Amalfi Casino and Hotel Resort
18th March - 12.08 a.m.
Kicking their stools out from under them, people began to run, half-drunk cocktails collapsing to the floor and neatly stacked piles of chips swooning on to the baize as gamblers clambered over each other like calves trying to escape a branding pen.
Tom fought his way across to Jennifer’s side, Ortiz only a few feet behind him. She was still alive, thank God, her eyes wide with shock, but still alive. He ripped her blouse open, saw the blood frothing from under her left breast.
‘It’s okay,’ Tom reassured her, leaning close so she could hear him. She nodded, lifted her head as if to speak, then fell back.
‘Where’s she hit?’ Ortiz fell on to his knees next to him as the fire alarm sounded.
‘Get an ambulance here,’ Tom shouted back over the noise, ripping his jacket off and folding
it into a makeshift pillow. ‘Press down -’ He grabbed Ortiz’s hand and jammed it hard against the wound, then leant across and snatched his Beretta out from under his arm.
‘Where the hell are you going?’ Ortiz called after him.
‘To find the shooter.’
He leapt up on to the roulette table, knowing from the location of her wound and the direction she’d been facing that the gunman must have been positioned somewhere ahead of her. Scanning the floor, he suddenly noticed an unexpected shimmer of glass under the stampeding crowd’s feet. He glanced instinctively up at the ceiling and saw that a single mirrored panel was missing from its reflective surface, the empty black square as obvious as a decaying tooth in an otherwise perfect smile.
‘He’s in the ceiling void,’ Tom breathed.
He leapt down and grabbed a passing security guard who seemed more intent on saving himself than in stewarding anyone else to the exit.
‘The observation deck,’ Tom shouted. ‘How do I get up there?’
The guard paused, momentarily transfixed by the gun gripped in Tom’s left hand, then pointed unsteadily at a set of double doors on the other side of the floor.
‘Through there,’ he stuttered.
Snatching the guard’s security pass off his belt, Tom fought his way through to the doors he had
indicated and swiped them open. He found himself in a long white service corridor lit by overhead strip lighting and lined on both sides by a series of identical red doors. Cowering under the fire alarm’s strident and persistent echo, a steady stream of people were half walking, half running towards him - casino staff ordered to evacuate the building, judging from their identical red Mao jackets and the confusion etched on to their faces.
Tom walked against the flow, scanning for a pair of shoes, or a uniform, or a face that didn’t quite fit. Ahead of him, about two thirds of the way down the corridor, a door opened and a man wearing a baseball cap stepped out. Tom noticed him immediately. It was his studied calmness that gave him away. His calmness and the detached, almost curious expression on his face, as if he was taking part in some bizarre sociological experiment that he couldn’t quite relate to.
He seemed to notice Tom at almost the same time because, grimacing, he turned and retreated back inside, locking the door behind him. Tom sprinted down the corridor after him, tried the handle and then stepped back and pumped four shots into the locks. With a firm kick, the door splintered open.
Carefully covering the angles above him, Tom made his way up the stairs into the shadows of the observation deck, his eyes adjusting to the darkness. He felt the shooter before he saw him,
the metal walkways shuddering under his heavy step as he sprinted along the gantries away from him. Tom took aim and fired three times, then twice more, a couple of the bullets sparking brightly where they struck the steel supports. But the man barely broke his stride, turning sharply to his left and then to his right.
Tom set off after him, trying to guess where he’d turned, so that he wouldn’t end up stranded in a different section of the deck. Up ahead the gunman paused and then in an instant was over the side of the gantry and dangling down over the suspended ceiling below. Tom again took aim, and fired twice, this time catching him in his shoulder. With a pained yell he let go, crashing through the mirrored ceiling and vanishing from sight.
Tom sprinted across to the same point and then lowered himself down as far as he could before letting go and dropping through the hole on to a blackjack table scattered with chips and fresh blood.
‘Where did he go?’ Tom asked the dealer, who was staring up at him open-mouthed.
The man pointed dumbly towards the exit. Tom looked up and saw the gunman almost at the door, his jacket burst open at the shoulder where the bullet had passed through him. Tom again pulled the trigger, the bullet skimming the man’s head and shattering a slot machine deliberately
positioned to tempt people into one final roll of the dice before heading outside. Next to it a bearded man in a
‘Remember Pearl Harbor’
baseball cap carried on playing, gazing at the wheels as if he hated them.
