Silver ota-1 Page 13

  “So I see,” Uzzi Sokol said. “I would imagine someone like this Lethe of yours could be dangerous if he put his mind to it.” He chuckled at that. Orla didn’t contradict him. She knew enough about how numbered accounts worked to know that with some of the older Zurich banks the number was all you needed to make a withdrawal. It was all part of the arcane secrecy of the Old World banking system. Some were password protected, but she was in no doubt Jude Lethe could find that just as easily if he set his mind to it. What he did was rather frightening when she considered it. It went beyond invasive and into Orwellian Big Brother. These numbered accounts were meant to be among the most closely guarded secrets of a secret-obsessed nation, and Lethe had followed the money all the way back to the vaults of the Bahnhofstrasse in less than an hour. There were millions of reasons why anyone in their right mind might be tempted to try their luck.

  “As you will see, withdrawals have been made as recently as three months ago. Deposits appeared to have ceased six months prior. That nine months of inactivity ended six days ago when a substantial deposit was made.” By substantial she meant another eight-figure sum.

  Sokol flipped over the page and scanned the rows of numbers. She could guess what he was thinking as the balance turned into a numerical string longer than the account number that protected it. “None of this looks like a widow’s pension,” he admitted. “At least not an Israeli widow. I don’t mind telling you if my wife was in line for this kind of payout, I’d be looking over my shoulder while we spooned.”

  Orla knew exactly what he meant. There was enough money in Akim Caspi’s account to finance a small war. That was what frightened her. These last few days didn’t feel like random acts of violence anymore; they felt like the opening salvos in a war. And given that, it made even less sense that Sir Charles had chosen to make it their war.

  Someone had access to the account and was using it regularly, and if the real Akim Caspi was as dead as the headstone made him look, it was a safe bet this other Akim Caspi from Fisher’s photograph was the man spending all of that money.

  A hooded crow settled on the stone cross beside Caspi’s grave. Orla chose not to take it as a sign.

  “Can I ask you something, Uzzi?”

  “You can ask.”

  “Do you really expect me to believe the IDF would send out an Intelligence officer on a grunt mission like this if it didn’t already have an inkling as to what was going on with the dead general’s money?”

  “Lieutenant general,” Sokol corrected, instinctively.

  “That doesn’t change the question.”

  “Contrary to what the song says, it isn’t all about the money,” Sokol said.

  “That sounds like an answer I’d love to have explained. You know who this man is, don’t you?”

  Instead of answering her, Uzzi Sokol said, “I know a lot of things. First, tell me, have you heard of the Shrieks?” He watched her intently, looking for any sign of recognition.

  "3" face="Helvetica" color="black"›Orla shook her head. “No.”

  “Then you need to know about the Shrieks.” Sokol scratched at the back of his neck as though he’d just been bitten. It seemed to derail his train of thought.

  She looked at him, expecting him to go on, but Sokol was clearly no longer in a confessional mood.

  “Then tell me about the Shrieks,” Orla said, steering him toward the tidbit he’d dangled so tantalizingly. He looked at her.

  Above them the sky filled with a flock of migratory birds on their way from swathes of European fields for the warmth of a North African winter.

  “Not here,” he looked over his shoulder as though he expected the dead to be eavesdropping on them. Orla followed the direction of his gaze. An old Jewish mother was laying flowers on her soldier son’s grave. “And take the gun out of your briefcase. It is no good to anyone in there.”

  13

  Don’t Drink the Water

  He watched the woman drink.

  Botticelli would no doubt have considered her exquisite. As she bent over, raven black hair cascaded down around her face. Her breasts spilled white over the red-laced top of her bra. He enjoyed looking. He had always had a thing for fuller-figured women. It was something about the extra flesh that promised excess, like there was so much body for him to lose himself in. The woman wore a thin cotton blouse made translucent by the sweat that clung to the curves of her body. He delighted in the flesh. Unfortunately for her there were fewer and fewer men like him in the world; the ideals of beauty had moved on. Beauty was leaner, a work of art now, anorexic over ample. It was all about carving away the curves, turning beauty asexual, boyish. What was beautiful to the old Italian masters was nothing short of obese in this new world. He despaired at the kind of world that couldn’t enjoy the sensation of sinking into that warm softness only a big body could offer.

