Silver

by Steven Savile

  So if it had been him, Noah would have wanted to walk the land. Study

  the set up. He would have wanted to be sure he knew where the target was

  coming from, exactly, and where it was leaving to. Each terrain had its own

  issues that needed to be contended with. The last thing you wanted was something as stupid as a stray beam of sunlight reflecting off the wrong pane of

  glass to make the shot any more difficult than it had to be.

  Control the variables.

  Every way he looked at it, Rome was the perfect location for an attempt

  on the Pope's life.

  "I've changed my mind," Noah said, opening his eyes again. Neri looked

  at him expectantly. "There are just so many things wrong with this scenario. This

  can't be about the Pope, not yet. This is about Rome, just like today was about

  Berlin. It has to be."

  "But the quatrain the suicide called in?" Neri said. "Roman Pontiff beware

  of your approaching, of the city where two rivers water, your blood you will

  come to spit in that place, both you and yours when blooms the Rose." He

  quoted te piece perfectly. Noah wondered how many times the Roman had read

  those four lines of prophecy in the last forty-eight hours.

  "It's the smoke and mirrors part," Noah said, sure he was right. It was the

  only thing that made sense. He had let himself become distracted with

  everything else. "Gets us barking up trees, it has to be. You said it yourself, the

  Pope isn't here. These guys are meticulous. They have to be to have

  orchestrated thirteen to-the-minute suicides in thirteen cities, and then duplicate

  the feat in the U-Bahn today. There's no way they'd make such a blatantly

  amateurish mistake as to not know exactly where His Holiness is right down to

  the bloody minute. Think about it,"--he shook his head, something approaching

  admiration in his voice--"the message might have been about the Pope, but we

  keep forgetting that so was the one in Berlin. Those were the long-term threat;

  the fact that they were different earmarked Berlin and Rome as targets. Forty days of terror they promised, and at the end of it all of our gods will

  die--Christian, Muslim, bloody Norse, it doesn't matter." Noah grunted. "The

  clock's ticking. Tomorrow they will strike against Rome. I don't know where, I

  don't know when, but I am prepared to bet my bloody life on the fact it will be

  spectacular. And in thirty-eight days they'll make their move on the Pope. Right

  now they're in the blind, waiting," he said, thinking back to Basrah. "You paint a bleak picture," Neri said. "Assuming you are right, what do

  you want from my people?"

  "This is your city. Where would you hit? What would you do? Think about

  it. Whoever it is, they're in Rome right now. They will have been here for a while,

  going over the minutia of their strike, dry runs, timing every twist and turn and

  exhausting every eventuality, because that's what these people are like.

  Someone has seen them. Someone knows who they are. Nothing goes unseen in

  a city this size. You need people out on the streets, asking the right questions.

  These people will look Italian. They'll sound Italian. They'll have normal lives that

  they've worked for years to secure. They could be married, have kids in good

  Roman schools. They're playing a long game."

  Neri screwed up his already battered face, as though understanding for

  the first time that anyone from the young couple with the tourist guide to the old man with the paper to the waitress with her promising eyes, or the guy in the street wrestling with a hot, overly tired toddler could be their terrorist. You couldn't tell just by looking at them, you couldn't read their thoughts. They were

  just like everyone else, perfectly so, cultivated to be so.

  "And with that, I think it's time for me to go haunt my countryman's

  ghost." Noah pushed back his chair and made to stand. Neri stubbed out the

  dog-end of his latest cigarette.

  "The victim rented a garret in one of the poorer parts of the city proper

  under the name Nick Simmonds. No doubt you already have the address. You

  seem very well connected for someone who doesn't work for your government,"

  Neri said wryly, "but there's nothing there. The place was empty when we got

  there. And not just empty. It had been thoroughly disinfected and every last

  trace of Nick Simmonds removed. There was absolutely nothing left of a personal

  nature. Nothing to say he had ever lived there. Not so much as a strand of hair

  to run against his DNA."

