The Sacred Cut nc-3

by David Hewson

  There was a sharp intake of breath and a cold flash of those blue eyes. “OK, OK. I represent the great imperial power and we’re just brimming over with soldiers. So take my word for it. When It comes to war, memories don’t fade easily. Especially for him…”

  She pointed to the name in the middle of the weird, rambling memo that was on the screen. The one that said: Subject: Babylon Sisters. Status: You have to ask?

  He read it, page by page, stumbling over the odd, colloquial language.

  “William F. Kaspar again,” he said when he’d finished. “OK. I didn’t have time to chase the diplomat I mentioned. But I called the desk about him. Honest. There’s nothing.”

  “I’d be amazed if there was. I didn’t find out much myself. There are no military records. Nothing personal out there. Just this one memo.”

  “This is all about some big secret or something?”

  “I think so.”

  “Then why’s there still some evidence left? Just this one piece?”

  “I don’t know!” Something about its provenance exasperated her too. “Maybe it was a mistake,” she suggested, and didn’t look him in the eye when she said it. “They happen. It was filed under the wrong keywords.”

  Costa was starting to convince himself she knew more than she was revealing at that moment. But before he could pursue the point she was moving on, impatient to get over her point.

  “It isn’t just this memo, Nic. It’s what’s in here too. My dad knew this guy. I vaguely remember him coming to our house. A big, noisy man, all laughter and presents. Loud. And scary too. He was sort of the boss, I think. You can hear it in the tone of this memo. He’s the guy who’s leading this assignment, assembling the teams, taking them into action. My dad with him.”

  Cases went bad when they began to bite into your own private life. Nic knew that only too well from his own experience.

  “Are you sure? That your father was a part of this?”

  “Absolutely. There’s a whole chunk of 1991 when he wasn’t around. I remember it clearly. I’m an only child. They notice things like that. He was gone and while he was away you could touch the atmosphere in that apartment the embassy gave us. Everything felt so odd. I’ve tried to talk to my mom about it and all she says is he was away somewhere, working.”

  “Maybe he was.”

  “I don’t doubt it. Now I know where. And I know it did something to him, too. When he came back he was… different. He’d changed. Something had marked him. He wasn’t…”

  She hesitated, determined to be precise about this last point.

  “He wasn’t the same dad anymore. A part of him-the good part, all the life and joy-had gone. He was cold and unhappy. It wasn’t long and he was gone too. Out of the house, talking to the divorce lawyers. There was just my mom and me and a lot-I mean a lot-of bad feeling.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Emily Deacon was waving a hand at him in embarrassment. “OK, OK. I know what you’re thinking. This is just a run-of-the-mill family break-up I’m trying to rationalize by blaming it on something else. First point: Bill Kaspar murdered my dad. No arguments there. I knew that without a doubt when I looked into his face and watched him trying to decide whether to kill me, too. Second point: yes, I do want to know why, but it’s not just for me. It’s for all of them. Whatever brought him to kill my dad was the same thing that brought him to kill those others. Knowing that will solve this case for everyone.”

  He could see what she’d been through, getting scarred twice over. By the change in her father when she was a kid and by his death a few months ago. Nonetheless there was a strong, rational line in her argument. Emily Deacon could tough it through the pain, or so she thought.

  “We need proof, Emily,” he said.

  She fired up a Web browser, hammering in a flurry of words. “And you don’t just get it from hacking embassy computer systems. Sometimes it’s waiting out there on the Web. Take a look at this and see what you think.”

  Costa vaguely recognized what he was now looking at. It was a newsgroup, one of those anonymous bulletin boards the surveillance people regularly browsed for raw intelligence. There was a short message starting a thread with the title “Babylon Sisters.” The first entry, the one opening the discussion, had been posted on 30 September.

