The Sacred Cut

by David Hewson

  Morrison, a weary man in his mid-thirties, came out straightaway. He looked overworked and more than a little grumpy. “What can I do for you?”

  She held out the box, placed it on the counter and smiled. “Your nice Agent Leapman needs these. He wants them in his office. Now.”

  He really didn’t look the brightest of buttons. Or the kind to argue too much. “I tried to call him earlier,” he said. “Agent Leapman’s not here at the moment. I don’t think Agent Deacon’s in the office either. I’ll make sure Leapman gets them.”

  “You don’t remember me, do you?”

  “Should I?”

  “The Pantheon. Two days ago. You came to pick up the body.”

  He swore under his breath. “Oh. That.”

  “You forgot something.”

  “Miss—”

  She flashed the police ID at him. “Doctor.”

  “Doctor Lupo. I will take these things and make sure they go to the proper place.”

  “Yes, well, you won’t mind if I make sure.”

  “What?”

  She sighed, as if she were trying to keep her patience. “You left them in the Pantheon, Morrison. I had Joel Leapman screaming down the phone at me this morning as if it were my fault or something.”

  “What?” he asked again.

  “You came to pick up the body, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah! Which we did. Hell, I’m not running some damn funeral-home service here. We shouldn’t be doing this kind of stuff anyway.”

  She tapped her shoe on the shiny reception floor. “You took the body. You left her stuff. You wouldn’t be fit to run a funeral home. If it wasn’t for me, these things could have been lost for good. Not that I’m getting any credit for it. Do you wonder Joel Leapman’s going berserk over this?”

  The woman behind the counter was starting to stare now. She had a little “serve you right” smile on her face. Joel Leapman couldn’t be that popular around here, Teresa thought. But maybe Cy Morrison wasn’t either.

  Morrison walked a little way away from the desk to get a touch of privacy. “Listen,” he said in a low, furious voice, “I’m not interested in what Joel Leapman thinks. I don’t work for him. I’m damned if I’m supposed to clean up whatever mess he leaves behind either. Just give me the things and it’s done.”

  “No,” Teresa snapped. “I’m not having him screaming at me because you fouled up again. I want to see them in there. If they turn up missing again he’s going to go ballistic again and I don’t want that coming in my direction.”

  “Dammit!” Morrison yelled. “Since when did you get the right to give orders here?”

  She took out Emily’s security card and waved it in his face, keeping the photo side away from him, hoping, hoping. “Since Joel Leapman told me to go see ”that moron Morrison,“ gave me this and told me not to let go of this stuff until I saw it safely on his desk with my own eyes. Now, do you want to accompany me there? Or should I just find my own way? God knows,” she lied, “I’ve seen enough of that place and that man these past few days.”

  Cy Morrison peered at the security card. Someone like Joel Leapman wouldn’t give these things out lightly, Teresa guessed. It had to mean something. Still, Morrison ought to at the very least check the photo, and some inner reminder of that seemed to be just beginning to work its way into his consciousness.

  “Plus,” she improvised, wondering if she was going to foul up here, and what trying to talk your way into a secure office in the US embassy meant for your career, “he needs these urgently.”

  Teresa Lupo dug deep into the bottom of the box and retrieved one of the bags she’d taken from the apartment the previous day.

  “This was yesterday’s woman,” she said. “You heard about that? Turns out she was American too. Maybe I’ll be calling you to pick up her corpse before long. She was decapitated,” Teresa said, getting his attention on the bag. “While wearing this nightdress.”

  The scarlet garment lay in a large evidence bag, the bloodstains black and stiff beneath the plastic. Morrison eyed the bag sideways. He looked queasy.

  “Of course if you want to take responsibility yourself…” he managed, “I’d just have to tell Leapman you’d done that, you understand. So if it went missing, if anything got tampered with, damaged, lost, altered in any way which meant it couldn’t be used in a court of law…”

  Scaring men was fun sometimes, she thought. A skill to be cultivated.

  “You do know about rules of evidence, don’t you?” she demanded. “You do understand what happens if this doesn’t get handled in exactly the right way? If one thumbprint goes in the wrong place?”

  “Frankly,” Morrison muttered briskly, “I don’t give a shit. If the guy gave you his card, go wherever the hell you want. And find your own damn way out too.”

  With that he stormed off, in the opposite direction, away from the office she wanted, the one just round the corner and down the hall.

  Teresa Lupo whistled a little tune as she walked there. Then she ran Emily Deacon’s ID through the security slot, waited for the lock to retreat and walked in.

  She’d been thinking this through all the way there, phrasing the right message, tweaking the nuances. She’d had an uncle who took her hunting once, when she was a kid. She’d hated the entire experience. All except for the dog. The wonderful dog who was as lovable as they came but could flush out a single pheasant in a field of corn just by scenting where the bird lived and emitting a single bark in its direction.

