The Blue Demon

by David Hewson

  Sordi looked down. The livid spot, some sighting aid from a twenty-first-century weapon hidden away on a distant rooftop, had ranged across the grass to climb his arm. It began moving steadily toward his head.

  Ranieri yelled something. Sordi found himself surrounded by a pushing, arguing phalanx of bodies, men dragging him to the ground, trying to cover his frame with theirs. He glimpsed Costa’s anxious face. Then Ranieri’s. A shot rang out. A man’s pained shriek rent the air. Then another.

  “My God …” Sordi cried, and found himself swamped again by the crush around him. Still afraid?

  It was an old dead voice. German. Clearly audible in the crush of struggling men around.

  There was a time to stand up, he thought. A time to face the Devil.

  Sordi pushed and yelled and screamed and fought his way against their good intentions. Finally, his fury and what little strength he possessed had some effect. He scrambled to his feet to see three silver-clad corazzieri bent over the motionless frame of Fabio Ranieri. One man straightened. There were tears in his eyes.

  Sordi tore himself away from the broken form of the Corazzieri captain and turned to look at the bright blue sky and the buildings around them.

  “Bastards!” he screamed. “Do you think I fear you now?” He pounded his chest with his fist, looking for something, anything, seeing only the skyline of Rome, its ancient buildings and church towers, a horizon imprinted on his memory since he was a child. “Do you really think that after all these long, bloody years …?”

  “Dario.” Costa stood beside him. “You must—”

  The red dot returned and ran up the young police officer’s sleeve. Sordi elbowed him out of the way and let the deadly bead fall on him, bellowing, “Take me. Take me if you dare!”

  He waited. Nothing.

  Then a low, worried sound came from the officers still crouched by the unmoving Ranieri. Sordi followed the direction of their gaze. The sighting point had moved on; it was now traveling along Ugo Campagnolo’s right arm. The prime minister saw it too, shrieked and stupidly tried to rub it off with his hand. The scarlet mark rose to his brown, stocky neck, higher to his cheek, then stopped above his right eye.

  Campagnolo howled with fear, clutched at his face with his hands. The single sniper shot, one that caught him straight in the head, threw him backwards.

  Sordi turned to one side and looked at this cherished oasis of green in the heart of an overcrowded, overburdened city. The still Roman evening was broken by the urgent, hurt cries of the men around him.

  Il Torrino began to toll the half hour. On the third stroke, the sonorous tones of its chimes were drowned out by another noise, a deep baritone bellowing like the roar of some subterranean monster shaking itself awake. They all turned toward the building, staring. A black and yellow storm cloud was beginning to tear through the palace behind them, right to left, a rolling ball of thunder that picked up debris, stone and fabric and canvas in its maw, and burst out of the porticoed arcade like a fiery tsunami shrieking as it traveled, tearing down columns, turning this side of the palace—a view Dario Sordi had come to love—to rubble and chaos.

  The final resonant chimes of the campanile were faintly audible as the noise of the blast abated. They were replaced by the harsh mechanical chatter of a million alarm bells strewn somewhere inside the shattered Quirinale. Sordi watched the flames start to recede and the garden edge of the building begin to crumble and collapse into a tumult of disorder. The corazzieri left the broken, shattered body of their leader and began to stumble mindlessly toward the place they were sworn to protect.

  Duty followed a good man forever, from the first dawn of consciousness all the way to the grave.

  Sordi watched the palace of the popes disintegrate before his eyes. This is what they wanted all along, he thought. Not blood, not vengeance, but anarchy over order, the sharp, bright fury of the moment victorious over the slow, pained progress he knew as civilization. It was the lesson Andrea Petrakis had learned from the Etruscans, and perhaps the man had a point.

  The Blue Demon was everywhere and nowhere, eternal, invisible, waiting for its time to come.

  PART SEVEN

  The Way South

  70

  COSTA WAS WOKEN BY THE SMELL OF TOBACCO SMOKE drifting into the bedroom from the patio outside. The acrid aroma mingled with the fragrance of jasmine blossom clinging to the wall of his country home off the Via Appia Antica.