Tom leapt down and followed the gunman outside, determined not to lose him. But rather than melt away into the panicked crowd that had swamped the forecourt, the man seemed to be waiting for him, backpack hitched over one arm. For an instant, no longer, they stood about twenty feet apart, their eyes locked, the swollen human flow parting around them like a river around two rocks. The gunman, clutching his shoulder, studied Tom with a detached curiosity; Tom, his gun raised, finger tested the trigger spring’s resistance. But before he could take the shot, a powerful hand gripped his arm and pulled him back.
‘Not here, for Chrissake,’ Stokes yelled. ‘Are you fucking crazy? You’ll hit someone.’
Tom angrily shook him off, took aim and fired. The gun clicked, empty. With a wink, the killer turned and dived into the frothing sea of people.
In an instant, he was gone.
18th March - 12.23 a.m.
‘Where’s the backup? They need to set up a perimeter,’ Tom ordered angrily.
‘It’s a little late for that,’ Stokes shrugged helplessly at the untamed mob that had already spilled out on to the Strip, bringing the traffic to a standstill as they surged across the road, trying to get as far away from the Amalfi as they could.
Tom glared resentfully at the crowd, wanting Stokes to be wrong but knowing he wasn’t. What made it worse was that the gunman had played him. He’d seen Tom was carrying a Beretta, counted the shots until he’d known it was empty, then waited for him. Taunted him.
With a violent jolt, Tom’s thoughts snapped back to Jennifer.
‘How is she?’
‘The paramedics are with her now,’ Stokes
reassured him, before lowering his gaze. ‘She’s lost a lot of blood.’
‘Where is she?’
‘They’re taking her up on to the roof for a medevac to UMC.’
‘Get me up there,’ Tom barked.
They ran back into the casino and, using the card Tom had taken from the security guard, rode up to the top floor.
‘What happened to the priest?’ Tom asked as the levels pinged past.
‘We lost him too,’ Stokes admitted. ‘Soon as everyone started running, he vanished. The money’s safe, though.’
‘You think I give a shit about the money?’ Tom hissed.
The doors opened and they sprinted up the final two flights of the service staircase to a metal door that Tom swiped open. The helicopter was already there, its rotors buffeting them with a wash of hot, dusty air. Jennifer was being loaded into the rear by two paramedics, a drip attached to her arm and an oxygen mask over her face. Ortiz was crouching on the ground, his shirt covered in her blood, his head in his hands.
‘I’m going with her,’ Tom shouted over the throb of the engines.
‘No way,’ Stokes called back. ‘You’re the only person who can ID the gunman. I need you here.’
‘I wasn’t asking for your permission.’
Keeping his head down, Tom sprinted across the pad and hauled himself in behind the stretcher, slamming the door shut after him. The pitch of the engines deepened as the pilot throttled up and with a lurch they rose into the sky.
‘How is she?’ Tom called to one of the medics as they hooked her up to a mobile ECG, her pulse registering with a green blip on the screen and a sharp tone - Beep…beep…beep. Around them power and warning lights from other machines flashed and sounded intermittently.
‘Who are you?’
‘A friend.’
‘She’s lost a lot of blood…we need to get her into theatre ASAP.’
‘Is she conscious?’
‘In and out. Try talking to her. Keep her awake.’
Tom shuffled forward until he was sitting next to Jennifer’s head. The glow of the ECG screen was staining her skin green. Her eyes flickered open and he was certain that he saw a smile of recognition tremble across her face.
‘Hold on, Jen,’ he whispered, pressing his lips to her ear. ‘We’ll be there soon.’
She nodded weakly. He brushed the hair out of her eyes, speaking almost to himself.
‘You’re going to be okay. I’ll make sure you’re okay.’
Beep…beep…beep.
He smiled at her reassuringly, glad that she
couldn’t see the paramedics’ grim-faced expression as they worked on the wound, the blood still oozing from her chest. He felt her hand reach for his, press something hard and rectangular into it, her grip tightening as she pulled him closer, her mouth moving under the oxygen mask.
He bent over her, straining to hear her voice against the chop of the rotors and the rhythmic pinging of the heart monitor. He caught something, the fragment of a word, perhaps more, and then her eyes closed again and her grip loosened, allowing him to slip what she had given him into his pocket.
‘Come on, Jen,’ Tom called, shaking her arm gently at first and then with increasing urgency. ‘We’re nearly there now. You’re going to be okay. You just need to keep listening to me. Listen to my voice.’
He shook her again, more roughly this time. But there was no reaction and all he could hear was the gradual, almost imperceptible lengthening of the gaps between each tone of the ECG.
