“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.