The Blue Demon

by David Hewson

  A single drop of what appeared to be blood landed on the camera lens. Anna watched as it began to streak slowly downward, smearing everything a lurid shade of red. When the storm that had roared out from the Trevi subsided, the fountain was transformed.

  Neptune lay in pieces, a stone corpse, facedown, ruined limbs torn asunder amidst a gushing scarlet stream. Everywhere the water had taken on a familiar, livid hue.

  Sweat started to dampen her palms, a pain began to bite at her temples. In the window on the screen next to this terrible scene, they could see the world leaders, less than a kilometer away, on the hill, recoiling in shock at the noise of the nearby blast. Their faces were bloodless, their eyes blank with anger and fear. Dark-suited men with coils emerging from their perfect, standard-issue haircuts were beginning to hurry them away from the podium, back into the palace behind.

  Terror had arrived in Rome—not the private kind, reserved for the likes of the politician they had kidnapped in the dead of night, but a different sort of beast, one so bold and vicious it felt free to roam the city in the bright, clear light of a summer’s day.

  She looked at the fountain again, fearing to see the injuries, knowing she had to look. Desperate shapes stumbled through the dust cloud, hands to heads, shrieking, blinded. A few bodies sprawled on the floor. Police officers had clapped handkerchiefs over their mouths and were trying to make their way into the howling mob to help. Yet, as the dust storm began to settle, it didn’t look like a massacre. The damage to the famous landmark seemed limited to missing stone limbs and cracked frozen waves at the feet of the figures where the bloodied water had burst upon the crowd.

  Anna Ybarra watched carefully, trying to understand. It was as if someone had placed a blood clot in the Trevi’s thrashing, flowing vein, then punctured it, sending a pressurized burst of fake gore out onto the models and photographers and curious, gawping bystanders in the crowd.

  It was a piece of theater, a visual political gesture, one that possessed a vicious, cruel streak of brilliance.

  “Did you kill anyone?” she asked quietly.

  “Probably not,” Petrakis said without looking at her. “That wasn’t the point.” He scowled at the screen, as if trying to clarify his thoughts. “I don’t want their fear clouded by hatred. Not yet.”

  “You never really needed Joseph there, did you?” she asked quietly. For the first time, she feared him.

  Andrea Petrakis watched the mayhem on the screen, amused by his handiwork.

  “Of course I did,” he responded, casting her an icy, disappointed look. “Just not for the reason he thought.”

  The explosion had been perfectly timed to match the appearance of the world leaders on the podium outside the Quirinale. She’d watched Andrea give Joseph the Rolex that morning before he set off. The time was wrong, too fast. It had to be. The Nigerian had attempted to detonate the blast a good two minutes before the correct time. He was as much a part of the show as the fake blood and the hidden explosives.

  Petrakis turned to Deniz Nesin. “You can email that to the right people? Al Jazeera. The BBC. CNN.”

  “In a moment …” the Turk replied.

  “And they won’t be able to trace it from here?”

  Deniz gazed at him, offended by the question, and said nothing.

  “What about Joseph?” she demanded. “If he talks …”

  Petrakis wasn’t even listening.

  23

  SOMETHING HAPPENED JUST AFTER HE STARTED TO RUN, something loud and shocking and deadly. Joseph Priest wanted to turn to the pair pursuing him and scream: It wasn’t me.

  The soft, dull roar of an explosion had sent flocks of grubby pigeons scattering into the bright blue sky, shaking the windows of the stores he ran past, putting fear on the faces of the men and women he bumped into as he fled. Within seconds a cacophony of sirens began to rise from the streets around the Trevi Fountain. Joseph Priest raced as quickly as he could in the opposite direction, determined to find sanctuary somewhere, anywhere.

  Another narrow cobbled alley. Another line of fashion shops and stores selling cosmetics. Huge photos of beautiful women, smiling down at him, their flawless suntanned flesh seemingly so real, so exposed he felt he could reach out and touch the soft, stray cloud of gentle down on their forearms.