  Emily Deacon stared at the screen and said without emotion, “I found this just by looking on the Net. It’s public and it’s meant to be. Someone put it there for a reason. The memo tells you what Babylon Sisters meant. It was the code name for the operation. My guess is that Babylon was the closest notable location to where they were headed. The name’s from an old rock song my dad liked. Maybe Kaspar had the same tastes. And here it is thirteen years later. Think of the timing, Nic. This was posted three days after my dad was murdered.”

  He looked at the first message on the screen and hated what he saw, felt tainted by the craziness of the language.

  The Scarlet Beast was a generous beast. Honor his memory. Fuck China. Fuck the ziggurat. Let’s get together again back in the old places, folks. Reunion time for the class of “91. Just one spare place at the table. You coming or not?

  “You get this kind of crap everywhere on the Net, Emily.”

  “Of course. It’s meant to sound like that. Whoever wrote that message doesn’t want it to mean anything to anyone but Bill Kaspar. They know what Kaspar’s like. They know that, from time to time, he’s going to walk up to a PC somewhere in the world, fire up a search engine and type in two words: ”Babylon Sisters.“ Sooner or later he’s going to hit on this. Sooner or later he’s going to respond. Which he does. Read the second message.”

  Nic hit the key for the next window.

  Lying fuckhead, treasonable, cowardly scum. I’ve waited long enough now. “Bill Kaspar” my ass. This is the real thing. Fear not. There will be a reunion. And soon. Pray we don’t meet.

  The reply was dated that morning, signed, simply, “killthem@killthemall.com.”

  “It could be Kaspar sending messages to himself,” Costa suggested. The language sounded like the kind of internal argument that might lurk inside the brain of someone who could dismember a woman, park her head in front of the TV to make a room look “normal,” then smear the walls with her blood in a strange, repeating pattern, over and over again. “He’s crazy enough.”

  “Why wait more than three months before answering yourself? What’s more, consider this: at eleven this morning, just after Kaspar’s reply got posted, Leapman ordered a couple of the five security guys I never knew existed out onto the street. Want to bet where they’re looking? Net cafes, just to see if he can’t resist the bait second time round. You see what’s happening?”

  He could and he wondered if they appreciated how futile it was likely to be. The city was full of places, large and small, where you could wander in off the street and buy fifteen minutes online. Five men couldn’t cover every last Net cafe, moneychanger and bookshop in Rome.

  “Would Leapman write something like this?”

  She shook her head slowly, deliberately, and he couldn’t stop himself watching the way her soft blonde hair moved. “No need to. We have specialists to do that. Someone from profiling maybe, who’s got access to files I don’t possess. The syntax is very deliberate and direct. Maybe Kaspar is a good ol” boy or something or maybe they just copied it from that first memo I showed you. Though I doubt it. If they knew that was still around on the system my guess is they’d have erased it.“

  There were so many possibilities here. Costa wished his head were in better working order to consider them, to separate speculation from fact.

  “We need to discuss this with someone. Your people. Mine. Maybe there’s something here. Or maybe we’re just seeing what we want to see.”

  “Oh, Nic.” Her hand brushed his arm. There was a flash of a white smile. “You really don’t understand what we’re dealing with, do you? My people know. I think a good few of yours do, too.”

  Not Falcone,
though, Costa thought. He was sure of that. It just wasn’t the inspector’s style.

  “Finish reading,” she ordered quietly. “Leapman’s man came back for a third try.”

  He scrolled down and read the third message, posted at noon, again from “WillFK@whitehouse.gov.”

  Well hang me high and stretch me wide. Just when you think you made somethin“ idiot-proof they come along and invent a better idiot. Can’t keep those fingers still, can you, Billy Boy? All this cuttin‘ has turned your mind, brother. Call home, brother. Reel yourself in. Nothin” smells worse than an old soldier gone bad. There’s mercy waiting here if only you got the sense to ask for it. Least that way you get to stay alive.

  Oh and by the by. What did Laura Lee ever do to you, man? She took a bullet in all that mess back then. So how come she gets dead now and Little Em walks away without a scratch? You turn weakling when there’s a WASP around? Or are you just going soft in your old age?

