City of Fear nc-8

by David Hewson

  “What was the rush to close it down?” Esposito asked.

  The Englishwoman laughed as if the question were ridiculous. “This was politics! Everyone had had enough. Except Marco Costa. It was …” She sighed, and her large shoulders heaved as she did so. “… like rummaging through your own dirty linen. And for what? However much we might have argued about who put that lunatic Andrea Petrakis up to his tricks, the truth was that we were agreed on one thing: It seemed as if it was all over. No reprisals followed for the deaths of those three students in the Maremma. No threats.”

  “These allegations,” Costa said. “That the Petrakises were agents of Gladio. That Frasca somehow ran them, or paid for them.”

  She screwed up her large, pale face in dissatisfaction. “I was never totally happy with that idea. Gregor and Alyssa were typical Greek fascists, utterly out of control. I doubt anyone could handle them effectively, least of all a junior spook from the U.S. Embassy. Why do you think the colonels sent them over here in the first place? They were sick of all the trouble they were causing in Athens. You won’t find it in the report, but we got a pretty good steer from the Greeks that both Petrakises faced arrest for murder if they were unwise enough to return home. The colonels were long gone by then. There were some half-decent people in the government. The Petrakises were involved in subverting naïve students, and didn’t stop short of a little brutality with anyone who resisted. Some of those they talked to never came home for supper afterwards.”

  She shook her head, as if puzzled by something. “Very much like those three idiots Andrea roped into his scheme, if you think about it. The Greeks didn’t mind taking Gregor and Alyssa back when they were dead, mind. I saw the grave for myself. They were buried together beneath the same stone in a little cemetery not far from the Plaka. I had a damned good lunch afterwards, and on expenses too.”

  “The commission sent you to Athens?” Costa asked. “Why?”

  “To talk to Greek Intelligence, of course. I told you. The colonels were gone. We were all good Europeans together. The new people let me see the files, some of them, anyway. The Petrakises were career criminals who worked as hired hands for anyone who paid them. When they weren’t doing the dirty work for LOK, they were busy robbing, stealing, buying and selling dope. Not a nice couple at all.”

  Mirko Oliva sat on his chair, wide-eyed, speechless. Elizabeth Murray leaned forward and smiled at him.

  “Yes, children. All of this happened, here, not long before you were born.”

  “And Frasca?” Falcone wanted to know.

  “The Americans stonewalled us,” she replied. “Just as they stonewalled you yesterday in the Quirinale. Frasca was Intelligence, probably CIA. A thoroughly decent government officer, from what I could gather. It’s possible, I say no more, that he was trying to dismantle the nonsense he’d inherited. This was the late eighties. The collapse of the Eastern Bloc was just around the corner. Anyone with half a brain could see that coming. The Cold War was in its death throes. Who needed a bunch of right-wing crazies running around Europe handing out guns and banknotes to any passing terrorist they could find? Just to keep out a Russian regime that was crumbling from within anyway, with that very nice man Gorbachev at the helm?”

  She hesitated, thinking. “I suspect the smart money was already on the next threat coming from the east. From Afghanistan, Pakistan. Washington got the message first. Makes sense. They put the mujahideen through college in the first place. By the late eighties the CIA had started cutting up Osama’s Company AmEx card. Dealing with thugs and terrorists in Europe didn’t matter anymore. That battle was won. It was only a question of waiting for the Berlin Wall to come down. Though that’s partly conjecture, which is entertaining, but ultimately futile. The truth is, I don’t know what Renzo Frasca did, exactly. Except he was no bean counter.”

  “False flags,” Teresa murmured.

  Elizabeth Murray smiled at her and nodded.

  15

  “False flags” Elizabeth Murray agreed. “Gladio. All of those networks. That’s exactly what they were. They existed to convince the people who were shot and bombed, who’d lost family and friends, that they’d better sit tight and make sure nothing changes, because the wicked bogeymen were waiting round the corner with their balaclavas and Kalashnikovs.”

  “This is outrageous,” Rosa complained, visibly upset. “You’re saying these atrocities were sanctioned. By the Americans? By our own politicians? That they killed people here in order to keep themselves in power?”

