“Look out, you’re going to get a shock,” said Alberti in alarm.
Dante showed him that he’d been using his gloved hand. “It’s insulated. And where I’m touching it, I don’t think it’s any more than twelve volts. Hold on …” He let loose some more sparks. “Do you hear anything?”
“No.”
Dante looked around and then, on the floor, buried under a pile of old sports magazines, he found a stereo. He turned it on, pulled the audio cable out of the CD player, and stripped the jack with his teeth, laying bare the metal wires inside. He spit the plastic sheath into an ashtray.
“You’re contaminating a crime scene, Signor Torre.”
“We work with the double-oh-sevens, Alberti, we have a license to kill.” He spat out another little chunk of plastic. “If this doesn’t work either, I give up.” Using the bare wires, he touched the interior of the cordless base. The stereo sputtered, then there was nothing but static.
“Something’s making a contact …” said Alberti.
Dante turned the volume all the way up. “Tell me if you hear anything that’s not just white noise.”
Alberti felt his teeth vibrate. “It’s like fingernails on a blackboard,” he said.
Dante turned it off, put the cordless base into his overcoat pocket, and limped over to the door. “Come on, we’re done here. I need something to drink.”
Alberti tried to put everything back as it had been and clumsily replaced the judicial seal on the door handle. He caught up with Dante on Portico’s main street and together they walked down to the town park, where a little gazebo was serving as a bar. Dante drank a glass of vodka, straight, sitting on a bench. As far as he was concerned, there was no point in ordering a cocktail unless the bar had at least one certificate of excellence.
“What was that stuff?” Alberti asked.
Dante lit a cigarette. “Have you ever heard of Nevada? The company, not the state. According to the intelligence agencies, it was one of COW’s subsidiaries. After Belyy’s death, there was a complete reshuffle of the board of directors, impossible to trace it back to him.”
“Never heard of it.”
“It was founded in 2010 in Washington, DC, and at first it had only one customer: the United States government. It worked in the sectors of cryptography and secure communications technology. Then, seeing that business was booming, it started selling systems to private citizens. And do you know what one of their most popular products is? The ultrasound acoustic dissuader.”
“For mosquitoes?”
“No, for human beings. If you turn it on, all the young men and women and boys and girls under the age of twenty-five take to their heels, and stop loitering around your shop windows or smoking crack in front of your apartment house entrance. They call it Teen Buzz, and the device that generates it is called the Driller.” Dante held up the device they’d removed from the cordless phone. “This is a Driller.”
“And grown-ups don’t hear anything?”
“No. You’re not thirty yet, so you’re in the range, while Loris was younger than you and suffered the full effects of it.”
“It’s connected to a SIM card. So it turned the cordless into a cell phone.”
“That means that, even if Loris unplugged it, it would still work. So my brother calls that number and the whistling starts. Loris starts being unable to sleep, having nightmares, snorting coke just to stay awake, and he skids off the rails. At that point, Leo starts talking to him directly through the SIM card. He tells him that his girlfriend is dead and that he needs to take revenge. Kill Colomba Caselli. Woo-oo-oo.” Dante imitated the sound of a cartoon ghost.
“And was it Bonaccorso who installed this in his house?”
“Or maybe an accomplice.” He turned the Driller over in his gloved hand and pulled out the SIM card. “It’s a Dutch Lyca Mobile, anonymous. There’s no way to get call records. Do you have any fingerprint powder with you?”
“You’ve developed a strange idea of the work I do, Signor Torre …”
“Yes, that it’s pointless. Let’s go buy some glue.”
19
Colomba returned from Rimini tired and starving, and found Dante, Esposito, and Alberti playing junior chemist on the back porch. They’d built a sort of mini-greenhouse with some coat hangers and something that looked very similar to … “That’s the garment bag for my down coat,” said Colomba.
“It was lying around …” said Dante.