  That gelled with what Konstantin had found in Berlin. That similarity in

  itself made this garret in the poor quarter worth following up.

  "His work?" Noah asked. He knew that Simmonds had been interning with

  the Vatican archivist, but beyond that it was anyone's guess.

  "I've got one of my team trying to make inroads over there,"--he nodded

  across St. Peter's Square toward the dome of the basilica--"but between you and

  me, I suspect Dante was writing about that place when he designed his

  Purgatory."

  "That good?"

  "Trust me," Neri said, reaching for his tobacco tin yet again. "It's enough

  to make a guy like me believe in the Devil." He nodded to the older man reading

  his newspaper. The man returned the gesture and folded the broadsheet neatly

  before paying his bill and leaving the table. Smiling wryly, Neri nodded toward

  the young couple who, likewise, put away their Rough Guide and settled their

  bill, leaving a generous tip as they vacated the table.

  "They were your people?"

  "They were."

  "Trusting soul, aren't you?" Noah said.

  "This is Rome, Noah," Dominico Neri said with an almost friendly smile.

  "You can't trust anybody. Faces of angels, morals of devils."

  3" face="Helvetica" color="black"> 10

  Some Devil Konstantin had been on both sides of enough black-bag jobs to know when something was wrong.

  He liked that euphemism, black bag. It was just a polite way of saying burglary. The British were peculiar like that, they liked to use words like cut-outs, false flags and honey traps instead of calling a robbery a robbery. It was all terribly 1950s, stiff upper lip and all that.

  From the surveillance side the set-up with most of these jobs was simple: you baited the trap, sat back and waited. Something would shake loose. It invariably did. Surveillance was all about patience. You sit, you wait, you see who shows up.

  Metzger's apartment was the baited trap in this case, and he'd just walked right into it.

  There was nothing sixth sense-ish about it. No prickling hairs on the nape of his neck. No instinctive mental alarm tripped to warn him. It wasn't his reptilian brain or anything like that. Konstantin was a practical man on all levels. He had no time for the stuff and nonsense of superstition. That didn't mean he dismissed well-honed instincts, though. A trained man would recognize things on a subconscious level that a normal man would more than likely miss. That was simply the way of it. It was all about tradecraft. Konstantin Khavin knew he was being followed because he was observant. There was no great mystery to having your eyes open. Konstantin had learned to interpret the signs left by careless people. More than once, being observant had kept him alive.

  He had picked up the tail as he left Metzger's building on Schlossstrasse.

  There had been three tells that gave the watchers away, and each of them was surprisingly obvious (and therefore amateurish) given the level of sophistication the U-Bahn at
tack had demanded. That was something to worry over later. Right now his first concern was learning as much as he could about the people following him--which meant turning the whole thing on its head and following the followers.

  The first tell was as thoughtless as an unshielded lens cap in an upper window across the street from Metzger's place. Whoever was up there in the otherwise darkened room had been taking photographs of everyone coming and going from Metzger's building. It was a grunt job. Observe and log for further investigation. Someone else would do the foot work, and they'd probably relieve each other on eight- to ten-hour shifts up in the dark room to alleviate the boredom of staring out into the street if nothing else. As the noonday sun hit the camera's beveled lens it sent a momentary splash of glare across the window. It was just careless. He imagined they had been up in their rented room for days without a break. That was when sloppiness set in.

  He would have dismissed it if it hadn't been for the second tell, the engine of one of the cars across the street gunning as he walked toward the kiosk at the end of the street. The two together were more than mere coincidence.

  Konstantin was tempted to go pay the watchers an unexpected visit and bust a few heads. That was his Russian blood. He turned away from the apartment without so much as an upward glance. There would be time enough to return to Schlossstrasse later. A four a.m. visit would satisfy his heritage.

