Silver (11 page)

The last bookcase was filled with cheap, trashy airport novels. The spines were creased, the pages dog-eared, as though each one had been read a dozen times. He took one down from the shelf and thumbed through it. On the inside he saw a price written in pencil and the stamp of a second-hand bookstore in the city. He tried three more, selected at random. They all bore the same secondhand stamp.

There was a television, a small portable set that had to be over twenty years old. It didn’t dominate the room. Indeed, given the angle it was on, it was almost certainly never watched. There was nothing to say it even worked. Konstantin assumed that these dog-eared paperbacks had replaced the television in Grey Metzger’s life. Like Russia, the Germans protected their language obsessively, dubbing the endless reruns of American sitcoms. It would have come as something of a culture shock to an Englishman who probably thought the world revolved around his mother tongue. Konstantin shelved the book.

The hallway opened into a high-ceilinged room. The drapes where thick, heavy green velvet, tied back with a thick gold brocade rope. The hook in the wall had an exquisitely molded lion’s head. It was a small detail, but as the KGB had drilled into him, the truth was in the details. There were dozens of tiny details, from the wainscoting on the sash window and the original ropes laid into the side of the frame to the black and white tiles that made a chessboard of the floor, or rather the three broken ones that might have been proof of a struggle. Konstantin walked slowly around the room, then sank into the faux Chesterfield sofa in the middle of the room.

He put his feet up on the granite-topped coffee table. The room barely looked lived in. He had expected it to be strewn with journals and academic literature, with forgotten coffee cups and other signs of the absent-minded professor, but Grey Metzger was meticulously ordered and fastidiously tidy. Like a man who had been a guest here, not the owner.

Or like a man whose life had been purged away before he could come in and look at it, he thought.

There was a single painting on the wall. Konstantin recognized it:
Sorrow
. It was a print, rather than the original, but that was hardly surprising—a school teacher would not have had the wherewithal to on a painting worth upwards of fifty million dollars. It was, Konstantin thought, an ugly image to have on the wall where you did most of your living.

There was a fish tank beneath it, but there were no fish in it.

Konstantin was beginning to get a feel for the man he was following.

He checked the rest of the apartment.

There was a neatly made bed with white silk sheets in the one bedroom, and a manikin draped with the dead man’s clothes stood in the corner, looking like the Ghost of Christmas Past come to haunt the room. The rug appeared to be an elk hide. There was little in the way of personality to the room, not so much as an alarm clock on the side table. He checked the drawers. They were empty. That, more than anything else, convinced him that the apartment had been cleaned by whoever had last set foot in the place. It would be pointless dusting for fingerprints.

In the center of the bathroom was a beautiful antique porcelain bathtub set on pedestal legs. Again, like the details in the curtain hooks in the front room, the legs were molded in the likeness of lions. There were no shampoo bottles, no body washes or facial scrubs. There wasn’t a toothbrush in the cup on the sink. He ran his finger along the top of the medicine cabinet—it came away without so much as a speck of dust on it.

The narrow galley kitchen was just as bare. He opened the cupboards one at a time, but after the first he knew it was pointless. There wasn’t a single package of junk food in any of them. No boxes of cereal. No tea bags. No dried spaghetti or noodles or any other staple of fast-food living. There should have been moldy bread, curdled milk in the refrigerator, cheese blue with bacteria and many other signs of abandonment. But there wasn’t. The purge had been absolute. There was nothing of Grey Metzger left in the place save those few clothes on the manikin and the books.

Konstantin reached into his pocket for the letter. Could they have been so thorough and so careless at the same time? He went back through to the living room, but instead of sitting on the leather sofa he perched on the windowsill so that he could look out over the People’s Park as he read it again.

He read the letter through, start to finish, three times. The first thing he noticed this time was that she had called him Graham, his full name, not Grey, not the short, affectionate version a lover might be expected to use. That seemed odd given that Grey used the shortened version of his name on almost every official document Lethe had uncovered. The second thing that stuck out was that she hadn’t signed it with her name, rather she’d called herself Sorrow’s Bride. That was hardly the goodbye a lover would want to remembered by.

