“You mean he went there?”
Fielding shifted uncomfortably. “I don’t know the details. It’s a million miles from my job and I don’t want to know the details. Let me just say this. Rome’s a great place for putting together certain kinds of projects. Particularly ones that have to do with the Middle East. You’ve got the communication. You’re near the action. You don’t have the security issues you hit somewhere like Greece. There are facilities, too, out of town. That’s as much as I know.”
“He was in Iraq?” she pressed.
“Maybe. Probably. Hell, I don’t know and I’m not about to start asking. There was a whole bunch of spooky people around at the time. I kept clear. I didn’t like what was going on. We had a casus belli there anyway-Saddam had invaded another country, for God’s sake. But we hadn’t thought it through. Which was kind of the opposite second time round, in my opinion. With that we’d done the war games over and over again and never quite found the reason to use them. Not in all truth. I very nearly resigned over that one.”
She was shocked. The idea of Thornton Fielding walking out of the embassy after twenty years seemed incredible.
“You thought about quitting?”
Her bafflement seemed to offend him. “Is that so odd? Do you think we just sit here taking orders, never questioning them? I wasn’t the only one. Some guy in the visa department just left his desk the day the first bombs fell, went outside and joined the crowds. Guess he’s making coffee in a bar or something right now. Stupid move. I can’t believe I nearly joined him.”
His eyes slid towards the closed door again. Suddenly she felt guilty for putting this decent man in such an awkward position.
“It’s not always easy to do what’s right, Emily. You have to marry up your conscience with your duty. Sometimes they don’t match too well. One has to make way for the other. Either that or you just start all over again at something new and I’m too old for that. Hell, I’m too good for that. You can walk away or you can wait for another day to fight. I chose the latter.”
She tried to think back to the blur that was her childhood.
“He was gone a long time, I think. I remember it was odd. My mom cried at night. She was worried.”
“He was gone for almost three months,” Fielding said bluntly. “But he came back, Emily. At least you got that. They didn’t all make it.”
“And now he’s dead. This creep killed him anyway. In a temple in Beijing. Killed him, then carved this crazy pattern out of his back, just like all these others.”
The connection hovered just out of reach… Fielding was waving a hand in front of his face. “I thought I told you. No details. Don’t give me any details…”
“Without details I’m lost, Thornton. And I can’t get a single piece of useful information out of the damn system, because it’s blocked off to underlings like me. The moment I get near anything I hit the same barrier: no security clearance. I can’t talk to Leapman. All I’ve got is you and some local cops who maybe know more than they’re letting on.”
“I haven’t got any more, Emily,” he said with resolution. “I shouldn’t have said what I did. Forget it. You want my advice? Go home. Get sick. Lay a complaint against Leapman or something. You won’t have a problem making them believe that. Get back to Washington, find yourself a comfy desk somewhere and get on with your life. Leave Rome and all this shit behind. There are graves around here you don’t want to start digging up.”
“That’s not possible.”
He looked into her face and there was no mistaking his expression. Thornton Fielding was begging her to be gone.
“Why not?” he asked.
“Because I met him last night, Thornton, and I can’t just walk away from this now. He could have killed me, but he didn’t. Why? I don’t know. I have to know. Because of who I am. Because… Shit. He’s smart. Maybe he thought that’s why I was here in the first place? To lure him out. And he just didn’t want to play someone else’s game.”
He put his hands together and asked very slowly, “You met who?”
“Bill Kaspar.”
Fielding’s handsome face drained of expression. “Jesus Christ, Em. Where the hell did you get a name like that?”
“From the guy last night,” she lied. He’d only given her a surname. Her early memories provided the rest. “He called me that, too. ”Little Em…“ ”
Bill Kaspar. What a guy.
They’d all said that of this man once upon a time. She didn’t know how she remembered that or why. Just that it was true. Her father thought that. Perhaps Thornton Fielding did once too.
“ ”Little Em…“ ” she repeated. “But I’m not little anymore, Thornton.”
“I can see that,” he murmured. “We’ve all grown up a lot over the last few years.”
“So tell me. What the hell’s going on around here?”
“Can’t,” he sighed, shaking his head. “I’m not even sure I know myself. I just know this: you steer clear of this shit. Otherwise it will eat you up, like it did…”
He fell silent and looked at the door. It was different now. He wanted someone to intervene.
“Like it did my father? And these other people too?”
“Emily…”
She was making Thornton Fielding squirm and it felt awful.
“You know what I think, Thornton? Leapman brought me here as bait of some kind. I’m my father in disguise just to remind this man of something, to throw him off his guard. Joel Leapman thinks I’ll bring out this… monster. Make him crawl out of the woodwork. Is that what Bill Kaspar was like all along? And if he was…”
He was staring at some papers on the desk, pretending she wasn’t there.
“Dammit, Thornton! You were my dad’s friend. Are you going to help me find out what happened to him or not?”
He didn’t say a thing. It was all a waste of time. Maybe he was so scared he’d report it all back to Leapman the moment she was gone.
“And you’re the guy who nearly resigned over a principle, huh? You expect me to believe that?”
It didn’t make her feel any better. Thornton Fielding was part of the good Rome she remembered, and here she was beating up on him for no real reason at all.
“I can’t help what you believe, Emily. But please. Listen to me. Drop this. For your own sake. Just leave the whole thing alone.”
She stormed through the door and slammed it behind her. Fielding watched her go, miserable. Then he turned round his desk and started typing, very slowly, very deliberately, into his PC.
Emily Deacon walked back to her seat in Leapman’s office. The place was empty. Leapman hadn’t even left a message.
You don’t leave messages for bait.
So what she was supposed to do? Where she was supposed to be? It was an act. Everything was, and there wasn’t a single thing she could do to change matters.
The icon on her e-mail in-box blinked. She opened the message.
I am sorry for the problems you have been experiencing with the embassy network. We are currently carrying out some urgent maintenance in order to rectify this. I have set up a temporary network identity which you can use in the meantime. This will expire permanently at 14.00.
Username: WillFK. Password: BabylonSisters.
Regards, TF
Breathless, she typed in the details, logged on. Then she looked at her watch. It was now 13.05. Fielding wasn’t being generous but maybe this was about as much as he could risk.
Emily Deacon entered keywords she’d tried before, the ones that brought down the security block.
Then she sat back in her seat and watched the screen begin to fill with text.