She was in my arms and I was swooning a bit just from proximity. Balancing against that was the fact that she could read my mind; that threw a monkey wrench into every way I knew to be with women. There was no point offering false comfort-like Max, she would know it instantly for what it was. I struggled to find something both true and encouraging to say and found I didn’t have much experience with that combination.
“What’s good about you,” I said finally, “is that you’re so twisted up trying to do what’s right. When the time comes, you’ll know the right answer.”
She flickered a smile-like she was trying to encourage me — settled against my arm and, as long as no one disturbed us, I wouldn’t have needed anything else for the rest of the day.
But those moments don’t last. Max seemed to have wandered away but Tauber was stalking the rooms like an alien energy force was chewing on him, singing some classic rock song in a terrible off-key voice. Probably Neil Young-off-key seemed to suit the song. We were all drowning in jet lag while he was getting wired.
“So?” he demanded on his next pass through. “How do we protect Singh if L Corps’ got access?”
“What’s our problem?” Kate asked lazily, lolling on the railing. “Why does everyone have access but us?” and it was like streamers going off in my skull.
I leapt to the bureau to check our video camera really held the images we’d taken in the bomber’s apartment, that I hadn’t imagined or erased them. Then I grabbed the phone, pulling the business card from the airport out of my pocket.
“Billy Symczck, please. Billy? Greg! Listen, my crew and I need credentials-yeah, for the G8. Same to you, buddy. I’ll tell you why. You have any friends in G8 security? Good-call and tell them their bomb is wired wrong. No chance of it going off. See what they have to say and call me back.”
I slouched into a chair, crossing my legs over another ornate table.
“We gon’ get access!”
“It’s called Tiber Island,” Kate said. Not that you could miss the place-a stone wall and concrete deck breaching the water like the prow of a ship, a collection of Renaissance buildings rising through thickets of palm and locust trees, awash in spotlights, the island curved into the elbow bend of the Tiber, Vatican domes in distant silhouette and two ancient bridges like a belt propping it up.
Getting there, though, was like trying to push a ham through a sieve. Soldiers clustered behind concrete roadblocks at every corner starting a half-mile away, in visible body armor, over-the-ear helmets and automatic weapons at the ready. Each stop required ID, a body check and interrogation (Purpose of your visit? Press Credentials? So Late? We’re disorganized. No one in Italy seems shocked by this answer).
“The bridge dates to 62 BC,” Kate narrated, reading the museum tour off her cell. “One story says the Romans killed a dictator, threw his body in the river and the silt collected around it to create the island. It looked like a ship so they added the prow and stern.” She was chattering, nerves on edge-I could feel it as well as hear it. Or maybe it was my own nerves I was feeling.
The air had that stuffy, close feeling like when Max blocked us-I wondered if he was keeping tabs now. He’d run through several techniques with me as we prepared, step by step. When I said, ‘You think I can handle this?’ he answered, ‘Think how far you’ve come in a few days. You’re not the same man’ and I knew it was true.
So now I worked the system, like a new driver obsessively checking the mirrors before pulling out of the driveway. Ruby. Emerald. Sapphire. Turquoise. Don’t look for anything in particular; don’t anticipate. Listen for words or rhythms of speaking in your head that aren’t your own. Just follow those and see where they take you.
It didn’t take long. I started feeling paranoid and defensive and realized it was coming in waves; it only took a beat after that to realize it wasn’t my own paranoia but theirs, whoever they were. I relaxed into the vibration and suddenly it was coming from everywhere. Lingering in doorways and street cafes, watchful eyes from cars on strategic corners, waiters and newspaper sellers, students and telephone lineworkers, everywhere we went, the vibrations and those tiny green-tipped lapel pins. If I wasn’t successfully blocking myself, we’d find out pretty quick.
Billy said he’d meet me at the bridge but two blocks early, a car pulled up alongside us and he jumped out the open door. “In!” he demanded, grabbing me and throwing me into the seat. He slammed the door in Kate’s face, crying, “One ride per customer.”
And then we were off, weaving through a maze of alleyways onto a wide avenue past the Coliseum and Circus Maximus.
“Your friends think they’re spies,” he said, rechecking the rear-view mirror. “Are they?”
In the vanity mirror I made out an Alfa Romeo following at a respectable distance but I didn’t know the driver. I never would’ve noticed on my own.
“Not mine,” I shook my head.
Billy shrugged, “No matter.” A sharp right bounced us across a sidewalk and into an archaeological site marked ‘No Admittance’ in three languages. We detoured past a 2200-year-old arch and between 40-foot-high marble slabs fallen from a temple, then sped the wrong way down a one-way street onto a service road under a viaduct and into a warehouse district. There was nobody in sight. “If they are spies,” Billy remarked, “they’re overpaid.”
He screeched to a stop in front of a shuttered plant, all graffiti’d walls and glass skylight roof panels. The whole district was shut tight, not a car or moving body in sight on a Sunday in the capitol of Roman Catholicism. Billy jumped out, punched a couple of keys on a touchpad and the front gate rattled upward. It closed automatically when he pulled inside.
“Come on,” he said, politely, considering he was already dragging me by the collar. Up a metal staircase to a row of locked offices, dragging me like he didn’t care if I got hurt-or maybe preferred that I did.
I don’t know what happened to me, but somehow I was taking this pretty calmly. Billy was taller and broader than me but that was a nice way of saying he was a pudgy media grunt, more used to bullying a word processor than a man. He was already puffing from climbing the stairs. A year out of the Army, I could probably take him. ‘Probably’ was a big word but it relaxed me a bit. Let him drag me around a little more, wear himself out. Let things develop a bit. Then we’ll see. The place was deserted; it wasn’t like he had three guys waiting to jump me. He counted the offices as we went and I noticed there weren’t any numbers on the doors. He dragged me to ‘Six’ and pulled me roughly against the wall.
“You listen to me,” he gasped, jingling through a mass of keys on a White Sox keyring. “I don’t know how stupid you think I am but I don’t take this shit lightly. I made your fucking phone call. I know a guy at Intervento Speciale — the Italian counter-terrorists? I told him what you said; he dropped the fucking phone! I hear him scrambling around trying to pick it up, I take it as a sign from God. Duck down the back steps and by the time I hit the corner, there’s six military police cars outside my door. I haven’t stopped in one place for two minutes since.” He found the key and fumbled it into the lock. “They told me you lost it a year ago but I had no clue. This is fucking Italy! I’ll be locked up for weeks before anybody gets to talk to me! I could end up in fucking Baku getting waterboarded! So I don’t give a rat’s ass about your goddamn credentials-you’re going to tell me what, how and where or you can send me a postcard from Baku whenever you get a chance.”
He was totally panicked and panic does scary things, even to sensible people. That’s what was going through my head when he threw the door open and flicked on the light and I stopped worrying.
Max was lounging behind Billy’s desk; Kate was next to him in a straight-back wooden chair, sitting quietly, waiting. Tauber stepped from the darkened far side of the room, closed the door behind Billy and conducted him politely but firmly into another wood chair directly opposite the desk. When that was done, he took up a position leaning alertly next to the now-closed door.