Frescoes danced on the ceilings, twenty-foot glass double doors opened onto deep iron-railed balconies, every piece of furniture in the place seemed to come off the millennium version of Antiques Roadshow. Max and Tauber fell to prowling out of habit, throwing doors open and fretting over security, but after twenty yawning-huge unoccupied drawing rooms, the whole idea got comical.
We stepped into an open central courtyard wrapped in three stories of block-shaped stucco, locust trees towering over a garden gone natural (one step short of gone to seed). White flowers crawled up the walls and the light poured through vines and bushes that probably dated to Garibaldi. After drifting through four more ornate rooms-one holding a grand piano and a bronze harp taller than any of us-we found the renovation project, a stainless-steel kitchen with the inevitable granite-topped center island (Iron Chef, season two).
“No cameras,” Tauber announced, returning from his sweep of the place. “No security wiring either. There’s an Alfa parked out back-doors unlocked.”
“Light magnetic field,” Max said-apparently this was agreement. “I feel the fridge and the air conditioners- there’s a home theatre with big speakers on the second floor. But nobody home and no signs of a hasty retreat.”
Kate returned from the office, which boasted a spectacular view of the fountain (if you have a villa, you’ve gotta have a fountain) and a birdhouse the size of a Mini-Cooper, carrying a day planner scrawled with notes.
“Sardinia,” she said. “They’re in Sardinia for the week.”
“Why hassle that nasty G8 traffic?” Tauber smirked.
“Especially when you can be in Sardinia,” Kate sighed. “Why come home? Ever?”
Tauber, all at once, was full of energy, a DT’s second wind. Surviving the catacombs seemed to have galvanized him and he insisted on leading a security tour.
“The front gate’s got a proper lock; the back’s just a padlock on a chain. So if they’re comin’, they’ll clip the chain; keep yer ears tuned that way. It’s about a minute’s run, gate to house and up the stairs. We all sleep here, the east corner. See that gazebo below? Locked gates on both sides; I just jammed ‘em. So we keep ropes or sheets on the balcony; things get tight, we drop off and have a shot at the river before they nail us.”
“What are our odds?” I asked and saw from Tauber’s scowl that this wasn’t a proper question.
“If they’re good, we won’t have time to go anywhere,” Max answered. “But Mark’s is a good plan if they’re incompetent.”
“Which is a 50/50 shot,” Tauber added. “That’s the worst of it. Otherwise, ya got neighbors at a distance, no breaks in the fence. Better’n most.”
“Okay,” Max said, “this is base of operations.”
There was a stock of really high-priced food in the fridge. Five minutes later, the place was stuffed with burbling pots and pans, every new discovery from the pantry (anchovies, peppers for roasting, really expensive veal slices and Saturday’s fresh mozzarella) added to the mix, dishes being carried out to the closest dining room as fast as they were done.
“Do we have time for this?” Tauber asked, not that he seemed to care. For a skinny dude, nothing got past him without damage being done.
“Gotta eat,” I insisted and Kate nodded, pressing garlic into slices of veal and eggplant. I threw her contents over penne in garlic, oil and lemon juice. A speck of the mix dropped onto the counter in front of me and I tossed it at her. She tossed back and, three seconds later, the whole bunch of us were chucking around everything loose. Still alive, as well as hungry.
“It really stuck in my craw when I saw that bastard at the airport and figgered we were too late,” Tauber said across the forty-foot darkwood table in Dining Room #1. “And we coulda been.” The man was a coiled spring but he brought us down to earth pretty quick.
“That was a fake-out,” Max said, carrying in a chopped salad, chopped a little too thoroughly if you weren’t planning to eat with a spoon. “If that was it, they wouldn’t have been flying people in today. This was giving a false sense of security. They’ll let everyone relax before they move again.”
“But why send a bomber out to get caught?” Kate asked. “Won’t that just tighten security?”
“Damn straight,” Tauber said.
Full as a python in mid-cow, I dropped into the informal living room, the one with the TV. I’m comfortable anywhere with a working television. Two seconds later, I had Kate’s answer.
“ Here’s why,” I said, loud enough to gather them all in. On the TV, pixeling away in front of me, stood Pietr Volkov and two other L Corp types I recognized from the airport. The police chief of Rome and the G8 security head were reading a joint statement, subtitled onscreen.
“Wanna guess whose people took out the bomber?” I asked.
“The people who programmed him to stand on a street corner like a sitting duck,” Max answered.
“You win.”
A man identified as an L Corp VP rambled on about “proprietary multi-point body-language analysis software that screens crowd scenes and identifies anti-social behavior before it actually occurs.”
“You’re saying,” came a reporter’s voice, “that you can predict crimes before they happen?”
“We’re saying we can identify individuals with bad intent,” the VP answered. “The software is still experimental and by no means foolproof. It requires a good deal of support and fine tuning. But-”
“Let me guess…” Max said drily.
“-we have agreed to a trial here, to provide additional security for this conference. Anyone who wants to crash this party will have us to reckon with.”
“…unless they’re already wearin’ an L Corp badge,” Tauber said. “Fan-tastic.”
“Why set up the bomber to fail? To get yourself access,” Max answered, smiling hideously. “It’s actually very clever in a perverted sort of way.”
“They’ll be with her every step,” Tauber said. “No need fer a sniper if ye’re a foot away.”
“Worse yet,” Max added, “they’ve set her up as a martyr. Someone’s tried to kill her. Everyone’s focus now will be her safety-so when she dies, hope will feel even more futile.”
“ If,” Kate said. “ If she dies.” Max nodded stiffly.
We ruined the last couple of dishes, overcooking perfectly good food because, all at once, nobody was paying attention. We’d kept away from the half-wrecked cellar, feeling funny about drinking in front of Tauber until he came back upstairs with some really expensive booze.
“It ain’t Prohibition,” he said. “I’ll see somebody drinking soon-might as well be y’all.”
We ended up sprawled across forty-year-old overstuffed couches on one of the balconies. Kate and I both dove for the same couch-we’d had a gang of wine and she ended up nuzzling up against me, having her usual effect on my anatomy. Things got real warm there, notwithstanding the breeze. We were all giggly and exhausted and dopey.
“Where did them ghosts come from?” Tauber drawled lazily. “Chariots and peacocks and Hercules with a golden hammer? What the hell was that?”
“Hercules didn’t have a golden hammer. That was Thor.”
“What’s Thor doing in Rome?”
“Not what I meant. I meant-”
“And where’d Jesus get a wand? What was that about?”
“It’s Kate’s power, how she’s developed her skills.” Max nodded to her. “You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.” He seemed to be trying to make amends for the way he’d pushed her in Philadelphia. Which made sense, once you knew what she could do if you pissed her off.
“No, it’s okay,” she said, rousing herself. “We’re a team. You need to know what you can expect of me-which is that I don’t know what to expect of myself.
“My dolls had their own lives, that’s how it started. At first, I just talked to them the way little girls do. But eventually, they talked back, stole each other’s clothes and the horses from my brother’s cavalry set to ride around the house.”
“You have a brother?”
“He died ten years ago. He decided he could levitate off a tenth-story balcony. We don’t last long, the Crowell’s. As I got older, the dolls told me things I couldn’t have known-”
“You did,” Max said flatly. “You knew things you weren’t supposed to know, maybe, so you projected them on the dolls.”
