"The Sacred Cut" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hewson David)

Venerdi

NIC COSTA LOOKED OUT OF THE LIVING-ROOM WINDOW, out at the bright morning and a garden that was a perfect sheet of white, broken only by the bent old-men backs of olive trees sagging under the weight of snow. The farmhouse off the Appian Way couldn’t cope with the weather. It was still cold, in spite of two log fires roaring away at either end of the big, airy room. This was home, though, a good place to be. Since his father died and Costa had embarked on a lengthy, solitary recuperation from a near-fatal shooting, the house had rarely echoed to anything but his own footsteps. That was a shame. It was a place that needed people to make it live again.

He glanced at last summer’s logs crackling and sputtering in the ancient fireplaces, still damp from the snow, and remembered what his father had looked like during those final days, swathed in a blanket in his wheelchair, slipping away gradually, battling his disease every inch of the way. Then he heard the deep, round sound of Gianni Peroni’s guffaw roll out of the kitchen, followed, a little more hesitantly, by light young laughter.

Teresa Lupo walked out, shaking her head, and eyed the tray in his hands. “Are you going to take it up to her, Nic? Or shall I? That coffee’s going cold and there’s nothing Americans hate more than cold coffee.”

“I’ll do it. How is he?”

“Gianni?” Teresa’s eyes were shining, as if she’d been close to tears. She looked exhausted, but happy too. Costa had called her after the incident in the Campo. It was her decision to drive there straightaway, then on to the farmhouse. Costa wondered how they would have coped without her.

“He’s fine.” She sighed. “For an idiot. She’s a messed-up immigrant kid, Nic. I talked to the social people on the phone when you were asleep. They’ll have to take her into care. You can’t just”-she formed the words very deliberately-“transfer the way you feel about your own kids to someone else. However much you need to. Gianni just wants to be home with his own family. I know that. I don’t blame him.”

Costa wondered if it was really so simple. “The girl looks happy, Teresa. Maybe it works both ways. She’s seeing a little of her own father in him. Besides, he’s doing his job too. She refused to say a damn word until he began clowning around.”

“It’s not the girl I’m worried about,” she said with sudden severity. “He’s not the big, invulnerable hulk he looks, or haven’t you noticed?”

“I know.”

“Good. Now you take that coffee to your guest.”

He did as he was told and was unable to suppress slight nervousness when he knocked on the door of the guest room. It was now just before eight. Emily Deacon had slept solidly from the moment they took her back to the farmhouse and probably remembered little about the confused hour or so after she fainted in the Campo. She was going to wake up with plenty of questions. Costa took a deep breath. Then, when there was no response, he entered.

This had been his sister’s room before she went to Milan to work. It had an uninterrupted view back to the old Appian Way. The outline of the tomb of Cecilia Metella sat, a drum-like shape, on the horizon. He placed the tray on the bedside table, coughed loudly and waited as the American woman stirred slowly into consciousness, watching, with no little fascination, the way she was transformed from slumbering innocence back to the taut, alert FBI agent of the day before.

She looked around the room and frowned.

“Where the hell am I?” she demanded, then gulped at the glass of fresh orange juice.

“My house. With the girl. She’s downstairs with Peroni right now. You remember our pathologist?”

“I remember.”

“We got her to take a look at you after you fainted. We were worried you might have been concussed. You banged your head when you went down like that. You were… mumbling.”

“A pathologist? Thanks.”

“She used to be a doctor,” he said.

She felt her head. “You could have taken me home.”

“We didn’t know where home was. Your friend Leapman wasn’t exactly helpful when we spoke to him. He seemed more interested in the man.”

“As was I,” she grumbled.

“I’m sorry. We just didn’t know what else to do. We wanted Laila somewhere safe. It seemed to make sense.”

She swore quietly. “My, won’t I be in his good books now?” Then she looked at him and Costa could see she was remembering something afresh from the previous night. Something she didn’t care to explain just then. “I need to go into the office. Can you drive me?”

“Of course. The bathroom’s through that door. When you’re done, come downstairs. Peroni’s cooking breakfast. You might find it interesting. Also…”

He wanted to laugh. She was looking at herself, still in last night’s clothes, wrapped in the bedsheets, trying to clear her head.

“This is like being a student again,” she complained. “ ”Also“ what?”

“You might be able to forget about the bad books.”

MONICA SAWYER LAY STILL on the floor, arms hugging the coverlet he’d placed around her the previous night, the cord tight in her flesh, chestnut hair strewn around her face. She looked like a shattered doll dressed in a gaudy nightgown, mouth open, blank eyes staring at the ceiling. Purple thumb marks had turned livid on her neck. A line of dried blood stood on her lower lip.

It wasn’t a dream. In truth, he’d known that all along. Kaspar looked at her and felt something approaching regret. It hadn’t been planned. He’d lost control and that was bad. He fetched the bag and automatically, without a conscious thought, turned her over, sliced the scalpel down the back of the nightgown, then the scarlet slip, and stared at her back. Not bad for a woman in her forties. Smooth skin, barely blemished.

He wondered what he would have done if he’d got the chance to lead a life of dissolution. If there’d been the space inside the last thirteen years to do anything but think of survival, a way of getting through the meagre day, then getting even.

“You’d be as fat as a pig, Kaspar.” It was another voice inside him. They just kept getting noisier all the time, all the more so since this last, unexpected misadventure. This was the guy from Alabama, whose name was lost to him now through the mist.

“You’d be wearing pinstripes, working in a bank, screwing your wife once a week just to keep her happy.” Uptight New England WASP, speaking through the back of the nose. There’d been many an officer like that, Kaspar thought. Or maybe it was just a movie. Or Steely Dan Deacon himself. He’d got it. That was his New England whine, brought back from the dead by seeing his girl the night before. And letting her live…

“I’d be me,” he murmured, and that was a voice he only distantly recognized, one that had no accent at all because it was him. As close as it got these days.

“I’d be me, Monica,” he said again, stroking the side of her dead cheek with a single finger. “And you know something? You wouldn’t like me. Because I’m not like Peter O’Malley. Or Harvey. Or anyone you know. I’m just a piece of dry shit blowing on the wind. A part of the elements, like rain or snow, looking for the right place to fall.”

He straddled her buttocks, took the back of her scalp and turned her dead head around.

“You hear me, bitch?”

It was the guy from Alabama again. Maybe this one would hang around a lot today. He’d been a vicious bastard. He could be useful too. Black as hell, muscles like steel, a vocabulary that rarely strayed from A-class obscene.

Monroe. That was the name. Monroe had been the first to catch a bullet when they’d run from the Humvee, got pinned down with no option but to try to make a break to the most obvious place of safety. The shard of burning metal had come clean through the man’s head, tore off most of his lower jaw, left him running round with half his face off till a second shell came and finished the job. The guy was a moron too. Thought he was immortal, could just bark his way through anything, catch a piece of red-hot iron with his fist and fling it to the ground.

Sometimes, when the memories came back, Kaspar wanted to cry, to hold his face in his hands and bawl like a baby. Mostly, though, he could keep that away these days. He’d done enough bawling for one lifetime. He could keep it at bay by thinking of the pattern, the magic pattern in his little black bag, carved into the living, waiting to be complete.

“See, Monica,” he said, back in the old voice, the real one. “They never read Shelley, my dear. Can you believe that?”

My name is Ozymandias, king of kings

He did a good Englishman-posh if you please.

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!

He laid the scalpel on her back, got comfy on her plump ass and called into his head the sacred cut and its magical subset, that shape burned on his consciousness, so set there now he could carve it out of anything without the pattern he had needed to begin with.

Shapes made sense of things, shapes told you there was sanity and truth somewhere in the universe. So he carved the first line, quickly, easily, and it didn’t feel right.

“Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” he whispered, but it was still the old voice. He couldn’t quite find the tone.

Because it didn’t work this time. There were tears in his eyes. He couldn’t just run through the same procedure again. She wasn’t right. She was like Little Emily Deacon, only not so lucky. She didn’t belong there, not at all.

Screeching quietly to himself, the way he’d done when the guards used to come through the door and drag him back to the room with the electric poles and whips, he rocked from side to side, wildly slashing the scalpel across her waxy flesh, back and forth, back and forth, making marks that looked like the talons of a giant, crazy bird.

This went on for a while. How long he didn’t know. He was looking for those voices in him: Dan Deacon, Monroe, the big black sergeant with half a jaw, one of the women even. Anyone, anyone-it didn’t matter who, so long as it didn’t sound like him, the old him.

The voices wouldn’t come and he knew why. He’d offended them. They kept whispering something in his ear, Dan Deacon loudest of all. He’d been a fool. The list was incomplete. One final set of skin remained to be added to the pattern, the most important one, from someone he couldn’t begin to guess. And what did he do when he was supposed to be looking? Get distracted by some horny California gal who couldn’t keep her hands out of his private belongings.

Thinking of rutting when you shoulda been cutting, forgetting who you truly are.

“Bitch,” he murmured, and found the scalpel flying in his hand again.

Also, he thought, she stood in the way. He could be here for days if he wanted. She could start to stink and he hated that stink. It carried so many black memories with it.

Haul her onto the terrace, boy! It’s like an icehouse out there. You won’t smell a thing.

Smart, Alabama boy. They had helicopters hovering overhead all the time, cameras on rooftops, mikes in the walls, people spying everywhere these days, listening to the words you whispered in your sleep. They had to do that because they knew he was among them, knew he was close to finishing the job.

Then KISS my ass, remember?

Keep It Simple, Stupid. The black guy said that all the time. Sometimes he had a point.

This was a place with a kitchen you could film a cookery show in: big knives, little knives, meat saws, cleavers. Monica Sawyer had brought two large, expensive-looking suitcases with her. They still sat in the living room with Delta’s business class stickers on the side. It would be a crime to let them go to waste.

THE VIA DEL BABUINO ran from the Spanish Steps to the Piazza del Popolo, a narrow, cobbled medieval lane in permanent shadow from the high buildings on either side. The shutters were still on the designer stores and the newspaper vendor next to the Greek church had only just opened his bundles that bright sunny morning as the three-car team rolled past.

The Fiats squirmed on the slippery cobblestones, scattering a flock of black-coated nuns like fleeing crows, hurrying across the snow towards the outline of the familiar twin staircase winding down from Trinità dei Monti. Leo Falcone sat in the back of the first car with Joel Leapman by his side, and wished the sound of the sirens could drown out his growing misgivings. What Teresa Lupo had revealed the previous night continued to bug him, all the more because he’d decided to keep the information to himself and to defy Filippo Viale, at least for the moment. It was hard enough dealing with his own grey men without a bunch of FBI agents thrown into the mix. Falcone had tried to discuss this with Moretti earlier that morning, only to find the grim-faced commissario already sharing his office with Leapman and Viale. The spooks had the smug look of people in charge. It was a pointless meeting, relieved only by Costa’s phone call with a possible address for them to search. Not that they were under any illusions. The idea that the man would stick around at the apartment seemed ludicrous in the circumstances.

Leapman wriggled in his black winter coat as the car approached the address Costa had given them. He shook his scalped head, shot Falcone a disapproving glance, and laughed.

“Something wrong?” Falcone wondered.

“You guys kill me. It’s all so damn casual. What if he didn’t wise up? What if he’s still in there? You gonna knock on the door and ask him to come out for a talk?”

“Maybe.” Falcone knew this area well. The houses were identical: terraced properties that fetched a fortune in spite of the constant roar of traffic from Spagna to Popolo. They were apartments now, all with a single shared door at the front. There was just one way out. At this time of day it was easy, too, to gain entrance to any place like this in the city.

The car pulled over. Falcone got out, walked to the intercom, pressed a couple of buttons simultaneously and waited for the electronic lock to buzz. When it did, he held open the green wooden door and let his team of six walk into the narrow communal passage.

Leapman couldn’t believe his eyes.

“It’s what we do to let the trash man in,” Falcone explained, nodding at the pile of black plastic bags behind the front door.

“Jesus,” Leapman groaned. He pulled out a black revolver, checked it, then, under Falcone’s fierce gaze, slid the weapon back in its leather shoulder holster.

“No guns,” Falcone ordered. “Not unless I say so.”

One of the detectives was grilling a woman who’d come out of the first ground-floor apartment.

“Third floor, Number Nine,” he said. “Foreigner, rented apartment. Been here two weeks or so. She hasn’t seen him since the night before last. She’s got a key.”

Falcone sent the entry team ahead. Leapman stayed with him downstairs. The American seemed bored. Falcone took a look at his own pistol, just in case, then quickly put it away.

“You ever used that?” Leapman asked.

“Lots of times,” Falcone answered. “Just never had to fire it, that’s all.”

Leapman was laughing again. “This is the European thing, isn’t it?” he asked.

“You’ve lost me.”

“The idea that there’s some kind of middle way we could take if only we were civilized enough to see it. The idea you can just walk down the centre of the road and then everything will be just fine, all the crap will never come and touch you.”

“Perhaps it’s best not to judge situations too quickly. I don’t believe that’s a European thing or any other kind of thing either. It’s just how some of us work.”

Leapman grimaced. “Until you wise up. That’s what separates us. See, we don’t wait for the nasty surprises to prove what we know already. This guy’s a lunatic, right? You treat him like one or you get hurt.”

“Possibly.” Falcone wondered how many men Leapman had in Rome, where they were, what they were doing. “I thought you might have asked Agent Deacon along,” he said. “Or someone.”

“Why? Is she supposed to give an art lesson here, too?”

“She got us this far. With my men, of course.”

Peroni had called in at one a.m. with a brief report after the incident in the Campo. It had been shared with Leapman, at Moretti’s insistence. Falcone had then called Viale, partly because he liked the idea of getting him out of bed. The SISDE man had listened, grunted, then put down the phone.

“She did,” Leapman murmured sourly. “She saw the guy too and look what happened. He walks. She blacks out. It’s a crying shame. That kid just can’t cut it.”

Falcon didn’t argue. Emily Deacon looked all wrong in the job Leapman had given her, though Leo had no intention of saying so. “In that case, why did you bring her here?”

Leapman resented the question. Falcone would have felt the same way in his position. These were operational decisions. You left them to the officer in charge, until they went wrong.

“It seemed a good idea at the time,” the American said after a while. “She speaks Italian like one of you. She knows this place. And like I said yesterday, she’s got one hell of an incentive to see this guy go down. Is that good enough? Can we get on with taking a look around now?”

Falcone went up the stone steps and walked into the room, where his team were making a slow and professional job of checking out what was there. It was a typical short-term rented place: a large studio with an old sofa, a tiny table with grubby chairs, a small, cheap colour TV. There was an uncomfortable-looking single bed in the corner, unmade, with the sheets strewn on the floor. Falcone walked into the cramped bathroom. At first glance there was nothing there he could work with for DNA: no toothbrush, no used tissues. The main room looked just as bare.

“The guy came back and cleared everything,” Leapman said. “Smart. He was probably in and out of here before you people finished dealing with the medics.”

But medics were important, Falcone thought. You had to work out your priorities.

“How’d this kid know he was from here?” Leapman wondered. “Was she working a trick for him or something?”

“No.” They’d got some background on the girl already. One of the charities had worked with her for a few months with little success. It was a psychological problem, one that wouldn’t go away. A form of kleptomania, constant, even when she knew she’d be caught. “She follows people she thinks are interesting. Then she steals something from them. He just came out of this place and she saw him in the street, followed him to the Pantheon. She remembered a green door and the Gucci shop.”

Leapman looked interested. “The kid saw him meet up with the woman?”

“No. She lost him for a little while. The couple were already inside the Pantheon when she went in. Which is interesting in itself. Perhaps they already knew each other.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Leapman stated. “I’d like to hear it from the street brat myself.”

“No,” Falcone said firmly. “You can have the transcript of the interview but I’m not putting a child up for interrogation. We wouldn’t allow that with one of our own. It’s against the law. I’m sorry.”

The FBI agent sighed, but at least he didn’t seem ready to argue. “The law. I won’t go to the wall over this one, Falcone. But don’t you try standing in my way when it comes to something important. I won’t tolerate it.”

“I imagine not.” Falcone sighed, “What do you want of me, Agent Leapman?”

“Some action might be nice.”

“Action?” That was, it seemed to Falcone, the last thing they needed. The killer moved carefully, thought ahead. He wasn’t going to be caught by some random, blanket operation. He’d disappear the moment he heard anyone coming down the street.

“We have almost fifty officers working on this case already. I think that counts as action.”

Leapman picked up a sweater one of the detectives had found in a cupboard. It was the only item the man hadn’t taken. Maybe it didn’t even belong to him. Leapman didn’t look as if he cared. Falcone had to remind himself about the kind of officer he was dealing with here. Leapman wasn’t a cop. He was part of a rigid, bureaucratic apparatus that worked by the book. He was accustomed to thinking that “action”-constant investigation, the sledgehammer of detection that vast amounts of manpower allowed-brought results. It was one way of looking at things, Falcone thought, it made sense. But not always. You had to be flexible. You had to think round problems. You couldn’t just follow a set of procedures laid out on the page of some textbook.

The American’s cell phone trilled. He walked over to the corner so that no one could hear. Falcone turned to Ciccone, one of the team he’d brought along, and asked, “Whose apartment is this? Who’d he rent from?”

It was, as Falcone hoped, the woman who had given them the keys.

Leapman finished the call and announced, “I’m gone. I want an update when you hear something, Falcone.”

“I’ll do my very best,” the inspector replied, smiling. “Let me see you out.”

They walked back downstairs. Falcone held open the door. There was a flurry of snow outside. Maybe it was that which made Leapman hesitate. He gave Falcone a sharp glance.

“They think you’re something, you know. That SISDE guy told me. My, isn’t he a cryptic piece of work?”

“I really don’t know. I work for the police, not SISDE, though I’m flattered all the same.”

“Or maybe I’m just getting some prime Italian bullshit. ”We got our best man on the case.“ Huh.”

Falcone had finally reached a decision on how to handle Leapman. Gently. Politely. From a distance. Just the way the American least wanted.

“I’ll keep you posted,” he replied.

He walked to the door of the first apartment. It was ajar. The woman, middle-aged, frumpy in a white blouse and black skirt, peered back at him from behind the security chain. She had prematurely grey hair, too long for her. She looked worried.

“Signora?”

He waited for her to unhook the chain, then walked in. The room was overflowing with expensive antique furniture. The contrast with the hovel above could scarcely be more vivid.

“What’s he done?” she asked.

“Perhaps nothing. Was he known to you personally?”

“He answered the ad. He paid a month’s rent and I never saw him again. He went out at night mainly. Don’t ask me why.”

“And his line of work was?”

She lit a cigarette with a shaking hand. “He was a tourist. How should I know?”

Falcone nodded, thinking. “How much does an apartment like that cost these days?”

“Four thousand for the month,” she answered.

“So much money?”

She wanted him out of there. He could feel there was something wrong.

“By law all property owners must keep a note of a foreigner’s passport,” he told her. “You did that, of course.”

She walked over to a small, highly polished bureau and took out a sheet of paper. “I know the rules.”

Falcone studied the page. It was a photocopy of the main ID page of an EU passport.

“Thank you,” he said. “And the receipt? By law you have to give a receipt and keep a copy. For the tax authorities.”

The woman stared at the carpet. Falcone knew: this was what she was hiding.

“You don’t have a receipt, do you? He paid in cash, I imagine.”

“Stupid paperwork,” she hissed. “I’m a widow. Do you think I’ve got nothing better to do than keep receipts?”

“It’s the law,” he said sternly. “Without receipts who’s to know that you’re declaring this income on your tax return? Who’s to say the money just doesn’t go straight into a shoebox under your bed?”

Along with a lot else besides, he guessed. She probably hadn’t declared any income from the apartment for years.

“I have a suggestion,” he said.

She looked into his eyes, hoping. He folded the photocopy of the passport and tucked it in his jacket pocket.

“You don’t tell anyone else about this if someone should come calling,” he said. “And I won’t call the tax people. Is that a deal?”

She didn’t even look grateful. She merely said, “And you wonder why people hate the police.”

Falcone felt a small red flicker of anger begin to burn at the back of his head. “We’re just doing what we suppose you want. It’s not easy, you know. If something happened out there in the street you’d be the first to get on the phone and start yelling at us. Yet in private you’re a little criminal, too, except you don’t quite see it that way. So what are we here for? Just to pick on the people you happen to hate?”

The woman didn’t answer that. She knew when she’d gone too far. Falcone was damn close to changing his mind.

Then something happened: the sound of a siren in the street, voices and, far off, the soft paff of an explosion, a noise he now knew well, one that sent a cold chill of dread straight through his mind.

Before he consciously knew it, Leo Falcone was through the door and running, back towards the Spanish Steps and a visible plume of black smoke rising above the white, white street.

EMILY DEACON SHOWERED, climbed back into the same clothes, then came downstairs into the farmhouse living room and found herself almost blinded by the bright winter light streaming through the windows.

Costa was waiting for her at the foot of the stairs. He looked sickeningly fresh and awake. She envied him. Her head hurt and it felt wrong to be in this beautiful isolated house, not knowing the aftermath of the previous evening’s encounter with the man called Kaspar.

“Where the hell am I, Nic? I need to be back in Rome.”

“Leapman knows where you are. He’s not screaming for you. This is my place. On a day like this it’s twenty minutes, thirty at the most, to the Via Veneto. The Porta San Sebastiano is exactly one kilometre over there.” He pointed at the end wall with its blazing fire.

“Great. I have time for breakfast. And you could tell me what the hell’s going on too, if that’s OK with you?”

He walked her through the large living room into the bright, square kitchen. Gianni Peroni and the girl were busy around a huge hob, happily throwing food into a couple of gigantic pans.

Peroni gave her a mock-sinister leer. “Soon you eat. My new friend Laila and I are cooking Kurdish. Which isn’t that far from Tuscan, just a little less fashionable.”

“Good!” the girl protested. “It’s good.”

Emily walked over, as close as the sputtering fat from the pans allowed, and stared at a banquet of frying food: eggs swimming in olive oil, chunks of bread turning crisp and golden in a mess of whole cloves of garlic, sliced onions and a tangle of half-burnt peppers.

“I don’t suppose you have toast?” she asked. “Or yogurt?”

Teresa arrived with a cup of coffee and gave it to her. “This is a bachelor pad, in case you hadn’t noticed. That means the bread’s all stale and the yogurt… ooh. I have to warn you, Nic. Some of those things in your fridge are so past their sell-by date they wouldn’t count as vegetarian anymore.”

“I’ve been busy,” Costa protested.

“Of course you have,” Teresa said in a deeply patronizing fashion. “How long, Gianni?”

“Come back in five.”

“Done,” Costa said and ushered the two women back into the main room, out of earshot.

Emily Deacon sat down and came right to the point. “OK. What happened with the girl? What did she tell you?”

“Don’t worry,” Costa replied. “We’ve passed it all on to Leapman. She gave us an address. The place she first saw him. Probably where he lived. The chances of him being there now-”

“That’s it? You didn’t get any more?”

The two Italians exchanged glances. “Emily,” the woman said, “this is one seriously screwed-up kid. Even before what happened last night. The charities gave up on her, she was so unreliable, so disruptive. She’s not-if you will excuse a non-medical phrase-right in the head. You can’t just sit down, ask her questions and take notes. Try if you want.”

“Maybe I will. She doesn’t look that way now.”

“She met the man,” Costa said. “This is Peroni’s patch. Give him a starving kid and a couple of pans. Don’t ask me how he does it. I doubt I’ll ever understand. He knew she was hungry, I guess. No, it’s more than that.”

Teresa Lupo cast a backwards glance at the kitchen and sighed. Emily Deacon understood then: there was something going on between her and Costa’s partner.

“He’s being like a parent, for God’s sake,” Teresa sighed. “Nic and I did all the cop things. Threw questions at her. Kept on and on. Gianni waited awhile, sat not saying much, then started listening. Like Nic said. Don’t ask. It’s a gift.”

Emily thought about Gianni Peroni and realized she understood that last point. There was something extraordinarily warm behind that pugilistic facade. All the same…

“We need to know what happened in the Pantheon,” she insisted. “What she saw.”

“Now that,” Costa answered, “is a place even Gianni can’t go just yet. The shutters come straight down. Give him some time. We’ve got that, you know. This man is on the run now. Maybe on the street himself. He knows we’re looking for him. He’s not leaving Rome in a hurry. There’s not a train going out of Termini. No buses. No planes. Not much traffic.”

She thought about the way the man had looked at her the previous night, the conscious decision he’d had to make. “He doesn’t want to leave Rome. He’s got unfinished business here.”

“Then we’ll work on finding out what it is,” Costa insisted.

“This is crazy. Why am I here? Why are you keeping a material witness in a private house? The only murder witness we’ve got?”

“Why not?” Costa asked. “Where else would she go? She doesn’t have a home. She doesn’t have parents, not here anyway. None of the charities want her because all she does is steal stuff in front of their eyes.”

“I don’t care!” Emily yelled, hearing her voice rise a couple of decibels. “This is all so wrong. You can’t run a criminal investigation like this.”

The pathologist rolled her eyes up at the ceiling and said nothing.

“So what do you think we should do?” Costa asked.

“Talk to her some more. Now. Get Leapman down here.”

“She’d like Agent Leapman,” Teresa said quietly. “She’d just love a man like that. I bet she wouldn’t stop talking.” She looked Emily directly in the face, daring her to argue. “Well?”

“OK,” Emily agreed. “Maybe that’s not such a great idea.”

“So what do you think we should do?” Costa repeated.

The girl put her head round the door of the kitchen. Emily could see the doubt in her face. The kid had heard her yelling, could sense the tension in the room.

Emily Deacon made herself smile.

“Let’s eat,” she said under her breath, then added more loudly. “Laila. You made us breakfast. That’s nice.”

“Ready!” The girl gestured into the kitchen.

They sat around an ancient wooden table. Peroni and Laila handed out dinner plates of food: potatoes, onions and peppers, with a couple of fried eggs perched on top of each, everything swimming in olive oil, with bread on the side. Emily Deacon looked at hers and wondered when she’d ever eaten anything like this before for breakfast, lunch or dinner.

“Good country food,” Peroni said, stabbing a finger at the plate. “In a normal house”-he cast a deprecatory glance at his partner-“there’d have been some ham or sausage or something.”

“It’s lovely as it is.” Emily sighed, watching Teresa Lupo retrieve an old bottle of ketchup from a cupboard, stare at the use-by date, shrug her shoulders and set the container on the table. The girl grabbed it straightaway, deposited a pool on her food and started to eat manically, as if she’d been starving for half her life. Which, Emily reflected, just might be the case.

Then Laila looked up at them, amazed they weren’t touching their food.

“Eat!” she ordered. “Eat!”

Emily Deacon tried a corner of crisp, almost burnt egg, and, suddenly, out of nowhere, found herself laughing, a self-conscious, half-hysterical laugh, one that stemmed in part, she decided, from her amazement at being among these odd strangers, being touched by the intimate ordinariness of the scene.

Somewhere out there a man was carving magical shapes on of the backs of dead people. He was waiting in the frozen city. And he had a name. Kaspar. It came to her now. A distant, returning memory from childhood, ten, twelve years ago, maybe more. She’d been in the study of their old apartment on the Aventine hill, stopping her practice on the upright piano for a moment, overhearing a remark from one of her father’s rare discussions of his work with her mother.

Bill Kaspar. What a guy.

“What a guy…” she murmured.

Peroni was peering at her. “Who, me?”

She smiled at the crude, makeshift feast on the table, and Laila, who’d just about cleared her plate and was eyeing Peroni, probably wondering if, like Oliver Twist, she could really ask for more.

“Sure, Gianni,” Emily agreed. “You.”

IT WAS JUST A CAR. Some lunatic with an ancient Renault, probably stolen, who didn’t give a shit what happened once he’d had his fun. Falcone quickly picked up the story from the two uniformed men on the scene. The moron had torched the vehicle outside the church at the top of the steps then, watched by a couple of goggle-eyed street hawkers, pushed it over the edge. The vehicle had rolled and tumbled down the hill, settling in front of the fountain in the Piazza di Spagna, where the fuel tank had exploded with the soft roar Falcone had heard from down the road. Now a puzzled-looking fire crew were hosing down the damn thing in front of a small crowd of puzzled onlookers.

