“This is Rome. They’ll stick their fingers in their ears and make like they can’t hear a damned thing we’re saying because they think they’re all invincible. They’re part of God’s Army. There’s nothing worse than the grand delusions of True Believers. They either think they’re immortal, or they are quite happy they’re off to a better place. As far as I can tell it doesn’t really matter to them if they’re heading there in a million little pieces.” Neri’s grin was lopsided.
“How long has this trip been planned?”
“No idea. But given the kind of performance a papal visit is, months, six, ten?” Neri shrugged.
Noah tried to think.
How would he approach it in their place?
He covered his entire face with his calloused palm.
“Think, think, think,” he grunted, running his hand up through his hair. He shook his head. From the very first calls nothing about this was how he would have done it. For a start he sure as hell wouldn’t have broadcast he was going after the Pope. That was stupid. You misdirect with smoke and mirrors, you don’t set up that Scooby Doo moment unless you really want to mutter “if it wasn’t for you meddling kids” as they lead you away in handcuffs. So what the hell was really going on here?
Out of Vatican City the papal bodyguards would naturally be on a state of heightened alertness-that much made sense. Anywheretside of the Holy See would have to be considered hostile territory in these conflicted days. So, best case scenario, the Pope had people around him willing, as Neri had so eloquently put it, to take that bullet. His daily routine would be less predictable, making it a more difficult hit. You’d need good information flow, someone on the inside feeding schedules to you with enough time to get there ahead of the entourage; otherwise, you wouldn’t have been able scout out possible vantage points. Noah closed his eyes. As the assassin you wanted to minimize the random elements, control what could be controlled. The kill was about being patient and methodical. Chance had to be removed from any equation.
In Basrah Noah had lain hidden in a blind for five days, pissing into the water bottles he’d drunk dry, defecating into the wraps that had held his rations. Noah had made the shot on the third day and watched them tear the desert apart looking in all the wrong places for him for another day, but it wasn’t until the day after they gave up looking for him that he walked out of the desert. When he tore down the blind he took it all with him. There wasn’t a single sign he had ever been there. He heard three of the Mahdi call him the ghost killer. He liked that. He had it tattooed onto his left arm when he got home-it was the only thing he brought out of Iraq with him.
That was the kind of patience an assassination demanded.
The natural-environment kill was easier. The target was at ease. They followed their habits. Habits were patterns.
So if it had been him, Noah would have wanted to walk the land. Study the set up. He would have wanted to be sure he knew where the target was coming from, exactly, and where it was leaving to. Each terrain had its own issues that needed to be contended with. The last thing you wanted was something as stupid as a stray beam of sunlight reflecting off the wrong pane of glass to make the shot any more difficult than it had to be.
Control the variables.
Every way he looked at it, Rome was the perfect location for an attempt on the Pope’s life.
“I’ve changed my mind,” Noah said, opening his eyes again. Neri looked at him expectantly. “There are just so many things wrong with this scenario. This can’t be about the Pope, not yet. This is about Rome, just like today was about Berlin. It has to be.”
“But the quatrain the suicide called in?” Neri said. “Roman Pontiff beware of your approaching, of the city where two rivers water, your blood you will come to spit in that place, both you and yours when blooms the Rose.” He quoted te piece perfectly. Noah wondered how many times the Roman had read those four lines of prophecy in the last forty-eight hours.
“It’s the smoke and mirrors part,” Noah said, sure he was right. It was the only thing that made sense. He had let himself become distracted with everything else. “Gets us barking up trees, it has to be. You said it yourself, the Pope isn’t here. These guys are meticulous. They have to be to have orchestrated thirteen to-the-minute suicides in thirteen cities, and then duplicate the feat in the U-Bahn today. There’s no way they’d make such a blatantly amateurish mistake as to not know exactly where His Holiness is right down to the bloody minute. Think about it,”-he shook his head, something approaching admiration in his voice-“the message might have been about the Pope, but we keep forgetting that so was the one in Berlin. Those were the long-term threat; the fact that they were different earmarked Berlin and Rome as targets.
Forty days of terror they promised, and at the end of it all of our gods will die-Christian, Muslim, bloody Norse, it doesn’t matter.” Noah grunted. “The clock’s ticking. Tomorrow they will strike against Rome. I don’t know where, I don’t know when, but I am prepared to bet my bloody life on the fact it will be spectacular. And in thirty-eight days they’ll make their move on the Pope. Right now they’re in the blind, waiting,” he said, thinking back to Basrah.
“You paint a bleak picture,” Neri said. “Assuming you are right, what do you want from my people?”
“This is your city. Where would you hit? What would you do? Think about it. Whoever it is, they’re in Rome right now. They will have been here for a while, going over the minutia of their strike, dry runs, timing every twist and turn and exhausting every eventuality, because that’s what these people are like. Someone has seen them. Someone knows who they are. Nothing goes unseen in a city this size. You need people out on the streets, asking the right questions. These people will look Italian. They’ll sound Italian. They’ll have normal lives that they’ve worked for years to secure. They could be married, have kids in good Roman schools. They’re playing a long game.”
