The Sacred Cut

by David Hewson

  Costa thought of Emily Deacon drawing the pattern, so easily, so naturally, in the American embassy the previous day. “And the shape?”

  “I’m sorry. But if you want something concrete, look at this.”

  She reached round into the depths of the boot and came back with a hank of bloodstained material encased inside an evidence bag like a dead insect.

  “It’s the cord,” she told them. “He’d removed it from the neck this time. It was in one of the suitcases. This is the same material that he used on the woman in the Pantheon. Not a scintilla of doubt.”

  Costa didn’t know what to make of the thing. “But it’s not a cord.”

  Teresa frowned. “Leo didn’t tell you, huh? I guess he’s had other things on his mind. No, it isn’t a cord. It’s a piece of very tough fabric cut in that exact same shape we all know so well, then wrapped tightly to make a cord. At first I thought he must have done it himself, though it would have taken a hell of a long time. Still, he’s a gentleman with an obsession, no?”

  Peroni was getting interested. “But?”

  She handed the bag to Costa, then picked up her briefcase and shuffled through the mess of papers in it until she found what she wanted.

  “Silvio had this report waiting for me from forensic when I got here. Fastest piece of work those people have ever done.”

  Costa took the single page. Peroni joined him and read it simultaneously.

  “Has Falcone seen this?” Nic asked.

  “Oh yes,” Teresa continued. “I didn’t dare hold back on that one, not that he seems to know what to do with it right now. Your American friend over there doesn’t have a clue, though. Or an inkling that I still have the original cord from that poor cow in the Pantheon. In fact, from what I’ve heard of his bullshit already, if you were to talk to him you would find he doesn’t think this is part of the same game at all. Not directly, anyway. He’s got a theory.”

  Peroni blinked, bewildered. “A theory?”

  “Oh yes,” Teresa added. “And guess what? It’s one that lays all the crap at our door.”

  “ ”Our door‘?“ Costa repeated.

  “You bet,” she said with a smile. “Now would you boys like to borrow that report for a little while? Maybe you can give Leo some ideas.”

  “Yes,” Gianni Peroni replied, and began walking towards Leo Falcone and Joel Leapman with a look of pure fury on his face.

  THERE WAS TOO LITTLE TIME and too much information. It was like being lost in a forest of unreadable signs and signals. She’d typed in the name Nic had mentioned, “Henry Anderton,” and got a brief uninformative report on the attack that had triggered the alert over security for American visitors. It seemed routine, unconnected to the present case. The dead man was simply an academic who’d been the victim of unprovoked street violence in a small square in the ghetto, the Piazza Mattei. The name rang a bell. It had a tortoise fountain in the centre. Her father had shown it to her a couple of times, taken her picture standing beside it on one of their many walks around Rome. However, nothing connected that assault with the current investigation. The victim had been badly beaten. According to the records, he’d been flown back to America by his health insurer and hospitalized in Boston. A short search on the Internet proved that Costa’s suspicions were unfounded. Henry Anderton was a famous professor, now retired. There was only one item of minor interest in what she could glean of his background from the Net. One academic paper he’d published, on the structure and funding of Islamic terrorist groups, acknowledged the assistance of several FBI officers in the provision of advice and information. It was a tenuous link, but hardly earth-shattering.

  Then she tried “Bill Kaspar” and got nothing, not a damn thing, which was surely odd. Grateful as she was for Fielding’s covert help, she understood it had its limitations. Fielding hadn’t taken her into the very heart of the FBI’s internal network, its mother lode of precious intelligence, brought up to date each minute of every day, collated from around the world by systems that never went anywhere close to a piece of public cable. She guessed he’d set some parameters himself, a cutoff date of some fifteen years earlier, judging by the dates on the material her searches found. Other parameters had been set for him. There was another raft of security clearances still above her that brought down the shutters the moment she went near them. That made sense. Fielding was senior, but he was only an embassy official working in the field. There were many doors he couldn’t open.

  Yet there was a mine of precious intelligence here, if only she could find the right way to track down what she wanted. That required hitting the correct keywords—the terms that would take her straight to the relevant material. Without them, it was impossible to hope to read more than a fraction of what lay on the network. Instead, she had to prioritize. And if she did find anything, there was the problem, too, of what to do with it. Ordinarily she could have marked the documents she wanted and set them up as a set of reference points for future retrieval. Ordinarily, however, she wouldn’t be using a phoney identity to hack the Bureau’s database in a way that doubtless broke the terms of her contract and probably put her in jeopardy of criminal action to boot.

  It was impossible to print a thing without leaving a record. She couldn’t e-mail material out of the system either. There were bars in place to prevent that. She couldn’t even cut and paste items into another document and get them out that way, or, because the hardware prevented it, copy a thing to a floppy or pen drive. It was simply too dangerous to take notes, written or dictated. All she could hope to do was track down some key documents and, as best she could, memorize as much of the broad content as possible. Or… take a bigger risk.

  “Find something first,” she reminded herself, and typed another phrase.

