A Cold Flame

by Aidan Conway

  “We will need to establish a strict protocol,” said Jibril. “Access to the weaponry, storage, movement; it all requires planning and we can start by mounting a series of dry runs, dummy runs if you like.

  Ali was nodding. He too had followed the training, the main thrust of which Jibril was now passing on.

  “Ali, as quartermaster, will oversee the cache, will monitor and guarantee its integrity and, acting on my orders, will distribute arms accordingly. In the meantime, you will each have a weapon for personal defence and cash sufficient to maintain your autonomy.”

  He then reached behind him for a holdall. He unzipped it to reveal its contents, bundles of currency the like of which none of them had seen before. Yet they were focused. This was the means which funded the cause and the excitement in their eyes was because what they saw made their objectives real and reachable.

  “Now you can see that we were right to accept patronage,” said Ali.

  “Use it wisely,” said Jibril, handing out wedges to each, “and discreetly. This is your guarantee, your protection. With this you can blend in and remain a ghost within this city. You need to look like a businessman, you buy a suit, some nice shoes, a briefcase. You want to stay in a hotel to check out a target? You go there and you pay in cash. But you use a decent wallet so no one starts asking questions about where you got it from.”

  “Little do they know,” said Ali, reaching out to take his and holding it up to the others, “that when they pay for their perversions – their whores and their drugs – they are putting down a deposit on their eventual purification by fire.”

  He looked at Jibril again and then at the others as if wanting their approval for what he was about to say next. Karim and Yusef sat cross-legged, tense.

  “We are growing impatient, Jibril. The time has come to abandon caution and perfect planning. No attack can be 100 per cent safe. We wouldn’t be here otherwise, because we know the dangers and we accept them.”

  He took from his pocket his own plans. A grave risk in itself, carrying such papers, but Jibril knew he had said enough for now. “This is how to make a device; rudimentary but effective. Household products, easily obtained. Acetone and hydrogen peroxide.”

  Jibril knew too. “The Mother of Satan”, they called it, as it was undetectable, devastating, but lethally unstable.

  “I am working now on its manufacture so we can build stockpiles. It’s time we made a mark. Then when the serious weapons come we will all be battle-hardened.”

  Ali’s eyes had rested on Jibril, who, unflinching, returned his questioning gaze. Had Jibril let doubts creep in? He was the senior figure, they all knew his military past, but if he had lost his nerve he could be their downfall.

  “Where do you propose?” said Jibril before Ali could further feed his doubts. “Where would you have us hit? A symbolic target? Civilian? Military?”

  “Here,” he said, jabbing a finger onto the map of the city before them. “With a timed device, during a demonstration. It will be massive. It will bring us respect, and it will spread fear.”

  Fifty-Three

  It turned out that a scrupulous maresciallo had been doing his job properly. His instructions in line with the new security protocol had been to evaluate any anomaly, no matter how seemingly banal. He knew that not all his colleagues would have been so scrupulous but that was the way he was. He’d weighed up the young lady before him as soon as she had begun her story; something in his instinct had told him that she might have been lucky. Lucky to be alive even. Perhaps he’d remembered the time at the airport when they’d shot up the El Al check-in desk, or the naive and trusting Irish girl who had come within a hair’s breadth of carrying a bomb onto a plane, duped by her Jordanian boyfriend in the so-called Hindawi affair. As this young lady, Olivia, had revealed her skeletal knowledge of her friend or lover, his suspicions had grown.

  He’d left a colleague in the denuncia office to continue registering lost wallets and complaints about noisy neighbours, and he had driven to the offices of the charitable association she had indicated. Sure enough, a concerned secretary showed him the class lists and the subscription form. A search then through the police computer revealed what he had suspected – that no such person existed, at least with that name and those particulars. In short, the papers were false. Then there was the address and there had been a match with the name on the police computer. There was an outside chance that the name could refer to a person of interest. It hadn’t come up before because the papers were fake and not on any database. Now it had. A conversation with his superiors had been enough for them to pass on the information to the relevant inter-force coordination team and word was soon winging its way in the direction of the RSCS and the rapid response unit.

  A call came through over the radio for operatives in the region of Piazza Vittorio, Via Principe Eugenio, 23, flat 7. Name of Jibril. Rossi was onto it in a flash. African male, twenty-five to thirty-five. Possible criminal suspect. False papers. Exercise caution. Advise for backup.

  “Perhaps Maroni might give us some credit now,” said Rossi. “This could be the breakthrough,” he said slapping the siren on the Alfa’s roof.

  “Do we need that?” said Carrara.

  “You haven’t seen the traffic yet.”

  Carrara put his foot down and slewed the car onto the tram tracks.

  “Sure about taking this route?” said Rossi, “remember the last time.”

  “Course I remember,” said Carrara, remembering how during The Carpenter case they had narrowly avoided a collision with the number 3. “But this time you’re not navigating.”

  The Alfa was eating up the straight stretch of road between Termini station and Porta Maggiore and even a few disgruntled taxi drivers had ceded them the right of way.

  “That’s what I call public-spirited,” said Rossi.

