Kill the King Read online

  One of the SIS agents had accompanied him through the room, using an LED flashlight to illuminate the darker corners during their tour. Two private security guards were sprawled on the steps of the central monumental staircase: one had a crushed Adam’s apple, the other had a broken neck. The SIS agents pointed out that both men had been killed by someone using their bare hands, someone who really knew what they were doing. Santini hadn’t paid much attention to them, or maybe he had. His brain, to be honest, was little more than a bowl of mush, right then and there.

  The upper floor was basically a narrow colonnade that ran along the main wall, furnished more or less like the VIP area of a discotheque. The furniture was all made of garishly colored plastic, the rooms divided by glass partitions that had been shattered into smithereens. Everything was covered with rubble and dust.

  In one of those rooms, a young man sprawled with his neck resting on the jagged edge of a jutting piece of glass from one of the shattered partitions, nicely dressed and practically decapitated by the razor-sharp shard. In front of him, two other security guards spread-eagled in the sloppy positions of death. The white jumpsuit had pointed to a patch of blood on the ground. “Your colleague was right here,” he’d told Santini. And for an instant Santini had secretly hoped that Colomba had been killed instantly, sparing him the headaches that were in the offing.

  Alberti knocked on the doorjamb, bringing him back to the present day. “Your ride is here, boss,” he said.

  “Any updates?”

  Alberti shook his head. “Just the confirmation.”

  The espresso from the little Moka pot still scorched Santini’s stomach lining, while a civilian automobile with a blinking emergency light on the roof conveyed him to the military airport. Two NOA agents, members of the counterterrorism operational units, with ski masks and submachine guns, escorted him to the landing strip where an Italian Navy NH90 NFH helicopter stood, engines silent. It was a behemoth almost sixty-five feet long with a crew of three, and it could carry as many as twenty passengers. Standing next to the helicopter’s open side hatch was Colonel Di Marco, and Santini had a moment of disheartenment. He’d been hoping against hope that he wouldn’t have to deal with the man, but he should have known the whole time that Di Marco wouldn’t miss out on the final act. Di Marco was a few years older than Santini, and he was straight as a walking stick and every bit as malleable. He wore a loden overcoat that was too light for the season, and he left it unbuttoned, revealing a dark blue three-piece suit with a regimental necktie. He extended his hand.

  “Colonel Santini. How’s it going with your leg?”

  “Painfully. Are we traveling in this beast?”

  “Yes, we are, unless you have a problem with airsickness,” Di Marco replied, turning his back on him and climbing aboard. The pilot saluted him. “We’re going to swing by to pick up Caselli,” he said. “Fasten your seat belt.”

  7

  At two in the morning, the NH90 landed on the roof of the Portico hospital, after awakening half the population of the little town. Many of the townsfolk assumed that war had broken out and they jammed the local emergency response phone lines. In the meantime, Colomba was summoned from a military jeep and escorted to the service elevator. Up on the roof, the helicopter’s whirling rotors filled the air with ice dust. The beast was enormous, a roaring prehistoric monster flashing dazzlingly in the night. A soldier from the crew that had escorted her helped Colomba into the helicopter and made sure she fastened her seat belt.

  Santini was sitting at the far end of the row of empty seats. Di Marco, in the cabin with the pilots, turned to look at her, and Colomba stifled her urge to wipe that smug little smile off his face with a windmill of punches. They took off fast, far faster than any civilian aircraft, and Colomba felt as if her stomach had been left on the ground. Portico dwindled until it became a patch of yellow lights in the mist. The helicopter’s windows iced over, the sky became a slab of gray slate, the moon turned small and pale. As soon as they were out of the zone of turbulence and bad weather, Colomba undid her seat belt and moved over next to Santini. He’d lost weight since they’d last met, his face was lined with new wrinkles, and his mustache was felted and gray. She lifted his earmuffs and shouted into his ear. “So did your boyfriend tell you anything about the corpse?”

  “No, and he’s not a friend of mine,” Santini replied in the same fashion and tone of voice. He noticed the cut on her lip, and her extreme weight loss. “How are you?”

  “Living healthy. How about you, with all your new gold braid?”

  “Tired.”

  “Then why don’t you quit, too? You could use a little rest. So, where did they find the boat?”

  “Have you ever heard of Keith Reef?”

  “It’s the part of the Skerki Banks that’s closest to the surface,” Colomba replied. She’d been an avid scuba fisher for many years.

  “The reef rises to just a foot under the water’s surface. The Chourmo didn’t have its sonar running, or else maybe Bonaccorso fell asleep at the helm. Whatever the explanation, he ran into the reef and sank.”

  “Like a fool.”

  “Quandoque bonus dormitat Homerus,” Santini said, spouting an old Latin adage. “Even good old Homer—”

  “—nods off from time to time. Maybe Homer, but not Leo. Who found the boat?”

  “The Libyan Navy. They identified the wreck and were kind enough to inform us. What with all the boats we’ve given them lately, they’ve started to become more collegial.” He put a cigarette in his mouth, but he didn’t try to light it. “The boat has been there since right after Venice.”

  The blood drained out of Colomba’s face. “Are you sure of that?”

