The Blue Demon

by David Hewson

  When the marker beeped on the GPS, he turned, setting the final destination of the plane: the apron at Ciampino, directly in front of the terminal building. Latitude 41°48’4.76″N, longitude 12°35’21.49″E. He pictured the destination in his head as he locked the cheap autopilot to the handheld GPS unit.

  The modern world was, he decided, like ancient Rome in many ways. It invented the means of its own destruction, in the name of science and knowledge and prosperity, blinded to the threat of its own arrogance. Twenty years before, when he’d learned to fly in a battered old Cessna 152, nothing like this existed. No power on earth would have allowed him to penetrate to the inner sanctum of the state in the way he now planned.

  Five kilometers short of Ciampino, the airfield clearly visible ahead, outlined by runway lights, Andrea Petrakis unfastened his pilot’s harness. He took out his second GPS unit, a tiny handheld model meant for walkers. It had long since seized the position. He waited for the waypoint he’d agreed upon with Deniz Nesin and Anna Ybarra before they left Tarquinia: the long, perfectly straight line of the old Appian Way, running almost parallel to Ciampino’s runway, just a kilometer short of the field.

  He looked down. A car was there, where it was supposed to be. He watched as it flashed its headlights close to the circular tower of the tomb of Cecilia Metella, the monument’s silhouette clear in the moonlit night.

  Petrakis brought the plane up to six hundred feet, aware that at any moment, somewhere in the control room of Ciampino, an air traffic control officer would notice a blip on the radar screen.

  It was too late for them to do anything. Even if a military fighter was in the area, it would now have little more than a minute in which to act. No jet could maneuver onto a previously unseen target in such time. They worked the way they had always worked, on the basis that the opposing parties fought by the same rules.

  He’d calculated the glide path, the rate of descent. He knew the simple autopilot was working as intended. The laws of physics applied to everyone, equally. Petrakis trimmed the plane down into a steady, accelerating descent—one that would soon rise to a hundred knots or more—checked that the autopilot was locked on the GPS coordinates, then ripped open the flimsy door of the plane and half fell, half leaped out into the black fury of the night.

  36

  THERE WAS A VOICE SOMEWHERE. FEMALE, TREMULOUS, familiar. It spoke his name. Marooned somewhere between wakefulness and dream, he wanted to turn toward the source of the sound.

  “Nic …” it said more insistently.

  A hand shook his shoulder. Costa found himself being turned upright. He didn’t know where he was. Then the memories flooded back, full of pain and despair. Rosa Prabakaran was staring at him, bleary-eyed, exhausted, frightened.

  He said the first words that came into his hurting head. “Why are we still alive?”

  “I don’t know,” she whispered. Then, as if she hated to say the words, she added, glancing backwards, to some unseen place behind him, “Mirko isn’t.”

  Costa dragged himself upright, fighting the crashing stab of hurt the effort brought on. Someone had slugged him hard on the back of the skull. Someone …

  Memories. A gun fired close to Rosa. Andrea Petrakis—a man who, they assumed, was working as part of a lone hit team—had taken an incoming phone call, one that had enraged him much more than the presence of three police officers invading his private lair. These things were important, though at that moment Costa lacked the energy and the intelligence to understand why.

  He walked over to look at the motionless figure visible beneath the intense, prurient moon. The young police officer’s corpse lay where Petrakis had shot him, stretched on the dry summer grass, arms akimbo, face bloodied and blank. In death he looked like a teenager.

  Rosa was by Costa’s side. “They took the car. They took everything. What do we do?”

  He looked up at the sky, thinking. “Are you all right?” he asked her.

  “My head hurts.”

  He stepped forward so that the silver light fell on her face and said, “Show me.”

  She turned. He reached forward and touched a matted patch of fine hair behind one ear.

  “Ouch!”

  “Sorry. It’s not so bad. They …” He fought to remember those last moments. One recollection stood out. “I thought they’d shot you.”

  “He fired into the ground. Then they struck me. I was too scared to do anything. I couldn’t even find the courage to run. Then …” Her voice broke. “Mirko … how could someone do that? As if he didn’t really matter?”