  Babylon Sisters.

  Thornton had surely given her the password for a reason. The words meant something too. It was another memory from her childhood, more voices from the airy, bright apartment on the Aventine hill. Of some old rock number getting played over and over again by a band her father and his friends all adored.

  The band was Steely Dan. “Babylon Sisters” was the long, jazzy number he loved so much that someone—but who?—had called him “Steely Dan Deacon” once and it stuck.

  With good reason too. It wasn’t just that, back in Rome before the sourness and the divorce consumed him, Dan Deacon loved that kind of music: cool, jazz-tinged rock, stuff Emily could never quite pin down, with weird, only half-comprehensible lyrics. It was because he was a tough guy too. The last few years he’d been alive he was so damn tough she scarcely dared go near him.

  She glanced at her watch—just fifteen minutes left on the system and nothing to show so far—and cursed herself, racked her brain for more of the numbers he and his buddies loved, listening to them over and over on the Bose hi-fi in the living room. They still sat in her head, dim stains on her consciousness from a time when music, for her, meant weekly piano lessons struggling with Hindemith under the sour gaze of a stuck-up old woman smelling of lavender in an apartment in the neighbouring block.

  Such a contrast to the rolling, unpredictable keyboards, stabs of lyrical guitar and the weird, weird lyrics her dad loved.

  “Babylon Sisters” most of all, with the throwaway line that came straight after the title, sung so rapidly you had to strain to catch the phrase.

  Shake it.

  She could picture her dad—Steely Dan Deacon—just a touch drunk with a couple of guys from work, singing along to the track, dancing, half swaying the way men did in that condition, yelling those words out loud.

  “You are so goddamn awful at this job, Emily Deacon,” she whispered to herself. “Any moment now Joel Leapman is going to walk in, see what you’re doing and put you on the first plane home.”

  And then she would never find out what had happened, never get to the bottom of the sacred cut.

  The network had one of those freeform text-searching systems, a kind of internal SuperGoogle reserved fo
r spooks. You could throw any number of different terms at it—“purple Transylvanian banana fetish igloo”—and it would trawl all the zillions of words it kept in its maw, try and put two and two together to make four, then shoot a few answers straight back at you within seconds.

  It was clever for a machine, which meant it had the combined IQ of a million worker ants if you were lucky enough to hit the right buttons.

  She typed in “Bill Kaspar Dan Deacon Iraq.”

  The same old stuff as before shot up on the screen—page upon page of documents, no particular order, no particular sense. Days of work. Weeks maybe.

  She looked at her watch again. The minutes were flying by now. Soon the shutters would come down for good. Thornton Fielding was risking a lot here. His career. Maybe more. She owed it to him to get better at this.

  “Sacred Cut Bill Kaspar Iraq.”

  It just got worse. There was all manner of crap creeping in now and she knew why. “Sacred cut” meant nothing to the system.

  Wherever that came from happened after.

  “Think of the song, stupid,” she muttered. “Think of Bill Kaspar. Think of what Thornton was trying to tell you.”

  The user name wasn’t BillK. It was WillFK.

  Some people liked to shorten their names in conversation and keep it formal on paper. Some people had middle names. The FBI was an institution. The higher up the ladder you got, the more likely you were to gain a few affectations along the way.

  She typed in “William F. Kaspar Steely Dan Deacon” and said a little prayer to whatever silicon god lived behind that screen, asking it to cut her a little slack, serve up a soupçon of mercy for a change, pick the right team of worker ants for this problem because, in all truth, she desperately needed them right now.

  The system chugged. A document came up with a date from 1990. Then the message: Access denied.

  “Shit,” she muttered and watched it chug through six other files blocked by the same rule. “Shit, shit, shit…”

  The network was running with all the speed of an octogenarian athlete. It was hopeless. It was dumb. It was typical of her career in the FBI.

  Then Emily Deacon, more out of desperation than anything, typed in “William F. Kaspar Steely Dan Babylon Sisters Shake It,” sat back and wondered what she’d do next. Go see the good-looking Italian cop at his gorgeous farmhouse out there in the snowy wilds, open her hands and say, “Got nothing. How about some wine? Why don’t we forget about everything for a while and just talk because I like talking to you.”

  Nic Costa hadn’t even come close to making a pass. It was odd. It was so un-Italian because she had a feeling he’d like to, really.

  “Ask me, Nic, because I’m going crazy staring at this stupid computer,” she whispered.

  Somewhere—in Miami or Washington, Seattle or on a server just down the hall—a hard drive flipped into life and popped a single, unrestricted document on the screen.

  It was just a memo. A scanned memo too, not a whole chunk of real, readable text, which may have been why it slipped through the security cracks. She checked the keywords some dumb underling had assigned to it. Just two: “Shake It.”

  Ha, ha.

  She was breathless. She felt stupidly alive. This was the only chance. Take it or leave it, because this never comes again.