It was an odd and disturbing scene in a part of the city that never quite worked for Leo Falcone. The mix of tourists and McDonald’s rubbing shoulders in the shadow of the house where Keats died puzzled him at the best of times.

Falcone strolled back down the Via del Babuino and ordered the uniformed men to return to the Questura, then he called intelligence to check the name on the passport. After they had run a swift search he set off on the drive out to Costa’s house, taking the time alone to think about that morning’s meeting with Joel Leapman, Bruno Moretti and Filippo Viale, the grey man from SISDE, and the way they all just sat there, silent, as if this were some kind of game.

The streets were treacherous: half snow, half slush. Even in the abnormally light traffic he had to be on his guard every moment. The average Roman had never driven on snow. What passed as the normal rules of the road in Rome were gone. Cars were careering around crazily, from right to left and back again. Drivers were arguing with each other over minor collisions. The city was, briefly, beyond control, beyond order. He thought about the old Renault tumbling down the Spanish Steps, bursting into flames at the foot of the staircase, and how amazing it was no one had got hurt. Rome, like any big city, had its share of vandalism. Still, there were always places that were somehow exempt, almost sacrosanct. People didn’t mess with sights like that. It would be like spray-painting graffiti on St. Peter’s.

Until now.

Falcone turned the car into the narrow lane that was the Via Appia Antica and couldn’t stop himself from laughing. The city streets were a mess. The authorities just didn’t have the right equipment to clear up after the constant blizzards. Here, at the municipal boundary, the Via Appia became clear and safe, still showing cobblestones that were, in places, a good two thousand years old.

“Farmers,” Falcone said to himself. The tractors had been out, unbidden, without payment in all probability, ploughing aside the drifts. This was where the city ended and a different kind of Italy started. He made a note to remind himself of that the next time he wondered why Nic Costa lived where he did.

The drive to Costa’s farmhouse was different, though: deep in snow so thick that Falcone kept his foot lightly on the pedal all the way, and was grateful the car didn’t grind to a halt. He made one call back to the Questura, then stood on the doorstep, stamping his shoes to get rid of the packed ice, sniffing the air, trying to work out if the smell of the countryside, fresh and wholesome, really suited him.

Costa looked him up and down when he opened the door. “Problems?”

“A few,” Falcone replied. “Is she still here?”

“The girl? Of course.”

“No. I meant Emily Deacon.”

Costa nodded. “Sure. I’m going to drive her to the embassy soon.”

“Has she told you anything?”

“About what? I wasn’t aware we were interrogating her.”

“Maybe we should be.” Falcone stayed by the door, not wanting this conversation to go inside. “About this Leapman character, for a start. What the hell’s he up to?”

Costa shuffled on his feet, uncomfortable. “I’m not sure she’s got anything to tell, to be honest. She’s just as much in the dark as we are.”

“Maybe. Maybe not,” Falcone murmured, then stamped his smart city shoes on the doorstep one last time and walked inside, throwing his coat onto a chair and following Costa into the kitchen.

Peroni was clearing away a huge dinner plate still bearing a few eggs and fried potatoes. “Hey, Leo. Want some?”

“I think I’ll pass,” Falcone replied, staring at the group around the table: Emily Deacon, Teresa Lupo, the Kurdish girl. “Am I interrupting something?”

Peroni shrugged. “Just breakfast. Out here in the big wide world people tend to take it together, you know.”

“Cut the lecture,” Falcone snapped. “You do have coffee?”

Teresa Lupo pushed the filter pot over to him. He stared mutely at the thing.

“This is a home, Leo,” she insisted. “A bachelor’s at that. Not a cafe. This is how coffee comes.”

Falcone looked at the girl and held out a hand. “I gather you’re Laila. My name’s Leo Falcone. I have the”-this was for their benefit, not hers-“dubious distinction of being their boss.”

The girl took his hand for a brief moment and stiffened. She didn’t like authority. No one could miss that.

“How old are you?”

“Th-thirteen,” she stuttered.

“I’m sure they’ve asked you this, but let me ask again to make sure. Is there anyone in Rome you want us to contact? Your mother. Your father. Do you know where they are?”

“My father’s dead. My mother’s in Iraq. Somewhere.”

She said it in that flat, neutral tone of acceptance Falcone knew only too well. The kid really did have no one.

He took a ten-euro note out of his wallet. “Fine. You know what I liked to do when I was thirteen and the weather was like this?”

Teresa Lupo gasped. “You were thirteen once, Leo? Now that’s a hard one to swallow.”

“When I was thirteen,” Falcone continued, ignoring her, “I just loved to build snowmen.”

“Snowmen?” the girl asked, wide-eyed.

“Absolutely.” He waved the note. “This is for you.”

Her hand reached out gingerly for the money. Falcone placed the note under a spare dinner plate.

“Once you’ve built me the best snowman I’ve ever seen. And here’s the best part.” He smiled briefly at Teresa Lupo. “Our friendly doctor here is going to help you.”

“I am?” the pathologist snarled.

Falcone leaned over and whispered to the kid, loud enough so they all could hear, “She’s good. I promise.”

Then he waited until the two of them had left the room, Teresa Lupo grumbling under her breath, waited until he heard their voices outside in the snow, ringing in that odd way they do in the extreme cold. Only then did he turn to Emily Deacon, take out a sheet of paper from his jacket and unfold it in front of her on the table.

“I have an ID for the man we’re all looking for, Agent Deacon. Your friend Leapman doesn’t know about this yet. You can give it to him when you go into your office if you like.”

Costa and Peroni crowded round to look at the imprint of the passport. It was issued in the name of Roger Houseman, with a contact address for a wife in London as next of kin, and a photo of an anonymous-looking man wearing thick, black-rimmed glasses.

“Is this who you saw last night?” Costa asked Deacon.

She shook her head. “No. I mean… possibly. It’s a fake passport, surely.”

“It’s a fake,” Falcone agreed. “We seem to be having a run on fake passports.”

“Excuse me?” she said.

Falcone repeated himself. “I said we seem to be having a run on them. The woman who was killed in the Pantheon had a false passport too. But I guess you must know that. After all, you were the people who were contacting her relatives.”

“What?” Deacon seemed genuinely amazed, Falcone thought. And Costa was already bristling on her behalf too, which was worth noting. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“Margaret Kearney. Thirty-eight. From New York City. No such woman. No such home address. We checked. I know we’re not supposed to. We’re supposed to swallow every last piece of bullshit you and Leapman push our way. But just this once we didn’t. Margaret Kearney doesn’t exist. So who is she, Agent Deacon? Whose relatives are you comforting exactly?”

“I don’t know!” She was struggling to make sense of it. It didn’t look like an act, Falcone thought, then reminded himself of what she was. The FBI spent years training their officers. No doubt lying was top of the curriculum. “I didn’t deal with that side of things. I thought it was all handled by the usual people.”

“ ”The usual people.“ Are these the usual people?”

Falcone pulled out another piece of paper from his pocket and placed it on the table. “This came to me this morning from the Palazzo Chigi. It’s a list of five men. All FBI agents. Do you know them?”

She peered at the names, shaking her head. “I’ve no idea who these people are.”

“Really. Do you think they’re armed? I guess so. Are they looking for Roger Houseman or whoever this man is? I guess so too. I’ve worked in the Questura all my adult life, Agent Deacon, and I’ve never seen a piece of paper like this before. It says you have five men here doing God knows what and all I know is, if I happen upon them, whatever’s going on, I just look in the other direction, walk away and pretend they don’t exist. So you tell me: what’s happening?”

“I don’t know! I’d no idea anyone else was working on the case. What are they supposed to be doing?”

“You tell me…”

“I don’t know.”

“You know who this man is-” Falcone began.

“No!” she yelled. “Believe me. I am not part of this.”

Costa was going a little red in the face now. Peroni, sensibly, was keeping quiet. Both knew how Falcone worked. They’d seen this tactic often enough. You push and push and see how far you get. Emily Deacon was, it seemed to Falcone, telling the truth. But he had to make sure.

“Sir,” Costa interjected, “Agent Deacon helped us a lot last night at no small risk to herself. Without her we wouldn’t know anything right now.”

“Thank you, Nic,” she said under her breath. “I can’t believe I’m getting interrogated like this. Not after…”

Falcone finished the sentence for her. “After Roger Houseman, or whoever, nearly killed you. Or, to be more precise, chose not to kill you. Why was that?”

It was such a small thing. A flicker of hesitation in her face. But unmistakable.

“I can’t begin to guess. Perhaps it didn’t fit his plan. Laila had escaped. Perhaps he doesn’t just kill for the hell of it. In fact everything we know about him suggests that’s the last thing he does. He’s too careful. Too obsessed by detail.”

“I agree with the last part,” Falcone said. “Still… if he was faced with an officer of the law. One who was determined to apprehend him…”

“He was too smart for me. And too strong. He…” She thought about this carefully before saying it. “He knows how we work. He actually complimented me on how I’d cuffed the girl. As if he were an instructor or something. Can you believe that? As if he knew I’d done a good job.”

“You didn’t mention that, Emily,” Peroni said quietly, a faint note of distrust in his voice.

“It only just came back to me.”

“Of course,” Falcone said. “It must have been very shocking. You should try to remember more.”

“I will.” She sighed.

“Can we get to hear it too?” Peroni asked.

“That’s the deal,” she said icily. “Isn’t it?”

“I’m sorry, Agent Deacon,” Falcone interposed. “This has been very stressful for you. I didn’t mean to offend. Or interrogate you. It’s just that I’ve spent rather a lot of time in the company of your colleague today and I have to say that man gets to me.”

She wasn’t rising to the bait.

“But you see my problem?” Falcone added.

She didn’t answer for a moment. Then she looked at Costa. “Nic. I need to be in the office. I promised.”

“This is your problem too,” Falcone persisted. “If Leapman is lying to you as much as he’s lying to us there has to be a reason. Can you guess what that might be?”

“I don’t know how you work, Inspector. But when we have problems we raise them with our own people. Not strangers from another force. Another country.”

“Is that what we are?” Falcone queried. “Just a bunch of odd foreigners who happen to be in the way?”

“No. You’re the resident police force here. You’ve got every right to know what we know. That’s what we agreed. I’ll try to honour it as much as I can.”

“I’ll hold you to that.” Falcone passed the paper with the passport details over to her. “You can give him this, for what it’s worth. I don’t believe you’ll find he’s interested. Agent Leapman is one step ahead of us. Of you too, but I think you know that. You ought to consider what that means.”

She was getting up rapidly from the table, anxious to be out of there. Falcone placed his hand on her arm.

“In times like these, Emily,” he said, “it’s best we work together. When you need us…”

She just glared at his hand until he withdrew it. Emily Deacon was no pushover, however uncertain she felt about the position in which Leapman had placed her.

“I’ll bear that in mind, Inspector. Nic. Can we go now?”

Peroni watched the two of them walk out of the door.

“More coffee, Leo?” he asked.

Falcone grimaced at the mug. “Is this really the best Nic can do?”

“Like Teresa said, Nic’s on his own. What kind of man goes to a lot of trouble to make good coffee just for himself?”

The look on Falcone’s face told Peroni the answer.

“OK,” the big cop said. “I guess you’ve got your own espresso machine or something. But just grin and bear it.” He filled the kettle and turned it on.

Falcone felt troubled by his talk with Emily Deacon. He’d got most of what he wanted, but he couldn’t shake off the impression she was withholding something too. The expression on her face when he mentioned the incident in the Campo…

“You’ve got to remember to call me by my rank in these situations, Peroni. This relationship’s getting too damn casual.”

“Sorry.” Peroni smiled wanly at the surroundings. “It was this place. It’s a home, Leo. Ooh… sorry again, sir. At least it was a home. For me it’s starting to feel like one of those old tombs out by the road right now. What am I supposed to do about my partner?”

“He keeps asking me that about you.”

“Arrogant kids…”

Peroni stared out of the window. Teresa Lupo and the girl were steadily building a snowman there. It was a good metre tall. Not bad for the short time they’d had.

“That’s worth ten euros of your money,” he suggested. “Don’t you think?”

Falcone watched the pair outside working on the cold white figure and remembered how that felt as a child, when he’d spend hours building one alone at the weekend house his father owned in the mountains close to the Swiss border. “It is.”

“Where the hell did that idea come from anyway?”

“I loved building snowmen when I was a kid. Is that so odd?”

“No,” Peroni stuttered. “Not exactly. It’s just… ah, forget it.”

Falcone took the note out from under the plate and passed it over. “You give it to her. You’re better with kids than me. And after that, you start talking to her. Hard. You and your friend.”

Peroni blinked. “Hard?”

“Moretti’s pushing me for progress. More than usual. Don’t ask me what’s going on here, but I need to come up with something and that kid’s got to have it. There’s a lot more we need to know. What really happened in the Pantheon?”

Peroni felt his blood begin to rise. “We know what happened!”

“Not the details. She saw it.”

“She’s a thirteen-year-old kid! You want me to drag that out of her just by yelling or something?”

“Yes,” Falcone barked back. “If that’s what it takes. It’s what you’re paid for. Remember?”

Peroni kept quiet. He was a good cop. One of the best, Falcone reminded himself.

“And something else,” Falcone continued. “Why exactly did this creature want the kid dead, which he surely did? Just because of what she saw? It doesn’t make sense. All it would gain him was some more time where he was staying, and sure as hell he’d be out of there soon anyway. I don’t get it.”

The kettle came to a boil and switched itself off. Falcone looked at his watch.

“Forget about the coffee,” he said. “I don’t have time. Get that kid in here when I’m gone. Make her talk. I don’t care how we get this out of her,” Falcone insisted. Peroni couldn’t distance himself from the girl. That was the problem. Maybe that would provide the solution too. “Cruel or kind. I just want to know.”

Peroni was getting mad. “You’re starting to sound like that damn American. Is that what you want?”

“I’m your boss, Peroni. I don’t care how you think I sound.”

“Really? Well, I’m your friend, dammit. I’ve known you for twenty years. I could be ordering you around by now if things had worked out differently.”

Falcone just stared back at him, lacking the heart to say it. Peroni didn’t need to hear the words. They were there somewhere inside him, always. Things didn’t work out differently. Something-some hidden inner flaw-surfaced and sent a well-ordered life tumbling down the wrong turning.

“Fine.” Peroni sighed. “But let this humble minion offer you some advice. I know what you’re thinking. You can run this all your own way, let Moretti and the rest of them stew in their own juices, work the old Falcone magic. But let me tell you something. This time it won’t work. That ugly American has got the pen-pushers on his side. All those nice men in suits with titles that never really make much sense. If you screw with them-”

“This isn’t the Wild West,” Falcone spat back. “I’ve got the law. That’s bigger than any damn piece of paper from the Palazzo Chigi.”

Peroni shook his big ugly head. “The law? Don’t you get a flavour of what’s going on these days, Leo? Haven’t you noticed the only people who care much about the law anymore are idiots like us? These are pick-and-choose times, my friend. Wear the coat that suits you. Forget the one that doesn’t. Start squawking about the law to the people you’re dealing with now and they’ll laugh straight in your face.”

He paused to make sure this hit home. “Let me tell you something, Leo. I do believe that is the dumbest thing I have ever heard you say. And you are not, by nature, a dumb person.”

Falcone couldn’t take his eyes off the two figures beyond the window: Teresa Lupo watching the girl work steadily on the snowman. He could smell the mountains. He could hear the dead voices of his parents. Single kids were like that. Solitary years followed them around like ghosts all their lives.

“Is that so?” he asked.

SWEET, SWEET, SWEET, Billy Kaspar. You’re doing OK for a white kid.

He’d watched the car roll down the Spanish Steps (straight on the line that led past the Pantheon, across the river, on to the Vatican, perfect in its flaming, smoking trajectory), still hearing the voices, baffled by why they refused to leave him, why they’d taunted him all night long, ever since he’d killed the woman. The voices played a part in that, too, Kaspar thought, not that he was trying to evade any of the responsibility. Something was wrong. The last piece of the jigsaw should have fallen into place. All of Steely Dan Deacon’s team were dead now. The Scarlet Beast had died when he killed Deacon himself back in China. He’d been sure of that. He’d worked out the story, pieced it together in jail. There were pieces to be cleaned up. A couple of minor scores to be settled and now some property, important property, precious, sacred memories, to be recovered.

But the voices…

You can hear me, Kaspar. Loud and clear. What did Dan the man say that time?

The voices wouldn’t go away. They sat on his shoulder, whispering, like cartoon demons.

What’d he say, boy?

The same thing, Kaspar recalled. Twice. Thirteen years apart. When they were working on the Babylon Sisters, he’d established a routine with Deacon. They’d meet in the Pantheon, Deacon and he, sit together in a quiet corner. No one could eavesdrop on them in a place like that. And just once Deacon had let slip some doubts.

Say it.

Kaspar spoke the words out loud, “Did you meet the man from the Piazza Mattei?”

It was November 1990. A month before they were due to go in. Kaspar hadn’t understood a damn word. He’d told Dan Deacon so. There wasn’t time to bring anyone else in on the act. It was dumb. Insecure. And a part of him had, at the time, had to quell some rumbling suspicion, some little whisper inside that said Deacon seemed to be checking him out on something.

Then the conversation had gone awkward, went dead. For thirteen long years, until Kaspar had his cord round Dan Deacon’s scrawny throat in Beijing, trying to strangle some last, cathartic confession out of him.

It never came. Dan Deacon just shook his head and said…

What?

“You should have met the man from the Piazza Mattei.”

And he’d tried to. Later, when he’d got free, though it all went wrong, damn near got him caught.

There were two ways to find a secret. You could look for it out in the plain light of day. Or you could keep chipping away at what you didn’t know, waiting for the truth to emerge from the lies. A certainty was growing inside his head, solid, reliable, like the patterns on the floor of the ziggurat all those years ago. It had to work. Otherwise the voices would never go away.

How long we got to wait, Billy K?

“I don’t know,” he whispered between gritted teeth.

The old black voice kept rising up to bait him. Kaspar didn’t like remembering things. Remembering got in the way. There were more important matters to consider. Money, for one thing. Without it he was impotent. All the crucial tasks… buying airline tickets, finding fake passports, weapons, tools, information. Without money they just didn’t happen, and he was running out, fast.

Since coming back into the world, fleeing that burning jail outside Baghdad, he’d salted away $35,000 in seven different bank accounts in the UK, France, Italy and the Bahamas. Small sums always, originating from some equally small crime, then turned into cash and paid in through a street moneychanger. It was more than enough for his needs, if only he had easy access to it. That wasn’t simple. After 9/11 the American and European authorities had started to change the rules about foreign exchange movements. When the first transaction rang alarm bells and he’d been forced to leave San Francisco in a hurry he’d used the Net to pick up information about how the new world order of money control worked. They watched cash movements as much as they could. They tried to heavy-hand information out of the small foreign banks that allowed just about anyone to open an account. Even with legitimate institutions, quite modest movements of money now attracted attention. It was a constant challenge to transfer a few hundred dollars around here and there, always to another ghost account to hide the trail if someone latched onto what he was doing. The result: only a trickle of cash came safely into his hands each week and he needed another source of income to cover sudden, unexpected expenses.

Like equipment. Three bugs and a receiver alone had cost him two thousand euros, almost all the ready money he had, from some crook out in Testaccio. With the block placed on his funds by the bureaucratic banks that left him virtually broke.

He’d used the grubby Internet cafe in the Piazza Barberini before. It was big enough for him to be anonymous. All he need do was pay for a few hours online, type in a fake Hotmail address to validate it, then access his accounts, try to shift a little cash around, do some research, read the news, from CNN to La Stampa, keep ahead of the pack. The place was perfect. You could sit on a PC all day doing anything. No one asked a damn thing. When he was done he just hit the reboot button and the machine wiped out every last keystroke, every place he’d been. It was more anonymous than a phone, more secure than a personal meeting, a place that seemed designed for what he wanted. Once he’d even picked up a woman there, a Lebanese housewife e-mailing back home, and stolen her handbag as she waited for him to emerge from the bathroom of one of the fancy Via Veneto cafes across the road.

Today the place was almost empty, the piazza close to deserted. Snow continued to paralyse the city. He’d read on the Net about the problems the authorities faced: a lack of ploughs since none had been needed for twenty years, an unwillingness by municipal workers to tackle jobs they’d never had to face before. The bus lines were running a quarter of their normal schedule and at a tenth of their usual capacity. The subway was largely unaffected, but in Rome the subway went mainly to the places people didn’t work anyway. It was as if a cold white coverlet of torpor had fallen from the sky and now sat on the city, daring it to move.

There were opportunities here, surely. If only he could understand how best to use them.

He’d found some hair dye in Monica Sawyer’s bathroom, washed it in, waited, washed it out, used her dryer, looked at himself in the mirror and liked what he saw: grey turning chestnut. Just to make certain, when he went out he bought a tube of fake tan and a pair of cheap sunglasses from a shop in Tritone. Change was good. It helped keep him on his toes, made him work to fit inside a new skin, forget who-what-he really was.

Now he stood in the toilet of the Net cafe working the tan into his face. It was a little exaggerated, a little too dark. That was good. It meant people wouldn’t look at him too hard. The glasses fitted only loosely. He peered at himself in Monica Sawyer’s hand mirror, hunching up his shoulders like a punk. This was better than the hair dye alone, much better. Now he could pass as an idiotic hustler, the kind of man who hung around outside tourist restaurants trying to coax the unwary inside with a menu and the promise of a warm, Roman welcome. The kind of man most people would want to avoid.

Then he went back into the deserted main room, sat at a dusty PC out of sight of the moron at the counter, who just might be smart enough to register the change in his appearance, and started wasting time until his head cleared.

How long?

The damn question and the old black voice wouldn’t go away and now he knew he couldn’t stop himself looking, couldn’t help himself when it came to punching the keys, trying out the combinations. All this was new when he first got out. It was amazing how much the world had changed in little over a decade. And it was useful too. A stored global memory you could log into anywhere, provided someone sold the key.

He pulled up Google and typed in “Desert Storm.”

So much stuff, so much of it wrong, just the hindsight you got from the media and the old, old lies. But the dates were there and the deadline: 15 January 1991.

Get your sorry Arab ass out of Kuwait by then or we come kicking.

Yeah. That happened. Except you didn’t wait for January to come, did you? War was about planning, preparation. You placed a few markers to make sure the bets fell your way. At Christmas you slung two camouflaged Humvees underneath a couple of Black Hawks, loaded up two teams of “specialists” who’d been locked in training in a secluded villa out beyond Orvieto for weeks. Then you dropped the vehicles and the crew somewhere in the desert outside Babylon, pointed them to where the friendlies were supposed to be waiting and never said-never-that good and bad were relative in the desert, depended on which way the sun was shining, how many dollars you had stashed alongside the M16s, the rocket-propelled grenades, and the radios that could bring those same Black Hawks storming back to save you anytime you wanted.

Remembering. Kaspar hated remembering. So he hit the other Google button, the one marked “groups,” the one that took you straight into crazy territory, all those anonymous Usenet pits where anyone was anyone, could say what they liked and always be out of reach, untraceable, faceless, nameless, flaming each other night and day all around the world, just wishing there was something you could put in a mail message that would harm the other person-physically, permanently-like a demon biting its way out of the screen.

He liked these places more than anything. You could say your mind and no one ever got payback. You could type in “Desert Storm Babylon Bill Kaspar” and see… what?

A list of episodes from some dumb science-fiction series spawned out of Star Trek. He’d tried it a million times when he first got free. It was always the same. Until this September in Beijing. Something had happened then. Something that had set him on his present path.

Nothing ever got erased on the Net. The message, the solitary first in a thread marked “Babylon Sisters,” was still there.

The Scarlet Beast was a generous beast. Honor his memory. Fuck China. Fuck the ziggurat. Let’s get together again back in the old places, folks. Reunion time for the class of “91. Just one spare place at the table. You coming or not?

It was signed: [email protected] and, seeing it again, remembering the way it first goaded him in the Internet cafe on the other side of the world, Bill Kaspar thought he might go crazy, just pick up the fucking screen there and then and throw it across the empty room, stomp on it till there was nothing left but shattered plastic and glass.

The Scarlet Beast was a generous beast. Honor his memory.

They were saying he was dead now, that he’d been Dan Deacon, too. They lied, always, and maybe that was one good reason the voices wouldn’t go away.

He closed his eyes, squeezed hard, tried to think, tried to remember, calm himself. He hadn’t risen to the bait in Beijing. He’d been too shocked to see it there. Now, increasingly, there was nothing to lose.

He’d read the Bible during all that time in the wilderness, stuck in the stinking jail in Baghdad. The Bible was the only book they allowed him. It was a new experience. When he’d first got his orders, first seen that crazy code name for the unseen figure who created and bankrolled their little project, he hadn’t got the reference. The Book of Revelation provided it. The Scarlet Beast, the Whore of Babylon. She held a golden cup in her hand, filled with abominable things and the filth of her adulteries.

Nine bodies in the ground now and the voices kept screaming at Bill Kaspar, telling him he still didn’t have a face he could believe in, a real name, anything.

Thought you knew the guy, white boy? Or did you screw up there too?

“Like fuck I did!” Kaspar yelled out loud, and stomped a big fist on the grimy desk, sending the Japanese teenager two seats along scurrying into the corner to find another machine.

Unable to stop himself, he typed in a reply and knew immediately that this was what they wanted. Some spook just up the road or in Washington somewhere, some stupid little geek masquerading as the FBI, gawped at a screen, waiting for a fish to wriggle on the line.

Lying fuckhead, treasonable, cowardly scum, he wrote. I’ve waited long enough now. “Bill Kaspar” my ass. This is the real thing. Fear not. There will be a reunion. And soon. Pray we don’t meet.

You hunt. You get hunted. You wave to each other from across the canyon, wondering who gets to taste whose blood first. And when.

He logged off, set the PC to reboot, ran a comb through his hair and took one last furtive look at himself in the reflection of the PC screen. Then he walked out through the side door, avoiding the front desk, out into the freezing street, thinking about distances, measuring the space between this tacky office block and the big building in the Via Veneto, spanning the icy air between them in discrete units in his head.

The bug worked for half a kilometre, maybe more. It was made almost entirely from plastic, which was supposed to let it through any standard scanning system. The little battery was designed to keep it running for a week. By his reckoning the embassy ought to be just in range. To make sure, he crossed the empty road, watched a bus struggling over the slush, then walked a couple of hundred metres up the hill before taking out the earphone of the receiver and popping it in so that it looked as if he were listening to football on a little radio.

He cast one short glance back towards Barberini. A couple of guys in dark coats were going into the Net cafe. Not the usual clientele.

Morons. This was like playing with amateurs. Like playing with little Emily Deacon, who wasn’t that much changed, in some ways, from when she’d been a girl, shaking her long blonde hair to rock music in Steely Dan Deacon’s parlour a lifetime before, a little kid wondering why two grown men full of beer found her so funny.

There was a cafe on the corner of a side street: standard coffee, two uncomfortable wooden seats by the window, just one customer, an old man spooning stained sugar into his mouth out of an empty cup. Bill Kaspar ordered an overpriced cappuccino and sat by the smeary glass, damp with condensation, looking out into the cold world beyond, listening. Bugs were unreliable. They’d never work from inside the embassy. There were devices to prevent that, networks of transmitters that sent out a constant blur of electronic noise to deafen anyone trying to intrude.

But he was fishing too. In truth he was starting to get desperate. He’d tried every other avenue he could think of. The idea had occurred to him the previous night, just when he was beginning to realize who Emily Deacon was as she struggled against his iron grip, just as he was struggling against the voices, trying to convince them there was something better he could do with the girl than take her life.

