We made it to the seafront and stopped outside Caffè Babe, one of the area’s few upmarket haunts, shortly after noon. I paid the driver, crossed the busy boardwalk and went inside.
Caffè Babe was the kind of distressed-wood, exposed-wrought-ironwork, filament-lightbulbs joint I could easily imagine visiting in Greenwich Village, New York City, or Clerkenwell in London, but it seemed out of place in this part of Italy. The incongruity didn’t seem to bother its clientele and all thirty tables were occupied by groups of people busily eating and drinking, many of them while also working on laptops.
I approached the counter, which featured a glass cabinet displaying perfectly baked pastries. Their sweet smell mingled enticingly with the aroma of coffee.
“Sì?” said the barista, a woman in her twenties.
“Double espresso, please,” I replied. “And a chocolate twist.”
“Of course,” she said, setting to work on my order.
“I’m looking for Valentina,” I remarked, as she prepared my coffee.
“You shouldn’t snack between meals,” a woman said as she sidled up next to me.
She had short brown hair, piercings in her ears, nose and eyebrows, and tattoos covering her arms. They curled up her neck out of the back of her black T-shirt, and down her legs exposed beneath a pair of red shorts.
“Valentina?” I guessed.
“Mo-bot told me to keep an eye out for a square,” she replied, pointing to my suit. “At least it’s not gray.” She turned to the barista. “Isabella, bring his order back to us, per favore.”
She led me past the counter and through a door that took us further into the building.
“I bought the place five years ago,” Valentina explained. “I got tired of giving my money to other café owners and thought I could do a better job.”
She walked me along a corridor to a supply room. Here she stopped by a rack of sugar sacks and pressed a concealed button.
“The volume of Internet traffic among the customers provides great cover,” she said as the rack and wall behind it slid aside to reveal a hidden room full of screens and computer gear.
Isabella entered the room with my coffee and pastry. She seemed unfazed by the sight of the secret computer facility.
“Everyone who works here is in training,” Valentina remarked. “Magicians with coffee and computers. Thank you, Isabella.”
The barista nodded and withdrew. I carried my coffee into the computer cave.
Valentina sealed the room behind us and took a seat at one of half a dozen terminals. All around us there were racks of servers in Faraday cages, shelves laden with sensors, devices I couldn’t identify, and stacks of data drives.
“I looked you up, Mr. Morgan,” Valentina said as she woke her computer from sleep mode. “You’re a saint. One of the good guys.”
“I wouldn’t say that,” I replied. “I snack between meals.”
She chuckled.
“Maureen says you have a SIM card to investigate.”
I nodded and produced the dead gunman’s SIM.
Valentina placed it in a reader and opened a program on her computer.
“This isn’t much of a challenge,” she remarked.
“I’ll be sure to bring you something tougher next time,” I responded, and she smiled.
“The suit conceals so much spirit,” she said, before turning her attention to the screen. “There is one SMS message. The phone was never used for anything else.”
She opened Google Maps. “Looks like GPS coordinates and a time — 8 p.m.”
She pointed at a little red marker on her screen that showed a location: a courtyard in the heart of Rome.
“It’s in the Vatican,” she noted, and I looked at the screen and the overhead view of St Peter’s and wondered why an assassin would be given a location inside the spiritual center of the Eternal City.
Chapter 21
I had a time but no date, and it was impossible to tell whether the appointed hour referred to something that had already happened or something that was yet to take place. I didn’t have any immediate leads. After a day spent at my hotel reviewing the background files Mo-bot had sent me on Joseph Stadler, Christian Altmer and Luna Colombo, I took an evening walk to Vatican City.
It’s impossible not to picture the history of Rome. Its humble beginnings as a farming community, its emergence as a territorial power, unbounded riches flowing into the capital of an empire and leading to a grandeur that became the stuff of legend. The tiny alleyways threading between bars and cafés were once used to run details of intrigues or shield plotters on their way to clandestine meetings. The old churches witnessing countless confessions, the hidden sins of the city long lost within their thick stone walls. The old mansions and villas, monuments to commerce and conquest, and the modern infill in gaps created by World War Two. Unsightly post-war office blocks and apartment buildings dotted here and there, evidence of corruption in the city, the infamous nexus of construction, politics and organized crime that took hold of Rome during the 1970s and 1980s.
I walked the streets intrigued by the history of the place, each corner a detective’s dream, full of stories, every building a trove of clues for the inquisitive investigator. All around me were the sounds and smells of a city winding up for the evening.
Tourists ambled, photographing the sites, and locals sought out their favorite eateries and bars. The tourists became more numerous as I neared Vatican City and I joined a steady stream of people heading for a late-evening service. Instead of following them toward the dome of St Peter’s, I walked along the North Colonnade until I reached the pedestrian checkpoint that would allow me into Vatican City.
Joseph Stadler had put my name on a list of visitors who could pass as they pleased. Once I was through security, I walked round the back of St Peter’s, past the beautiful gardens in front of St Mary’s Chapel, to the Campo Santo Teutonico, the courtyard garden that occupied the coordinates Valentina had discovered in the dead man’s phone.
I went to the center of a small bone-dry lawn and looked around. To the north lay the great basilica, to the east the chapel dedicated to St Mary, to the south a red-brick building with high arched windows. It looked institutional, like a school or hospital. To the west was the Museum of St Peter. I couldn’t see any reason for an assassin to come here, other than the fact it was a relatively secluded location.
I waited until 8 p.m. to see if there was some temporal reason for this hour being specified, something that happened only at that time, but apart from the sound of bells near and far chiming the passing of the hour, the courtyard remained undisturbed.
I lingered a while longer and at 8:15 p.m. a figure came through the arched entrance to one side of me. As he passed from shadow to light, I saw a priest dressed in a black cassock. He was tall and slim, with salt-and-pepper hair and the dark eyes and olive complexion that marked him out as southern Mediterranean. From his hair and lined face, I put his age in the late forties.
He smiled warmly when he saw me.
“Mi scusi, mi dispiace disturbarla,” he said.
“I’m sorry,” I responded. “I don’t speak Italian.”
“American,” he said. “I love America. I spent many happy years there in Boston. I was apologizing for disturbing you and intruding on your meditation.”