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  “What about you, Deputy Chief?”

  “I was stupid enough to board the train. The toxin may still be active, and I could easily become the vector for further infection. I can’t leave here without running the risk of getting someone else sick. So, is that all clear?”

  “Yes.” Alberti’s voice seemed on the verge of cracking.

  Colomba hung up. She went back into the gangway where she had entered the car and shut the doors leading into the first carriage by pulling the emergency lever. Then she chose a seat at random in the first-class carriage, which, compared to Top Class, looked like a ramshackle car for the poorest passengers, and waited to find out if she was going to survive.

  4

  The fire department emergency squads—NBC for Nuclear, Bacteriological, and Chemical; dressed in Tyvek jumpsuits and breathing apparatuses—activated standard emergency protocol. They took control of the area by taping it off, then they covered the train carriages with unbreathable plastic sheets, creating a small airlock at the entrance to the first car.

  Inside that car, Colomba was waiting, obsessively monitoring her state of health, checking for the symptoms of contamination. She thought her glands were normal, she wasn’t sweating any more than normal, and she wasn’t shivering, though she had no idea how long it took the virus or toxin to take effect. After two hours of utter paranoia, over the course of which the stench and the heat became intolerable, two soldiers in hazmat suits came aboard. The first was carrying a suit like the one he was wearing, while the second had an assault rifle leveled. “Put both hands on the back of your neck,” said a voice, muffled by the breathing apparatus.

  Colomba obeyed. “I’m Deputy Chief Caselli,” she said. “I’m the one who issued the alarm.”

  “Don’t move,” said the soldier with the rifle as the other soldier searched her with confident movements, in spite of his thick gloves. He took away her regulation handgun and her switchblade knife, dropping them into a plastic bag, then handed the bag out to a third soldier who stood on the train car’s external steps; he in turn handed the second soldier a larger bag that he then held out to Colomba. “Take off all your clothes and put them in the bag,” he said. “Then put on the jumpsuit.”

  “In front of you two?” asked Colomba. “No way.”

  “If you refuse, we’re authorized to shoot you. Don’t make us do it.”

  Colomba shut her eyes for a moment and then decided there were worse things than stripping naked in public—for instance, vomiting blood till you died or else being killed by a bullet to the back of your head. Still, she pointed at the combat-cam that the soldier with the rifle had fastened to his helmet. “All right. But you turn that off. I don’t want to wind up naked on the Internet, whether I’m dead or alive.”

  The soldier covered the lens with one hand. “Hurry up.”

  Colomba stripped her clothes off in a hurry, well aware of the men’s eyes on her. With her clothes on, the musculature of her thighs and shoulders made her seem bigger than she was, but naked, she resumed the spare proportions of a woman who had spent her life staying in shape. She put on the heavy jumpsuit, and the soldiers helped her to hook up the respirator.

  Colomba was an expert scuba diver, but the mask and the sound of her own breathing in her ears immediately gave her a sense of oppression. Once again, there was a tiny spasm in her lungs, but this time, too, it was just a phantom that quickly vanished. The soldiers pushed her outside, escorting her through the lines of soldiers surrounding the train, wrapped and bundled like artwork by Christo.

  All around them was the apocalypse.

  It was four in the morning and the station, lit up as if it was broad daylight by military halogen spotlights, was teeming with people, all of them either soldiers, carabinieri, police officers, firemen, or plainclothes cops. There was no sound of trains arriving or departing, no announcements from loudspeakers, no passengers chatting on their cell phones. Only the low thud of combat boots echoing off the domed roof, interrupted by orders shouted by ranking officers and the sirens of squad cars.

  The soldiers made Colomba get into a camper equipped as a mobile laboratory, parked at the center of the gallery of the ticket windows. A military physician started taking blood and fluid samples, driving the needles through a rubber patch that Colomba had on her arm. By means of the same system, the doctor also gave her an injection that made an acid taste rise into her mouth.