“Sure, in my closet.” Colomba looked at the “greenhouse” more carefully. Inside it was a drinking glass full of some slimy transparent substance, another that was smoking, and a broken chunk of plastic. “What is that stuff?” she asked.
“Gorilla Glue with cyanoacrylate. Glass of hot water. And Driller,” Dante explained, pointing to each object. “The hot water is there to hydrate old fingerprints. The cyanoacrylate vulcanizes them, making them visible.”
“We found the Driller at Loris’s house,” said Alberti.
Colomba stopped him. “Start over. From the beginning.”
Dante told her everything, while the fumes from the glue were bonding with the grease of the fingerprints, turning them three-dimensional. And she told him all about her conversation with D’Amore. “The king is dead, long live the king,” Dante commented. “And something tells me that the Nevada company has just jumped onto the winner’s bandwagon.”
“But is Leo the King of Diamonds or does he just work for him?” asked Esposito. He opened the plastic bag and pulled out the Driller, then he dusted it with powdered pencil graphite. A series of black fingerprints appeared on the battery.
Colomba took a picture of the fingerprints with her cell phone. “It wouldn’t take D’Amore two seconds to run them down on the system,” she said, “but I’d just as soon keep this part of the investigation to ourselves.”
“I’ll ask a partner of mine for a favor,” said Esposito.
“That might not be necessary, even though I hope it is. Hold on.” Dante found the file folder on Martina that he’d left on the kitchen sofa, which now stood under the trees in the back of the house. He still couldn’t stand to stay indoors for long, especially in the dark, and the night before he’d slept outside wrapped up in a cocoon of blankets. He brought the file folder back to the patio and compared Martina’s fingerprints with the ones on the Driller. “A waste of time,” he said with some irritation. The fingerprints matched exactly.
“She didn’t even use gloves, what a dope,” said Esposito.
“She thought she was working for the good guys. Working for someone who could have her transferred to Rome. Why should she wear gloves?” said Colomba, boiling over with rage. “Leo got her to put this thing in Loris’s house to use it when he killed her.”
“That guy is sick in the head,” said Esposito. “I really am starting to think he might be your brother, Genius.”
PART THREE THE TWO KINGS
BEFORE
The man who used to call himself Leo Bonaccorso revs down the outboard motor and sets the autopilot. Behind him, a life that is already starting to dissolve; before him, Nothingness.
Mu.
When he tries to explain to someone what “Mu” means, he rarely if ever manages to make himself understood. According to Zen it’s the symbol of that which cannot be described or defined in any way: Nothingness. And Nothingness is the only god he believes in. The most powerful god, before which the universe itself will eventually succumb. And so, what is the only answer to questions such as right or wrong, Good or Evil?
The man who used to call himself Leo Bonaccorso steps out onto the deck and unwraps an energy bar, seeking within himself the lingering traces of the last identity he’d put on. From time to time a thought occurs to him that stubbornly remains alive, as if the mask refuses to let itself be deleted. A regret, a nostalgic yearning. When he finds a thought like that, he writes it on a scrap of paper and sets fire to it.
What’s rebelling against his will this time is the n
ame of a woman with green irises that change with her mood and the weather. He writes that name on the wrapper of the energy bar, lights it, and watches as it falls into the sea, turning into a shower of sparks. He sniffs at the scent of the ashes it’s been transformed into, and he feels purified.
The watch on his wrist vibrates. The man who no longer has a name looks out at the sea one last time—a reminder of the infinite array of possibilities that Nothingness endows him with—and then goes belowdecks, stepping into a cabin that the prior owner of the boat used as a storeroom. He had tossed everything in that cluttered room into the water, except for an extraordinary assortment of narcotics and poisons, synthesized or blended with a masterful touch that verged on the artistic. He fills an insulin syringe with an opioid solution, then steps toward his prisoner to administer the dose, exactly as he’s been doing regularly for days.