  So…

  Emily Deacon cast a quick look at the door, saw no one beyond it, then took the tiny digital camera out of her purse, the one she kept for road accidents and shots of buildings, sights that interested her out of the blue. Then, trying not to tremble, she snapped the screen, and the next one, and the one after that.

  From: William F. Kaspar

  To: Steely Dan B. et al

  Date: 1991, near as dammit

  Subject: Babylon Sisters

  Status: you have to ask?

  Let it be known that I, William F. Kaspar, the Lizard King, the Holy Owl, Grand Master of the Universe, etcetera, etcetera, shall be attending the court of the Scarlet Beast presently, accompanied by my royal harem, and I demand—DEMAND—fealty from you lazy, good-for-nothing, pasta-sucking ingrates.

  There is a purpose, acolytes. A great one: mayhem.

  The Scarlet Beast has charged us with creating mayhem. We possess a God-given duty to deliver and it is a mighty relief to old Bill K this faceless bastard has volunteered you already. Though I cannot help but wonder, dear friend, whether you didn’t understand that all along. NTK, huh?

  I read the cast list. A few men I know. A few are new but I guess we’re gonna love ‘em all the same. Plus I’m bringing a couple of ladies of my own too, since we live in emancipated days and they can do things with radios and computers and stuff that beats the living shit out of me. Though I cannot help but wonder, dear friend, whether you didn’t know that all along. NTK, huh?

  Practicalities.

  1. The Scarlet Beast is a generous Beast, though I guess you know that already! Those figures you sent me are enough to keep us going for six months in the desert if some spine-deficient pen-pusher in the Pentagon starts to get cold feet and wonders whether we shouldn’t just pick up the phone, call Saddam and say: please, pretty please, mister, just pack up your tanks and your soldiers and walk all the way home to Baghdad.

  2. We got immunity. Hell, we got more immunity than a Klansman in Alabama. We can do what we like, when we like, and no one’s ever going to care. (Am I telling you something you don’t know here or what, boy?)

  3. We got deep cover. We’re the Babylon Sisters, buddy. And no one knows our name. This is a cash-only, love-‘em-and-leave-’em operation entirely in the hands of a bunch of ghosts. So don’t expect no medals. Knowing what little I do of our anonymous master don’t expect no thanks either. Duty is its own reward.

  4. This Scarlet Beast guy may not have told you yet but you got extra work to do. I looked at your record, brother. Hell, Danboy! You ain’t fired a weapon in anger since Nicaragua! What happened to old Steely? I am the military guy here, so listen to me when I say this. When we hit the sand there we start running. This thing happens on army time. Two hours’ sleep a day if we’re lucky and more work, more action, in between than you’ve ever seen in your little life. We’re pre-empting stuff here, laying down the groundwork for what comes after. And that means the shit happens constantly, sometimes when old Bill here won’t expect it to. I don’t have room for passengers. So tell me this: are you going soft now you got that lovely little rugrat running round your feet? If that’s the case let me illuminate you a little. FORGET THE LITTLE CRITTER TILL THIS IS DONE. Kids are great, Dan. When I came visiting and bounced that little darling up and down on my knee last spring I thought you were the luckiest SOB on the planet. But you know something? You’re not. You just got a whole load of new responsibilities to add to the old ones.

  5. We got to toughen you up, we got to work on those desert skills. You need to learn what goes inside a military Humvee in the magical nineties (and these ladies the Marines sent me are putting toys on board those two iron beauties you just won’t believe, toys that can shoot and burn and kill, then talk you straight out to safety even if it’s pitch dark and spitting fire out there). Plus I got two Black Hawks waiting in Saudi ready to sling those babies under their guts and deliver us out into no-man’s-land. This is serious shit, Steely. We’re all coming home afterwards. That I promise you. Also: I’ll kill any damn man who gets in the way. Anyone who don’t understand the meaning of the word “mission” had better look it up in the dictionary ‘cos there’s no time for bookwork on the road.

  6. We got friends. You know how many Iraqis it takes to change a president? Just a couple, provided you got the dough. We’ve been buying buddies on the ground there for years, making the down payments, preparing the way. They’re waiting on us to show up and close the deal. That check’s just burning a hole in someone’s back pocket right now.

  7. We got a home. A nice home too, picked it myself. No tent for us, boy. No running hot water and mints on the pillow at be
dtime either. But this place has got class. I’m a history man, Steely, got campaigns going back to Mesopotamia locked in these brain cells. Never forget that. This place is like you, it’s got breeding. Also, it’s real nice and peaceful, a little oasis in the desert where the Republican Guard got no reason to visit at all. Here’s a word to think about, Steely. Ziggurat.

  Your old friend Billy K. bids farewell now. Eat this paper after reading. Wipe your ass with it if you like. Or even—no, I mean this, this is the best of all!!!—file the damn thing somewhere among all those big metal cabinets you people in the Via Veneto love so much. Put away a little piece of my ramblings for history. It doesn’t matter a damn.

  I am William F. Kaspar which means, as you understand well, I don’t exist.