Gates of Hades (27 page)

So far, he was unsure what that meant.

He had few leads as to who the warring factions might be.

Little clue, but not no clue.

He looked at the e-mail that had come in from Interpol at his request that morning.

A week or so ago, five, perhaps six men had perished in a fire someplace in the Caribbean. He thumbed the corner of a page. The Turks and Caicos Islands, a British crown
colony. In itself, that was insignificant. The interesting fact was the only parts readily identifiable were dental work.

Russian dental work.

The house's owner, one Jason Peters, holder of an American passport, had been suspected of setting the fire to conceal the deaths. A search of the ashes also turned up a number of firearms, both AK-47s and a couple of other, somewhat more exotic specimens. Even more intriguing was Mr. Peters's escape from the local jail by stealing a plane under a barrage of gunfire from unknown gunmen who had made their own disappearance before the Royal Police, or whatever they called themselves in that part of the world, could arrest them.

Whatever was going on, there definitely was bad blood between this Peters and an as-yet-unknown group of Russians, a feud the island authorities had done little to squelch.

Guiellmo indulged himself in a snort of contempt. Ineffective police work was offensive to him no matter where.

The plane Peters had stolen turned up in . . . He turned another page. The Dominican Republic and Interpol concluded he had fled from there to parts unknown, presumably under some other name.

Jason Peters, American.

Guiellmo leaned back in his chair and stared out of the window without actually seeing the Roman skyline framed in fire by a setting sun. The Cold War was over. Why would Americans want to strew the landscape with dead Russians? Yet, it appeared that, in at least one instance, this Jason Peters had done just that.

A guess, admittedly. But then, few things were certain in the Chief's line of work. The time line fit. He had found someone with an apparent if unknown reason to do violence to Russians. Now all he had to do was find Mr. Peters. And if the Chief were a betting man—which he most
certainly was not—he would have bet a lot that Peters would be found in Italy, where the Russian fatality rate had taken a large jump.

Exactly where he might be was unknown, but, happily, there were leads.

The house in Sicily was owned by the Italian government, some obscure bureau that dealt with the study of volcanoes. The chief moved a couple of sheets of paper. The Bureau of Geological Studies, that was it. At the time of the incident, one of its employees, a Dr. Maria Bergenghetti, had been in residence, studying Aetna. The morning the local authorities found the shooting scene, she had called in to announce she was taking a few of the sixty or so vacation days enjoyed by government employees.

An explanation for the glacial speed at which the government accomplished anything.

Dr. Bergenghetti, though, had taken no leave for two years. This must be special.

He thumbed sheets of paper until he came to a photograph. Black-and-white, slightly fuzzy from being faxed. Still, the doctor was an extremely attractive woman—attractive enough, he hoped, to be remembered by the countless law enforcement officials to whom it had been distributed, along with the notation to notify him immediately if she were seen. Report, not detain.

Nor had there been an explanation as to the source of the Chief's interest. He had learned the painful lesson that sharing information about an investigation was the same as calling a press conference. The story wound up in the papers either way.

Inspectore
Guiellmo was curious as to the company she might be keeping.

 

 

Piazza San Carlo

Turin, Italy

Late afternoon

The cobblestoned square had become world-famous from television coverage of the 2006 Winter Olympics. The only differences were that the red tile roofs were not snow covered and the crowds were nonexistent. As Jason and Maria sipped espresso in front of a trattoria, he studied the white limestone baroque churches of San Carlo and Santa Christina at the southern end of the piazza, his fingers drumming a nervous tattoo on the table. Somewhere nearby was the small café where, supposedly, vermouth had been invented, a mecca for martini drinkers worldwide. In the distance, purple shadows were blurring the jagged edges of the Alps.

This time there had been no unusual requests for rooms at the small hotel just off the arcaded Via Roma, the main street of the historic district. They had left a message for Adrian before Maria had called Eno Calligini, whose arrival they now awaited.