Dante is curled up in a fetal position in one of the berths, naked except for an adult diaper; his wrists and ankles are fastened tight with duct tape, and a rubber ball is jammed into his mouth with a bit, part of the standard gear for masochists. He’s awake now—he always wakes up between one dose and another—but his eyes are glassy. His jailer pats him on the head, then proceeds to change his diaper and wash him with a soapy bath sponge. Dante starts to come to, kicking his legs like a seal. The other man waits for his eyes to focus, then loosens the mouth bit.
“It’s lunchtime,” he says.
Dante licks his cracked lips. “No,” he murmurs.
“You can either eat like this, or through a tube stuck down your throat. Which do you prefer?”
“Kill me.”
“Don’t be so melodramatic.”
The man with no name takes another energy bar out of his pocket, unwraps it, and places it against Dante’s lips. At first he sucks on it hesitantly, then he starts biting it. It’s soft and he has no difficulty. His jailer lets him drink a glass of isotonic solution, then he disinfects Dante’s lips and rubs a dab of balm onto them.
“Don’t put that thing back on me,” Dante says. “Please.”
“It’s for your own good. You’d be capable of severing your veins with your teeth.” That’s not a wisecrack: he’s pretty sure that Dante would try, and he’s even more certain that he’d succeed. “You just need to be brave, little brother,” he says. “It’s almost over. And you’ll never even remember waking up again. That’s how it always is.”
Gripping Dante’s left arm tightly, he makes his veins pop, and then he delicately slides the thin hypodermic needle into his flesh.
And it is at that moment that the world turns upside down.
The cabin tilts thirty degrees, and the man who was Bonaccorso falls backward, hitting the door. The bed is screwed to the floor, as is only right and proper in a gas-powered boat, but Dante slides out of it, half-stunned, hitting the planking of the hull. Wrists and ankles are still bound with duct tape, and the drug coursing through his veins keeps him in a dull state between sleep and wakefulness.
There’s a smell of chemical fumes, then the engine dies. Without even bothering to try to look out the closed door, the man without a name calculates his chances of survival. The Chourmo is taking on water. From the angle of the deck, he can tell that he has less than two minutes to try to get out, and his odds are growing worse with each passing second.
Water is starting to seep underneath the door. He resists the rational imperative that ought to drive him out of that cabin and grabs one of Dante’s feet; he drags him closer, into the puddle that’s starting to form, then he frees his hands and feet and starts strapping him into a life jacket.
Dante mutters, “You killed her” and “blood.”
The man who was once Bonaccorso hits him in the face. “Your friend is fine,” he says. “If I’d wanted to kill her I would have twisted the knife in the opposite direction.”
Dante’s hand restrains him, feebly. “I’ll die of radiation,” he mumbles.
“It’s not radiation that you need to worry about.” The boat tilts even more. A lamp breaks off the wall and rolls toward them. Mu pushes it away with one hand and lifts Dante with the other, holding him single-handed the way one does with sleeping children. He opens the doors and steps into the bilge surging with icy water and kerosene. There’s a wooden crate floating with a scorpion clinging to it.
By now, the water has reached his waist, and he’s walking toward the ladder, which with the Chourmo keeling over on one side has risen to an angle of almost ninety degrees. He uses Dante as a flotation device, then he pushes him onto the ladder, by now practically horizontal. The bubble of air in the bilge is keeping only the stern of the boat in the air, as far as the quarterdeck and part of the starboard hull.
There’s a small explosion toward the bow, when the kerosene that has spilled out of the fuel tanks catches fire on the surface. Now the Chourmo looks like nothing so much as a comet with a long glowing tail on a sea covered with black smoke.
Dante opens only his left eye, rolling it upward into the socket. “Then what do I have … to worry about,” he finally manages to get out.
“The right question is who, little brother. If you ever run into him, you’ll certainly recognize him, and if you do … run as fast as you can.” He grabs Dante and with a twist of the hips hurls him down, into the flaming sea.
