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 cafe, 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 cafe, 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. Ily, perhd 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,” 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 din›
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
