The villa was a place out of time, one that had long since abandoned history and found its own solitary track. 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.”
“They…knew my mother was dying,” Kate stammered, “before the doctors. When the doctors were still saying she’d be fine.
“In college, I…got lonely. I guess everyone creates their own world, but mine was more…elaborate than most. I replayed my bad dates, saying all the lines I wished I had, y’know? Except I started hearing answers from the boys I didn’t expect. What they really thought, what they really wanted.”
“Things you read in them,” Max said conclusively. “You just didn’t want to admit what you knew.” He kept trying to reel her in, to persuade her she’d maintained some kind of control but clearly Kate wasn’t buying.
“We went to Morocco once. We strolled through the marketplace, ate dates overlooking the ocean, I got sunburnt, we made love in a rocky cove. We never left Philadelphia. It was all in my head. Those memories are more real to me still than anything that really happened.”
“Everyone does that,” I tried to console her-you could see her getting more frantic as she went along. “We all get carried by imagination.”
She shook her head. “This wasn’t just me. My boyfriend insisted on showing everyone our pictures from the trip. We took cameras wherever we went. Of course, no pictures. We never left the apartment.”
“Wow,” Tauber said.
“So understand-I learned to do this by fooling myself. And that’s scary.”
“You need practice,” Max said, “enough practice to catch yourself before you go off the rails.”
“We don’t have time for practice,” she said, wandering to the edge of the balcony.
The sun was going down. Sunset in Rome-like any other time in Rome-is spiritual overload. The clouds billowed like they were being conducted. The warm light burnished church domes and swaying trees, the god’s head fountain across the street and the Fiat 500 that kept circling the block, buzzing like a bee on steroids. In this light, the whole world seemed precious and Kate, blocking the sun, hair aflame, seemed miraculous. The sadness in her eyes would have pierced a dead man’s heart. I wandered to the rail and had my hands on her shoulders before I realized I’d stood up.
“You don’t have to know everything,” I said. It wasn’t good but it was what came out.
“But I have to know enough, don’t I? This is it. Whatever we came to do, it’s soon. I want to do good. But this is opening things inside that scare me to death.”
She was in my arms and I was swooning a bit just from proximity. Balancing against that was the fact that she could read my mind; that threw a monkey wrench into every way I knew to be with women. There was no point offering false comfort-like Max, she would know it instantly for what it was. I struggled to find something both true and encouraging to say and found I didn’t have much experience with that combination.
“What’s good about you,” I said finally, “is that you’re so twisted up trying to do what’s right. When the time comes, you’ll know the right answer.”
She flickered a smile-like she was trying to encourage me — settled against my arm and, as long as no one disturbed us, I wouldn’t have needed anything else for the rest of the day.
But those moments don’t last. Max seemed to have wandered away but Tauber was stalking the rooms like an alien energy force was chewing on him, singing some classic rock song in a terrible off-key voice. Probably Neil Young-off-key seemed to suit the song. We were all drowning in jet lag while he was getting wired.
“So?” he demanded on his next pass through. “How do we protect Singh if L Corps’ got access?”
“What’s our problem?” Kate asked lazily, lolling on the railing. “Why does everyone have access but us?” and it was like streamers going off in my skull.
I leapt to the bureau to check our video camera really held the images we’d taken in the bomber’s apartment, that I hadn’t imagined or erased them. Then I grabbed the phone, pulling the business card from the airport out of my pocket.
“Billy Symczck, please. Billy? Greg! Listen, my crew and I need credentials-yeah, for the G8. Same to you, buddy. I’ll tell you why. You have any friends in G8 security? Good-call and tell them their bomb is wired wrong. No chance of it going off. See what they have to say and call me back.”
I slouched into a chair, crossing my legs over another ornate table.
“We gon’ get access!”
