“Are you sure?”
Dante said nothing and ran out of the room, slamming the door behind him.
“Is he always like this?” asked De Michele.
“Only on his good days,” said Colomba. She couldn’t reach the AC vent even standing on tiptoes and reaching up. She dragged the desk over and stood on it. Now her face was next to the vent, but all she could see inside was darkness. It was held in place by four Phillips-head screws.
“Do you need a hand, Deputy Captain?” asked Alberti.
“Do you happen to have a screwdriver in your pocket?”
“No.”
“I do,” said De Michele. “I was a boy scout. Be prepared.” He tossed her a Swiss Army knife. “But exactly what do you hope to find?”
Colomba chose a blade with a flat edge. “I just hope I don’t find anything at all.”
But something was there, and Colomba knew it when she turned the first screw. It moved too easily; someone had opened it recently. She undid the third screw and rotated the vent using the fourth screw as a pivot. And then she saw.
In the HVAC duct, fastened to the wall with duct tape, was a video camera.
6
Dante had smoked the last cigarette in the packet when Colomba came out with two little plastic cups of espresso. “The coffee machine on the ground floor is on,” she said, handing him one.
“Are you trying to poison me?”
“Lots of people drink it, and it doesn’t kill them.”
“Lots of people drink Ganges River water.”
“You make things harder than they need to be.” Colomba poured the contents of the second cup into the first and gulped it down. “The main thing is that it keeps you awake.”
Lieutenant Dino Anzelmo from the Ministry of Justice’s postal and communication police came to meet them. He was about thirty and looked for all the world like a college student who’d fallen behind on his exams; he wore glasses with black frames. He’d been sent here by Rovere, and he’d brought along a couple of his men and a search warrant.
“We found some fingerprints,” said Anzelmo. “He’d cleaned them off the video camera but not off the cassette, and there’s a partial on the wall, as well.” He waved the tablet he was holding, a terminal connected to AFIS, the automatic fingerprint identification system. “And we were lucky: We found a match.”
“Does he have a record?” asked Colomba.
“He was arrested for assault and battery fifteen years ago,” Anzelmo replied. “And there’s a criminal complaint for illegal gambling. No sex offenses. But he’s a pro at surveillance, the video camera was equipped with a motion detector. If there was no one in the room, it was on standby.”
“How old is he?” asked Colomba.
“Fifty,” said Anzelmo, reading from the screen, and then he gave her the handheld terminal. Colomba saw a man with a goatee and short salt-and-pepper hair. His name was Sabino Montanari, born and currently residing in Rome. Divorced, no kids.
“He works here, right?” asked Dante.
“As an attendant,” Anzelmo replied. “You ought to be a cop.”
“I’d only enlist in case of war.”
Anzelmo blinked in bafflement and decided to speak to Colomba from now on. “I alerted the magistrate, who issued an order of precautionary detainment. I mentioned an anonymous tip, I’ll manage to make it look like one.”
“Thanks,” said Colomba, who knew what Anzelmo was risking by covering for her. Dante pulled on her arm and walked a short distance away.
“I didn’t know you were such a patriot,” she observed.
Dante looked at her, uncomprehending. “Patriot?”
“You said you’d sign up if a war broke out.”
“Strictly because in wartime more civilians die than soldiers, didn’t you know? I need to talk to him.”
“To who?” asked Colomba.
“To Montanari.”
“Forget about that. The cops are going to pick him up, and he’ll be interviewed by the judge.”
“The Father went through him to reach Luca Maugeri,” Dante insisted.
“Even if there is a connection between the video camera and the kidnapping, Montanari might have done it all on his own.”
“If it was him and Luca was who he was looking for, why didn’t he take the camera?”
“Maybe he just didn’t move fast enough,” Colomba replied.
“Was it on or off?”
“On.”