  A familiar stench. Black Russian. He got up, dressed slowly, thinking.

  It was six days since the bloody events at the Quirinale. Normality, of a kind, had returned. An interim government was in power, awaiting elections that Ugo Campagnolo’s heirs, shadowy men of dubious provenance, were expected to win by a landslide. The prime minister had been accorded a state funeral, which Dario Sordi, looking frail for the first time, attended in silence. Afterwards the president had gone to the private ceremony for Fabio Ranieri, one that had attracted no publicity whatsoever, at the insistence of the dead Corazzieri captain’s family.

  No one in Italy quite believed they had heard the full story. No one expected to. The Spanish woman, Anna Ybarra, remained in police custody, charged with attempted murder and numerous terrorist offenses, seemingly unable to shed any useful light on the men who had brought her to Italy. An attempt by the divided opposition to force an investigation into the affair had failed. After that, Dario Sordi had retired behind the shutters of the Quirinale Palace, refusing to appear in public. The natural Italian penchant for cynicism toward politicians had come into play too, filling the Web and the scurrilous tabloids with rumors and allegations. The identity of the final sniper remained a mystery. Only his location was known, through the discovery of a set of shell cases in the campanile of Il Torrino.

  The previous afternoon Costa had passed the old, crumbling statue of Pasquino near the Piazza Navona and found the base plastered in fresh posters bearing a flurry of allegations about the political classes—a few about Sordi himself. There was a febrile mood in the air, along with a sense of guilty gratitude. Whatever had happened behind the ring of steel surrounding the Quirinale Palace, the crisis had passed. The status quo—awkward, imperfect, fragile—had returned. In a sense, the Blue Demon had won. No one questioned the present state of the nation. The average Roman lacked the energy, and saw no point in attempting to summon up the necessary courage.

  Costa had read the scabrous messages on Pasquino on his way back from the Questura after some nameless official from the Ministry served suspension notices on all those who’d worked in the apartment in San Giovanni in Laterano, even Teresa and her hapless assistant Di Capua. Commissario Esposito was hanging on to his job by the skin of his teeth somehow. It was unclear what would happen next. An investigation would have proved too embarrassing for the Ministry. Some swift judgment—a loss of pay, demotion, perhaps, even ejection from the force—would be handed down to the police officers involved, probably in a matter of days.

  This no longer concerned Nic. After they handed out the suspension notices, he had turned down Falcone’s offer of a consolation lunch with the others, walked into a stationer’s shop, bought a few sheets of notepaper and envelopes, then sat in the belly of the Pantheon, listening to the echoing voices of the visitors, entranced as always by the light falling through the oculus, the eye in the center of the dome, which dispatched a shaft of bright sun directly into what was once the hall of a pagan temple built by the emperor Hadrian. This was a building with memories for him, of a time when he’d felt some kind of hope and ambition, for himself and the world. A period of love too, something that had slipped between his fingers like dust almost as swiftly as it had arrived, unbidden, almost unwanted.

  Beneath the great span of Hadrian’s sanctuary, he penned his resignation from the police force. It was a brief, unapologetic, practical note, which he delivered by hand to Prinzivalli, the desk officer on duty at the Questura, one hour later, asking that he pass it on to whoever was in charge at that
moment.

  He had no plans. Some part of him that had been slumbering for a decade or more whispered reminders of a dream he’d almost forgotten: taking a bicycle onto the ancient cobbles of the Appian Way, the old Roman road at the foot of his drive, which ran all the way from the capital to Brindisi in Apulia, moving from modern Italy into the lost past of fable. He’d never allowed himself that kind of freedom. There had always been cares and duties that got in the way as he slipped from a quiet, introverted childhood into the sudden demands of a family falling apart beneath the weight of controversy, illness, and death.

  Costa made two cups of coffee and poured a couple of glasses of orange juice, then went outside. Elizabeth Murray was basking in the hot morning sun. She wore sunglasses, a blue checked cotton shirt, and a baggy pair of jeans. The cigarette went out the moment he appeared, ditched beneath the wooden table that had been used for outdoor meals for as long as he could remember. He saw, now, that the oak of the table was rotten, and perhaps had been for some time, without his noticing.