The bug was the size of a one-cent coin. As he’d wrestled her into submission under Giordano Bruno’s watching statue, he’d pushed the Velcro back into the underside of the collar on her thick black jacket, on the off chance, not knowing how he could use this opportunity or whether she’d be smart enough to pick it up anyway. It was worth a try.

The earphone crackled. There was just static, the unintelligible rustling of a digital infinity, maybe one the embassy was putting out itself. It could be two thousand euros, the last real money he had, straight down the drain.

Then, after thirty minutes, just when the man behind the counter was beginning to stare at his empty cup wondering when he’d buy another, he heard something else, the unmistakable sound of traffic heard from inside a car. Muffled horns, a car engine, the guttural echo of a bus rumbling up the Via Veneto.

He signalled to the barman for another. And in his ear there came two voices: Emily Deacon and a man, a native Italian, so clear, so young and determined, he could almost picture a face emerging out of the hissing, fizzing jingle jangle of sound in his ear.

“YOU CAN PULL in here, Nic. I need to go home and pick up a few things first.”

She indicated an apartment block just up from the embassy. A fancy address. From her expression-Emily Deacon didn’t miss much-Costa was aware a look of surprise had crossed his face.

“It’s a government apartment,” she told him, amused. “No, I can’t afford a place in the Via Veneto myself. Not on an FBI salary.”

She hesitated for a moment, then scribbled a number down on a notepad, ripped off the page and handed it to him. “If you want, call direct. On my mobile. It can be difficult getting through to the office. The apartment is the one with Clinton on the bell. Someone’s idea of a joke, I guess.”

He watched a bus work gingerly past the car, navigating the soft, grey slush, then made a U-turn and parked a little way up from the embassy, just outside the block she’d pointed out.

“You should get some sleep,” he suggested. “It was a long night.”

“I did sleep. Remember?”

“Ah, right.” It was easy to forget. She looked exhausted. Troubled, too. She’d listened silently to Falcone’s brusque interrogation. She was tough enough to take it, Costa didn’t doubt that. But something was bothering her and he had a feeling it wasn’t just a grilling from a pushy Italian cop.

“What do you do next?” he asked.

“Get some fresh clothes, take a shower and go into the office. What else is there?”

Not much, he thought. For either of them. All the same it was worth making the protest. “Why? You can’t work all the time. There’s nothing new, is there? You saw the expression on Falcone’s face. He’s like a barometer. When things look up so does he.”

She was silent.

“Sorry,” he said, cursing himself. “What I meant to say was, there’s nothing new as far as we’re aware. Maybe your friend in there is better informed.”

She smiled and he saw it again: the years just fell off her. Being a pseudo-cop didn’t fit Emily Deacon. It was a deadweight on her slender shoulders, one she wouldn’t shirk, even though he didn’t doubt it had never been part of her plan.

“Maybe he is,” she answered. “Maybe not. How many times do I need to explain this, Nic? Do you really think I’m going to find out?”

“I don’t know.”

The light blue eyes didn’t leave him for a moment. It was a kind of reproach. “You don’t?”

“No. All I know is we’re getting bounced around like junior partners or something. And this is our town, Emily. You should remind the man in there of that sometime.”

“I’m sure he’d listen.”

“Someone has to,” he said firmly.

She shook her head and ran a couple of fingers through her blonde locks.

“Are you asking what I think you’re asking?”

“I’m asking for some trust.”

“I don’t know you.” It came out as a flat, plain statement. It was true too. “Do you go around trusting people you don’t know?”

“All the time,” he replied. “It’s one of my many weaknesses.”

“Then you’re a fool, Nic. I need to go now.”

He peered out of the jeep window, which was clouding over with condensation in spite of the air-conditioning running full blast. She’d picked up her bag and was reaching for the door.

Costa leaned over and put his hand on her arm. He needed to make this point. “Leapman refused to tell us why he knew it was worth coming to Rome before anything happened. Did he tell you?”

“We’ve been through this,” she said with a weary sigh. “I’ve no idea. I just know what Leapman wants me to know.”

“Emily. We told you about Margaret Kearney being a fake. We gave you that passport photo. Seems to me that’s a hell of a lot more than anyone in there”-he nodded towards the big grey building-“has been prepared to give us. And another thing…”

What was the phrase the English used? “In for a penny, in for a pound.”

“What are you doing here? Don’t you ever ask yourself that? Why you? A…”

He didn’t even know what she was back in America.

She came up with the answer for him. “Junior systems analyst.”

“Exactly. Whatever the hell that means. It doesn’t sound like ideal training for chasing a serial killer around Rome.”

“Look. I ask myself this all the time, Nic, and I don’t hear any answers. What am I supposed to do? Shout and scream at Leapman until he cracks? You’re not the only ones in the dark here. Leapman is his own man in that building. Half the embassy staff don’t know who he is and those that do daren’t talk to him.”

“Well, that’s just wonderful-”

“Yes, it is!”

“OK,” he said, trying to bring down the temperature just a little. “Let me make a suggestion. Maybe this is nothing, Emily. Maybe not.”

He waited. She had to ask.

“Well?” The blue eyes wouldn’t let go.

“It’s just this. We’ve been on a kind of alert over attacks on Americans since October. A man called Henry Anderton was attacked in the ghetto. Badly beaten up. Anderton lived, but he was lucky. There were a couple of uniform cops in the area who got involved. Whoever the guy was ran off. If our men hadn’t been there…”

“I didn’t know that.” She was interested. He’d caught her attention. “What did Anderton do?”

Costa pulled out his notebook and rifled through the pages. “I checked during the night. He was some kind of academic working over here on a project. A military historian. Does his name mean anything?”

She shook her head. “Should it?”

“I don’t know. I made a few more inquiries. I can’t find an academic anywhere called Henry Anderton. He was out of hospital after two days, gone to some private clinic, no one knows where.”

“Keeps on happening.”

“Quite.”

He didn’t want to come right out and ask it. He wasn’t sure he was close enough to her yet. All the same…

“Someone in there will know, Emily. It could help. Both of us.”

She sighed, folded her arms. “This isn’t about my father, Nic. Don’t try and use that. I want this guy caught for all of them. More than anything I want him caught because that’s my job now. It’s what I’m supposed to do, like it or not.”

He shrugged. “Sorry.”

She didn’t move.

“Will you at least think about it?” he asked.

A flash of fury again. “What? Smuggling information out of the confidential files of the US embassy? They fire you for that, I believe.”

“Would that be so bad?”

“You mean because I’m lousy at this anyway?”

Delicate territory. “I meant because… I don’t think you enjoy this kind of work.”

“Perhaps I don’t. But they also send you to jail. I don’t imagine I’d enjoy that either.”

He couldn’t stifle a brief laugh.

“What’s so funny?” she demanded.

“I had that kind of conflict myself once. Did all the wrong things. Which were, in my view, all the right things.”

“What happened?”

“Long story. You can hear it sometime if you want. Anyway I’m still here, aren’t I?”

“Oh yes,” she murmured. “You’re here. You and that partner of yours. But no one’s going to miss either of you.”

It hung on a knife edge. He could so easily ruin things.

“Henry Anderton,” she repeated.

“I can write it down,” he said, reaching for the pad.

She snatched it away. “That would be really smart. Are you at home this evening? Six or seven onwards?”

“Could be.”

“Do me a favour too.” She started scribbling something on the notepad. “Look up this name. Everywhere you can find. Tonight we can compare notes. And… Damn!”

There was a shape by the car. Costa felt his spine stiffen, saw images from the previous two nights flash through his head and reached for his gun.

The jeep door opened. Agent Leapman stood there, staring in at them, looking even more pissed off than usual.

“What is this? The kindergarten run?” Leapman demanded. “You should’ve been at your desk an hour ago, Deacon.”

Behind her back, Emily’s hand, small, firm and warm, thrust itself briefly into Costa’s, pushing the screwed-up page from the pad into his palm. Their fingers entwined, just briefly.

Leapman didn’t see a thing. He was too busy making an impression.

“Go sit in there and look busy, will you, Deacon?” the FBI man snarled. “I got things to do.”

She pulled her hand free, reclaimed her bag and started to get out of the car.

“Can’t I come along?”

“What’s the point?” Leapman’s back was turned to her already; he wasn’t even bothering to watch. “Go write a report. File something. Defrag a hard drive. Whatever…”

Costa watched them go their separate ways. She didn’t look back. A part of him resented that. Another knew better. Falcone had said it. Perhaps he’d seen this coming all along.

“Dangerous games,” Nic Costa murmured to himself, then opened the piece of paper and read the name: Bill Kaspar.

From across the road, seated on a hard wooden chair in a tiny cafe, someone else watched them too, watched Emily Deacon flash a card at the gate, then walk past the security guard, straight through the door, into a sea of bright, unintelligible noise.

GIANNI PERONI was good with the girl. No, Teresa Lupo corrected herself, he was amazing. He built a bond with her in a way Teresa couldn’t hope to comprehend, able to communicate an emotion-sympathy, disappointment, expectation-with just a look, able to see too that Laila had a need for what he could provide. Reassurance. And sometimes just attention. It wasn’t easy. It wasn’t all plain sailing. Each time Laila got tired, Peroni backed off. He knew just when to stop pushing.

And the kid wanted to be on her own a lot. Or at least that’s what she pretended. It was an act, though. After a while-ten, fifteen minutes-she’d drift back to Peroni, nudge him with an elbow, ask some pointless question. Her Italian was heavily accented but much better than they’d first thought. She was quick-witted too. Teresa could see a glint of keen intelligence in her dark eyes, though much of the time it was marred by the stain of suspicion every street kid seemed to own. They were never quite happy, even in their own company. Something, some cataclysm, hunger, disaster, an encounter with the cops, was always waiting around the corner.

Laila couldn’t stop stealing either, even in the house. Peroni had patiently removed all manner of stuff-cutlery, food, family photographs, even an old, stained ashtray-from the multitude of pockets in the grubby black jacket the girl wore all the time. God knows what she’d stashed in the room Nic had given her upstairs, where she retreated from time to time.

The three of them now sat in front of the bigger of the two fires, Laila sprawled out teenage-fashion on an old sofa, trying to read a comic book Nic had dug up from somewhere. Peroni was slumped in the chair next to her, eyes closed, snoring lightly. It was getting on for noon. Teresa had already called the office and checked with Silvio Di Capua. The autopsy on Mauro Sandri was done, the report filed safely in the cabinet marked “boring,” the one that said people who die from gunshot wounds and knives were rarely deserving of further attention. Agent Leapman and his friends had made sure she couldn’t get her hands on the one body that did interest her, that of the so-called Margaret Kearney.

Silvio sounded as if he was coping. He needed to be left on his own more, Teresa thought, needed to understand he was capable of this.

Then the sequence of events of the previous day raced through her mind.

“Shit,” she hissed abruptly to herself and reached again for the phone. Gianni Peroni didn’t even stir. He was sound asleep.

When she phoned, Teresa had meant to tell Silvio to take the dead American woman’s belongings round to the embassy. It had slipped her memory. You’re getting old, she thought. This is Alzheimer’s kicking in.

And it doubtless meant another argument soon, maybe more trouble for Leo Falcone from those faceless men above him. She’d heard whispers going round the Questura the previous night. Falcone was in trouble. His career escalator was stuck. Maybe soon it would start to go the other way.

Yeah, she thought. These were the tricks men played when they wanted something. Don’t take a person to one side and say, what’s the problem? Just bring out the whips and the shackles and start talking demotion. Maybe worse.

On the other hand…

It meant there was the opportunity for another look. Once they’d achieved something here. Not that she expected to find anything. She didn’t fool herself about that for one moment. It would just feel right to be trying. She’d been no use to Peroni and Nic with the girl. They might as well have invited in an alien.

Or Leo Falcone, she suddenly thought.

“Laila,” she whispered, catching the kid’s attention. She got a hint of a suspicious smile in return. Teresa nodded at the sleeping Peroni, making the obvious gesture with her two palms pressed to the sides of her head.

Then she pointed to the kitchen and got up. The girl, as she’d hoped, followed her.

There was just enough juice left for a couple of small glasses. Men and shopping, she thought. Venus and Mars.

“We made a good snowman. You must have done that before.”

The girl made a puzzled face. “No.”

The squat figure sat in the garden, staring back at them through the frosted glass, an old man’s hat found in a cupboard somewhere perched lopsidedly on his white head.

“We treat you like a kid. And you’re not. Not really, are you?”

Laila squirmed. Teresa wished she could get the hang of this awkward challenge in communication. Peroni had a family of his own. It gave him a head start with a recalcitrant kid like this.

“It doesn’t matter. When I go to town, is there something you need? Someone you’d like me to contact?”

The dark eyes clouded over instantly. All that suspicion again. Maybe Peroni would have been graced with a real answer. Not her. “No…”

Teresa touched the old, grubby jacket. “How about some new clothes?”

“I get my own clothes.”

“You’re such a pretty kid. Slim too. It would be a pleasure to buy something. I was never slim. At your age…”

Teresa tried to remember herself then, to put the image she had in her own head against what she saw in Laila now. “I was a fat, bad-tempered little monster. Not much changes.”

The girl laughed, a little nervously.

“What’s so funny?” Teresa asked. “Don’t you believe me?”

“No!”

There was a divide you couldn’t cross and if she knew more about kids, as much as Peroni did, she’d have understood that already. A kid could never see an adult and imagine them when they were young, never envisage them as anything but what they were: part of another world, in Laila’s case a threatening one, fixed, run by other people, with their arguments and hidden possibilities. Peroni had worked on that assumption from the moment he started talking to the girl. He didn’t pretend to be anything he wasn’t. He simply set out his position-I will be your friend, you can trust me, just keep listening and you’ll see-and let her find a way to get close to him, like a moth attracted to a distant flickering flame. It established a connection, almost straightaway. It created room for hurt too. Teresa and the kid had both heard the tail end of Peroni’s heated conversation with Falcone. Peroni even told her a little of what it was about. Teresa, the grown-up rational adult, was able to dismiss this level of bickering as the way things were. Laila was different. She heard the sound of men yelling at each other and shrank into herself, fearing the worst.

“So what do you think I was like when I was your age?”

Laila thought about it. “Normal.”

“Hah! How wrong can you get? I’m not normal now, kid. You want to know what they call me? In the Questura?”

“What?”

“ ”Crazy Teresa.“ The lunatic pathologist. Mad as they come.”

Laila shook her head, refusing to accept a word of it. This seemed, to Teresa Lupo, dreadfully unfair.

“It’s true,” she asserted, “whether you believe it or not. And I am crazy. Crazy enough to buy you some stuff just because I want to. Just because all that black gear drives me nuts. Why be pretty and hide it?”

Laila didn’t think of herself as pretty. Pretty didn’t exist in Laila’s world. She probably didn’t think of herself at all. A flicker of anxiety crossed her face. “When will they make me go?”

“Nobody’s making you do anything, Laila.”

She didn’t believe that either. Teresa couldn’t blame her. It was a particularly vague answer, one full of holes even a thirteen-year-old street kid could see.

“Gianni stays with me?”

“Sure. For a while. But he’s a cop. He’s got work to do. Lots of work. You’re not his…”

Teresa checked herself, horrified at the words running through her head: You’re not his kid, he’s got two of them and he already thinks he’s failed them. You’re just filling in the spaces without even knowing it.

“It’s not his job, Laila. We’ll work something out. But Gianni and Nic are paid to find bad people and put them in prison. They have to find that man you saw. They need you to help them.”

The girl threw her skinny arms around herself, staring at the floor.

“I didn’t see anything,” she mumbled. “I just…”

You didn’t threaten in a situation like this. That couldn’t work. Yet they’d spent hours trying to pull out the facts of what happened, piece by piece, from Laila’s head, and it was all so… meagre. The address had come easily. The rest was a jumble. She had followed the man because he looked “interesting.”

Really. How, Laila? The kid didn’t explain. She merely shrugged. This was what she did. Follow people. Maybe, Teresa thought, offer them something-she didn’t want to think what-then take their money and their wallets, too.

They’d got Laila to talk as far as she wanted to. Then she’d clammed up, however subtly Peroni tried to find a way past her defences. Every understated question just walked straight into a brick wall.

Teresa Lupo tried to imagine what it was like for her that night. You sneaked into an old temple because someone left the door open. So what were you thinking?

It’s warm in there.

OK. And what do you think when you get there and see two people, a man and a woman, close up to each other, something going on?

They’re going to make out and I can watch.

OK too. She knew she’d have done that at thirteen.

I can steal stuff. God knows what.

And that was OK as well, except nothing had gone the way it was supposed to. The two didn’t make out. Probably not, anyway, from what Teresa had seen of the body.

The man had strangled her with his special piece of cord, the one he kept for such occasions. Then he took off all her clothes, pulled out a scalpel, looked around the room, flipped her over so that her dead face bit into all that ancient stone, did his work (which he’d know by heart by now, without the need for templates, because he’d done it-how many?-eight times before already), then flipped the poor mutilated bitch back and let her blank, unseeing eyes stare at the oculus, pulled out her arms like that, cold fingers pointing out at some hidden magical points in space.

Teresa looked at Laila and a hidden inner voice provided the answer, persuaded her she knew what had happened, so surely she didn’t need to keep asking this poor kid over and over again.

Laila had done what any sane person would have done in the circumstances. She’d hidden in the shadows, just where she was when Nic came into the place, cowering, shivering, stifling the scream in her throat, refusing to look because seeing would make those noises she was hearing take on another dimension, let them climb straight into her brain and stay there forever.

Teresa put a hand on the girl’s shoulder and smiled. “Just tell me the truth, Laila. Then we’ll leave it. You really didn’t see anything, did you? It was just too… bad. Too scary to look. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. We’d all have done the same.”

“I told you,” the girl said with a pout.

No, you didn’t, she wanted to say. Even Gianni Peroni had missed that, maybe because it needed a woman to understand how a teenage girl would react to that particular fear. Men had a curiosity they couldn’t quell. They had to watch. It was compulsive. A woman had somewhere else to go, somewhere inside herself where she could believe the world was still warm and kind and ultimately good.

She wished to God Peroni had been awake and standing there then. Because Teresa Lupo knew this kid was telling the truth, and knew, too, she was hiding something. No amount of street life, no big, shadowy pre-history, could explain the shifty expression in her eyes. There was a secret there. Maybe it was too personal-thirteen-year-olds could do things for a man too. Maybe…

You haven’t a clue, Teresa told herself. Quit guessing. Either she tells or she doesn’t.

Teresa thought about Falcone and how he would have handled an interview like this. He and Peroni were so different, used such dissimilar tactics to reach the same end. Temperamentally she was closer to Falcone. She didn’t like fishing, didn’t care for walking around a problem, looking for its weaknesses. You plunged in, asked the right questions, then stood there, arms crossed, tapping your feet loudly on the floor until the answers came. It was one reason she liked Peroni so much. Loved him even, though she wasn’t quite sure exactly what that meant. Gianni added some charity into the day-to-day routine of investigation. He got what he wanted by exploiting some innate belief that in just about everyone there existed some small spark of humanity, if only you could find it. She was in no doubt this was a weird way for a cop to proceed. Even Costa, who was once a pushover, had started to toughen up his act of late. The job did that to most of them. Why twenty years of dealing with vice made Gianni Peroni the man he was, more sensitive, not less, was beyond her.

But Peroni had gone as far as he could. It was time to lean on Falcone’s tactics a little. Besides, all she was doing was telling Laila the truth, juiced up a little.

“Do you know what it means to get fired?” Teresa asked sotto voce, casting an eye into the living room, making sure Peroni was still asleep.

Some emotion flickered in Laila’s eyes. “I’m not stupid.”

“I know that. I just wanted to make sure you understood.”

“Understood what?”

Teresa hesitated, as if she’d overstepped the mark. “It’s nothing. It’s about Gianni. It doesn’t concern you.”

“I know what being fired means,” the girl repeated.

“When that other man came, the inspector,” Teresa continued, “he asked us to go outside. Remember?”

Laila took Falcone’s banknote out of her pocket, rolled it in her fingers and almost smiled.

“Quite,” Teresa said evenly. “You heard the inspector and Gianni arguing. Did Gianni tell you what he said?”

“No,” she replied, puzzled.

“Typical.” It would have been, too. “I don’t know why I’m telling you this, Laila. I shouldn’t, but you two seem to get along so maybe you ought to know. Gianni’s in trouble. Things haven’t been going so well recently.”

She let that sink in, waited for the moment, hoped she wouldn’t come to hate herself too much along the way.

“The inspector came to tell Gianni that it’s make-or-break time. Either he gets you to tell him what you know or he’s fired. No job. No money, Laila. Nothing. He’s got kids too. One about your age.”

The girl shivered and stared at the table. “It’s not true.”

Teresa shrugged. “If that’s what you want to think. It doesn’t matter. Why should you worry about Gianni anyway? You don’t even know him.”

She reached forward, touched the kid’s lank hair and hoped to God Peroni never found out about this. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have bothered you with this. It’s none of your business. I’ve got to go soon. I’ll be upstairs for a little while. Please don’t tell him I told you.”

Teresa went up the old stone steps and found a spare bedroom. There was nothing for her there. She just wanted them to be together, Peroni and the girl. She could imagine Peroni waking up, finding the kid staring at him, ready to talk. It could work. She’d seen that extraordinary bond grow between them that morning. It had to work. The kid wouldn’t talk to anyone else.

So she lay on the cover of the bed in the dusty, musky-smelling room, closed her eyes and dreamed a pleasant dream, a stupid, childlike fantasy set in a bright world of pastel colours where the sun always shone, where families, young and old, stayed together always, sharing the years, growing closer all the time. It was the kind of dream place you never wanted to leave, a warm, embracing neverland just beyond reach.

A noise intruded into this welcome reverie: the sound of the downstairs door.

Nic, she thought. He knew as much about family as Peroni in a way. It was all wrapped up in a tight bundle inside this old, cold farmhouse buried beneath the snow off the old Appian Way. Where you could just sleep forever with a musty, ancient coverlet keeping out the freezing cold.

Except…

The door opened and closed again after a while and that didn’t add up, that could only be part of this half dream.

Maybe.

Cursing herself, Teresa Lupo threw off the stupor, forced herself awake and, with growing trepidation, went downstairs.

Peroni still slumbered in front of the fire. Nic was going through the place, room by room.

“Where’s Laila?” he asked. “Upstairs with you?”

“I don’t think so,” she answered.

Teresa Lupo went to the front window. The snow was piling down again, a thick blanket of gigantic soft flakes. Through them she could just make out a couple of fresh tracks zigzagging towards the gate, fast disappearing in the blizzard.

“Shit,” she sighed to herself. “Shit, shit and double shit. The kid’s only thirteen for Christ’s sake. How the hell am I supposed to know she’s an escapologist? Didn’t you see someone on a bike when you came here?”

Nic stuck a hand towards the blizzard beyond the window. “In that weather?”

She went back to the living room. Her handbag was open, her purse, too, the money all gone.

A big, familiar figure came and stood by her. She could sense his puzzlement without even looking at him. Peroni had some silent, unseen way of communicating his emotions.

“Where is she?” Costa asked again.

“You’ve got a bike here?”

He nodded.

“Not anymore. She must have taken it. I’m sorry, I fell asleep.”

“For Christ’s sake…” Peroni muttered under his breath.

“Excuse me! You were sleeping too. And you were the cop here, remember?”

Costa was juggling the keys to the jeep already. He looked wiped out.

“I was trying to help!” Teresa yelled, watching the two men head for the door, not bothering to look back. “I was trying…”

Then they were gone.

“Shit,” she said to no one.

She didn’t even have time to tell them it was her fault. Or to wonder: Why?

A swirl of fatigue swam around her head. Then something made her jump: the phone trilling like a wild beast, the volume turned up to max the way a solitary man would in a big house like this.

“Yeah?” she yelled into the thing.

It was Silvio Di Capua, screaming hysterically from his mobile, wondering why she hadn’t answered hers, not understanding it was in another room, dead to the world while she slept elsewhere. She listened, ruefully grateful that some work had appeared to thrust aside the doubts and guilt lurking inside her head. Silvio had danced this frantic little dance in tantrum-land all too often, but this time round it sounded as if he had good reason to do so.

“It’s a body, Silvio,” she said, when she had a chance to interrupt the babbling sea of details and questions. “Just remember that and follow procedures.”

“Oh, wonderful!” he yelled. “Procedures, procedures. Tell me that when you get here. It’s a slaughterhouse and right near McDonald’s too.”

“Well, in that case it’s somewhat appropriate, don’t you think?”

“This is not a time for jokes, Teresa. Falcone’s livid you weren’t answering your phone.”

“What am I?” she screamed back at him. “Instant fucking pathologist? Just add water and I crawl out of the bottle?”

Besides, she thought, Falcone was going to have plenty more reasons to go berserk soon. His solitary witness had gone walkabout after that little lecture of hers and she didn’t need to wonder about who’d catch the blame on that one.

Think about work. It’s what they pay you for.

“One thing, Silvio. You say the woman’s been cut.”

“Oh yes.”

“Good. Now calm down and think about this because what I’m about to ask is important: are there any signs someone’s used a scalpel?”

The voice on the line paused for breath.

“That and the rest,” Di Capua panted. “You’ve got to get here, Teresa. It’s… scary.”

She grabbed her car keys out of the bag. At least the kid hadn’t stolen them, too.

“Twenty minutes,” she told Silvio. “And make mine a quarter pounder with cheese.”

EMILY DEACON SAT in her small embassy apartment eyeing the phone, wondering what she could say. It had been a month since she’d spoken to her mother, a week since they’d exchanged e-mails. The relationship was close but had boundaries. They’d never really had the right conversation about her father’s death. Even now, she was uncertain how her mother felt about what had happened. Saddened, obviously. But shocked? A part of Emily said that wasn’t the case. And there was only one way to find out.

She called home, went through the niceties, heard the conversation fade into its customary silences.

“What do you really want, Emily?” her mother said after a while.

“I want to bury Dad,” she answered immediately. “I don’t feel I’ve done that yet. Do you?”

There was a pause on the line. “We were divorced, honey. It wasn’t pretty. By the time he died, he wasn’t a part of my life anymore. It’s different for you, I know. That’s only to be expected.”

“But you loved him!”

“ ”Loved.“ ”

Her mother could be tough. Emily knew that. Maybe it was all part of being married to her dad.

“And you hated him? After?”

“No…” Yet there was no emotion in her voice. In a way, Dan Deacon had vacated both their lives long before his last breath in a temple in Beijing. “I can’t have this discussion over the phone. Let it wait till you get home.”

“I can’t wait. I’m in Rome. I’ve got memories. I’ve got things happening here…”

She had to hang on so long for an answer she wondered if the line had gone dead. “Things?” her mother asked.

“Maybe they’re not connected. I don’t know. It’s just…”

Connected or not, there was a larger point.

“Until I know what really happened,” she continued, “until I really know who he was, what he did, why it ended this way… I don’t think he’s quite dead. Not in my head.”

“He got killed by a lunatic, Emily!” her mother yelled. “What more is there to know?”

“Who he was. What he did.”

That pause again. And then the cruellest thing. An act she’d never have expected, not in the harshest, most difficult of times during the divorce.

“I’m not in the mood for this,” her mother snapped. Then the line really did go dead and Emily Deacon understood. She was the only one keeping Dan Deacon’s memory from the grave.

THORNTON FIELDING WAS one of the embassy good guys, a long-serving member of the embassy staff who’d gone native over the two decades he’d spent in Rome. Emily Deacon could remember Fielding from her childhood. He was now fifty-five or so, still as slim, as elegant, as ever, today in a dark, fine-wool suit, perfectly ironed white shirt and red silk tie. He’d lost only the big, bushy head of dark hair, a feature which, she recalled, even back then seemed a little outré for the job. Now he was back to a conservative, short, scholarly clip, turning salt-and-pepper grey. This unvarnished admission of age somehow made his intelligent, constantly beaming face even more likeable.

