Giorgio Bramante’s knife glittered in a shaft of dying sunlight from a crack in the earth above. Falcone watched it, unmoved, thinking. Bramante had tied his hands behind his back, pushed him around, into the position he wanted. This was not, Leo thought, the way a man who was about to die would be treated. Bramante’s attention lay elsewhere. Falcone’s presence in this underground chamber, next to the altar, was of importance to this event. But he was a prop, not the central actor, much as he’d been in Monti when Bramante had seemed to want to snatch him. And in the Questura, too, the night before last.
There was a faint sound down the corridor, the route by which he assumed they’d approached. The gap in the rock was barely wide enough for two men. What little Falcone knew about tactical training told him this was an impossible position to attack. Anyone entering the room would be fatally exposed to Bramante’s view the moment they arrived. And given a broad, uninterrupted view of the scene ahead of them, two men at an altar, one apparently about to die.
He thought about Bramante’s last words.
This isn’t about you.
Then there was a single, distinct sound: the voice of a woman, her Italian still bearing the faint imprint of an American accent. Judith Turnhouse. Falcone recognised her hard monotone from their brief conversation by the banks of the Tiber the day before. He couldn’t begin to imagine what reason she had to be there or why a police team that was surely attempting to operate with some secrecy and surprise would allow her to break silence in this way.
He and Bramante stood upright before the altar in anticipation, like figures on a stage. The woman’s voice drifted to them sporadically, approaching. As the police team grew closer, Bramante gripped Falcone’s coat, held the knife to his throat, eyes on the entrance, both bodies exposed to the line of fire.
Falcone didn’t struggle. Instead, he said, quite calmly, “You’re a poor thespian, Giorgio. I’m pleased to find something at which you don’t excel. It makes you more human.”
“Be silent,” Bramante murmured, not taking his gaze from the dark cave mouth ahead. A lone flashlight beam danced there, like a distant firefly, one more sign to betray their approach.
Falcone had been unable to shake from his brain the words of Teresa Lupo when he’d believed, for a few brief moments, they might have solved the riddle of what had happened to Alessio Bramante. And of what Giorgio himself had said to him in Monti, when he was almost snatched. When, if Falcone was honest with himself, he could have been taken, too, had Bramante pushed his luck.
“The seventh sacrament,” Falcone said, peering into Bramante’s face, which now betrayed some trace of fear, and that, too, made him more human. “It’s not me at all, is it, Giorgio? This is about you. It was about you all along. Is suicide not enough? Is that dead child trapped in your imagination so hungry that he needs his father’s blood, too, along with all the others’?”
The figure gripping him flinched.
“If Alessio is dead,” Falcone pressed, “he surely doesn’t require this spectacle. If he isn’t, do you think he’d be happy to know?”
The dark, intelligent eyes flashed at him. “You don’t understand,” Bramante muttered. “You’ve no idea what’s in my head.”
“I’d willingly listen,” Falcone said. “If we’d had this conversation all those years ago…”
“Then you’d hate me even more than you do now, Falcone. This is simple. They kill me. Or I kill you. One or the other. You choose it.”
Falcone waited, thinking about his physical state, what worked, what was still struggling back to health. One thing, above all, he’d learned these last three days: he wasn’t weak. He was merely, to some unknowable extent, damaged.
A flood of yellow illumination burst into the chamber: four flashlights searching, probing. Finding.
With all the remaining strength he could muster, Falcone abruptly twisted hard on his ankle, forced his body round in a fast, powerful spin, tore himself from Bramante’s grip, rolled left, kept on rolling, aware that the man’s attention was divided now, between the captive he’d lost and the group ahead of him — black suits, black masks, four men, and Judith Turnhouse, whose eyes shone with anticipation, like a Fury leading them on.
“No weapons!” Falcone barked, rolling two more turns on the floor. “No damn weapons! That’s an order!”
The dark figure still stood in front of the altar, confused, struggling for some form of response.
Four black barrels rose in a line, aimed directly at the man with the knife who was frozen in front of them.
The woman was screeching something Falcone couldn’t understand.
“Secure the prisoner,” he ordered. “Get the knife. One of you only. The rest, cover.”
A single masked figure stepped out of the line. He lowered his machine pistol.
Bramante held the silver blade in front of him, point upwards.
“Put it down, for God’s sake,” Falcone barked at Bramante, battling to his feet, leaning against the raw rock wall, feeling the breath come back into his lungs. Feeling well, if he was honest with himself. Already, he was thinking of the Questura. An interview room. He’d be in charge. The deal for time he’d cut with Messina hadn’t yet run out. “And one of you get over here and cut these ropes.”
Falcone closed his eyes, fought to clear his head. He’d always been proud of the way he could claw his way back to some form of competence, some quick, avid intelligence, even in the most pressured of situations. It was a skill he hadn’t lost after all.
“We need that conversation, Giorgio. We will have that conversation. I want this finished, once and for all….”
He opened his eyes, determined to control this situation. Then he fell silent. The two of them had acted so swiftly, so silently, that during his brief, self-indulgent reverie he’d not heard a thing. Three officers in black were now being pushed, weaponless, to one side of Bramante, hands in the air. One of their pistols sat easily in Judith Turnhouse’s hands, pointed in their direction. The other two weapons lay on the floor out of reach. The fourth individual in the team moved his gun slowly from side to side, from Bramante to his colleagues and back.
“You think,” Judith Turnhouse spat at Falcone, with a bitter malevolence, “you can take this from me? After all these years?”
“I apologise,” he replied honestly. “I simply had no idea.”
He glanced at Bramante, who looked uncharacteristically helpless.
“But then I’m not alone in that,” Falcone added. “Signora Turnhouse—”
The dark, ugly weapon in her hands swung round and pointed directly at his head. To his surprise, Falcone found that, for the first time since leaving the Questura the previous evening, he was genuinely in fear for his life.
“Say one more thing,” she muttered, “and I will, I swear, empty this into your head and enjoy every moment.”
She walked forward and, without a word, took the blade from Bramante’s hand.
Bramante shook his head, opened his hands, looked at her, glanced at Falcone, then turned to the woman again.
“What is this?” he asked, baffled, a shred of anger rising on his face. “We agreed.”
“I’ve something to show you,” she said, and nodded at the man by her side.
The figure in black crooked the weapon under his left arm, then with his free hand dragged the hood off his head.
He was a handsome young man, Falcone thought. A little young for the job. A little naive, not fully in control. He stood erect in the shadows, Bramante’s height, his build. And with his looks, too, though they seemed more exaggerated somehow, so that the resemblance was obvious only by comparison.