“Are we finished here, then? Because as much as I am enjoying our little reunion I can think of a lot prettier faces I’d like to be looking at, no offense.”
“She didn’t die well,” the old man said. “I thought you ought to know. It wasn’t clean, but even at the last she was professional enough to get a message out. We found all of her journals. Everything she had dug up, the entire paper trail. My boy is going through it right now.”
“Do you know who did it?”
“I have my suspicions.”
“Now who’s being coy. You’ve had my tit, you owe me your tat. Who killed her, Charles? Who killed my brilliant little girl?”
“One of two men: an Israeli who calls himself Mabus or Miles Devere.”
Quentin nodded. “Will you promise this old man something, Charles?”
The old man raised an eyebrow. “I would say it rather depends on what it is you want me to promise, my friend.”
“When you know which one it is, don’t wait for justice to take its course. Kill them for me. No one kills one of my people and lives to tell the tale. I’m old fashioned like that.”
20
Video Killed…
Jude Lethe stared at the screen. The video clip had gone viral. In a matter of hours from its first being posted on the net to when he’d found it just now, some three million people had seen it.
The picture wasn’t good. It was the usual kind of fuzzy, grainy image with poor-quality lighting and terrible audio distortion. It didn’t matter. The content was hypnotic. Hypnotic in the same way as a car wreck where the paramedics are loading up the body-board as you drive slowly past. You can’t help but look, even though you know what you are seeing is someone else’s tragedy.
He watched again, trying to be sure, but it was so difficult because of the poor resolution and bad light. He knew in his gut though. Just knew. On the small screen a man in black walked backward and forward, ranting every so often at the camera. Behind him slumped a woman in chains, her head down, hands trussed up over her head. Her body was sliced with red welts where she had been whipped and beaten. She didn’t look up once. The masked man pulled a blade and held it up to the camera. Lethe couldn’t understand what he was saying, but it had that fanatic’s rising pitch that sent a shiver, bone by bone, down his back. Normally Orla would have interpreted the madman’s rant for them. Nothing about this was normal.
The dagger man paced back and forth.
Lethe studied the blade in his hand. It was old, that much was obvious. It wasn’t Damascene, but it was quite similar.
The dagger man walked up to the chained woman and drove a fist into her stomach. She barely reacted. Off screen someone laughed. It was the single most chilling sound Jude Lethe had ever heard. The man took a sheet of paper from his pocket and walked toward the camera. He read what Lethe assumed was a list of demands, then walked back across to where the woman hung. Someone off camera moved the light source, casting an eerily bright glare across the woman’s tortured body. She looked wretched. Her body was covered in bruises, and her bones stood out like an anorexic’s against her wax skin.
He ran the blade from her temple, down her cheek and neck all the way down to her hip, drawing the thinnest line of blood that welled in the cut. He tangled his hand in her hair and yanked her head back, forcing her to stare at the camera. He spat another outburst of bile at the screen. Lethe didn’t understand a word of it. He didn’t need to. He knew exactly what was going to happen next.
The man took the blade, leaned in close and cut her throat.
He couldn’t watch.
Equally, he couldn’t look away.
The man didn’t stop cutting until he was through the windpipe and the blood was streaming down his hands. Then, holding her head up, he finished the job with a thicker machete-like blade, cleaving through the bone. Her body still hung there, suspended by the chains. The masked man picked the woman’s head up from the floor and showed her face to the camera.
He paraded his trophy back and forth, with more ranting in whatever language it was. This wasn’t the part that had stunned Lethe. It was the last ten seconds before the camera died, as the picture roved wildly around the makeshift dungeon.
He froze the stream.
In the shadows, barely recognizable for the beating she had taken, he saw another woman chained to the wall. He pushed the image on, frame by frame, until she looked up. For a single frame she stared straight at the camera.
Orla.
He called up to the old man and told him. For a moment there was only silence. Then the old man said, “Are you sure it was her?”
“As sure as I can be, sir.”