As a kid she’d had a crush on Fielding, even though she understood he was, in some way she couldn’t quite work out, different. Then, when she finally came back to the Via Veneto under Leapman’s wing, she’d understood. Thornton Fielding stayed in Rome for two reasons. He loved the place so much it was now home. Just as important, Rome didn’t judge him. His sexuality wasn’t an issue here. Professionally, it clouded his career, kept him out of the constant circle of foreign postings that meant promotion in the diplomatic world. Privately-and Fielding was a very private man, she now understood-this city let him breathe, let him be what he was. He’d never have got that in most places, and certainly not at home, amid all the backroom fighting and bitching of Washington.

Leapman always referred to him as “the faggot,” sometimes within his hearing. Maybe that was because Leapman realized she knew and liked him anyway. Or perhaps she was just being paranoid. Either way, the two men kept out of each other’s company as much as possible. It was for the best, though Fielding’s remit covered the maintenance of security systems. As far as she understood, Fielding was the Bureau’s point man within the embassy, the one they came to when things needed fixing or they had to liaise on relations with other agencies. It was inconceivable they’d be able to avoid each other all the time.

She had typed the two names she had-“Henry Anderton” and “Bill Kaspar”-into the network and got nothing. She needed more clearance so, after thinking this through and realizing there were so few options, she walked to Thornton Fielding’s office, waited for one of the assistants to finish talking to him and then went in, taking care to close the door behind her.

Fielding was a smart man. He watched her push the glass shut, then said, “I’m just guessing here, but if you’re about to complain about your boss, Emily, let me save you some time. First, I don’t handle human resources issues for the FBI. Second, even if I did, there’s nothing I or anyone here can do to help you. Leapman is his own man. We just provide you guys with floor space, heating and free coffee. What you do with them is your business.”

It was amusing, almost. Fielding automatically assumed she couldn’t cope with a prick like Leapman. He couldn’t yet separate her from the kid he’d known more than a decade before.

“Why should I want to complain about him?”

“Are you joking? If I had to work with that pig I’d be complaining. Mightily.”

Which wasn’t true at all. Fielding had too much of the diplomat in his blood for that. He’d have found some way around the problem. “He’s not employed for his manners, Thornton. He’s there because he’s good at his job. He is, isn’t he?”

Fielding’s eyes immediately went to the glass door. There was no one there. He held his long, slender arms out wide in a gesture of bafflement. “I guess so. Do you know what that job is exactly?”

The question fascinated her. She’d never met Leapman before this assignment. He came out of nowhere, throwing so many demands and orders in her direction that she’d never thought about his background.

Fielding answered his own question. “You don’t, do you? Well, let me tell you one thing, Emily. I recognize that kind of guy. If you could pull out his FBI records-and that’s a big if, I doubt even I have clearance to get that far-I’d put good money on the fact he started life elsewhere. Military maybe. I don’t know. Don’t care either. I can live with the FBI, most of the time. You’re just a bunch of people with a job to do. Leapman. He’s something else. Something private’s eating that bastard alive. Don’t know what it is. Don’t care. But if it’s not him burning you up, tell me what is.”

She pulled up a chair and sat next to his desk. “I’m here to ask a favour. I want you to tell me about my father.”

“Right now?” Fielding asked. “This sounds like social. I like social. Just not on company time. Couldn’t we have dinner sometime? After the holiday?”

“Yes, we could. But I’d like to start the ball rolling. Being here… it brings back memories.”

“I don’t understand the urgency.” He looked baffled, reluctant to go along with this.

“Let’s say I have a sudden curiosity. I wondered what you felt about my father. I was wondering what he did while he was in Rome. I was so young. And he wasn’t exactly forthcoming about things.”

Dan Deacon had been a military attaché. Strictly speaking, that meant his role was to liaise with his counterparts in the country where he was stationed. But it could be one of those catch-all jobs too. She’d learned enough about that from scanning the newspaper files after he died. There was nothing specific about him. But there were stories everywhere, in reputable journals around the world, which made it plain the job could be a cover for something else.

“I didn’t work alongside Dan,” Fielding replied cautiously. “We just knew one another. He spent a lot of time with the military people here. Really, Emily, I’m the wrong guy. Ask your mom.”

“They divorced ten years ago. Not long after we left Rome. It all got… difficult around then. He was kind of cranky a lot of the time. Didn’t you know?”

“I’d heard,” he said shiftily. “All the same, you should ask her.”

“I have. Either she doesn’t know or she doesn’t want to say.”

Fielding’s good-natured expression dropped for a moment and, for the first time, Emily felt the distance in years between them. Thornton Fielding had always had something boyish about him. Now it was an effort to keep up the act. “Maybe she’s got her reasons.”

“Maybe she has. But if that’s the case, don’t I have the right to know, too?”

“Jesus,” Fielding murmured, then got up and stood with his back to her, staring out of the window, out at the torrent of snow.

She came to join him. It was an extraordinary sight: a cloud of soft white flakes pouring from the sky, creating a world that was cold and bereft of colour.

“Will you look at that?” Fielding murmured. “I’ve not seen anything like it in twenty years. I doubt I’ll see it again either.”

“Why not? It’s just weird weather. It happens from time to time.”

He glanced at her. “All kinds of weird things happen from time to time, Emily. You just have to sit back, do your best, watch and learn, then put the whole damn circus behind you when it’s over.”

“Meaning?” she wondered.

“Meaning your father was a good, brave man who served his country. It’s a tragedy he’s dead. I’m sorry.”

It wasn’t enough. She wouldn’t leave it at that.

“Everyone’s sorry, Thornton, but sympathy doesn’t help. I’m trying to understand something here. You can help me.”

His fine eyebrows rose. “You’re sure of that?”

“Absolutely! You were here. You knew him. It wasn’t just a casual acquaintance. I was a kid back then. I remember you coming round. There was music. We laughed. I think…”

It was a distant memory, one so odd it stuck out.

“We used to dance.”

He laughed. “The beer used to flow in the Deacon household, Emily. Dancing was just a part of it.”

“I know. I wasn’t blind, deaf and dumb. I remember things, not the exact detail but the feeling, the atmosphere.”

He wasn’t taking the bait.

“I remember how bad that atmosphere got in 1991,” she persisted. “So bad it was what led them to divorce a few years later, I think. So what was it? I know he went away. I remember. It was my birthday. He wasn’t there. That kind of thing never happened. He always came back for my birthday. He used to say…”

The memory was so sharp, so real, it brought tears to her eyes.

“ ”When you’ve only got the one kid spoil “ em rotten.” He said it all the time. You must have heard it.“

“Must I?”

He cast an uncharacteristic look, one that just might have been fear, and returned to his desk.

“Have you asked Leapman about any of this?” he asked.

“No. What’s the point?”

“He’s your boss, isn’t he? This is business, Emily. There are rules.”

Fielding assumed she knew something. Maybe that was only to be expected.

“Thornton, I don’t think you understand. Before I came here I was a trainee geek in systems. They put me there because I was so lousy out in the field. I’m in the Bureau because it’s what I was supposed to do. Dad fixed it for me. I don’t pretend I’m good at it. Then, all of a sudden, I’m on a plane to Rome with Joel Leapman in the next seat, staring hard at his copy of The New Republic, not saying a damn word about anything. Maybe I’m here because of my Italian. Maybe because I have that degree and I know a little of the background to this pattern he keeps obsessing about.”

The pattern. That magic weave of curves and angles. She couldn’t get it out of her head.

“What pattern?” Fielding wondered.

“This.”

She picked up a pen and started sketching a sacred cut on his notepad, outlining the part that made the shape of the beast. The man, Bill Kaspar, couldn’t have done it more quickly, more fluently, she thought.

“I don’t know anything about some damn pattern,” Fielding complained, waving a hand at her. “This is your business, Emily, not mine.”

“Yes! It is my business.” Her voice rose. “But believe me. I don’t know what the hell’s going on.”

He thought about that, trying to measure if it were true or not. “Are you kidding me?”

“No!”

Fielding rubbed his hand across his mouth, thinking. “OK. Let’s say I believe you. Here’s the first piece of advice: don’t ask Leapman any of these questions. You’re right. You won’t get an answer. And it may just make things worse between you.”

“Fine,” she persisted. “So let me ask you. Again. What happened in 1991?”

An uncharacteristic sourness crossed Thornton Fielding’s face. “You’ve got books, haven’t you, Emily? You know what happened in 1991. Desert Storm. A bunch of allies got together to kick the Iraqis out of Kuwait.”

“My dad was involved in that?”

“He was the military attaché. What did you expect him to do? Stay here counting paper clips?”

So that part of her memory was accurate. He had gone away, and for some time.

“You mean he went there?”

Fielding shifted uncomfortably. “I don’t know the details. It’s a million miles from my job and I don’t want to know the details. Let me just say this. Rome’s a great place for putting together certain kinds of projects. Particularly ones that have to do with the Middle East. You’ve got the communication. You’re near the action. You don’t have the security issues you hit somewhere like Greece. There are facilities, too, out of town. That’s as much as I know.”

“He was in Iraq?” she pressed.

“Maybe. Probably. Hell, I don’t know and I’m not about to start asking. There was a whole bunch of spooky people around at the time. I kept clear. I didn’t like what was going on. We had a casus belli there anyway-Saddam had invaded another country, for God’s sake. But we hadn’t thought it through. Which was kind of the opposite second time round, in my opinion. With that we’d done the war games over and over again and never quite found the reason to use them. Not in all truth. I very nearly resigned over that one.”

She was shocked. The idea of Thornton Fielding walking out of the embassy after twenty years seemed incredible.

“You thought about quitting?”

Her bafflement seemed to offend him. “Is that so odd? Do you think we just sit here taking orders, never questioning them? I wasn’t the only one. Some guy in the visa department just left his desk the day the first bombs fell, went outside and joined the crowds. Guess he’s making coffee in a bar or something right now. Stupid move. I can’t believe I nearly joined him.”

His eyes slid towards the closed door again. Suddenly she felt guilty for putting this decent man in such an awkward position.

“It’s not always easy to do what’s right, Emily. You have to marry up your conscience with your duty. Sometimes they don’t match too well. One has to make way for the other. Either that or you just start all over again at something new and I’m too old for that. Hell, I’m too good for that. You can walk away or you can wait for another day to fight. I chose the latter.”

She tried to think back to the blur that was her childhood.

“He was gone a long time, I think. I remember it was odd. My mom cried at night. She was worried.”

“He was gone for almost three months,” Fielding said bluntly. “But he came back, Emily. At least you got that. They didn’t all make it.”

“And now he’s dead. This creep killed him anyway. In a temple in Beijing. Killed him, then carved this crazy pattern out of his back, just like all these others.”

The connection hovered just out of reach… Fielding was waving a hand in front of his face. “I thought I told you. No details. Don’t give me any details…”

“Without details I’m lost, Thornton. And I can’t get a single piece of useful information out of the damn system, because it’s blocked off to underlings like me. The moment I get near anything I hit the same barrier: no security clearance. I can’t talk to Leapman. All I’ve got is you and some local cops who maybe know more than they’re letting on.”

“I haven’t got any more, Emily,” he said with resolution. “I shouldn’t have said what I did. Forget it. You want my advice? Go home. Get sick. Lay a complaint against Leapman or something. You won’t have a problem making them believe that. Get back to Washington, find yourself a comfy desk somewhere and get on with your life. Leave Rome and all this shit behind. There are graves around here you don’t want to start digging up.”

“That’s not possible.”

He looked into her face and there was no mistaking his expression. Thornton Fielding was begging her to be gone.

“Why not?” he asked.

“Because I met him last night, Thornton, and I can’t just walk away from this now. He could have killed me, but he didn’t. Why? I don’t know. I have to know. Because of who I am. Because… Shit. He’s smart. Maybe he thought that’s why I was here in the first place? To lure him out. And he just didn’t want to play someone else’s game.”

He put his hands together and asked very slowly, “You met who?”

“Bill Kaspar.”

Fielding’s handsome face drained of expression. “Jesus Christ, Em. Where the hell did you get a name like that?”

“From the guy last night,” she lied. He’d only given her a surname. Her early memories provided the rest. “He called me that, too. ”Little Em…“ ”

Bill Kaspar. What a guy.

They’d all said that of this man once upon a time. She didn’t know how she remembered that or why. Just that it was true. Her father thought that. Perhaps Thornton Fielding did once too.

“ ”Little Em…“ ” she repeated. “But I’m not little anymore, Thornton.”

“I can see that,” he murmured. “We’ve all grown up a lot over the last few years.”

“So tell me. What the hell’s going on around here?”

“Can’t,” he sighed, shaking his head. “I’m not even sure I know myself. I just know this: you steer clear of this shit. Otherwise it will eat you up, like it did…”

He fell silent and looked at the door. It was different now. He wanted someone to intervene.

“Like it did my father? And these other people too?”

“Emily…”

She was making Thornton Fielding squirm and it felt awful.

“You know what I think, Thornton? Leapman brought me here as bait of some kind. I’m my father in disguise just to remind this man of something, to throw him off his guard. Joel Leapman thinks I’ll bring out this… monster. Make him crawl out of the woodwork. Is that what Bill Kaspar was like all along? And if he was…”

He was staring at some papers on the desk, pretending she wasn’t there.

“Dammit, Thornton! You were my dad’s friend. Are you going to help me find out what happened to him or not?”

He didn’t say a thing. It was all a waste of time. Maybe he was so scared he’d report it all back to Leapman the moment she was gone.

“And you’re the guy who nearly resigned over a principle, huh? You expect me to believe that?”

It didn’t make her feel any better. Thornton Fielding was part of the good Rome she remembered, and here she was beating up on him for no real reason at all.

“I can’t help what you believe, Emily. But please. Listen to me. Drop this. For your own sake. Just leave the whole thing alone.”

She stormed through the door and slammed it behind her. Fielding watched her go, miserable. Then he turned round his desk and started typing, very slowly, very deliberately, into his PC.

Emily Deacon walked back to her seat in Leapman’s office. The place was empty. Leapman hadn’t even left a message.

You don’t leave messages for bait.

So what she was supposed to do? Where she was supposed to be? It was an act. Everything was, and there wasn’t a single thing she could do to change matters.

The icon on her e-mail in-box blinked. She opened the message.

I am sorry for the problems you have been experiencing with the embassy network. We are currently carrying out some urgent maintenance in order to rectify this. I have set up a temporary network identity which you can use in the meantime. This will expire permanently at 14.00.

Username: WillFK. Password: BabylonSisters.

Regards, TF

Breathless, she typed in the details, logged on. Then she looked at her watch. It was now 13.05. Fielding wasn’t being generous but maybe this was about as much as he could risk.

Emily Deacon entered keywords she’d tried before, the ones that brought down the security block.

Then she sat back in her seat and watched the screen begin to fill with text.

TWO UNIFORM MEN found Monica Sawyer. They’d taken a crowbar to the boot of the half-burnt-out Renault at the foot of the Spanish Steps, peered inside, wondered about the smell and the dark liquid leaking from the couple of suitcases in there, then popped the locks on them.

One was still in the emergency department of San Giovanni puking up diminishing returns from his breakfast. The second, a raw young recruit who looked no more than twenty, now sat between Costa and Peroni in the jeep, leaning back in the rear seat, eyes closed, face the colour of the grey, wan sky still dumping snowflakes down on the city.

Costa and Peroni had listened in silence to his story. They’d been called in by Falcone as they vainly combed the riverfront for Laila, Peroni complaining loudly that there had to be other cops in town who could handle the call.

Costa had pointed the car towards the Piazza di Spagna as soon as Falcone called. Peroni openly begged down the phone for more time to look for the girl. It didn’t cut any ice. Falcone wanted them there for some reason of his own, and both men had begun to guess what that was. The inspector was feeling cornered, outnumbered, scared even. Big players were gathering around him, people he refused to trust. Costa and Peroni seemed to be at the top of his very short list of confidants just now.

Peroni was right, though. There were plenty of other cops around, all of them on the job already. Plainclothes officers and SOCOs milled around the wrecked vehicle, a tide of white bunny suits and dark winter coats. There were men and women working the nearby shops and offices too. This was a big operation. Falcone wouldn’t commit this kind of resource without good reason. Either he felt that things were coming to a head. Or that they were falling apart.

“Best you go home,” Peroni said to the uniform. The man’s face was utterly bloodless. He’d be seeing the department shrink before long.

“I go off shift at five,” the young officer said curtly. “That’s when I go home.”

Peroni nodded. “What’s your name, son?”

“Sacco.”

“I’ll remember that. You look like a sound guy. This your first?”

Sacco closed his eyes. “The first time I found a body in a suitcase?”

“No,” Peroni replied patiently. “The first murder?”

“Yeah.”

“OK.” Peroni slapped his shoulder and started climbing out of the car. “Take care.”

The two of them walked towards the crime scene, Peroni shaking his head.

“Rookies,” he muttered. “What is it with this macho thing?”

“He’s just doing what he thinks is expected of him, Gianni.”

“Aren’t we all? And what about Laila?”

Peroni’s insistence on treating everyone under the age of twenty-five as somehow not quite fully formed never ceased to astonish Costa.

“Laila’s been living on the streets for months, Gianni. She’s as tough as they come. Didn’t you notice? Whatever you think of the rights and wrongs of the situation, I don’t think there’s any doubt about her coping.”

Peroni favoured him with an icy stare. “Coping. That’s what life’s about, is it?”

“Sometimes,” Costa offered lamely. “It’s what you do in between figuring out what you really want to do with your time. I seem to recall getting this lecture from you once.”

“OK, smart guy,” Peroni conceded. “Throw my own bullshit back at me if you like.”

“Look. When we’ve got the opportunity I’ll help you find Laila.”

His partner nodded at the wrecked Renault. “If he doesn’t get there first.”

That sparked something in Costa’s head. “He’s got bigger things on his plate, don’t you think? Besides…” He wished there was more time to mull over what they knew and less spent chasing phantoms. “He could have killed her last night if he’d wanted, surely? Emily Deacon’s not that great a deterrent. But he didn’t. Have you worked that one out yet?”

“No,” Peroni confessed. “Unless the Deacon woman broke his stride somehow. Not that that makes much sense. What the hell. Let’s put it to one side for now.”

He walked towards the back of the car. A lone idiot in a Santa Claus uniform stood on the corner forlornly shaking a bell. The city never had this particular American import until recently. This Christmas they seemed to be springing up everywhere.

The fake Santa shook his bell, held out a candy stick, looked Peroni in the eye and nodded at the bucket that stood between them on the snow.

“Have you been a good boy, Officer?” the man asked.

“Define ”good,“ ” Peroni snapped and brushed past him.

Nic Costa looked at the sign round the man’s neck: a charity for foreign kids. He threw a couple of notes in the bucket, then shook his head at the candy stick.

“Give it to your friend,” Santa suggested. “Might sweeten him up a bit.”

“I doubt that somehow,” Costa murmured and joined the team by the car.

Falcone was off to one side, just outside the deserted McDonald’s, talking solemnly with a couple of plainclothes cops, watched by the bored-looking Joel Leapman. Teresa Lupo and Silvio Di Capua were working steadily on something in the boot of the car, half-concealed by badly placed screens, one of which Peroni was moving to get access to the vehicle.

Peroni took one glance at the mess in the boot, one at Teresa Lupo, then turned away and asked sharply, “Anything we should know?”

The pathologist moved her head out from under the shadow of the car, nodded at Di Capua to keep going, then walked over to them. “Did you find her?”

“Not yet,” Costa said quickly. “We got called here instead. She didn’t say anything…?”

“No,” Teresa began. “I’m sorry, Gianni…”

“Me too,” Peroni mumbled. “It’s just so… inadequate.”

There were tears starting to work their way into Teresa Lupo’s eyes, something Nic Costa realized he’d never witnessed before.

Peroni spotted them, put his hand on her arm, briefly kissed her cheek and mouthed, “It’s OK.” He cast a vicious glance at the buzzards leering at them from behind the crime scene tape: photographers, reporters and a whole bunch of spectators with nothing better to do.

“I guess you’ve been asked this a million times,” Peroni said when she’d got her act together again, “but how’d this one die?”

Teresa shrugged, regaining her old self. “This is all preliminary, understood? I’m just telling you what I told your boss, with the same reservations. I don’t want to leap to conclusions, not out here. Also, unless someone tells me otherwise, I get to take this lady home. That American bastard isn’t playing body snatchers this time around. Even if she is one of his, there’s no way of knowing yet.”

“How?” Peroni asked again.

“Still working on the method. Let me put this delicately. She’s not exactly complete.”

There was something she didn’t want to say, probably for Peroni’s sake. “She’s naked. Not a scrap of clothing on her. The tags have been taken off the suitcases. I’ll hand them over to forensic once we’re done here. They don’t look like a common make to me. Expensive too. Maybe…”

They looked at each other and knew what each of them was thinking. Work of that nature took a long, long time.

“You haven’t asked me yet,” she said. “That question.”

“He’d marked the skin?” Costa asked.

“Kind of.” She shrugged again. “It’s the same man. But it’s not like the others, though. If you want to look, I can…”

Both men had their hands up before she’d finished the sentence.

“Understood,” she continued. “The honest answer is I don’t know if the cuts were made by the same instrument. Ask me when I’ve cleaned her up a little back in the morgue. There are a lot of cuts on this woman. But there are marks on her back that aren’t just… practical, if I can put it that way. They could be made by a scalpel. Maybe.”

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 for 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 bedtime 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.

And you know the good news, Steely? For the next few months, neither do you.

We are the Babylon Sisters. Shake it.

“I AM CALM,” Peroni protested, storming towards Falcone and the American, his face a dangerous shade of red.

The big man stopped and Costa felt the full force of his frank and intelligent stare.

“Nic,” Peroni raged, “Falcone has half the Questura here. He doesn’t need me. That runaway kid does. I know what I’m doing. Trust me. Leo will love this one.”

“Oh great,” Costa replied ruefully. He knew it was no damn good arguing anyway. In this mood Peroni was unstoppable.

They marched over to the big black car where Falcone and Leapman stood smoking, watching the SOCOs and Teresa Lupo’s team at work, not exchanging a word.

“Sir,” Peroni said briskly.

The inspector cast him a puzzled glance. “Officer?” Leapman looked him up and down.

“I came to hear the theory,” Peroni demanded.

“The theory?” Falcone repeated.

“Yeah. There’s some lunatic out there with a scalpel. This dead woman’s been cut with one, too. Seems obvious to me what’s going on, but I gather our friend here’s got a theory. I was wondering what it was.”

Falcone nodded at the American. “Agent Leapman seems to think it’s coincidence. And we’re not absolutely sure about the scalpel, Peroni. Let’s not jump to conclusions.”

Peroni pulled a face at Falcone. The two men exchanged a brief knowing look that made Costa think something interesting was in the cards. Then Peroni gave his partner that “Can you believe this?” expression and glowered at the FBI agent. “Coincidence? You’ve got to be kidding.”

Leapman blinked slowly, as if to show he was dealing with very stupid people. “No, it’s not coincidence. It’s just sloppy police work. You guys have been so goddamn lax with your news management, half of Rome knows what this guy does to get his kicks. It’s in all the papers. Everyone in Rome is sitting around the breakfast table out there reading every last detail and guess what? Someone’s starting to think maybe he’d like to get in on the act too. This is just copycat stuff, that’s all. Maybe some guy was going to kill the woman anyway and thought he’d mess around with a scalpel just so’s we’d think it was our man all along. Who knows? Not you, that’s for sure.”

Costa couldn’t believe his ears. “Copycat? What the hell does that mean?”

“Read the stuff I send you,” Leapman barked. “Think about it. This guy’s a perfectionist. He kills these people in a specific way. He lays them out in a specific place, cuts pieces into their backs like he’s a surgeon or something. He doesn’t slash them around, then chop ”em into pieces and stuff them into suitcases. This is just run-of-the-mill stuff. It’s out of his class. Beneath him. Besides…“

Leapman stopped himself, as if he were about to go too far.

“Besides what, Agent Leapman?” the inspector asked.

“Besides… nothing. This is not our man. I’ve been working on this longer than you. I’ve got a feel for this guy.”

Falcone was quiet for a moment, thinking, watching the path team work at the car. “I didn’t think that was the way you people worked. Feelings.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Leapman grumbled. “Come up with the smart stuff. Get it off your chest.”

“Perhaps something went wrong,” Costa suggested. “Maybe he’s losing his self-control. Maybe this wasn’t someone he intended to kill.”

Leapman screwed up his face in disbelief. “Don’t you people understand a criminal profile when you see it? Don’t you have a word for ”modus operandi“ in Italian?”

Falcone’s eyebrows rose in amusement.

“I’ll check,” he said dryly. “Where’s the girl, Peroni? I thought she was in your care.”

The big man grimaced. “I don’t know. I thought I’d got her trust. I didn’t realize we needed to keep her under lock and key. I’ll happily go looking if you want.”

“What’s the point?” Leapman snarled. “Immigrant brat like that. She can run rings round you guys. Not that it seems hard. I mean… letting a material witness go-”

The expression on Peroni’s face cut him short. Nic Costa had to hand it to his partner sometimes. The big cop surely knew how to scare the daylights out of people.

Peroni prodded Leapman in the chest and muttered, “I wasn’t aware I was talking to you. Sir.”

Leapman bridled and eyed Falcone. “You got a discipline problem here too, Leo?”

Peroni breathed deeply, gave the American a stony stare, then turned and walked inside the empty McDonald’s. The three of them watched as he marched to the deserted counter, jabbed a finger at something on the rack, then returned with a burger, which he unwrapped steadily on the way, tossing the paper into the street with the casual nonchalance that drove Nic Costa crazy.

Peroni rejoined them, with the burger now steaming in his hand.

Costa knew what was coming next.

“Whoa!” the FBI man yelled as loud as he could manage, so loud even Teresa Lupo turned to listen from the wrecked Renault. “Do you people own some weird work practices or what? I mean, you’ve got a dead woman here carved up in suitcases. You got uniforms wandering round throwing up like punks at a prom. And the best this guy can do is go feed his ugly face. I mean what the fu-”

Peroni stepped forward, seized Leapman by the collar of his winter coat, then crammed the burger full into the American’s gaping mouth, pushing damn hard so that the bun, the mayo, the vegetables and the grey, greasy meat splattered all over his face, down to his bright white cotton shirt and expensive black wool coat.

Leapman reeled back, spluttering, hands waving, food falling down his front, eyes fixed on Peroni, scared of what the big man would do next.

“Ah, ah,” Peroni warned, waggling a finger in his face. “The next burger goes up your ass and that won’t be pretty.”

“Morons!” Leapman yelled, beside himself with fury. “Utter fucking morons! They’ll hear about this, Falcone. I’m warning you!”

“About what?” Falcone wondered placidly.

“About him!” Leapman screamed, stabbing a finger at Peroni.

Falcone folded his arms over his camel-hair coat. “Oh, him.”

He exchanged a single, sly glance with Peroni.

“Officer,” Falcone said in a flat monotone, “that was quite unacceptable behaviour. Do you have an explanation for it?”

Peroni pulled Teresa’s report out of his pocket. “Yeah. This.”

Leapman stared at the sheet of paper, puzzled, suddenly a little worried. “What the hell’s that? I don’t read Italian too well.”

“Forensic report,” Costa answered. “When we looked at the cord he used to kill the woman in the Pantheon we found it wasn’t a cord at all. It was a piece of material, cut into those shapes he likes, then rolled up tight like rope.”

Leapman blinked. He couldn’t decide whether to be defensive or furious.

“You were supposed to hand over everything you had to us,” he snapped. “I gave you that goddamn order.”

Falcone sniffed and stared at Leapman. “Your men left the item behind when they came to collect the body. What were we supposed to do? Chase after them? You can send someone round for it whenever you like.”

“Dammit, Falcone…” Leapman muttered, then went abruptly quiet, probably realizing the three Italians surrounded him now.

Peroni began to read the report. “The fabric in question is all one-inch by three-quarter-inch textile webbing. Desert brown and green 483, mildew resistant, type X, class 2B, made in accordance with MIL-W-5665K, whatever the hell that is. Maybe the shape it’s got. The shape all American military webbing’s got. You know that shape, Agent Leapman?”

