“I’ve changed my mind,” Noah said, opening his eyes again. Neri looked at him expectantly. “There are just so many things wrong with this scenario. This can’t be about the Pope, not yet. This is about Rome, just like today was about Berlin. It has to be.”
“But the quatrain the suicide called in?” Neri said. “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.” He quoted te piece perfectly. Noah wondered how many times the Roman had read those four lines of prophecy in the last forty-eight hours.
“It’s the smoke and mirrors part,” Noah said, sure he was right. It was the only thing that made sense. He had let himself become distracted with everything else. “Gets us barking up trees, it has to be. You said it yourself, the Pope isn’t here. These guys are meticulous. They have to be to have orchestrated thirteen to-the-minute suicides in thirteen cities, and then duplicate the feat in the U-Bahn today. There’s no way they’d make such a blatantly amateurish mistake as to not know exactly where His Holiness is right down to the bloody minute. Think about it,”-he shook his head, something approaching admiration in his voice-“the message might have been about the Pope, but we keep forgetting that so was the one in Berlin. Those were the long-term threat; the fact that they were different earmarked Berlin and Rome as targets.
Forty days of terror they promised, and at the end of it all of our gods will die-Christian, Muslim, bloody Norse, it doesn’t matter.” Noah grunted. “The clock’s ticking. Tomorrow they will strike against Rome. I don’t know where, I don’t know when, but I am prepared to bet my bloody life on the fact it will be spectacular. And in thirty-eight days they’ll make their move on the Pope. Right now they’re in the blind, waiting,” he said, thinking back to Basrah.
“You paint a bleak picture,” Neri said. “Assuming you are right, what do you want from my people?”
“This is your city. Where would you hit? What would you do? Think about it. Whoever it is, they’re in Rome right now. They will have been here for a while, going over the minutia of their strike, dry runs, timing every twist and turn and exhausting every eventuality, because that’s what these people are like. Someone has seen them. Someone knows who they are. Nothing goes unseen in a city this size. You need people out on the streets, asking the right questions. These people will look Italian. They’ll sound Italian. They’ll have normal lives that they’ve worked for years to secure. They could be married, have kids in good Roman schools. They’re playing a long game.”
Neri screwed up his already battered face, as though understanding for the first time that anyone from the young couple with the tourist guide to the old man with the paper to the waitress with her promising eyes, or the guy in the street wrestling with a hot, overly tired toddler could be their terrorist. You couldn’t tell just by looking at them, you couldn’t read their thoughts. They were just like everyone else, perfectly so, cultivated to be so.
“And with that, I think it’s time for me to go haunt my countryman’s ghost.” Noah pushed back his chair and made to stand. Neri stubbed out the dog-end of his latest cigarette.
“The victim rented a garret in one of the poorer parts of the city proper under the name Nick Simmonds. No doubt you already have the address. You seem very well connected for someone who doesn’t work for your government,” Neri said wryly, “but there’s nothing there. The place was empty when we got there. And not just empty. It had been thoroughly disinfected and every last trace of Nick Simmonds removed. There was absolutely nothing left of a personal nature. Nothing to say he had ever lived there. Not so much as a strand of hair to run against his DNA.”
That gelled with what Konstantin had found in Berlin. That similarity in itself made this garret in the poor quarter worth following up.
“His work?” Noah asked. He knew that Simmonds had been interning with the Vatican archivist, but beyond that it was anyone’s guess.
“I’ve got one of my team trying to make inroads over there,”-he nodded across St. Peter’s Square toward the dome of the basilica-“but between you and me, I suspect Dante was writing about that place when he designed his Purgatory.”
“That good?”
“Trust me,” Neri said, reaching for his tobacco tin yet again. “It’s enough to make a guy like me believe in the Devil.” He nodded to the older man reading his newspaper. The man returned the gesture and folded the broadsheet neatly before paying his bill and leaving the table. Smiling wryly, Neri nodded toward the young couple who, likewise, put away their Rough Guide and settled their bill, leaving a generous tip as they vacated the table.
“They were your people?”
“They were.”
“Trusting soul, aren’t you?” Noah said.
“This is Rome, Noah,” Dominico Neri said with an almost friendly smile. “You can’t trust anybody. Faces of angels, morals of devils.”
10
Konstantin had been on both sides of enough black-bag jobs to know when something was wrong.
He liked that euphemism, black bag. It was just a polite way of saying burglary. The British were peculiar like that, they liked to use words like cut-outs, false flags and honey traps instead of calling a robbery a robbery. It was all terribly 1950s, stiff upper lip and all that.
From the surveillance side the set-up with most of these jobs was simple: you baited the trap, sat back and waited. Something would shake loose. It invariably did. Surveillance was all about patience. You sit, you wait, you see who shows up.
Metzger’s apartment was the baited trap in this case, and he’d just walked right into it.
There was nothing sixth sense-ish about it. No prickling hairs on the nape of his neck. No instinctive mental alarm tripped to warn him. It wasn’t his reptilian brain or anything like that. Konstantin was a practical man on all levels. He had no time for the stuff and nonsense of superstition. That didn’t mean he dismissed well-honed instincts, though. A trained man would recognize things on a subconscious level that a normal man would more than likely miss. That was simply the way of it. It was all about tradecraft. Konstantin Khavin knew he was being followed because he was observant. There was no great mystery to having your eyes open. Konstantin had learned to interpret the signs left by careless people. More than once, being observant had kept him alive.
He had picked up the tail as he left Metzger’s building on Schlossstrasse.
There had been three tells that gave the watchers away, and each of them was surprisingly obvious (and therefore amateurish) given the level of sophistication the U-Bahn attack had demanded. That was something to worry over later. Right now his first concern was learning as much as he could about the people following him-which meant turning the whole thing on its head and following the followers.
The first tell was as thoughtless as an unshielded lens cap in an upper window across the street from Metzger’s place. Whoever was up there in the otherwise darkened room had been taking photographs of everyone coming and going from Metzger’s building. It was a grunt job. Observe and log for further investigation. Someone else would do the foot work, and they’d probably relieve each other on eight- to ten-hour shifts up in the dark room to alleviate the boredom of staring out into the street if nothing else. As the noonday sun hit the camera’s beveled lens it sent a momentary splash of glare across the window. It was just careless. He imagined they had been up in their rented room for days without a break. That was when sloppiness set in.
He would have dismissed it if it hadn’t been for the second tell, the engine of one of the cars across the street gunning as he walked toward the kiosk at the end of the street. The two together were more than mere coincidence.