“The battery doesn’t last four days,” Dante noted. “Montanari is a middleman for the kidnapper, whether or not you choose to believe in the Father. And if you let him wind up in the gears of the justice system, we’re screwed. I won’t get a chance to talk to him until they let him out.”
Colomba rolled her eyes and went back to Anzelmo. “What instructions did Rovere give you?”
“He just said to help you out here.”
“Then keep helping me out. Let me take part in the arrest.”
Anzelmo shook his head. “You’re not on active duty.” His sidelong stare seemed to imply that he knew why.
Colomba wasn’t giving up. “To Montanari I’ll just be another cop asking questions. It won’t even occur to him to say I was there unless someone asks. And who the fuck is going to ask? Come on, partner, don’t make me beg.”
Anzelmo pointed at Dante, who stood a short distance away. “What about him?”
“He’ll stay in the car.”
“And so will you until I’ve handcuffed him, okay? Because if he has a gun and shoots you, I’d have to find a way to get rid of your corpse.”
“Okay,” said Colomba. She kept her face impassive, but even from where he stood, Dante could tell she was lying.
7
Montanari lived on Via Salaria, and he wasn’t answering the doorbell. Alberti and his older partner forced the lock with a small battering ram and stepped aside to let Anzelmo and Colomba through, guns in hand.
Anzelmo stopped just inside the door, aiming his gun at the center of the room and shouting “Police! Show yourself with your hands in the air!”
Every time he said those words, he sounded to himself as if he were in a bad movie, but he’d never been able to come up with another sentence that was quite as effective. Luckily, given the nature of his job, he didn’t have to deal with the issue often, and the only time he’d fired his gun was at the shooting range. Colomba, on the other hand, seemed to be a woman who used her gun for everything, even to open bottles at home. Anzelmo was astonished to see her so determined and active after everything that had happened to her. She might even be a little too active. As soon as they’d pulled up in front of the building, she’d hopped out of the car, leaving it in the middle of the street, and had started ringing the neighbors’ doorbells to get the front door open.
Anzelmo had run after her. “Have you already forgotten we had a deal?”
Colomba ignored him. A woman’s voice burst out of the intercom, and Colomba answered immediately. “I’m locked out without my keys. Could you let me in, please?”
“Caselli . . . are you listening to me?” Anzelmo had said, feeling that she was treating him like a fool.
The front door buzzed open, and Colomba had lunged through it, stopping only to examine the names on the mailboxes. The other two cops had looked at him in bafflement. “She’s not supposed to come with us,” one said.
“You want to tell her that?” Anzelmo replied.
The other cop took a step back. “No.”
Following Colomba into Montanari’s apartment were Anzelmo’s two partners and, bringing up the rear, Alberti and his partner.
“He’s not here,” said Colomba, putting her gun back into the holster on her belt.
Anzelmo, who’d checked out the bathroom, too, also holstered his regulation weapon. “I’ll have a search warrant issued,” he said.
“You think he caught a whiff of something?” asked one of the two partners. “It’s two in the morning.”
/> “Maybe he saw us at the clinic,” Anzelmo replied.
Colomba started wandering around the apartment, inspecting the place. “I don’t think he packed his bags.” She glanced over at the one ramshackle armoire in the room, the door shut tight. “Do you have a pair of gloves?”
Anzelmo rolled his eyes. “Caselli, considering you’re not even supposed to be here, you’re making a hell of a lot of noise.”
“Gloves,” she said again.
One of Anzelmo’s partners tossed her a box of single-use gloves. Colomba put on a pair and opened the armoire, looking around carefully. It seemed to her that there were no significant gaps between the items of clothing. When someone went on the run in a hurry, they always left a considerable mess behind.
“Look here,” said one of the two other cops. He’d opened the pantry, revealing a small pull-out desk with a laptop computer. The laptop was hooked up to a MiniDV player, which took the discs used by the video camera they’d confiscated.
