Gregg Loomis: The Coptic Secret

Then he heard it again, a scuffling, scraping sound, the sound of shoe leather on pavement.

They were on the Alfa almost before Lang saw them, four men, each carrying something.

He hardly had time to guess what before the night was shredded with gunfire. Four sets of muzzle flashes burned into Lang's retinas as his ears rang with what must have been hundreds of rounds from automatic weapons.

Like a living creature, the Alfa shuddered under the impact of the fusillade, bullets shattering glass and piercing metal The little car seemed to utter a death shudder as it sank on bare rims from which the tires had been shredded.

The storm of gunfire passed as quickly as it had begun. Quiet pressed on Lang's eardrums, relieved only by the hissing of a punctured radiator. The pulsating wail of a siren was growing stronger. There would be no time for the would-be killers to verify their work.

From the shadows in which he had hidden the second time he had gotten out of the car, he watched as the gates across the street swung slowly open to allow the silhouettes of four men entry.

Up and down the street, lights were coming on. The curious and foolhardy were wandering outside. Questions were shouted into the dark.

"I'd say you've gotten your proof."

Lang flinched. He hadn't heard Jacob come up from his post downhill. "I'd say. Now we go to the second part of the plan."

Jacob placed a hand on Lang's shoulder, gently moving him away from the hole-riddled Alfa. "We'd best get along before the coppers show up."

Thirty Minutes Later

Deputy Chief Police Inspector Hanaratti put a hand to his eyes to shade them from the glare of the lights arranged around the ruins of what had been an Alfa Romeo Spyder, the sort of car the inspector would have lusted after twenty years, three children and an ex-wife ago. It was so much scrap metal now. Not a square centimeter of the once sleek coachwork that didn't have a bullet hole in it. Fortunate for the driver he had escaped; he would not have survived the hailstorm of lead.

Hanaratti scowled. This looked very much like a botched Mafia job. Personally, he couldn't care less how many mafiosi bodies littered the streets. Good riddance to bad garbage. The problem was, one shooting usually begat another and another. The criminals could go to mattress as they called it, but the unaware civilian too often got caught in the cross fire.

And a strange location, too. One of the city's more upscale neighborhoods and right across the street from the Piazza dei Cavalieri di Malta. Could the shooting be related to the fact the order was having some sort of meeting? Like any good policeman, the inspector was suspicious of coincidences.

But it would be absurd to see a connection between some church order and organized crime, particularly the Mafia, which the church had denounced for centuries. He dismissed the idea but it stubbornly refused to vanish.

There was something else tiptoeing around the perimeter of his mind, like a man wary of stepping onto a floor of rotted wood. What…?

"No one inside heard the shots, Inspector."

Hanaratti had not noticed that Manicci was standing beside him. "It seems those old walls deafen a lot of sound," the junior inspector said.

It would take walls a lot thicker to prevent the sound of so much gunfire, Hanaratti thought sourly. The precinct had gotten telephone calls from as far as nearly a kilometer away. The priestly members of the order should set a better example than trying to evade cooperating with an investigation, no matter how important their meeting.

The priests.

The thought stirred something, an idea a little less reticent to step forward.

"From the license plate, we have learned the car was rented," Manicci continued.

We? Hanaratti thought. The inspector was a master of claiming credit due others, equally adept at passing along blame like a soup bowl too hot to hold. The perfect bureaucrat but not someone Hanaratti would have chosen for this particularly brazen crime. But he didn't get to choose with whom he worked. Manicci was married to the daughter of the chief inspector's wife's first cousin.

In Italy, nepotism was a matter of family pride.

"We have already located the Hertz office and the manager will meet one of my men there to ascertain the name of the person renting it."

Opportunity knocked.

"One of your men? It is too important to entrust to an underling. Go yourself."

Hanaratti tried not to smile as he savored the disappointment on Manicci's face at being banished from the crime scene where he might seize the accolades for someone's discovery of an important bit of evidence. It was only as he was watching Manicci reluctantly climb into the blue and white Fiat that the idea he had been toying with solidified.

Priests.

A religious order.

It had been only a few weeks since that Greek Orthodox priest had been fished out of the Tiber after Hanaratti had investigated some sort of gun battle at his apartment near the Vatican.

Connection?

Tenuous at best, but priests were not the type one would ordinarily connect with violent acts, certainly not as perpetrators and usually not as victims.

Coincidences.

"Inspector?"

One of the uniforms was at his elbow.

"We have just received a report that the car, the Alfa there, was stolen from near the Pantheon."

Hanaratti felt his gut clinch as he saw the most obvious clue in this shooting begin to fade. "Stolen?"

"Yes, sir. It was rented to an American who is staying at a hotel near there."

"When?"

The officer looked confused. "

"'When'?"

The deputy chief inspector swallowed the urge to scream at the man. "When was it stolen?"

The policeman shrugged. "The American doesn't know. He went into a restaurant and when he came out, the car was gone."

Perfect.

At least Hanaratti would have the pleasure of assigning Manicci to a mundane car theft. After all, it was connected to a shooting, and interviewing the American would keep the junior inspector out of the main investigation for at least half of tomorrow.

Even misfortune had its bright side.

Piazza dei Cavalieri di Malta

Aventine Hill

The Next Morning

It had taken most of the morning for Lang and Jacob to find a truck from the electrician they had seen entering the piazza yesterday. A few euro liberally spread among the two-man crew and Lang and Jacob were dressed in the same coveralls as the two legitimate workers. A little more money and the van was in front of the wooden gates, honking for admission.

The one electrician who spoke English was explaining in Italian that they were here to check on yesterday's job and, no, there would be no additional costs involved for the service. Once inside, Lang and Jacob, toolboxes in hand, split up to explore the multiwindowed gray stone building.

Their hopes the uniforms would give them the invisibility of anonymity proved to be correct. Cooks, serving personnel as well as a few workmen filled the hallways with good-natured confusion. The five-year meeting of the council had the air of a country fair. No one gave the two electricians a second look.

The larger offices were deserted, leaving only what Lang guessed was salaried administrative staff. Members and officials would be attending the meeting of the grand council in the church next door.

Jacob peered around the corner of the largest office either he or Lang had found. "Boss's digs, I'd bet."

Standing in the hall, Lang nervously looked both ways. "So?"

"So, we take a look."

Jacob was inside while Lang stood sentry in the hall.

Jacob picked up the phone on the desk, pushing all four buttons on its base one by one. Nodding as though confirming an undivulged theory, he followed the line to the wall plug, where he inserted an instrument resembling a thermometer.