by David Hewson
He could imagine the men the Italians had rounded up, locked in some grim cell, being screamed at by interrogators, wondering if the Americans might intercede at any moment, whisk them away to a private jet and a short trip to a friendly foreign country where torture was an everyday occurrence. Rendition was supposed to be banned in Italy; the politicians had demanded that after one case had resulted in criminal prosecutions against some of those involved. But in reality …?
Petrakis had no idea whether it would happen or not, and he didn’t care. The pain and outrage would make the detention all the more galling, and there would be mistakes, as there always were, which the media would seize upon and scream from the rooftops as evidence of the new, draconian state.
Terror was about more than the visible act. It concerned the temperament of a nation, the breaking of its spirit, the destruction of anything it could use to cling to the certainties of the past.
By the side of the pool, he found his attention drifting to the woman once more. He had checked her story himself, every last detail. She had grown up in the Basque country, daughter of a simple country farmer. Married at nineteen. A mother at twenty-one. Five years later, in the midst of a police crackdown after ETA exploded a bomb at Madrid airport, killing three people, a covert anti-terror squad had stormed into the farmhouse she shared with her husband. It was a nighttime raid, badly handled. In the ensuing firefight he had died, and so had their little boy, who was just a week away from his fifth birthday. When the sun rose on their humble home outside the village of Hernani, near San Sebastián, it shed light on a terrible mistake. The police had entered the wrong house, thinking it belonged to her brother-in-law, an ETA sympathizer. Her husband had merely been trying to defend his family against a group of armed masked men who had hammered down the door and attacked them. He was no ETA member, not even a supporter. But soon afterwards, when she was allowed home from the hospital where she was treated for a minor gunshot wound to the abdomen, Anna Ybarra was. A volunteer demanding something special, something that would give her satisfaction.
The other two were different. Joseph Priest was a member of the Kenyan Mungiki gang, half terrorist, half criminal, someone who could be relied upon to kill without a thought and steal everything he could find from the corpses left behind. Money was Joseph’s god, though not as much as it was for the men who had sent him all the way from Nairobi.
Deniz Nesin grew up in the wild lands of eastern Turkey and was the brotherhood’s placeman in the team. A frontline soldier who’d trained suicide units in Afghanistan, Palestine, and Iraq, helped develop networks of supporters throughout the world, set up conduits through which cash and arms and technical equipment might be moved swiftly and securely. Never once getting caught, getting wounded, getting his face or alias out on the wires.
Petrakis liked him. Or, rather, he felt comfortable in his presence. The man was a type he had come to recognize and understand over the last two decades. A severe, dedicated fundamentalist through and through, never missing prayer, never far from his copy of a well-thumbed Koran, Deniz was meticulous, predictable, determined, and, when necessary, capable of instant and extreme violence. With these strengths came flaws and fallibilities. Deniz was a zealot surrounded by atheists. He had accepted Petrakis’s leadership because the proposal was too tempting to ignore. Still, he was unhappy in the company of strangers, and the presence of Anna Ybarra preyed upon him deeply, in part for her forthright character, but more for the reliance they had come to place on a woman.
It was of no consequence. This was Petrakis’s operation. She was his choice, as were they. He’d made his position plain to the people at the top, not in person because he wasn’t quite of sufficient stature to gain that privilege. But through video links and covert emails, exchanged with their shifting camps that flitted constantly, between Afghanistan and Pakistan, Petrakis had persuaded them, by the force of his argument and the strength of his position. Either the venture happened his way or it didn’t happen at all. They didn’t like the implicit threat in that statement. Still, they knew the truth in what he was saying. Italy would be on the alert for a conventional terrorist team, willing to lock up anyone who generated the slightest suspicion. In order to penetrate to the heart of Rome, new tactics were needed. No hijacked planes. No homemade bombs, crafted out of chemicals and fertilizer, left on commuter trains, detonated by a simple phone call.
What was required was terror on a different scale. An enormity that would send a message to the citizens of one of the most beautiful, ancient cities in the world: No one is exempt, no one is immune.
“Andrea!”
Anna’s curiously accented English drifted to him from the patio.
He turned to look. Deniz and Joseph were seated at the outdoor dining table. The African nursed a coffee. Deniz was playing with the satellite phone they’d had programmed onto an illicit frequency of one of the networks the Americans supposedly couldn’t crack. He wore a face like thunder.
Anna walked in front of the two of them wearing a swimsuit that was too old for her.
“What’s the water like?” she called.
“Wet,” Petrakis called back. “What do you expect?”
She laughed and uttered something in Spanish, a curse, probably a nasty one. He liked having this woman around. There’d been nothing in the way of real female company in Afghanistan. Just “wives” who materialized to fill the perceived need. Anna answered back. He hadn’t heard that kind of spirit in a female for a long time.
Deniz muttered something caustic in Arabic.
“If you want to insult me,” Anna retorted, standing in front of him, hands on her hips, “at least do it in a language I can understand.”
“Show some modesty,” he grumbled.
“After yesterday you want modesty?”
