The Blue Demon

by David Hewson

  “It’s called police work,” the old inspector answered. “How did you—”

  “I ask the questions. Not answer them. How did you find this place?”

  Costa rose and stood next to his inspector. “We were following up on a report that someone had been seen near the tomb of the Blue Demon. It was routine.”

  “Here?” Palombo bellowed. “In Tarquinia? You heard my orders. You’re supposed to be in Rome, dealing with the kind of work you’re fit for. Keeping order. Watching the streets.”

  Teresa Lupo said, “The streets are empty. Didn’t you notice? People don’t dare to go out. If they do, they can’t get home. You’ve closed Rome. There’s nothing for us to do there.”

  Peroni added calmly, “We’ve got a dead officer here, friend. Don’t push it.”

  Palombo glanced at the shape on the earth and said, “I’m sorry. We will deal with him.”

  “He was a colleague of ours,” Rosa said, her voice cracking. “We deal with him.”

  “Not on this occasion,” Palombo snapped. “What else is here? I need to know now. I don’t have much time.”

  “There’s a corpse in the tomb,” Costa said. “Shot. Petrakis had hidden some explosives. Firearms. Munitions. Whether they’re still there …” He held out the phone he’d retrieved from the hall of the Blue Demon. “This was on the dead man.”

  Palombo snatched the handset from his fingers, then ordered two of his men to go down below to take a look, while another group took care of the fallen officer.

  A couple of the figures in black began lifting Mirko Oliva’s body onto a gurney. There was a commotion near the tomb entrance. Two men had brought the body to the surface.

  “I don’t imagine Stefan Kyriakis was his real name,” Costa said quietly.

  “I don’t imagine it’s any of your concern,” Palombo retorted.

  “What is?” Falcone asked without emotion. “If you’d care to shed any further light on what’s happened here …”

  Palombo’s phone was ringing again. He looked at the screen, swore once, then barked into it, “I’ll call when I’m back. We’ll be in Rome within the hour.” A moment of hesitation, listening, then angrily, “No. I don’t know. Do you?”

  The conversation ended. The man from the Ministry of the Interior stared at them, his face haggard and weary in the moonlight.

  “I will say this once and once only, and I shall expect Esposito to remind you of it when you finally crawl back to the city. Your duty lies in Rome. Nowhere else. It’s confined to the streets. To keeping people safe and the traffic moving. And staying out of my way. The death of your agente is unfortunate, but it will remain secret until I deem otherwise.

  The Carabinieri will investigate, not you.”

  “He was a police officer!” Peroni roared.

  “This is the Carabinieri’s case. You will not mention his death to anyone. You will not inform next of kin or any other party until I allow it, and that will not be for another day at the very least, until the summit is over.” He glared at Costa. “You’re lucky you’re not dead too. If you breach my order, I will, I swear, make very certain that you wish you were. I could throw the whole bunch of you into jail for as long as I damn well feel like.”

  “This is not a police state!” Teresa yelled at him. “You can’t just imprison innocent people for no good reason. It’s not—”

  “Listen to me! Earlier this evening, Ciampino was bombed. They flew some kind of aircraft filled with explosives straight onto the landing strip. Two aircraft were destroyed. We think there are fatalities. The president has issued the decree. We’re now in a formal state of emergency. With the anti-terrorist laws I have at my disposal …” His face was grim, yet bore the mark of some satisfaction too. “I can do anything I like.” He glanced at the armed men dealing with the body from the tomb. These people aren’t even looking for evidence, Costa thought. It was as if they already knew what had happened.

  “So what do you expect of us, sir?” Costa asked Palombo.

  “Go back home. Stay inside. Order a pizza. Turn on the TV. If any of you cross my path again, I shall not be so lenient.”

  He watched the second gurney make its way to the nearest helicopter.

  “Good evening,” Palombo told them, and then followed it.

  The machines stirred into life, their rotor blades chopping through the black night air.

  As quickly as they came, Palombo’s team were gone—dark, diminishing shapes against the stars, sweeping south toward Rome.