Neri screwed up his already battered face, as though understanding for the first time that anyone from the young couple with the tourist guide to the old man with the paper to the waitress with her promising eyes, or the guy in the street wrestling with a hot, overly tired toddler could be their terrorist. You couldn’t tell just by looking at them, you couldn’t read their thoughts. They were just like everyone else, perfectly so, cultivated to be so.
“And with that, I think it’s time for me to go haunt my countryman’s ghost.” Noah pushed back his chair and made to stand. Neri stubbed out the dog-end of his latest cigarette.
“The victim rented a garret in one of the poorer parts of the city proper under the name Nick Simmonds. No doubt you already have the address. You seem very well connected for someone who doesn’t work for your government,” Neri said wryly, “but there’s nothing there. The place was empty when we got there. And not just empty. It had been thoroughly disinfected and every last trace of Nick Simmonds removed. There was absolutely nothing left of a personal nature. Nothing to say he had ever lived there. Not so much as a strand of hair to run against his DNA.”
That gelled with what Konstantin had found in Berlin. That similarity in itself made this garret in the poor quarter worth following up.
“His work?” Noah asked. He knew that Simmonds had been interning with the Vatican archivist, but beyond that it was anyone’s guess.
“I’ve got one of my team trying to make inroads over there,”-he nodded across St. Peter’s Square toward the dome of the basilica-“but between you and me, I suspect Dante was writing about that place when he designed his Purgatory.”
“That good?”
“Trust me,” Neri said, reaching for his tobacco tin yet again. “It’s enough to make a guy like me believe in the Devil.” He nodded to the older man reading his newspaper. The man returned the gesture and folded the broadsheet neatly before paying his bill and leaving the table. Smiling wryly, Neri nodded toward the young couple who, likewise, put away their Rough Guide and settled their bill, leaving a generous tip as th
ey vacated the table.
“They were your people?”
“They were.”
“Trusting soul, aren’t you?” Noah said.
“This is Rome, Noah,” Dominico Neri said with an almost friendly smile. “You can’t trust anybody. Faces of angels, morals of devils.”
10
Some Devil
Konstantin had been on both sides of enough black-bag jobs to know when something was wrong.
He liked that euphemism, black bag. It was just a polite way of saying burglary. The British were peculiar like that, they liked to use words like cut-outs, false flags and honey traps instead of calling a robbery a robbery. It was all terribly 1950s, stiff upper lip and all that.
From the surveillance side the set-up with most of these jobs was simple: you baited the trap, sat back and waited. Something would shake loose. It invariably did. Surveillance was all about patience. You sit, you wait, you see who shows up.
Metzger’s apartment was the baited trap in this case, and he’d just walked right into it.
There was nothing sixth sense-ish about it. No prickling hairs on the nape of his neck. No instinctive mental alarm tripped to warn him. It wasn’t his reptilian brain or anything like that. Konstantin was a practical man on all levels. He had no time for the stuff and nonsense of superstition. That didn’t mean he dismissed well-honed instincts, though. A trained man would recognize things on a subconscious level that a normal man would more than likely miss. That was simply the way of it. It was all about tradecraft. Konstantin Khavin knew he was being followed because he was observant. There was no great mystery to having your eyes open. Konstantin had learned to interpret the signs left by careless people. More than once, being observant had kept him alive.
He had picked up the tail as he left Metzger’s building on Schlossstrasse.
There had been three tells that gave the watchers away, and each of them was surprisingly obvious (and therefore amateurish) given the level of sophistication the U-Bahn attack had demanded. That was something to worry over later. Right now his first concern was learning as much as he could about the people following him-which meant turning the whole thing on its head and following the followers.
The first tell was as thoughtless as an unshielded lens cap in an upper window across the street from Metzger’s place. Whoever was up there in the otherwise darkened room had been taking photographs of everyone coming and going from Metzger’s building. It was a grunt job. Observe and log for further investigation. Someone else would do the foot work, and they’d probably relieve each other on eight- to ten-hour shifts up in the dark room to alleviate the boredom of staring out into the street if nothing else. As the noonday sun hit the camera’s beveled lens it sent a momentary splash of glare across the window. It was just careless. He imagined they had been up in their rented room for days without a break. That was when sloppiness set in.
He would have dismissed it if it hadn’t been for the second tell, the engine of one of the cars across the street gunning as he walked toward the kiosk at the end of the street. The two together were more than mere coincidence.
Konstantin was tempted to go pay the watchers an unexpected visit and bust a few heads. That was his Russian blood. He turned away from the apartment without so much as an upward glance. There would be time enough to return to Schlossstrasse later. A four a.m. visit would satisfy his heritage.
The final giveaway was the guy on the corner who still sat on one of the red benches in front of the sausage kiosk, still eating a bratwurst sprinkled with dried onions. Konstantin had noticed him sitting there, hunched up against the cold, when he had turned onto Schlossstrasse looking for Metzger’s home. In the time it had taken Konstantin to go through Metzger’s apartment the sausage eater hadn’t managed a single bite-probably because he had bought it in the early hours, and now it was cold and greasy and more likely to make him throw up than to sate any real hunger he might have.