“Bring Frost in. We need to deal with this as cleanly and simply as possible. She is not ending up on some bastard’s propaganda movie, Mister Lethe. Believe me, hell will freeze over before I allow that to happen.”
“Yes, sir. Do I recall Koni and Noah?”
“The world doesn’t stop because Orla’s in trouble, Mister Lethe.” The old man sounded cold. Detached. Fire and ice. Just a second before passion had been driving his tongue. All it took was a second for the tactician to take control. Jude was immediately reminded of the half-played-out game of chess on the board beside the great fireplace. The Saavedra position. It was the old man’s favorite endgame for a reason. “And Mister Lethe, whatever happens, under no circumstances are you to inform Larkin about any of this. Do I make myself clear?”
“Crystal, sir.”
“The fact of the matter is that Larkin is too unpredictable as far as she is concerned. I can’t be worrying about him going off message,” which was the old man’s way of saying Noah was in fact far too predictable in this case. He’d wage a one-man war to bring Orla home. He wouldn’t care about casualties or collateral damage-he would bring Orla home, and God help anyone who tried to stop him. It was precisely the kind of thing that made Noah so vital to the team; but sometimes one’s greatest strength can become their greatest weakness. The old man wouldn’t be able to control him.
In one breath Lethe had heard the best of the old man, and the worst.
“Understood.”
“Good man. After you’ve contacted Frost I want you to run a few queries for me. Specifically, I’m after information concerning Humanity Capital. I want a list of territories where they have insured fighters, and if there is a paper trail, I want to know all of the places where they have supplied mercenary fighters.”
“There’s always a paper trail,” Lethe said. “If they sent a private army out there, you’ll know before lunchtime.”
“Good. When you’ve done that, I want you to cross-reference these against any contracts won by companies Miles Devere has a stake in. I want to know exactly how much Little Man Devere has made out of the suffering of others.”
The old man hung up on him.
21
The Words of the Prophets Written On Subway Walls
Noah Larkin had spent the night alive and well and living in hell.
Each one of his personal demons were within arm’s reach. There was a bottle of thirty-year-old McCallan scotch whiskey on the nightstand, a plastic cup beside it. The bottle’s top lay on the nightstand beside the bottle. The cheap hotel room beside the Rome Stazione Termini reeked of alcohol. He had drunk a third of the bottle but felt like he had downed the lot. He sat on the windowsill, watching the girls out in the street. It would have been easy to call down, and one of them would come up to help him take his mind off things. Sometimes that was all he wanted.
He had music playing simply because he couldn’t stand to be alone with his own thoughts. It got like that some nights. The dead started talking to him with the voices of his imagination. The music helped to drown them out, but it didn’t silence them completely. That was what the drink was for.
The girls on this side of the world were the same as the girls back home. They congregated on the street corners and in doorways and walked up and down the street, advertising their w
ares. Every creed and color was out there to be bought. A car trawled the gutter, driving slowly from woman to woman as they walked up toward the rolled-down window. Watching was uncomfortably voyeuristic and made Noah feel distinctly dirty. He poured himself another slug of whiskey before he went back to the window. He thought about Margot, the middle-aged whore he’d found in Kings Cross.
He’d paid her to stay off the street for a night. She wouldn’t, of course. She was one of these creatures. This was her life. It was all she knew. Like the song said, it was a hard habit to break. But that was what the money was all about. It wasn’t about the sex. He hadn’t enjoyed sex for a long time. Now he used it to punish himself. He’d given up on the dream of beautiful flesh and candles and soft music and all of that nonsense. It was hard to lose yourself in beauty when inside your own head it was so ugly. He knew his own psychology as well as anyone could.
He looked at the clock blinking red beneath the small portable television set, with its little round aerial poking out from the back: 2:47. The night was slipping remorselessly into morning. He had a little under seven hours until he was supposed to meet Dominico Neri’s man from the Vatican. He could sleep. He could drink. He could screw. The truth was he didn’t feel like doing any of that.
