The Sacred Cut

by David Hewson

  There was a sound from nearby, close to the little office the caretaker had shown him. Someone was flipping the circuit breakers. The lights were going off, one by one, in a circular dance. The CCTV cameras too, he guessed. This guy had been here before. Laila knew that, maybe straightaway, just from sensing his presence.

  Smart kid, Peroni thought, then yelled out into the airy, pregnant darkness, lit now by nothing more than the silvery light tumbling down the oculus.

  “Listen, mister, I’m armed. I’m a cop. And you’re not going anywhere near this kid, not unless you come straight through me. And that’s not gonna happen. Understand?”

  Then, just for form, “Best give yourself up now. Or climb out the window and curl up in the cold somewhere. You hear me?”

  It was just a laugh. The kind of laugh you got in the movies—hard-edged, nasal, knowing. Foreign too, somehow, because Italians didn’t laugh like that, they didn’t know how to make such a shapeless, wordless sound become a figure of speech in itself, full of meaning, brimming with malevolence.

  All the same, a man couldn’t scare you just by laughing. Not even this guy, with his magic scalpel and his skilful fixation on shapes.

  No. Peroni knew why the sound made him shrink inside himself, shivering, wondering which way to look. It was the way the laughter echoed symmetrically around the hidden axes of the building, the way it ran along some hidden geometric path, crossing and recrossing the empty interior, time and time again, almost as if the man who made the noise planned it that way, rolled his own voice into some mystic complex of ley lines until it floated upwards and out of the ancient dead eye, out towards the moon.

  Peroni flipped the safety catch on his service pistol and tried to remember the last time the weapon had been fired in anger.

  “LAURA LEE? Who the hell is Laura Lee?”

  Emily Deacon had an answer already. She just wanted to make him earn it.

  “Let’s take this one step at a time. Decode the first message before anything else. Remember, this is three days after Kaspar has killed my dad in Beijing. Can that be a coincidence?”

  Anything could be a coincidence, Costa thought. You could ruin an entire investigation by reading too much into shreds of half-related information like this.

  “Maybe.”

  “No! Think about it. Kaspar’s reached right into the heart of the US diplomatic service here. He’s murdered a military attaché. He knows, as sure as hell, there’ll be all kinds of people on his back. So what do these guys chasing him do?”

  It could be true. He saw the logic. “You think they sent him this message?”

  “Damn right I do. Maybe it’s us. Maybe the CIA. I don’t know. But someone from our side is dialing into his private line. And they’re telling him, ”We know who you are, we know where you’ve been, we know what you’ve done. Time to call it a day, Bill K, before you get hurt too.“ ”

  Costa wondered about the implications of that idea. “They seem very forgiving, considering the circumstances.”

  “You noticed?” she replied with a brief, icy scowl.

  “And Leapman?”

  She cast him a sideways glance.

  “Have you talked this through with him?”

  “Do you really think that would be wise right now? If he doesn’t know already, he’ll go ballistic when he discovers how I found out. And if he does…”

  Leapman knew. At least that’s what she suspected. Costa thought about the way the FBI agent had acted ever since that first unexpected meeting in the Pantheon. Some unspoken knowledge seemed to underpin everything he did.

  “And the ziggurat?”

  She keyed up something on the computer: a page full of technical archaeological jargon and three photos of a mound-like site.

  “A ziggurat’s a kind of ancient temple in Iraq. My guess is it’s what Kaspar used as a base for his mission. There’s nothing in any of the official records, of course. But a UN archaeological inspection team was sent into Iraq last summer to try to assess the damage to historical monuments caused by two wars and the Saddam regime. I found this…”

  The page was about a temple close to a place called Shiltagh, near the banks of the Euphrates between Al Hillah and Karbala, slap in the middle of ancient Mesopotamia. It was less well known—or, as the report put it, less well documented—than the famous ziggurat at Ur. But it had been damaged during the first Gulf War. What must once have been a low, stepped pyramid was now a crumbling, wrecked mound, its original outline only faintly discernible. Mortar craters pockmarked the broad ceremonial staircase entrance.

  “Looks like it must have been a hell of a battle,” he murmured.

  “Exactly,” she agreed. “This isn’t collateral damage. It’s not aerial bombardment either. There was one big, vicious firefight here and the report dates the damage to 1991.”

  “So why’s this place special?”

  “For two reasons. The allied troops never got this far in 1991. There couldn’t have been a pitched battle between conventional soldiers here.”

  “All the same—”

  She hit a key and said, interrupting him, “Look at the pattern, Nic. The sacred cut. It’s everywhere. This is where he gets it from.”