“It’s called Tiber Island,” Kate said. Not that you could miss the place-a stone wall and concrete deck breaching the water like the prow of a ship, a collection of Renaissance buildings rising through thickets of palm and locust trees, awash in spotlights, the island curved into the elbow bend of the Tiber, Vatican domes in distant silhouette and two ancient bridges like a belt propping it up.
Getting there, though, was like trying to push a ham through a sieve. Soldiers clustered behind concrete roadblocks at every corner starting a half-mile away, in visible body armor, over-the-ear helmets and automatic weapons at the ready. Each stop required ID, a body check and interrogation (Purpose of your visit? Press Credentials? So Late? We’re disorganized. No one in Italy seems shocked by this answer).
“The bridge dates to 62 BC,” Kate narrated, reading the museum tour off her cell. “One story says the Romans killed a dictator, threw his body in the river and the silt collected around it to create the island. It looked like a ship so they added the prow and stern.” She was chattering, nerves on edge-I could feel it as well as hear it. Or maybe it was my own nerves I was feeling.
The air had that stuffy, close feeling like when Max blocked us-I wondered if he was keeping tabs now. He’d run through several techniques with me as we prepared, step by step. When I said, ‘You think I can handle this?’ he answered, ‘Think how far you’ve come in a few days. You’re not the same man’ and I knew it was true.
So now I worked the system, like a new driver obsessively checking the mirrors before pulling out of the driveway. Ruby. Emerald. Sapphire. Turquoise. Don’t look for anything in particular; don’t anticipate. Listen for words or rhythms of speaking in your head that aren’t your own. Just follow those and see where they take you.
It didn’t take long. I started feeling paranoid and defensive and realized it was coming in waves; it only took a beat after that to realize it wasn’t my own paranoia but theirs, whoever they were. I relaxed into the vibration and suddenly it was coming from everywhere. Lingering in doorways and street cafes, watchful eyes from cars on strategic corners, waiters and newspaper sellers, students and telephone lineworkers, everywhere we went, the vibrations and those tiny green-tipped lapel pins. If I wasn’t successfully blocking myself, we’d find out pretty quick.
Billy said he’d meet me at the bridge but two blocks early, a car pulled up alongside us and he jumped out the open door. “In!” he demanded, grabbing me and throwing me into the seat. He slammed the door in Kate’s face, crying, “One ride per customer.”
And then we were off, weaving through a maze of alleyways onto a wide avenue past the Coliseum and Circus Maximus.
“Your friends think they’re spies,” he said, rechecking the rear-view mirror. “Are they?”
In the vanity mirror I made out an Alfa Romeo following at a respectable distance but I didn’t know the driver. I never would’ve noticed on my own.
“Not mine,” I shook my head.
Billy shrugged, “No matter.” A sharp right bounced us across a sidewalk and into an archaeological site marked ‘No Admittance’ in three languages. We detoured past a 2200-year-old arch and between 40-foot-high marble slabs fallen from a temple, then sped the wrong way down a one-way street onto a service road under a viaduct and into a warehouse district. There was nobody in sight. “If they are spies,” Billy remarked, “they’re overpaid.”
He screeched to a stop in front of a shuttered plant, all graffiti’d walls and glass skylight roof panels. The whole district was shut tight, not a car or moving body in sight on a Sunday in the capitol of Roman Catholicism. Billy jumped out, punched a couple of keys on a touchpad and the front gate rattled upward. It closed automatically when he pulled inside.
“Come on,” he said, politely, considering he was already dragging me by the collar. Up a metal staircase to a row of locked offices, dragging me like he didn’t care if I got hurt-or maybe preferred that I did.
I don’t know what happened to me, but somehow I was taking this pretty calmly. Billy was taller and broader than me but that was a nice way of saying he was a pudgy media grunt, more used to bullying a word processor than a man. He was already puffing from climbing the stairs. A year out of the Army, I could probably take him. ‘Probably’ was a big word but it relaxed me a bit. Let him drag me around a little more, wear himself out. Let things develop a bit. Then we’ll see. The place was deserted; it wasn’t like he had three guys waiting to jump me. He counted the offices as we went and I noticed there weren’t any numbers on the doors. He dragged me to ‘Six’ and pulled me roughly against the wall.