  As he fell deeper into the fashion area of the city, becoming ever more lost with every step, he began to feel he was drowning in the modern world he had, for so long, coveted. He stumbled, panting, through the streets that ran from the Spanish Steps to the Corso, a tangle of medieval alleys that had metamorphosed into temples for shoppers who’d pay more for a tiny scrap of denim, manufactured in some distant Third World sweatshop, than he could dream of earning in a month. A universe of brands and trademarks consumed him from every angle, totemic symbols of a materialism he had craved for as long as he could remember. The faces of international supermodels and sportsmen grinned down at his flight from the clothes stores in the Via Condotti and beyond, as he fought to lose the scary couple who’d picked him out at the Trevi Fountain and known his name all along.

  This was not his world, he thought, gasping for breath, too afraid to look behind him for fear of what he might see.

  He dashed past an ancient statue, reclining in a fountain, green and algaed, surrounded by water that still bore the clear, untainted sheen of the Acqua Vergine, upstream perhaps of whatever strange device Deniz had placed in the flow near the Trevi. He glanced at the sign on the wall—the Via dei Greci—and realized he understood enough Italian to know what it meant. The Street of the Greeks.

  The face of Andrea Petrakis popped unbidden into his head, bigger and scarier than the gigantic soccer players and beautiful women leering at him from the storefronts.

  Priest dashed into a dark side alley.

  A sharp, agonizing pain began to stab at his stomach. He doubled over. As his head went down he realized he’d blundered into a dead end. The cul-de-sac was full of public trash receptacles, green and blue, overflowing with trash. A few meters away stood the grimy, smoke-stained wall that must have marked the rear of some building in the adjoining alley.

  He took three hoarse breaths, then looked up, half knowing what he’d see.

  They were out of breath too. And angry. The woman more than the man. Her face was shiny with sweat.

  There was nowhere to run, even if he had the strength.

  Joseph Priest knew when he was beaten. He raised his hands in the air, closed his eyes briefly, tried to collect his thoughts, then opened them. He said, “I got no gun. Nothing.”

  They had, though. Two small pistols low at their sides, and they were walking toward him.

  “You listening to me?” Priest shoved his arms as high as he could stretch.

  From somewhere nearby came the sound of another siren, its tone descending the scale as the source disappeared down some unseen street.

  “No gun,” Priest emphasized. “No nothing. You understand?”

  They stopped in front of him and he knew for sure now: She was the boss.

  The burly man looked at her, as if waiting for some kind of instruction.

  “Listen,” Priest began to plead. “I can tell you where they are. I can tell you what they’ve got. What they plan to do. Everything.”

  Not a word, not an emotion.

  “E-e-everything,” he stuttered. “They’re crazy. Animals. Lunatics.”

  Very slowly, to show there was no ill intent, no concealed weapon, he lowered his left hand, placed it on his heart, and looked the woman in the eye.

  “I swear, lady. Whatever you want, it’s yours. The Mungiki made me do these things. I hate those bastards.” He glanced out at the street. “I can take you to these people. To Andrea Petrakis, right now. You never get a problem again. Not from Joe Priest.”

  It was as good a performance as he’d ever given. He felt proud of it. The hefty man with the gun was still watching him, hesitating. But the woman …

  There was something here
Joe didn’t understand.

  She flashed her eyes at the figure beside her and said, “Do it.”

  Then she turned on her heel.

  Joseph Priest, who wished he’d had time to tell them this was his real name, looked up at the guy and found he had to shield his eyes against the light because the sun was that dazzling, that insistent.

  “Do what …?” he began to ask, until he realized it was a stupid question, and that he knew the answer already.

  PART THREE

  The Tomb

  Facilis descensus Averno;

  noctes atque dies patet atri ianua Ditis;

  sed revocare gradum superasque evadere ad auras,

  hoc opus, hic labor est.

  The gates of Hell are open night and day;

  Smooth the descent, and easy is the way:

  But to return, and view the cheerful skies,

  In this the task and mighty labor lies.