  A minute. That was all it would take to type a simple e-mail, swiped with Emily’s ID card to authenticate it as genuine, mark the message as urgent as hell, hit Send and stand back to see what happened.

  She hammered the keyboard with her fat, clumsy fingers.

  “Now run, you bastard,” Teresa Lupo said to herself and hoped to God this made a difference. Those hard canisters she felt as she hugged Emily Deacon’s scared, skinny body kept popping pictures into her head of what they could deliver on her cold, shining table if anything went wrong.

  “That was a piece of cake,” Teresa Lupo whispered to herself. “You should do this more often.”

  The box lay on Leapman’s desk now. Rightfully most of the contents belonged to him. But not the nightdress from the apartment. She had just brought that along as a last resort, for effect. And that was evidence of her own, something she could need for a crime that remained in the jurisdiction of the state police.

  “Wasted on these people,” she sniffed. “All of it.”

  They’ll know, too, she thought. When the dust settled, Leapman would be able to look at that odd box on his desk, retrace her steps, work out how this was done.

  “What the hell?” Teresa Lupo murmured, then picked up the evidence packet with the blackened, stained silk shift, dropped it in her bag, went out and called a cab for the centro storico.

  “LOOK AROUND YOU, gentlemen. Enjoy the view.”

  Costa had placed the phone on the empty chair next to Emily. Now they crowded close to it, listening to Bill Kaspar’s voice crackling out of the speaker, clear and determined.

  “Can you imagine being in a hellhole like that, watching your buddies going down one by one, clinging to a piece of webbing as if it could keep out the fire? All because some asshole you thought you could trust wants a cut of the action?”

  “We get the point,” Leapman grumbled.

  There was a pause. “OK. I hear you. The man from the Agency. Or wherever. Right?”

  Viale made a gesture to Leapman: Pursue this.

  “Listen, Kaspar,” Leapman continued. “It doesn’t matter who I am. All I want to do is make sure you understand something. We know what happened. Washington’s got no doubts. Not anymore.”

  “You think you know—” the tinny voice interrupted.

  “You got screwed! Live with it! You’re not the first. So you and your people went down there. That’s tough. In war you get casualties.”

  Kaspar waited before answering.
It was a scary moment. “We were ”casualties‘?“

  “You and lots of others. Except they let it go. I don’t know. I don’t get…”

  Leapman was struggling. Viale sat down and stared at him, disappointed.

  “You don’t get the symmetry,” Kaspar said calmly. “Understandable. I guess you needed to be there.”

  Leapman fought to get a grip on himself, glanced at Emily, then said, “Look. Dan Deacon fooled us all. You, me, Washington, everyone. We never even began to guess until a good way through all this. I’m sorry. Is that what you want to hear?”

  The voice on the phone—hidden somewhere they could only guess at—sighed. “Ignorance—such a rotten excuse. Being smart’s not about when or where you’re born, you know. It’s about who you are. That’s history, man. The guy who built that place you’re in—he was called Hadrian, a little history for you there. He could fight battles. Run empires. Think about life. He could sit right where you are now and imagine a whole cosmos in his head.”

  Leapman blinked hard, looked at Viale and made the “crazy” sign with his right index finger.

  “I slept above his mausoleum last night,” Kaspar continued. “I thought I’d dream about him. I didn’t. It was just the same damn shit I always hear. Which doesn’t make sense, since they’re all supposed to be dead now. You follow?”

  “So we’re going through all this because of your dreams, Kaspar?” Leapman asked. “Are you listening to yourself? That’s how crazy people sound. That’s what—”

  The voice from the tinny speaker cranked up several decibels. “Crazy! CRAZY! This seem crazy to you?”

  There was a sudden, unexpected noise behind them. Something coming out of Emily Deacon’s jacket and not a phone this time, a pop, like the report of a small gun, and she was screaming again, terrified to move, terrified to stay still. A bright spark, alive and fiery, was worming its way out of the uppermost yellow canister on the vest.

  The men were scattering again. Costa took a good look at the jacket, walked over, tried to hold her still, wrapped a handkerchief around his fist and jabbed at the burning object. It came out, stinging his fingers. He threw it to the floor, where it fizzled ominously.

  “Don’t play games,” Costa barked at the phone. “She didn’t deserve that.”

  “You don’t know what you deserve!” Kaspar yelled back. “You don’t have a clue.”

  Costa wasn’t listening. He was back with Emily, hand to her head, noting the tears in her eyes, the look of terror there.

  “I’m sorry,” she gasped. “I’m so sorry.”

  Kaspar’s laugh rattled out of the phone. “Good! Are you people learning something here? Improvisation’s everything. A man needs tricks up his sleeve. What you got there was the demo. A little firecracker to keep you on your toes, folks. Still leaves me with seven real ones, though. Plus the set I got here, somewhere you’d never guess, full of lots of people who surely wouldn’t want to die without knowing what Christmas presents they’ve got. Ask your munitions moron to stick his nose round Little Em’s vest. This is real, people. Don’t ever forget that.”