“It’s just how it is,” the American replied.

“Is that the best you can do?” Peroni demanded. “This is the shape of US military webbing. He’s killing them with it. He’s cutting it into their backs when they’re dead. And this is US Army issue. No one else uses it. It never gets near to being sold to the public in any way.”

“Hey!” Leapman yelled. “What the fuck do you guys know about the US military? Stuff leaks out of the army like candy from a store. Everything’s for sale if you want it.”

“I’ll take your word on that,” Falcone intervened, before Peroni could reply. “The problem we have, Joel, is this. The forensic evidence is quite clear. It’s not just that the only people who use this material are your military. It’s a new fabric too. It was produced for desert warfare. It only went into production a year ago. From what we can gather, the only place it’s been deployed in the field is covert operations in Iraq.”

Leapman glowered at him. “You knew about this all along, Falcone. This is just some stupid setup.”

Costa pulled out Teresa’s evidence bag, with the latest cord noose inside it. “This came from the car here. We never knew about the cord until a few hours ago. It certainly never found its way into the press. So you see, Agent Leapman, this isn’t a copycat at work. This is the same man. It has to be. So we were wondering, is this what you found with the others, too? And, if it is, why didn’t you tell us? Because surely this man’s been near some US military facility. Recently, too.”

The FBI man was lost, shaking his head.

“Maybe,” he murmured. “But who the hell is the woman here? It doesn’t make any sense. It doesn’t…”

He clammed up, as if he’d said too much already.

“You know, I’m sorry about that,” Peroni said, brushing some of the burger off the lapels of Leapman’s coat. “I sort of lost my temper. It’s a shame, Leapman. We could all get along really well.”

“Really.”

“Yeah. If it weren’t for one thing.”

Leapman waited.

Peroni bent forward and removed a slice of pickle off the American’s collar.

“You’ve got to start telling us the truth,” he said. “Maybe not me. Maybe not even my partner. But Inspector Falcone here. He’s a good guy. A reliable guy. He deserves your trust, don’t you think?”

Leapman just glared back at him, glassy-eyed.

“You need to trust us,” Peroni continued, “because if you don’t we’re just going to keep going round and round in circles, not getting anywhere at all. With this person of yours-of yours-still out there.”

The FBI man sniffed, then looked down the street and signalled for his driver.

“I don’t have the slightest idea what you are talking about,” he said and pushed his way between Costa and Falcone, taking the easy route, the one that didn’t go near Gianni Peroni, stomping off down the street towards his car, not bothering to look back.

Peroni frowned and looked at Falcone. Costa knew what the gesture said: I tried.

“Am I helping around here?” Peroni enquired.

Falcone scowled, not at them, at the chaos around all of them. “Ask me later.”

“I’d like to go after the girl, sir,” Peroni said quietly. “Just me. You can spare one man. This isn’t a personal thing. I still think she’s got something to tell us.”

“Do it,” Falcone murmured. “And, Peroni-it was a nice try.”

“Thanks,” the big man murmured.

Costa followed his partner back to the jeep and handed over the keys.

“Where are you going to look, Gianni?”

“Same places as we did before.”

He had to ask-Peroni got wrapped up in himself sometimes. “What if this guy’s still after her, too?”

“Then I guess we might meet. If it happens I’ll call. Besides, I don’t think you’re going to bump into him with Agent Leapman around. Do you?”

“Not really.” All the same, the difficult relationship with the FBI agent had surely been fractured beyond repair now. Was that what they wanted? “When did Leo put you up to this little act?”

Peroni’s face registered mock shock. “Put me up to what?”

“You know damn well.”

He laughed. It was a good sound, one Costa had missed of late. “Look, Leo and I know each other of old. Sometimes you don’t have to put things in words. You just improvise a little. He’s as sick of that asshole as we are. And what I said was true. It’s time for the guy to level with us. Sooner or later he’s going to realize that himself. We’re supposed to be on the same side, aren’t we?”

Leapman had been shaken by the evidence they’d got on the cord, Costa thought. But there was something else bugging the American too: the latest death. For some reason, he still found it difficult to believe it really was the same killer.

Peroni’s face was serious again. “Forget Agent Leapman for a moment, Nic. Tell me this. Why did Laila run away? I don’t get it. I thought we were doing really well and normally I don’t read those situations the wrong way.”

Costa shrugged. “Who knows with a kid like that? Maybe it’s because you were doing so well. Maybe the idea of closeness terrifies her.”

“Nah,” Peroni murmured and gave him a friendly slap on the shoulder. “I don’t buy that any more than I buy Leapman playing innocent. You don’t know the first thing about kids, do you, Nic?”

“As you constantly remind me.”

He watched Peroni fit his big bulk behind the wheel.

“Call me if you need me, Gianni,” he said.

“Yeah,” the big man laughed and gently eased the jeep out into the street.

Nic Costa hated instincts. They played tricks with your imagination. They lied constantly. He reminded himself of that as Gianni Peroni disappeared down what was once a narrow, medieval lane, now a line of upscale fashion shops running all the way down to the Corso. Some stupid, pointless instinct was nagging at him, raking over the dregs of his memory to find the long-dead face of another partner, Luca Rossi, one who’d wandered off without him in much the same way and never come back.

Instincts intruded into real life, disturbed what really mattered. Besides, something was happening now. Falcone was listening to the squawk of a voice coming out of the car radio. The tall inspector had a look of intense concentration on his face, one Costa recognized. One he liked.

Falcone finished the conversation and scanned the square. Then he caught Costa’s eye, clicked his fingers and pointed, with some urgency, to the car.

JOEL LEAPMAN CAME BACK to the embassy looking uncharacteristically dishevelled, shambling through the door like a bull looking for somewhere to pick a fight. He was in a foul, unpredictable mood.

“Sir?” Emily asked.

“What have you been doing all day? Don’t I get the courtesy of a call from you, girl?”

“I thought…”

She glanced at the computer screen, now back to her customary log-on with its round of low-level information. The camera was still in her purse. That was dumb. She should have taken it back to the apartment, got the evidence out of the building.

“You thought what?”

“I thought you wanted me to wait until you had something for me to do.”

“Jesus…”

Leapman seemed seriously out of sorts. Food spattered his coat.

“Is there something wrong?” she asked.

“Is there something right?” he complained.

Leapman looked like someone with doubts and that wasn’t a position he liked or understood very much at all.

“These cops,” he said. “Falcone. The other guys. Why’d they hate us so much?”

“I don’t think they do,” she answered promptly. “Not for one moment.”

“Really? I just had that big ugly bastard stuff a burger into my mouth. What was that all about?”

She thought about Gianni Peroni. It didn’t add up. “You tell me.”

“None of your business,” Leapman barked back at her.

Emily Deacon was getting deeply sick of this man. Maybe Thornton Fielding was right. She should just file a complaint and get out of his presence.

“Then why ask?”

“Because, because…” he grumbled. “You don’t need to know the reasons. Sometimes events just run away with you, Agent Deacon, and there’s not a damn thing you can do about it.”

“If that’s an apology, you should direct it at them.”

Leapman had pissed everyone off. He’d been working on it from the moment they walked into the Pantheon. It had been deliberate, determined.

“So now they’re the good guys, huh? I should go running to them?”

“I think they’re doing their best in difficult circumstances.”

His voice rose. “It’s difficult for all of us, girl!”

Enough was enough. “It’s more difficult for them, Leapman. They think they’re being kept in the dark. They’re right. And one more thing.” She pointed a slender finger at his chest. “Don’t call me ”girl.“ Not ever again.”

Or “Little Em.”

He laughed and Emily Deacon was surprised to find herself thinking that this was, perhaps, what he wanted to hear.

“So you can answer back,” Leapman said. “Who’d have believed it?”

He leaned over to his PC, keyed in a few words, then turned the screen to face her. It was the RAI news website. The lead story was about another murder in the city, with a photo of a burnt-out car by the Spanish Steps.

“We’re losing this, Emily,” he said in a flat, miserable voice. “And I don’t know why. He’s killed someone else and I’ve got to tell you that’s the last thing I expected. This isn’t part of any pattern I can figure out. He’s killed some poor, helpless bitch who got in the way somehow. I never…”

Leapman fell silent and stared at the monitor.

“You never what?”

“I never thought he’d stoop to that.”

He picked up the phone and hit a speed-dial button.

“Viale?” he asked, and there was a different tone to his voice now, a resigned, almost scared resonance she scarcely recognized. “We’ve got to talk… Just a minute.”

Leapman cupped the mouthpiece and stared at her.

“I’d like a coffee, Agent Deacon,” he said. “Cappuccino. The good stuff, from that place over the road. And take your time. I’ve got work to do.”

NIC COSTA TOOK a deep breath and found it amazing that, only an hour earlier, he’d been worried about Gianni Peroni. Wherever the big man was in the white, frozen world that was Rome, it had to be better than this: clinging to a narrow, icy fire-escape ladder a dizzying height above the cobbled streets in the labyrinthine quarter north of the Pantheon, trying to peer through the billowing blizzard that was sweeping all around him.

Another time, in different weather, when the wind wasn’t trying to peel him off the roof and dash him to the ground below, it would have been quite a view. The Palazzo Borghese should have been somewhere ahead. On a good day the great dome of St. Peter’s would have shone from across the river. Now all he could see was the blinding cloud of ice swirling painfully around his face, threatening to confuse his senses.

Falcone had made it plain: it was his choice. The sly old bastard knew all along what Costa would say too. Nic was the youngest there and the most suited for the job. He’d done some mountaineering once, solitary trips into the Dolomites and the Alps as a teenager. They could have waited until a specialist was brought in, but that meant time, in this weather perhaps a long time. The problem was simple. A woman in the block had reported that an American tourist living on the top floor had, unusually, been absent all day. The previous evening she’d been seen entering the building with a stranger. The same stranger had walked out that morning carrying a couple of big, expensive-looking suitcases. They’d got a description of the man. It could be the same person Costa and Peroni had seen twice now, outside the Pantheon and by the Tiber the previous night.

So should they pile through the door with an entry team, blundering into the place, hoping he was still hiding there? Or did they check it out first to see whether it was occupied or not? And if it was empty, wait a while outside to see if anyone happened to call back?

For Costa the decision was clear-cut. The killer was human, not a monster. It was important not to let go of that fact. The man needed somewhere warm and private to retreat to in weather like this. This could be the first real chance they had of trapping him.

Ordinarily there were easier ways to find out if someone was inside. They could spy from neighbouring blocks. They could use listening equipment through the walls. Not this time. The place was a tiny, probably illegal cabin perched high above street level like a giant toy box flung onto the big, flat roof of the nineteenth-century apartment block. The windows were higher than any of the buildings around. This must be the only home in the area with a scenic outlook, which also meant it was impregnable, impossible to watch. The only way to find out what lay inside was to try to get close somehow, and not through the front door either, which lay up a narrow covered staircase leading from the top floor, giving no visual access into the cabin whatsoever. The fire escape was the only option. If the man was at home, Costa would, the plan said, see so through the outside window and call in the forced entry team. If the place was empty, he’d just take a quick look around, get the hell out of there, then wait with the rest of them until someone came home.

Plans.

Costa shivered on the shaky ladder and wondered what plans were worth now. He hadn’t thought too hard about the weather after he’d talked to the woman who first made the call. He’d just cleared his ideas with Falcone, then walked up three flights of stairs in the building, found the ancient fire escape and started climbing through the swirling snowflakes. He hadn’t thought much about the odd geography of the building either. Falcone and his men were parked discreetly outside, sufficiently close to stop anyone getting away, anonymous enough not to be noticed by someone walking in through the entrance. Or so they hoped.

Still, it didn’t give Costa much room for manoeuvre. They’d agreed it was too risky to post a second person outside the apartment, even one posing as a cleaner or a deliveryman. The individual they were after seemed too smart for tricks like that. Any intruder would stick out like a sore thumb if the man came back in the meantime. So if something went wrong Falcone and his team would have to make an entrance from outside.

Now that he’d climbed those steep, steep stairs Costa appreciated how long that would take. His instinct couldn’t tell him whether someone was at home, but if someone was, it was going to be vital not to alert him.

On this side of the cabin was a blind ledge just a metre wide, pointing back towards the hill where Trinità dei Monti lay, now hidden by the blizzard. Around the corner was a private terrace made for another climate. A pair of small palm trees cut incongruous shapes in their giant terra-cotta pots there, ice fringing their dead leaves, making them look like fantastic Christmas trees. The snow was so deep Nic could only guess at what occupied the other areas of the roof from the rounded white outlines they made: a barbecue, an outside sink with a single, swan-necked tap, a collection of brushes and brooms carelessly left to rot in the open air.

He took one final, careful step up the treacherous ladder, reached the wall and pulled himself upright onto the constricted strip of the ledge, teeth chattering, shivering uncontrollably, feet almost off the building’s edge.

Falcone had ordered him to keep the ring tone on his phone turned off until they knew the state of the cabin. No one wanted the risk of an unwanted call. But in the freezing cold Costa found it difficult to think straight. His brain felt numb. Had he remembered to turn it off or not? And if so when?

With numb fingers he struggled to pull the handset out of his pocket, fumbling it in his hands. The thing was off. He still couldn’t remember doing that. Then he tried to put the phone away, found it slipping in his frozen fingers, knew what would happen next, how the ineluctable laws of gravity and stupidity could collide at times like this.

The handset turned in his dead, icy grip, revolved slowly through the snow-flecked air, bounced off the ledge and tumbled down into the street below.

Costa closed his eyes, felt the flakes begin to fall on them instantly and cursed his luck. He couldn’t go back down the ladder. He was too weary, too cold. The icy rungs were perilous enough when he was climbing, with the odds and gravity in his favour. Nothing could persuade him to risk a descent.

He took out his gun, checked the safety was on, the magazine loaded. He was a lousy shot at the best of times. Now, with unsteady fingers and a head that felt like a block of ice, he’d be as much of a danger to himself as anyone else.

Trying to clear an open space in his mind, he pushed the weapon into the side pocket of his jacket and hoped some warmth and blood would come back to his hand, and with them some semblance of control.

Costa edged carefully along the narrow ledge, spent one dizzying, terrifying moment negotiating the corner, then rolled onto the deep snow of the terrace, glad that he finally had some railings between him and the precipice down to the street. When he got back his breath, when his head told him to keep moving or he’d just curl up in a tight, shivering ball, freeze and die on the spot, he stood up, clung to the wall and edged along it. There was just one small window here. A bedroom in all probability. He neared the glass. The curtain was closed. There was no light inside, not a sign of life.

Keep it that way, he prayed and stumbled on towards the river side of the building.

A memory came from his mountaineering days. Wind speed increases with altitude.

A sudden, gusting blast roared round the cabin’s apex, crackling with vicious energy, dashing hard, stinging ice into his face. He huddled into himself, drawing his arms around his head, fighting to keep upright, vainly trying to wish away the blank numbness growing in his brain. Then the blizzard paused for breath. After a moment in which Costa doubted his ability to go on, he struggled towards the corner of the building, hugged the drainpipe there, steeled himself against another battering from the storm.

Sometimes there were no choices. Whatever the situation inside the cabin, he’d have to break in. It was simply too dangerous to do anything else. He turned the corner, clinging to the brickwork. Most of this side of the building was given over to a French window, almost opaque under a glazing of ice, with just a small gap kept clear by an updraught from the heating inside.

He crept forward and peered through the glass. From this angle he could see a table lamp glowing in the corner of the small, cluttered room. Costa tried to imagine what that meant. Then the wind abated briefly and his heart sank like a frozen stone.

There was a TV on inside. He could hear it. When he stretched his head further beyond the edge of the French door he could see it: a distant, small colour set in the corner of the room. Rousing music, a horse whinnying and gunshots. He glanced at the screen and knew the scene instantly; it was one of those iconic Hollywood moments you never forgot.

John Wayne with an eyepatch turning his horse to face the bad guys at the end of True Grit. Costa almost wept at the irony.

Fill your hand, you son of a bitch.

It’s so easy in the movies. You put the reins between your teeth and ride.

He tried to convince himself he was feeling braver.

Then he saw the man.

People watch TV, stupid, his distant brain reminded him.

He was where you’d expect someone to be while glued to the box. Upright in a chair on the other side of the little room, with his back to Costa and the window, just the top of his head visible, a good crop of brown hair now, not the stupid Mickey Mouse hat Costa had seen on two occasions.

Costa pressed his back to the wall, slid his body down to sit in the snow, head against the brickwork, eyes closed, desperately trying to think.

There was no alternative. His damn phone was gone. Falcone would wait in the street. Not forever. But maybe long enough for him to freeze to death in the vicious gale that gripped this cruelly exposed Roman rooftop.

Fill your hand, you son of a bitch.

You put the reins between your teeth and ride.

He glanced at the French windows. No one expected burglars at this level. Then he took another look inside. The man was engrossed in the TV. He wouldn’t, surely, be sitting in an armchair with a weapon on his lap.

Never assume.

Someone who carved shapes out of his victims’ backs was impossible to predict. All Costa could do was take every precaution in the book, and add a few of his own.

He got up quickly, stood foursquare to the windows, then kicked as hard as he could. The doors flew open, glass crashed to the tiled floor inside. The volume of the TV set suddenly seemed abnormally loud.

“Police!” Costa yelled, and followed up that meaningless comment with all the other orders that were supposed to make sense on these occasions.

The man didn’t budge.

Costa moved purposefully towards the chair, wishing the damn TV would stop screaming like that, wishing the room wasn’t so stuffily hot and filled with a strong smell, aware, too, that there was something deeply strange here, that the walls were covered with a familiar pattern, repeating over and over, painted in a colour he didn’t want to think about too closely.

And the man didn’t shift an inch, which made Costa feel foolish as he watched the back of his head and the thick brown hair, waiting for a response, saying, more than once, “Don’t move.”

There was a noise: voices, the sound of wood smashing, the racket of an entry team on the other side of the door.

Focus.

“Don’t,” he said, accidentally nudging the chair, and watched in shock as a woman’s head, ripped from her body, red gore blackening around her throat, rolled sideways over the arm, fell on his foot, finished upright on the carpet, long brown hair flowing back from a pale dead face, mouth open, fixed in a scream, glassy eyes staring at him, seeing nothing.

“Shit!” he gasped, and lurched over to the smashed French windows, turned his back on this crazy scene, breathed in as much of the freezing, snow-filled air as he could get into his lungs, hoping it would get the noxious smell of meat out of him somehow.

They were inside now. He could hear their voices behind him, hear the shock and someone starting to retch.

And it was as if someone had turned a key, opened the door to a little enlightenment. The unnatural heat and the stench had stirred something the frozen rooftop had put into cold storage. The pieces finally started to fall into place. Teresa Lupo had, in a sense, warned him, if only he’d pursued the point far enough to get the detail.

She’s not exactly complete.

The cord was in one of the suitcases, not around her neck, because it couldn’t have been…

Nic Costa turned round and looked at the room. The geometric pattern covered half of the side wall and would probably have extended further had not the source run out. It was a running fresco painted in what could only be the woman’s blood. And a message too, in English. One word in big, bold, dark red letters, underneath the scrawls: WHO?

The SOCOs would have a field day here. The place had to be crawling with promising material and that, in itself, was strange. Costa had read the files, had understood what happened in the Pantheon. The killer had always been meticulous about cleaning up afterwards. But here he seemed to be leaving a deliberate sign.

I am nearly done. Help me.

Falcone walked through the room, stared at the item on the floor, and sniffed.

“Neat,” he said. “You just prop the poor bitch’s head up on a couple of cushions, turn on the TV and all you see is someone working on a couch-potato habit. Clever.”

Then he came up to Costa, something in his hand.

“You dropped this, that’s why we came up,” the inspector said, and gave him the mobile phone that, just a couple of minutes earlier, had tumbled all the way from the windy rooftop down into the drifts in the street. “Nothing personal, Nic, but I think it’s time you went home and got some sleep. Don’t you?”

BY FOUR IT WAS DARK. By five the city was a treacherous warren of icy alleys, deserted under a blinding moon. But at least the blizzard was over. Gianni Peroni had taken the jeep everywhere he could think of. Back to the Serbian’s cafe next to Termini. Down to the dark corners by the river where she’d lurked the night before. It was futile. The Serbians knew nothing. In the streets there were plenty of kids: dark, miserable figures, huddled inside their black jackets, crowding round fires built from noxious-smelling trash. Not one admitted to seeing her. Peroni tried every last trick in the book-money, threats, sweet talk-and it was just no good. They knew her. That much was plain. But Laila was an outcast in this bunch for some reason. Too strange, too difficult, to fit in.

The way they lived depressed him. It was all such a waste. And it made him think of his own children, warm in a comfy, fatherless home outside Siena, getting ready for Christmas, eyes glittering in anticipation of what was to come.

For the first time ever he wouldn’t be there. Not for one minute. He wasn’t a reflective man. He hated looking back. There were too many painful memories lurking in the recent past. Time healed, he knew that. One day the hurt would subside and, with that miraculous capacity for self-deception every living being on the planet seemed to possess, the good times would come to be uppermost in his mind once more. Till then he just had to swallow down the awkward mix of emotions that kept gripping him. He’d been a good father but, in the end, a lousy husband. It was just another of life’s cruel tricks that one couldn’t cancel out the other.

Tired, bored, almost despondent, he took a break and went for a coffee in one of his favourite places, the little cafe run by the old-fashioned restaurant Checco er Carrettiere behind the Piazza Trilussa in Trastevere. He knew why he went there. He used to take the kids during the summer, watch them wait goggle-eyed as some pretty girl in a smart white waitress uniform piled high some of the best ice cream in Rome.

Today the tiny cafe was as deserted as the frozen piazza. There was a pretty young girl behind the counter but she looked tired and careworn. He sat on a stool pouring sugar into a double macchiato and knew: those times would never come again. They were locked in the past. A part of him had understood that would happen all along. Kids grew up, invented their own lives, went away in the end. But his own stupidity had hastened the process irreversibly, sent them scattering north to Tuscany, where he’d never be anything but a stranger to them now.

He finished the coffee and ordered another. On days like this the system needed caffeine. Then he tried to distract himself by focusing on Laila, racking his brain again about where she might have gone. Something didn’t make sense. He had established a bond with the kid. It just didn’t add up that she should flee the house like that, without a word, without a good reason. He was out of options too. Short of pounding the streets aimlessly, hoping for some rare good luck-and surely that was a waste of time-he might as well give in, call Leo Falcone, get some sleep, then rejoin the team. Maybe even pat the surly American on the back and say sorry a little more loudly if that was what was needed.

The girl behind the counter came with the second coffee and said, to his dismay, “I know you from the summer. Where are your kids?”

“It’s not ice-cream weather,” was the best he could offer.

“It’s not anything weather,” she complained. “I don’t know why I bothered opening the doors. Waste of time.”

“Thanks. I’m flattered.”

“Oh.” She laughed and the sudden burst of amusement brought back the memory of her, not much more than a kid herself, piling up ice cream generously as they waited and watched under the bright, burning July sun. “Sorry. I was just feeling a bit down.”

Everyone did from time to time, Peroni reminded himself. You just had to stop it slipping into self-pity.

“Gimme an ice cream, then,” he said.

Her lively eyes opened wide in amusement. “What?”

“You heard. A tub. Those cones are too damn difficult for an old guy like me. Coffee. Pistachio. And another flavor, too. You choose.”

She looked at him as if he were crazy. “In this weather?”

“Yeah. In this weather. Me customer, you waitress. Work on the relationship, kid.”

The girl disappeared out back for quite a while. When she returned she’d taken off the white uniform and was now wearing a short red skirt and a black sweater.

She sat down next to him. There were two dishes in her hand, each with a selection of multicoloured blobs of ice cream.

“It’s on the house,” she said. “I’m calling it a day.”

“Wise move,” he answered and tried the chocolate. It was exquisite, though the cold made his teeth hurt. “What is it? Boyfriend trouble?”

She eyed him suspiciously. “Oh, per-lease. Is that really the best you can do?”

“It’s a start,” he objected. “You see a pretty young girl. She looks miserable. Nine times out of ten it’s boyfriend trouble. Old men like me understand that. We were young men once. We used to cause these problems.”

She licked the pistachio. It gave her a creamy green tongue.

“Well?” he persisted. “Am I wrong?”

“No…” Her voice had that pouty, caustic edge he recognized growing in his own daughter.

“Well?”

“He never calls!” she cried. “Never! It’s always me. I’m always the one who has to phone him. What is it with men? Do they hate phone bills that much?”

He shrugged. “It’s not just men. That happens in relationships. It’s how it is. Like old-fashioned dancing. One person leads, the other one follows.”

“It’s not like dancing. So why do they do it?”

Her face had that frank, questioning intensity you got from teenagers.

“Because.”

“Because why?”

“Because…” He couldn’t go on. There was no answer. It was a stupid question. He couldn’t think of a single good reason to support what he’d just said.

“Do you call your wife?” she asked. “Or does she call you?”

“My wife calls me. Only rarely and with gleeful updates on how well the divorce is going and what new bills dropped through her mama’s door.”

She didn’t know whether to believe that or not. “Really?”

“Really. No need to feel sorry. Crap like this happens.”

“You’ve got a girlfriend, then?”

Peroni was beginning to wish she’d put the uniform back on. It made her easier to handle somehow. “What is this? I’m the grown-up around here. I ask the questions.”

“So you have got a girlfriend?”

He shifted awkwardly on the tiny metal stool. “Yeah. Sort of. Now. It’s not what you think. I didn’t have then.”

“Sounds a deep relationship,” she commented. “This ”sort of girlfriend.“ Does she call you? Or do you call her?”

Peroni swallowed a huge chunk of gorgeous lemon sorbet, which stuck at the back of his throat and made him gag for a moment. Once the coughing stopped he was dismayed to find some of the gelato was dribbling down his chin. He never would get the hang of eating this stuff.

The girl handed him a napkin. He dabbed at his face, then said, “Bit of both. What’s it to you?”

It was a lie. Teresa always called. He had just never faced the fact till then.

“You’re eating my ice cream for free, mister. I can ask any damn thing I like.” She poked the front of his coat with a long fingernail. “Men who don’t call piss me off.”

“I am getting that message.”

The green eyes narrowed. “Are you? Are you really?”

He thought about it and wondered how he’d come to develop this habit of having weird, half-jocular arguments with strangers in cafes. Nothing like this ever happened in Tuscany. People were too polite there. The Romans just spoke a thought the moment it entered their heads.

“I am hearing what you say, my girl. It doesn’t mean I intend to act on it.”

“We’ll see about that.”

She took his ice-cream dish, even though it was only half-eaten.

“Hey!” Peroni objected. “That’s mine.”

“No it isn’t. I gave it to you.”

“OK.” He threw some notes on the counter. “How much?”

She threw the money back at him. “I told you. It’s free. I just don’t think you phone her. You’re a man. Why would you?”

“That’s my ice cream,” he repeated. “I want it back.”

She waved at the door. “Go outside and call your girlfriend. Now. You can have some more when you come back and say you’ve done it. And no lying. I’m not as dumb as I look.”

“Jesus Christ…” Peroni cursed, and added a few more epithets under his breath that it was best the girl didn’t hear. “What is this?”

“Christmas,” she hissed. “Almost. Hadn’t you noticed?”

Damn teenagers, he thought. You never got an ounce of respect from them. Though maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea after all. Not that he would tell her so.

“I was going to do it anyway,” he objected, heading for the door, trying not to listen to her muttering, “Yeah, right,” straight into his big back.

It was crazy. Now that he thought about it he never called Teresa. He had to look up her mobile number in his address book because he hadn’t even programmed it into the phone.

Teresa answered on the third ring and was quiet for a moment when she heard his voice.

“Gianni?” she asked eventually. “Are you OK?”

“Of course I’m OK! Nothing wrong with me phoning you, is there?”