  There was a black briefcase on the surface and a cell phone.

  Elizabeth grabbed at her cup, took a swig, closed her eyes, and remarked, “You know, there’s nowhere else in the world where coffee tastes like this. Rome. It must be the water.”

  “Why didn’t you tell us?” he asked. “That you knew what Petrakis’s message meant?”

  She opened her eyes and squinted at the horizon: the ruins of tombs, the roofs of the nearby mansions, a fringe of trees waving in the soft morning breeze.

  “What would you have done?” she asked.

  “We could have talked to Ranieri.”

  “You would never have got through. So who else? Palombo? Dario himself? You should read history more. These things don’t happen by accident. They’re conspired at. Plotted. Planned. They knew exactly what they were doing from the moment Andrea Petrakis left Afghanistan. Dario was isolated as soon as the G8 parties left for the Vatican. I know. I tried to call him myself. It was never going to work.”

  She shrugged and a brief, self-deprecating smile creased her face. “So I did what you can’t. I took matters into my own hands.”

  “You might have failed.”

  “I might,” she agreed placidly. “I didn’t feel I had much of an option. It was obvious they’d try to attack Dario while he was in the garden. I know his little tea ceremony well. Where do you think the old boy gets those English biscuits he loves so much?” She frowned. “I was sure Petrakis would try to do the job himself. He had a theatrical streak to his nature, in case you didn’t notice. I reasoned that in those circumstances I could take him out. I would have too. I wasn’t trying to wound the bastard. I wanted him dead. So did Ugo Campagnolo, of course, though for entirely different reasons.”

  “Petrakis wasn’t alone.”

  “No. I’m old. Out of practice. Twenty years ago I might have seen the rifle poking out of Il Torrino. Not now. Sorry!”

  “Peroni could have shot you.”

  A look of puzzlement crossed her face. “Is life meant to be led without risk? I didn’t know that. Never occurred to me. How boring.”

  She patted the briefcase. “Before I open up this thing, do you want to tell me what you think happened? Then we can compare notes.”

  “I don’t know,” Costa said emphatically. “And the truth is, I don’t care anymore.”

  The answer surprised her.

  Elizabeth Murray gazed at him and there was something in her friendly, mannish face he couldn’t interpret. Sympathy? Reluctance? Some slow, subtle anger?

  “But you do care, Nic,” she told him quietly. “I’m going to make sure of that, I’m afraid.”

  She snapped open the case, reached inside, and lifted out some kind of report. The paper was yellowed with age, the words clearly typed, not printed from a modern machine.

  “This is the submission your father produced for the Blue Demon commission. Twenty years ago, I suppressed it, with the backing of Dario Sordi, before any other member could see it. Or so we thought.”

  “No, Elizabeth. You can’t do this. I won’t become involved.…”

  “Nic!” She looked furious, and for the first time since they met he realized he could imagine her in the security services, an active participant in some live operation; could see her as Peroni had described, spread-eagled like a professional on the rooftop overlooking the Quirinale gardens. “May I ask you a personal question?”

  “Can I stop you?”

  “No.” She watched him intently. “Tell me. Your parents died of the selfsame cancer eleven years apart. An identical disease. Did that never strike you as a very unfortunate and unusual coincidence? Are you perpetually incurious? Or simply downright naïve?”

  The bright morning seemed to pall, the vivid country colors leaching out of the fields and flowers and vines around them. He couldn’t hear the birds singing. It was impossible to think.

  “What did you say?” he murmured, shaking his head.

  “I’m going for a smoke. In what passes for your vineyard.” She threw the report at him. “Read this. Then we’ll talk.”

  71

  THERE WAS A VOICE INSIDE THE WORDS ON THE FADING pages, and it was that of his father: precise, impatient, penetrating, and angry. The submission ran to ten pages and described the relationship between Ugo Campagnolo, the Gladio team led by Renzo Frasca, Gregor Petrakis (the father of Andrea), the network’s placeman, and the three principal crime organizations in Italy: the Sicilian Cosa Nostra, the Camorra of Naples, and the ’Ndrangheta of Calabria.