  No one spoke to her. No one answered her questions or responded to her requests, not even the most elementary ones. After half an hour of that treatment, Colomba lost control and roughly shoved the doctor against the interior wall of the camper. “I want to know what shape I’m in, do you understand me? And I want to know what I inhaled!” Her eyes had become two hard pieces of jade.

  Two soldiers grabbed Colomba, crushing her against the ground with her arms pinned behind her back. “I want answers!” she shouted again. “I’m not a prisoner! I’m a police officer, goddamn it!”

  The doctor got to his feet. Under the hood, his glasses had slid off his nose. “You’re fine, you’re fine,” he muttered. “We’re about to release you.”

  “Well, you could have fucking said so before this!” The soldiers let go of her, and she got to her feet, intentionally elbowing the belly of the one closest to her. “And my fellow officers?”

  The doctor tried to put his glasses back on without taking off his gloves and almost blinded himself with the temple arms. “Everyone’s fine. I assure you.”

  Colomba took off her helmet. Sweet Jesus, it was nice to breathe air that didn’t reek of her own sweat. Five minutes later, she was given back her clothing and she could start feeling like a human being again instead of a piece of meat to be poked at and measured. She had a terrifying headache, but she was alive, and just a few hours ago she wouldn’t have bet on that. In the station, meanwhile, the floodlights had been turned off, though a surreal atmosphere of military occupation continued to reign. The corpses had been placed into hermetically sealed white body bags lined up alongside the train. A couple of the bodies were missing because they’d already been taken to one of the other campers for examination.

  Colonel Marco Santini broke away from the small knot of officers standing next to the exit to the metro and came over to her; he limped on his left leg. He was tall, with a mustache that looked like a pair of steel wires and an aquiline nose. He was wearing a tattered trench coat and an Irish flat cap that made him look like a retiree, though if you looked him in the face and studied him closely, it was clear that he was still a dangerous son of a bitch. “How do you feel, Caselli?”

  “They say I’m fine, but I need to think that over.”

  “They gave me something for you.” Santini handed her the bag with the weapons that the soldiers had confiscated from her. “I didn’t know you went around packing a switchblade knife.”

  “It’s a good-luck charm,” she said, stuffing it into her jacket pocket. “And it works better than a four-leaf clover if someone’s busting your balls.”

  “Not exactly a regulation weapon.”

  “Do you have a problem with that?”

  “Not until the day you stab me in the back with it.”

  Colomba clipped the Beretta’s holster to her belt: in relaxed situations, she wore it in the hollow of her back so it was less obvious. In the summer, it was a real pain. “What are the chances that it was just an accident? A chemical leak or something like that?”

  “Zero.” Santini stared at her. “We’ve already received a claim of responsibility. ISIS.”

  5

  In the video, which looked as if it had been shot with a cell phone, there were two men of average build, wearing jeans and dark T-shirts, black hoods, and sunglasses. From the hue of the skin on their arms, it was safe to guess they were Middle Eastern. Young, under thirty, without tattoos or scars on the visible parts of their bodies. Behind them hung a sheet, concealing the rest of the room from view.

  Each thanked their G
od, then expressed a deferential statement of allegiance to the Caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the Iraqi leader of ISIS. They each held a piece of paper in their hands from which they read, looking up from time to time into the lens. They spoke in Italian.

  “We are soldiers of the Islamic State,” the one on the left said into the screen. “We are the ones who struck a blow against a train that is forbidden to our immigrant brothers and frequented instead by the rich men who pay for the war against the true religion.”

  The one on the right spoke up in a deeper voice and with an unmistakably Roman accent. “We’ll never stop fighting against you, whether you’re traveling for pleasure, traveling for work, or sleeping in your beds at home. What we are doing is entirely legitimate in accordance with the law of the Koran. You strike the true believers, you imprison them, you bombard them, and so we now strike back at you.”

