Faduma gave me a disapproving look as I raised my hands in mock deference.
“I won’t do anything,” I said.
“There’s an apartment upstairs. Three bedrooms, living room, kitchen,” Amr said. He handed me the key. “The lock sticks, but you’ll get the hang of it.”
“Thank you,” I replied.
“As I said before, it’s a business arrangement, Mr. Morgan,” he responded. “There is no need for thanks. You are a profitable guest. Trouble, but profitable.”
Valentina nudged him. “Don’t let Amr fool you with his hard-nosed persona. He likes helping people, particularly people he likes. He has a big heart.”
Amr smiled bashfully. “Don’t listen to her lies about the size of my heart. But I do hope you’ll be safer here, Mr. Morgan.”
“Thank you,” I told them both.
“I’d do anything for Mo-bot,” Valentina said. “I owe her.”
“She’s in Rome,” I revealed. “In police custody, I think.”
“Why? What for?”
“Knowing me,” I replied.
“I hope she’s okay,” Valentina said. “I’ll ask around. See if I can find out where she is. Come on, Amr, let’s get out of here before he gets us busted.”
They left the warehouse and I closed the shutter, sealing myself and Faduma inside. We were in another part of Ostia, this neighborhood even more rundown than the first, and I didn’t want to invite any trouble, particularly as the entrance could be seen from the road. The warehouse was located on Via dell’Idroscalo, a road that ran through the estuary marshes to the north of Ostia center, and the building and surrounding industrial estate backed onto the River Tiber.
Twenty minutes later, Faduma and I were in the living room of a musty apartment above the offices at the back of the warehouse. We had a view of the estuary from here and could see the bright lights of buildings on the other side of the river.
Faduma sat beside me on a frayed old couch, the floral pattern bleached by the sun. I’d set up Mo-bot’s and Sci’s computers and was analyzing the hard drive that had been connected up to them. The guy I’d knocked down had been trying to steal data from the machines and was copying the hard drives of both computers, clearly intending to mine them for everything and anything useful. He had a disk-wipe program set up and ready to execute. I was relieved he had prioritized the theft otherwise we’d have lost the surveillance footage being recorded from the devices planted around the Inferno Bar.
As it was, the footage seemed intact, right up to the moment Milan Verde discovered and destroyed the bugs. There were multiple final shots of angry, hostile members of the Dark Fates finding the cameras, snarling into the lenses and cursing before reaching up to send the transmission dark for the very last time.
“So, they found the cameras,” Faduma remarked.
I nodded. “And the listening devices. Thankfully the guy wasn’t able to wipe the hard drives, so we can see what was recorded while Sci, Mo-bot and Justine have been in custody.”
I set up multiple windows so we could view simultaneous feeds from most of the cameras and started scrubbing back through the footage.
It was painstaking work, and my eyes were heavy with tiredness that only pulled at me more as the adrenalin of the night ebbed away. I could sense Faduma’s fatigue, but like me she fought through it.
“There,” she said, and I followed her pointing finger to see a man in a suit enter the bar.
I paused the videos. The timecode showed he’d arrived at 2:13 p.m. He looked uncomfortable and out of place.
I pressed play and the videos ran forward simultaneously. It wasn’t until the awkward-looking man approached the bar that I saw his face.
It was Christian Altmer, Joseph Stadler’s executive assistant, the man Justine had flagged as having something to hide. My mind raced, wondering what a respectable banker was doing in the lair of one of the most dangerous gangs in Rome.
Chapter 73
Whatever Altmer was doing at the Inferno Bar, neither he nor Milan Verde wanted anyone to know about it. The brutal gang leader came in a couple of minutes after Altmer arrived, greeted him like an old friend, put an arm around his shoulders and shepherded him outside.
Milan returned fifteen minutes later, alone.
There was nothing else in the footage, and for a while Faduma and I puzzled over the incident with Altmer.
“You think they’re laundering funds through the Vatican Bank?” she asked.
“That’s a step up for a street gang,” I replied.
“Or a step down for a bank,” she countered. “Some institutions are desperate for liquidity though.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “But what I do find interesting is that this meeting took place after Mo-bot, Sci and Justine were taken into custody. Did they know they were being watched at this point? Were they counting on being able to delete the footage before Justine and the others were released?”
Faduma shrugged, but I couldn’t help feeling the heat of anger building within me. I considered the prospect that someone working for a client might have set us up for arrest or worse.
Faduma stretched. “I’m going to sleep,” she said. “My place is probably too dangerous, so I’ll take a bedroom if that’s okay?”
I nodded. “Of course.”
She got to her feet and headed along the corridor toward the bedrooms. I stared at the image of Altmer, puzzling over the man and his intentions until finally, in the early hours, bereft of answers, my anger smoldering, I fell asleep.
The following morning, I woke on the couch, the computer in sleep mode, the rising sun shining brilliantly through the large windows, the river shimmering beyond.
I stood, stretched and walked along the corridor to the bedrooms. The doors were all open and there was no sign of Faduma, although the bed clothes in the middle room looked to have been slept in.
I heard a noise coming from behind me and crept into the living room to discover her coming in from the main warehouse. She was holding a large paper bag packed with groceries.
“I got some breakfast,” she said, placing the bag on the table.
She started pulling out juice cartons, pastries and spreads.
“I was thinking about Christian Altmer,” she said. “How would you like the chance to talk to him?”
Chapter 74
Rome is full of mysteries that extend beyond the metaphysical into the physical. How did the emperors and senators flee from a siege and escape to their homes in the provinces? Or the old Renaissance families hide from civil unrest?
Secret tunnels like the one linking Basilica di Santa Maria in Montesanto and Chiesa Santa Maria dei Miracoli, the church where Father Carlos had died, run beneath the city like veins, a physical manifestation of the intrigue and mystery that has been the city’s lifeblood for centuries.
Faduma and I took a taxi from Ostia to Via Angelo Emo, a busy street a few blocks from the western edge of Vatican City. She led me past shops and offices until we reached the mouth of Via Giovanni Secchi, a narrow sidestreet that bent sharply before running east. We followed it past a line of modern five-story apartment blocks until we came to a dead end. The street was fringed by thick greenery; bushes and trees packed tightly together beneath the ancient Fornaci Viaduct, a tall, multi-arched brick causeway that ran toward Vatican City.
Faduma guided me through the thick mass of undergrowth and I thought I could discern the faintest of paths as we pushed on. Suddenly we came to a clearing beneath the viaduct, a stretch of stone under one of the arches. It looked like a storm drain and followed the line of the viaduct above us. Faduma turned into it, heading toward the brick column that formed one side of the arch we were standing in. When we got closer, I realized it was a freestanding wall, designed to look like part of the arch, and that there was in fact a one-foot gap between the wall and the viaduct structure. As we edged into the gap, I saw granite steps leading into the ground, beyond the line of the viaduct, past the foundations. When we reached the bottom of the steps, we found an ancient cobblestone well capped with a manhole cover.