  Peroni picked up a flashlight and marched back into the tomb. The big cop came back a minute later, red-faced, livid.

  “They didn’t just take the body, Leo. They took everything. The explosives. The weapons. The ammunition. The evidence, for Christ’s sake.”

  “Screw them. I can find things,” Teresa told him. “You can’t clean a crime scene in a couple of minutes. Give me time—”

  “We don’t have time,” Falcone interrupted. “Palombo knows that. If I bring in a unit …”

  The sequence had already run through Costa’s head. They would need to liaise with the local questura. To establish a forensic team. To involve so many people—it would be impossible to keep the case quiet. Palombo knew exactly what he was doing.

  “This has been a long night,” Falcone said. “Palombo may be right. We could put you two in a hotel somewhere nearby. Back in Porto Ercole, perhaps. You could stay out of this.”

  “I want to go back to Rome,” Rosa said.

  Falcone sighed. He murmured, “Nic?”

  “Someone can fetch a change of clothes to the apartment. Silvio can take a look at this,” he added.

  He pulled the little object from his pocket. He’d managed to extract it while they were on the ground, waiting, wondering what the helicopters might bring.

  They looked at the piece of plastic in his hands.

  “It’s the SIM from the phone I found in the tomb,” Costa told them. “I don’t think Palombo needs it. Does he?”

  40

  THEY LEFT DENIZ NESIN IN THE FIELD WHERE PETRAKIS had shot him. This was the last day. She understood that now. By fleeing Tarquinia, they had broken some part of a plan she’d never suspected. A scheme that entailed the steady diminution of the team. First Danny, the strange kid who baffled her with his bad English, Russian, and Pashto. Then Joseph Priest, slaughtered in the street after the outrage at the Trevi Fountain, for which he was not truly responsible.

  Now the Turk. When her turn came, she wondered, did Petrakis really think he could attempt the final part of the job—the hardest, penetrating directly into the Quirinale itself—all on his own? This seemed impossible. She was, she thought, meant to die, just as he was, in all probability. But their deaths would be at the end, as part of achieving what they came for.

  They took the car Deniz had rented at a deserted Hertz depot on the outskirts of Fiumicino and drove up a narrow lane until they joined the main road running directly past the airport, almost parallel with the single runway. It was impossible to get nearer. The police had blocked the highway. Flames still engulfed the horizon. Fire engines and ambulances fought one another to get through the crush of vehicles. Crowds of bystanders and newspaper photographers were out of their cars, on foot, trying to get closer to the scene.

  Petrakis turned the car around, retraced their tracks down the little lane to the Appian Way, and pulled into a farm entrance. There he took out his phone, the fancy one Deniz had given him, and called up the RAI mobile news service. There was video footage of a plane in flames. She moved closer to him from the passenger seat, trying to see. On the aircraft’s tail, burned almost beyond recognition, was the Stars and Stripes, and beneath it a number. The charred outline had the bulbous nose of a 747.

  “Air Force One?” Anna Ybarra asked.

  Petrakis grinned like a schoolkid. The phone said three aircraft ground staff were already confirmed dead. Another five were missing. All Italian. The crew of the plane, and everyone
else in the American party, were in the city when the bomb struck.

  “The little people have died,” she murmured. “Again.”

  Petrakis snapped the phone shut and glared at her. She remembered the way he’d killed Deniz Nesin, and didn’t say anything else.

  He turned around, took another lane behind the Via Appia Antica. Somewhere along the way, he pulled off onto a narrow track. She noticed it wasn’t far from a church with a name that rang a bell. Quo Vadis?

  Some distant memory rose in her head. It was Latin: Where are you going? She remembered the connection too. Saint Peter fleeing Rome, in fear of crucifixion, only to find a ghostly Jesus waiting for him on the road south, asking this very question. Where?

  The track ended. There was a trailer stranded in a field. It was old, small, the kind of thing a tramp might inhabit.