  The one on the left: “We shall conquer Rome, we will destroy your crosses, and we will enslave your women with the approval of Allah. You will not feel safe even in your bedrooms.”

  “That is why our faces are covered, so that we can continue to fight until we die as martyrs,” concluded the one on the right.

  The video ended with a graveyard silence. It had played on the liquid-crystal screen of the frequent-traveler club at Termini Station, which was being guarded by men from the Carabinieri Special Operations Group with ski masks over their faces and assault rifles at the ready. Inside, fifty or so higher-ranking officers of the various police forces and army corps were clustered on the lounge sofas with their undulating design. When the lights went back on, they all started talking at the same time, and the carabinieri general who was presiding over the meeting was forced to call for silence. “Gentlemen, one at a time, please.”

  “Do you think that they represent a larger group, or is it just the two of them?” asked a ranking police officer.

  “As of now, one theory is every bit as good as another,” said the general. “As you know, these days any lunatic with an ax to grind proclaims himself to be a soldier of the caliphate. No doubt, this attack demanded a higher level of sophisticated preparation as well as materials that aren’t easy to procure. Therefore, the existence of a connection with the command structure of ISIS remains a distinct possibility.”

  Colomba, who had been standing off to one side, leaning against one of the frosted-glass walls, raised her hand. “Were there sensitive targets aboard the train?”

  A few people elbowed each other at the sight of her, but the general didn’t blink an eye. “No, ma’am, not as far as we know. But the investigation has only just begun.” He looked at them all. “The crisis unit at the Ministry of the Interior has just convened with the prime minister and the minister of the interior. Let me inform you that the terror alert level has been raised to Alpha 1, which—I’ll remind you—means that there is a likelihood of further terror attacks. All police and security forces have been mobilized. Rome has been declared a no-fly zone, and for now, air traffic has been grounded all over the country. Termini Station is also going to remain closed until further orders, and the metro will not be running until the bomb squad has completed the inspection.”

  There was a moment of silence while those present did their best to digest the enormity of the situation. Italy had been transformed into a war zone.

  “What did the terrorists use?” asked the police official from before.

  The general gestured to a woman in a dark skirt suit. This was Roberta Bartone of the Laboratory of Forensic Analysis in Milan, Bart to her friends. Colomba knew how good she was, but she hadn’t expected to run into Bart here. “Dr. Bartone, if you would,” said the general. “Dr. Bartone of the LABANOF is coordinating the examinations of the victims’ corpses.”

  Bart went around behind the counter serving as a podium and connected her laptop to the LCD screen. “Let me warn you, there are going to be some hard-to-stomach pictures here.” She clicked on the space bar, and a photograph appeared: what seemed to be a large spray can wrapped in packing paper. From the nozzle of the tank ran two electric wires connected to a battery-powered timer.

  There was a bit of hubbub as the participants in the meeting shifted around to get a better view; someone in the back objected that he couldn’t see a thing.

  “During the investigation,” Bart said, “the bomb squad found this one-liter compressed-air tank connected to the air-conditioning system.” With that, the screen changed to a photo depicting an open panel in the wall of the train: behind the panel door ran electric cables and rubber tubing. “At eleven-thirty-five p.m., an electric solenoid valve was activated, allowing the tank to release the gas it contained into the interior of the Top Class carriage. The solenoid valve was connected to a Nokia 105 of French origin, a burner phone, which most likely received a call from another burner phone. The techs are looking into it.”

  Bart clicked. The screen showed an overall picture of the carriage taken from the door through which Colomba had entered. The first bodies could be seen clearly. Bart clicked again, flipping forward through pictures of the dead bodies. There was murmuring from the audience. “The gas took effect almost immediately after being inhaled, causing convulsions, release of the sphincters, and internal hemorrhaging.”

  Another click. Now the old man with the walking stick appeared.