  The final giveaway was the guy on the corner who still sat on one of the red benches in front of the sausage kiosk, still eating a bratwurst sprinkled with dried onions. Konstantin had noticed him sitting there, hunched up against the cold, when he had turned onto Schlossstrasse looking for Metzger's home. In the time it had taken Konstantin to go through Metzger's apartment the sausage eater hadn't managed a single bite--probably because he had bought it in the early hours, and now it was cold and greasy and more likely to make him throw up than to sate any real hunger he might have.

  The devil was in the details.

  He walked up to the window and ordered himself a brat with all of the fixings, then made a show of licking his fingers as he enjoyed it. The sausage was hot and tasted twice as good for it. He washed it down with an apple spritzer. Konstantin nodded to the cold man with the half-eaten sausage and said, "God, I needed that," before he walked away. He smiled. It was unnecessary--a game--but he liked the idea of letting the man know he'd seen him, twice. Konstantin was interested to see how they would deal with the knowledge that they had been compromised. How they reacted would tell him how good the team he was up against really was.

  He stopped on the corner, ostensibly to retie a shoelace. He checked out the street. The sausage eater hadn't made a move to follow him, which was unsurprising. There was no point in the one face he would recognize tailing him if they had someone else on the street.

  The car rolled slowly up to the end of Schlossstrasse and indicated a right turn. He watched it make the turn and drive away. There were two ways the car could play it--it could drop off another watcher once it was around the corner, allowing them to follow him from the front, or it could hope to pick him up again later and assume one nondescript sedan was much like another in this city of nondescript BMWs and Mercedes, Volvos and Saabs.

  There was an element of risk in trying to drop back onto his tail that Konstantin himself would never have allowed if he had been running the operation, so he had to assume whoever his opposite number was, the man was every bit as methodical as he was. And that meant they had at least one more man on the street that he had missed.

  Konstantin took his time. There was a green pissoir fifty feet further down the road. Berlin's elaborate city crest was embossed on the swing door. He walked toward it, counting out his footsteps on the paving stones. Each step sounded crisp in the chilly air. Twenty feet away the reek of urine came his way as the wind picked up. It was one of a thousand unpleasant smells in the city. Some cities had a thousand stories, he thought, remembering the old TV show-Berlin had a thousand reeks. Konstantin grunted. He decided to relieve himself.

  The pissoir was built in such a way that he could see over the top into the street as he urinated. It was a rather peculiar idea, very German. It did, however, give him a full minute to watch people, see who was moving, who was slowing down, and who the sausage eater was watching--because it wasn't him. Konstantin tried to follow the direction of the man's gaze without dribbling on his shoes.

  The man seeme looking intently at Grey Metzger's doorway. That was when Konstantin saw the woman in the red dress--it looked like some sort of evening wear, beautifully cut around her full curves--walk out into the street. She was coming his way. He zipped up and timed his exit to meet her on the street as he stepped out of the green urinal.

  She regarded him openly, her gaze drifting slowly from his head down to his feet and back again. Konstantin inclined his head slightly and gestured for her to pass. She did. She walked slowly. He followed her for six blocks, enjoying the luscious, ripe curve of her ass as the material clung to it. He allowed her to lead him another block before ending the game. She broke away, ostensibly drawn like a magpie to the bright, shiny glitter of jewels in a shop window, while he crossed the street. He didn't wait for the lights. He had heard a second set of footsteps just out of rhythm with his own as he followed the woman in the red dress.

  Just as he would have done in their place, they were leading him front and back. Shepherding him.

  So, knowing what was happening, he decided there was nothing else to do than appreciate the view--there was something hypnotic about watching the gentle sway of her hips as she walked. That, Konstantin was sure, was the purpose of the red dress. It was the honey on the trap. As pleasing as the view was, it didn't take his mind off the fact that he was being led like a lamb to the slaughter. Tailing front and back was professional. It took numbers and discipline and, given that the Berlin cell had already sacrificed at least seven from their ranks with the U-Bahn strike, the fact they had the manpower to spare on Metzger's apartment was more than a little interesting to the Russian.