  “No, no, no,” the Englishwoman said quickly. “It’s not that simple. ‘Sanctioned’ isn’t the right word. No one phoned back to Rome or Washington or wherever to get permission. They didn’t need to. They were spooks out in the wild, on their own, working by the rules they invented. But Gladio existed. Just a few years after this report was killed, your own prime minister, Giulio Andreotti, confirmed its existence to a rather more weighty parliamentary commission than ours. It makes for awkward reading, I know. Perhaps that’s why so many have forgotten what went on. False flags have been around for centuries. Japan invaded Manchuria by fabricating the politically expedient Mukden incident. Hitler set fire to the Reichstag to blame it on the Communists and seize power in Berlin. There are those who think the attack on the World Trade Center was a false-flag incident. The Madrid bombings. Pan Am 103. Are you starting to see the world you’ve entered?”

  “Not exactly,” Peroni complained.

  “It’s a hall of mirrors. The truth seems as likely, or as improbable, as the absurd. Personally, and I have no particular information to support this, I do not believe for one moment that the Twin Towers fell through the actions of anyone but the murdering bastards in al-Qaeda. Equally, I know for a fact that paid agents of NATO provisioned and guided the men who planted bombs that killed ordinary Italian citizens the length of this country during the seventies and eighties. The difficulty is …” For the first time, an expression of doubt crossed her face. “Why would any of them stay behind so long? Who, exactly, is the enemy?”

  “Petrakis thinks he’s fighting what he always fought,” Costa pointed out. “Us. Rome. Society.”

  “Andrea was someone’s plaything back then, and probably still is now,” she said, with absolute certainty. “An interesting man, even when he was young. But all this …” She waved at the window. “This is beyond him. Without a little help from his friends, he’d never be here. Didn’t Dario make this clear?”

  Commissario Esposito held out his arms, exasperated. “We’re police officers, not spies. What are we supposed to do?”

  She shrugged. “Find the answers that eluded us twenty years ago, perhaps? Or at least provide some insight. You’re not a part of the Great Game. That could be an asset. You may see something I’d miss.”

  “If you couldn’t find the answers,” Esposito began, “what makes you think—?”

  “I came here because Dario Sordi begged me, Commissario. He thought”—she grimaced—“perhaps there was something I’d overlooked. Or forgotten. And that you … I don’t know.”

  She shook her head, got to her feet, took the stick, and hobbled to the window. Elizabeth Murray was older than he had first thought, Costa realized. And she wasn’t well, either.

  The woman threw up the pane, took out an unusual packet of cigarettes, with a black cover bearing some heraldic emblem. She lit one and blew the smoke out into the hot, rank city air. The rumble of angry car horns drifted into the room.

  Costa walked over and stood next to her. She was scanning the narrow street, up to the Lateran, down to the Colosseum.

  “Old habits,” she muttered, holding up the cigarette. It had a gold tip and a dark body. “They’re called Russian Blacks.” She took another look out into the street. “Apologies if I appear paranoid. I did surveillance for a while. No one ever suspected. A batty Englishwoman. Why should they?”

  “Who for?” he asked.

  She turned and looked at him. An icy, deprecating st
are.

  “Sorry,” Costa said quickly. “Foolish of me to ask.”

  “No one’s watching us anyway. At least as far as I can see. Perhaps they realize we’re chasing phantoms.”

  Falcone bent down and leaned out of the window too, then waved away the cigarette smoke.

  “What do you find most puzzling about this, signora?” the inspector wondered.

  “That’s an extraordinary question,” she said, laughing. “Where do you start?”

  “Sometimes with something you’ve dismissed already, because you feel you’ll never know the answer, and therefore it’s not worth pursuing.”

  “You are an interesting bunch, aren’t you?” she mused, gazing at him. “I can see why Dario picked you.”

  “And the answer?” Falcone persisted.