Beep…beep. Beep……beep. Beep………beep.
‘Help her,’ Tom shouted angrily to the paramedics. ‘Do something.’
They swapped a glance, one of them wiping the back of his hand across his brow, smearing blood.
‘We’ve done what we can.’
Far below, the city’s neon carpet unravelled into
the distance. But from up here, Tom could see that it ended, that a black line had been drawn across the desert at the city’s limits, and that beyond that was only darkness.
He leaned forward, his lips brushing against her cheek. He knew now that it was just him and her. Him and her and the hiss of the respirator and the unfeeling pulse of the ECG’s electronic heart.
‘Stay with me,’ he whispered.
For a second he could have sworn that her breathing quickened. Then the machine gave a piercing shriek. The monitor showed a perfectly flat line.
‘It is from the greatest dangers that the greatest glory is to be won.’
Thucydides,
History of the Peloponnesian War
-
Book 1, 144
Via Galvani, Testaccio, Rome
18th March - 3.12 p.m.
The speaker crackled into life.
‘Mitto tibi navem prora puppique carentem.’
Allegra hesitated, her mind racing. She understood the Latin, of course - I send you a ship lacking stern and bow. But what did it mean? How could a ship not have a stern and a bow? Unless…unless it was referring to something else. To the front and the back? The beginning and the end? The first and the last? Latin for ship was
navem
, so if it was missing its beginning and its end, its first and last letters perhaps…
‘
Ave
,’ she replied with a smile. Latin for hello.
‘
Ave
, indeed,’ the voice replied with a chuckle. ‘Although I can’t claim the credit this time. That was one of Cicero’s.’
The door buzzed open and Allegra made her way to the lift, smiling. She’d first met Aurelio
Eco at La Sapienza, before heading off to Columbia for her Masters, where he’d been a visiting professor in the university’s antiquities department. Before that, he’d spent fifteen years as the Director of the Villa Giulia, Rome’s foremost Etruscan museum, during ten of which he had also headed up the Ufficio Sequestri e Scavi Clandestini, the Office of Clandestine Excavations and Seized Objects. Unfortunately for her, these posts seemed to have provided him with an inexhaustible supply of riddles, which he delighted in asking her as a condition of entry to his apartment. A latter-day Sphinx to her Odysseus.
As usual the door was open and the kettle boiling. She made herself a strong black coffee and Aurelio an Earl Grey tea with lemon, an affectation of his from a brief stint at Oxford in his twenties that he had never been able, or wanted, to shake off.
He was waiting for her in his high-backed leather chair, the split in the seat cushion covered by a red-and-white
keffiyeh
purchased during an exchange posting to Jordan. His dusty office was full of such mementoes - photographs of him at various digs over the decades, framed maps and faded prints, prayer beads and inlaid boxes picked up in dusty Middle-Eastern souks, fragments of inscribed Roman tablets, shards of Etruscan pottery, carved remnants of Greek statues. At times it seemed to Allegra that his entire life was held in this small room, each piece invested with a
particular meaning or memory that he only had to glance at or hold to live all over again.
And yet this primitive mental filing system was as chaotic as it was effective, pictures hanging askew, books stacked any which way on the shelves with dirty cups and glasses squeezed into the gaps, the floor covered in a confetti trail of newspaper cuttings and half-read books left facedown, alongside a stack of index cards inscribed with notes for a forthcoming lecture. And while a favoured few of his artefacts had been placed in a glass display cabinet, the rest were scattered indiscriminately around the room, some squeezed on to his desk and the marble mantelpiece, others lining the edges of the bookshelves like paratroopers waiting for the order to jump.
Despite his cheerfulness on the intercom, Aurelio now seemed to have sunk into what Allegra could only describe as a sulk, his bottom lip jutting out, brows furrowed. Funny, she thought, how old age seemed to have given him an almost childlike ability to flit between moods on a whim.
‘Maybe you shouldn’t come any more,’ he sighed. ‘Spend time with your real friends, instead, people your own age.’
‘Don’t start that again,’ she sighed. ‘I’ve told you, I’m too busy to have any friends. Besides, I like old things.’ She winked. ‘They smell more interesting.’
Approaching seventy, Aurelio had no family left now, apart from a distant cousin who only seemed to show up when he needed a handout. As they had got to know each other, therefore, Allegra had taken it upon herself to look in on him whenever she knew she would be in the area. And sometimes, like today, when she knew she wouldn’t.