  Costa stared at the words on the screen. There couldn’t be any other explanation.

  “Little Em…”

  “That’s me,” she said.

  * * *

  As Gianni Peroni’s luck would have it, the same damn caretaker was on duty and sporting the same bad, red-faced mood he’d owned the night Mauro Sandri died.

  The grumpy old bastard spent his time alone at the booth by the door of the Pantheon, checking his watch at regular intervals, wandering over to the centre of the building now and then to sweep away the flecks of snow spiralling lightly down through the oculus. Peroni had a seat in the shadows on the opposite side of the chilly circular hall. The place was a wonderful sight, timeless, even with the anachronistic illumination of the dim electric lights. The distant part of him that remembered school history lessons half imagined an ancient Roman emperor coming here, lord of his own realm, staring up through that open eye, wondering what was looking back at him from the greater kingdom of the heavens. Peroni felt more than a little awed by what he saw. It was wrong that a place like this had been sullied by what happened two nights before. That thought depressed him, that and the plain fact he was probably wasting his time. After he’d left the cafe in Trastevere with such high hopes, Peroni had driven the jeep across the river, parked discreetly in one of the side turnings off Rinascimento and made his way to the monument, taking the caretaker aside for a quiet talk when he arrived. There wasn’t a single sign he was in luck. Only a couple of people had walked through the door while he’d been there, and both of them were searching-in vain-for respite from the cold. The place would close in less than an hour. It was a dumb idea, but it was the only idea he’d got.

  Besides, she’d so much time on him. She could have walked in, picked up anything she’d left behind and walked back out into the premature wintry darkness hours ago. But then what? Peroni clung to the belief Laila acted the way she did because, after Teresa’s invented story, the girl wanted to help him. She’d have made contact somehow, surely. He tried to draw some encouragement, too, from the fact the caretaker was adamant no lone, black-clad kid had been in. Given how few visitors the place was getting in this extraordinary bout of ice and snow, there ought to be some comfort in that.

  His mind was wandering when the caretaker ambled over, picking snowflakes off the sleeve of his tatty uniform.

  “Hey, mister,” he moaned, “seeing as how I seem to be doing you favours day in and day out around here, how about you do one for me?”

  “What?”

  He nodded at the booth and the small, private office down the same curving side of the building. “Cover for me. There’s supposed to be two of us around but the other guy’s sick and, what with the weather…”

  He licked his bulbous lips and Peroni knew what was coming. “All you got to do is sit there and look important. You’re up to it.”

  It wasn’t a big favour. The place was empty. Peroni had no intention of sweeping away the snow. Nor had he anything else to do. He’d checked in with Falcone, heard the news about the dead woman’s apartment and received not the slightest reprimand for his behaviour earlier with Leapman. He recognized the resignation in Falcone’s voice. The whole case was in stasis, buried under the weather and the search for something-anything-in the trail of places the elusive killer had abandoned along the way. The likelihood was that until the killer did something-something stupid, without spilling of blood preferably-they’d just be sitting around twiddling their fingers, waiting, not that Leo Falcone would admit as much.

  “Where are you going exactly, friend?” Peroni demanded.

  The man’s florid, wrinkled face squinted back at him. “It’s no big deal. I need a drink. I’ve been freezing my balls off in this place all day long. There should be a rule about working in weather like this. What am I? An Eskimo or something? Just half an hour. That’s all I ask. Here…”

  He led Peroni over to the office by the side entrance, the one with the closed-circuit TVs and security systems that had been so carefully disabled two nights before.

  “Everything’s working again now. All you need to know is where the circuit breakers are. If a bulb blows, it’ll throw the switch. You just throw it back and I change the bulb later. If I can be bothered. Also, I’m going to let you have a special treat for helping me. When I come back I’m gonna let you close the door, all on your own. I don’t allow civilians to do that ordinarily. Big privilege.”

  Lazy bastard, Peroni thought. It was just a door, one of two, the other closed. A big, very old door.

  “Is that so?” he asked.