  —Virgil, Aeneid, Book VI

  24

  THEY WERE PASSING CIVITAVECCHIA WHEN FALCONE called with the lead. Costa turned off the radio to take it. Aldo Bartoli, the brother of the dead carabiniere, was still at work, Falcone told him. Aldo was unwilling to discuss the case with a stranger over the phone, but agreeable to a personal approach on the understanding that his name would not be attached to any report.

  So they kept driving, past Tarquinia, a solitary town in the Etruscan foothills to their right as they followed the coast road. Mirko Oliva was at the wheel, talking of his childhood holidays when his family swapped urban Turin for Monte Argentario, the rocky peninsula where Porto Ercole lay. The mood changed as every passing minute took them farther from Rome. The young officer was a good conversationalist, happily chatting about the fishing, the swimming, the hiking. The radio stayed off. It was against the rules. But so was sneaking into Tuscany without authority.

  Rosa sat in the back, asking questions from time to time, laughing. Costa watched the countryside slip past and the landscape become ever more bleak and bare as they entered the flatlands of the Maremma. He couldn’t get their destination out of his head. Porto Ercole was where Caravaggio died a pauper in a charity hospital. For years he’d thought of it as a harsh, cold coastal hamlet, unwelcoming toward visitors, neglectful of strangers who arrived sick and penniless. Then they crossed the causeway that linked the mainland to Monte Argentario and found themselves on a narrow road winding through lush green countryside, Mirko still talking about holidays and his childhood. And Nic Costa began to realize how foolish it was to judge a place by its history alone.

  The Guardia Costiera building was a pink-washed villa on the sleepy, picturesque harbor front. It looked more like a home than an outpost of the law enforcement agency tasked with surveillance of the port and the Tyrrhenian Sea beyond. The national flag fluttered red, white, and green by the steps at the entrance. There was the sound of a television from behind shuttered windows thrown open to the breeze. Rich yachts filled the tiny port. Luxurious homes dotted the surrounding hills. Mirko Oliva said that his father’s old place just outside town, little more than a country cottage, was now worth more than one million euros, and would probably wind up in the hands of some rich financier from Milan. This was not the bitter, poor outpost of a shattered Italy that had turned its back on a stricken Caravaggio, leaving him to a beggar’s death and an unmarked grave. Times had changed.

  They walked into the coast guard post and found that Aldo Bartoli was the only officer there. He was sitting beneath an old-fashioned ceiling fan in front of a small TV, watching the news, sucking on a cigarette, a thin, wiry man in early middle age, with close-cropped silver hair, a mournful face, and a downturned, immobile mouth that didn’t look as if it often broke into a smile. His eyes were watery and red-rimmed, like those of someone who drank too much.

  He listened to their introductions and then stated, without emotion, “You don’t know, do you?”

  “Know what?” Costa asked.

  “There’s been a bomb. In Rome.” Bartoli thrust a hand at the TV. A reporter was standing in front of the Trevi Fountain. It appeared to be awash with blood, more than was physically possible, even in the most vicious of blasts.

  “No one dead,” Bartoli told them. “It’s a miracle. They shot the terrorist. That’s something, anyway. Maybe there are more bombs in the city. Poison in the water supply. God, am I glad to be out of all that crap!”

  “Excuse me,” Costa apologized, then stepped outside to call Rome.

  It was a brief conversation; an unwelcome one, judging by Falcone’s testy response.

  “You can’t get back here, Nic. They’ve closed every route in and out. Make arrangements to stay in a hotel somewhere. Do some digging. Ask this Bartoli where you should start. Take a look around Tarquinia.”

  Costa watched a palatial yacht edging across the peaceful harbor. It was impossible to imagine that, little more than ninety minutes away, Italy’s capital was paralyzed by chaos, waiting for the next outrage. He wanted to be there.

  “What good are we here? We can make it back. I know roads—”

  “There’s nothing for you to do here. Don’t you understand?”

  He could see Rosa and Mirko Oliva seated next to the dour-faced Guardia Costiera officer, silent, watching the newscast.

