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.