  She frowned. “Why on earth would Andrea Petrakis take Frasca’s son in the first place? He was fleeing Italy, en route to God knows where. Who would want a three-year-old child in tow while he was on the run? As a hostage? Possibly. But why keep him for twenty years in that case? Just so that he could teach the poor bastard a little Etruscan handiwork with a knife, then bring him back to Rome and shoot him like some wild animal?”

  “We’re sure it is Danny Frasca?” Teresa asked.

  Peroni said, “He called himself Danny. He had that locket. He did that thing to Batisti, he spoke Indian—”

  “He spoke Pashto mostly,” Rosa cut in.

  Esposito waved her into silence. “Palombo says they have a confirmed DNA link with samples from the Frasca couple,” the commissario told them. “He was their son. There can be no doubt about it.”

  “That was quick,” Teresa observed. “A DNA match from a sample twenty years old doesn’t normally turn up overnight.”

  Elizabeth Murray nodded at her. “And a sample that matched what? The Frascas are buried outside Washington. Would you keep physical evidence all that time? For a closed investigation?”

  “We would,” Esposito insisted. “So would the Carabinieri. This was their case.”

  “Bodies,” Elizabeth muttered, then walked over to the computer, took Costa’s CD off the desk, and thrust it into the machine. “That bothered me back then.”

  She shuffled through the report until she found the photographs of the shack in the Maremma, after it was stormed by the two remaining Carabinieri men.

  “I only put three or four photos into the report, but we had twenty, thirty to go on. And real graves. Two young men, one young woman, dead. Grieving parents. I talked to them.”

  “What did they say?” Costa asked. “About why their children did what they did?”

  “The usual. Their kid could be a little wild. Easily led. But …” She was running through the report on the screen. “It was the disparity. They gave me just two photos of the Frascas. Two of the Petrakises. You can see them here.”

  Teresa was at her elbow immediately.

  “You’re the pathologist,” the Englishwoman said. “What do you think?”

  “I think I don’t make snap judgments. Not without more information. Where are the autopsy reports? Where’s the rest of the paperwork?”

  “It wasn’t in our brief. I had a couple of pages on each. They didn’t tell us anything.”

  Teresa looked at her, wide-eyed. “A couple of pages?”

  “The case was closed! We weren’t trying to reopen it.” The Englishwoman looked briefly guilty. “We were trying to understand why.”

  Falcone harrumphed and said, “You can’t hope to find an answer without understanding the question. Are you telling us you saw no contemporary accounts of what actually happened in any of these places?”

  “I was an intelligence officer,” Elizabeth Murray complained. “Not a cop. It was a dead case. The Carabinieri had solved it, hadn’t they?”

  “With their customary zeal,” Falcone observed. “Nic. Go to the Maremma. Take Prabakaran and Oliva with you. Find someone there who remembers all this. Perhaps a local police officer from the time. We’ll see if we can track one down while you’re on your way. It would be interesting to know their version of events.”

  The inspector turned to Esposito and Silvio Di Capua. “I need all the information you can find on both the Petrakises and the Frascas. Sir?”

  Commissario Esposito shuffled on his feet, looking as if he couldn’t wait to flee back to the Questura. “What is it?” the senior officer asked miserably.

  “I want your permission to ask for the Carabinieri files. And for the names and whereabouts of all the officers who dealt with the case twenty years ago.”

  “Do you honestly believe none of this has occurred to them?” Esposito demanded.

  Falcone’s tanned face was starting to turn a deep shade of red. “I have no idea what has or has not occurred to the Carabinieri over the last twenty-four hours. Nor are they likely to tell me if I call and ask. You have the power to do that. We need to know. If the president wants—”

  “No!”

  The force of Esposito’s voice was such that it echoed off the walls of the high-ceilinged room. Even Elizabeth Murray looked a little shocked.

  “I don’t report to the president and neither do you, Falcone. Dario Sordi will be gone in a few years and we’ll still be here. Once this little adventure is over, we go back to being under the wing of the Ministry of the Interior. They’ll be here until we’re in the grave. Don’t make me regret indulging Sordi and his theories. They may turn out to be fantasy all along. There will be no approaches to Palombo or anyone else in the Quirinale.” He nodded at Di Capua at the computer. “Use the resources you have here, and nothing more. If they are insufficient, then pray that Palombo and the rest of them are doing their job. That is my final word on the matter.”

