Costa 08 - City of Fear by David Hewson Read Free Book Online Page A

hand to his mouth, then dashed for the open window. Rosa was calling for backup, forensics, everything she could think of. Her voice sounded harsh and brittle and frightened in the airless room where the only other sounds were the buzzing of flies and the distant muffled hum of traffic from the tunnel beneath the Quirinale.
    “I’m too old for this,” Peroni muttered, and found he couldn’t stop himself thinking about the picture on the wall.
    Oliva was still retching out the open window, heaving up his lunch into the street below.
    “Get away from there!” Peroni yelled, angry all of a sudden.
    From the dark corner opposite there emerged another young man, this one almost naked, his face painted blue, like the demon in the poster, his eyes wild with fear and anguish.
    Words Peroni didn’t recognize were coming out of his throat. In his left hand he held a bloodied dagger. In his right two incense sticks burned, their sweet smoke curling upward to the ceiling, through the swarming cloud of insects.

7
    PALOMBO TURNED OFF THE COMPUTER SCREEN.
    “The same night Andrea Petrakis’s acolytes killed themselves in Tarquinia, five days after the murder of the Frascas, a witness saw a small motorboat being stolen from Porto Ercole, thirty minutes north. A young man and possibly someone else were on board. The theory was that Petrakis tried to reach Corsica with the Frasca child as some kind of hostage. He was an experienced sailor. His parents owned a boat. He had a student pilot license as well. He understood navigation, the weather. We never heard from him again, until now.”
    “I remember something about a parliamentary commission,” Costa said. “My father was a member.” He looked at Sordi. “So were you, sir.”
    The president nodded. “So I was. Parliament wanted to know whether this was yet one more political terrorist group to worry about, or simply something bizarre. Something inexplicable.”
    “And?” Falcone persisted, when the man said no more.
    “The consensus we reached, with which Marco Costa disagreed, as was his habit, determined that Andrea Petrakis was a lunatic heading his own strange cult, one he named after this image he found in a tomb in the Maremma. The Blue Demon amounted to nothing more than the man himself and his three dead followers. Petrakis managed to make these young people murderous through drugs and any other means he could find. Perhaps his parents found out and he killed them. That was as far as we got.”
    “Until now,” Rennick interrupted, tapping the laptop’s keyboard, bringing the picture back to life. A map appeared. Southern Afghanistan, Helmand province.
    The American indicated an area on the screen using a laser pointer.
    “What you’re looking at is British-managed territory near the Afghan-Pakistan border. The most unstable sector in the region, which is saying something. It’s got everything. Ordinary decent people. Opium farmers. Bandits, Taliban, al-Qaeda. Cheek by jowl, indivisible, inseparable. Three weeks ago one of our teams carried out a raid on a suspect house. We found all kinds of material relating to Rome. Maps. Satellite images. Details of water and transport systems. Documents on the Quirinale hill. Whoever collected this material began on February 13 this year. The very day Prime Minister Campagnolo announced the G8 summit would take place here. Intelligence finally came up with this.…”
    He punched up a fuzzy photograph of a clean-shaven man in Western dress. His hair was long and gray, dirty, wavy. He was wearing sunglasses and peering in the direction of the camera, as if suspicious.
    “Everything referred to an operation that was code-named
Il Demone Azzurro
. We’ve never encountered any kind of document in Italian in situations like this before. It took a while before we were able to make the connections. Then we got a DNA match from the house. There was physical evidence on file from his parents. It’s Andrea Petrakis. No doubt about