“If you don’t need me here,” Judith Turnhouse said sharply, “I will quite happily go back to my work. I was rather under the impression you wanted to know where Giorgio might be in this rabbit warren. There are three levels of tunnels. Probably close to a hundred different chambers and anterooms of different dimensions. This map doesn’t tell you perhaps eighty percent of what it’s like now. You could spend the next two days wandering around down there. Or I could make an educated guess. It’s your call.”
“So you know where this man is?” Peccia asked, with a childish degree of sarcasm.
She shook her head. “No. Do you?”
“What about there?” Messina, determined to seize back the direction of this argument, pointed to the emblem on the map: the picture of the altar, with its powerful figure subduing the bull. “This is the temple, isn’t it?”
“Read the fine print, Commissario. I told you: This place has changed.”
The two policemen stared at the paper. Sure enough, something had been scribbled underneath the figure.
“I think,” she added, “that’s Giorgio’s handwriting. It indicates that the altar has been moved. The original position” — she pointed towards the Palatino — “was over there. Where you can see a visible collapse in the ground. Whatever Giorgio found, it didn’t go into a museum or I’d know about it. So it’s a safe bet it’s somewhere else inside this complex for safekeeping.” She looked them both in the face. “And for what it’s worth, yes, I think that would be where Giorgio would go. This is all some kind of ritual for him, isn’t it?
Sacrificing the people he blames for Alessio. Where else would he be?”
Messina squinted at the labyrinth of lines on the map. “Where the hell do we begin?” he asked of no one in particular.
Judith Turnhouse peered at the map, scrutinising what looked like an indecipherable maze.
“I can tell you how I’d proceed in there. I can see where a professional archaeologist would want to go. If they moved that altar, it can’t be that far away.”
“So where?” Messina demanded.
She laughed in his face. “I’d need to be inside. It’s not something you can tell from a map. I’d have to see what it’s like on the ground—”
“No, no, no, no,” Peccia exclaimed. “This man is armed! I will not have a civilian around. It’s impossible.”
Messina couldn’t avoid the woman’s gaze. She wanted to do this for some reason, and he wasn’t remotely interested in what it was. All he cared about was Giorgio Bramante. And, he reminded himself, the fate of Falcone.
“Professor,” he said, “this may be a dangerous offer you’re making.”
“Giorgio hates you people,” she insisted. “But he has no reason to harm me. I don’t believe, for one moment, there’s even a possibility he would do so. Perhaps if I’m there, someone he knows, I can talk a little sense into him. I can try, anyway. I wouldn’t say we’re the best of friends, but at least he doesn’t loathe me. Are you really going to pass up that possibility?”
“Sir—” Peccia began to say.
“If the professore wishes to help,” Messina interrupted, “it would be foolish to reject her offer.”
She muttered some short thanks.
“I must insist,” Messina went on, “that you follow the strict orders of Peccia’s men. This is important.”
“I’m not intent on getting myself killed, Commissario. You don’t need to worry about that.”
“Good.” Messina stabbed a finger at the map. “I want a team down there within twenty minutes. Look at this map. Listen to Signora Turnhouse. Go where she suggests. Your men in front. Always, Peccia.”
“Sir…” Peccia seemed to expect something else. “What are your orders?” he asked.
“If Falcone’s alive, get him out of there.”
“And if Bramante resists?”
“Then do what you will. If there’s a corpse at the end of this, let it be his. No one else. You hear me?”
Peccia gave him a cold look.
A large black helicopter swooped overhead, its blades so loud the roar blocked out the desperate timbre Messina knew was in his own voice. He waved to Bavetti and ordered him to call off the surveillance flights. They were, surely, no longer needed. Then he ordered Peccia to assemble his team. The man grunted and stalked off to one of the dark blue vans, all bristling with antennae, from which his unit operated. He returned with four individuals, each dressed entirely in black, each carrying the same stubby, deadly-looking military machine pistol Messina had seen before.
They were all about the same height: all young, alert, dispassionate. They didn’t appear much like police officers. More like soldiers ready for battle.
“We have no idea what you’ll meet down there,” Messina told them. “Inspector Falcone may be alive or dead. If the former, I wish him to stay that way.”
“We negotiate?” one asked.
“You see if that’s an option, by all means,” Peccia declared.
Messina shook his head. “This man is not going to negotiate. If he says he is, it will be a ploy. He kidnapped Falcone in order to kill him. Just as he’s killed the others.”
“People change when they’re cornered,” Peccia told his men.
“Giorgio Bramante does not change. You order him to lay down his weapons and hand himself over. If he doesn’t comply, you act accordingly. Do I make myself clear?”
The men nodded. One of them glowered at the woman, an expression of bafflement and aggression on his face.
“Who’s the civilian?” he asked.
“My name is Professor Judith Turnhouse,” she said. She held out her hand. He didn’t take it. “I’m an archaeologist. I think I can help you find him…”
Peccia’s team glanced at one another. The leader grimaced, then retrieved a black hood from his pocket and pulled it over his head. “We can find him ourselves,” he muttered.
“That,” Messina said firmly, “I very much doubt. Professor?”
Judith Turnhouse spread out the map. Her thin, nimble fingers worked their way across its surface, following each line, travelling across the maze, tracing each chamber, each passage, every last dead end.
It took Alessio five minutes to get his bearings. The string was where he remembered it, left on the floor, just at the point where the one he now knew as Andrea — big, stupid, but strong — had grabbed him in the dark.
They went quiet when he found it. They were all grateful, even Torchia. All games, all the rituals, had to come to an end, one way or another.
He couldn’t begin to imagine what Giorgio Bramante would say if he found out what they’d done. Alessio had seen his father’s fury in full flight only occasionally, and each time it had left him chilled and shaking. Once he’d witnessed him beating his mother, an act that was too much, one that made him intervene, small fists flying, miniature mimics of his father’s, struggling to separate them. Women were weak and needing of protection. That was something the young Alessio Bramante never doubted. What his family required — all three of them — was to become closer, to wind themselves into each other’s lives, so tightly nothing could come between them again, ever. What was needed, it occurred to him, was a sacrament.
And fate, or perhaps some destiny he himself had found in this labyrinth, had provided one: six stupid students who thought they could get away with trespass, dreamed they could sneak into some secret, holy place, desecrate it with their clumsy rites, then walk out, free, untouched.
Smiling to himself, confident, he went on running the string through his fingers as they walked slowly up the corridor. There was no light yet. But if he continued for a minute or more, it would be there, surely. The sun. Escape. Freedom for the interlopers. The six of them would be like the cowards rescued by Theseus, ungrateful for their release, unworthy of saving.