  “That’s what I’ve been told.”

  “By your boyfriend.”

  “He’s not my friend, I already told you that. But it’s credible, don’t you think? We thought that Bonaccorso had superpowers, but instead he just chose the wrong course setting.”

  Colomba went back to her seat and pretended to sleep.

  They landed at the military presidio near the port of Pantelleria and were transferred to an Italian Navy tugboat. They saw nothing of the island itself, except for the coastline receding into the distance. Still, Colomba remembered spending a very nice vacation there when she’d still been in the police academy. She was reminded of the lights of Cape Bon in Tunisia glittering on nighttime water, the pools of the natural hot springs, the African vegetation. The tugboat jolted them over the waves until the sun rose, and before their eyes emerged Keith Reef and the ships patrolling it. Colomba had been pressed against the side of the ship the whole time, doing her best not to vomit. It was almost hot by now, and the top half of a dead dolphin was pounding against the rocks, emitting the stench of rot.

  They boarded the Comsubin support ship—Comsubin being the Italian Navy’s elite frogman special forces unit. Sticking out over the water was the mechanical arm from which the Rover, a small remotely operated submarine, dangled on a bundle of cables. The Rover was used to explore shipwrecks and clear underwater minefields.

  On the main deck, they passed by four scuba divers, who were being helped by a small knot of technicians into high-pressure diving suits. Hanging from the winches on the decks, they looked like so many gigantic black toy robots, with globular joints and heads. Colomba barely even noticed them. Her anxiety was devouring all her energy, and she could barely stand upright. She would rather have been back in Tommy’s bedroom, she’d have preferred to bury her own parents’ dead bodies with her bare hands, a thousand times—anything would have been better than this. But what she’d experienced the day before was already starting to fade, erased by a past that never seemed to be over.

  Aside from the Comsubin escort, they also saw a small cluster of officers in battle dress on the bridge, including the vessel’s commander and the medical officer. From the way they approached Di Marco, there was no doubt that he had the higher rank. A monitor displayed imagery of the h
ull of the Chourmo, illuminated by the Rover’s floodlights.

  “Where’s the body?” Colomba asked even before they were done shaking hands.

  “On the far side of the wreck,” the commander replied.

  “Have you identified it?”

  “The condition of the body makes that impossible, at least remotely, Deputy Captain,” said the medical officer.

  “I want to see it.”

  “In a few hours, we’ll start recovery.”

  “I want to see it now, not in a few hours.”

  Di Marco resolved the impasse by ordering the commander to stop making problems. Santini, who hadn’t given him so much as a glance throughout the entire journey, shot the other man a look of frank appreciation that Di Marco pretended not to see. The sailor at the console twisted the joystick and the image shifted accordingly, sliding along the side of the hull. It appeared to be intact, in spite of the blanket of deep-sea tangle, kelp, and sargassum that covered it. The real damage started at the screws in the stern: the starboard screw was completely gone, and where the propeller ought to have been was a gash in the keel, while the port screw was bent like a dried flower.

  “This is the point of impact,” said the commander. “The engine shaft hit the reef and the vessel immediately began to take on water. The scuba divers will enter through there, enlarging the hole in the sheet metal with hydraulic jacks. Still, from up here, we can at least zoom in.”

  The gash in the hull widened on the screens, becoming the access portal to a gravity-free world infested with seaweed and posidonia plants. Tables and electric appliances hung from the ceiling—actually the floor—while a mattress and a lounge chair floated amid the thickets of underwater vegetation and lengths of fabric that had once been sheets or curtains. There were schools of small fluorescent fish and mollusks slithering slowly along, trying to escape from the beam of light. Out of the silt and muck, glass bottles and unrecognizable metal instruments stuck up here and there.

  Colomba held her breath. The picture stabilized on a heap of rotting material from which protruded a number of greenish bones. It was the torso of a skeleton filled with multicolored jellyfish. Frightened by the glare of the floodlights, they pumped hastily away in all directions, revealing the skull, sunken in the chest cavity. From the eye sockets hung filaments of seaweed tossing like eyelids in the underwater current. Some kind of eyeless eel was crawling over the cranium, emitting clouds of mucus.

  Colomba’s teeth bit into her lip, reopening the wound there. Was that Dante? Could those really be his late lamented remains? She turned to the medical officer who had been standing beside her in grim silence, with his uniform cap wedged under his arm. “Doctor, were you given Dante Torre’s medical chart?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “So you really can’t tell if …” For a moment her voice failed her. “If that’s him?”

  “It’s very hard to do by video feed. But let me take a look.” He zoomed in on the skeleton. “From the bone mass I’d have to say it’s probably a man.” He zoomed in further. “From the cranial sutures he could have been somewhere between forty and fifty years of age.”

  “So this could be Torre every bit as much as it could be Bonaccorso,” said Santini, opening his mouth for the first time.

  “Or any of millions of other people,” said Colomba, who just couldn’t take her eyes off the screen as she searched for even the slightest sign that could help her. Dante had a deformed hand, but the skeleton had lost both of its hands.