  It wasn't some random coincidence. There were no random coincidences in his world.

  They had been watching for someone. Why? Well he could make an educated guess: it was down to Sorrow's Bride. They had had the woman for at least a week, perhaps two, and no matter what she was, what her training had prepared her for, there was one basic truth to espionage Konstantin had brought with him over the wall: everybody talks in the end.

  The films and books made it glamorous and painted portraits of the hero with the iron resolve and trembling lip who withstood any amount of pain to hold onto his secrets before eventually breaking free. That was all silver screen bullshit. Given time, everyone broke. Everyone talked.

  So they knew who she was, who she worked for. They knew what she knew about them, and they had come to see who came looking for her. Again, it was exactly what he would have done. Konstantin had to admit a grudging amount of admiratn for these people. They were thorough, organized, thoughtful and disciplined. All traits he would have associated with professionals, not some home-grown terror cell based around a core of fanaticism. If he had been a gambling man, he would have put a substantial bet on them being ex-military.

  What it came down to was this: Konstantin needed to know more about the woman in the painting. She was the key, but he had no idea to which lock.

  He had his suspicions, but they were essentially groundless. This case of mistaken identity was only serving to reinforce them. They were looking for whoever came to claim the information on the thumb drive. Who would have known it was there? Her handler? If she was an agent, it made sense--but then why would an agent from one of the Secret Services have latched on to Grey Metzger? Until yesterday there had been nothing remotely interesting about the man.

  While the woman disappeared into the antique jewelers, the second ghost set of steps followed him across the road.

  Konstantin didn't look over his shoulder, not even once.

  H
e wanted to see how serious this person was; that meant changing the nature of the game.

  He turned the corner and stopped dead in his tracks. He had fifteen steps on the man behind him. He pressed himself up against the wall, taking a second to calm himself, center his breathing and focus before exploding into action. He counted the steps out in his head, tensing.

  As the man came around the corner Konstantin stepped into his path. Recognition flashed across the man's eyes, followed a split second later by blinding pain. Konstantin moved instinctively. Violence was his trade. He knew how to hurt people. He stepped in close, getting right up in the man's face, feinted as though to slap the man, drawing his eyes to the flurry of motion, and drove the heel of his shoe through the man's knee hard enough to shatter the cap and tear the cartilage as he forced it to bend the wrong way. The man went down in the fetal position, clutching his ruined leg up to his chest and screaming.

  Konstantin stood over him.

  "You'll be lucky to be walking in six months. Be grateful I didn't kill you. Next time I will."

  He left the man lying in the middle of the street. He crossed the road again, weaving between the slow moving cars. A yellow bus indicated that it was coming to a stop. Konstantin hd scr board and took up one of the window seats that allowed him to see down the length of Schlossstrasse for a few seconds as they drove past the mouth of the street. The man was still lying on the cobbles. The woman in the red dress stood over him, talking quickly into her cell phone. Konstantin couldn't read lips but he could guess what she was saying: the job was botched, the target got away and they had a man down. It wasn't the kind of call any operative wanted to make. There would be repercussions. Konstantin didn't feel the slightest bit of sympathy for them. The woman looked up, and for a moment their eyes met. Then the bus carried him out of sight.

  He rang the bell and hopped off less than three hundred yards up the road.

  The last thing they would have expected was for him to double-back and switch from hunted to hunter. He walked briskly past the usual line of personality-less shops with their blind windows, then saw the bright yellow sign of a charity shop and ducked inside. It took him less than a minute to pick an oversized sheepskin coat and flat working man's cap from the rack of dead men's clothes at the back of the store. He paid in cash and left his own coat as a donation. He pulled the cap down so it covered most of his face and buttoned the sheepskin all the way up to the throat as he stepped back out onto the street. The entire transaction had taken less than two minutes.