Dominus

by Tom Fox

  “We’re not splitting up. I’m not standing to the side and leaving you to handle this alone.”

  Gabriella swung her head toward him. Of all the moments for machismo . . . This wasn’t the time for protests.

  “You’re a reporter, I’m a police officer. You’ll do what I tell you.” She spun her gaze forward. “Stay behind me, out of the line of fire. Close the door.”

  But Alexander moved up, sidestepped her position and stood in front of her. Suddenly his tall frame and athletic build seemed like a wall.

  “Listen, Gabriella, I’m not just being noble. That man wasn’t speaking in the singular. That means there’s at least two of them outside.”

  Gabriella looked annoyed at his interjection but recognized he wasn’t wrong. “What would you have us do instead? Stand here and hope they go away?”

  Alexander shook his head. “I vote we leave.”

  “You know another way out of your third-floor flat?”

  He pointed behind her, toward a wide window that opened out on to the cityscape beyond.

  “As a matter of fact, I do.”

  Thirty seconds later, the window was open and Alexander was standing on the metal fire escape landing outside, lowering the extendable ladder to the second-floor platform below. Gabriella had insisted he pass through the window first so she could keep cover. Only when the ladder clicked into position and Alexander had his foot on the first rung did she saddle herself over the jamb and swing a leg out into the cool air.

  As she did so, the door to the apartment exploded in a spray of wood chips and dust.

  21

  10:28 p.m.

  The door in front of them at first seemed to split apart in violent, thrashing chunks. Then, as Maso held his finger down over the automatic firing trigger, 950 rounds per minute quickly turned the chunks to fragments and the fragments to dust. The door appeared to dissolve, and the deafening report of the MP7 cut out all other sound.

  It took only three seconds. When Umberto motioned for his partner to cease his firing, there simply was no door left to prevent their entry.

  In an instant the two brothers were in motion. Their sidearms were raised to eye level as they partnered their way into the flat, filled with haze and dust from the destruction. The suppressors at the end of their barrels seemed entirely pointless now and they detached them with a quick twist. When plans change, accept the change. The firearms were more accurate without them anyway.

  The flat was a scene of chaos. Splinters of wood still soared through the air and the impact of the bullets had shredded a blue sofa and nearby chair, whose linings and synthetic fluff filling now floated through the room’s interior in a frenetic cloud.

  Umberto was on highest alert. He swung his arms steadily from the center of the room to the right, allowing Maso to take the left half of the flat. His forearms never left their solid pose, the gun sighted directly forward of his eyes. The moment something, anything, came into his line of vision, it would be dead center in his firing line.

  It came less than a second later.

  On the far side of the room, beyond the haze, Umberto caught a flicker of motion. It was tall, nearly six feet—the height of a man. He spun toward it, and at the same time the shape spun toward him.

  His skin prickled. The hunt, running in both directions. He would have to give Alexander Trecchio credit for fighting back, for taking a stand. But Umberto was too well trained, and he was too fast.

  He pulled his finger back on the trigger, the smooth shape of the metal sliding beneath the pad of his fingertip until he felt the familiar click of the pressure threshold giving way. The gun fired. Before the muzzle flash had died, he’d fired again. Twin shots blasted through the room, their loud report crashing from the walls.

  Umberto instinctively crouched aside as his finger came off the trigger, making himself a moving target in case the other man happened to get off a shot in return. But that shot never came. The man simply exploded before Umberto’s gaze.

  Exploded.

  It was so surreal it took his mind a moment to register. The man with the gun aimed at him through the dust and swirling debris fragmented into a thousand pieces, accompanied by the sound of glass shattering as he fluttered out of existence.

  “Fuck!” Umberto cried a second later, his senses grasping what had just taken place. On the far side of the sitting room the shattered fragments of a full-length mirror fell to the floor. He had skillfully assassinated his own reflection.

  “Boss, look here!” Maso’s voice burst through his angry self-reproach. His younger brother had called him “boss” since they’d started working together, a habit he couldn’t break and which Umberto didn’t mind. He looked across the room to the younger man.

  Maso was pointing toward his left. Just beyond the edge of the room, a few steps into a small corridor, the door to a bedroom stood open. On its far wall was a window, open to the night air of the city beyond.

  Alexander had never descended a fire escape in his life, and the absurdly inappropriate thought that raced through his mind as he took the last steps down to ground level was that it was far harder going than it appeared to be in films. The quick escape out of the side of a building always seemed to show people racing downward as if they were taking a set of stairs. The reality was that the escape was an extraordinarily steep series of ladders woven through tightly spaced iron framing, all of which was constricting, difficult to manage and made for slow going. They had started only three flights up, but it seemed like minutes later when Alexander finally landed on solid ground.

  Gabriella was a few feet above him and he held out his arms to help her with the final drop—an act of bravado that felt comical a moment later as she reached back under her jacket and reclaimed her firearm from its holster. Hardly a woman who needs help off a ladder. But he also noticed she hadn’t resisted the hand.

  “Get moving,” Gabriella commanded. She motioned toward the corner of the building, redbrick and sleek, then raised her eyes and her handgun back up the fire escape.