  He left, leaving a puzzled silence behind.

  “Wonderful,” Teresa snapped. “He wants the job done so long as we don’t use anything obvious.”

  Silvio Di Capua’s fingers were rattling the computer keyboard. Elizabeth Murray stumbled across on her stick to stand behind him, her eyes glued avidly to the screen.

  “I suspect,” she observed, “you may have been picked precisely because the obvious isn’t going to get anyone anywhere. Don’t you?” Di Capua was still typing. “We never had toys like this in my day. What on earth are you looking at?”

  “More than I expected,” Di Capua answered. “Who set us up with this system?”

  “Esposito,” Falcone responded.

  “Interesting.”

  “Because …?” Teresa asked, sliding behind the pair of them to gaze at the monitor as it filled with records: names and numbers, dates and file names.

  “I thought I was just going to get what we have back in the Questura. I was wrong.…” He grinned at them. Di Capua had matured lately. The geek ponytail was gone. He wore a suit most of the time. Rumor had it he had acquired a live-in girlfriend and taken to playing squash, which Teresa found deeply troubling on the rare occasions she thought about it. “We’re straight into the records system of both the Ministry of the Interior and the Carabinieri. In deep too. I don’t know where the shutters are going to come down, but I’ve never seen stuff like this before.”

  “Can we have that in words I might understand?” Peroni asked.

  Di Capua said, “Esposito may not want us to talk to Palombo directly. But we can read a lot of their reports. Quite high-level reports too.”

  “Esposito fixed that?” Costa asked, surprised.

  Di Capua shrugged. “Someone did.”

  “Get in there quick before someone spots the hole,” Teresa ordered. She reached for a stool to sit next to him.

  “No,” Falcone said. “Miss Murray and I will work here. You and Peroni can go to the Villa Giulia. See if you can track down anyone who remembers the Frasca incident. Or Andrea Petrakis.”

  Teresa Lupo’s nose wrinkled. “Me? With him? Together? Like a team or something?”

  Peroni looked just as horrified.

  “Best get going,�
�� the inspector added. “The traffic’s terrible out there.”

  16

  Joseph Priest didn’t argue when Petrakis said he had a job in Rome. Priest was determined to go back to Nairobi in one piece, and with increased authority in the Mungiki. Extortion, beatings, blackmail, robbery — these were habits he intended to confine to his past. His future lay in the upper ranks, among those who controlled the Mungiki army throughout Kenya and, increasingly, neighboring parts of Africa. The firm was growing, and with that came opportunities. There’d be plenty of money waiting for him when he got home, maybe enough to take a stake in some small tourist hotel on the beach in Mombasa. A step up the ladder. Something that set him apart from all the other slum kids trying to claw their way up in the world.

  But the Mungiki had rules, and obedience was one of them. Priest had to return with the job done. Victorious. So he hung on every word Andrea Petrakis said, even the history, since, to an African — a man who didn’t take the ready supply of drinking water for granted — it seemed important. The Acqua Vergine was one of the city’s oldest supplies, one of its purest too, as the name suggested. It rose in the east, fed by rain from the Alban Hills, dividing into two channels, the Antica and the Nuova, which between them supplied, without artificial pumps or pressure, almost every important fountain in Rome, from the toothy dolphins in the Pantheon’s square to the grim-faced lions overlooking the Piazza del Popolo. Even in the twenty-first century, older members of the dwindling local population would fill their plastic bottles with the flow from these public fountains, Petrakis told Priest, flattered to drink from the same supply that had once slaked the thirst of emperors.

  The Antica ran in a subterranean channel under the park of the Villa Borghese, through the gardens of the Villa Medici, winding beneath the busy cobbled streets around the Spanish Steps. Its journey from the quiet Lazio countryside ended at a spectacular mostra, an endpoint for the water system constructed for a pope emulating the architectural habits of the emperors he had succeeded.