  Petrakis parked the car by the side, got out, and unlocked the heavy padlock chain on the door. She followed him inside. There was an electric light system. When the dim bulbs came on, she saw that the place was as tidy as an office. A single bed in the corner. A desk with a computer. A small gas stove, a refrigerator. Petrakis reached inside and immediately found a bottle of champagne there.

  She looked at the label: Krug, 1995. From the expression on his face she guessed she was supposed to feel impressed.

  “I thought we might need something to drink if we wound up here,” he said, nothing more.

  Anna Ybarra glanced at the desk. There was a set of passports there, shuffled like a pack of cards. So many: British, American, European, South African, Australian.

  She flicked through them and saw mug shots of herself and Petrakis, pictures taken in Afghanistan. No one else. Not Joseph Priest or Deniz Nesin anywhere.

  Three of the passports were sets, made for a couple who would pose as man and wife.

  “I have a name already,” Anna Ybarra told him.

  “A good general plans for all eventualities,” Petrakis said, watching her. He’d poured the champagne into two cheap glass beakers. The drink was the color of straw. She let him hand her a glass and took a sip. Vintage champagne didn’t taste like anything she’d ever tried before. It made her throat feel a little numb, made her head spin for a moment.

  She took one more sip and put the glass down.

  “The passports …” she murmured. “My photo. Anyone would think I get out of this alive, Andrea.”

  He toasted her with the champagne. “Is there any reason you shouldn’t?”

  “Three I can think of so far.”

  “They were drones. There’s something different about you.” He took a long draft of the drink and briefly closed his eyes. “You don’t care, do you?”

  “Not much.”

  “That makes two of us.”

  “Where would we go? Afterwards?”

  He shrugged. “Where would you like?”

  “Somewhere there’s not many people. A desert island. Antarctica.”

  “I’ll book the tickets.”

  He took one step forward and chinked his glass against hers.

  Petrakis placed his hand against her jacket and began to unfasten the buttons. Then he bent down, pulled her into him with his arm, placed his face in the nape of her neck, kissed her neck with an amateurish roughness.

  She put the passports back on the table.

  Anna Ybarra couldn’t get their faces out of her mind. Joseph, the stupid Kenyan, thinking he was working his way to a different kind of life. Deniz, miserable, coldhearted Deniz, who had no love for anything.

  And the man-child Danny, which was not his real name and never had been. She’d heard him chattering in his sleep, frightened murmurings, the product of nightmares she could only guess at. In those extreme moments he used one language and one alone: It sounded like Russian, and it had the plaintive, pleading tone of a captive.

  Petrakis was working at her clothes with awkward, fumbling fingers. She let him. She’d allow him anything at that moment, however much it revolted her. Anna Ybarra knew she was lucky to be alive, and somehow, for the first time in ages, this seemed to matter.

  41

  IT WAS PAST THREE IN THE MORNING BY THE TIME THEY got on the road: Falcone at the wheel, Peroni in the front seat, Costa squeezed in the back between Teresa and Rosa, both of whom began to doze as the car worked its way back to the highway on the coast.

  He couldn’t sleep. He couldn’t stop thinking. About how Mirko Oliva died and they survived. And the way the black helicopters of Luca Palombo had descended from the night sky unbidden, only to disappear just as quickly once the Ministry of the Interior spook had found what he was looking for.

  As they drove from Tarquinia toward the coast and the glittering sea beyond, Costa pulled Teresa’s phone out of her bag and called the Quirinale Palace, asking to be put through to the duty Corazzieri captain.

  “Nic …” Falcone began to say testily from the front.

  It was too late. The palace switchboard sounded alert and a little frightened. He had to talk his way past three people before Fabio Ranieri answered, sounding tired and close to the end of his tether.

  “It’s Costa. I can’t talk to you the usual way. Sorry.”

  Ranieri went quiet for a moment, then asked, “What was I doing twenty years ago?”

  “Working for military liaison with NATO in Brussels. And looking for somewhere decent to eat.”

  “Let me call you back on another line.”