  Alexander followed the motion. On the third landing, a head poked its way out of his bedroom window.

  Alexander froze as he caught the man’s eyes staring down at them. Cold didn’t begin to describe the complete lack of emotion there, and that dispassion was far more terrifying than any expression of rage or hatred could have been. He knew in that instant that this was a man who would extinguish his life without emotion or remorse.

  A moment later, beneath the man’s shoulder and head, an arm emerged from the window.

  “Run, now!” Gabriella commanded. Her voice jolted Alexander into action. He forced his legs to move, glancing back to ensure Gabriella was doing the same.

  Her arm was raised to the man at the window, and Alexander saw her hand clench as she fired the gun. Sparks flew from the metalwork of the fire escape and she darted to the side, aiming high and firing again.

  Alexander rounded the corner as the sounds of more gunshots and impact ricochets filled the air.

  He could only pray they were coming from Gabriella’s weapon.

  22

  10:34 p.m.

  Umberto waited a few seconds after the sound of the last shot had faded before he darted another glance outside. The woman was gone, as he expected, but at least he could now start his descent.

  Inspector Gabriella Fierro was clearly well trained. She’d missed him in the exchange of gunfire, but not with the accidental spread of an amateur. If there hadn’t been the metal grating of the fire escape between them, Umberto would be dead.

  The forces of evil are cunning, he reminded himself as he moved, the quasi-sacred nature of his approach to his work showing through as it so often did. There is skill in the heart of our enemies. It was a lesson he would have to keep in mind.

  In under a minute both assassins were on the street. Their motion never slowed.

  “Go around the other side of the building,” Umberto shouted to Maso. His brother swerved to th
e left as Umberto continued forward, following the path of their soon-to-be victims.

  It was only as the night air, rich and heavy with the diesel fumes that marked out the urban Roman ethos, began to sting the wound that Alexander realized he’d torn the skin of his right hand in descending the fire escape. As he ran, pain shot through his wrist and up his arm—a too-sudden reminder that this situation had just changed dramatically.

  There was no longer any doubt that Crossler’s death and Alexander’s story were connected: that the professor had spotted fraud in the works and had been executed for it. And the men who had killed him were only a few hundred meters behind them.

  Gabriella rounded the corner a few seconds after Alexander, the exchange of gunfire still echoing off the stone and brick buildings. She made up the distance between them in only a few bounds.

  “Do you have a car?” She asked the question through tense breaths and glances darted behind them. She clearly expected the gunman to reappear at any moment.

  “In the garage, under the building.” Alexander sucked in a quick breath, keeping in motion. “The entrance is out front. Back the way we came.”

  Gabriella shook her head. “No good. We’ll go for mine. I parked four streets away.”

  Parking congestion, Alexander thought, glancing over his own shoulder. In the neighborhood it was next to impossible, forcing people to park streets and even blocks away. Tonight, that fact might just be our salvation.

  Gabriella reached out and grabbed Alexander’s arm, pulling him to the right. Then, looking back to ensure the gunman hadn’t emerged from the front corner of the building, she yanked him across the street.

  Umberto stuck close to the side of the apartment block, his left shoulder scraping the brickwork as he pushed forward to the corner. He took a deep breath, counted to three and turned, his gun forward.

  Nothing. He scanned the side street quickly, but darkness merged shape and shadow and made it hard to know what he was seeing. A car. A hedgerow, perhaps. A fire hydrant. He stood perfectly still, waiting for any signs of movement, but nothing hustled its way into his vision.

  Shit, he muttered, moving forward along the street. Had he lost them so quickly? Fierro and Trecchio must be running behind the building, heading for the interior of the residential neighborhood. A smart move: fewer streetlights, a more broken structure of separate buildings.

  But this chase was far from over. Maso would round the building from the other side soon enough and they would pincer the pair between them. They might run for a bit, but they wouldn’t escape.

  Then, out of nowhere, motion.

  Six hundred meters down the road, give or take, two shapes emerged from the left, from behind a blocky shadow in the darkness that must be a parked transit van. They moved swiftly to the right—two people running from one side of the street to the other.

  Umberto had them.

  Without hesitation, he aimed his gun at the two figures and squeezed the trigger.

  The bullets came fast, the pavement exploding beneath Gabriella’s feet. She didn’t bother to look for the source of the gunfire, knowing that in the darkness aim was only an approximation. And despite a powerful urge to return fire, she resisted the impulse. They were in the middle of a residential area. There could be people around. Children.

  “Alex, get in the car!” she shouted.

  “Which one?” he yelled back over another explosive report.

  “Red Fiat. There.” She pointed to her minuscule car, parked three spaces further down the street.

  “A Fiat! Christ, it’ll be as dangerous inside as out!” The sarcastic eruption was an automatic reaction, as another gunshot planted itself inches from Alexander’s feet.

  A second later, the rear light of the car parked in front of Gabriella’s exploded and Alexander’s wit vanished. Gabriella chirped open the lock and they both made for the doors. Alexander was nearest the driver’s seat and he dived in without thinking.

