Noah shook his head. “No. We’re, hell, how do I put this? Okay, we’re outside the government. We’re off the books. If we were still military, we’d be deniable ops. It’s the same theory. We are out looking after our country’s interests overseas, but if we’re compromised, if we’re captured or become an embarrassment, we simply don’t exist. We’re a private concern which just so happens to be comprised of counterterrorist experts and ex-special forces.”
“Fascinating, and wholly unbelievable of course. Tell me, what, precisely, does this Forge Team do, then, that Her Majesty’s Government reserves the right to deny its existence?” Neri’s voice was leery, and it was obvious the real question he was asking here was: How the hell do you know what’s going on while we don’t?
“We’re in salvage,” Noah said.
“Interesting,” Neri mused, “and I would imagine wholly irrelevant.”
No flies on you, Noah thought. “You’d be surprised.”
“No,” Neri said without missing a beat, “I wouldn’t. What would surprise me would be the unguarded truth slipping out of your mouth when you weren’t paying attention.”
Noah almost laughed at that. Instead he gestured for the waitress to come over and ordered himself a light beer. She nodded and hurried away. He liked her eyes, the little he saw of them. They promised. There was nothing better than a pretty young thing who promised-and it didn’t matter what it was they promised. He looked back at Dominico Neri. He found himself liking this dour little detective with his doubting mind. He was Noah’s kind of guy.
“Now, tell me again why I should listen to you.”
Noah leaned forward. He said one word: “Berlin.”
That one word was enough. He had known it would be. Neri could bluster all he wanted. He could demand proof that Noah wasn’t up to his neck in this whole thing-the killer needing to put himself in the center of the show, needing to see, to feel a part of the fear his murders created. That was the common philosophy of crime fighting, thanks to Hollywood. He could demand Noah turn himself over into his custody while he ran the name Ogmios through their own networks, trying to verify the unverifiable, just to make Noah’s life difficult for the sake of making it din›
The number of dead was rising by the hour. There was a grossly inappropriate counter on the ticker on the silent screen behind Noah’s head that said BERLIN DEATH TOLL RISING and showed the number jumping in small increments as each new fatality was reported. Noah’s skin crawled. He didn’t want to contemplate where that ticker would finally settle, but wherever that was, it was going to be a number that simply stopped making sense. That much they all knew from Konstantin’s very first report from the city. Berlin was in trouble.
“There’s nothing particularly secret about what I am going to tell you now, but bear with me.” The Italian nodded. “With each of the public suicides there was a message delivered to one of the national news agencies. In London the message was: There is a plague coming. For forty days and forty nights fear shall savage the streets. Those steeped in sin shall burn. The dying begins now. It was the same message in eleven of the thirteen cities where someone burned.” It was obvious the Italian knew the message off by heart. He wanted to hear something he didn’t know.
“And the other two? Where were they, Mister Larkin? Why were the messages different?”
“One was Berlin, the other was Rome.” He reached into his pocket for the piece of paper he had written the transcripts of the two calls down on. Noah smoothed it out and read through both short messages aloud. “In Berlin the message was: The Holy Father passed through a big city half in ruins and half trembling with halting step, afflicted with pain and sorrow, he prayed for the souls of the corpses he met on his way; having reached the top of the mountain, on his knees at the foot of the big cross he was killed by a group of soldiers. You might be familiar with it. It is a passage from the third secret of Fatima, I believe.”
Neri nodded.
“The message in Rome hit closer to home, and I’d take it as a direct threat to the Pope: Roman Pontiff beware of your approaching, of the city where two rivers water, your blood you will come to spit in that place, both you and yours when blooms the Rose. It’s one of the prophecies of Nostradamus.”
Neri nodded again. “That was the message, yes.” He let out a short sharp breath, then reached for his tobacco tin again. “I need to smoke,” he said. “I am an old Roman, not one of these new children of the city on their damned Piaggios, honking their horns every time they see a pretty gi. It helps me to think.”
“Knock yourself out,” Noah told him. “As to why the messages were different, we think they were telling us where they were going to hit first. And if we are right, Berlin today means Rome tomorrow.”
“Dio ci aiuti,” the Carabinieri breathed, part prayer, part absolute denial as he looked over Noah’s shoulder at the screen. Noah knew he was reading the numbers and imaging the same tragedy overlaid on his familiar streets. His hand trembled as he raised it to his lips and took a drag on the thin cigarette. It was a painfully human gesture, frail, frightened. This was outside of his philosophy. He was a man made for corruption, mafioso, narrow alleyways and the intrigue of an intimate death. Death with honor, as the old saying went. This faceless death was, for want of a better word, un-Italian. For that fraction of a second, when Neri let his guard down, Noah pitied him. He knew all too well the kind of hell that was coming to his city; he’d been shown it all across the television this afternoon. It didn’t take any imagination to switch the word Berlin for Rome.
Noah took a swallow on his Nasturo Azzurro. The beer was cold going down, which was just about all he asked of a beer. He wiped his lips and put the bottle back down on the table between them. He didn’t turn to look at the screen.
“How do we stop it, Noah?” Dominico Neri asked, using his given name for the first time.
He wished he knew.
“You came to me for a reason, so tell me, how do we stop it?”
He leaned forward, closing the gap between them. It was an intimate gesture, especially for a coffee-shop conversation. Noah didn’t want the wrong ears hearing what he was about to say, even if they couldn’t possibly know what he was talking about. The old adage of loose talk costing lives had never really been forgotten by the military services. “All of the victims were English,” he said instead of answering Neri’s impossible question. “We’ve got people looking into what, specifically, links them. Something has to. And we’ll find it. It’s what we do. And when we find it, we’ll find the people behind it.”
“But you won’t find them today, will you?” Neri said. It wasn’t a question. Not really. “Which means tomorrow…” his voice trailed off.
“Look at the messages,” he said. “Look at what they say. They’re a direct threat against one man, not against the city. It wn, not ae like it was in Berlin.” Noah didn’t know that was true, but as he said it he realized there was a certain logic to it.
“You really do think they will move against His Holiness?” Neri asked, almost disbelieving. Only the television kept him from dismissing the idea as absurd. “Dear God, you do, don’t you?”
Noah nodded slowly.
“Don’t take this the wrong way, my friend, but I wish I’d never met you.”
“The feeling’s mutual,” Noah said, without the vaguest hint of amusement.
“I still don’t understand why you would come to me rather than NOCS.” The Nucleo Operativo Centrale di Sicurezza was the Italian police’s counterterrorism unit. They were as good as it got, HALO-trained and worked side by side with the FBI Hostage Rescue, the Israeli YAMAM, the German GSG-9, the Danes, the Dutch, and other special forces groups across Europe. He was right, they were the logical place for Noah to go with this sort of global threat. They were also the least likely to believe him, he thought, but he didn’t say that. They might have taken him seriously if he had the weight of Six backing him up, but he didn’t. He was as good as alone in this mess.