  “How bad is it?” he asked.

  He was sure he heard Falcone utter a short, grim laugh.

  “That depends on what you mean by ‘bad.’ You can’t move anywhere, except on foot, and that’s not easy. The city council has warned everyone to drink nothing but bottled water until they know the public mains are free of contamination. Whatever this device was, they planted it in the domestic supply. There may be others. So there’s panic in the shops. For bottled water and food. Most people won’t be able to get home from work for hours.”

  “It feels wrong we’re not there, Leo.”

  “There are a million people—ours, the Carabinieri, Palombo’s secret-service agents—tripping over each other here. They don’t need three more bodies in the way.”

  “What was it?”

  “Some kind of explosive device hidden inside the Trevi Fountain. A small bomb and a lot of red dye. It’s almost as if they didn’t want to kill anyone. As if it was some kind of a prank. There’s a handful of models and photographers in the hospital with minor injuries. This was for show, not to kill. The only fatality is the terrorist. The news says some unmarked officers saw him planting the thing on CCTV. There was some kind of confrontation near the Via Condotti. He was shot dead by two agents.”

  “Ours?”

  “No. We knew nothing about it until the bomb went off. Palombo’s people, I guess. I talked to Esposito. He’s no more in the picture than we are. There’s been an unconfirmed email claiming responsibility. It says this is just the beginning. We have to work on the assumption the dead man planted several devices. Esposito’s sent out everyone he can lay hands on. They’re searching everywhere. Every tourist site. Every station. Every bus and train. Let’s leave them to it.”

  Costa tried to picture his native city brought to its knees.

  “Who’s claiming responsibility?” he asked.

  “The email went straight to the president’s office. They haven’t released that detail yet. Nic … there are aspects of this case that are beginning to trouble me. Please. Take care. See what Bartoli can tell you. Pass on anything you find immediately, and do nothing else. We’re not entirely masters of our own fate at the moment. I don’t want you thinking we can try to track down these people. That was never our brief. Just try to find some facts.”

  “And then?”

  “Then Commissario Esposito calls the president and asks him what to do next. If we get that far. We’re a handful of officers up against … what? I’ve no idea, and neither do you.”

  There were some questions the inspector wanted answered. A second warning not to try to return to Rome. Then Falcone hung up.

  Aldo Bartoli sat grim-faced and immobile in the o
ffice, watching what was happening in Rome, Rosa and Mirko by his side. From the apartments nearby, Costa could hear the racket of TV sets, tuned to the same terrible news. It was a scene he knew was being repeated everywhere throughout Italy. Perhaps the world. This was what Petrakis had sought in the first place, twenty years ago: attention, fear, to instill some deep, haunting doubt in the nation about what the remains of the day might bring. Back then he had failed in everything except the murder of two young Americans. Now he was making amends. This bloody act, a foretaste—it seemed to say—of what was to come, had attracted an audience of millions, brought together by the same sense of terror.

  “Jesus!” Bartoli’s outraged voice broke through his thoughts with a stream of florid curses. Costa strode back into the office. There was a new picture on the screen: a shaky video, the kind taken using a cell phone. He watched as the familiar statues at the Trevi Fountain disappeared in a storm of rubble and dust, and a livid red spume of liquid burst out from the cloud, soaking the cowering, screaming crowd in fake blood.

  “The bastards handed out that thing themselves,” Bartoli exclaimed. “They put it on the Internet, as if it was some kid’s video.”

  “Who?” Costa asked. “Did they use a name?”

  Bartoli glowered at him. “You know who. That’s why you’re here.”

  He turned up the volume. The announcer was speaking rapidly, blurring his words with an unprofessional haste. A caption ran across the bottom of the TV, looping over and over.

  The president’s office has announced that the terrorist group known as the Blue Demon has claimed responsibility, and say this is the first act of many.…

  Familiar images filled the screen: of a young Andrea Petrakis, the corpses in the nymphaeum at the Villa Giulia, the bloodied shack near Tarquinia where the three students died, alongside a member of the Carabinieri.