  “He didn’t,” Costa answered. Mirko Oliva’s life carried no more meaning than that of the golden-haired young man whose body had been riddled with bullets in the Via Rasella. Petrakis had a mission. Nothing would stand in its way.

  Yet, somehow, they had survived.

  He checked his jacket. Nothing. No weapon. Not even a wallet. His police cell phone was gone. So was the tiny phone Dario Sordi had given him.

  “Do we have anything else?” he asked Rosa.

  “Just this.” She had a flashlight in her hand. “It was Mirko’s, I think. He must have dropped it.”

  “Stay here.”

  “You’re leaving me?” she asked, outraged.

  “I’m going back into the tomb. Do you want to come? It may be a waste of time. Your choice.”

  She didn’t blink. Rosa Prabakaran said, “I’ll come.”

  The way seemed shorter the second time around. He didn’t look at the paintings on the wall, in the large chamber or the small. He walked on, feeling Rosa’s arm touching his for safety, for comfort.

  When they got to the corpse slumped in the corner, in the room of the Blue Demon, the rats scurried away once more.

  Costa bent to look at the man. He’d been shot through the mouth and the chest. It was the same kind of death that had been delivered to Mirko Oliva. Sudden, deliberate, unthinking. The dead man wore a cheap dark suit and a white shirt, now stained with gore, open at the collar.

  Costa reached inside his jacket and recovered a wallet. There was a little money and an ID card. It said he was a Greek national called Stefan Kyriakis.

  In the other pocket was a very new-looking cell phone. Costa glanced at Rosa as he pushed the On button.

  “Wish us luck,” he said.

  A light came on the screen. Almost immediately the low battery warning began to bleep.

  Together, they got back up the wooden steps as quickly as they could. Beneath the Mediterranean moon, by the corpse of his young colleague, Costa found the weakest of signals.

  He called Falcone. The inspector’s familiar, bad-tempered voice barked, “Pronto.”

  “Petrakis found us,” Costa said. “They killed Mirko Oliva.”

  “And you?” Falcone demanded.

  “We’ll live.”

  “Where are you?”

  Costa told him as best he could.

  “This is not what I asked you …” Falcone began.

  “I’m sorry. You need to alert Palombo. You need to bring in everyone you can. They’re here, Leo. Not Rome. Here. This is …” He thought of the Blue Demon in the earth beneath his feet. “… their home. Where they came from. What made them.”

  He could hear talking in the background. Then Falcone said, “I somehow doubt that. We’ll be there in five minutes.”

  “Five …?”

  “Stay where you are. Don’t—”

  The last milliamp of power in the phone he’d found on the corpse in the Blue Demon’s tomb expired. The thing fell silent in Costa’s fingers.

  37

  IT TOOK THEM LONGER THAN ANYONE EXPECTED TO locate the tomb in the parched grass knoll in the woods. An hour perhaps, even more. Costa found it difficult to speak when they arrived, but he answered the inspector’s questions evenly. Teresa had her arms around Rosa, who wept openly. Peroni stood over the young officer’s body, grim-faced, furious.

  After listening to what Costa had to say, Falcone took
a flashlight and went down into the tomb. The rest of them waited. Costa didn’t want to see that face on the wall again.

  When the inspector came out again, he demanded, “Who is he?”

  Costa took out the wallet and the ID card he’d found. “Stefan Kyriakis.”

  “No, Nic,” Falcone insisted. “Who is he?” He looked close to losing control. “Who are any of them? The Blue Demon? Jesus …”

  “I don’t understand,” Costa replied weakly.

  He felt faint. He needed food. And sleep.

  “We’re not supposed to,” Peroni interjected. “We’re not supposed to understand any of—”

  He didn’t finish the sentence.

  Something had arrived in the night sky, something so large it began to block out the moon. The thing wasn’t alone.