  “Even though it looks like an attack, the wound is self-inflicted, caused by convulsions on the verge of death. From the appearance of the bodies and the rapidity of the onset of death, the directors of the NBC at first hypothesized a nerve gas of some kind, either VX or Sarin. That is why they chose to implement the protocol that calls for total isolation of the affected area. Upon my arrival on the scene, however, and from a preliminary examination of the corpses, I noticed light-red precocious hypostases.”

  Click. The pinkish patch on the bare back of one of the corpses on the autopsy table.

  “And I noticed the brilliance of the blood.”

  Click. A patch of blood on one of the seats.

  A policeman hastily exited through the automatic doors, his hands over his mouth.

  “This made me think of something other than nerve gas,” Bart went on, “and in a certain sense, more classical, a hypothesis that later proved accurate after further examination of the samples.” She paused. “Cyanide,” she finally said with a faint quaver.

  Click. A diagram of a molecule.

  “Prussic acid, or hydrogen cyanide, in a gaseous form,” she went on in a firmer voice. “As many of you must know, cyanide acts by processing the iron in the cells and interrupting the chain of respiration. The victims die in convulsions, because the oxygen is no longer transported by the red globules to the tissues. They suffocate even though they continue to breathe. The oxygen remains in the blood, which therefore appears much brighter than normal.”

  Click. A picture of a Top Class window.

  “The carriage dispersed the airborne gas through the door and the cracks in the windows, assisted by the movement of the train and by the depressurizing action produced while passing through tunnels.”

  Click. The dead conductor.

  “There was still a highly toxic concentration of gas when the conductor opened the doors, and unfortunately, he was exposed to a dose that proved fatal. Luckily, at that point, the cyanide dispersed further into the surrounding air, even though the Railway Police officer who performed the first inspection absorbed a sufficient amount to suffer respiratory problems, and he collapsed while on his way home. He eventually received medical attention, but the prognosis is still uncertain.”

  There was another wave of murmuring. Bart paused while the carabinieri general once again asked for silence, and Colomba thought of Dante Alighieri’s law of the contrappasso, or poetic justice, a fitting comeuppance for the lazy slacker from the Railway Police. If he’d just stayed at his post, he would have been surrounded by medical professionals.

  “In any case,” Bart went on, “all the people who entered into con
tact with the corpses and the carriage were administered a Cyanokit prophylaxis. Aside from some nausea or headaches, they should suffer no medical problems.”

  “Why did the gas spread only through the first carriage?” asked the general after studying the pictures.

  “Because we were lucky.”

  Click. A rough sketch of a series of tubes that looked to Colomba as if it had been sketched out on a sheet of paper with a pen, which was probably exactly what it was. “You see the red circle? That marks the location of an air exchanger that splits the flow of air between Top Class and the other carriages.” Bart used a pen to point to another, smaller circle. “The tank was connected here, two inches downstream from this exchange in the air-conditioning system. If the attackers had connected the tank just upstream from the air exchanger, the gas would have spread through all the cars in the train, including the engineer’s cabin. The death count would have been a great deal higher.”

  There were other questions, but Colomba’s headache had turned into a throbbing vise grip, and she left the room to get a breath of fresh air.

  Maurizio Curcio caught up with her just outside the door a few seconds later and lit a cigarette. He was the chief of the Mobile Squad, and ever since Colomba had returned to active duty seven months ago, relations between them had been unfailingly cordial. “Everything all right?” he asked. He had recently shaved his mustache, and Colomba still hadn’t gotten used to it: his curved upper lip gave him a perennially ironic appearance, almost malevolent.

  “I’m just a little bit dopey. Any chance of finding out where the cyanide came from?”

  “It won’t be easy, according to the doctor. It’s homemade, not industrial. Derived from plants that can grow anywhere, called the Prunus lauro-something-or-other.”

  “Prunus laurocerasus,” said Colomba, who had had one of those bushes in her garden when she was stationed in Palermo. “The cherry laurel.” It had been the only green plant she’d managed to keep from dying immediately. “ISIS has a laboratory somewhere in Italy, then.”