  Rome loved its water, even more so than Venice. There were the fountains, the horses of Trevi, Bernini’s Four Rivers in Piazza Navona, the tridents of Neptune in Piazza del Popolo, the Fountain of Books, the Fountain of the Porter in Piazza Venezia, Triton, and then there were the springs and drinking fountains. Every street tapped into the water, every tap filled tourists’ water bottles and slaked thirsts as the sun burned hotter. Spring in Rome was given over to the sound of water pouring from the fountains, people laughing as they turned their backs on the Trevi and tossed coins over their shoulders, hoping for the new romance promised Maggie McNamara in Three Coins in a Fountain. He wondered how many of those wishers knew the actress wound up dead after a deliberate overdose. It rather took the Tinseltown shine off the story.

  He watched the woman walk away from the drinking fountain. She brushed her hair back out of her face, and seeing him looking at her, smiled. Her cheeks were flushed slightly red from the spring sun. Rome was like that now. A few years ago there had been four defined seasons; now there were two. And a few weeks either side that fluctuated between freezing and sweltering. She had a wonderful smile. The kind of smile that stirred his mind as well as his body. He inclined his head slightly, his own smile knowing.

  It was a pity she was already dead, though actually there was no pity in it. He thought about going over there andseducing her. He knew he could. He could be with her when she died, then. He could watch that last beautiful sigh as the life left her glorious body. He could share that most intimate of moments, that final breath. He could see the fear in her eyes as she looked up at him, see the horror and the inevitability as she surrendered. He could smile down at her, touch her cheek perhaps. Kiss away the tears of fear, knowing he had given her both la petite mort and la grande mort in one sweet day. He was good with words and knew what most women wanted to hear, how to gently brush his fingers against places most men were too lazy to touch and how to use that gentle pressure to turn a woman’s lips toward him. He knew how to seduce, how to play to both vanities and insecurities, and more importantly, he looked the part. Like her, he had been blessed with classical features, but for men the ideal of beauty had remained unchanged for centuries so he was every bit as beautiful today as he would have been in the Renaissance. That was just another small cruelty of this male-driven world.

  She was with two other women, both thinner, both prettier on the new scale of beauty. He imagined she enjoyed his attention simply because she was used to being overlooked in favor of her friends. He blew her a kiss across the cobbles of the piazza.

  When he looked back toward the drinking fountain a father was helping his small daughter stick her tongue out to catch the splashes.

  Over the course of an hour, over two hundred people had drunk from that one fountain-students, tourists, locals, men and women of all shapes and differing beauties, and children. He enjoyed watching, counting them all as they stooped over the dripping fountainhead.

  He gave up his seat and went for a walk, and everywhere he went instead of admiring the Baroque grandeur of Bernini or Lombardi, Peruzzi or Michelangelo, he watched the people as they stopped
to drink and said a silent prayer of thanks to whatever god of the old pantheons brought the sun out on this day of all days.

  Dominico Neri stared at the clock. He had run the permutations in his head all day-the number of seconds in an hour, the number of seconds Rome would be bathed in sunlight, the number of seconds she would gleam alabaster-pure under the moon. He had counted his heartbeat as it drummed against his ribcage, knowing it was its own clock. It didn’t matter which one he obsessed over, both left him feeling like Nero with his damned fiddle. But for all that, it was less than forty-five minutes until today officially became tomorrow, and Rome was still sanding.

  He felt an inordinate sense of relief as each new second ticked by without all hell breaking loose in the incident room. His desk was piled high with case reports, witness statements and anything else he had been able to pull from the files that matched the Englishman’s concerns.

  Neri had a sixth sense for trouble, and the Englishman was trouble. He knew the sort, he might not be the instigator, but Noah Larkin had the air of a man used to walking hand in hand with death. The fact that Neri hadn’t been able to find anything beyond Larkin’s sealed military records and that every query he made ran up against proverbial brick walls only added to that sense of unease.