The rest of the letter was the usual string of sentimental stuff and nonsense that had his eyes glazing over after thirty seconds. He forced himself to concentrate, going over each sentence slowly, looking for an out-of-place word, looking at how the letters themselves rested on the lines in case she’d elevated the occasional letter to spell out some second message within the message—a way of talking to them from beyond the grave. There was nothing that he could see.

He sat there for an hour, the midday sun streaming in through the windows in bright unbroken beams. The heat through the glass prickled his skin. Konstantin looked up from the letter and saw Van Gogh’s
Sorrow
, with her sagging breasts, weeping into her hands, and he was again struck by how ugly the painting really was, especially for the only piece of art in the place. He put the letter back in the envelope and the envelope back inside his pocket and went over to the painting. He reached up and ran his fingers over it, feeling for any imperfections on the canvas. He worked his fingers from the top edge of the frame down, slowly. He chewed on his lower lip, not realizing he was doing it. There was nothing. The frame was perfectly smooth. He ran his hand up and down the sides of the frame again, refusing to believe he was wrong. Second time was no more revealing. He hadn’t really expected the cryptic epigraph to mean anything, but it had been worth a try.

He grunted.

It had been too easy to think she’d simply point him to the hidden treasure, X marks the spot.

For the sake of thoroughness, he lifted down the picture. There wasn’t a safe hidden away conveniently behind the picture, of course. The sun-shadow outline of the picture was stained deeply enough to suggest the picture had hung there for years, not a few days.

Konstantin hoisted it up, tilting the frame to re-hang it when something fell out from the back and clattered on the tiled floor. He put
Sorrow
back down and picked up the white gold wedding band that had fallen out from the back of the picture. There was an engraving on the inside of the ring: a series of digits, probably the date of the wedding, he thought. Only, according to the paper trail, Grey Metzger had never been married. Sorrow’s Bride indeed.

He pocketed the ring and flipped the painting over. The USB thumb drive taped to the inside of the frame was so small he had almost missed it. He peeled away the tiny strip of tape and pocketed the stick along with the letter and the ring.

“Who were you?” he asked, rubbing at his chin as he looked down at the painting on the floor. His skin was rough with stubble. It had been forty-eight hours since he had shaved. He knew from experience that that was enough to transform him from human into some atavistic throw-back that could be used to scare the living daylights out of young children—and grown men at four a.m. for that matter.

Who was this woman who called herself the Bride of Sorrow? Everything about her presence of mind in the face of death screamed CIA, MI6, KGB, Mossad, any one of them but absolutely one of them. He might not know who she was, but he was pretty damned sure she wasn’t a school teacher.

The answer to that question, and possibly so many others, was almost certainly on the flash drive. He wanted to get a look at it before he turned it over to Lethe. That meant finding a computer.

Konstantin re-hung the picture and left the apartment, knowing he’d found all there was to find in the dead man’s home.

9

The Secrets of Fatima

Dominico Neri was a sour-faced little man with the weight of the world on his slouched shoulders. He was cut from the typical Italian male cloth—interesting features rather than outright handsome, dark-skinned and narrow, his torso an inverted equilateral triangle of jutting ribs beneath a wrinkled cotton shirt. He sat across the table from Noah, sipping at a double-shot espresso in a stupidly small cup.

He looked like he hadn’t slept in a week. That disheveled look and the half-awake eyes no doubt made him painfully popular with the fairer sex, Noah thought. Neri looked like the kind of man who didn’t so much love them and leave them as he did the kind of man who skipped the whole love thing and went straight for the checkbook to pay the alimony. He stared at Noah. The scrutiny was almost uncomfortable.

That was hardly surprising, Neri was
Carabinieri
.

Rome was burdened by half a dozen levels of police, from traffic cops to jail cops and forestry police all the way to the normal beat cops. The Carabinieri were set aside from all of them. They were military police.

Only Neri’s eyes looked the part, Noah thought, studying the man back openly. If he’d been pushed to guess a career, he would have said journalist. The gun worn casually at his hip killed that career path, though.

“So,” Neri said, setting the espresso cup down on the cheap white saucer. The coffee left a near-black stain around the inside of the cup. Noah could only imagine what it was busy doing to the detective’s stomach lining. “You think this is all somehow linked to the suicide in Piazza San Pietro two days ago?”

Noah nodded.