“You listen to me,” he gasped, jingling through a mass of keys on a White Sox keyring. “I don’t know how stupid you think I am but I don’t take this shit lightly. I made your fucking phone call. I know a guy at Intervento Speciale — the Italian counter-terrorists? I told him what you said; he dropped the fucking phone! I hear him scrambling around trying to pick it up, I take it as a sign from God. Duck down the back steps and by the time I hit the corner, there’s six military police cars outside my door. I haven’t stopped in one place for two minutes since.” He found the key and fumbled it into the lock. “They told me you lost it a year ago but I had no clue. This is fucking Italy! I’ll be locked up for weeks before anybody gets to talk to me! I could end up in fucking Baku getting waterboarded! So I don’t give a rat’s ass about your goddamn credentials-you’re going to tell me what, how and where or you can send me a postcard from Baku whenever you get a chance.”
He was totally panicked and panic does scary things, even to sensible people. That’s what was going through my head when he threw the door open and flicked on the light and I stopped worrying.
Max was lounging behind Billy’s desk; Kate was next to him in a straight-back wooden chair, sitting quietly, waiting. Tauber stepped from the darkened far side of the room, closed the door behind Billy and conducted him politely but firmly into another wood chair directly opposite the desk. When that was done, he took up a position leaning alertly next to the now-closed door.
“Locking him up won’t help you,” Max said calmly. “And it isn’t necessary. We’ll tell you what you want to know. We just need credentials.”
Billy’s eyes bulged. He kept staring from one unexpected visitor to the next, eyes like billiard balls. “How-how’d you get in here?” When no one answered, he gulped hard and said, “I had to tell them who told me. They won’t give you credentials no matter what.”
“You didn’t get the chance to tell them-you were ducking down the back steps, remember?” Max said with that assurance that so impressed strangers. “It’s not an issue. You get us the meeting with the right people-I’ll take care of the rest.”
Billy was still flustered, still mulling the previous question. “You-how’d you find this place? You didn’t follow us, I was watching.”
“We got here first,” Max nodded. “So no, we didn’t follow you.”
“So how’d you know…we were coming here?”
“If your network will get us in, you can tell them later that I forced you. They’ll believe you, I promise.”
“Why would they?”
“Because that’s what I do,” Max said darkly. “I make people do things they don’t want to do.” He was using the quiet voice, which only brought out the menace in him. Billy sank into a chair next to the desk. Then he stared, alarmed, at the desk itself. Max slid away and held his hands up to show they were empty.
“I haven’t opened anything. Your weed’s still in the top drawer and your revolver still in the leg. The emails from your publisher’s wife-”
“That’s enough!” Billy yelled. “You had no right; this is a private-”
“Check the locks,” Max said, stepping away and motioning. Billy showed no sign of moving from his chair. “I didn’t have to look. I knew you would tell me what’s there.” This struck me odd and I saw Tauber and Kate also staring at Max now. Where was he going with this?
“You’ve been troubled recently by memories of a woman named Christina. You haven’t seen her in years but she’s in your dreams and waking thoughts. You’ve been trying to think of a way to ask your ex for her address but-”
Billy was trembling now; it took a lot of visible effort before he was actually able to speak. “In the time you’ve spent monitoring me,” he burst, “you could’ve got the credentials yourself.”
“How could I monitor something you haven’t said aloud? To anyone?” Max asked, as low-key as a hospital shrink. “I’m reading your mind, Billy.” It was shocking to hear him say it out loud. We just needed credentials-why give away the farm?
“Bullshit,” Billy answered. I remembered saying the same thing…two days ago? Was that possible?