Joseph raised his coffee cup. “Good point.”
Deniz swore and went back to the phone. Anna shook her head, came over to the pool, dived in, swam a length underwater, then bobbed up next to Petrakis.
“What do we do today?” she asked him.
“Relax. Stop bugging Deniz.”
She stared at him, her long hair slicked back against her head. It made her round, tanned face even more striking.
“I’m wearing a very ordinary swimsuit. This is not Afghanistan. He doesn’t get to stone me to death here.”
“We don’t need distractions.”
“Why do you never tell us anything?” she asked. “Who was that man who came here in your little plane? The Greek? Where is he?”
Deniz went back into the house, taking the satphone with him. Joseph had his eyes closed and was listening to some beat on his iPod, feet jogging, looking every inch the rich, idle tourist.
“I don’t know what rules you had in ETA,” Petrakis told her. “But here, I tell you what you need to know, when you need to know it.”
“I don’t know what rules they had, either. I wasn’t a part of ETA. That’s why you wanted me.”
She let her body float up to the surface, go rigid, then drifted across the rippling surface of the pool on her back. He watched her, couldn’t help it. Her figure reminded him of that girl from Treviso who’d died in his parents’ cottage.…
Andrea Petrakis found himself thinking of the parties they’d held in those final days, seeing them briefly in his head, remembering the touch of warm skin, the liquid sound of doped-up laughter, the furtive, anxious sex. There’d been no rules there, either.
Very briskly, with the swiftness of an athlete, Anna flipped over, disappeared beneath the surface, and came up by his legs.
“Deniz should think himself lucky,” she said. “The reason I’m wearing an old woman’s bathing suit is that I hate people seeing the scar. Where they shot me. Right …” She made a cutting gesture over her stomach. “… here.” She looked at him and asked, “Why did you kill the boy?”
“I had no choice. And he wasn’t a boy.”
She gave him a searching glance. “You c
ould have let him live. He was soft in the head. Boy or man, he didn’t even know which day of the week it was.”
“Danny went to pieces.”
“Does that always happen the first time?” she asked. There was a cold, curious look in her eyes. He’d deliberately left her out of the seizure of Batisti. She lacked the experience, the training.
“It didn’t with me. It won’t with you.”
She frowned. “Can I ask you something? You’ll tell me the truth? Promise?”
“If it’s a question I can answer, then I will tell you. If not …”
“You meant to kill him all along, didn’t you? That was what he was for. A piece of the plan. Like all of us.” Her dark eyes never left him. “Me the innocent. Joseph the dumb one. Deniz”—she cast a cold glance at the house—“the bigot. Is that why you chose us?”
“I chose you because you wanted this, Anna.”
He checked his watch and looked north, along the stark stretch of Maremma coastline. It was only a ten-minute drive to the excavation where they’d uncovered the original Blue Demon, the place that had captivated him when he first saw it almost thirty years before. He felt he could stare at that face forever, with its eyes that burned like red-hot coals, full of malice toward everything that lived.
“Joseph,” he yelled.
The long, lean black figure took off the headphones and looked across at them, puzzled.
Petrakis thought of Rome and the tourist mecca not far from the Spanish Steps. Ugo Campagnolo had neglected to check his calendar when he booked the leaders of the world’s industrialized nations for their stay in the city. It was also Fashion Week, an annual ritual that would not walk away easily, whatever the pressure. That morning there would be an event for the world’s photographers. Models and the media. Anxious, gawping crowds, all packed around the Trevi Fountain, none of them more than a minute’s walk away from the Via Rasella.
It was too good an opportunity to miss.
“I’ve an errand for you,” he told the African. “An important one.”
14
DARIO SORDI’S CD CONTAINED THE CONFIDENTIAL report of the commission into the Blue Demon incident, seventy-nine pages on disc, including a note declaring that Marco Costa, an original member of the investigation, had declined to sign the findings and resigned shortly before the remaining members reached their decidedly anodyne conclusions. His son Nic had read the entire document immediately after the president and his bodyguards left. It was four a.m. before Costa got any sleep. The intuition he’d recognized in Sacro e Profano—that time might be short in the days to come—would soon, he felt, be proved right.
But at least their new home was sufficiently distant from the Questura to give them time to think. Esposito had provided a large, five-room first-floor apartment in a former monastery overlooking the narrow street of San Giovanni in Laterano, close to the vast cathedral that was the seat of the Catholic Church before the construction of St. Peter’s centuries ago. Beyond the Lateran the city was a nightmare: traffic jams in every direction, train and bus cancellations, streets full of angry, scared people walking to work because there was no other way to get there. The headline in Corriere della Sera, over a photograph of a threatening watchtower in the Piazza Venezia, with an armed soldier at its summit, said everything: La città eterna, assediata. The eternal city, under siege. Radio talk shows carried caller after caller complaining about their plight, and its immediate cause: an unwanted summit at which the aloof and distant presidents and prime ministers of foreign nations might take cocktails with one another in the Quirinale Palace. To Costa’s surprise and dismay, much of the fury seemed to be directed more at Dario Sordi, who had inherited the chaos, than at Ugo Campagnolo, the man who invited it. There was an intemperate, irrational aspect to the popular mood, one that was almost palpable on the street as he walked past the everyday shops and cafes from his parking place near the hospital.