  She keyed up a photo of what he assumed was the subterranean interior of the ziggurat. The walls were peppered with bullet marks. Huge chunks had been carved out of the masonry around the door as if someone had tried to fight off an entering attacker. But the pattern was unmistakable: carved stucco on the walls, repeating itself in every direction. And elsewhere too. There were what looked like spent munitions boxes, wrecked equipment. At the centre was a pile of dark material, clumped together in a heap.

  She hit the zoom key on the photo. The material became clearer: bales of ancient camouflage webbing.

  “This has the pattern too,” she said. “They’d probably use it for making sleeping quarters, getting a little privacy. It’s just a coincidence, of course. The webbing’s got that shape because that’s how it’s made. Maybe it makes it strong, I don’t know. But, what with the walls and the webbing, I imagine that’s all he saw when they came for him, when he watched the rest of his team getting taken, killed, all around him. On the walls. In the quarters they’d made for themselves. Can you imagine what that must have been like?”

  The floor, the low, curving ceiling, reminded Nic of what he’d seen painted in blood in the tiny apartment that stank of meat, just a few hours ago.

  “I imagine it wouldn’t leave you. Ever.”

  “Right,” she agreed. “So what do you do? You live that nightmare over and over again until you understand what caused it. You get free. You hunt people down in the same kind of sacred places and see if that same pattern gives you any answers.”

  She looked into his eyes, not flinching. “Do you think he’s found some answers? Do you think he’s even close?”

  He thought of the single word written in blood in the dead woman’s apartment. “Not close enough. When he killed that woman he wrote something, over and over, underneath the pattern. A question. ”Who?“ ”

  It didn’t seem to make any sense to her either.

  “He’s been killing people he knew,” she said. “Why would he ask that?”

  “I don’t know. You said they’d all been strangled with a cord?”

  “That’s right,” she agreed.

  “No, it’s not. He didn’t use cord. At least not in the Pantheon. It was this stuff. Webbing, wrapped up into a ligature. Teresa held that information back. Leapman is going wild. It was the same with the woman we found today. Teresa got positive ID back from forensic on the first sample. This is US military issue webbing. You can’t buy it retail. And it’s not from years ago either. This particular type wasn’t manufactured until last year. As far as we can work out, the only place it’s been used in the field is Iraq.”

  “Whoa.” She sighed. “Now you’re the one who’s going too fast.”

  He had to ask. “If this man is that consistent
, surely he would have used it on the others? Did he?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Costa said nothing.

  She squinted at him, then pointed at the computer. “You think I’m holding out on you? After this?”

  “No.” He laughed. “Not at all.”

  Her fingers flew on the keyboard. “Let’s see. I’ve got the standard reports on here anyway. The ones we sent round to you.”

  Carefully, one by one, they went through each of the case file summaries. All were brief, reduced to just a few pages.

  “This is ridiculous,” Emily snapped. “Why the hell didn’t I see this in the first place? Why didn’t your people?”

  “You’re not a detective. And we didn’t have the time. Remember?”

  “Sorry.”

  She’d left the last document on the screen open. It was the report on her own father’s death. Now that he thought about it, the omission almost screamed at them from the screen. The summary gave a cause of death—strangulation—but contained no forensic data on the material used by the murderer.

  “That can’t be normal.” Emily pointed at the screen. “Just a cause of death. Nothing about the actual ligature itself. Forensic would have information there, wouldn’t they? Something that could be useful?”

  “Absolutely. A couple of years ago Teresa Lupo coaxed some skin samples out of forensic when they were about to give up on a domestic we had. When they took a good look again they had proof the husband was responsible. He’d pulled the cord so tightly he’d left material there himself.”

  Emily glowered at the screen. “Watch this. I still have some clearance.”

  She hit the keys. The modem inside the machine cracked and whistled. Costa watched her thrash her way through more security screens than he’d ever seen in his life. Finally she got to where she wanted: a report topped by the FBI logo. The full file, of which until then he’d only seen the summary.

  “Forensic, forensic, forensic…” she whispered. “Shit!”

  She’d scrolled down until she found the section. It contained just four words: PENDING. REFER TO HIGHER AUTHORITY.

  “You could…” he began to say.

  “… try the others? You bet.”

  She bent down over the computer, head in hands, furious. Costa gingerly put a hand on her shoulder, then removed it.

  “Emily?”

  “Say something useful. Say something I want to hear.”

  “You just made a discovery. You’ve just worked out what those people were really killed with. Not just ”cord.“ The same thing we found here. US military webbing. Maybe he brought it with him. Maybe he acquired it here. Either way, we know. Why else?”

  She took her head out of her hands and smiled brightly at him. “Christ, you’re right, too. It’s the dog that didn’t bark.”

  Costa looked baffled.

  “I’ll explain later, Nic. Now what do we do?”

  The last thing she wanted, he thought. “We leave this till the morning. We continue this conversation with other people around.”

