“Thallium?”
“The Poisoner’s Poison; it’s arcane stuff. It was popular during the Renaissance. The Medici family’s weapon of choice. It isn’t a ‘nice’ poison.” She shrugged, almost as though embarrassed by the notion that there could be anything considered a nice poison. “Symptoms include vomiting, hair loss, blindness, stomach pains. Then the brain misfires, and the victim is subjected to hallucinations before they die.”
Neri looked at the clock. Three people dead wasn’t bad, considering how Berlin had suffered yesterday. Three people he could live with, even if the symptoms of their death were as horrible as Grillo had outlined. As soon as the thought had crossed his mind he felt guilty for it. Grillo’s next sentence drove that guilt home, and the good Catholic in Dominico Neri couldn’t help but think God was punishing him for it.
“I’ve checked against other hospital admissions, we’ve got reports of over five hundred admissions in the outer districts in the last hour alone. There seems to be a concentration around Torrenova, Acilia, Rebibbia, Primavella and San Lorenzo, but I am not sure that tells us anything, really.”
“It gives us somewhere to start looking,” Neri said, knowing that wasn’t true, knowing that all that would achieve would be to make them feel as though they were doing something. “How do you poison five hundred people in a city like Rome without being seen?” he said, more to himself than to Rina Grillo.
“The water,” she said. “It’s the only way that makes sense. You contaminate the water supply with some sort of heavy metal halide solution, lethal in even small quantities, and with the sun out people are drinking. And the more they are drinking, the worse their deaths are going to be. It’s evil, Neri.”
He thought about the implications of what she suggested. He wasn’t going to argue with her; it was evil, as pure an evil as any he had ever encountered. How long had the water been poisoned? How long did it take for the symptoms to manifest? Could these people have been poisoned even before the suicide in St. Peter’s Piazza? And the implications that went with that line of thought: How many more people had drunk the poisoned water? How many more were already dead and didn’t know it?
He stopped himself as he was about to take another mouthful of cold coffee. The taste wasn’t worth dying for. He thought about all the coffee he had drunk in the last week. Like most Italians he took his caffeine intravenously. He tossed the Styrofoam cup into the trash can beneath his desk. His hand was shaking. Neri had no idea if that was one of the symptoms of thallium poisoning, or if it was just one of the more banal side effects of fear. He was frightened, and not just for his city now. Now his fear had a name; it had symptoms, and a pathology. Worst of all, it had a death toll.
Thirty-six minutes.
They had been so close.
14
Ronan Frost looked up at the huge painting of the girl in the red coat that dominated the side of the building. She dwarfed Frost, easily ten times his size. He didn’t understand how the urban artist had worked his art, but he appreciated the finished product. There was a certain sadness about her and the toys scattered around her feet, or so it looked at first glance, weren’t toys at all. They were all political statements, the broken constructs of state and society scattered around the spoilt child’s feet. Frost didn’t like the picture. It reminded him too much of the kind of disaffected street art that lined the Falls Road in Belfast, and that just brought back other memories he didn’t want to be reminded of.
Further down the street came the usual gang tags and swastikas spray-painted on the weeping walls. Beside the little girl in red there was something infinitely more infantile about the swastikas, like children playing at politics, shouting for the sake of shouting but with nothing to say.
Ronan Frost had found eight of the thirteen victims’ houses. The story had been the same at each of them. The places had been ransacked. There were signs of family but no actual family to be found, and in each place it looked as though they had left in a hurry. There was food untouched and moldy on the plates in front of the TV. The DVD menu in one house played the same mindlessly chirpy thirty seconds of music over and over and over again. Frost knew it had been playing like that for at least a week. It was a wonder the relentless happiness hadn’t driven the neighbors insane. Despite the fact that the houses had all been scoured, there were still things that linked them back to Israel. This puzzled Frost. If they weren’t trying to hide the links to Masada what were they trying to hide? What was the purpose of ransacking the houses if it wasn’t to purge it of any links to the dig? It was a good question.
Frost checked in with Lethe for the latest situation report from the others. It was difficult running an operation across four countries. The sooner they were back together, the better. Still, they had limited resources, the scarcest of which was manpower. They weren’t the Army. They couldn’t dispatch a dozen agents into the field. What they had was Lethe. Lethe gave him a brief rundown. Rome had fallen, meaning they’d been right in their interpretation of those first two targets, but from here on in they were running blind. Tomorrow it could be any of eleven cities.
Of everything Lethe said, it was the fate of Grace Weller, the MI6 agent who had ingratiated herself into the life of the Berlin suicide, that interested him the most. She was almost certainly dead, but she’d had the wherewithal to leave them a trail like Gretel following the witch off into the woods. The documents on that USB stick were her breadcrumbs. In other words Grace Weller was something tangible. She existed. She had a personal file. She had a desk, a home, all of the clutter of life. She might have spent years watching Grey Metzger, but that didn’t mean she had spent years without going home. He needed to know where she lived; he needed to know who, exactly, she worked for. He needed to talk to her contact here in the UK. He needed to know what she was doing out there in Berlin. He needed to know why Six had marked Grey Metzger as a person of interest. Was Metzger somehow at the center of this? Less a victim than an instigator?
He didn’t need to tell Lethe to keep on digging.
Come dawn they’d know everything there was to know about this Ghost Walker woman.
But it was still a long time until dawn, and he had a ninth house to visit.
He had talked to neighbors, trying to build up a picture of the victims’ last few days, but they were city people. City people kept to themselves. It wasn’t like even fifteen years ago when everyone knew everyone else’s business. Now the doors closed, and what went on behind them was anyone’s guess. Door-to-door inquiries were a waste of time. Even if they had seen something, people pretended temporary blindness. There was no sense of civic duty anymore. There wasn’t even a milkman doing a daily delivery anymore. Everything had become so anonymous.
Ronan Frost walked down the street. He pulled his jacket closer. The night was cold on his skin. It didn’t feel like spring had finally arrived. It felt like winter had killed any trace of warmth. Cars lined the side of the road, parked bumper to bumper. There were no expensive sports cars in the long snake of Fords, Fiats, Mazdas and Citroens. These were all functional vehicles. None of them were new. This was a part of the city where a new car came in a poor second to feeding the family.
Most of the houses had alarm boxes up above the doors. It was a good bet that more than half of them were dummies. It was that kind of place.
He looked for a twitching curtain, a Neighborhood Watch sticker in a window, anything that would suggest a nosy neighbor who might just have seen something out of the ordinary. But the curtains were drawn and the lights dimmed. People didn’t look out into the street because they knew what was good for them. Frost walked down the middle of the road, breathing in the city smell. He could almost taste the danger pheromones in the back of his throat. This place had more in common with the Belfast of his early 20s than just the graffiti.