by David Hewson
The mission didn’t exist. The combatants, as far as their relatives were concerned, remained incommunicado on private training exercises in the Gulf until, two months later, an army captain visited their homes with stories of dead heroes in the real conflict, which was now under way. There could be no medals, no public mourning. Not even a private Purple Heart. None of them was officially in the military. Dead spooks wear no honours.
Wars make noise. In the tumult of the conflict the loss of nine unknown, unseen individuals made little impact. Money went around to keep families and others quiet. The men and women who survived went back to their jobs, in the diplomatic and intelligence services, and in civilian life too. They kept their secrets, they got on with their lives. The battle was won. Saddam went home, leaving a trail of corpses in his wake, claiming victory. And Kuwait was free beneath the smoke of burning oil fields.
All in all, Leapman said, the verdict was that the war was half a job well done. There were people who thought they should have gone all the way into Saddam’s palaces in Baghdad. But that wasn’t part of the UN brief, and military people lived by UN briefs back then. The objective had been to recover Kuwait and hope that Saddam learned his lesson. They got part of what they wanted.
He took a swig of the bottle of water he’d brought with him and stared at each of them in turn.
“You get all that for free,” Leapman said. “It’s history now, anyway, and who gives a shit? What comes next, though, is different. If this goes public, then everything goes way over our heads, gentlemen. It won’t be me or Viale here who’s screaming blue murder. It’ll be bureau chiefs and generals or worse and none of us wants that. Understood?”
Peroni found himself nodding automatically, as if he had a choice.
What happened next, Leapman said, was they realized Baghdad had got insight. Postwar, someone somewhere was helping Saddam.
“Helping him how?” Falcone demanded.
“Background,” Leapman answered. “It was a question of adding things up and working out what didn’t make sense. There were sanctions in place by then. Tough sanctions, ones that worked, as well as sanctions can, anyway. All the same, we knew Saddam was getting wind of things he shouldn’t. He understood some of our military hardware better than he ought. He took out three Iraqis we’d placed near him to keep an eye on what was going on. He had intelligence, stuff he wasn’t supposed to know. So we had to ask ourselves what was going on.”
“Kaspar?” Peroni wondered. “I thought you said he was a hero.”
“Yeah. I also said he was dead. Great cover twice over, huh? We went back and talked to people in Deacon’s team again. They were uncomfortable about it. I guess if you go through that kind of experience, you don’t want to think ill of your comrades. But a couple of them, Deacon included, had their suspicions. Or so they said after a lot of prompting. Don’t forget, at that stage we thought Kaspar was blown away along with the rest of his team. But maybe that was what we were supposed to believe. And all the while he was living the good life in some quiet palace out in the desert, counting his money, gradually spilling out every last thing he knew, while Saddam lapped it up. So if that’s true, what do you do?”
You didn’t have much in the way of options, Peroni thought. “You look for proof.”
“Exactly.”
Leapman nodded at Viale. “SISDE already had someone secreted inside Iraq. Dan Deacon came back to Rome for a couple of months and worked alongside Viale here to send in a new team, see if anyone was saying anything about an American on their side. Four officers went in. One came back. The others…”
Leapman shook his head. “I don’t even want to think what happened there. One report we got said Uday disposed of the poor bastards personally. You heard the stories about how he used to feed the lions?”
He let them digest that in silence.
“They weren’t fairy tales,” Leapman continued. “But they weren’t the full story either. Anyway, it was Deacon’s man who came back and he had some news. There was an American there. He was talking. And he was some big tough guy who seemed to know everything. Fitted Kaspar in every respect. Some hero, huh? And you know something? We couldn’t touch him. He was just going to sit there gossiping day and night until we came back another time. We were working with kid gloves then. It took all the persuasion we had to get that covert team in just to look for intelligence. We couldn’t be seen to be running heavier missions, maybe to capture him or take him out, because that would screw up any chance we had of rebuilding a coalition to finish the job. Not that that worked either. We were in a deep pile of shit and there was nothing we could do about it.”
“Still,” Peroni said, “you got there in the end.”
“Yes, we did!” Leapman barked back at him. “And one day you people might realize what a damn big favour we did you.”
Falcone shook his head. “You’re getting away from the subject, Leapman.”
“Yeah,” he grumbled. “None of you ever like that conversation. OK. So, come last spring, we get back to Iraq. And we say to some of our intelligence people, look out for this guy called Bill Kaspar. And when you find him, throw him in a cell somewhere, call home and leave him alone with us for a little while.”
Peroni had to ask. “Us being?”
“What’s it matter? What’s in a name?”
“It matters because you’re supposed to be FBI,” Falcone pointed out.
“Sue me,” Leapman grunted. “The point is this. Ten days into the war we find Bill Kaspar running like hell in some little town outside Baghdad. Our guys do just as they’re told. Lock him up and wait for a special team to come and take out the trash. And you know what he does?”
