Costa 08 - City of Fear Read Online Free

help. It was boring, necessary labor, and Peroni was glad he had good company for the job: Rosa Prabakaran, an experienced
agente
who was quickly turning into one of the most intelligent and reliable officers in the Questura team; and a genial trainee, Mirko Oliva, a bright young man from Turin newly transferred from uniform to plainclothes duties.
    Only Oliva, starry-eyed still with the eagerness of youth, managed to look enthusiastic after five futile responses to calls that, for the most part, had been sparked by nothing more than the innocent presence of foreigners of Middle Eastern origin. Terrorism, for the masses, still meant something from
outside
Italy; their memories, it seemed to Peroni, were mercifully short at times.
    Now the three of them were no more than a ten-minute walk from the point at which Batisti had been kidnapped. The address they’d been given lay in a dark narrow lane to one side of the Quirinale, running from the Barberini Palace to the busy tunnel that traveled beneath the palace gardens to emerge near the Trevi Fountain. Peroni could see a phalanx of buses fighting for space at the foot of the street so that they could discharge their cargoes of tourists.
    “What are we looking for this time?” Oliva asked. He was twenty-three, stocky like a rugby player, with close-cropped black hair and bright blue eyes.
    “You’re supposed to remember these things, Mirko,” Rosa Prabakaran scolded him. “Not keep relying on your colleagues.”
    “Sorry. I wish we were doing something
important.”
    “This is important,” Peroni insisted. He looked at his notebook. “Or it might be.”
    It was more than thirty years since Gianni Peroni joined the police, but he could still remember the impetuousness he’d felt in the early days.
    Rosa Prabakaran was beyond that stage already. A slim, elegant young woman, born in Rome to Indian parents, she was dressed in a severe gray suit, the uniform of an ambitious young officer keen to take astep up to
sovrintendente
. Rosa was something of an enigma within the Questura: self-assured, striking, with a round, dark face, intelligent brown eyes, and—a deliberate sign, Peroni thought, of her heritage—the smallest of gold studs in her snub nose. She never mixed with her colleagues, never talked about anything personal, relationships least of all. When the work was there, she was always the last to leave. When she was off duty, no one had any idea what she did, or with whom.
    “We had a phone call from someone called Moro,” Rosa told the young trainee, giving Peroni a meaningful look, one that said he ought to comment upon Oliva’s sluggishness one day. “He lives on the ground floor. He thinks he saw two suspicious-looking foreigners going up the stairs.”
    “How does someone look ‘suspicious’?” Oliva wondered.
    It seemed, to Peroni, a very good question.

4
    THE MAN PERONI REGARDED AS ONE OF HIS CLOSEST friends was only a few hundred meters away at that moment, standing outside the Palazzo del Quirinale at the summit of the hill, almost dizzy with memories. Nic Costa was just starting to look his thirty years—slim, athletically built, dark-faced and handsome, his manner still diffident, with a quiet charm bordering on shyness, but sufficient professional steel to have gained him promotion to the rank of
sovrintendente
. As the three police officers waited for clearance into the presidential palace, Costa scarcely noticed Inspector Leo Falcone and the Questura
commissario
Vincenzo Esposito next to him. He’d been through the tightly guarded entrance of the Quirinale once before, as a child, when his father, Marco, a communist politician, had taken him on a private visit “to see how the enemy live.” The place had seemed huge and fascinating, like some magical fortress from a fairy tale, one guarded by the armored figures of the Corazzieri, the presidential guard, tall men with shining swords and glittering breastplates who seemed to tower above