, made her invaluable. The police and the secret services worked the way they knew, with precision and practice based on past experience. They would be looking for what their shared understanding told them to seek: a group of men hiding in the network of safe houses that the organization had acquired the length of Europe. The online news services were already talking of raids on suspected Muslim extremists in the grim immigrant suburbs of Rome, Milan, Turin, and beyond. This was what he hoped for, knowing that not one of those whom the police would arrest could breathe a word about what was happening, for the simplest of reasons: None knew. This was an operation that came from on high, like 9/11, Madrid, and the London bombs. No one could have expected it, because no one, outside the closest circle of those moving to and fro each evening on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, was aware that the plot existed.