  “This is real,” Emily Deacon murmured to no one, head down.

  Viale, Leapman and the two Americans were slinking back to the centre of the hall now, looking somewhat ashamed.

  Costa scowled at them, picked up the phone, turned off the speaker and held the handset to his ear, ignoring Leapman’s protests. “My name’s Nic Costa. Rome police. Tell me what you want, Kaspar, and I’ll tell you if they can give it to you.”

  A pause on the end of the line. A wry, amused laugh, and Costa knew somehow: he was dealing with someone very smart. “Finally. Mr. Costa. Are we talking privately, son?”

  The voice in his ear had changed. The person behind it sounded closer. More human. And just a little apprehensive too.

  “Yes,” Costa replied and listened, very carefully, as he watched Gianni Peroni restrain the furious Leapman from grabbing the phone.

  “I like that. So you think you can convince them to let you out of that place with something?”

  “Yes,” Costa said, and tried to sound convincing.

  “Good. I’m impressed.”

  “Meaning?”

  That laugh again. “Meaning we’re halfway there already. ”Cos I got something for you.“

  Then the line went dead. Nothing, not a single background noise, a half-heard word from a third party, gave Costa a clue about where Kaspar was really located.

  Leapman was shaking with fury. Peroni released him. The American pointed at Falcone and spat, “That was not part of the deal!”

  “You were losing it,” Falcone said coldly. “If you’d gone much further she’d be dead, and the rest of us too, probably. Save your thanks for later.”

  “You—”

  “Shut up! Shut up!” Emily Deacon looked ready to break. She was hugging herself inside the deadly parka, gently rocking backwards and forwards, tears streaming down her cheeks.

  “For God’s sake,” she pleaded, “either give him what he wants, or just get the hell out of here so he doesn’t kill the rest of you too.”

  To Costa’s amazement, that did, at least, give the FBI man pause for thought.

  “What does he want?” Leapman demanded.

  “Just what he asked for last night,” Costa explained quietly. “Proof.”

  “Great,” Leapman grunted. “And in return?”

  Costa phrased this very carefully. “In return, he swears he’ll give himself up. He’ll take off the vests, disarm them both—”

  “What?” Viale looked livid. “We’re supposed to take that on trust? I want him in my sight before he gets a damn thing. I’m not waiting on a promise.”

  Costa caught Emily’s eye. He wanted her to know there was still hope, still room to make things right. “I guess he’s thinking much the same way. He wants me to take him the evidence you’ve got. He’ll check it out. If it’s real. Then—”

  “Where’s the delivery?” Falcone asked.

  “I don’t know,” Costa lied. “He said he’d phone along the way. And don’t try to follow me. If he sees that, sees anything that suggests we’re trying to trick him, it’s all over.”

  Costa watched them turn this over in their heads. He knew what defeat looked like.

  “He’s set this up so we don’t have a lot of choices,” he argued. “He’s not stupid enough to walk in here to collect. I don’t think we’re in a position to get round him either. Do you?”

  Leapman stared at the stone floor in despair. “Jesus,” he moaned. “The bastard’s still running rings around us.”

  Costa risked a hopeful glance in Emily’s direction. “Let me do it,” he urged. “What’s there to lose? He’s adamant. If he gets the documents you promised, he comes back with me and he’s all yours. He said he’d ”surrender.“ That was the word he used.”

  A military word, Costa thought. One that would strike a chord with a man like Joel Leapman.

  “Do we have any other options?” Falcone wondered. “Is any part of this negotiable?”

  Costa shook his head. “Absolutely not. I wouldn’t even know how to phone him back. He blocked the number.”

  “Bill Kaspar,” Leapman sighed. “What a guy.” He looked Costa straight in the face. “This place is a church or something, right?”

  “Among other things.”

  “Really.”

  Leapman walked over to Viale, held out his hand, then, when the SISDE officer didn’t move an inch, took the blue folder from under his arm.

  “This is mine,” Leapman said, handing him the thing. “I read it on the way here. There’s no one in there but Dan Deacon. If that doesn’t convince him Deacon was to blame, then nothing will. You go run your errand, Costa. We stay here and pray.”

  THE SKY WAS HAVING second thoughts. It was still bright, but there was a hint of hazy ice seeping into the blue. More snow, Costa thought. Not for a few hours, but it was on the way, a final random throw of the d
ice for this extraordinary Christmas.

  He walked out of the shadow of the Pantheon doors, waited as Peroni closed the vast bronze slab behind him, then strode down the steps into the piazza, close to where Mauro Sandri had fallen three nights before. So much in such a short space of time. This must have been what it was like for Kaspar in Iraq. Constant movement, constant threats. That experience shaped the man now, made him what he was. Obsessed with detail and planning, tied to the symmetry of the complex web he’d spun around all of them, weaving his way through its intricacies with an extraordinary, lethal dexterity.