  “Is that what you want?” At least she didn’t argue. There weren’t many options open to them.

  “You mean, am I scared?” he asked.

  “Kind of.”

  “No.”

  “Don’t you ever get scared?”

  He looked around the living room. It felt good with another person there. The fires were doing their job at last. The place finally seemed warm, human.

  “Not here,” he answered. “Not now. But I have to tell you, another fifteen minutes and I fall fast asleep, Agent Deacon. You’d better have something else to amaze me.”

  “Oh, I have,” she said with a grin, and went back to stabbing the keys of the machine.

  PERONI HAD NEVER DONE well on the weapons range, never paid much attention to the smart-ass firearms monkeys who thought you could run the world through the sights of a gun. He was a vice cop. He didn’t mind frontline work. When he was a senior officer he’d made damn sure he didn’t let his men take risks he’d never face himself. All the same, vice was nothing like this. It was pimps and hookers, turf wars and stupid, cheated johns. Black and white in the corners sometimes, but more often a difficult, indeterminate shade of grey. Not something shapeless moving through the dark, unknown, unseen, looking to kill for no real reason at all.

  Peroni did what seemed natural, put his big arms out and covered the girl with his body. A futile gesture, one designed more for reassurance than anything else. The huge door opposite was completely shut. The side exit was doubtless locked too. This killer made no mistakes. They couldn’t flee. They couldn’t do much but wait and face whatever lay out there.

  And think…

  Even a stupid old vice cop could do that.

  “What do you want?” he yelled into the darkness.

  Someone moved, feet tapping on the ancient stone floor, a menacing presence shifting around the echoing interior like a ghost. He could be anywhere. The sound of his shoes on the hard floor bounced around the upturned stone eyelid, came at them from every direction.

  “What do you want?” Peroni yelled again.

  The footsteps stopped. The hall was silent except for the faint rumble of a lone car making it through the night in the distant world beyond.

  “What’s mine.”

  It was an American voice. Flat, middle-aged, monotonous. A voice that sounded as if most of the life had been squeezed out of it somewhere along the line. Peroni wondered if he could guess where it came from. If he could just point the service pistol in that direction, loose off a few shots and hope something—good luck, God, the remnants of a benevolent spirit still lurking here—would send one piece of metal spinning in the right direction.

  But he didn’t believe in God or ghosts. You had to make your own way.

  Peroni turned, still doing his best to cover the kid behind him, peered into her face and held out his hand. She was clutching the wallet, thin fingers tight on the leather, as if it were the most precious thing in the world.

  “Laila,” he whispered. “Please…”

  Stealing’s a bad thing, he wanted to say. Stealing gets you into big trouble, marks you out for life, as visibly as if you were wearing a sign round your neck saying “evil.” Or a magical symbol carved out of your back.

  That was why cops like him spent their working days chasing little thieves, looking for those telltale marks. It was too hard trying to catch the big, smart guys, the ones who carried scalpels and didn’t baulk at using them. And as for the really big fish—well, they just got immunity from their paid politicians anyway. None of which helped a dumb cop on the street to work out the difference between what was truly good and bad.

  She passed the wallet over to him without a word, eyes glittering, shiny, full of fear.

  “Here!” Peroni bellowed into the darkness and sent the wallet spinning out into the heart of the building, hard enough, he hoped, to take it into the shade on the other side where their unseen stalker could collect it, say a quick thank-you, then disappear into the night leaving everyone safe and sound.

  Instead, the thing fell with a gentle thud, slap bang in the middle of the tiny mound of snow building beneath the oculus, and sat there under the silver light like a beacon, like a bright, shiny trap.

  “I didn’t mean to do that,” Peroni said, half to himself, half to the figure hiding in the dark. “I’m not playing any tricks here, friend. Just take the damn wallet and go, will you?”

  The gun felt heavy in his hand. Behind him, Laila was beginning to squirm. If there’d been an easy and obvious exit he’d have sent her flying towards it, screaming at her to get the hell out of this makeshift tomb in the centre of a slumbering, snow-covered city. Instead, all he could think of was how to hide her from whatever was approaching, how to keep her frail body protected behind his.

  And even that wasn’t enough. When it came, straight out of the darkness, it came as a storm of pure physical force, furious, relentless. The man wa
s punching and kicking and screaming, pistol-whipping Peroni’s skull with what felt like a hammer. The gun flew out of Peroni’s hand, clattering across the stonework, spinning into the shadows. He tried to dodge, to find some way of shifting his frame away from the sudden, vicious onslaught of violence, but it was impossible. His hands left Laila and tried to cover his face. He felt his breath flee from his lungs, his mind start to wander off into another place.

  … death, they called it, somewhere this man knew very well indeed. Somewhere he liked to visit often, in the company of others.