News had begun to filter through from Berlin, so Neri was taking him more seriously than he would have even two hours ago. The threat had suddenly become credible, and this was Neri’s city. The Carabinieri man pinched the bottom of his nose, both fingers almost disappearing up his nostrils as he thought about what it meant to Rome.

“Forgive my bluntness, Mister Larkin, but an hour ago my office put in a call to your government. They deny that you are working on their behalf, which I admit does not surprise me. When has your government ever owned up to spying?”

“I am not a spy,” Noah said.

The Italian wasn’t listening to him and carried on as though presenting a case: “And yet despite the fact you have no verifiable credentials to back up your wild claims, you obviously know far too much about what happened in the piazza not to be some sort of intelligence officer. Either that, or you were more directly involved. So I ask myself this: were you involved? You do not look like a terrorist.” He grunted a soft chuckle at that. “Not that any of us know what a terrorist looks like, eh?”

“Indeed,” Noah said. He decided against saying anything more. Neri would come to the point, eventually.

Neri reached into his pocket and pulled out a battered tobacco tin. He opened it and took out the fixings for a thin licorice paper smoke, rolling it neatly between his fingers. It was a well practiced motion that needed no thought. Placing the cigarette between his lips he took out his lighter, sparked the wheel against the flint and inhaled with a slow, deep sigh of pleasure as he lit the cigarette. He drew a second lungful of smoke, letting it leak out through his nose before he carried on with his thought. “So then I think perhaps Mister Larkin is a well-known journalist where he comes from and he is here in Rome fishing for a story? It was a reasonable guess. Unfortunately none of the papers in your country appear to know who the hell you are. So not a journalist, not with your government, that leaves me in something of a quandary. What I am saying is, why shouldn’t I arrest you right here and now?”

“If you thought I was involved, you wouldn’t have come out to meet me in this rather overpriced café, would you?”

“Or perhaps the couple at the table over there are not a young couple in love but are actually my men. And the older gentleman over there, studying the newspaper so intently, perhaps he is actually one of mine waiting for the signal to take you in?”

Noah looked at the young couple. There was a Rough Guide on the table between them. The man was dressed like a fairly typical straight-out-of-university backpacker. His sneakers were a little too clean for someone who’d been slogging around Europe on an Inter-Rail ticket for a month, but otherwise he looked the part. The girl was pretty, blonde, and petite, all the things a younger Noah would have fallen for. They looked good together. They fit. He watched them talk for a moment. He couldn’t hear exactly what they were saying above the lunchtime noise of the café, but he could hear enough to know the guy had a fairly broad Mancunian accent and seemed to be spouting the usual bollocks a postgrad on vacation in Rome would. It wasn’t the kind of attention to detail he would have expected from an undercover policeman, so he felt relatively confident when he told Neri, “They aren’t. Iar d know.”

“Perhaps,” the Carabinieri man said, drawing slowly on the cigarette again. The smell of the licorice paper was sickly sweet. “But that still doesn’t tell me why I shouldn’t arrest you, Mister Larkin, now does it?”

Noah couldn’t argue with him. In his position Noah’s bullshit radar would have been firing off warning signals left, right and center. “Call me Noah. Mister Larkin was my father.”

“Perhaps later, if we become friends,” Neri said. “For now I will call you Mister Larkin, and you can pretend I am talking to your father if it helps.”

“Not really,” Noah said. “I work for an organization with ah, how shall I put it?”—he spread his hands slightly, as though looking for inspiration from above—“let’s say ‘concerns’ in various countries across the world. We have rather specialized interests and areas of expertise.”

“Go on,” Neri said, stubbing out the last of his cigarette in the dregs of his coffee and leaving the butt to soak in the tiny cup.

“Because of our interests we have a rather unique network of contacts, and because of our distance from the more political aspects of things, we can sometimes see links between things that others closer to the fact miss, or overlook.”

“So you are a spy.”

Noah shook his head. “I’m not. Nothing as glamorous. I work for Sir Charles Wyndham. Unofficially my group is known as the Forge Team. We’re all ex-military, so we have certain skills. Sir Charles likes to joke that we were forged in the crucible of battle. The old man isn’t particularly funny, but we humor him.”

“And what might you ‘officially’ be called?”