The pause on the line said otherwise. “Not exactly. Though I have to tell you I am in a very strange apartment right now dealing with a stray head. That lady you met earlier, if you remember. I think we have all the pieces at last.”

“Jesus,” he swore quietly. “Listen, Teresa. There’s something I need to know. About Laila. What happened this morning? Why’d she leave like that? Have you any idea?”

She sighed and said something about taking the call outside. The line was quiet for a short while, then Peroni heard the unmistakable sound of the night wind roaring behind her.

“I told her you were going to get fired unless she gave you something about what happened in the Pantheon,” Teresa said over the noise. “I’m sorry. I thought it might help.”

“I wish I’d thought of that,” he said. He made absolutely sure that there was no edge to his words. “It was really clever. Classic stuff too, Teresa. Good cop, bad cop, huh? Maybe they should pin a badge on you and let me drive the corpse wagon.”

He could almost feel the tension on the other end. “Don’t be so ridiculous, you big goof. Falcone would be lost without you. Gianni?”

“Yeah?”

“You mean that? I did the right thing?”

“Of course I mean that! It should have worked too. If she had anything to tell us…”

She sounded so relieved he felt like going back into the cafe and hugging that mouthy girl.

“Gianni, she knows something. That’s what I don’t understand.”

“Me neither.” If Laila did have more to tell, that ought to have dragged it out of her. “I just don’t get it.”

“Unless…”

Teresa Lupo would have made a good cop. “Unless what?”

“She keeps stealing things. What if she stole something from this guy? What if he took his jacket off when he was doing what he did? Do you think Laila could resist a peek? Or something more?”

“I don’t know. But if she stole something why doesn’t she just give it to us? I mean, it’s not as if we don’t know about her habits. I must have emptied her pockets ten times this morning.”

She didn’t say anything. He was glad of that. She was thinking.

“I’m improvising here so don’t treat it as any more than that,” she said after a long moment. “What if she hid it somewhere? What if that’s why she ran away? To get what she stole, recover it from somewhere? Then give it to you?”

It just fell into a place in his head, the little compartment that said: right.

“God, I wish I could kiss you now,” Gianni Peroni sighed.

The sound of short, tinny laughter flew through the cold night air. “I’m wearing surgical gloves covered in blood. And I’m standing on the roof of some dead woman’s apartment freezing my ass off.”

“All the same…”

He was an idiot, moping over his kids. They were safe and comfortable and warm. He’d drive up to Tuscany when the weather cleared, take them to one of those little country restaurants they loved, maybe introduce them to Teresa Lupo, too. They were just a couple of young people learning to live with damaged parents. It wasn’t ideal, but there were a lot worse things the world could throw at you.

“I’m sorry if I’ve not exactly been normal lately,” he said, his voice choking a touch, doubtless from the aftermath of the lemon gelato.

“If I wanted ”normal,“ Gianni, do you think I’d be dating you?”

“No, I mean…”

The words dried up. He was terrible at this. He just hoped she got the message.

“Can I go back to my head now?” she asked. “This isn’t the right way to have a conversation like this.”

“OK.”

“And by the way-thanks for phoning.”

He heard her cut the call, looked at the empty Piazza Trilussa, and said, “You’re welcome.”

Then Gianni Peroni went back into the cafe, smiled at the girl, said thanks, and sat over a newly replenished bowl of ice cream thinking about what Teresa Lupo had said.

Laila stole something. Where? In the Pantheon, surely. Laila hid that something. Where? In the Pantheon. Where else?

He looked at his watch and thought about that miserable, florid-faced caretaker and the hours he kept. The place closed at seven-thirty. Maybe she’d been there already. But if that was the case why hadn’t she tried to get in touch? Wouldn’t she wait till the very last moment when there were hardly any people around? Or-and this thought appalled him-had she left the thing somewhere that meant she had to spend another night there to recover it?

The waitress was reading a magazine. He placed a ten-euro note on the counter and got up.

“Hey, kid,” he said. “You want to know why that boyfriend never calls you?”

The green eyes looked at him with steady, intrigued intent. “Possibly…”

“Because he’s a jerk. That’s why.”

WILLIAM F. KASPAR SAT in the yellow Fiat Punto he’d ripped off from the cavernous underground car park by Porta Pinciana, waiting, thinking, watching the steady, light fall of snow descend on the deserted Via Veneto, listening to nothing but static from the tiny device clipped into his ear. This could go on forever. Not that he was worried about being caught. The weather meant the car park was dark and dead and deserted. He’d been able to swap the Fiat’s plates with those of a dusty Lancia that hadn’t moved in days. Even when the theft got reported they’d be looking for the wrong car.

That was the kind of thing the old Bill Kaspar would have done. This recent carelessness wasn’t like him. He’d tested his luck in the Net cafe and, for once, got away with it. Still, this was bad. This was unlike him. He knew who he was: William F. Kaspar. He knew where he came from: Kentucky, a big old stud farm outside Lexington, where the horses flew like the wind across green fields that stretched forever, where family meant family, a tight, unbreakable bond of love, and you could get good whiskey straight from an illicit still if you knew where to ask.

Kentucky was where he’d grown up, where he’d loved his first woman. After college in Alabama (and the memory alone sent a Dan song, with its refrain about the Crimson Tide, spinning through his head), a Kentucky military academy had started him on the long, hard road to becoming a soldier, filled him with a love of the classical world through studying the campaigns of Hadrian and Caesar and Hannibal. A Kentucky congressman, no stranger to the covert world himself, had first marked him out as someone whose talents could be used outside a conventional military career.

Memories. Fading ghosts, blurring the line between reality and illusion.

It was a lost world now, a distant sea of faded, two-dimensional mental pictures. He couldn’t return there even if he wanted to. He’d assembled his team, the best team, the Babylon Sisters (shake it, his head said immediately, right on cue) and he’d screwed up, been betrayed, whatever. There’d been blood on the ground, the holy ground, on the floor of the ziggurat, gore tracing the outlines of the patterns there, a red stain on the filigreed stone tattoo Hadrian himself had once touched. He’d wrapped the corpses of his own men and women in that same pattern, trapped in something as mundane as camouflage webbing. Then, before he’d had the chance to go down with them, bad luck got in the way. Thirteen wasted years that changed forever what he was and what he could be.

A killer.

No, that didn’t worry him. Bill Kaspar had killed plenty in his career. Never unnecessarily, never without good reason. It went with the job. Sometimes it was the only way to stay alive. He’d killed in the jungles of Colombia and on the streets of Managua. He’d taken men down in Afghanistan and Indonesia. And the Middle East. He’d been there a lot, enough to speak good Arabic, Kurdish and Farsi. Enough to help him convince a few people who should have known better, men who, temperamentally, hated everything American, that he really could be on their side, put some weapons their way, provided they had the money and information to share.

He’d read every last book he could find on Hadrian, knew every twist and turn of his career all the way from Italica to Rome. Long before these new voices came to occupy his head, Bill Kaspar had thought he heard Hadrian talking to him sometimes, a strong, educated voice carrying across almost two millennia. The voice taught him lessons that kept a man like him alive. How it was impossible to fight battles on multiple fronts, which made it necessary, on occasion, to convert an enemy into a friend. How important it was to be a true leader, one everyone could look up to. And how the ambition was, invariably, more important than the achievement because, in the end, everything was dust and death and failure, a shallow, temporary grave in a foreign place far from home.

Hadrian had been rash sometimes, too, and arrogant. The mind that could imagine a building like the Pantheon had also seen fit to slaughter those who stood in his way. Kaspar had murdered Monica Sawyer brutally, his head full of screaming voices, feeling his power enter her body, and still he couldn’t quite work out why, still he knew that the patterns he’d painted with her blood, the holy frieze of interlocking shapes, was powder over a stupid misdeed, a disguise that failed to hide the enormity of the crime. Monica wasn’t a part of the endgame now playing out on the streets of Rome. She hadn’t-there was no avoiding the thought-merited that particular death.

He was Bill Kaspar. He could have prevented that, locked her in the bedroom with a gag round her overactive mouth, and stayed safe and warm in her apartment knowing not a soul could see there was anything wrong. He could have tried to explain to her that he was in his own frame of reference, an honourable man set upon an honourable mission. A man who had been abandoned, cheated, robbed, even here in Rome.

Bill Kaspar didn’t kill people because he wanted to. Only because he had to. Hadn’t he let Emily Deacon live that night? The bug was a long shot. He was lucky it provided anything. Or was his reluctance to kill a symptom of a greater problem? Had some unconscious part of his head now started to operate on its own, demanding a victim, any victim, just because it hated the idea of being cheated?

Hadrian, the brightest emperor of them all, the man who set limits to the empire, who said this far, no further, was crazy by the end and Bill Kaspar knew he couldn’t even hope to stand in the shadow of that colossus.

He wasn’t sure about any of this. He wasn’t sure it was worth worrying about either. What mattered was finishing the job. For the life of him he couldn’t think of any way he could do that without involving Emily Deacon. It was possible she was the key to the whole damn thing anyway, and that Steely Dan Deacon, in spite of appearances, in spite of the way Deacon had protested his innocence just before he died, had been in charge all along. Kaspar knew he was running out of alternatives. He didn’t dare hang around Net cafes anymore in case they were being watched. Steely Dan’s girl had to provide the answers. Somehow.

The headphone came alive just after dawn, the sound of the thin traffic working its way just far enough up the hill to break through over the embassy’s electronic fog. Then a car engine, something like the notching of gears.

She was in a vehicle. Kaspar pulled the Fiat forward until its yellow nose edged out into the Via Veneto and watched the big iron gates. A red Ford was coming through them, Emily Deacon behind the wheel.

“Little Em,” he said to himself.

Kids didn’t get to pick their parents. It wasn’t her fault Steely Dan turned out the way he was. From what he’d seen, what little he’d heard on the hidden mike, she wasn’t even part of the current plan. They’d just brought her in for old time’s sake, maybe. Or to tease him, to say: Look, the Deacons just go on and on.

In that case, he thought, they ought to look after their precious belongings more carefully.

There was scarcely any traffic. A good agent-and he knew Emily didn’t fit into that category just from watching her the night before-should have been alert, should have seen that a little yellow Fiat was dogging her all the way.

Little Em drove and drove, all the way out to the Via Appia Antica, where she took a turn into what looked like a farm drive, barely passable in the drifts. He drove on for a few hundred yards before pulling into a deserted bus stop. He loved this place. In happier times he’d walked miles and miles along the Appian Way, thinking about the tombs, wondering about the dead feet that had trudged this way over the centuries.

He popped in the earphone and turned up the volume on the radio. Two voices: Little Em and the young Italian he now recognized.

Bill Kaspar listened intently, wondering all the time about his options.

Then he realized he couldn’t stay here. He heard something he should have figured out long, long before.

You’re getting old and careless, white boy, the ghost of the black sergeant whispered in the back of his head. Git out there and find what belongs to you.

He reached into his bag and pulled out the digital music player he’d stolen from a backpacker in the Corso a couple of weeks before. It had all his favourite music on there: the Dan, the Doobies, Todd Rundgren and a couple of hundred others, all good hippie listening for a sixties child turned spook.

It had stacks of spare space for more recording too and a full battery charge, enough to store another ten hours of conversation right alongside the holy grooves.

There was a spare mini-jack in the bag. He connected the radio to the player and hit the record button. Then he placed the kit carefully in a dry patch behind the bus shelter, where it was hidden, not that anyone was going to walk along this deserted piece of imperial Roman highway on such a bitter, hostile night.

It was a good twenty or thirty minutes to the centro storico and the more he thought about the journey, the more William F. Kaspar realized he was in danger of losing the gift. The voices inside him were getting louder all the time. It was a question of killing them before they killed him.

NIC COSTA WAS nodding off on the sofa when the doorbell rang. Emily Deacon walked straight in, grinning, looking bright and rosy, as if she could go without sleep forever.

She had a briefcase in her hand and a notebook computer bag slung over her shoulder. “Where is everyone? Gianni? Laila?”

“Short version: she ran away. Gianni’s looking for her now.”

“Oh no,” she murmured, genuinely shocked.

“Don’t worry. Gianni will find her. He won’t stop till he does. I got a call from him half an hour ago. He wanted to check out a theory Laila stole something from our friend, then dumped it in the Pantheon. Maybe she’s going back to retrieve it.”

She considered the idea. “I think possessions are important to the killer. Perhaps that’s why he wanted to find Laila. But the idea she could leave something in the Pantheon… Wouldn’t you have found it?”

“Not if it was hidden. I’m starting to come to the conclusion that anything’s possible right now. Besides, if you knew my partner better, you’d understand there’s not much point in arguing.”

He looked at her, trying to remember what he’d promised to do.

“You forgot, didn’t you?” she asked with a smile.

He was trying to drag that morning’s conversation back from the depths of his memory. So much had intervened in the meantime.

“I promised I’d check a couple of names for you.”

She held up the laptop case. “It’s OK. I came prepared. I’ve been following the logs. I know what’s been happening. A busy day.”

Costa doubted she knew half of what had really gone on. He led the way to the living room and watched her set up her gear on the coffee table in front of the low sofa.

“You can say that again. Coffee?”

“I’d rather have a real drink,” she said, throwing the black jacket over the back of the sofa, getting straight down to work. “You do have wine here?”

“Wine,” he sighed and wondered how much longer he could keep his eyes open. Then he went to the kitchen, opened a cold bottle of Alto Adige Sauvignon and brought back a couple of glasses. The hard mountain grape had a kick in it. He ought to be able to stay alert for a little while before crashing completely.

Emily looked animated, a little too much for his liking. The more Leapman froze her out of the case, the more she seemed determined to find herself. It was an attractive transformation to witness and the distraction was beginning to worry him.

“Are you all right?” she asked. “You look exhausted.”

“I’ll survive. You said you know what happened?”

She shrugged. “Just from what I’ve seen in the log. Leapman isn’t updating me on anything at all. I heard a woman was killed. And that you guys managed to find where.”

The memory of the little room, and a head rolling crazily off a chair, John Wayne screaming in the background. “Oh yes.”

The blue eyes blinked at him. “Are you sure you’re OK?”

“I’m sure.” He sighed. He didn’t want to go into detail. “It was different though, somehow. Let’s leave it at that.”

She opened the computer, scanned the room for a phone socket, plugged in the machine, then returned to the sofa, motioning for him to join her. “Different… that’s interesting. I don’t think our guy likes different.”

“You think you’re starting to know him?”

“I gave you his name this morning. Now I’ve got a story. A hell of a one. A story that was supposed to end differently, I think, with heroes and victory and what we like to call ”closure.“ ”

Nic Costa took another sip of the wine and tried to convince himself he wasn’t that tired as he sank into the cushions by Emily Deacon’s side.

She hit a key and a couple of images popped up on the screen.

“These are photos I took of some documents I found in the embassy. Leapman may be acting as if I don’t exist but I got a little help there anyway. It took me to places I couldn’t visit before.”

“Photos,” Costa repeated.

“That’s right. They’d have my hide if they knew I had them.”

He groaned and went to the kitchen, returning with a dish of peanuts.

Emily Deacon cast a wry glance at them. “You Italians really know how to treat a woman.”

“Yes and I’ll show you sometime. So you’re stealing information from your embassy?”

Her narrow, pale eyebrows rose perceptibly. “I thought that’s what you wanted. Besides, this is not the kind of stuff you can photocopy, Nic. Are you turning prissy on me? Do you want to hear about it or not?”

He raised the glass and toasted her. “Talk away, Agent Deacon. I’ll try not to fall asleep on you.”

“This is a story that begins in 1990. The Gulf War is about to happen. We were kids then. You do remember the first Gulf War?”

“Sort of. My old man was a Communist Deputy at the time. I remember him burning the Stars and Stripes outside your embassy.”

She stared at him. “You’re kidding me.”

“Not at all. He took me with him. We’re an unusual family.”

“I can believe that,” she conceded. “So you do remember the war. Better than me, but then, you’re a couple of years older. It’s like any war. Each side, naturally, wants some intelligence. And they want it before the fighting even starts. So they put people in beforehand. For reconnaissance. To establish links with the Iraqi opposition. Name the reasons, it really doesn’t matter. They’re putting together a team, mainly American, maybe a couple of Iraqis for local knowledge. They’re putting it together here, in Rome. Don’t ask me how I know. I just do. They don’t want anyone outside their immediate circle to find out. Does that sound plausible?”

Military affairs weren’t Costa’s scene. His late father had a favourite rant about the army. Something along the lines that war was a hangover from another era in mankind’s development, one they’d soon leave behind. Marco Costa hadn’t lived long enough-quite-to see how wrong he was.

“It’s a story,” Costa said.

“No, Nic,” she said firmly, “it’s the truth. The man we’re looking for now was the leader of that team, on the military side anyway. William F. Kaspar. And somehow what happened to him then is behind what’s happening now.”

She paused. “Do you mind if I smoke?”

“You smoke?”

“Sometimes. I have been known to have a boyfriend on occasion too. Are you shocked? What is this? A monastery?”

“Not always,” he answered. “But no one-and I mean no one-smokes in here. If you need a cigarette, do what everyone else does-go outside.”

She looked at the door.

“Later,” he added. “Please.”

He was thinking about what she said. Every military campaign had to be preceded by some kind of covert activity. It still seemed light-years away from a bizarre streak of killings more than a decade later.

“This is all a long time ago, Emily.”

She shook her head vigorously. “Oh no. Only for those of us who were young then. For the people who fought there it’s like yesterday. That’s what wars are like, Nic. Haven’t you talked to an old soldier? It’s the first thing you notice. It lives with them, day in, day out, often for the rest of their lives. Usually it’s the most important thing that ever happens to them.”

“This is Italy. We don’t have many old soldiers.”

There was a sharp intake of breath and a cold flash of those blue eyes. “OK, OK. I represent the great imperial power and we’re just brimming over with soldiers. So take my word for it. When It comes to war, memories don’t fade easily. Especially for him…”

She pointed to the name in the middle of the weird, rambling memo that was on the screen. The one that said: Subject: Babylon Sisters. Status: You have to ask?

He read it, page by page, stumbling over the odd, colloquial language.

“William F. Kaspar again,” he said when he’d finished. “OK. I didn’t have time to chase the diplomat I mentioned. But I called the desk about him. Honest. There’s nothing.”

“I’d be amazed if there was. I didn’t find out much myself. There are no military records. Nothing personal out there. Just this one memo.”

“This is all about some big secret or something?”

“I think so.”

“Then why’s there still some evidence left? Just this one piece?”

“I don’t know!” Something about its provenance exasperated her too. “Maybe it was a mistake,” she suggested, and didn’t look him in the eye when she said it. “They happen. It was filed under the wrong keywords.”

Costa was starting to convince himself she knew more than she was revealing at that moment. But before he could pursue the point she was moving on, impatient to get over her point.

“It isn’t just this memo, Nic. It’s what’s in here too. My dad knew this guy. I vaguely remember him coming to our house. A big, noisy man, all laughter and presents. Loud. And scary too. He was sort of the boss, I think. You can hear it in the tone of this memo. He’s the guy who’s leading this assignment, assembling the teams, taking them into action. My dad with him.”

Cases went bad when they began to bite into your own private life. Nic knew that only too well from his own experience.

“Are you sure? That your father was a part of this?”

“Absolutely. There’s a whole chunk of 1991 when he wasn’t around. I remember it clearly. I’m an only child. They notice things like that. He was gone and while he was away you could touch the atmosphere in that apartment the embassy gave us. Everything felt so odd. I’ve tried to talk to my mom about it and all she says is he was away somewhere, working.”

“Maybe he was.”

“I don’t doubt it. Now I know where. And I know it did something to him, too. When he came back he was… different. He’d changed. Something had marked him. He wasn’t…”

She hesitated, determined to be precise about this last point.

“He wasn’t the same dad anymore. A part of him-the good part, all the life and joy-had gone. He was cold and unhappy. It wasn’t long and he was gone too. Out of the house, talking to the divorce lawyers. There was just my mom and me and a lot-I mean a lot-of bad feeling.”

“I’m sorry.”

Emily Deacon was waving a hand at him in embarrassment. “OK, OK. I know what you’re thinking. This is just a run-of-the-mill family break-up I’m trying to rationalize by blaming it on something else. First point: Bill Kaspar murdered my dad. No arguments there. I knew that without a doubt when I looked into his face and watched him trying to decide whether to kill me, too. Second point: yes, I do want to know why, but it’s not just for me. It’s for all of them. Whatever brought him to kill my dad was the same thing that brought him to kill those others. Knowing that will solve this case for everyone.”

He could see what she’d been through, getting scarred twice over. By the change in her father when she was a kid and by his death a few months ago. Nonetheless there was a strong, rational line in her argument. Emily Deacon could tough it through the pain, or so she thought.

“We need proof, Emily,” he said.

She fired up a Web browser, hammering in a flurry of words. “And you don’t just get it from hacking embassy computer systems. Sometimes it’s waiting out there on the Web. Take a look at this and see what you think.”

Costa vaguely recognized what he was now looking at. It was a newsgroup, one of those anonymous bulletin boards the surveillance people regularly browsed for raw intelligence. There was a short message starting a thread with the title “Babylon Sisters.” The first entry, the one opening the discussion, had been posted on 30 September.

Emily Deacon stared at the screen and said without emotion, “I found this just by looking on the Net. It’s public and it’s meant to be. Someone put it there for a reason. The memo tells you what Babylon Sisters meant. It was the code name for the operation. My guess is that Babylon was the closest notable location to where they were headed. The name’s from an old rock song my dad liked. Maybe Kaspar had the same tastes. And here it is thirteen years later. Think of the timing, Nic. This was posted three days after my dad was murdered.”

He looked at the first message on the screen and hated what he saw, felt tainted by the craziness of the language.

The Scarlet Beast was a generous beast. Honor his memory. Fuck China. Fuck the ziggurat. Let’s get together again back in the old places, folks. Reunion time for the class of “91. Just one spare place at the table. You coming or not?

“You get this kind of crap everywhere on the Net, Emily.”

“Of course. It’s meant to sound like that. Whoever wrote that message doesn’t want it to mean anything to anyone but Bill Kaspar. They know what Kaspar’s like. They know that, from time to time, he’s going to walk up to a PC somewhere in the world, fire up a search engine and type in two words: ”Babylon Sisters.“ Sooner or later he’s going to hit on this. Sooner or later he’s going to respond. Which he does. Read the second message.”

Nic hit the key for the next window.

Lying fuckhead, treasonable, cowardly scum. I’ve waited long enough now. “Bill Kaspar” my ass. This is the real thing. Fear not. There will be a reunion. And soon. Pray we don’t meet.

The reply was dated that morning, signed, simply, “[email protected].”

“It could be Kaspar sending messages to himself,” Costa suggested. The language sounded like the kind of internal argument that might lurk inside the brain of someone who could dismember a woman, park her head in front of the TV to make a room look “normal,” then smear the walls with her blood in a strange, repeating pattern, over and over again. “He’s crazy enough.”

“Why wait more than three months before answering yourself? What’s more, consider this: at eleven this morning, just after Kaspar’s reply got posted, Leapman ordered a couple of the five security guys I never knew existed out onto the street. Want to bet where they’re looking? Net cafes, just to see if he can’t resist the bait second time round. You see what’s happening?”

He could and he wondered if they appreciated how futile it was likely to be. The city was full of places, large and small, where you could wander in off the street and buy fifteen minutes online. Five men couldn’t cover every last Net cafe, moneychanger and bookshop in Rome.

“Would Leapman write something like this?”

She shook her head slowly, deliberately, and he couldn’t stop himself watching the way her soft blonde hair moved. “No need to. We have specialists to do that. Someone from profiling maybe, who’s got access to files I don’t possess. The syntax is very deliberate and direct. Maybe Kaspar is a good ol” boy or something or maybe they just copied it from that first memo I showed you. Though I doubt it. If they knew that was still around on the system my guess is they’d have erased it.“

There were so many possibilities here. Costa wished his head were in better working order to consider them, to separate speculation from fact.

“We need to discuss this with someone. Your people. Mine. Maybe there’s something here. Or maybe we’re just seeing what we want to see.”

“Oh, Nic.” Her hand brushed his arm. There was a flash of a white smile. “You really don’t understand what we’re dealing with, do you? My people know. I think a good few of yours do, too.”

Not Falcone, though, Costa thought. He was sure of that. It just wasn’t the inspector’s style.

“Finish reading,” she ordered quietly. “Leapman’s man came back for a third try.”

He scrolled down and read the third message, posted at noon, again from “[email protected].”

Well hang me high and stretch me wide. Just when you think you made somethin“ idiot-proof they come along and invent a better idiot. Can’t keep those fingers still, can you, Billy Boy? All this cuttin‘ has turned your mind, brother. Call home, brother. Reel yourself in. Nothin” smells worse than an old soldier gone bad. There’s mercy waiting here if only you got the sense to ask for it. Least that way you get to stay alive.

Oh and by the by. What did Laura Lee ever do to you, man? She took a bullet in all that mess back then. So how come she gets dead now and Little Em walks away without a scratch? You turn weakling when there’s a WASP around? Or are you just going soft in your old age?

Costa stared at the words on the screen. There couldn’t be any other explanation.

“Little Em…”

“That’s me,” she said.

AS GIANNI PERONI’S LUCK would have it, the same damn caretaker was on duty and sporting the same bad, red-faced mood he’d owned the night Mauro Sandri died.

The grumpy old bastard spent his time alone at the booth by the door of the Pantheon, checking his watch at regular intervals, wandering over to the centre of the building now and then to sweep away the flecks of snow spiralling lightly down through the oculus. Peroni had a seat in the shadows on the opposite side of the chilly circular hall. The place was a wonderful sight, timeless, even with the anachronistic illumination of the dim electric lights. The distant part of him that remembered school history lessons half imagined an ancient Roman emperor coming here, lord of his own realm, staring up through that open eye, wondering what was looking back at him from the greater kingdom of the heavens. Peroni felt more than a little awed by what he saw. It was wrong that a place like this had been sullied by what happened two nights before. That thought depressed him, that and the plain fact he was probably wasting his time. After he’d left the cafe in Trastevere with such high hopes, Peroni had driven the jeep across the river, parked discreetly in one of the side turnings off Rinascimento and made his way to the monument, taking the caretaker aside for a quiet talk when he arrived. There wasn’t a single sign he was in luck. Only a couple of people had walked through the door while he’d been there, and both of them were searching-in vain-for respite from the cold. The place would close in less than an hour. It was a dumb idea, but it was the only idea he’d got.

Besides, she’d so much time on him. She could have walked in, picked up anything she’d left behind and walked back out into the premature wintry darkness hours ago. But then what? Peroni clung to the belief Laila acted the way she did because, after Teresa’s invented story, the girl wanted to help him. She’d have made contact somehow, surely. He tried to draw some encouragement, too, from the fact the caretaker was adamant no lone, black-clad kid had been in. Given how few visitors the place was getting in this extraordinary bout of ice and snow, there ought to be some comfort in that.

His mind was wandering when the caretaker ambled over, picking snowflakes off the sleeve of his tatty uniform.

“Hey, mister,” he moaned, “seeing as how I seem to be doing you favours day in and day out around here, how about you do one for me?”

“What?”

He nodded at the booth and the small, private office down the same curving side of the building. “Cover for me. There’s supposed to be two of us around but the other guy’s sick and, what with the weather…”

He licked his bulbous lips and Peroni knew what was coming. “All you got to do is sit there and look important. You’re up to it.”

It wasn’t a big favour. The place was empty. Peroni had no intention of sweeping away the snow. Nor had he anything else to do. He’d checked in with Falcone, heard the news about the dead woman’s apartment and received not the slightest reprimand for his behaviour earlier with Leapman. He recognized the resignation in Falcone’s voice. The whole case was in stasis, buried under the weather and the search for something-anything-in the trail of places the elusive killer had abandoned along the way. The likelihood was that until the killer did something-something stupid, without spilling of blood preferably-they’d just be sitting around twiddling their fingers, waiting, not that Leo Falcone would admit as much.

“Where are you going exactly, friend?” Peroni demanded.

