Blood Rain - 7 Read Online Free Page A

Giulio had so invitingly put it.
    Almost every aspect of this cover story had turned out to be untrue. For a start, the new ‘élite corps’ did not exist, or rather it existed already in the form of the Direzione Investigated Anti-Mafia , set up in 1995 by Judge Giovanni Falcone with the collaboration of the then Minister of Justice, Claudio Martelli. Aurelio Zen had not been invited to join this group, and not surprisingly, since it consisted of young, keen, energetic volunteers from the country’s three separate police forces. Nevertheless, he was being posted to Sicily, he had learned shortly after his return to Rome following the false close he had achieved in the Vincenzo affair. In what role, however, remained for the moment ambiguous.
    ‘Essentially, you’re to act as a facilitator,’ Zen’s immediate superior had told him before his departure from Rome. ‘Needless to say, the DIA are doing admirable work, on the whole. Nevertheless, there is a growing feeling abroad that, like every élite division, they sometimes exhibit a regrettable and perhaps potentially perilous tendency towards a … How shall I put it? A degree of professional myopia. There have been instances, some quite recently, when they have regretfully been perceived to be acting without due consultation, and in apparent ignorance of the wider issues involved.’
    The official paused, awaiting Zen’s response. At length, realizing that it would not be forthcoming, he continued.
    ‘With the aforesaid factors in mind, a decision has been made at ministerial level to deploy a pool of mature and experienced officials such as yourself to liaise directly with members of the Polizia Statale seconded to the DIA. Your role will be firstly to report to us here at the Viminale on the nature and scope of DIA initiatives, both current and planned, secondly to monitor the response of all local personnel to ensuing governmental directives, and thirdly to communicate these in turn to Rome, all with a view to expediting an efficient and unproblematic implementation of official policy Do you understand?’
    Zen understood only too well: he was being asked to act as a spy. The position of Head of Post in each DIA office was allocated in turn to a representative of one of the police forces involved, each responsible to a different ministry in Rome: Defence, Finance, or Interior. The novelty of the DIA was that it had been set up from the first as a cooperative venture involving all three forces, and had been specifically designed to function independently of any ministerial interference.
    At the time, in the wake of the bloodbath initiated by the Corleone clan, and the killings of General Dalla Chiesa and the judges Falcone and Borsellino, it would have been politically unthinkable for any interested party to try to limit or control that independence. But times had changed. The Mafia had apparently been broken, with all but a few of its top capi jailed or in hiding, and there had been no large-scale outbreaks of violence for several years. Clearly someone in Rome, possibly several people, felt that the moment was now propitious to rein in this too-efficient and semi-autonomous organization. Even the public seemed to be starting to feel that enough was enough. Where would it all end? Were we to bring back the Inquisition?
    It was in this new climate of covert consensus that Aurelio Zen had been sent south, and not to Syracuse but to Catania, the island’s second-largest city and a stronghold of various Mafia clans who had long resented the power, fame and influence of their rivals — and sometimes uneasy allies — in Palermo. The office of the DIA responsible for the provincia di Catania was presently commanded by a colonel of the paramilitary Carabinieri, whose ultimate loyalties — in the event of any inter-ministerial disputes — lay with his superiors at the Ministry of Defence. The new political appointees at the rival Interior Ministry wanted their own