At one point, the wide shopping thoroughfare we were on, lined with cypress trees in neat rows, sidewalk cafes and leather and haute couture boutiques, changed without warning or transition to a one-lane brick shelf descending three stories across the face of an ancient stone wall, dropping to a narrow cobblestoned roadway twisting through the middle of a pruned, manicured park-all in the space of a quarter mile-before dumping us in the midst of a working-class neighborhood filled with grimy apartment houses, trattorias and a spectacular domed temple built before Christ to a God I’d never heard of and restored later by a Pope I’d never heard of in commemoration of an apostle I’d never heard of.
All this to reach a pretty ordinary-looking block of apartments built above a Laundromat, an electronics store and a local flea market offering sheets, plumbing supplies and live ducks and pigs for on-the-spot slaughter.
“We’ve got a problem,” Max said as the cab stopped. A pair of carabinieri stood all puffed-up outside the front door. We loitered, stymied, wandering into the stores to keep from being too obvious.
“We’ve got to find a way in,” Max said as we lingered among the IPods and laptop computers, electric pasta makers (in Italy?) and the latest digital cameras. “The caretaker’s in the basement. He’s already trying to figure out how to turn this unfortunate boarder into cash.” He pulled a couple of hundred-Euro notes out of his pocket. “But we need an excuse to get in there without alarming the cops. You know, normal everyday graft.”
“You couldn’t just suggest they leave us alone?”
“Suggestions are short-term; when they remember, they get very pissed. Not good pissing off cops, especially if you need them later.”
I’d been admiring a really nice digital video camera behind the counter, sizing up the detachable microphone and the very nice zoom lens. That’s when I had one of those cartoon moments, the thought balloon with the exclamation point going off right over my head. “It’s a story!”
“What is?”
“The apartment-the bomber. Billy asked me if I was covering the summit. I’m a reporter, remember? At least I was. We got this guy’s address from a source and we’re checking it out.”
“If you’re the reporter,” Kate demanded, “who are we?”
It took a two-second glance at this group to answer the question. “ You’re the reporter,” I told her. “I’m your producer, Max is cameraman and Mark is audio.” I pulled Max’s bogus credit card out of my back pocket, gesturing at the counterwoman and the video camera.
Five minutes later, we tramped around the back of the apartment house, skirting the edges of a deep pit covered by heavy planks and rubber sheeting. The pit filled the space between the rear walls of several adjoining houses. Kate threw a curious look at the spades and brushes stacked against the outer wall as we went by.
“Keep the lens on wide-angle,” I told Max. “It’ll keep the picture from shaking too much. Get as close as you can to your subject. If you want a wider shot, back up but remember, it’s TV-closeups still read better across the room.” I knocked on the door several times before a slightly feral face appeared, bearing that universal hungry look. That hunger was a great reassurance.
“GNN,” I told him in English, assuming like an arrogant American that he could speak it. “We want pictures. Video. TV.” I held out my bogus passport without actually giving him time to read it. That’s all the look he’d have gotten if I’d had real ID. We tried to dance past him through the door but he stepped over to block it. He wasn’t big but he was built like an oak tree.
“Polizia is coming,” he said in accented but reasonable English.
“We want pictures,” I said. “ Before the polizia come.”
“Polizia statale,” he clarified. “Especiale. They want everything very clean. Nobody sees nothing.”
His words said good citizen, his eyes read hungry. I pulled out 200 Euro and kept adding 50 Euro increments (slower and slower each time) until we reached 450 and he grabbed for the money. I pulled it back. “Fifteen minutes,” I told him.
“Fifteen,” he repeated with a look that said 450 Euro.
“We don’t have fifteen minutes,” Max said as we went up the stairs. “Marat got into a cab just ahead of us-”
“You saw him?!” Tauber nearly lifted out of his shoes. “And you let the son-of-a-bitch get away?”
“It was more important to get here first,” Max answered. “Besides, I got this address when he gave it to his cab driver.”
“How’d we beat him here?”
“That unfortunate cab driver is temporarily seeing left as right and right as left. So Marat is now on the wrong side of town and getting into a new cab. He’s not stupid-he’ll call in reinforcements. We have approximately seven to ten minutes.”
“Give me the camera,” I told Max and he handed it over gratefully. “Nobody’s going to let us carry evidence out of here. We’ve got to document as much as we can.”
The room was a classic student clutter, a hovel, clothes piled on the ripped second-hand couch, Godard and Che on the wall, books and pamphlets in piles on the floor and bomb-making equipment spread across the table.
Tauber pulled a pair of latex gloves from a box and handed each of us a pair. “Put them on now. Nobody touches anything nekkid.” Then he set to work examining wires and diagrams.
Max wandered to the desk by the side window, and picked up a battered leatherette slipcase that was lying open. “The bomb maker was doing his bills,” he said.
“What?”
“He was writing checks-my Italian’s not perfect but it looks like the gas company, electric, telephone…” I jumped to the desk and got pictures of the ledger.
“Putting his affairs in order?” Kate offered.
“He’s a nihilist-he’s going out in a few minutes with a bomb strapped to his chest. He’s paying the phone bill?”
“This is even better,” Tauber said and we grouped around him. A pad of longwise European paper displayed bomb-making preparations, a diagram of the bomb, a scrawled map of the airport and scribbled notes around the edges. “He marked down his destination,” Tauber said. “Look where,” holding up the pad and angling it so I could get video. “He wasn’t even trying to reach the gate; his goal was the corner. Across the street. Several lanes of traffic between him and the target.”
“Too far away-you said so yourself,” Kate said.
“Only,” Tauber twinkled, “if ya actually intend to blow somebody up.”
“Look! The rubies!” Scribbles of the gems were all over the edges of the page, obsessively drawn and colored in with marker or something. I shot close-ups.
“Yeah,” Tauber nodded like this was no surprise. “Gems are a good control. Almost everybody sees rubies as the same shade-even if you’re color-blind, it’s a consistent, vivid shade o’gray.”
“And color,” Max cut in, “is a frequency, just like sound. So if you want to maintain control over somebody at a distance, you program them to replay the image in their heads over and over. It keeps them around the right frequency, so they keep receiving your suggestions.” He kept picking through the wire and clutter on the table, examining each bit and holding it out to the camera, moving rapidly. “This was a fall guy. They monitored him-”
“Who did?”
“That, we’ll see-I think we all know the prime candidate-they controlled and moved him around like a dog on a leash. Kate heard his panic-he had to reach the right spot on time but, when he did, he had no idea what to do, no further goal. It was all fed to him and now the feed dropped off.”
“So I was wrong.” I wasn’t surprised but a little disappointed. It sure felt like I’d been tapped into somebody.
“No-you were right too,” Max said and I was totally confused. “You, I’m certain, tuned into the suggestion — the signal from his minder, his runner. The guy whose job was to lead him to the wrong spot and abandon him there.”