The man’s florid, wrinkled face squinted back at him. “It’s no big deal. I need a drink. I’ve been freezing my balls off in this place all day long. There should be a rule about working in weather like this. What am I? An Eskimo or something? Just half an hour. That’s all I ask. Here…”

He led Peroni over to the office by the side entrance, the one with the closed-circuit TVs and security systems that had been so carefully disabled two nights before.

“Everything’s working again now. All you need to know is where the circuit breakers are. If a bulb blows, it’ll throw the switch. You just throw it back and I change the bulb later. If I can be bothered. Also, I’m going to let you have a special treat for helping me. When I come back I’m gonna let you close the door, all on your own. I don’t allow civilians to do that ordinarily. Big privilege.”

Lazy bastard, Peroni thought. It was just a door, one of two, the other closed. A big, very old door.

“Is that so?” he asked.

“You bet,” the caretaker said, on his way out already, picking up speed with the eagerness of a man in desperate need of alcohol.

Peroni sat down on the hard chair behind the glass front of the booth. Then he thought about what he was doing and pulled himself back into the darkness of the little cubicle. Entry into the place was free. People just walked in and out as they pleased, except for the odd dumb tourist who couldn’t believe it was possible to get into a historic monument without a ticket. There was no need to make his presence obvious, none at all.

So he sat on the chair behind the glass and did what came naturally to him in the solitary gloom of the booth. He thought about his kids, wondering what they were doing, whether they were happy, whether they missed him. He thought about Laila, trying to imagine what kind of life she led, what had brought her all the way from Iraq to the streets of a hostile city where no one, as far as he could work out, knew who she was or cared much either.

And he looked at this odd old building, with its spherical interior pointed towards the sky like half an upturned eyeball, the pupil set on the stars. Peroni tried to work out where it lay in the tangle of facts they’d assembled so far. He hadn’t listened much to Emily Deacon’s lecture about why the Pantheon was important. Temperamentally he inclined towards Joel Leapman’s view. That a man who carved weird geometrical shapes out of the skins of the people he slaughtered was just plain crazy, however you tried to rationalize it. Thinking about the idea again inside the Pantheon itself, he was no longer so sure. The kind of killer they were hunting was, undoubtedly, deranged and dangerous. That didn’t make the guy illogical or erratic. The very opposite, in fact. If they’d thought this through-if events had given them the chance even to begin the process-he’d have suggested to Falcone that they should have left some plainclothes guy around here all day, just on the off chance. The old saw about people returning to the scene of their crimes was part of the argument. That did happen. More to the point, this place obsessed the man somehow. It was part of his story, part of the way he saw the world. In its angles and curves, the shadowy corners of its precise proportions, this killer found some hidden truth that made sense of what he was trying to achieve.

Several ideas were starting to form in Gianni Peroni’s head, each of them pushing the memory of his kids and a stray Kurdish girl from his mind.

Then he glanced at the long vertical slit of the door, outlined by the lights of the square behind, and saw a slim, recognizable figure slip through, casting a long slender shadow on the geometric floor.

Peroni sat in the booth, trying to decide how to handle the girl. She’d crept straight into the shade to the right of the altar opposite the entrance, hopping the rope designed to keep out the public, intent on something. Every movement was deliberate, determined. Teresa had been right. Laila was back here to retrieve something. Then another shape came through the door: the caretaker returning, walking steadily, head down, not the shambling gait Peroni expected of a man who, just half an hour earlier, looked as if his mind was set on downing three quick coffees liberally laced with brandy.

Peroni glanced at his watch.

“You’re five minutes late,” he grumbled at the ratty uniform now heading for the booth, then the big cop walked towards the altar, straight through the sharp beam of moonlight tumbling through the oculus.

The girl was just visible behind some kind of drape at the side of the altar, half-concealed by the cloth.

“Laila.”

He spoke her name firmly, with warmth and familiarity. All the same, it wasn’t enough. Her skinny frame stiffened visibly at the sound of a human voice and he began to wonder: if she ran now, was there any way a man approaching fifty could possibly stop her reaching the door and disappearing once again into the night?

“It’s me,” he said. “Peroni. You don’t need to worry. There’s nothing to be scared of. Nothing at all.”

Except…

Just a sudden flashback of all those doubts that drifted wordlessly through the back of his head in the booth waiting for the caretaker to get back. All those wonderful little nightmares kids-or, more accurately, their existence-sent scattering through a parent’s mind at random times: car crashes and meningitis, the wrong friends, the wrong time to cross the road, rubella, crappy bike helmets, a random falling meteor.

And, Laila being a girl, all those fears about men. In the street. In the home. Men who ought to know better. Men lurking half-hidden under the cover of night, and all of them looking for the same thing: someone weak enough to fill the role of prey.

It was a shitty world sometimes, though Peroni guessed Laila had learned that at a very early age.

There was movement from behind the drape. She walked out. Her dark eyes were glittering, a little moist maybe. But she was smiling, smiling in a way he hadn’t seen before. Smiling naturally, a little shy, a little proud too.

She had something in her hands that looked very much like a man’s wallet and Gianni Peroni was suddenly aware that he didn’t give a damn about the thing, however interesting it might prove. The investigation could wait. There was something more important going on here.

“Hey,” he said and held out his arms, wishing to God she’d just run straight into them.

That was too much to ask. Laila walked up, holding the wallet in her right hand, grinning now, wiping tears-of joy, relief, fear, what?-from her cheeks.

Peroni put his arms round her skinny shoulders and hugged that frail, frightened body to his big chest.

“Don’t you go giving your uncle Gianni frights like that,” he whispered into her lank, musky-smelling hair. “He’s an old man, too old for this business.”

And she wasn’t going to the Questura tonight either. They could sleep at Teresa’s. Or Nic’s if she preferred. Anywhere there wasn’t a soul in uniform or the dead, disinterested face of a social worker looking at her, shaking a disappointed, middle-class head, thinking, “Damaged goods, damaged goods, put it down on the list and let someone else pick up the problem.”

Uniforms…

He hadn’t even spoken to the caretaker since the moron got back from his secret drink. It was time to kiss good-bye to this weird, spooky space and re-enter the land of the living.

Soon, too, because when Peroni turned he could see the idiot was now closing the door, that big vertical slab of bronze that had stood in the same archway for almost a couple of millennia, watching generation after generation walk through and gawp at the mysteries within.

Which was odd, given that he was supposed to be handing over that particular privilege as a reward to the dumb cop who’d stood duty while he’d lined his gut with cheap brandy.

“Hey, buster,” Peroni yelled, “you’ve still got some customers inside. Remember?”

The door kept moving. It slammed shut and the sudden absence of the electric lights from the square made Gianni Peroni blink, sent a brisk rush of pain and fear stabbing through the back of his head.

Laila was clinging to him. She was shivering. The caretaker was nowhere to be seen.

Gianni Peroni pushed the girl firmly back into the corner and whispered in her ear, “There’s nothing wrong here. Trust me. Just stay out of the way until your uncle Gianni sorts this out.”

She didn’t protest. She crushed herself up behind the drape again, so hard against the ancient slabs of the stone wall that it looked as if she were hoping she could somehow creep inside the cracks.

There was a sound from nearby, close to the little office the caretaker had shown him. Someone was flipping the circuit breakers. The lights were going off, one by one, in a circular dance. The CCTV cameras too, he guessed. This guy had been here before. Laila knew that, maybe straightaway, just from sensing his presence.

Smart kid, Peroni thought, then yelled out into the airy, pregnant darkness, lit now by nothing more than the silvery light tumbling down the oculus.

“Listen, mister, I’m armed. I’m a cop. And you’re not going anywhere near this kid, not unless you come straight through me. And that’s not gonna happen. Understand?”

Then, just for form, “Best give yourself up now. Or climb out the window and curl up in the cold somewhere. You hear me?”

It was just a laugh. The kind of laugh you got in the movies-hard-edged, nasal, knowing. Foreign too, somehow, because Italians didn’t laugh like that, they didn’t know how to make such a shapeless, wordless sound become a figure of speech in itself, full of meaning, brimming with malevolence.

All the same, a man couldn’t scare you just by laughing. Not even this guy, with his magic scalpel and his skilful fixation on shapes.

No. Peroni knew why the sound made him shrink inside himself, shivering, wondering which way to look. It was the way the laughter echoed symmetrically around the hidden axes of the building, the way it ran along some hidden geometric path, crossing and recrossing the empty interior, time and time again, almost as if the man who made the noise planned it that way, rolled his own voice into some mystic complex of ley lines until it floated upwards and out of the ancient dead eye, out towards the moon.

Peroni flipped the safety catch on his service pistol and tried to remember the last time the weapon had been fired in anger.

“LAURA LEE? Who the hell is Laura Lee?”

Emily Deacon had an answer already. She just wanted to make him earn it.

“Let’s take this one step at a time. Decode the first message before anything else. Remember, this is three days after Kaspar has killed my dad in Beijing. Can that be a coincidence?”

Anything could be a coincidence, Costa thought. You could ruin an entire investigation by reading too much into shreds of half-related information like this.

“Maybe.”

“No! Think about it. Kaspar’s reached right into the heart of the US diplomatic service here. He’s murdered a military attaché. He knows, as sure as hell, there’ll be all kinds of people on his back. So what do these guys chasing him do?”

It could be true. He saw the logic. “You think they sent him this message?”

“Damn right I do. Maybe it’s us. Maybe the CIA. I don’t know. But someone from our side is dialing into his private line. And they’re telling him, ”We know who you are, we know where you’ve been, we know what you’ve done. Time to call it a day, Bill K, before you get hurt too.“ ”

Costa wondered about the implications of that idea. “They seem very forgiving, considering the circumstances.”

“You noticed?” she replied with a brief, icy scowl.

“And Leapman?”

She cast him a sideways glance.

“Have you talked this through with him?”

“Do you really think that would be wise right now? If he doesn’t know already, he’ll go ballistic when he discovers how I found out. And if he does…”

Leapman knew. At least that’s what she suspected. Costa thought about the way the FBI agent had acted ever since that first unexpected meeting in the Pantheon. Some unspoken knowledge seemed to underpin everything he did.

“And the ziggurat?”

She keyed up something on the computer: a page full of technical archaeological jargon and three photos of a mound-like site.

“A ziggurat’s a kind of ancient temple in Iraq. My guess is it’s what Kaspar used as a base for his mission. There’s nothing in any of the official records, of course. But a UN archaeological inspection team was sent into Iraq last summer to try to assess the damage to historical monuments caused by two wars and the Saddam regime. I found this…”

The page was about a temple close to a place called Shiltagh, near the banks of the Euphrates between Al Hillah and Karbala, slap in the middle of ancient Mesopotamia. It was less well known-or, as the report put it, less well documented-than the famous ziggurat at Ur. But it had been damaged during the first Gulf War. What must once have been a low, stepped pyramid was now a crumbling, wrecked mound, its original outline only faintly discernible. Mortar craters pockmarked the broad ceremonial staircase entrance.

“Looks like it must have been a hell of a battle,” he murmured.

“Exactly,” she agreed. “This isn’t collateral damage. It’s not aerial bombardment either. There was one big, vicious firefight here and the report dates the damage to 1991.”

“So why’s this place special?”

“For two reasons. The allied troops never got this far in 1991. There couldn’t have been a pitched battle between conventional soldiers here.”

“All the same-”

She hit a key and said, interrupting him, “Look at the pattern, Nic. The sacred cut. It’s everywhere. This is where he gets it from.”

She keyed up a photo of what he assumed was the subterranean interior of the ziggurat. The walls were peppered with bullet marks. Huge chunks had been carved out of the masonry around the door as if someone had tried to fight off an entering attacker. But the pattern was unmistakable: carved stucco on the walls, repeating itself in every direction. And elsewhere too. There were what looked like spent munitions boxes, wrecked equipment. At the centre was a pile of dark material, clumped together in a heap.

She hit the zoom key on the photo. The material became clearer: bales of ancient camouflage webbing.

“This has the pattern too,” she said. “They’d probably use it for making sleeping quarters, getting a little privacy. It’s just a coincidence, of course. The webbing’s got that shape because that’s how it’s made. Maybe it makes it strong, I don’t know. But, what with the walls and the webbing, I imagine that’s all he saw when they came for him, when he watched the rest of his team getting taken, killed, all around him. On the walls. In the quarters they’d made for themselves. Can you imagine what that must have been like?”

The floor, the low, curving ceiling, reminded Nic of what he’d seen painted in blood in the tiny apartment that stank of meat, just a few hours ago.

“I imagine it wouldn’t leave you. Ever.”

“Right,” she agreed. “So what do you do? You live that nightmare over and over again until you understand what caused it. You get free. You hunt people down in the same kind of sacred places and see if that same pattern gives you any answers.”

She looked into his eyes, not flinching. “Do you think he’s found some answers? Do you think he’s even close?”

He thought of the single word written in blood in the dead woman’s apartment. “Not close enough. When he killed that woman he wrote something, over and over, underneath the pattern. A question. ”Who?“ ”

It didn’t seem to make any sense to her either.

“He’s been killing people he knew,” she said. “Why would he ask that?”

“I don’t know. You said they’d all been strangled with a cord?”

“That’s right,” she agreed.

“No, it’s not. He didn’t use cord. At least not in the Pantheon. It was this stuff. Webbing, wrapped up into a ligature. Teresa held that information back. Leapman is going wild. It was the same with the woman we found today. Teresa got positive ID back from forensic on the first sample. This is US military issue webbing. You can’t buy it retail. And it’s not from years ago either. This particular type wasn’t manufactured until last year. As far as we can work out, the only place it’s been used in the field is Iraq.”

“Whoa.” She sighed. “Now you’re the one who’s going too fast.”

He had to ask. “If this man is that consistent, surely he would have used it on the others? Did he?”

“I don’t know.”

Costa said nothing.

She squinted at him, then pointed at the computer. “You think I’m holding out on you? After this?”

“No.” He laughed. “Not at all.”

Her fingers flew on the keyboard. “Let’s see. I’ve got the standard reports on here anyway. The ones we sent round to you.”

Carefully, one by one, they went through each of the case file summaries. All were brief, reduced to just a few pages.

“This is ridiculous,” Emily snapped. “Why the hell didn’t I see this in the first place? Why didn’t your people?”

“You’re not a detective. And we didn’t have the time. Remember?”

“Sorry.”

She’d left the last document on the screen open. It was the report on her own father’s death. Now that he thought about it, the omission almost screamed at them from the screen. The summary gave a cause of death-strangulation-but contained no forensic data on the material used by the murderer.

“That can’t be normal.” Emily pointed at the screen. “Just a cause of death. Nothing about the actual ligature itself. Forensic would have information there, wouldn’t they? Something that could be useful?”

“Absolutely. A couple of years ago Teresa Lupo coaxed some skin samples out of forensic when they were about to give up on a domestic we had. When they took a good look again they had proof the husband was responsible. He’d pulled the cord so tightly he’d left material there himself.”

Emily glowered at the screen. “Watch this. I still have some clearance.”

She hit the keys. The modem inside the machine cracked and whistled. Costa watched her thrash her way through more security screens than he’d ever seen in his life. Finally she got to where she wanted: a report topped by the FBI logo. The full file, of which until then he’d only seen the summary.

“Forensic, forensic, forensic…” she whispered. “Shit!”

She’d scrolled down until she found the section. It contained just four words: PENDING. REFER TO HIGHER AUTHORITY.

“You could…” he began to say.

“… try the others? You bet.”

She bent down over the computer, head in hands, furious. Costa gingerly put a hand on her shoulder, then removed it.

“Emily?”

“Say something useful. Say something I want to hear.”

“You just made a discovery. You’ve just worked out what those people were really killed with. Not just ”cord.“ The same thing we found here. US military webbing. Maybe he brought it with him. Maybe he acquired it here. Either way, we know. Why else?”

She took her head out of her hands and smiled brightly at him. “Christ, you’re right, too. It’s the dog that didn’t bark.”

Costa looked baffled.

“I’ll explain later, Nic. Now what do we do?”

The last thing she wanted, he thought. “We leave this till the morning. We continue this conversation with other people around.”

“Is that what you want?” At least she didn’t argue. There weren’t many options open to them.

“You mean, am I scared?” he asked.

“Kind of.”

“No.”

“Don’t you ever get scared?”

He looked around the living room. It felt good with another person there. The fires were doing their job at last. The place finally seemed warm, human.

“Not here,” he answered. “Not now. But I have to tell you, another fifteen minutes and I fall fast asleep, Agent Deacon. You’d better have something else to amaze me.”

“Oh, I have,” she said with a grin, and went back to stabbing the keys of the machine.

PERONI HAD NEVER DONE well on the weapons range, never paid much attention to the smart-ass firearms monkeys who thought you could run the world through the sights of a gun. He was a vice cop. He didn’t mind frontline work. When he was a senior officer he’d made damn sure he didn’t let his men take risks he’d never face himself. All the same, vice was nothing like this. It was pimps and hookers, turf wars and stupid, cheated johns. Black and white in the corners sometimes, but more often a difficult, indeterminate shade of grey. Not something shapeless moving through the dark, unknown, unseen, looking to kill for no real reason at all.

Peroni did what seemed natural, put his big arms out and covered the girl with his body. A futile gesture, one designed more for reassurance than anything else. The huge door opposite was completely shut. The side exit was doubtless locked too. This killer made no mistakes. They couldn’t flee. They couldn’t do much but wait and face whatever lay out there.

And think…

Even a stupid old vice cop could do that.

“What do you want?” he yelled into the darkness.

Someone moved, feet tapping on the ancient stone floor, a menacing presence shifting around the echoing interior like a ghost. He could be anywhere. The sound of his shoes on the hard floor bounced around the upturned stone eyelid, came at them from every direction.

“What do you want?” Peroni yelled again.

The footsteps stopped. The hall was silent except for the faint rumble of a lone car making it through the night in the distant world beyond.

“What’s mine.”

It was an American voice. Flat, middle-aged, monotonous. A voice that sounded as if most of the life had been squeezed out of it somewhere along the line. Peroni wondered if he could guess where it came from. If he could just point the service pistol in that direction, loose off a few shots and hope something-good luck, God, the remnants of a benevolent spirit still lurking here-would send one piece of metal spinning in the right direction.

But he didn’t believe in God or ghosts. You had to make your own way.

Peroni turned, still doing his best to cover the kid behind him, peered into her face and held out his hand. She was clutching the wallet, thin fingers tight on the leather, as if it were the most precious thing in the world.

“Laila,” he whispered. “Please…”

Stealing’s a bad thing, he wanted to say. Stealing gets you into big trouble, marks you out for life, as visibly as if you were wearing a sign round your neck saying “evil.” Or a magical symbol carved out of your back.

That was why cops like him spent their working days chasing little thieves, looking for those telltale marks. It was too hard trying to catch the big, smart guys, the ones who carried scalpels and didn’t baulk at using them. And as for the really big fish-well, they just got immunity from their paid politicians anyway. None of which helped a dumb cop on the street to work out the difference between what was truly good and bad.

She passed the wallet over to him without a word, eyes glittering, shiny, full of fear.

“Here!” Peroni bellowed into the darkness and sent the wallet spinning out into the heart of the building, hard enough, he hoped, to take it into the shade on the other side where their unseen stalker could collect it, say a quick thank-you, then disappear into the night leaving everyone safe and sound.

Instead, the thing fell with a gentle thud, slap bang in the middle of the tiny mound of snow building beneath the oculus, and sat there under the silver light like a beacon, like a bright, shiny trap.

“I didn’t mean to do that,” Peroni said, half to himself, half to the figure hiding in the dark. “I’m not playing any tricks here, friend. Just take the damn wallet and go, will you?”

The gun felt heavy in his hand. Behind him, Laila was beginning to squirm. If there’d been an easy and obvious exit he’d have sent her flying towards it, screaming at her to get the hell out of this makeshift tomb in the centre of a slumbering, snow-covered city. Instead, all he could think of was how to hide her from whatever was approaching, how to keep her frail body protected behind his.

And even that wasn’t enough. When it came, straight out of the darkness, it came as a storm of pure physical force, furious, relentless. The man was punching and kicking and screaming, pistol-whipping Peroni’s skull with what felt like a hammer. The gun flew out of Peroni’s hand, clattering across the stonework, spinning into the shadows. He tried to dodge, to find some way of shifting his frame away from the sudden, vicious onslaught of violence, but it was impossible. His hands left Laila and tried to cover his face. He felt his breath flee from his lungs, his mind start to wander off into another place.

… death, they called it, somewhere this man knew very well indeed. Somewhere he liked to visit often, in the company of others.

“Just let her go,” Peroni mumbled, aware that the iron taste of his own blood was feeding into his mouth as he spoke, bowing his head now, knowing what was to come. “What can a kid do to you?”

He saw the butt of the pistol now, racing down towards him through the dark, heard what the figure at the other end of that powerful, sweeping arm was saying, over and over again.

Busy, busy, busy, busy.

He was a busy man, Peroni thought. That was about all they knew of him. Then even that was gone once the pistol butt connected, gone into an agonizing blackness where nothing made sense, not even the words he heard through the rushing bloody haze inside his head.

“THIS ZIGGURAT IS UNIQUE, Nic,” Emily said. “Read the report. That design is not uncommon, but an entire room, the holiest of holies, was decorated with it throughout. There’s nowhere like it in the whole of Iraq. Probably in the world. The place was uncovered back in the 1980s, at which time no one had the money to excavate it properly. It’s only now people are starting to see what’s really there. The irony is the Romans probably knew about this kind of architecture all along. They borrowed from it for buildings like the Pantheon. The resemblance can’t be coincidence. Hell, it even had an oculus. Hadrian could have copied the whole damn thing.”

“So what do you think happened?” he asked.

“Let’s start with some facts. He knew my dad. They were in the ziggurat together. My dad and those other people got out. Kaspar didn’t. Work it out.”

It wasn’t hard.

“Laura Lee?” he asked again.

“I think she was the woman who died in the Pantheon. It’s not her real name. God knows what that is. I tried to look at the files on her this afternoon. All gone. Buried so deep they might as well not exist. Why would anyone want to do that?”

The answer was always the same. “Because something went wrong.”

“Exactly. Listen: none of this is random. It never has been. He’s had thirteen years in some stinking Iraqi pit to think about this. So, come this year, Iraq’s free. He doesn’t walk up to the nearest American base and say, ”Hey, take me home.“ For some reason he doesn’t want to come in from the cold. He wants to get even. So he begins on the line that led to my dad.”

There was something missing. She knew it too.

“Why?” Nic asked. “If you were in jail that long, why’d you want to prolong the pain?”

“I don’t have the answer to that yet. Maybe Joel Leapman does, but he isn’t telling. You heard him. Publicly he’s just sticking to the line that Kaspar’s insane. But listen to the tone of some of their messages. You said it yourself. They’re offering this guy a lifeline. This sounds stupid, but I think in some way they still regard him as a hero. It’s the only thing that makes sense. Otherwise, why send an FBI unit and God knows who else here? Why not just leave it to you people to clean up all the crap?”

“He doesn’t trust Leapman,” Costa suggested. “Or anyone.”

“I know. Maybe he really is just plain crazy. Until we get the chance to ask him there’s no way of telling. Hell, if I’d known this last night I would have asked. Perhaps that’s all it needs. You just have to leech the wound.”

Costa didn’t like the idea one bit. “I don’t think that’s your job.”

“You could be right,” she agreed hesitantly. “But someone’s got to do it. Bill Kaspar has some entire messy chapter of history running around and around in his head, and until we understand that we get nowhere. I went back over the names of his victims again this afternoon. Most of them just don’t exist, but those that do have some interesting histories. The second victim was an executive with a private oil-distribution service. He’d worked in Iraq before the war. One of the women had been attached to the US embassy in Tehran for a while, civilian contract supposedly. It’s obvious, isn’t it? They’re just the kind of people who could be involved in this kind of covert activity. One way or another they got out and he didn’t. Now he’s back and he’s killing his old comrades. One by one. And I don’t think he’s done.”

The doubt must have been obvious in Nic’s face.

“You have a problem with that?” she asked.

“Yes. Why the hell did Laura Lee or whoever she was come here to Rome in the first place? Surely she must have known. And how did he track down all these people?”

“He’s a professional, remember? It’s what he does. You’ve got to see him close up to understand that, Nic. He must have been something. Maybe that’s what’s eating him up. Knowing he failed.”

“It doesn’t answer the question about her. If she knew, why would she deliberately put herself in danger?”

“I can give you one simple reason,” Emily replied with a grim certainty. “Because she didn’t have a choice. She’s still in the service. Leapman made her come to Rome, just as he made me. We were both bait. She got unlucky. Kaspar took her from straight under Leapman’s nose, snatched her out of his grip and carved her up. No wonder Leapman’s running around like a bear with a sore head. Imagine what his boss is saying right now.”

Costa could. Men like Leapman attracted their own kind. Someone kicked down on him. He kicked down in return.

“Are you with me so far?” she asked.

“I think so. But what do you want me to do?”

“You’ve done it. I wanted you to listen. I was sort of half-hoping you’d tell me I was crazy.”

“You are crazy. Just not about this.”

“Thank you, Mr. Costa,” she said primly, then closed her eyes and gently let her head slip down onto the back of the sofa. “Jesus, I feel as if I could sleep for a million years. And, maybe, when I wake up all of this could be gone, just a bad dream.”

She was close enough for him to smell her hair. A part of him wanted to reach out and touch a shining, golden strand, know what it felt like under his fingers.

“I don’t know what the hell to do,” she said in a quiet, half-scared voice. “Aside from not dreaming.”

He looked at the wine bottle. It was just about gone.

“I am going to find us something to eat,” he said. “Then…”

It was just a glance, he told himself. Just an expression in her eyes.

“… we sleep on it.”

She’d moved against him, just enough for him to feel her shoulder against his. He hadn’t meant it that way. Not consciously.

The blue eyes fixed him. Nic Costa felt lost in them. She looked grateful. Sharing the burden of doubts had helped her, brought the two of them closer. A brief smile flickered on her face. She was very close. On another occasion, under different circumstances…

He stirred uncomfortably on the sofa, looking for something to divert the way the night was moving.

“So what the hell is the Scarlet Beast, then?” he asked her.

It worked. There was a flash of delight on her face, an expression he was beginning to recognize, beginning to look forward to.

“First,” she said, pushing aside the bottle, “no more wine. We need all the concentration we’ve got. And food, Mr. Costa. This odd bachelor pad does run to food and water, doesn’t it?”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

“Good. There’s just one more secret. And then”-Emily Deacon made a conscious effort to get the words right-“I’m through.”

LAILA WAS HALF YELLING, half pleading, in another language, a musical one quite foreign to him, though he knew somehow what it was. Her own: Kurdish. He’d heard enough of the street immigrants speaking it to be familiar with the odd cadences, half Western, half oriental.

And in his hurting, confused head, Peroni knew what she was saying too.

Please, please, please.

She was a thin, dark figure dancing on her light, light feet in this shadowy hall, pleading for her life from an unseen stranger while the big, burly cop who was supposed to be keeping her safe curled into a pained ball on the stone floor like a damaged child.

Please, please, please.

He tried to stand and the hammer blow of the pistol came down again, dashing him to the stones under a flurry of obscenities.

Laila screamed, louder this time, a noise that might even filter out into the night air through the open eye of the oculus.

No, no, no, no, no.

Then it came to him, with a sudden grim certainty that made him feel more miserable than ever. She wasn’t arguing for her life. She was begging for his. Trying to bargain with this unseen monster to keep away the hurt and that act of final silence.

“Don’t waste your breath, Laila,” he spluttered through bloody lips. “Run. Let this jerk have his fun.”

Then the world was moving. A strong, firm hand gripped him by the collar of his coat, pushed him hard against the wall, into the faint stream of moonlight falling through the oculus.