“If he’s on the run, he didn’t come home before leaving,” said Colomba. “Otherwise he’d have taken it with him.” She stood up and opened the screen of the laptop, which lit up, displaying the Windows start menu.
“Don’t waste time on that,” said Anzelmo. “I’ll take everything to the lab. Then I’ll tell you what they found, if you want.”
“Can’t you do a preliminary on-site examination?” asked Colomba. “We have to wait here anyway, in case Montanari comes home.”
“I thought I’d just leave a squad car here,” Anzelmo replied. Still, he took a quick look at the contents of the hard drive. “He has a video-editing program but no videos. He must store them online somewhere. Or on some removable storage device. Still, if the content went through the computer at any point, we’d find traces of it.”
“Can you do that here?” Colomba inquired.
“No. First we’d have to do an overall backup and make a copy of the content that’s on there now. Anyway, I’m no expert. There are some things I leave to the technicians.”
Colomba gave him a level look. “Aren’t you a hacker or something like that?”
“Should I be?”
“You’re from the Special Internet Crimes Division, you spend all your time on computers.”
“You’re a homicide cop, and you spend lots of time with dead bodies. Does that make you a pathologist?”
“Excellent point.” Colomba shut the computer and pulled the plug out of the wall.
“If you’re planning to take it away somewhere, I swear that this time I’ll handcuff you to a radiator,” said Anzelmo.
“Just downstairs.”
They got into Colomba’s minivan. She and Dante sat in the back, Anzelmo turning to watch them over the seat back.
Dante had one hand on the trackpad and had started opening and closing folders.
“What are you doing?” asked Colomba, who at a certain point was able to keep up with his rapid movements.
“I’m looking for a program run log, so I can find out how they’ve been used recently.”
“I could have done that myself,” Anzelmo objected from his vantage point over the seat back, peering down and trying to see something.
“Afterwards I’ll let you play with it for all the time you like,” Dante said, tolerantly.
“I want him to see what he can figure out,” said Colomba.
“Is he a hacker?” asked Anzelmo, mockingly.
“No, but he found the video camera.”
“But we weren’t looking for one,” Anzelmo said defensively.
Dante snickered. “Which is exactly the point . . . Okay. Montanari signed on to the Internet using Tor.”
“What’s that?” Colomba asked. She knew how to use a computer, but when things went over into the realm of the technical, she no longer understood.
“It’s a program that renders online connections anonymous,” Anzelmo replied.
“That’s right,” said Dante. “And with it you can find sites you wouldn’t be able to otherwise.”
“The darknet,” she commented.
“Oh, please . . . only journalists use that term.”
Anzelmo nodded. “On anonymous sites, once you get access, you can buy things online that are illegal in nearly every country on Earth. Weapons, drugs . . .”
“And child pornography,” Colomba summed up.
“True, although most people use Tor only to download pirated movies,” Dante pointed out. “We don’t know what servers Montanari signed onto, much less where he kept his shit. But . . . let’s see . . . he has a PayPal account. And a payment receipt to Leonard McCoy, an American, through a virtual credit card issued from the Cayman Islands. Ten thousand euros. That’s something. I can’t see any of the other transactions without his password.”
“Do you think this McCoy exists?” asked Colomba.
“If you’re going to use your real name, you might as well use a normal credit card,” Dante replied. “It’s the alias of one of his buyers.”
“Do you think he was selling the footage?” Colomba probed.
“What do you think he was doing with it?”
“Maybe he liked watching them,” said Anzelmo.
“Were there pictures of kids in the house, even innocent ones? On the walls, on the fridge?” Dante wanted to know.
“No,” Anzelmo replied.
“Toys, children’s clothing, kiddie comic books?”
Colomba shook her head.
“But he has four different apps for online casinos. He’s a compulsive gambler, he needs money.”
“Anything else?” asked Colomba.
“He just has one Skype profile. But he hasn’t used it in the past six months. And he doesn’t have a subscription for local numbers.”
“Why did you think he might?” Anzelmo asked.