  Likewise none of his searches for Ogmios brought any joy, but then he hadn’t expected them to. Somewhere, no doubt, his queries had raised red flags and the surveillance was turning back on him, wondering who the hell he was to be asking about Ogmios and Noah Larkin. That was the joy of this clandestine world. And Neri was under no illusion that he had stumbled into some sort of secret world here. He didn’t believe Noah Larkin was in salvage any more than he believed Santa Claus was a big, chubby white guy who looked disturbingly like God. Neri was a good Italian boy, he believed in crime and corruption and his mother’s cooking; beyond that everything was open to doubt.

  All he could do, for now, was take Larkin at face value.

  That meant in the next forty-five minutes people were going to start dying in Rome.

  He didn’t know what to expect. None of them did. He’d had his men working the streets, looking for suspicious activity, but how the hell were they supposed to see a potential terrorist when he looked just like the next man? These people weren’t walking around with Jihadist tattooed on their foreheads. They were normal people-well, normal on the outside. There was nothing normal about their psychology. They were blonde, blue-eyed; they were olive-skinned Italians with five o’clock shadows and dangerous smiles; they were university students and businessmen. What they weren’t was a bin-Laden caricature swathed head-to-toe in desert robes, with the gleam of madness in their eyes.

  He looked at the clock again. Forty-three minutes. He wanted to believe nothing was going to happen, that Noah had been wrong in his assessment of the threat to Rome. Neri was still learning things about himself. Today he had learned that he was by nature a pessimist.

  Forty-one minutes.

  He took a sip from the coffee that he’d allowed to go cold on the desk. It didn’t taste any better for his neglect.

  Two hours earlier Neri had taken a risk. He’d called in a favor, setting up a meeting with Monsignor Gianni Abandonato for Larkin. The Monsignor oversaw work on several of the sacred texts and was one of the three archivists who worked closely with Nick Simmonds in the days leading up to his suicide. If anyone had an inkling as to the dead man’s state of mind it was Abandonato. Neri put the Styrofoam cup down. He needed another drink to wash the taste of the coffee from his mouth. He circled Abandonato’s name on the notepad beside the phone. It meant The Forsaken in Latin-a curious name for a man of the faith-but maybe it just went to prove the Holy Father had as rotten a sense of humor as the next man.

  Rina Grillo poked her head around the door. “You need to see this,” she said. He didn’t like the way she said it, especially as there were only thirty-nine minutes left until midnight, and safety.

  “What is it?” he asked, pushing himself up out of his chair.

  She came across the squad room and offered him the file in her hand.

  “San Gallicano Hospital in Trastevere just reported its third death in an hour from what they believe could well be thallium poisoning.”

  “Thallium?”

  “The Poisoner’s Poison; it’s arcane stuff. It was popular during the Renaissance. The Medici family’s weapon of choice. It isn’t a ‘nice’ poison.” She shrugged, almost as though embarrassed by the notion that there could be anything considered a nice poison. “Symptoms include vomiting, hair loss, blindness, stomach pains. Then the brain misfires, and the victim is subjected to hallucinations before they die.”

  Neri looked at the clock. Three people dead wasn’t bad, considering how Berlin had suffered yesterday. Three people he could live with, even if the symptoms of their death were as horrible as Grillo had outlined. As soon as the thought had crossed his mind he felt guilty for it. Grillo’s next sentence drove that guilt home, and the good Catholic in Dominico Neri couldn’t help but think God was punishing him for it.

  “I’ve checked against other hospital admissions, we’ve got reports of over five hundred admissions in the outer districts in the last hour alone. There seems to be a concentration around Torrenova, Acilia, Rebibbia, Primavella and San Lorenzo, but I am not sure that tells us anything, really.”

  “It gives us somewhere to start looking,” Neri said, knowing that wasn’t true, knowing that all that would achieve would be to make them feel as though they were doing something. “How do you poison five hundred people in a city like Rome without being seen?” he said, more to himself than to Rina Grillo.