  Costa read the accusations his own father had put down on paper two decades before.

  The charge was simple: Gregor Petrakis and Ugo Campagnolo met through the covert Gladio organization, initially set up to provide a network of undercover agents in the event of a Soviet takeover of Italy. The Blue Demon was one of several fake terror groups envisaged by the two men as a way of meeting Gladio’s demand for a “strategy of tension.” But the pair soon discovered a mutual taste for illicit income. At the time, Campagnolo’s legitimate businesses were beginning to fail. He and Petrakis quietly made themselves small fortunes through the supply of hard drugs—not just in Tarquinia, but in Rome and Florence too—by using the Greek’s links with Afghan sources to channel heroin and marijuana directly to customers outside the usual networks controlled by the mobs.

  Over time, Campagnolo came to understand the risk he was running by undercutting the gangs. His solution was to persuade the three normally independent crime organizations to pool their resources, to take over the Blue Demon’s drug network and use him and its resources as a conduit into the world of politics. Slowly, Campagnolo subverted the political ambitions of his NATO handlers and shifted his allegiance to the mobs in return for their support. The Blue Demon became a conspiracy, a consortium dedicated to a covert attempt to fund, shape, and control the political future of the nation, infiltrating its institutions, creating parties and groupings that would quietly work in the interests of organized crime.

  Petrakis and his wife, idealists at heart, died when they realized what was happening and threatened to inform their original paymasters, the Americans and the British running the Gladio operation. Campagnolo’s response was to inform the consortium that Petrakis was still involved in direct drug trafficking on behalf of the Afghan gangs, against their express orders.

  When the couple were murdered, Renzo Frasca, the U.S. handler for the couple’s work with Gladio, was panicked into inventing a solution that would prevent discovery of the network. Petrakis’s original plan for the Blue Demon as a terror group became the answer, and his son—a minor participant in his parents’ schemes—was talked into fronting the imaginary cell as a way of getting him out of the country safely and saving what reputation his parents had. The deaths of Frasca and his wife were faked. Those of three students whose only interest had been drugs, and of a hapless carabiniere, were all too real, props to lend the story a terrible credence.

&nb
sp; And Ugo Campagnolo escaped, to rise and prosper through the world of Italian politics, the front man for the conglomerate of crime interests that took on the name that the late Gregor Petrakis had given his fledgling terror group: the Blue Demon.

  Costa finished the report. His head was spinning. There was nothing there but supposition and hearsay. Not a single statement from a named witness or a piece of paper that could link Campagnolo’s companies to the Petrakises’ illicit operations.

  Yet it was true, and he knew it. His father had been a careful, fair-minded man. He would never have put down on paper suspicions that were mere gossip and rumor.

  These events had begun in Nic Costa’s childhood. Much of them passed him by. There were reasons: The headlines the Blue Demon generated in the media had come to an end once Andrea Petrakis disappeared. More personal grounds too. Not long afterwards his mother had become sick, falling into the debilitating illness that would take her life, slowly, day by day, as the rest of them watched, distraught and utterly impotent.

  The words Elizabeth Murray had uttered brought back a thought that had dogged him for years: Why should they have been so unlucky? What savage quirk of fate meant that both his father and mother should fall victim to the same disease?

  He was lost in his own memories. Only the smell of smoke told him, in the end, that she’d returned to sit at the old table again, where his family used to eat together, laughing mostly, even in the dark days.

  72

  “WHY DID YOU BURY THIS?” COSTA ASKED HER.

  “For his own good. Ugo Campagnolo was a member of the commission. Your father would have been serving his own death warrant had we allowed that report to be presented.”

  “You could have done something.”

  “Listen to yourself. You’re a cop. How many bent politicians do you have in Italy? How many have seen the inside of a jail cell these last thirty years? Besides, they’d covered their tracks so well. There was nothing we could do. It was impossible.… So we tried to keep Marco safe, in spite of himself. We had to make sure Campagnolo’s people never knew any of this report existed. It was too dangerous. For your father.” Her bright, serious eyes never left him. “For his family.”