Maria glanced around the piazza as she took a Marlboro
from her purse without exposing the pack. She ignored Jason's grimace of disapproval as she lit up and exhaled a jet of blue smoke. “Did you watch the Olympics here?”

Jason shook his head. He had not owned a television since he left Washington. “Missed it.” He swiveled his head, scanning their surroundings. “This professor friend of yours usually on time?”

Punctuality was not an Italian virtue.

She leaned back in her chair, squinting through the smoke drifting into her face. “My, are not you the chatterbox?”

His attempt at a smile was a failure at best. “Don't like sitting out here where we can be seen by people we can't see. Makes me nervous.”

Maria took a long drag as she looked around the square. “You are paranoid.”

“I'm still alive.”

They sat in the silence of an uneasy truce until Jason leaned forward to pull the magazine containing the summary of Dr. Calligini's book from his pocket. He had read all but the last two chapters on the train they had taken after the boat back to the mainland. Flying would have been quicker but would have involved security likely to turn up his weapon. The SIG Sauer would have been hard to explain.

“I appreciate Adrian giving this to us.” He held it out. “Want to read it?”

She stubbed her cigarette out in a small glass ashtray. “Read the book when it first appeared. I do not know if . . .”

She stood, leaving the sentence unfinished. Jason followed her gaze across the piazza to where a tall man was striding toward them. Hatless, with a full mane of shoulder-length silver hair that reached a shabby cardigan. Faded jeans were stuffed into rubber-soled boots. As
the man approached, Jason saw tanned features, the skin wrinkled from exposure to wind and sun.

It was not until he stood at tableside, his long face split by a dazzling smile, that Jason realized the man was more than old enough to be Maria's father. That did little to diminish a twinge of jealousy as the two embraced.

Jason stood as Maria turned to him. “Jason, I want you to meet Dr. Calligini. . . .”

The doctor extended a hand with a firm grip. “Eno, please.” He immediately returned his attention to Maria with a stream of Italian before stopping and turning back to Jason.
“Mi dispiace.
I'm sorry. I have not seen little Maria long time.”

Jason arched an eyebrow, looking at Maria. “ ‘Little' Maria?”

Eno nodded.
“Si.
Beeg Maria, she my seester, marry to Maria's poppa.”

For reasons quite understandable, Jason felt relieved. “A pleasure, Dr., er, Eno. You speak good English.”

Jason was treated to a smile that could have served as an ad for toothpaste as the doctor held thumb and index finger an inch or so apart. “Only a leetle.”

The three sat, and Eno barked Italian at the waiter, who scurried away, returning almost immediately with a tiny cup of espresso.

The professor's eyes fell on the magazine on the table, and he smiled even wider. “You read?”

“Interesting,” Jason said without commitment. “I'm not sure Greco-Roman mythology is going to be helpful in finding what I want.”

Eno turned to Maria, obviously seeking a translation.

They exchanged sentences Jason didn't understand before she said, “It is no myth. He believes that the Roman's journal is an accurate representation of what happened.”

Jason lowered the coffee cup he had almost put to his lips. “It's real; he thinks it's real? That there really is a hell?”

Eno apparently understood the gravamen of that. He shook his head. “No ‘hell.' Hades.”

“There's a difference?”

“Si.
Difference.”

The professor ignored his coffee to speak rapidly to Maria. His gesticulations confirmed Jason's belief that an Italian unfortunate enough to lose both arms would be struck dumb also.

When he had finished, or at least subsided, Maria said, “There really is—was—a Hades, complete with River Styx and all. It was the place of departed spirits, a place of darkness, of heat and volcanic activity, hence the fire and brimstone the Christians associate with hell.”

Jason leaned back in his chair, unconvinced. “If it was real, where was it?”

“Baia, or in the old Roman Latin, Baiae.”

“The place in the article.”

She nodded.

“But how—”

Eno interrupted with another stream of italian.

When he finished, Maria said, “General Agrippa blocked it in, perhaps on the orders of Augustus Caesar, his friend and patron. That would have been sometime
A.D.
12 or before.”

