Peroni had to ask. “Us being?”
“What’s it matter? What’s in a name?”
“It matters because you’re supposed to be FBI,” Falcone pointed out.
“Sue me,” Leapman grunted. “The point is this. Ten days into the war we find Bill Kaspar running like hell in some little town outside Baghdad. Our guys do just as they’re told. Lock him up and wait for a special team to come and take out the trash. And you know what he does?”
What men like that always did, Peroni thought.
“I can imagine,” he said.
“No.” Leapman shook his head vigorously. “You can’t. The men who picked him up were low-level grunts. They understood he was supposed to be a bad guy. They told him so. I know Bill Kaspar. He could’ve taken them out one by one if he’d wanted. What he did instead was go crazy. I mean angry crazy. Outraged. Some stupid sergeant knocked him around a little and told him he was a traitor. Kaspar went ballistic. He demanded to see the platoon commander, the guy above him, the regional commander, Dubya himself. Why? Because we’d got it all wrong. He hadn’t been sitting there in some Iraqi palace trading secrets for dough. The poor bastard had been in jail all along, probably getting tortured daily after a breakfast of dust and shit, not saying a word because that’s what Bill Kaspar is like.”
Leapman took a big deep breath before going on. “We got fooled and Kaspar knew it long before we did. He listens to this dumb sergeant for a couple of minutes, thinks it through, and then he’s out of there. Doesn’t even kill one of the grunts on the way, either, though a couple of them won’t walk too well for a while. And all we know is some lowly soldiers got a report from an American prisoner that doesn’t add up to much, then let the guy we wanted so badly escape out into the mess that was going on all over the place. We didn’t stand a chance of catching up with Kaspar after that. And for one good reason. He didn’t want to be caught.”
“He had no money,” Peroni objected. “No one to help him.”
“He’s Bill Kaspar!” Leapman yelled. “I keep telling you. Kaspar wrote the book on every last trick and scam you can pull in circumstances like that. You could parachute him onto Mars, come back six months later and he wouldn’t just be alive, he’d be sitting in a nice house with lobster on the table, fresh champagne on ice in a bucket and some goddamn hippie CD from the seventies on the stereo. Kaspar survives. He’s the best there is at it.”
“When did you know?” Falcone asked.
Leapman grimaced. “It took a while. We didn’t even realize Kaspar had made it to the US. We thought he’d hide out in Syria or somewhere. These people in Deacon’s team… most of them were civilians by this time. We didn’t put two and two together until those deaths in Virginia. By then there were just too many coincidences. All the same we still couldn’t work out what he was up to. As far as we were concerned, Bill Kaspar was a renegade, a wanted criminal. We couldn’t figure out what possible reason he’d have for risking his neck by coming home and killing these people. Then…”
He mulled over how far to go. “Then we realized that the only evidence we had against Kaspar came from Deacon’s man who’d gone on that covert mission a few years earlier. Nothing else corroborated the story. Certainly not the other three guys who never made it out of there. So we started taking a few peeks at the bank accounts of some of the others, the ones who did get out. They’d done their best to keep it hidden at first. I guess after time you get lazy. There’s a whole lot we don’t know. Was this arranged before Deacon and Kaspar went into Iraq? Did one or two of the team plan it and just face the rest with the choice when they all got there? Live and be a rich traitor or die and be an unsung hero? It’s all guesswork now. Operations like these don’t keep records for good reasons and everyone involved except Bill Kaspar is dead. But we were starting to firm up our suspicions by the time he made it to Dan Deacon in Beijing. After that, we were certain. Deacon had half a million dollars stashed away in a bank account in the Philippines. The moron never even spent a penny of it. Can you believe it?”
“The woman who died in the Pantheon?” Falcone asked.
“What about her?” Leapman asked.
“She knew. She must have known. You brought her here.”
“Yeah,” he snarled. “So we screwed up. I had five men watching her. How Kaspar got past them sure beats me.”
Falcone wasn’t letting go. “And she came here because…?”
“Because, Inspector, I didn’t give her any choice. She was a criminal. I could have snapped my fingers and she’d be gone for good anyway. She knew nothing. She got shot by accident after Deacon and Kaspar went in and scarcely knew what happened. So I gave her a chance to make up. Had it worked, she could have walked free.”
“Generous,” Peroni observed. “Why didn’t you just try talking to him direct?”
Leapman reached over the table and scattered Costa’s papers.
“We’ve been trying! What do you think all these messages are about? If I could just get him on the phone… I’d apologize. Then I’d tell him it’s time to end this crap and throw himself on our mercy. Except now…”
They waited. It had to come from him.
“Now he’s killed again,” Leapman muttered. “Which shouldn’t have happened. He’d killed everyone who’d gone into Iraq with him and betrayed him. The only one still standing is him. There’s no reason he should take out someone who had nothing to do with this. But Bill Kaspar always had a pretty old-fashioned view about patriotism. He came out of some Iraqi prison thinking he’d be home and free with everyone telling him he was a hero. Instead, he walked into all this crap. Us treating him as if he was a turncoat. If he feels his country’s abandoned him-written him off as a traitor-I suppose he thinks anything goes these days.”
“I suppose he’s right,” Peroni grumbled.
“Finally,” Leapman said, with a long, pained sigh, “we agree on something.”
Costa met Teresa where they’d arranged by phone, close to Largo Argentina, and briefed her on what he’d discovered. Then the two of them walked the short distance to the cafe where Emily had said she’d be waiting for them. He didn’t recognize her at first. She was standing at the counter of an empty Tazza d’Oro, close by the Pantheon, anonymous inside a too-big khaki winter parka with the hood still up. He nodded at her, got a couple of coffees, and the three of them retreated to a table.
Emily Deacon looked a little frightened, but a little excited too. Costa reached forward and gently pulled the hood down to her neckline, revealing her face. She managed the ghost of a smile and shook her long blonde hair automatically. It seemed lank and dirty.
Emily glanced at Teresa. “I thought perhaps it would be you and Gianni.”
“Gianni’s tied up,” Teresa said instantly. “I’m the best you’ve got.”
“No.” There was a flash of a smile. “I didn’t mean that. Sorry. You’ve got something out?”
Costa nodded at Teresa. “We think so. But put us in the picture first, Emily. What the hell happened last night? How did you find Kaspar?”
“I didn’t. He found me. You fell asleep.” She felt awkward with Teresa there, Costa guessed. “I went outside… I’m sorry. It’s the last thing I wanted, believe me. But maybe…” She bit her lip. “This could be the one chance we get. It’s important you understand the situation. Look.”
She flipped down the collar of the jacket and pointed to a tiny black plastic square. “It’s a mike. Kaspar’s listening somewhere. He can hear every word I say. He’ll be able to do that all the time until this is over, so please don’t get any smart ideas. And if the mike goes dead, so do I. Kaspar knows what he’s doing. You’ve both got to understand that. We can’t mess with him.”