  Rossi killed the siren as they zeroed in on their destination.

  “Let’s wait a second, which is it?”

  Carrara was localizing it on his maps app.

  “That one there,” he said, indicating a large pollution-encrusted and granite-porticoed entrance.

  “Flat number and name?”

  “Number, no name,” he said, “What about the age and appearance?”

  “I’d say generic but close enough to a fit,” said Rossi remembering both Iannelli’s and Tiziana’s descriptions.

  “Sure you don’t want to call backup?”

  “What do you think we’re going to find?”

  “No idea. I thought you knew.”

  “A priest-killer? A mutilator? Want me to continue?”

  “C’mon then,” said Carrara checking his weapon. “Let’s go in for a chat.”

  Rossi pressed a few random buzzers before he got a reply.

  “Can you open up, please, advertising.”

  The lock clicked.

  “Works every time,” he said swinging the heavy oak door inwards.

  “Which staircase?”

  “Two,” said Carrara, already having found his bearings. “Third floor. Lift?”

  “Walk,” said Rossi. “Element of surprise.”

  They climbed the few flights into the dark, groping for a light switch as they did so. It was out of order on the third, so there was only the borrowed illumination from the floors above and beneath.

  Rossi nodded to indicate the flat. He had his hand on his Beretta.

  “Gas leak?” whispered Carrara. Rossi nodded his agreement.

  Carrara rang and then knocked.

  “Open up, please, Gas board. There’s been a report of a gas leak.”

  From behind the door there was a babble of foreign voices, some shushing, more discussion then silence.

  “Again,” mouthed Rossi hanging back, his finger on the trigger, the safety now released.

  “Gas leak, open up,” said Carrara. “It’s urgent.”

  If anyone in there did open up, but with automatics, he was in the firing line, thought Rossi. It should h
ave been him, not the family man.

  There was a metallic rattle as a key turned and more voices, a male, clearly audible this time, before the door sprang open.

  Carrara hurled himself forward, and the door chain exploded off the jamb, sending a middle-aged man careering backwards into the hall. As he did so, a plump woman behind him let out a scream to wake the dead. Rossi followed, his weapon drawn. The man was cowering on his back, his hands in a futile protective position.

  “Don’t shoot, please. We are good people. Please, don’t shoot.”

  Calm returned quickly once Rossi had replaced his weapon, apologized and reached out to help the terrified gentleman to his feet. Carrara began a general sweep of the apartment then returned to give a provisional all-clear before checking the adults’ documents. Two small children had remained petrified on the threadbare couch in the living room. The family was African but there was no Jibril here. The father had sat down on a kitchen chair, his wife standing next to him a formidable dark Minerva in her flowing robes.

  “We have been living here for one week,” she said, in good Italian. “We know nothing of any Jibril. We are honest people.”

  Rossi apologized again, explaining then the circumstances behind their need for stealth and deceit.

  “Do you mind if we continue to look around?” he asked.

  The matriarch gave him his wish with a swish of her hand.

  “We have nothing to hide.”

  Carrara and Rossi went through the rooms one by one accompanied by the mildly disapproving presence of the woman of the house.

  “We have to search the children’s room too,” said Rossi, sensing her disapproval as he pushed open the door with its cartoon figures and felt-tip drawings emblazoned across it. Carrara waited outside as he lifted the mattress on the single bed and the cot, then reached in to the back of the wardrobe, and checked behind the row of picture books on a shelf. All tried and tested places for stashing drugs, money or weapons. But there was nothing.

  Carrara, meanwhile, had moved into the bathroom and after a search of the cupboards and behind the washing machine was fiddling with what looked like a loose panel running alongside the small chipped enamel bathtub. He looked up at Rossi standing now at the door. He gave him a nod. The panel came away with relative ease to reveal a space of around half a square metre.

  “Hiding place?” said Carrara.

  “Could be,” replied Rossi, “but no goodies, right?”

  Carrara bent further in and craned his head to look under the bottom of the bath and behind the dust-coated pipes. He shook his head, then, almost as an afterthought, ran his finger along the rough untiled concrete where there was a darkish stain. He rubbed his thumb and forefinger together then sniffed at them. It was a familiar smell. He wiped his finger on a handkerchief.

  “Oil, and baths don’t need oiling. Looks like it could be weapons-grade.”

  The former occupants, believed to be three Africans and a Pakistani, had disappeared without trace. A group of men claiming to be friends had subsequently materialized, stripping the flat of all its contents and settling their debts in cash. This, at least, was the landlord’s story and Rossi and Carrara could find no reason to believe he was lying, although he was unable to produce any documentary evidence for his tenants. A phone call had brought him there in record time, once Rossi had mentioned the issue of tax returns and prosecution for the unsanitary living conditions. They had taken his particulars, leaving him with a nice sword of Damocles hanging over him as he waited to see whether or when the revenue service would be paying him a social call.

  ***

  “But he was here,” said Rossi replacing his phone into his pocket as they descended the gloomy staircase. “Some sensitive soul’s reported him missing.”