Max stared him down for about ten seconds. “Twenty-five,” he replied coolly, responding to an unspoken question. “4672 Rogers Court, Medina Illinois. Dwight Eisenhower High School. There was a small mole on her left breast-left from your point of view, not hers.”
“Fuck you!” Billy jumped from his seat and lurched toward the door. He never made it. He stopped dead, frozen in air for twenty seconds, hand outstretched for the knob but going nowhere. Slowly, tortuously, the hand turned, moving mere inches from his eyes, fingers outstretched and pointing. Billy was shaking, sweating, trying with all his might to control his own body, without success. I remembered how frightening that felt. After a long moment, the fingers folded up, one by one, until he was giving himself the bird at close range.
Billy groaned and I cracked up but Max stayed focused behind the desk. “Like I said-I make people do things they don’t want to do. Why don’t you have a seat and we’ll talk.” No reply. “I’m not going to let you do anything else, so you might as well.” Billy finally, stiffly, returned to his chair.
“If you can do this, what do you need me for?” he asked.
“Our enemies are watching for us. We won’t get credentials without them noticing. On the other hand, a big network adding a crew at the last minute, even at the G8, is nothing special. But there’s more to it than that.”
He glanced at me. “I’ve had time to think about this since you called Billy. The more time we spend in Rome, the more obvious it is-you felt it along the river just now. They’re everywhere, the drones. I don’t know why-all they need is one guy a few feet from her-but look at how many they brought. Even if we manage to stop them here, this won’t be over. And the chances of us getting out alive aren’t great.” I shivered, simply because there was no drama in him, in what he’d just said. He’d sized up our situation, assessed the odds and they weren’t good. He was being Max, following his blessed facts. “So someone has to put out this story, has to let ordinary citizens know what’s happening. The fight will have to get bigger. It can’t be just us.”
“You see, Billy, you don’t look on the bright side. You’re worrying about what I might do to you. You’re missing what I can do for you.”
Billy, hair heavy with sweat, shirt soaked through, didn’t appear encouraged. “Such as?”
“I don’t know-what would make you happy? A Peabody? How about a Pulitzer?”
It took a minute for Billy to get his breathing under control but suddenly he was making the effort.
“How’s this for a story? Assassination. Governments toppled. Trillions in play. The fate of the World at stake. Mindreaders running wild, tipping the balance of power. Top of the News Hour and you tell our side of the story. Exclusive. ”
Billy slumped. “Jaysus! Conspiracies, Psychic Phenomena. UFO’s killed Kennedy. Not worth shit.”
“What if we can prove it? Pull back the curtain in public? In front of witnesses?” Billy’s face was cautious, but his eyes were ravenous.
“But here’s the rest,” Max warned. “You can’t tell this story until everything’s over. You’ll win awards but you probably won’t be able to accept them-you might not survive the trip. You’ll have to protect yourself against threats from people like me-threats inside your own head. So there’s a pricetag-and it won’t be fun.”
“I guess,” Billy laughed-a coarse, harsh cynical laugh. “Why would I want something like that?”
Max smiled his sad smile. “We all want to matter. Most of us don’t ever get the chance to really affect things. It’s an evil world and the worst threats come from inside, the places we’re not watching. You haven’t been a journalist all these years for the money, Billy,” he said and Billy laughed again. “You love the truth, even if it doesn’t always love you back. We’ll feed you the facts, new stuff on a regular basis. And you’ll post the stories Gregg writes too.”
“Me?”
“You’ve been keeping a journal,” Max told me, fervent. “Tell people what it’s like inside our little team. We’ll need to get our side out. Eventually, we’ll need accomplices.”
Billy was wearing the reporter’s gaze now. “What are you talking about? Worldwide revolution?”
“Not against governments,” Max shrugged. “They won’t take sides, not openly at least. This will be a rebellion by people who’ve had everything taken away from them-their dignity, control over their own lives. It’ll be their way to matter. You’re an old Commie, Billy-you should like that.”
Billy pulled a notepad off the desk. “What’s it all about?”