  The phone rang again almost immediately.

  “This time I do need to speak to him,” Costa insisted.

  “Do you have any idea what happened tonight?”

  “Some. That’s why.”

  There was a moment’s silence, another attempt at prevarication, which Costa avoided. Then he heard a familiar voice and a face rose in his memory: the long, extended features of the Bloodhound, a friendly, inquisitive countenance that seemed to have been ever-present in his childhood.

  “This is not the best of times, Sovrintendente,” Sordi said in a tone of mild irritation.

  Costa kept the narrative short and to the point, and found he was able to imagine the shock and outrage on Sordi’s sad, pale face as he spoke. He left out nothing that had happened at the site of the tomb of the Blue Demon. Not Mirko Oliva’s sudden end or Luca Palombo’s threats.

  When he was done, there was silence. Then Dario Sordi said, with a sigh, “I blame myself. I should never have asked you to undertake this task. You must stop immediately. Let me call Esposito. It’s … busy here, as you may imagine.”

  “We can’t stop,” Costa interrupted.

  There was a pause. Sordi was unaccustomed to being refused something.

  “Why not?”

  “Because we lost someone.”

  “I’m deeply sorry about that, Nic. I don’t want any more casualties on my conscience.”

  Costa sat up straight and was aware of the charged atmosphere in Falcone’s Lancia. “It doesn’t work like that, Dario. You can’t turn these things off and on when you feel like it. You can’t …”

  “I am the president of Italy!”

  “You’re one more individual under the law. No different from any of us. You gave us this job. We haven’t finished it, and we’ve more reason than ever to do that now. This is where we are, where you sent us.”

  “No!”

  He was aware that the car had stopped. Falcone had pulled into a turnout on the highway. They were all staring at him.

  “What?” Costa asked, looking at the four faces peering in his direction.

  “Do we get a say?” Peroni demanded.

  “Do you need one?”

  “Not really,” the big man answered. “But it would be nice to be asked.”

  Falcone held out his hand for the phone. Sordi’s voice was coming out of it, a tinny, angry shriek. The inspector waited and then introduced himself, listened for a moment, and said, “Mr. President, you heard the sovrintendente. We have a dead colleague, and Luca Palombo thinks it’s none
of our business. He is wrong. If you agree with him, you are wrong too. Now, kindly answer my colleague’s questions.”

  He handed the phone back.

  Sordi let loose an old and uncommon epithet, then bellowed, “Who the hell do you people think you are?”

  “We’re the police,” Costa responded. “We ask the questions you want answered, but are too polite to ask. We go to the places you want to know about, but dare not enter. You started this, Dario. Don’t think you can call it off now. You can’t.”

  “Jesus! You are your father’s son. What was I thinking?”

  “I was under the impression you were trying to find out the truth.”

  “I was, Nic. I am. But not at any cost …” Costa listened to Sordi’s long intake of breath. It was slow, a little wheezy, the sound of an old man. “Tomorrow morning—this morning—is the principal meeting of the summit. I have the most important men and women in the world under my roof. Sucking up to Ugo Campagnolo because they know he’s the man with the real power, and I’m just some old has-been with the keys to the front door. Good God.” A note of self-contempt entered his voice. “What am I talking about? This is to do with Rome. She’s like a ruin in the wilderness. Full of frightened people, wondering what they did to deserve any of this. And somewhere …” Another long sigh. “Petrakis and his people are still out there, planning. Do you have any idea where they are? What they really want?”

  “No.”

  “Can you find out?”

  “We can try. If you can stop Palombo getting in the way. Why do you think I called?”

  “Palombo is Campagnolo’s man, not mine. Now that we have a state of emergency …” There was desperation in his tired tones, something Costa had never heard before. “I’m head of the armed forces. But there are limits. You have to understand. In times like these the power lies with those in the field. Even a commander has little control over individual events, hour by hour. Luca Palombo is much more the master of Italy than I am at this moment, and through him Ugo Campagnolo.”

  “Do what you can,” Costa suggested.