Dante and Colomba exchanged a glance but said nothing. “But he did use a chat program,” said Dante.
“Can you see what he said?”
“No. He erased that. The last person he chatted with today is named Zardoz. And I have the IP address he connected from.”
He showed Colomba a string of numbers that revealed the identity of the server being used by whoever it was that had contacted Montanari; then he punched that string of numbers into the browser on his iPhone to see its provenance. “It’s a Tor server,” he said after a short while. It seemed to be taking him some effort to speak, as if he’d been distracted by a sudden thought.
Colomba spoke to Anzelmo. “Is there a way to establish Zardoz’s identity?”
“No, because the Tor server deletes the connection logs,” Anzelmo replied. “But maybe Montanari knows who he is. Let’s wait until we catch him, and then he can tell us.”
“Can I speak to you privately?” Dante asked Colomba.
She looked at Anzelmo.
“If I go, I’m taking the computer with me,” he pointed out, clearly offended.
Dante handed it to him without even glancing in his direction. “Be my guest.”
Anzelmo took it and got out.
“What is it?” asked Colomba once they were alone.
“Have you ever seen the movie Zardoz?” Dante asked.
“Never even heard of it.”
“It’s a sci-fi flick from the seventies, with Sean Connery.”
“He’s a hot guy.”
“He’s over eighty . . .”
“He’s still hot. Well?”
“The film is about a society in the future dominated by a false god who calls himself Zardoz, a character inspired by the Wizard of Oz. He appears to his subjects as an enormous mask with a thunderous voice, which is a sort of spaceship.”
“Does this have anything to do with us?”
“Yes. Zardoz demands a specific tribute from his subjugated people. Wheat. The slaves fill the flying mask with wheat at the beginning of the movie. The mask is nothing less than a flying silo, CC. Zardoz is the Father. And Montanari can take us to him.”
8
Sabino Montanari was sitting in his methane-powered Fiat Stilo, parked next to a pylon under the bypass highway, opposite the staircase leading up to the Tiburtina station. Until just two years ago, he’d owned a Mercedes, but he’d gambled it away little by little, same as had happened with the apartment he’d purchased when the cards were still running right for him. Now he lived in a one-room rental so far from the clinic that it took him two hours to get there every day. Two fucking hours of his life wasted every morning and an hour to get home in the evening. He thought about it all the time. Every day. He’d dreamed of quitting his regular job once and for all, once he’d set aside a bit of money, but things had gone the other way.
That’s why he’d started up with the videos, even if that shit turned his stomach. The video camera that he’d smuggled into gynecology, sure, every once in a while that yielded some interesting material . . . but pediatrics? Pure shit. It’s just that videos of women with their legs spread brought in nothing. If you tried to put them on the market, at the very best you might find someone willing to trade videos. But kids . . .
Kids were pure gold.
For the most part, the children remained fully dressed and the pediatricians just looked at their tonsils. Only occasionally did they take off their T-shirt or, even more rarely, drop their trousers to allow their nether regions to be checked. But he could sell that footage for a hundred euros a minute, and there was always someone willing to buy, even after the free preview. Then Zardoz had shown up. His account was a number assigned by the system, and Montanari had no idea what his real name might be. The system told him only that he’d been on the server for more than a year and that he’d made purchases without problems from vendors who were still operating. That was important information; it gave Montanari a reasonable certainty that the man wasn’t a cop from the Ministry of Justice trying to set him up. Zardoz had purchased a couple of minutes; then he’d made an offer that was almost too good to be true: the whole video for a flat fee of ten thousand euros. Montanari knew that there were very rich individuals who frequented the site, but there weren’t many clients who wanted to spend it all on a single vendor; they tended to be looking for variety. Instead Zardoz wanted even the dead footage, the parts where the mothers said hello to the doctors and that sort of thing. Montanari had remained skeptical until the money had actually been credited to his PayPal account.
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