The Bone Chamber

carabinieri, returned to acquire the proper dress and jewelry for Sydney. Her measurements and shoe size were taken, followed by some rapid transactions in Italian via the phone. Within a half hour, a delivery was made directly to the hotel from Salvatore Ferragamo on the Via dei Condotti, consisting of black satin pumps and a low-cut, black evening dress that gathered just below the bodice into a shimmering fall of crepe and velvet that brushed at her toes. Tex left for the safe house to change into his formal wear, and while they waited for him to return, she was briefed on what they expected of her, while Griffin paced the room, clearly not happy with this latest turn of events.

“Calm down, amico mio,” Giustino, the shorter of the two carabinieri, said to Griffin, as his partner, Marc, helped Sydney fasten a diamond bracelet, then showed her how to work the transmitter and receiver. “She will be fine. It is not as if you are taking some unsuspecting citizen off the street and dropping her into the den of the lion.”

“No,” Marc said. “We are dropping an unsuspecting FBI agent into the den.”

“But a beautiful and well-trained one, non e vero?” Giustino said.

Griffin threw the two men a dark look, then said to Sydney, “It’s not too late to back out.”

“If this gets me closer to finding out who killed Tasha and the ambassador’s daughter, and who tried to kill me, then I’m in.”

Marc said, “You do understand, signorina, that if something happens, if you or Tex are caught, we cannot acknowledge you? This is NOC.” He pronounced this last as “knock,” which meant nonofficial cover. No ties to any governments. Everything under the radar.

“You mentioned that twice.”

“We cannot even go in after you.”

“You are giving me a gun?”

Giustino said, “There is a small-caliber pistol in your evening bag. But as with everything else, if you get caught with it in Italy, you are-how do you say-on your own?”

“Even if the carabinieri give it to me?”

“Mi dispiace, signorina, we are not involved in this affair, just as Griffin and the Stati Uniti are not involved in this.”

Truly on her own, then. About to embark on her first unsanctioned black ops mission. And hoping she wasn’t about to make the biggest mistake of her life.

13

A shaft of moonlight broke through the clouds, allowing Sydney a glimpse of the pungent bay tree forests, as Tex drove the Lancia Thesis up the winding narrow and steep road in the Alban Hills. Their destination was the sixteenth-century Villa Patrizia. “Wait till you see this place,” Tex said. “Built on a crag overhanging the volcanic circle of Lake Nemi by one of the more eccentric Orsini dukes. Probably why Adami bought it.”

“So how is it no one ever came after this guy?” Sydney asked Tex.

“You can’t topple a well-loved public figure like Adami without irrefutable proof.”

“He’s American?”

“As apple pie as a gangster can get. Born Carl Adam in New Jersey. Moved to Italy and became Carlo Adami. That’s his identity now, and since he’s lived the past twenty-something years in Italy, married his wife and made his fortune, or rather, increased hers, he’s become untouchable. He’s handsome, rich, and the king of philanthropists. Donates millions of euros. Travels to Africa and Sudan, fights for orphaned AIDS babies, even holds and kisses them. That’s the figure the public sees. No one wants to look too closely at how his numerous international holdings in energy and construction companies prosper anytime there’s a war or civil unrest in the Mideast or third world countries. Or how some of that philanthropic money being thrown around the globe is funding terrorists, who keep that civil unrest going. That’s why our operation is unsanctioned. We, being Italy and the U.S., need the evidence before we point the fingers. And he has too many important people from both countries in his pocket for us to be able to get it via the normal investigative route.”

“So why would he have Alessandra murdered?”

“That, darlin’, is the million-euro question. Something we haven’t quite pieced together. We’re fairly certain it had to do with his arms smuggling, or a cover for it.”

“So she was working with your team on this?”

“She’s the one who brought it to our attention. She seemed to think that Adami was working on finding the source to some plague he could use for his bioweapons. Unfortunately, we couldn’t convince Alessandra not to go on this expedition he was financing. She insisted it would look better if she went herself. When she tried to contact Griffin about a week before she was murdered, he was working an operation in Tunisia. Didn’t get her message until too late.”

“Any idea what she wanted?”

“None. She only said it was urgent he contact her. A few days later she went missing, and we’ve been scrambling ever since,” he said, flicking on the high beams as they approached yet another steep uphill curve.

“But you were able to make a connection between her and Adami?”

“Last summer she stayed with her father at the Vatican embassy residence, and at a party, Adami approached her, asking if she knew of any good archeologists, as he was financing an expedition. Naturally, we assumed this was a cover for his arms smuggling. We got word that he was looking to start building up bioweapons. So far no proof. Can’t even find his damned lab. But a few weeks after she returned to the States for school, she telephoned the CIA, saying that she had some information she thought they might be interested in. Something called the third key, which translates to la terza chiave in Italian. We figured it had to do with a Freemason lodge in Italy called C3, if only because the initials are the same.”

“C3?” She thought of Xavier Caldwell’s conspiracy paper. “Any chance it’s connected to something called Propaganda Due?”

He looked over at her, then back at the road. “A big chance. How’d you come up with that?”

“A kid in Alessandra’s class at UVA wrote a paper on Freemasonry right before they went missing. He thought P2 was still going strong and had infiltrated the U.S. government.”

“Not sure about that last part, but we do think that C3 is possibly an offshoot of the old P2, Propaganda Due, a clandestine Masonic lodge that was shut down about twenty years ago. The Italian government nearly collapsed when it was found that P2’s members consisted of numerous top officials in Rome, all corrupt and on the take. Everyone from the highest-ranking politicians to the police and judicial officials, even a number of high-ranking Vatican officials, all commingling with the mafiosi.” He slowed for a turn, and Syd caught a glimpse of the steep cliffs and the lake below. “The downfall caused the collapse of the Banco Ambrosiano, a major financial institution which was controlled by the Vatican. And that’s not even counting the murders connected to the whole affair.”

“Was Adami part of that operation?”

“Damned straight he was. As usual, he managed to survive the scandal. Claimed he didn’t know the P2 Masonic lodge wasn’t the social club he’d thought. Which is how we came up with my cover. A rich American Freemason, looking to buy some artwork from him.”

Xavier’s conspiracy paper aside, it seemed the Freemason connection certainly opened doors, she told herself. “And all you intend to do tonight is to plant a listening device?”

“An undetectable device. It’s our best chance to figure out where he might be making and storing bioweapons. We want to prove it, destroy them, and shut him down.”

As they neared the villa, Sydney smoothed her dress, adjusted the diamond bracelet at her wrist, then pulled the visor down to look in the mirror. “How about a test,” she said, turning her head from side to side as though looking at the diamond earrings, but in reality checking to make sure the tiny transmitter in her ear was not visible. Griffin, Giustino, and Marc were holed up in a van farther down the hill near the small town of Nemi, monitoring their progress. Once at the villa, Tex would have to leave her to break into Carlo Adami’s office to plant the listening device.