He decided to go for a walk and picked his coat up off the bed.
Rome at night was a dangerous creature, but what city wasn’t. The mood Noah was in, if any local boy had decided to push his luck, he would have ended up hospitalized.
He took the stairs down to the lobby. It was another personal quirk. He had no love of elevators. It wasn’t the confined space, he wasn’t claustrophobic; and it wasn’t the height, he didn’t suffer from vertigo. But somehow, with the two put together, all he could think about were the metal cables above sheering away and the elevator car plunging, so he took the stairs.
Noah walked all the way down the hill of Via Cavour to the ruins of the Forum. Even in the dark, Rome was a spectacular place. But like the prostitutes at the top of the hill, there was something worn down and seedy about the place. It had seen better days. Almost two thousand years ago to be precise.
An occasional car cut through the streets, heading down toward the Coliseum and Constantine’s Arch. He walked in a circuit, following the beaten tourist tracks along Via Teatro Marcello and over to the Pantheon and then back around toward the hotel. He heard the revving engines of boy racers, proving that Rome was just like any other city in the Western Hemisphere- full of idiots with fast cars. The entire circuit through the old Rome took him the best part of three hours. The area around the railway station was the one part of the city that didn’t sleep. News vendors were up already, pasting up the day’s headlines.
One of the girls walked toward him, her smile and the sway of her hips inviting.
He didn’t see her.
He only had eyes for the thick black ink of the headline.
One word: Veleno!
Poison.
Rome had fallen silently while he drank his whiskey and watched the whores. He had been looking for fireworks. An explosion on the horizon. Something big. Bright. Bold.
He felt sick to the core.
He turned his back on the woman as she started to ask if he wanted company for the long, hot night.
Despite the drink, Noah was suddenly clear headed.
Noah could see Monsignor Gianni Abandonato was anxious. He shuffled about from foot to foot. He stood at the top of the steps of St. Peter’s Basilica. Behind him the white travertine stone of Maderno’s facade gleamed in the morning. The statues of Jo the Baptist, Christ himself and the eleven Apostles looked down on the Monsignor. Noah couldn’t help but look around himself at the Baroque stonework marvels Bernini had fashioned. There was something truly awe-inspiring about the approach to the cathedral. Bernini had somehow managed to balance heaven and earth in his grand design of a split plaza, with its elliptical circus and trapezoid courtyard. It had soul.
In contrast, Maderno’s facade seemed flawed. Instead of inspiring awe and reverence it smacked of mankind’s vanity. While Bernini had reached for the heavens, Maderno’s work lacked line and symmetry-and its cardinal sin… it lacked any form of vertical feature to draw the eye as the pilgrim approached the holiest of holies. That was left to the dome in the distance.
Noah squinted against the rising sun. The attic where the statues stood watch over the great square was too cluttered with detail for its relative lack of height, he realized. It was trying too hard to force grandeur into the white stone. But then Maderno had been frightened by the notion of original thought, almost as though by definition it became original sin, and had clung to the proportions of the rear of the basilica drafted by Michelangelo.
Noah walked slowly toward the Monsignor, who stood across the piazza. He was suddenly at a loss as to how he was supposed to greet the man. Did he call him Father? Eminence? Excellency? Just Monsignor? Gianni? Piazza di San Pietro itself was empty save for a few early morning tourists up with the crows. He counted five crows in the dry basin of the fountain as he walked past it. That made one crow for every early bird. There was no water in either of the fountains. They had been drained at first light, as had every other fountain in the city.
Noah hadn’t been able to reach Neri, which was hardly surprising. The Carabinieri man had been working all night, dealing with the effects of the poisoned water. Rome was a city under siege.
The Witness, the ancient Egyptian obelisk that had supposedly seen the crucifixion of Saint Peter, cast its shadow all the way to the dry fountain. Noah crossed the shadow. It felt as though he had passed some sort of boundary. On the other side, this world of God and Saints and Souls seemed so much more real.