Coffee completely forgotten, Jason rested his chin on open palms, elbows on the table. “You mean they sealed it off?”

She shook her head. “No, they tried to completely fill it in. Like Nero's Golden House in Rome.”

He shook his head.

“When Nero died, years after Augustus, Vespasian filled the palace with dirt. It's been excavated for only a few years. Hades at Baia was the same, filled in.”

“Then how . . .”

She held up a hand, rushing on. “A chemical engineer, an Englishman by the name of Robert Paget, retired to Baia and became interested in the local antiquities. In
1962 he and a native crew excavated part of it. They could work only in fifteen-minute shifts because of the heat and the gases, but he cleared the passageway to an underground river, the Styx. Along the way were sacrificial altars—”

“Gases?” Jason's interest quickened.

“They did no analysis, but there was some kind of gas that made them sleepy as well as prone to hallucinations.”

“Ethylene?” Jason was twisting his cup around on the tabletop.

Maria shrugged. “Possibly. They were amateur archeologists, not geologists.”

Eno was following the exchange closely. “The
Inglese,
Paget, he want to find Greek Hades, no geologist.”

Jason straightened up, palms flat on the table. “Okay, so it looks like I'll have to go to . . . where?”

“Baia,” Maria and Eno said in unison.

“Not so easy,” Eno added. “After Paget explore there, Italian government . . .” He made a motion of touching his hands together in silent applause. “How you . . . ?”

“The Italian government shut up the entrances, said it was too dangerous,” Maria said.

“Nobody's been in there since 1962?” Jason was incredulous.

Eno explained something to Maria, who turned to Jason. “Another archaeologist, Robert Temple, convinced the authorities to let him explore further in 2001. He reported the gas levels had subsided, as had the intense heat reported by Paget. He took some pictures and wrote a book about it,
Netherworld.
Then the government sealed it off again.”

Jason drained the remains of what was by now very cold espresso. “Why? I'd think the archeological value of the real Hades would be worth keeping it open.”

Eno motioned to the waiter for refills and joined in. “Government say too dangerous. My guess, Church wanted closed.”

“Despite what the politicians say, the Catholic Church has tremendous influence on Italian politics,” Maria explained. “Having a secular or pagan model of hell open for inspection would not be something the Holy Father would have supported.”

Jason thought about that for a moment. “According to Eno's book, or at least the English summary of it, this place at Baia was filled with hallucinogenic gases, which a sect of scheming priests used to basically fleece people who believed they could meet the dead. The gases were there naturally, so the priests created Hades centuries before Christ. But why not in Greece?”

“Cumae oldest Greek city in Italy,” Eno said.

“Besides,” Maria added, “they had little choice. Just the right gas combination was at Baia, so they had to create the Netherworld there. It was probably the only place in the Greek world with just the right characteristics: a cavern, gases, an underground river, and easy accessibility.”

Jason nodded. “Disney World for wealthy ancients.”

Maria lifted her head to nod thanks to the waiter as he set another cup in front of her and whisked away the old one. “Natural gases that were the product of a system of underground volcanic activity.”

“Part of the ‘fire and brimstone' of the Christian hell, as Eno noted in his book,” Jason said, exchanging his cup for the fresh one. “The physical evidence indicates that whatever minerals were involved in the Bering Sea incident and the Georgia National Forest came from around Naples, so I'd have to guess the ethylene blend did, too.”

Maria dunked the sugar-encrusted stick that came with her coffee. “Which raises a truly interesting question.”

No doubt the same question that had been nagging at Jason's subconscious, an unexpressed idea that had first lurked in the back of his mind like a wild animal at the edge of a campfire until his conversation with Adrian.

Maria voiced the issue Jason had thought about since Adrian had made his suggestion. “Why would the terrorists
go to the trouble to find the source of a hallucinogenic gas? Why not simply kill their victims rather than gassing them first?”