‘But you said you’d be here for lunch,’ he continued in a hurt tone, although she could sense that her reply had pleased him. ‘You’re late.’
‘And whose fault is that?’
He grinned, his sulk vanishing as quickly as she suspected it had appeared. He had a kindly face, with large light brown eyes, a beaked nose and leathered skin that spoke of too many long summers spent hunched over an excavation trench. He was dressed in an open-necked shirt and a yellow silk cravat, another hangover from his Oxford days. As ever, he was wearing a motheaten grey cardigan for warmth, his refusal to pay the ‘
extortionate’
prices demanded by ‘
piratical
’ energy companies condemning his apartment to a Siberian permafrost for at least three months of the year.
‘So they did call you?’ he crowed.
‘I knew it!’ she remonstrated angrily. ‘Who did you speak to? What did you tell them?’
‘The GICO wanted an antiquities expert. They called the university. The university put them on
to me. I told them I’d retired and recommended you instead.’
‘Did they tell you what they wanted?’
‘Of course not. It’s the GICO. They never tell you anything.’ He paused, suddenly concerned. ‘I thought you’d be pleased.’
With a deep breath, Allegra recounted the events of the past twenty-three hours. The inverted crucifixion at the site of Julius Caesar’s assassination. The carefully staged beheading in the Pantheon. The apparent link to two Caravaggio masterpieces. Aurelio listened intently, shaking his head at some of the more gruesome details, but otherwise remaining silent until she had finished.
‘So the man they found in the Pantheon…?’
‘Was Annibale Argento’s twin brother, Gio.’
‘
Merda
,’ he swore, for what could well have been the first time since she’d known him. ‘
They
must be lapping it up.’
They
, she knew, referred to the media, an industry he despised, having been tricked a few years ago into authenticating a forged Etruscan vase by an investigative reporter. He gave a contemptuous wave of his hand towards an imagined TV set in the corner of his room, as if trying to further distance himself from an object he had already demonstrably banished from his life.
‘I’ve spent half the day trying to see if there’s anything else that links the two sites or any of
Caravaggio’s other works. Gallo is trying to get me seconded on to the case full time.’
‘I’m sorry, Allegra. I didn’t know…I didn’t mean to get you involved in anything like this.’
She shrugged. It was hard to be angry with him. It was Aurelio after all who, guessing that she would quickly tire of academia, had encouraged her to apply to the art and antiquities unit of the Carabinieri in the first place. He’d only been trying to help.
‘I know.’
‘Anything to go on?’ he asked hopefully.
‘Plenty to go on. Just no idea where to start,’ she sighed. ‘Which reminds me. There’s something I wanted to ask you.’
‘Anything, of course.’
‘Both victims had what looked like an antique coin in their mouths.’
‘To pay Charon,’ Aurelio guessed immediately.
‘That’s what I thought. Except it wasn’t a coin. It was a lead disc.’
‘Lead?’ Aurelio frowned. ‘That’s unusual.’
‘That’s what I thought. I seem to remember reading that Roman forgers used to fake coins by casting them in lead and covering them in gold leaf, but I wondered if there was some other reference to the Classical world that might.’
‘Unusual, but not unprecedented,’ he continued, interrupting her. ‘Can you reach that red book down for me.’
She extricated the book from between the fifteen or so other academic texts he had written and handed it to him. He held it for a few seconds, his eyes closed, fingers resting lightly on the leather cover as if he was reading braille. Then, opening his eyes, he leafed through it, the brain haemorrhage that he’d suffered some fifteen years before betraying itself in his slow and deliberate movements.
‘Here,’ he fixed her with a knowing smile, about halfway in.
‘Here what?’
‘Threatened by the Persian empire, several Greek states came together in the fifth century BC to form a military alliance under the leadership of the Athenians,’
he read.
‘Members had to contribute ships or money, and in return the alliance agreed to protect their territory. Symbolically,’
he paused, Allegra remembering that he used to employ the same theatrical technique in lectures when he was about to make a particularly compelling point.
‘Symbolically, upon joining, representatives of the member states had to throw a piece of metal into the sea.’
‘Lead,’ Allegra breathed. He nodded.
‘Normally a piece of lead. The alliance was to last until it floated to the surface again.’
There was a pause, as she reflected on this.
‘And you think…?’
‘You asked about a link between lead and the Classical world.’ He smiled. ‘Thinking’s your job.’
‘What was the name of this alliance?’
Aurelio pretended to consult the book, although she could tell it was just an excuse for another of his dramatic pauses.
‘They called themselves the Delian League.’