What men like that always did, Peroni thought.
“I can imagine,” he said.
“No.” Leapman shook his head vigorously. “You can’t. The men who picked him up were low-level grunts. They understood he was supposed to be a bad guy. They told him so. I know Bill Kaspar. He could’ve taken them out one by one if he’d wanted. What he did instead was go crazy. I mean angry crazy. Outraged. Some stupid sergeant knocked him around a little and told him he was a traitor. Kaspar went ballistic. He demanded to see the platoon commander, the guy above him, the regional commander, Dubya himself. Why? Because we’d got it all wrong. He hadn’t been sitting there in some Iraqi palace trading secrets for dough. The poor bastard had been in jail all along, probably getting tortured daily after a breakfast of dust and shit, not saying a word because that’s what Bill Kaspar is like.”
Leapman took a big deep breath before going on. “We got fooled and Kaspar knew it long before we did. He listens to this dumb sergeant for a couple of minutes, thinks it through, and then he’s out of there. Doesn’t even kill one of the grunts on the way, either, though a couple of them won’t walk too well for a while. And all we know is some lowly soldiers got a report from an American prisoner that doesn’t add up to much, then let the guy we wanted so badly escape out into the mess that was going on all over the place. We didn’t stand a chance of catching up with Kaspar after that. And for one good reason. He didn’t want to be caught.”
“He had no money,” Peroni objected. “No one to help him.”
“He’s Bill Kaspar!” Leapman yelled. “I keep telling you. Kaspar wrote the book on every last trick and scam you can pull in circumstances like that. You could parachute him onto Mars, come back six months later and he wouldn’t just be alive, he’d be sitting in a nice house with lobster on the table, fresh champagne on ice in a bucket and some goddamn hippie CD from the seventies on the stereo. Kaspar survives. He’s the best there is at it.”
“When did you know?” Falcone asked.
Leapman grimaced. “It took a while. We didn’t even realize Kaspar had made it to the US. We thought he’d hide out in Syria or somewhere. These people in Deacon’s team… most of them were civilians by this time. We didn’t put two and two together until those deaths in Virginia. By then there were just to
o many coincidences. All the same we still couldn’t work out what he was up to. As far as we were concerned, Bill Kaspar was a renegade, a wanted criminal. We couldn’t figure out what possible reason he’d have for risking his neck by coming home and killing these people. Then…”
He mulled over how far to go. “Then we realized that the only evidence we had against Kaspar came from Deacon’s man who’d gone on that covert mission a few years earlier. Nothing else corroborated the story. Certainly not the other three guys who never made it out of there. So we started taking a few peeks at the bank accounts of some of the others, the ones who did get out. They’d done their best to keep it hidden at first. I guess after time you get lazy. There’s a whole lot we don’t know. Was this arranged before Deacon and Kaspar went into Iraq? Did one or two of the team plan it and just face the rest with the choice when they all got there? Live and be a rich traitor or die and be an unsung hero? It’s all guesswork now. Operations like these don’t keep records for good reasons and everyone involved except Bill Kaspar is dead. But we were starting to firm up our suspicions by the time he made it to Dan Deacon in Beijing. After that, we were certain. Deacon had half a million dollars stashed away in a bank account in the Philippines. The moron never even spent a penny of it. Can you believe it?”
“The woman who died in the Pantheon?” Falcone asked.
“What about her?” Leapman asked.
“She knew. She must have known. You brought her here.”
“Yeah,” he snarled. “So we screwed up. I had five men watching her. How Kaspar got past them sure beats me.”
Falcone wasn’t letting go. “And she came here because… ?”
“Because, Inspector, I didn’t give her any choice. She was a criminal. I could have snapped my fingers and she’d be gone for good anyway. She knew nothing. She got shot by accident after Deacon and Kaspar went in and scarcely knew what happened. So I gave her a chance to make up. Had it worked, she could have walked free.”
“Generous,” Peroni observed. “Why didn’t you just try talking to him direct?”
Leapman reached over the table and scattered Costa’s papers.
“We’ve been trying! What do you think all these messages are about? If I could just get him on the phone… I’d apologize. Then I’d tell him it’s time to end this crap and throw himself on our mercy. Except now…”
They waited. It had to come from him.
“Now he’s killed again,” Leapman muttered. “Which shouldn’t have happened. He’d killed everyone who’d gone into Iraq with him and betrayed him. The only one still standing is him. There’s no reason he should take out someone who had nothing to do with this. But Bill Kaspar always had a pretty old-fashioned view about patriotism. He came out of some Iraqi prison thinking he’d be home and free with everyone telling him he was a hero. Instead, he walked into all this crap. Us treating him as if he was a turncoat. If he feels his country’s abandoned him—written him off as a traitor—I suppose he thinks anything goes these days.”