  He’d managed to get through to Katia while she was at the Questura, and she had filled them in over the phone about the tip-off and its provenance. “And now that we’ve planted our size twelves in the community, everyone will know about it, don’t you think?”

  “Well it certainly wasn’t surgical,” Carrara replied.

  “We didn’t have much choice,” said Rossi as they emerged then into the bright September sunlight.

  “Where next then? This girl who gave us the tip-off?” said Carrara who’d picked up some of the details of Rossi’s conversation with Katia.

  “Girlfriend,” said Rossi.

  “Well, she must know something. Perhaps we should get on to whoever it was that sussed her out.”

  “Later,” said Rossi. “Give him time to file his report. But aren’t you forgetting young Gabriele and his video nasties? And I need to get on to the good people at The List of Shame about politically motivated murders in Nigeria. Something tells me they might have an angle on all this.”

  “Where first, me lud?” said Carrara.

  “The girl,” said Rossi after a brief reflection.

  “OK,” said Carrara. He might have known.

  Fifty-Four

  The visit hadn’t required any subterfuge on their part, and Olivia had shown them in to the shared apartment, apologizing for the mess, which, to Rossi’s eyes, seemed non-existent.

  “Can you describe these friends?” said Rossi. “Their approximate age, ethnicity, appearance. I believe you said you knew no names. Is that so?”

  “Yes,” she replied, “I had never met any of his close associates. I realize now I was being deliberately distanced and then when he went with them and said he had work to do, I assumed a woman was not welcome.”

  “And you mentioned a job, I believe,” said Carrara.

  “Yes, in the social services. Home help, domestic work and the like.”

  But Rossi was already shaking his head.

  “All a front, I’m afraid. He had no gainful employment, according to records. For reasons as yet unknown to us, he seems to have made up a cover story. One of many, I fear, although it may have been for his own protection.What else did he tell you?” he asked, seeing a way in. “Did he know people working in those jobs?”

  She shook her head. “He lived with other Muslim men, several in the same house. He said they prayed together, observed the festivities. It was for company and to save money.”

  Carrara was looking at Rossi now. They’d seen the flat. The panel under the bath. Rossi was homing in on the other link, the anonymous tip-off about Father Brell, the letter V.

  “Did he ever mention a friend?” said Rossi. “A friend whose name might begin with V?”

  Again she was shaking her head. Her eyes seemed elsewhere.

  “He didn’t mention any friends by name.”

  “Are you quite sure?” said Rossi. “It could be very important. Are you certain he never mentioned a name?”

  “Certain,” she replied. “I would have remembered.”

  She put a tired hand to her forehead. Rossi knew the pressure she was under. He knew that since she had reported him missing, the questions must have been coming thick and fast. “But I am afraid for him,” she said. “Not for what he might have done. I can’t believe he has committed any crime. Maybe he owes money to traffickers.”

  “There may be money involved,” said Rossi, “but there could be much more. So, you must help us find him and, if he is caught up in something, we can prevent him and anyone else from getting hurt.”

  She explained how they had met and how he had stood out as an exceptional student and a charming and polite young man.

  “It was my idea,” she said. “It was a combination of things, really. A desire to help but also an attraction. He was very kind, interesting. Sensitive.”

  “And did he ever tell you why he was here, in Italy?”

  Carrara got up to answer his phone and strode out onto the balcony.

  “He was a migrant. He arrived on the boats and after leaving Sicily he came to Rome.”

  “But did he say why?” said Rossi again.

  “To make a new life. A better life. That’s all. He said it was hard
in Nigeria, at least for him. He had been involved, as far as I could understand, with resistance groups in the Niger Delta; but he believed he had been doing the right thing.” She looked up at Rossi as if seeking his understanding. “But you would, wouldn’t you? If you had principles and a desire to see justice. Just like the partisans fighting fascism.”

  Rossi was still sitting across from her, waiting, listening. Arms and explosives training. Expertise. Battle-hardened. Traumatized even. PTSD. It was beginning to add up. He asked her to go on. “And then there was his family; his older brother who he had seen killed when he was only a little boy. His father had abandoned them and when Jibril’s mother died, he said he was an orphan, in all but name.”

  Rossi was thinking fast now. This was what they had needed – some backstory, more possible links to fill in the bigger picture he had been seeing all along, albeit “in a glass darkly”. But they were still no nearer to tracking him down. They had a picture, at least, to go on from the language school records. But where he was and what he was doing and why he had disappeared, were three towering unknowns in the equation. In terms of instinct and probability, however, it was all pointing one way. He was observant, ghettoized in his private life and he had got mixed up in something radical and likely violent. And if the corpse he had gone to identify really had been a friend then that might also have been the instigator, the initiating stressor to set him on a destructive path. He rattled off a text to Tiziana. If they had the CCTV pictures from the mortuary to match it would be another piece in the puzzle.

  Carrara came back in and took Rossi aside and out of earshot.

  “Got his prints coming through from the CIE in Sicily. And there’s a possible correspondence on the database search.”

  “Great!” said Rossi quietly, careful not to let Olivia overhear and squeezing Carrara’s shoulder. As they turned back to Olivia he sensed she knew they had discovered something significant.