  The air was rent by the slashing of vast rotor blades. Hulking black shapes descended around them, landing on the spare flat ground by the road. Men swarmed from their bellies, bright, hard beams of light emerging from their heads, weapons tight in their arms.

  A voice barked through a bullhorn.

  Get down on the ground. Arms outstretched. Don’t move.

  Falcone didn’t budge an inch. He glared into their bright beams as if he could stare them down with a single glance.

  “We’d best do as they say, Leo,” Costa murmured, and put a firm hand on his inspector’s arm, pushing him down to the hard, dry earth.

  38

  IN THE SNATCHED SECONDS AVAILABLE TO ANDREA PETRAKIS between tumbling out of the microlight and opening his ram-chute, he was able to orient himself and aim squarely for the target area: the large patch of open grassland next to the tomb of Cecilia Metella.

  He’d briefed Deniz Nesin and Anna Ybarra thoroughly. Their flashlights were clearly visible, sweeping to make two arcs that met at the safest, flattest point of the zone. Petrakis scarcely needed them. The moon was so bright it was like descending under floodlights. His chute opened with perfect precision at four hundred feet above the ground. Petrakis gripped the stays, taking the strain as the deployment fought the wind beneath the fabric and briefly dragged him upward once again.

  For a few delicious moments he found himself suspended in the hot summer air, seemingly free of the perpetual drag of gravity. The lights of Ciampino glittered beyond the line of lamps on the highway. A bird—an owl, perhaps—squawked somewhere near his head, as if resenting the intrusion of man into its private world.

  Then, slowly, he began to fall earthward, into the heart of the ranging beams of light below.

  The glittering horizon was still visible when the tiny plane, loaded with explosive, hit the apron of the airport. Just a little more than a kilometer away, the sky burst into flame. It was as if some deadly hothouse flower had suddenly shot blooming from the earth, Petrakis thought.

  He watched and laughed and clung to the chute stays all the way down. It was a gamble. Everything was. There was no way of knowing the precise alignment of the aircraft parked outside the terminal, no certain scheme to ensure one was hit. The little plane could as easily crash into bare asphalt, causing minor damage and a little inconvenience. Yet, watching the searing orange petals of gasoline fire rise into the night sky of Ciampino, he knew immediately this had not occurred. Guided by the amateurish autopilot, the microlight had hit home like a makeshift guided missile, finding the enemy, igniting the combustible fuel in the belly of some grounded leviathan on the apron.

  The noise of the explosion came after the beautiful angry flames. Then another, and a third.

  At that point the horizon disappeared and Petrakis found himself fighting to regain control of his descent. The ground loomed up, with a shocking swiftness. He bent his legs, crouching for impact. Their lights pinned him to the sky, blinding him. He rolled. The earth slammed into his shoulder, sending him tumbling, spinning like a child’s top.

  He wondered if something might break. If the whole escapade might come to nothing more than a fractured bone.

  Then the world ceased turning. He found himself on his back, staring up at the sky, the ram-chute wrapped around him like a clumsy shroud. His entire body hurt. But as he gingerly tried to move his limbs, he realized it was a familiar pain, that of nothing more than a bad fall.

  By the time the two of them arrived—out of breath, panting, looking at him in amazement—he was on his feet. The sky above the gently sloping hill that led to Ciampino was now a livid line of orange and red. They could hear the secondary explosions bursting in the unseen distance. The stench of burning gasoline was faintly noticeable over the scents of the Appian Way: grass and wild herbs.

  “Brother,” Deniz Nesin said, and came forward to embrace him.

  Anna Ybarra just stood there.

  “Congratulations,” she said quietly.

  “Congratulations? Congratulations?” Deniz was ecstatic. He raised his arms to the glowing sky. “This is a wonder, brother. We have struck them deep in the heart. We have brought them the fruits of jihad. They know fear now. They know terror. They know what we have endured all these years.” He thumped his chest with his fist. “We—all of us.”

  Petrakis laughed and wondered what was really happening at the airport, how much damage he had truly caused.