  “Let’s see if the sonar can give us any help,” said the medical officer. Colomba and Santini both learned that the Rover was capable of performing 3-D scans with extreme precision, down to fractions of an inch, a technique that was usually used for underwater mines. The medical officer rotated the image on the screen. “This skeleton had neck problems. The third and fourth cervical vertebrae are collapsed.”

  “What symptoms would that entail?”

  “Pain, and in serious cases, lesions on the bone marrow.”

  “That’s not Dante,” said Colomba with a sigh of relief. “He climbs trees and leaps in the air like a monkey.”

  “Could it be the other son of a bitch?” asked Santini.

  “No. He was pretty agile, too.” Colomba managed to get out those words in a neutral tone. She relived in a flash her first encounter with Leo, during a police search of a mosque in Rome. He’d been wearing a ski mask like all the other NOA agents, but what had captured her attention was his gaze, with a foundation of irony and common sense. What she ought to have done, though, was claw his eyes out, not smile at him.

  Di Marco snapped her out of her reverie. “Then we’ve found another member of the terror cell,” he said. “Good.”

  “So he, too, cheerfully immolated himself in the name of his god,” Colomba said sarcastically.

  “Don’t be childish, Deputy Captain,” said Di Marco. “Begin the recovery.”

  It took more than six hours for the divers to empty the vessel. Colomba spent that time between the bridge and the deck where the winch and mechanical arm was hauling up watertight coffin shapes made of black polycarbonate and as big as steamer trunks, evidence containers that had been sent down with the divers. They were opened by a crew of auxiliary technicians and the contents were then transferred to other, smaller containers, sterile and painstakingly cataloged. Even the water in the containers was collected and assigned the number from the original container.

  The skeleton came up on the first trip, followed by wreckage, bric-a-brac, and navigation equipment. Then came a number of intact wooden crates. They contained flasks of colorful liquids that were treated as if they were radioactive, test tubes, and bottles: it looked as if they’d cleared out Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory. The last crate contained nothing other than the remains of a man’s black suit, the one that Dante had been wearing the day he’d vanished. There was also a single black leather glove.

  Colomba leaned against the walls of the ship and vomited.

  8

  As always, they’d scared her dogs silly when they’d come to get her. The Doberman pinscher had started running frantically through the courtyard, disturbing her neighbors just at the time of night they were watching TV, and Deputy Captain Bartone had once again cursed the arrogance of the military, which preferred to land without warning in her backyard, submachine guns leveled, or at her lab at LABANOF, Milan’s Laboratory of Forensic Analysis, instead of simply making a phone call or sending a cab to pick her up. Since Venice, it had become a regular occurrence, at least a couple of times a month, the instant a fragment of uncataloged bone surfaced, or a stain on the clothing of this victim or that. She was proud to be the Ministry of Defense’s trusted forensic archaeologist, but she would rather have spent her time working on the dozens of nameless corpses that filled the morgue’s freezer compartments under her office. Restoring their identities, allowing their relatives and friends to get on with their lives—that was far more important to her than tending to Di Marco’s whims and obsessions. She would gladly have told him no, if it hadn’t been for Dante. Ever since the day that Bart had been summoned, during the investigation into the Father’s victims, to analyze the contents of a number of drums filled with acid and human body fragments, Dante and Colomba had practically become family to her.

  They transferred her to the Comsubin tugboat with a thermal blanket wrapped around her shoulders, and trembling with cold she’d found Santini waiting for her. Bart decided that he was aging in dog years, seven times as fast as other human beings. In just a couple of years, he’d gone from being a rough, tough no-nonsense cop with chest hair sprouting out of his shirt to a sort of elderly uncle, skinnier and clearly suffering from his wounded leg. With that inevitable Irish tweed flat cap pulled down over his nose. “Buongiorno, Doc,” he said to her, extending his hand.

  “Same to you, Santini. Do you happen to have an extra cigarette?”

  The policeman handed her one and brought her up to date on th
e recovery process. The divers were still at work: they were inserting enormous airbags into the hull, and by inflating them they’d bring the ship to the surface.

  “How is Colomba?” Bart asked.

  Santini shook his head. “She doesn’t believe it’s Dante.”

  “She might be right,” Bart said as she exhaled a cloud of smoke.

  “I hope you find something among the remains that can convince her.”

  Bart shook her head, disheartened. She really didn’t know what to hope for. Not finding anything would mean leaving Colomba’s hopes in place, but she didn’t think that was particularly good for her.

  Colomba stepped out on the main deck, and Bart had to make an effort to smile at her. She hadn’t seen her in six months, since she’d paid an ill-considered visit to her in “Culonia,” the ass end of nowhere, as they all thought of it, and Colomba had uttered no more than ten words in the whole time she’d stayed. Even now, she was still pale and skinny, bundled up in a fake fur coat that would have looked right on a homeless person, her eyes glistening, dark circles beneath them. Santini slapped Colomba on the back and strode away without a word, and she rubbed the spot as if a seagull had just pooped on her. “Hey,” Bart said to her and gave her a hug, pretending not to notice the stench of sweat. Colomba had boarded the helicopter without so much as a change of T-shirt. “God, you’re so skinny, do you ever eat anything?”