CHAPTER I
1
For a forensic scientist, night is an investigation’s best friend, because sometimes light covers things up instead of revealing them. If it’s a matter of getting blood to react with an application of Luminol, you might only need dim light and a powerful black light, but what Bart and her team were trying to find in the hallway of the Villa Quiete clinic was far more evanescent than mere bloodstains.
The hallway leading to the room where Dante had been held prisoner was sealed now, and a device that looked like nothing so much as a smoke machine from a film set was spewing a vaporized solution of sea salt and distilled water into the air. Two of Bart’s assistants dragged the machine from one end of the hallway to the other, careful not to step where they’d already passed.
Bart turned on the ultraviolet lamp and put on her goggles. “Lights!” she shouted.
Outside the door to the stairway, D’Amore was helping one of Bart’s assistants to open the cover of the junction box. Unlike the forensic technicians, he wasn’t wearing a head-to-foot jumpsuit—only gloves and shoe covers—but he was steering clear of the points that Bart was checking at that time. “Exactly what is she looking for?” he asked the assistant.
The assistant was a woman in her early thirties, wearing heart-shaped eyeglasses, which she pushed up to the bridge of her nose before answering.
“Do you know what aequorin is?”
“I’m afraid not.”
“It’s a molecule that can be found in certain jellyfish. Very similar to the luciferin found in fireflies.”
“The stuff that makes them light up.”
“Bioluminescence, exactly,” the assistant confirmed. “Luciferin has also been found in certain crustaceans and types of plankton that emit blue light when stimulated. Off Skerki Banks, there are a number of microorganisms that possess these physical characteristics. If we find samples of DNA or particulate matter that has been contaminated by aequorin or luciferin, and that doesn’t belong to Torre …”
“Then they might belong to Bonaccorso or perhaps an accomplice.” D’Amore put the e-cigarette into his mouth with a broad smile. “That strikes me as a fine idea.”
“If there were a Nobel Prize for forensic science, Dr. Bartone would have won it long ago,” the assistant said with great conviction. “We’ve sprayed the hallway with a solution of distilled water and sea salt, because an essential component of bioluminescence is calcium ions. Let’s hope it prompts a reaction, even if it’s been nearly a year and a half.”
D’Amore pushed aside a length of black plastic tarp that had been pulled over the doorway into the hall and peeked in through the glass. At
first all he could see was darkness but then, suddenly …
Inside, Bart, her eyes already accustomed to the dark, was holding her breath. She’d hoped to find tiny scattered sparks of light, but now, before her eyes, there glittered a galaxy of blue stars.
2
The NOA officers relieved each other, starting a new shift, over at the dog shelter, and a black car moved away, turning back and forth in the switchback curves. Dante followed the headlights until they vanished behind the trees, then he put the boom box on the table, pushing aside the dirty plates and Alberti’s regulation-issue PM12 submachine gun. He started up the playlist of Krrish 3, a movie he’d watched at least a couple of times in the original Hindi, then he took a seat at the head of the table, carefully easing himself down with his shiny new wooden walking stick. He hadn’t eaten with the others. His eyes looked demented, and there were new circles underneath them.
“Where did you get that?” Esposito asked, pointing at his walking stick.
“It came today,” Dante replied. “A Ham Brooks classic. My legs are working better, and I don’t need the walker. At least I don’t seem like an old mummy anymore.”
“Big improvement.” Esposito stood up. “I’m going to get some sleep. Good night, Deputy Captain.”
“You’re a big boy now, you can stay up late with the grown-ups,” said Dante.
“No, thanks. I can’t take any more of this Arab hurly-burly you make me listen to all day long.”
“It’s Indian, not Iraqi. And even if they were Iraqi, they have other words for it,” Dante said. “Is there a special course you have to take to be a Neanderthal policeman, or did you just recruit him special?” he asked Colomba.
She grabbed the cane out of his hands and slammed it down onto the table top.
“That’s enough bullshit. Sit down, Esposito. This concerns you, too,” she said grimly.
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