  “It was just a plane and some explosive, Deniz. None of them were there. No presidents. No politicians. They’re all in Rome. If we have killed anyone, it was a few cleaners and security guards. A mechanic, perhaps, and a couple of cops.”

  Cops. The memory of what had happened in the tomb of the Blue Demon refused to leave him. From that moment forward he would, he knew, have to improvise everything on his own. To take unexpected risks, and not listen to them anymore. To decide, swiftly, without compunction, which path to take.

  “It’s a beginning,” Deniz told him. “A great one. See …” He indicated the bright orange sky behind them. The smell of burning fuel was beginning to overwhelm everything else, and behind it they could hear the crackling of distant fires and the wailing of sirens. “Tomorrow we bring them something better. Tomorrow—”

  “They knew,” Petrakis cut in. “How else did the cops get there?”

  Anna Ybarra and Deniz Nesin didn’t answer. Petrakis felt a flicker of anger.

  “The Kenyan,” Deniz said. “The bastard must have told them.”

  Petrakis shuffled off the parachute. “Joseph never knew about the tomb, Deniz. Only you and I did. We took delivery of the explosives there. Remember?”

  The woman stepped back, looking at the ground.

  There was an expression on the Turk’s face Petrakis had seen only once before. The day in Helmand he had, out of nothing more than pure curiosity, pushed them too far in training.

  “What are you saying?” Deniz demanded. “The Kenyan could have followed us. And so,” he nodded at the woman, “could she. Anyone might have seen …”

  Petrakis took him by the arm. “All this is true. And yet …”

  He put his hand inside his light summer jacket. The weapon was there, in its holster. “I must ask myself, Deniz. Are these things possible?”

  “No!” the Turk yelled. “Do not say this. Not even in jest. Do not …”

  Andrea Petrakis wound his hand around Deniz’s tanned, bony skull and pressed the weapon into the man’s temple. Anna Ybarra took another two steps away from them. Her hands were by her sides, her eyes downcast, seeing nothing.

  “Even if I’m wrong,” Petrakis said calmly. “If … I must ask myself this, Deniz. What use are you now? Everything has changed. There is no need for your … toys … which, if I’m candid, are your solitary skill.”

  He was a commander. A general. He had decisions to make, challenges to face.

  “I beg you,” Deniz Nesin said, squirming in his grip. “I would not betray you, Andrea. Ever—”

  “Possibly.”

  “Ever …”

  There was a fresh explosion somewhere off in the distance. It was a good night. There was no guarantee their luck would conti
nue.

  “Then I shall be forced to apologize in Paradise,” Petrakis murmured.

  He fired—a single shot was all it took.

  She watched, trembling as the Turk fell, briefly thrashing, to the ground.

  Anna Ybarra had her own weapon in her hand, pointed, half shaking, in his direction.

  “You won’t kill me,” she said in a tremulous voice.

  It seemed a ridiculous statement. Petrakis stood motionless, studying her.

  “Of course not. I need you. As you need me. We shall drive to Ciampino and see what we can. Then I shall show you our new home.” He shrugged. “It’s not so magnificent as Tarquinia, I’m afraid. But we won’t be there long.”

  Her gun went down. She still refused to look at the body of the Turk.

  Andrea Petrakis smiled and said, “Good. Did you bring some food, like I asked? I’m starved.”

  39

  THEY WERE FACEDOWN ON THE EARTH, FEELING THE downdraft of the helicopter blades cutting slowly through the night air. Beyond them, teams of hooded, armed men spread through the area around the tomb.

  Costa heard a familiar voice, one he recognized instantly, though he had heard it only once before.

  Luca Palombo, the head Ministry of the Interior spook, was storming toward them, speaking loudly on the phone, distracted, it seemed, by events that—from his tone—were much worse than those he had somehow come to discover out in the wilds of the Maremma.

  Costa felt Rosa’s hand tighten on his arm, as if she were willing him to be ready for something.

  “Get up,” Palombo ordered. “Get up.”

  Falcone was first to his feet. Palombo listened to something on the phone, scowled, then dropped it into his pocket.

  “How did you get here?” he demanded.