The safe house occupied a wing of the block, reached by broad stairs that curled around a rickety cast-iron lift rising to the floors above. It wasn’t hard to imagine monks scurrying about the place, though—judging by the rows of strollers parked neatly in the lobby—most of the present occupants seemed to be ordinary families.
They had been joined by the newcomer that Dario Sordi had promised the previous day. Elizabeth Murray, born in London, raised in Italy, had been summoned from retirement to advise the small team Falcone headed. She had arrived in Rome only the evening before, from her farm in New Zealand, and looked a little the worse for the journey. A large, beaming woman, with a very English, weathered face, she might, in another incarnation, have been Peroni’s more aristocratic elder sister. She wore a khaki corduroy skirt over tan leather boots, and a blue denim shirt—winter clothing, she told them, since that was the season in the southern hemisphere. A shepherd’s crook that doubled as a walking stick stood next to the largest armchair in the apartment, which she more than occupied, casting envious glances from time to time at the neighboring desk where Teresa’s deputy, Silvio Di Capua, had taken control of the only two computers in the place.
Esposito appeared to be present only as a matter of principle. He seemed uncomfortable, and anxious to flee back to the Questura.
The commissario made terse introductions, then asked Costa to brief everyone on what he had learned overnight. It all came down to one word: Gladio. The roots of the organization that Dario Sordi believed was the genesis of the Blue Demon lay in the paranoia among the NATO alliance after the Second World War, when Europe appeared to be one more domino about to fall to expansionist Soviet Russia. Italy, Greece, Austria, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland … all were seen to be countries that might, in the wrong circumstances, perhaps even by democratic vote, turn communist. To counter such an outcome, the U.S. and the UK, in concert with domestic politicians, formed secret networks of stay-behind undercover agents, often working in affairs of state, the civil service, or other areas of public life, all prepared to carry out whatever was necessary to stave off a Soviet threat.
Much of the groundwork for what would, in Italy, become Gladio was apparently in the hands of Allen Dulles, the founder of the CIA, which was the ultimate financier of most of these operations. In Germany, Dulles had helped form the Gehlen Organization. It was headed by a former Wehrmacht officer turned Cold War spymaster, building a secret group that would one day become a central unit of West Germany’s principal federal intelligence service. In Italy, there had been no such reining in of the Cold War spooks. The stay-behind men had been sought in some of the darkest corners of the fractious postwar state, among the neofascists of the Movimento Sociale Italiano, created by the supporters of Mussolini, and from members of the P2 Masonic Lodge that was to feature in so many Roman and Vatican scandals of the late twentieth century.
The commission had uncovered evidence that Gregor and Alyssa Petrakis, Andrea’s parents, far from being the hippies they appeared, had connections with Gladio’s equivalent in Greece, Lochoi Oreinõn Katadromõn, the Mountain Raiding Companies. In the early 1970s, the couple had moved from Athens to the Maremma at the urging of intelligence agents in the right-wing colonels’ junta. Renzo Frasca too did not appear to be the office bureaucrat painted by the American Rennick the day before. There was some unconfirmed evidence to suggest that Frasca had a role as a liaison officer with agents such as the Petrakises.
This, in itself, did not surprise Costa. The Cold War was a time for spooks of all kinds, usually conducting small, secret campaigns against one another in ways that, for someone of his age, seemed quite inexplicable. What shocked him was the report’s section on the methods and aims of Gladio. The men and women of that organization were not, as Dario Sordi seemed to hint, tasked with waiting for some threatened communist takeover before moving into action.
They were there to prevent such a change in the first place, by any means at their disposal.
The cold, blunt language of an internal government document made this clear. The aim of
these covert groups was to achieve their purpose through “internal subversion” and a “strategy of tension.” In practice that meant illegal acts and support, where necessary, for terrorist movements that might sway the electorate against voting for a further swing to the left. The commission had interviewed some of those arrested from the Red Brigades trials in Italy and the Baader-Meinhof Gang in Germany. All of them alleged that they had been infiltrated by members of stay-behind teams bringing arms and funds. The names differed. In Belgium, the secret army was called the SDRA8; in Denmark, Absolon; and in Portugal, Aginter. But the intention was always the same: to counter any drift from the center by fomenting unease and uncertainty in the electorate, in an effort to convince the masses that a left-wing coup was imminent, and that safety lay in one direction only, the status quo.
Political allegiances meant less than hard cash and weaponry. Renegade Gladio members quietly helped the Marxist Red Brigades kidnap and murder. At the same time, they had also, Sordi’s report claimed, given money to Ordine Nuovo, the right-wing group behind the Piazza Fontana bomb in Milan in 1969 that killed sixteen people and began the cycle of extremist violence that gripped the country for the next two decades.