  “The water,” she said. “It’s the only way that makes sense. You contaminate the water supply with some sort of heavy metal halide solution, lethal in even small quantities, and with the sun out people are drinking. And the more they are drinking, the worse their deaths are going to be. It’s evil, Neri.”

  He thought about the implications of what she suggested. He wasn’t going to argue with her; it was evil, as pure an evil as any he had ever encountered. How long had the water been poisoned? How long did it take for the symptoms to manifest? Could these people have been poisoned even before the suicide in St. Peter’s Piazza? And the implications that went with that line of thought: How many more people had drunk the poisoned water? How many more were already dead and didn’t know it?

  He stopped himself as he was about to take another mouthful of cold coffee. The taste wasn’t worth dying for. He thought about all the coffee he had drunk in the last week. Like most Italians he took his caffeine intravenously. He tossed the Styrofoam cup into the trash can beneath his desk. His hand was shaking. Neri had no idea if that was one of the symptoms of thallium poisoning, or if it was just one of the more banal side effects of fear. He was frightened, and not just for his city now. Now his fear had a name; it had symptoms, and a pathology. Worst of all, it had a death toll.

  Thirty-six minutes.

  They had been so close.

  14

  Safe in Sorrow

  Ronan Frost looked up at the huge painting of the girl in the red coat that dominated the side of the building. She dwarfed Frost, easily ten times his size. He didn’t understand how the urban artist had worked his art, but he appreciated the finished product. There was a certain sadness about her and the toys scattered around her feet, or so it looked at first glance, weren’t toys at all. They were all political statements, the broken constructs of state and society scattered around the spoilt child’s feet. Frost didn’t like the picture. It reminded him too much of the kind of disaffected street art that lined the Falls Road in Belfast, and that just brought back other memories he didn’t want to be reminded of.

  Further down the street came the usual gang tags and swastikas spray-painted on the weeping walls. Beside the little girl in red there was something infinitely more infantile about the swastikas, like children playing at politics, shouting for the sake of shouting
but with nothing to say.

  Ronan Frost had found eight of the thirteen victims’ houses. The story had been the same at each of them. The places had been ransacked. There were signs of family but no actual family to be found, and in each place it looked as though they had left in a hurry. There was food untouched and moldy on the plates in front of the TV. The DVD menu in one house played the same mindlessly chirpy thirty seconds of music over and over and over again. Frost knew it had been playing like that for at least a week. It was a wonder the relentless happiness hadn’t driven the neighbors insane. Despite the fact that the houses had all been scoured, there were still things that linked them back to Israel. This puzzled Frost. If they weren’t trying to hide the links to Masada what were they trying to hide? What was the purpose of ransacking the houses if it wasn’t to purge it of any links to the dig? It was a good question.

  Frost checked in with Lethe for the latest situation report from the others. It was difficult running an operation across four countries. The sooner they were back together, the better. Still, they had limited resources, the scarcest of which was manpower. They weren’t the Army. They couldn’t dispatch a dozen agents into the field. What they had was Lethe. Lethe gave him a brief rundown. Rome had fallen, meaning they’d been right in their interpretation of those first two targets, but from here on in they were running blind. Tomorrow it could be any of eleven cities.

  Of everything Lethe said, it was the fate of Grace Weller, the MI6 agent who had ingratiated herself into the life of the Berlin suicide, that interested him the most. She was almost certainly dead, but she’d had the wherewithal to leave them a trail like Gretel following the witch off into the woods. The documents on that USB stick were her breadcrumbs. In other words Grace Weller was something tangible. She existed. She had a personal file. She had a desk, a home, all of the clutter of life. She might have spent years watching Grey Metzger, but that didn’t mean she had spent years without going home. He needed to know where she lived; he needed to know who, exactly, she worked for. He needed to talk to her contact here in the UK. He needed to know what she was doing out there in Berlin. He needed to know why Six had marked Grey Metzger as a person of interest. Was Metzger somehow at the center of this? Less a victim than an instigator?