THERE WAS A VOICE SOMEWHERE. FEMALE, TREMULOUS, familiar. It spoke his name. Marooned somewhere between wakefulness and dream, he wanted to turn toward the source of the sound. THERE WAS A VOICE SOMEWHERE. FEMALE, TREMULOUS, familiar. It spoke his name. Marooned somewhere between wakefulness and dream, he wanted to turn toward the source of the sound.
“Nic …” it said more insistently.
A hand shook his shoulder. Costa found himself being turned upright. He didn’t know where he was. Then the memories flooded back, full of pain and despair. Rosa Prabakaran was staring at him, bleary-eyed, exhausted, frightened.
He said the first words that came into his hurting head. “Why are we still alive?”
“I don’t know,” she whispered. Then, as if she hated to say the words, she added, glancing backwards, to some unseen place behind him, “Mirko isn’t.”
Costa dragged himself upright, fighting the crashing stab of hurt the effort brought on. Someone had slugged him hard on the back of the skull. Someone …
Memories. A gun fired close to Rosa. Andrea Petrakis—a man who, they assumed, was working as part of a lone hit team—had taken an incoming phone call, one that had enraged him much more than the presence of three police officers invading his private lair. These things were important, though at that moment Costa lacked the energy and the intelligence to understand why.
He walked over to look at the motionless figure visible beneath the intense, prurient moon. The young police officer’s corpse lay where Petrakis had shot him, stretched on the dry summer grass, arms akimbo, face bloodied and blank. In death he looked like a teenager.
Rosa was by Costa’s side. “They took the car. They took everything. What do we do?”
He looked up at the sky, thinking. “Are you all right?” he asked her.
“My head hurts.”
He stepped forward so that the silver light fell on her face and said, “Show me.”
She turned. He reached forward and touched a matted patch of fine hair behind one ear.
“Ouch!”
“Sorry. It’s not so bad. They …” He fought to remember those last moments. One recollection stood out. “I thought they’d shot you.”
“He fired into the ground. Then they struck me. I was too scared to do anything. I couldn’t even find the courage to run. Then …” Her voice broke. “Mirko … how could someone do that? As if he didn’t really matter?”
“He didn’t,” Costa answered. Mirko Oliva’s life carried no more meaning than that of the golden-haired young man whose body had been riddled with bullets in the Via Rasella. Petrakis had a mission. Nothing would stand in its way.
Yet, somehow, they had survived.
He checked his jacket. Nothing. No weapon. Not even a wallet. His police cell phone was gone. So was the tiny phone Dario Sordi had given him.
“Do we have anything else?” he asked Rosa.
“Just this.” She had a flashlight in her hand. “It was Mirko’s, I think. He must have dropped it.”
“Stay here.”
“You’re leaving me?” she asked, outraged.
“I’m going back into the tomb. Do you want to come? It may be a waste of time. Your choice.”
She didn’t blink. Rosa Prabakaran said, “I’ll come.”
The way seemed shorter the second time around. He didn’t look at the paintings on the wall, in the large chamber or the small. He walked on, feeling Rosa’s arm touching his for safety, for comfort.
When they got to the corpse slumped in the corner, in the room of the Blue Demon, the rats scurried away once more.
Costa bent to look at the man. He’d been shot through the mouth and the chest. It was the same kind of death that had been delivered to Mirko Oliva. Sudden, deliberate, unthinking. The dead man wore a cheap dark suit and a white shirt, now stained with gore, open at the collar.
Costa reached inside his jacket and recovered a wallet. There was a little money and an ID card. It said he was a Greek national called Stefan Kyriakis.
In the other pocket was a very new-looking cell phone. Costa glanced at Rosa as he pushed the On button.
“Wish us luck,” he said.
A light came on the screen. Almost immediately the low battery warning began to bleep.
Together, they got back up the wooden steps as quickly as they could. Beneath the Mediterranean moon, by the corpse of his young colleague, Costa found the weakest of signals.
He called Falcone. The inspector’s familiar, bad-tempered voice barked, “Pronto.”
“Petrakis found us,” Costa said. “They killed Mirko Oliva.”
“And you?” Falcone demanded.
“We’ll live.”
“Where are you?”
Costa told him as best he could.
“This is not what I asked you …” Falcone began.
“I’m sorry. You need to alert Palombo. You need to bring in everyone you can. They’re here, Leo. Not Rome. Here. This is …” He thought of the Blue Demon in the earth beneath his feet. “… their home. Where they came from. What made them.”
He could hear talking in the background. Then Falcone said, “I somehow doubt that. We’ll be there in five minutes.”
“Five …?”
“Stay where you are. Don’t—”
The last milliamp of power in the phone he’d found on the corpse in the Blue Demon’s tomb expired. The thing fell silent in Costa’s fingers.