  “Give me the keys!”

  Gabriella’s hand was already extended. As he took the keys and thrust them into the ignition, she turned toward the rear windscreen, extending her arm and her gun in case their attacker came into view.

  Instead, the rear windscreen exploded in an eruption of glass. Gabriella screamed.

  “Drive!”

  23

  Headquarters of Global Capital Italia: 10:37 p.m.

  Within the walls of Caterina Amato’s Global Capital Italia, the news coming in from the outside could not have been more encouraging. Her aims were always power—power and money—and such aims almost always involved managing and manipulating affairs in the world around her. But her present project was more personal, and far grander than any other she’d ever attempted.

  Before she was done, the man at the head of the church that had so scarred her family was going to be obliterated. And the church he ran would have its reputation as scarred as she had been. With all else that Caterina Amato had accomplished in life, it would be one of her greatest achievements.

  And the news flow of the day seemed almost custom-suited to her interests. All her planning, rushed as it had been once the scenario had seemed to set itself, was paying higher early dividends than anticipated.

  “Press attention is flourishing, just as we foresaw,” one of the members of her board of directors said, pleasure brightening his vowels. They’d come together on short notice at a summons from Amato’s secretary, though most had been active in the plot in one way or another since the morning. “The medical events have captured public attention. We managed the timing perfectly.”

  The board meeting was run like any other. Its membership preferred that the veneer of professionalism never be dropped, even if the board of directors was the one entity within Global Capital Italia entirely composed of those involved in the firm’s more secretive interests. This was a group of men—Caterina the only woman in the mix, and firmly at the helm—that fought against any law that stood in the way of their personal wealth, who manipulated markets and destroyed lives without a second thought if it meant their interests would be better served. And fuck it if people think that’s cruel, one board member had stated years ago. It’s life and it’s finance and I don’t have a single goddam problem with it. Survival of the fittest is a law of nature, and it’s just as much a law here. When, years ago, Caterina had for the first time flatly ordered the murder of a man who’d been standing in the way of their work, the board member had merely shrugged. Needs to be done. Do it.

  But despite their intensity, they were men who appreciated corporate civility. There was coffee in a silver thermos pot at a side station in the meeting room. A ring of perfectly polished glasses surrounded a jug of Fiji water at the center of the table. Their embossed dossiers included charts with full-color graphs on high-gloss paper. And their CEO sat at the head of the table in a cream business suit, looking as she always did: the picture-perfect image of professional elegance. Her hair was brushed simply, its mostly auburn locks falling straight to her shoulders with a slight inward curl at the ends; none of her board members had failed to notice that over recent years Caterina had not fought but fostered the advent of streaks of gray that had begun to flow down around her ears. In some people’s minds gray meant age and decrepitude. In the CEO of Global Capital Italia’s it meant wisdom and the power of experience.

  “Is the timing of the medical events generating the results we want?” another board member asked.

  “Do you mean are people piecing A and B together?” The man who’d spoken first was called Regio, and looked as if nothing could dampen his positive spirits. “Of course! How could they not? It’s called playing the advantage, and we’ve done it perfectly. One little event in the Vatican, and we become limitless beneficiaries. Everything we stage after it is endorsed as a miracle. Just as Caterina predicted.”

  “‘Endorsed’ is hardly the right word, Regio.” The man who answered was slick, immaculately groomed and could easily have played the po
ster child for a campaign on beauty in the workplace. His navy-blue, pinstriped suit was fronted by three mother-of-pearl buttons in the old style, the perfectly tailored sleeves coming to an end with plenty of room to accentuate the folded cuffs of the cream shirt beneath, their clamshells clasped with matching cufflinks set in gold. But his words were less glowing. “These people aren’t recommending some product we’re selling. You heal their sick and they’re going to rejoice. These are real people, expressing real emotions.”

  The call toward sincerity sounded duplicitous coming from such a plastic man, but behind his high cheekbones his expression was genuine.

  Two televisions on the walls continued to broadcast the images they’d watched earlier, though the board had muted the sound after fifteen minutes of reports. All the stations were focused on the same thing. Two Italian hospitals, dealing with two very different types of incurable medical conditions—genetic blindness and terminal cancer—had announced unexplained mass healings. The newsreels were non-stop with interviews of tear-laden family members rejoicing in the good news, the testimonies of little blind children who could now see, of medical professionals as baffled as they were delighted. And through it all the word “miracle,” dancing off the tongues of religiously pious and secular alike.

  “Don’t be so damned sentimental,” one of pinstripe’s colleagues answered. The man had just as much personal wealth and corporate experience but didn’t share the interest in fashion or personal decor. He sat in simple trousers and a shirt he’d purchased in 1983. His face was wrinkled like a walnut and bore the marks of long years of experience. “The more real, the more effective,” he continued. “And you’re a fool if you think this isn’t a product,” he waved toward the televisions, then down at their files, “or that this isn’t marketing. An opportunity arises, the right atmosphere is set, and we go in and control that market to get what we want. Guns, news, miracles—what does it matter what we’re offering?”