He took the opportunity to study the man on the steps. He was wearing the robes of his office but lacked the serenity of a man at peace with his place in the world. Noah recognized the telltale signs of a man on the verge of breaking. How much was he risking by meeting with Noah? Surely not so much as to be looking over his shoulder every few seconds? Noah wondered who was back there, hiding in the shadows? There was someone back there, he knew. One of the Swiss Guard perhaps? Another holy man? Who would he be more frightened of? The archivist was obviously eager to sweep him away from prying eyes and into the labyrinth of the cathedral itself. Curious then that he would choose such a public place to meet, especially as the doors wouldn’t open for pilims for a few hours yet. He held up a hand and waved in greeting. He reached the stairs a few moments later.
“Monsignor Abandonato?”
“Gianni. This way please, Mister Larkin,” he gestured not toward any of the three doors that led through to the nave, but rather toward another smaller passage that led toward the barracks of the Swiss Guard.
“Noah.”
“A propitious name if ever I heard one. Some of us are not so blessed,” he shrugged slightly. They turned one corner and then another, walking along the side of a narrow, yellow painted wall. There were a number of small doors set into the stone. He opened the fourth they came to and led Noah through into a small vestibule. It lacked the grandeur of the main basilica, but this was part of the administrative buildings not the holy face. “As you can well imagine, being called ‘The Forsaken’ in this place can prove rather, how shall I put it, convenient for jokes.” He looked up at the ceiling. It was a very theatrical gesture, practiced no doubt over many, many years. It was a long-suffering “why me, Lord?” look. Noah found himself rather liking this nervous priest.
Noah followed the Monsignor through a number of narrow passageways, and then the nature of the building seemed to change. For want of a better phrase, Noah thought it went from functional to holy. The ceilings raised. Plain walls became exquisitely painted with frescos, and every raised detail seemed to have been gilded with pure gold. Instead of being beautiful, it was staggering; instead of being calming, it was intense. Like Maderno’s facade, there was just too much going on, too much for the eye to see. Did the priests believe that b
y owning every single work of art they could prove themselves most holy? Most worthy? Was that what it was? Noah could suddenly understand the attraction of minimalism.
He felt very, very small as he followed the priest across the marble floor. Every few feet they crossed a new geometric shape laid into the stone. The sun streamed in through the windows set high above his head. Because of the angle of the sun, they didn’t reach the floor, but lit somewhere halfway down the wall on the right side of the passageway. Dust motes danced lazily in the beams. Noah half-expected to hear monks chanting in the distance somewhere or choirboys practicing their harmonies, or something. He knew he was getting his denominations all muddled up, but it felt like there really ought to be singing of some sort, even if it was only a single voice raised in hallelujah.
“Terrible business, this thing with the water,” Abandonato said, leading him onto a long, straight passageway that seemed, almost like some optical illusion, to go on and on and on into the vanishing point of the distance. “All these people poisoned. Have many died?” Before Noah could tell him that he didn’t honestly know, the Monnor continued, “How could anyone do that? I don’t understand. How could anyone knowingly poison all of these helpless people?” He had a handsome face, black hair swept back in a widow’s peak, and dark circles under the eyes. His skin had a vaguely waxen tint to it that suggested more than just a passing familiarity with the library stacks and darker corners of the Holy See.
“I think we’re having this conversation backwards, Gianni. I’m meant to be the one asking how can something so horrible happen, and you’re meant to be the one assuring me it is all part of God’s ineffable plan.” Noah smiled slightly to show he was joking. The archivist looked uncomfortable despite the gesture.
“Sometimes it is hard, even for us,” he admitted. “Our faith can be tested in the most surprising, and sometimes most human, of ways. What man could think of all those children queuing at the water fountains, thirsty for a drink yesterday, and not feel angry that today they are fighting for their lives and losing? But yes, the innocents will find their way to His side, where they will be safe and welcome. There is comfort in that, but the man in me still smarts, Noah.”
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