“Who were you?” he asked, rubbing at his chin as he looked down at the painting on the floor. His skin was rough with stubble. It had been forty-eight hours since he had shaved. He knew from experience that that was enough to transform him from human into some atavistic throw-back that could be used to scare the living daylights out of young children-and grown men at four a.m. for that matter.
Who was this woman who called herself the Bride of Sorrow? Everything about her presence of mind in the face of death screamed CIA, MI6, KGB, Mossad, any one of them but absolutely one of them. He might not know who she was, but he was pretty damned sure she wasn’t a school teacher.
The answer to that question, and possibly so many others, was almost certainly on the flash drive. He wanted to get a look at it before he turned it over to Lethe. That meant finding a computer.
Konstantin re-hung the picture and left the apartment, knowing he’d found all there was to find in the dead man’s home.
9
Dominico Neri was a sour-faced little man with the weight of the world on his slouched shoulders. He was cut from the typical Italian male cloth-interesting features rather than outright handsome, dark-skinned and narrow, his torso an inverted equilateral triangle of jutting ribs beneath a wrinkled cotton shirt. He sat across the table from Noah, sipping at a double-shot espresso in a stupidly small cup.
He looked like he hadn’t slept in a week. That disheveled look and the half-awake eyes no doubt made him painfully popular with the fairer sex, Noah thought. Neri looked like the kind of man who didn’t so much love them and leave them as he did the kind of man who skipped the whole love thing and went straight for the checkbook to pay the alimony. He stared at Noah. The scrutiny was almost uncomfortable.
That was hardly surprising, Neri was Carabinieri.
Rome was burdened by half a dozen levels of police, from traffic cops to jail cops and forestry police all the way to the normal beat cops. The Carabinieri were set aside from all of them. They were military police.
Only Neri’s eyes looked the part, Noah thought, studying the man back openly. If he’d been pushed to guess a career, he would have said journalist. The gun worn casually at his hip killed that career path, though.
“So,” Neri said, setting the espresso cup down on the cheap white saucer. The coffee left a near-black stain around the inside of the cup. Noah could only imagine what it was busy doing to the detective’s stomach lining. “You think this is all somehow linked to the suicide in Piazza San Pietro two days ago?”
Noah nodded.
News had begun to filter through from Berlin, so Neri was taking him more seriously than he would have even two hours ago. The threat had suddenly become credible, and this was Neri’s city. The Carabinieri man pinched the bottom of his nose, both fingers almost disappearing up his nostrils as he thought about what it meant to Rome.
“Forgive my bluntness, Mister Larkin, but an hour ago my office put in a call to your government. They deny that you are working on their behalf, which I admit does not surprise me. When has your government ever owned up to spying?”
“I am not a spy,” Noah said.
The Italian wasn’t listening to him and carried on as though presenting a case: “And yet despite the fact you have no verifiable credentials to back up your wild claims, you obviously know far too much about what happened in the piazza not to be some sort of intelligence officer. Either that, or you were more directly involved. So I ask myself this: were you involved? You do not look like a terrorist.” He grunted a soft chuckle at that. “Not that any of us know what a terrorist looks like, eh?”
“Indeed,” Noah said. He decided against saying anything more. Neri would come to the point, eventually.
Neri reached into his pocket and pulled out a battered tobacco tin. He opened it and took out the fixings for a thin licorice paper smoke, rolling it neatly between his fingers. It was a well practiced motion that needed no thought. Placing the cigarette between his lips he took out his lighter, sparked the wheel against the flint and inhaled with a slow, deep sigh of pleasure as he lit the cigarette. He drew a second lungful of smoke, letting it leak out through his nose before he carried on with his thought. “So then I think perhaps Mister Larkin is a well-known journalist where he comes from and he is here in Rome fishing for a story? It was a reasonable guess. Unfortunately none of the papers in your country appear to know who the hell you are. So not a journalist, not with your government, that leaves me in something of a quandary. What I am saying is, why shouldn’t I arrest you right here and now?”
“If you thought I was involved, you wouldn’t have come out to meet me in this rather overpriced cafe, would you?”
“Or perhaps the couple at the table over there are not a young couple in love but are actually my men. And the older gentleman over there, studying the newspaper so intently, perhaps he is actually one of mine waiting for the signal to take you in?”
Noah looked at the young couple. There was a Rough Guide on the table between them. The man was dressed like a fairly typical straight-out-of-university backpacker. His sneakers were a little too clean for someone who’d been slogging around Europe on an Inter-Rail ticket for a month, but otherwise he looked the part. The girl was pretty, blonde, and petite, all the things a younger Noah would have fallen for. They looked good together. They fit. He watched them talk for a moment. He couldn’t hear exactly what they were saying above the lunchtime noise of the cafe, but he could hear enough to know the guy had a fairly broad Mancunian accent and seemed to be spouting the usual bollocks a postgrad on vacation in Rome would. It wasn’t the kind of attention to detail he would have expected from an undercover policeman, so he felt relatively confident when he told Neri, “They aren’t. Ily, perhd know.”
“Perhaps,” the Carabinieri man said, drawing slowly on the cigarette again. The smell of the licorice paper was sickly sweet. “But that still doesn’t tell me why I shouldn’t arrest you, Mister Larkin, now does it?”
Noah couldn’t argue with him. In his position Noah’s bullshit radar would have been firing off warning signals left, right and center. “Call me Noah. Mister Larkin was my father.”
“Perhaps later, if we become friends,” Neri said. “For now I will call you Mister Larkin, and you can pretend I am talking to your father if it helps.”
“Not really,” Noah said. “I work for an organization with ah, how shall I put it?”-he spread his hands slightly, as though looking for inspiration from above-“let’s say ‘concerns’ in various countries across the world. We have rather specialized interests and areas of expertise.”
“Go on,” Neri said, stubbing out the last of his cigarette in the dregs of his coffee and leaving the butt to soak in the tiny cup.
“Because of our interests we have a rather unique network of contacts, and because of our distance from the more political aspects of things, we can sometimes see links between things that others closer to the fact miss, or overlook.”
“So you are a spy.”
Noah shook his head. “I’m not. Nothing as glamorous. I work for Sir Charles Wyndham. Unofficially my group is known as the Forge Team. We’re all ex-military, so we have certain skills. Sir Charles likes to joke that we were forged in the crucible of battle. The old man isn’t particularly funny, but we humor him.”
“And what might you ‘officially’ be called?”
Noah thought about deflecting the question, but he needed this guy to trust him if he was going to get through the reams of Italian bureaucracy and get him face time with someone on the other side of the border walls of Vatican City. “Our official government designation, if that isn’t a contradiction in terms, is Ogmios.”
“So you do work for the British government? Is that what you are telling me, Mister Larkin?”