The devil was in the details.
He walked up to the window and ordered himself a brat with all of the fixings, then made a show of licking his fingers as he enjoyed it. The sausage was hot and tasted twice as good for it. He washed it down with an apple spritzer. Konstantin nodded to the cold man with the half-eaten sausage and said, “God, I needed that,” before he walked away. He smiled. It was unnecessary-a game-but he liked the idea of letting the man know he’d seen him, twice. Konstantin was interested to see how they would deal with the knowledge that they had been compromised. How they reacted would tell him how good the team he was up against really was.
He stopped on the corner, ostensibly to retie a shoelace. He checked out the street. The sausage eater hadn’t made a move to follow him, which was unsurprising. There was no point in the one face he would recognize tailing him if they had someone else on the street.
The car rolled slowly up to the end of Schlossstrasse and indicated a right turn. He watched it make the turn and drive away. There were two ways the car could play it-it could drop off another watcher once it was around the corner, allowing them to follow him from the front, or it could hope to pick him up again later and assume one nondescript sedan was much like another in this city of nondescript BMWs and Mercedes, Volvos and Saabs.
There was an element of risk in trying to drop back onto his tail that Konstantin himself would never have allowed if he had been running the operation, so he had to assume whoever his opposite number was, the man was every bit as methodical as he was. And that meant they had at least one more man on the street that he had missed.
Konstantin took his time. There was a green pissoir fifty feet further down the road. Berlin’s elaborate city crest was embossed on the swing door. He walked toward it, counting out his footsteps on the paving stones. Each step sounded crisp in the chilly air. Twenty feet away the reek of urine came his way as the wind picked up. It was one of a thousand unpleasant smells in the city. Some cities had a thousand stories, he thought, remembering the old TV show-Berlin had a thousand reeks. Konstantin grunted. He decided to relieve himself.
The pissoir was built in such a way that he could see over the top into the street as he urinated. It was a rather peculiar idea, very German. It did, however, give him a full minute to watch people, see who was moving, who was slowing down, and who the sausage eater was watching-because it wasn’t him. Konstantin tried to follow the direction of the man’s gaze without dribbling on his shoes.
The man seeme looking intently at Grey Metzger’s doorway.
That was when Konstantin saw the woman in the red dress-it looked like some sort of evening wear, beautifully cut around her full curves-walk out into the street. She was coming his way. He zipped up and timed his exit to meet her on the street as he stepped out of the green urinal.
She regarded him openly, her gaze drifting slowly from his head down to his feet and back again. Konstantin inclined his head slightly and gestured for her to pass. She did. She walked slowly. He followed her for six blocks, enjoying the luscious, ripe curve of her ass as the material clung to it. He allowed her to lead him another block before ending the game. She broke away, ostensibly drawn like a magpie to the bright, shiny glitter of jewels in a shop window, while he crossed the street. He didn’t wait for the lights. He had heard a second set of footsteps just out of rhythm with his own as he followed the woman in the red dress.
Just as he would have done in their place, they were leading him front and back. Shepherding him.
So, knowing what was happening, he decided there was nothing else to do than appreciate the view-there was something hypnotic about watching the gentle sway of her hips as she walked. That, Konstantin was sure, was the purpose of the red dress. It was the honey on the trap. As pleasing as the view was, it didn’t take his mind off the fact that he was being led like a lamb to the slaughter. Tailing front and back was professional. It took numbers and discipline and, given that the Berlin cell had already sacrificed at least seven from their ranks with the U-Bahn strike, the fact t
hey had the manpower to spare on Metzger’s apartment was more than a little interesting to the Russian.
It wasn’t some random coincidence. There were no random coincidences in his world.
They had been watching for someone. Why? Well he could make an educated guess: it was down to Sorrow’s Bride. They had had the woman for at least a week, perhaps two, and no matter what she was, what her training had prepared her for, there was one basic truth to espionage Konstantin had brought with him over the wall: everybody talks in the end.
The films and books made it glamorous and painted portraits of the hero with the iron resolve and trembling lip who withstood any amount of pain to hold onto his secrets before eventually breaking free. That was all silver screen bullshit. Given time, everyone broke. Everyone talked.
So they knew who she was, who she worked for. They knew what she knew about them, and they had come to see who came looking for her. Again, it was exactly what he would have done. Konstantin had to admit a grudging amount of admiratn for these people. They were thorough, organized, thoughtful and disciplined. All traits he would have associated with professionals, not some home-grown terror cell based around a core of fanaticism. If he had been a gambling man, he would have put a substantial bet on them being ex-military.
What it came down to was this: Konstantin needed to know more about the woman in the painting. She was the key, but he had no idea to which lock.
He had his suspicions, but they were essentially groundless. This case of mistaken identity was only serving to reinforce them. They were looking for whoever came to claim the information on the thumb drive. Who would have known it was there? Her handler? If she was an agent, it made sense-but then why would an agent from one of the Secret Services have latched on to Grey Metzger? Until yesterday there had been nothing remotely interesting about the man.
While the woman disappeared into the antique jewelers, the second ghost set of steps followed him across the road.
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