  “You bet,” the caretaker said, on his way out already, picking up speed with the eagerness of a man in desperate need of alcohol.

  Peroni sat down on the hard chair behind the glass front of the booth. Then he thought about what he was doing and pulled himself back into the darkness of the little cubicle. Entry into the place was free. People just walked in and out as they pleased, except for the odd dumb tourist who couldn’t believe it was possible to get into a historic monument without a ticket. There was no need to make his presence obvious, none at all.

  So he sat on the chair behind the glass and did what came naturally to him in the solitary gloom of the booth. He thought about his kids, wondering what they were doing, whether they were happy, whether they missed him. He thought about Laila, trying to imagine what kind of life she led, what had brought her all the way from Iraq to the streets of a hostile city where no one, as far as he could work out, knew who she was or cared much either.

  And he looked at this odd old building, with its spherical interior pointed towards the sky like half an upturned eyeball, the pupil set on the stars. Peroni tried to work out where it lay in the tangle of facts they’d assembled so far. He hadn’t listened much to Emily Deacon’s lecture about why the Pantheon was important. Temperamentally he inclined towards Joel Leapman’s view. That a man who carved weird geometrical shapes out of the skins of the people he slaughtered was just plain crazy, however you tried to rationalize it. Thinking about the idea again inside the Pantheon itself, he was no longer so sure. The kind of killer they were hunting was, undoubtedly, deranged and dangerous. That didn’t make the guy illogical or erratic. The very opposite, in fact. If they’d thought this through-if events had given them the chance even to begin the process-he’d have suggested to Falcone that they should have left some plainclothes guy around here all day, just on the off chance. The old saw about people returning to the scene of their crimes was part of the argument. That did happen. More to the point, this place obsessed the man somehow. It was part of his story, part of the way he saw the world. In its angles and curves, the shadowy corners of its precise proportions, this killer found some hidden truth that made sense of what he was trying to achieve.

  Several ideas were starting to form in Gianni Peroni’s head, each of them pushing the memory of his kids and a stray Kurdish girl from his mind.

  Then he glanced at the long vertical slit of the door, outlined by the lights of the square behind, and
saw a slim, recognizable figure slip through, casting a long slender shadow on the geometric floor.

  Peroni sat in the booth, trying to decide how to handle the girl. She’d crept straight into the shade to the right of the altar opposite the entrance, hopping the rope designed to keep out the public, intent on something. Every movement was deliberate, determined. Teresa had been right. Laila was back here to retrieve something. Then another shape came through the door: the caretaker returning, walking steadily, head down, not the shambling gait Peroni expected of a man who, just half an hour earlier, looked as if his mind was set on downing three quick coffees liberally laced with brandy.

  Peroni glanced at his watch.

  “You’re five minutes late,” he grumbled at the ratty uniform now heading for the booth, then the big cop walked towards the altar, straight through the sharp beam of moonlight tumbling through the oculus.

  The girl was just visible behind some kind of drape at the side of the altar, half-concealed by the cloth.

  “Laila.”

  He spoke her name firmly, with warmth and familiarity. All the same, it wasn’t enough. Her skinny frame stiffened visibly at the sound of a human voice and he began to wonder: if she ran now, was there any way a man approaching fifty could possibly stop her reaching the door and disappearing once again into the night?

  “It’s me,” he said. “Peroni. You don’t need to worry. There’s nothing to be scared of. Nothing at all.”

  Except…

  Just a sudden flashback of all those doubts that drifted wordlessly through the back of his head in the booth waiting for the caretaker to get back. All those wonderful little nightmares kids-or, more accurately, their existence-sent scattering through a parent’s mind at random times: car crashes and meningitis, the wrong friends, the wrong time to cross the road, rubella, crappy bike helmets, a random falling meteor.

  And, Laila being a girl, all those fears about men. In the street. In the home. Men who ought to know better. Men lurking half-hidden under the cover of night, and all of them looking for the same thing: someone weak enough to fill the role of prey.