“I suppose he’s right,” Peroni grumbled.
“Finally,” Leapman said, with a long, pained sigh, “we agree on something.”
COSTA MET TERESA where they’d arranged by phone, close to Largo Argentina, and briefed her on what he’d discovered. Then the two of them walked the short distance to the cafe where Emily had said she’d be waiting for them. He didn’t recognize her at first. She was standing at the counter of an empty Tazza d’Oro, close by the Pantheon, anonymous inside a too-big khaki winter parka with the hood still up. He nodded at her, got a couple of coffees, and the three of them retreated to a table.
Emily Deacon looked a little frightened, but a little excited too. Costa reached forward and gently pulled the hood down to her neckline, revealing her face. She managed the ghost of a smile and shook her long blonde hair automatically. It seemed lank and dirty.
Emily glanced at Teresa. “I thought perhaps it would be you and Gianni.”
“Gianni’s tied up,” Teresa said instantly. “I’m the best you’ve got.”
“No.” There was a flash of a smile. “I didn’t mean that. Sorry. You’ve got something out?”
Costa nodded at Teresa. “We think so. But put us in the picture first, Emily. What the hell happened last night? How did you find Kaspar?”
“I didn’t. He found me. You fell asleep.” She felt awkward with Teresa there, Costa guessed. “I went outside… I’m sorry. It’s the last thing I wanted, believe me. But maybe…” She bit her lip. “This could be the one chance we get. It’s important you understand the situation. Look.”
She flipped down the collar of the jacket and pointed to a tiny black plastic square. “It’s a mike. Kaspar’s listening somewhere. He can hear every word I say. He’ll be able to do that all the time until this is over, so please don’t get any smart ideas. And if the mike goes dead, so do I. Kaspar knows what he’s doing. You’ve both got to understand that. We can’t mess with him.”
Instinctively, Costa scanned the bar.
Emily put her hand to his chin and pulled his attention back to her. “He could be anywhere. Don’t even think about it. There’s a deal on the table, Nic. Let’s focus on that. We mustn’t screw it up.”
He nodded. “I understand.”
“Good.”
Teresa was staring at a mark on the other woman’s neck. “Are you hurt, Emily?” she asked.
“I must have faIlen,” she replied. “It’s nothing. Don’t worry about me.”
Then Costa gently pulled down the first few inches of the zipper on the front of the parka.
“No, Nic,” Emily ordered. She pulled his hand away, then jerked the zip back up. “Not here. Not now. That’s not what matters. Don’t think about that part. We don’t even get that far.”
Teresa said quietly, “That’s what we all want, Emily. But can we stop him?”
“Yes!”
“You’re sure?” Teresa reiterated.
“I’m sure!” she snapped. Then, more quietly, “And I’m not in a position to argue. OK?”
Costa found it hard to work out whether she was saying what she did for Kaspar’s benefit or because she really believed it.
“He killed your father, Emily,” Teresa pointed out. “He killed all those other people. How can we trust him?”
Emily Deacon frowned. “I know that. But he talked to me last night. We went over a lot of things. He had his reasons. He feels he had some justification. That there was no other way. I don’t agree with that for one moment. I don’t imagine he’d expect me to. But…”
Nic took out a pen from his jacket pocket, slipped it onto the table next to a napkin.
“He just wants to know justice—his definition of justice—has been done,” she finished, looking at the pen without moving to pick it up.
Then she scribbled two words on the paper.
You know?
Costa nodded and wrote a name next to the question.
She closed her eyes. She looked a little faint. Then she picked up the napkin, stared at the writing there, fixed him with those sharp, incisive blue eyes and mouthed, “Sure?”
Costa cupped his hand over the mike, leaned close into her left ear, smelled the trace of shampoo on her hair, a familiar scent, one from his own home, and murmured, “I’m sure he lived in an American-owned house in the Piazza Mattei in 1990. And that he was the only one there. Is that enough?”
Her cheek pressed into his, her lips briefly kissed his neck.
“Oh yes,” Emily whispered into his ear.
She took his hand off the mike, brushed her lips against his fingers and smiled broadly, just for a moment.
“If Kaspar wants justice,” Nic said, “all he’s got to do is walk into any Questura. That’s why we’re there.”
“He will. I promise.”
She scribbled out an address and a time, then gave it to Teresa.
“That’s where he wants the evidence delivered and when. No one but you two know that. He
might want to test you. I’d be surprised if he didn’t. And”—she paused, making sure they understood this last point—“make it good evidence. Please.”
Nic Costa wanted a magic wand at that moment. Something that could just spirit them out of there, take away all the trappings of death and violence, put them back into a world that was whole and warm and human.
“What if something goes wrong?” he asked. “If there’s a delay… how do we get in touch with him?”