Noah thought about deflecting the question, but he needed this guy to trust him if he was going to get through the reams of Italian bureaucracy and get him face time with someone on the other side of the border walls of Vatican City. “Our official government designation, if that isn’t a contradiction in terms, is Ogmios.”

“So you do work for the British government? Is that what you are telling me, Mister Larkin?”

Noah shook his head. “No. We’re, hell, how do I put this? Okay, we’re outside the government. We’re off the books. If we were still military, we’d be deniable ops. It’s the same theory. We are out looking after our country’s interests overseas, but if we’re compromised, if we’re captured or become an embarrassment, we simply don’t exist. We’re a private concern which just so happens to be comprised of counterterrorist experts and ex-special forces.”

“Fascinating, and wholly unbelievable of course. Tell me, what, precisely, does this Forge Team do, then, that Her Majesty’s Government reserves the right to deny its existence?” Neri’s voice was leery, and it was obvious the real question he was asking here was:
How the hell do you know what’s going on while we don’t?

“We’re in salvage,” Noah said.

“Interesting,” Neri mused, “and I would imagine wholly irrelevant.”

No flies on you
, Noah thought. “You’d be surprised.”

“No,” Neri said without missing a beat, “I wouldn’t. What
would
surprise me would be the unguarded truth slipping out of your mouth when you weren’t paying attention.”

Noah almost laughed at that. Instead he gestured for the waitress to come over and ordered himself a light beer. She nodded and hurried away. He liked her eyes, the little he saw of them. They promised. There was nothing better than a pretty young thing who promised—and it didn’t matter what it was they promised. He looked back at Dominico Neri. He found himself liking this dour little detective with his doubting mind. He was Noah’s kind of guy.

“Now, tell me again why I should listen to you.”

Noah leaned forward. He said one word: “Berlin.”

That one word was enough. He had known it would be. Neri could bluster all he wanted. He could demand proof that Noah wasn’t up to his neck in this whole thing—the killer needing to put himself in the center of the show, needing to see, to feel a part of the fear his murders created. That was the common philosophy of crime fighting, thanks to Hollywood. He could demand Noah turn himself over into his custody while he ran the name Ogmios through their own networks, trying to verify the unverifiable, just to make Noah’s life difficult for the sake of making it dilack">

The number of dead was rising by the hour. There was a grossly inappropriate counter on the ticker on the silent screen behind Noah’s head that said BERLIN DEATH TOLL RISING and showed the number jumping in small increments as each new fatality was reported. Noah’s skin crawled. He didn’t want to contemplate where that ticker would finally settle, but wherever that was, it was going to be a number that simply stopped making sense. That much they all knew from Konstantin’s very first report from the city. Berlin was in trouble.

“There’s nothing particularly secret about what I am going to tell you now, but bear with me.” The Italian nodded. “With each of the public suicides there was a message delivered to one of the national news agencies. In London the message was:
There is a plague coming. For forty days and forty nights fear shall savage the streets. Those steeped in sin shall burn. The dying begins now.
It was the same message in eleven of the thirteen cities where someone burned.” It was obvious the Italian knew the message off by heart. He wanted to hear something he didn’t know.

“And the other two? Where were they, Mister Larkin? Why were the messages different?”

“One was Berlin, the other was Rome.” He reached into his pocket for the piece of paper he had written the transcripts of the two calls down on. Noah smoothed it out and read through both short messages aloud. “In Berlin the message was:
The Holy Father passed through a big city half in ruins and half trembling with halting step, afflicted with pain and sorrow, he prayed for the souls of the corpses he met on his way; having reached the top of the mountain, on his knees at the foot of the big cross he was killed by a group of soldiers.
You might be familiar with it. It is a passage from the third secret of Fatima, I believe.”

Neri nodded.

“The message in Rome hit closer to home, and I’d take it as a direct threat to the Pope:
Roman Pontiff beware of your approaching, of the city where two rivers water, your blood you will come to spit in that place, both you and yours when blooms the Rose.
It’s one of the prophecies of Nostradamus.”

Neri nodded again. “That was the message, yes.” He let out a short sharp breath, then reached for his tobacco tin again. “I need to smoke,” he said. “I am an old Roman, not one of these new children of the city on their damned Piaggios, honking their horns every time they see a pretty gi. It helps me to think.”