A powerful guy, Gianni Peroni thought. That was a big load he was throwing around like a sack of potatoes. A big…

Peroni found himself staring into a face that surprised him. It belonged to a man about his own age, clean-shaven, handsome in a sharp-featured way, keenly alert, devoid of emotion. Not the kind of face you expected of a killer, more like that of an academic or a doctor. He was wearing glasses. Maybe it was the odd silver light of the moon, but his skin seemed to have an unnatural tinge to it. Something in his eyes, the engaged, angular line of his mouth, told Peroni it was worth listening just then. The gun pointing straight at his temple helped, too.

“Let the girl go,” Peroni said once more.

The unfeeling, incisive eyes kept boring into him. “What’s she to you? A Kurd?”

“A kid’s a kid,” Peroni answered, tasting the warm trickle in his mouth again.

The man didn’t say anything. The powerful hands grabbed him again, slammed him hard against the wall.

“Don’t struggle,” the man said. “It only hurts more.”

Then he dangled something familiar in front of Peroni’s face as it mushed up against the stonework: a couple of pairs of plastic handcuffs, the sort the cops kept for special occasions.

“Yeah, yeah,” Peroni grumbled and shoved his hands out behind him, bunched up the way they did in training, holding his palms together as the cuffs came on, cutting tight into his skin.

“You,” the American said, jabbing a finger at Laila.

She held out her hands in front of her, looking meek and obedient.

He nodded. “You’re a smart little cookie, huh? You want some advice? Quit stealing. It just leads to trouble.”

The plastic went round her slender wrists with rather more care than he’d allowed before. Then he bounced Peroni round again, pulled him tight to the girl, withdrew another cuff from his pocket, looped it to join the two of them together through the wrist restraints and tied off the join around the narrow iron support for the altar rail. They couldn’t move. Just to ram home the point, the American reached into Peroni’s pocket, took out his phone, dropped it on the floor, and stomped the thing into pieces.

“I worked with Kurds once,” he said sourly. “They’d call you brother, they’d give you anything, they’d die for you. Then one night they’d see you’d got money in your baggage, and they’d come in and slit your throat, walk out and spend it on a new VCR. You know why?”

Peroni sighed. “I’m a cop, mister. I walk these streets. I do my best. I try to put people like you in jail if I can.”

It was as if the other man didn’t even hear. “I’ll tell you why. Because we taught them how. You think about that the next time she steals something.”

“Yeah,” Peroni replied sourly, without even thinking. “Nobody’s really responsible for anything these days, are they?”

He wondered if he was going to throw up. Or faint. Or both, possibly in the wrong order. “I guess,” he added, “it wasn’t really you who carved that woman up in here the other night. Just someone else wearing the same skin.”

The gun came down again. “You know you could just be right.”

The American drew out a small torch and shone the beam briefly in Peroni’s face. Then he pulled out the wallet, opened it up and took out a couple of old, battered photographs, held them beneath the beam. Two clusters of people, out in the desert somewhere. All were wearing military fatigues and sunglasses, looking as pleased as punch, posing against a couple of those huge jeep things the Americans loved.

He was in the first photo. Younger, happy, in control. The boss maybe, posing with his team, eight or so men and women, all smiling at the camera, all lords of their little universe.

“I got all of them inside me,” the American murmured. “Every one of them. I watched them die and I couldn’t do a damn thing because we were just walking straight into some stupid little turkey shoot, not knowing what was waiting there for us.”

“I guess that picture must be important to you, huh,” Peroni said.

“You could say that.”

He pushed the other photo to the front. A different set of people but the same kind of crowd. One them familiar, Peroni realized. Emily Deacon’s dad, looking a whole lot younger and happier than he had in that formal shot from a few months ago that they’d seen in the embassy. And a couple of women too. One who just might have been the corpse they’d found in this very building two nights before.

The American’s mouth came close to Peroni’s ear. “Ain’t they pretty?”

The grey, stony face didn’t flicker, but something was going on, Peroni realized. The man was thinking. He had the time, too. There was nothing Gianni Peroni could do that would shape the flow of events now.

“So you’re just a minion?” the American asked. “A local cop? Those guys from the embassy told you nothing?”

“Yeah, a minion. I only know what they think I need to know.”

Peroni gazed into the icy eyes, wondering what, if anything, could move this man. “That there’s a lunatic out there, carving some pattern out of people’s backs, for no reason at all. And he sure loves US military webbing, too.”

That struck a nerve somewhere. The guy was laughing. Not the cold, dry laughter Peroni had heard in the dark. This was more human somehow, more scary because it came from a place deep inside the man, and because it was the kind of laughter that could just go anywhere, from joy to despair in a heartbeat.

“No reason?” the American asked, and pushed the gun back into Gianni Peroni’s face. “You believe that?”

Peroni looked down at the dead grey metal barrel and tried to tick off the few remaining options in his hurting head.

“Not really,” he murmured.

HE’D FOUND SOME PASTA and a jar of tomato sauce. They sat on the sofa together in front of the empty plates, aware of the clock ticking towards midnight, bone-weary. Nic Costa wasn’t even sure he wanted any more questions answered. He wasn’t sure what he wanted at all.

Emily leaned back into the soft cushions, closed her eyes and asked, “Do you have a bible?”

He blinked, wide awake all of a sudden. “Excuse me?”

“A bible. This is a good Italian household, isn’t it?”

So many things to explain. So many preconceptions. “Yes, but that doesn’t mean I have a bible. I wouldn’t dare bring one through the door. I’d have my old man’s ghost haunting me forever. I told you. He was a Communist. Do you really need one?”

She thought about it, retrieved the notebook, turned it on and started looking for something.

“I can’t do this from memory. The Deacons aren’t exactly regular churchgoers either. But when I was in training I spent three months researching a bunch of religious fanatics on the Net. Nice people. All white. All armed to the teeth. All as crazy as they come. There is a reason here. Bear with me.”

He leaned over, close to her shoulder, and watched the skilful way she worked the Web. After a brief search Emily brought up a page from some bizarre religious site, one covered in woodcut engravings of mythical beasts next to a comic-book colour illustration of a naked woman writhing on a red, many-headed dragon.

“This is just one of their places. You can read about every last damn conspiracy under the sun here. How the Jews run everything. Except for the stuff that’s run by the Catholics. While both are really under the thumb of the Illuminati. And you know what they keep going back to for inspiration?”

“Ordinarily I’d suggest ”drugs and drink,“ but I rather imagine…”

“If only they would, Nic. Parts of Montana would be so much improved. They go to Revelation. The last book of the New Testament. Heard of it?”

Costa opened his hands in a gesture of despair.

“You remember,” she continued, “that Kaspar mentions ”the Scarlet Beast“ in that original memo from 1990. Leapman, or whoever, is taunting him with the same phrase now. So it’s important. The only reference I can find anywhere is in here. I remember it because these fundamentalist guys just can’t get it out of their heads. It’s meant to explain everything. Listen…”

She began reading from the screen. “ ”So he carried me away in the spirit into the wilderness: and I saw a woman sit upon a scarlet coloured beast, full of names of blasphemy, having seven heads and ten horns.“ ”

Costa’s head reeled. “Emily-”

“Stay with me, Nic. It gets weirder. A couple of sentences later: ”And here is the mind which hath wisdom. The seven heads are seven mountains, on which the woman sitteth.“ Seven mountains, Nic.”

His mind was a blank. This was so far from his normal realm of experience.

“Here’s a clue,” she said. “Think of it as seven hills instead. And another clue. The image of the woman was often used as a cipher meaning ”church.“ ”

There was only way to interpret that, surely. “You mean the Scarlet Beast is Rome?”

She nodded. “Exactly. These guys are just doing what lunatics have done forever. Rewriting history the way it suits them. Revelation was written at a time when Christianity was being torn apart by oppression from Domitian or whoever. They really did face their own particular apocalypse, but it wasn’t a supernatural one. It was real and it came from Rome. Because the Christians were under such threat, they had to refer to it in code. Later, people just started to like the code because it’s a code. When the Church split off into factions the same message that was supposed to encourage solidarity among Christians was used to make the case against Catholicism. That the pope’s just the new Roman emperor, the Antichrist.”

More blind alleys, more complexity. “So Kaspar’s a religious fanatic?”

“I doubt it.” There was no stopping her until this particular thread was through. “This is someone playing a game. You need code names for projects like this. So they compete to come up with the craziest ones. It started all those years ago when the Babylon Sisters got together. Maybe Kaspar thought of all this terminology. Maybe he comes from someplace out in the boondocks where this kind of stuff isn’t uncommon. It was appropriate on another front too. Rome was where they all met to begin the mission. Here’s another chunk of Revelation. Same chapter. ”And upon her forehead was a name written, Mystery, Babylon the great, the mother of harlots and abominations of the earth.“ You see?”

“Sort of,” he lied.

“It’s a joke within a joke. They have to use fake names and IDs. It’s that kind of job. Why not have some fun along the way? These guys were just hamming it up among each other. Scarlet Beast. Babylon Sisters. Throw in some backwoods fundamentalism, mix it in with a bunch of old jazz-rockers called Steely Dan…”

“Who?” He was wondering how much longer his head could contain all this.

“A band. A very good one, actually. I remember my dad playing their records when his buddies came around and the beer started to flow. Just bear with me, Nic. These people were having fun, playing spooks, everything NTK, just like he says.”

“NTK?”

“ ”Need to know.“ They’re the rules you play by when stuff is so secret you don’t tell anyone anything-your real name even-unless you absolutely have to. It’s all a game and my dad used to love games. He was always coming up with some crazy ideas.”

She’d been racing ahead until that memory, which made a little of the brightness go out of her eyes.

“At least, he was back then. They were just playing with words. He did it all the time. These guys are still doing it. Remember what your boss asked Leapman? How did we know he’d come to Rome? Remember his answer?”

Costa did. The FBI man flatly refused to deal with the question.

“I remember.” He considered what he’d seen on the screen. “He couldn’t say it, could he?”

“Kaspar came to Rome because he got invited.”

Costa read the new screen out loud. “ ”Let’s get together again back in the old places, folks. Reunion time for the class of “91. Just one spare place at the table. You coming or not?” Which translates to “Come to Rome, we’re waiting for you.” “

Emily punched his arm lightly. “See! You can get there.”

“Thanks.”

There was more to the argument, though, and he was surprised she hadn’t seen it.

“This all begs a big question.”

She gazed at him, amused, bright and attractive again. “I thought it begged several, actually. A couple of dozen, in fact, right off the top of my head.”

Suddenly there was surprise on her face, as if she’d seen something unexpected.

“Nic. For a moment there you stopped staring at me as if I’m the cleverest kid in the class. I don’t like that. I am the cleverest kid in the class. Aren’t I?”

“Of course you are, Little Em.”

“Don’t call me that,” she said coldly, drawing back from him. “Don’t ever call me that.”

“I’m sorry. It was stupid of me.”

“Yes…” She was almost pouting now. She was young and old in the same body. Costa wanted to laugh. More than that, though, he wanted to kiss her.

Instead, he reached over and messed with the computer.

“What are you doing?” she asked nervously.

“Looking for something. Here: ”Honor his memory.“ And here. In the original memo: ”The Scarlet Beast was a generous Beast.“ ”

She blinked. “So?”

“You’re right about the place, Emily. I don’t doubt it. But listen to the words. It’s more than that.”

He read the two sentences aloud again. She listened carefully. Costa watched her lively intelligent eyes, saw them glitter when she understood.

“Christ,” she murmured. “How could I have been that stupid?”

“It’s a riddle. It’s meant to be obscure. Besides, there’s no saying my interpretation’s the right one.”

She waved away his doubts. “Of course it is. I was just reading into it what I wanted to see. This is a place and a person, isn’t it? The Scarlet Beast’s the paymaster. He’s the man even Kaspar was ultimately beholden to.”

“I think so.”

“Is he the bad guy, then?” she asked. “Does Kaspar blame him for this? He thinks he was betrayed somehow?”

Costa threw up his hands in desperation. “It’s just guesswork.”

“Then who the hell was he? If it wasn’t Kaspar?”

Costa searched for the memo on the computer, found the sentence, highlighted it with the cursor.

“It’s just a guess. That’s all.”

They looked at the sentence from the document: 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.

She screwed up her face in bewilderment. “Someone in Rome? Does that make sense?”

“What was that you said about ”need to know“?”

“OK. OK. Point taken. Distance does makes sense. So maybe even Bill Kaspar doesn’t know who’s really in charge. Maybe he’s guessing right now…”

Emily was thinking hard. She looked at him with scared eyes. They both knew where this was going.

“Or maybe he does,” Costa finished quietly. He scrolled through some of the sentences in the original memo, pointing them out.

The Scarlet Beast-where do they get these names, Danboy? This one of yours or what?… 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?

“No, no, no, no, no!” she said with conviction. “My dad was lots of things but he wasn’t a traitor. That just isn’t a possibility.”

“Kaspar could be wrong.” Costa suggested it without much enthusiasm.

“So what are you saying?” she asked brusquely. “Kaspar thought my dad was taking part in his own escapade? Funding it and playing along, too?”

“Can you rule that out?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know.” Emily was going to stick up for her old man, but not in face of the facts. “Theoretically I guess so. The way these operations were funded was pretty secretive. Someone just dropped a bag of money out of nowhere and let the team get on with it. You had to have someone running finance, logistics. Dad was big time here in Rome. But…”

She leaned back on the sofa and, for a full minute, covered her face with her hands. When she took her fingers away from her cheeks there were tearstains there and naked fury in her eyes.

“I still don’t get it. I’m awful at this crap. I can’t believe my dad was too, and that’s not just family talking. He was so damned organized, Nic. If you knew him you’d know he couldn’t just screw it all up in the desert, get away with his own hide, then leave that poor bastard to go crazy in some Iraqi cell putting one and one together all the time over the years, working out who to blame. My father was a good man. He wouldn’t…”

She couldn’t go on. Costa wondered whether he could bring himself to say it, then realized he’d be selling her short if he didn’t.

“They thought Kaspar was a good man at the time, Emily. Now look… You said it yourself. Something changed.”

“No,” she insisted. “You didn’t know him. Maybe you can believe that’s a possible answer. But listen to me, it isn’t. Not for one moment.”

“I can’t think straight this late,” he sighed. “Let’s open this out a little in the morning.”

Her eyes scanned his face, searching for the doubts and prevarication. “What do you mean by that? You call your boss, I call mine? We tell them what we think, then walk away and hope it’ll turn out right?”

“No. I don’t think it’s that simple. Also, I don’t walk away from things, not until they’re done. It’s a family flaw.”

She let out a low, spontaneous burst of laughter. “You are so not the Roman cop I thought I’d meet.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment.”

“It’s meant that way.”

“Good. And you…” He had to say this because it was true. “It’s odd. You don’t know it but you could pass for Italian. Most of the time anyway. When you’re not around Agent Leapman. I never did believe that line about people spitting at you on buses.”

“It happened once,” she confessed with a shrug. “People like preconceptions. They’re compartments you can use so that everyone feels safe and comfortable for a while. They mean you don’t have to think too hard.”

“One more reason to avoid them.”

“Well, I’m certainly getting lots of preconceptions shaken straight out of me right now,” she said, smiling, looking around the old, airy room, with its dusty corners and faded paintings. “This is a beautiful place. If I lived here I don’t think I’d ever go beyond that front gate. You could just stay here and never get touched by the crap.”

“Or anything,” Costa said quietly. “I’ve been there.”

“Really.” Americans had an astonishing, unnerving frankness sometimes. She’d turned to stare straight into his face, trying to work out what to make of that last statement. “I guess we all get there sometime. When I was a kid I thought we’d never leave Rome, you know. It was how life was supposed to be. Safe. Happy. Secure from all those big, black surprises you never learn about till you’re older.”

“You’d rather not know about the surprises?”

“No.” Her smile dropped. “But I can try to understand why it all fell apart. I can… Oh shit.”

Her hands were covering her face again. He wondered if she was crying. But it was exhaustion probably, nothing more.

Emily Deacon slowly rolled herself sideways, over towards his shoulder, let her head fall softly onto him, didn’t move as his fingers took on a life of their own, reaching automatically for her long, soft hair.

Eyes closed, in the shy way strangers use when they kiss for the first time, he tasted her damp, supple mouth, felt her lips close on his, slowly working, until that moment of self-realization came and they both broke off, wondering, embarrassed.

She kept her head on his shoulder. He stared at the dying embers of the fire.

“I’m making a hell of a mess of this professional relationship, Mr. Costa,” Emily Deacon murmured into his ear. “Are you OK with that?”

He closed his eyes and wished to God he didn’t feel so exhausted. “I’ll think about it.”

She brushed his cheek briefly with her lips once more, then said, “Give me a moment.”

Nic Costa watched her walk upstairs to the bathroom and wished he wasn’t so gauche with women. He’d no idea what the hell she expected of him next. To follow her into one of the big, airy bedrooms? To wait so they could talk some more, not that he felt there were many words left in him after this long, long day?

He hadn’t planned any of this. He hadn’t wanted it, not now, in the middle of a sprawling black case that involved her more than was safe. Sometimes life just refused to do what it was told. Sometimes…

“WHAT’S HIS NAME? This guy from the embassy who tells you nothing?”

Peroni’s thoughts were wandering. The nausea wouldn’t go away. Still, this wasn’t a time to lose focus. He glowered at the gun, not saying a word. There was a point to be made here, a kind of relationship to be established.

“Joel Leapman,” he said, once the guy got the message and lowered the barrel. “You know him?”

The American grimaced. “If he’s in the business, I think names don’t mean a lot. Besides, I’ve been away for a while. What does he say he is? CIA? FBI? Something else?”

“Why ask me?”

The barrel of the weapon touched Peroni’s cheek. “Because you’re here and because you’re not dumb either.”

“He says he’s FBI. He’s got people with him who are FBI. One, anyway. You met her. Last night.”

“Yeah. I know.”

“Glad you didn’t hurt her, by the way. She’s a nice kid.”

He was thinking. Peroni judged it best to let him reach some decisions on his own.

“No accounting for breeding sometimes,” the American said in the end. “I need someone to deliver a message. That makes you a lucky man.”

Peroni tried to offer up an ironic smile. “You could have fooled me. Right now I feel something just drove over my head.”

“You’ll live. You”-he waved the gun at Laila-“and the thieving little kid. I’ll give you a couple of hours to figure a way out. Don’t make it sooner. I might still be around. You’ll find that idiot who was supposed to be in charge round the corner, peeing himself, I guess. Tell him he’s damn lucky. When you’re paid to look after a place like this…”

He cast his sharp eyes around the shadows of the Pantheon.

“… you’d best do it properly.”

“And the message?” Peroni mumbled.

The smart, deadpan face neared his. “I was coming to that. Tell this Leapman fellow I’m running out of patience. I’m bored looking. This time, he delivers. Or the rules change.”

“Delivers what?” Peroni wondered.

He got a grunt of impatience in return. “He knows.”

“You’re sure?”

That cold, dry laugh again. “Yeah. But just in case, you tell Leapman this. Tell him I talked to Dan Deacon before he died. He planted some doubts. I want to know if I’m done.”

It was the last thing Peroni was expecting to hear. “Listen to me,” he urged. “You’re done. Is that good enough?”

“Don’t fuck with me!” The American went from placid to furious instantly. The gun was waving around crazily again.

“OK,” Peroni agreed quietly.

“I want proof. Tell Leapman that.”

This was important. “Done.”

The gun caressed his cheek again. Peroni lifted his neck to get away from the cold, oily metal.

“I hope so,” the American murmured. “Because if Leapman’s not listening it all turns to shit around here. Tell him I’ll give him a little present real soon just as a reminder.”

“Turns to shit?” Peroni heard himself saying, without consciously forming the thought, watching the American walk away, out towards the night, not listening anymore, which was a shame.

Peroni believed him. Every single word. This man had rules. He could have killed them both. Maybe somewhere else, in different circumstances, when the pieces of the puzzle happened to fit, he would have done so, too. All he wanted were the right words, written on a piece of paper, all neat and geometrical, lined up in the magical order he sought.

That was all any of them had to do. Find the pattern, show him the runes, and then the city could quit waking up each morning wondering whether there’d be blood swimming around the floor somewhere, and that ancient tattoo cut into someone’s back.

Peroni waited till he heard the door close. Then he did his best to push back the feeling of nausea and the pain in his head, tried to concentrate, to think straight.

“Gianni?” the girl whispered, keeping close to him, shivering with the growing cold. “What do we do?”

“We wait, Laila,” he answered, with as much assurance and certainty as he could muster. “We wait a while. Just like the man said. Then we get out of these things and go somewhere nice and warm and comfortable. My friend’s place maybe. It’s not far away. Let’s sit down, huh?”

He found his way to the floor, the girl following him. Peroni closed his eyes and wondered how badly he was hurt, wondered too at the American’s closing words. Maybe the body in the car was just a taste of what was to come: random, shocking acts, designed to persuade Leapman to do the right thing. Maybe the killer had something nastier in store just to hammer home the message.

“Gianni,” the girl whispered.

“Just give it a minute,” he groaned. His head was spinning. His face hurt like hell.

Then something intervened, some semblance of sleep.

When he came to, jogged by a push from the kid, the place was different, noticeably colder and darker too. A stream of snow still circled down through the oculus. Laila had her head bent over their wrists, working at something.

“How long was I out?” he asked.

“Long time,” she said and looked up at him, half smiling. “Doesn’t matter now.”

Her mouth and her right wrist were covered in blood. Peroni saw in an instant what she’d done: spent all the time he was unconscious biting and wriggling at the plastic of her cuffs, working the flexible material over and over until she found a way through.

She stood there, half guilty, half wondering whether just to flee again. That was her natural instinct.

“That’s good,” Peroni said confidently, as if he hadn’t a clue what she was thinking. “If you reach into my jacket pocket,” he continued, “you should find a penknife there. It’s in a little compartment with a zip on it. You should be able to get at it now.”

There was a moment of hesitation, then her slim hand angled its way into his coat, an easy, familiar motion, and came out, so quickly, with the knife. And his wallet.

“Laila.”

The kid was crying. Real tears, streaming down her cheeks, more than he’d seen when the two of them faced the American, more than when they both knew they were so close to losing their lives.

“Not now,” he pleaded. “I need you to help me. I need you.”

Then she said something that made his blood run cold. Something straight from the American, said it with the same fervour, the same darting eyes looking everywhere.

“Busy, busy, busy, busy…”

A part of Peroni wanted to believe you could heal a damaged child with nothing but love and affection and honesty. But Teresa was surely right. It went deeper than that. Laila suffered from an illness, a malady as real as a fever, more damaging since it lurked inside her, unseen, unfathomable, misinterpreted by an icy, suspicious world.

Peroni turned and raised his painful wrists.

“Get busy with these, huh?” he murmured.

“Then?” she asked.

“Then we get you something to eat. And a comfortable bed. Your uncle Gianni’s got work to do. You’ve saved his skin tonight, you know.”

“I did?” she asked, only half believing him.

“You sure did. You’re not going to leave me here like this, are you?”

She thought about it, but not for long. Then she opened the knife and started to saw at the plastic.

Ten minutes later Peroni had freed the terrified caretaker, who was locked inside a portable office by the side of the building.

After that, he called Leo Falcone.

UPSTAIRS, IN THE RUSTIC, faded bathroom, Emily Deacon stood before the flaking mirror and peered at herself, trying to find answers for questions she couldn’t quite begin to frame.

She was never good at relationships and she knew it. Getting close to someone was like a drug. It solved so many problems but it had side effects too. Commitment left the window open for pain to blow in like poison on the breeze. It made the inevitable parting even harder, turned friends into enemies. She’d felt this way, seen this attitude blight her tentative, stumbling efforts at building a relationship, ever since she was a kid.

Ever since Rome.

Ever since her dad came back from his turn with the Babylon Sisters, playing out some bloody vaudeville act deep in the desert in Iraq, damaging himself irreparably for reasons that still eluded her but were now getting closer.

Why Dad? Why not someone else? Was he really Bill Kaspar’s boss pretending to be his best buddy? And if so, why did Kaspar feel justified in coming back to snuff out his life inside a beautiful wooden temple in a park in Beijing thirteen years later, carving into his back a shape from an ancient temple outside Babylon? Was he that desperate for revenge?

She looked at herself in the mirror and said, “Except he didn’t stop.”

If she was right, every last person who’d escaped Iraq thirteen years earlier was now dead. So why was Kaspar still killing? What would stop him?

The answer lay in his obsession. There were attractions in the belief, however crazy, that you could bring order to a life by placing it in the middle of an intricately symmetrical pattern of shapes and ideas. But it was the kind of process that belonged to the lost, the detached, the doomed. Obsession was, ultimately, the easy way out, derogating responsibility to an inanimate, dead simulacrum of perfection, a fake paradise buried inside a tangled whorl of lines and curves. In the real world it was the untidiness, the lack of completeness, the unpredictability of everyday life, that made each day human. That random, unforeseeable force lay at the bottom of a relationship, too. If the magnetism of personal attraction could be rationalized, it couldn’t, she knew, exist.

Was that why she’d always struggled to keep a man? Her insistence for some kind of reason, some element of proof? The face that stared back at her from the mirror had no answers. What she saw was just another part of the riddle. She was still working to shrug off the child Emily, whose earliest memories lay in that different, early Rome, where she’d spent the first ten years of her life believing the world was a bright, colourful heaven, a place of kindness, grace and beauty where the hard decisions were always someone else’s.

Innocence, ignorance-two sides of the same coin.

“You’ve got to grow up sometime,” she told herself. That was why she’d bitten Nic’s head off when he called her “Little Em.” A part of her recognized how apposite it still was.

She washed her face, brushed her teeth, sat down on the toilet seat and held her head in her hands, trying to find a strand of logic that would allow her to go forward.

There was still a missing piece. But she was too damn tired.

She got up, checked her face and hair once more in the mirror, wondered what she really saw there. A scared adolescent? A woman trying to identify herself among all the noise of modern life? Or, more likely, someone halfway between the two, a changeling shifting shapes, wondering what she would be in the end.

Emily Deacon was aware that, for the first time in her life, she was about to take the initiative, to tell a man it was time he took her to bed. Even if nothing happened there except the closeness of sleeping next to another human being.

Scared, in the way she felt when she was a kid, embarking on an adventure beyond the bounds of normal life, excited, intensely awake all of a sudden, she went downstairs.

He was asleep on the sofa, sprawled out, fully dressed. Completely asleep, not moving a muscle except for the faint rise and fall of his chest.

“Nic,” she said softly, so quietly she didn’t know herself whether she wanted him to hear.

She closed her eyes and laughed inwardly.

“There’s always tomorrow,” she whispered in a voice no louder than a breath.

And there’s always a cigarette.

She went to her purse, took out a Marlboro and a lighter, pulled the black jacket around her shoulders and opened the door very quietly, making sure she didn’t wake him.

The air was still, the night arctic and exquisitely beautiful. A too-white moon shone like a miniature cold sun over the rounded, snowy landscape punctuated by the outlines of the tombs on the Appian Way.

She lit the cigarette, watched the smoke curl its way towards the bare writhing muscle of a vine winding its way around a trellis and imagined how beautiful this shaded, grape-laden terrace would be during the summer.

“And I can’t even get myself a man,” she murmured, then wished she could laugh out loud.

The voice was cold, American and familiar.

“I wouldn’t say that,” it grunted.

A powerful arm came round her neck. A hidden hand forced some kind of cloth into her face, pushing the fabric brutally around her nose and mouth. There was the slight sound of glass breaking inside the rag, a smell that made her think of a hospital operating room, long, long ago, in the ancient facility on the Lateran where her father took her when she broke her arm trying to make her bike fly like something out of Power Rangers.

This won’t hurt… Steely Dan, where are you now, and what the hell did you do all those years ago?… someone said, her dad, a faceless doctor, Kaspar the Unfriendly Ghost, grinning Joel Leapman, Thornton Fielding, all concern and pity, Nic Costa even…

Every last one of them said the stupid phrase simultaneously, seeing her feebleness from somewhere beyond her vision, somewhere outside the aching corona of the moon.

This won’t hurt one little bit.