David Hewson - The Sacred Cut

“It isn’t just this memo, Nic. It’s what’s in here too. My dad knew this guy. I vaguely remember him coming to our house. A big, noisy man, all laughter and presents. Loud. And scary too. He was sort of the boss, I think. You can hear it in the tone of this memo. He’s the guy who’s leading this assignment, assembling the teams, taking them into action. My dad with him.”

Cases went bad when they began to bite into your own private life. Nic knew that only too well from his own experience.

“Are you sure? That your father was a part of this?”

“Absolutely. There’s a whole chunk of 1991 when he wasn’t around. I remember it clearly. I’m an only child. They notice things like that. He was gone and while he was away you could touch the atmosphere in that apartment the embassy gave us. Everything felt so odd. I’ve tried to talk to my mom about it and all she says is he was away somewhere, working.”

“Maybe he was.”

“I don’t doubt it. Now I know where. And I know it did something to him, too. When he came back he was… different. He’d changed. Something had marked him. He wasn’t…”

She hesitated, determined to be precise about this last point.

“He wasn’t the same dad anymore. A part of him-the good part, all the life and joy-had gone. He was cold and unhappy. It wasn’t long and he was gone too. Out of the house, talking to the divorce lawyers. There was just my mom and me and a lot-I mean a lot -of bad feeling.”

“I’m sorry.”

Emily Deacon was waving a hand at him in embarrassment. “OK, OK. I know what you’re thinking. This is just a run-of-the-mill family break-up I’m trying to rationalize by blaming it on something else. First point: Bill Kaspar murdered my dad. No arguments there. I knew that without a doubt when I looked into his face and watched him trying to decide whether to kill me, too. Second point: yes, I do want to know why, but it’s not just for me. It’s for all of them. Whatever brought him to kill my dad was the same thing that brought him to kill those others. Knowing that will solve this case for everyone.”

He could see what she’d been through, getting scarred twice over. By the change in her father when she was a kid and by his death a few months ago. Nonetheless there was a strong, rational line in her argument. Emily Deacon could tough it through the pain, or so she thought.

“We need proof, Emily,” he said.

She fired up a Web browser, hammering in a flurry of words. “And you don’t just get it from hacking embassy computer systems. Sometimes it’s waiting out there on the Web. Take a look at this and see what you think.”

Costa vaguely recognized what he was now looking at. It was a newsgroup, one of those anonymous bulletin boards the surveillance people regularly browsed for raw intelligence. There was a short message starting a thread with the title “Babylon Sisters.” The first entry, the one opening the discussion, had been posted on 30 September.

Emily Deacon stared at the screen and said without emotion, “I found this just by looking on the Net. It’s public and it’s meant to be. Someone put it there for a reason. The memo tells you what Babylon Sisters meant. It was the code name for the operation. My guess is that Babylon was the closest notable location to where they were headed. The name’s from an old rock song my dad liked. Maybe Kaspar had the same tastes. And here it is thirteen years later. Think of the timing, Nic. This was posted three days after my dad was murdered.”

He looked at the first message on the screen and hated what he saw, felt tainted by the craziness of the language.

The Scarlet Beast was a generous beast. Honor his memory. Fuck China. Fuck the ziggurat. Let’s get together again back in the old places, folks. Reunion time for the class of “91. Just one spare place at the table. You coming or not?

“You get this kind of crap everywhere on the Net, Emily.”

“Of course. It’s meant to sound like that. Whoever wrote that message doesn’t want it to mean anything to anyone but Bill Kaspar. They know what Kaspar’s like. They know that, from time to time, he’s going to walk up to a PC somewhere in the world, fire up a search engine and type in two words: ”Babylon Sisters.“ Sooner or later he’s going to hit on this. Sooner or later he’s going to respond. Which he does. Read the second message.”

Nic hit the key for the next window.

Lying fuckhead, treasonable, cowardly scum. I’ve waited long enough now. “Bill Kaspar” my ass. This is the real thing. Fear not. There will be a reunion. And soon. Pray we don’t meet.

The reply was dated that morning, signed, simply, “killthem@killthemall.com.”

“It could be Kaspar sending messages to himself,” Costa suggested. The language sounded like the kind of internal argument that might lurk inside the brain of someone who could dismember a woman, park her head in front of the TV to make a room look “normal,” then smear the walls with her blood in a strange, repeating pattern, over and over again. “He’s crazy enough.”

“Why wait more than three months before answering yourself? What’s more, consider this: at eleven this morning, just after Kaspar’s reply got posted, Leapman ordered a couple of the five security guys I never knew existed out onto the street. Want to bet where they’re looking? Net cafes, just to see if he can’t resist the bait second time round. You see what’s happening?”

He could and he wondered if they appreciated how futile it was likely to be. The city was full of places, large and small, where you could wander in off the street and buy fifteen minutes online. Five men couldn’t cover every last Net cafe, moneychanger and bookshop in Rome.

“Would Leapman write something like this?”

She shook her head slowly, deliberately, and he couldn’t stop himself watching the way her soft blonde hair moved. “No need to. We have specialists to do that. Someone from profiling maybe, who’s got access to files I don’t possess. The syntax is very deliberate and direct. Maybe Kaspar is a good ol” boy or something or maybe they just copied it from that first memo I showed you. Though I doubt it. If they knew that was still around on the system my guess is they’d have erased it.“

There were so many possibilities here. Costa wished his head were in better working order to consider them, to separate speculation from fact.

“We need to discuss this with someone. Your people. Mine. Maybe there’s something here. Or maybe we’re just seeing what we want to see.”

“Oh, Nic.” Her hand brushed his arm. There was a flash of a white smile. “You really don’t understand what we’re dealing with, do you? My people know . I think a good few of yours do, too.”

Not Falcone, though, Costa thought. He was sure of that. It just wasn’t the inspector’s style.

“Finish reading,” she ordered quietly. “Leapman’s man came back for a third try.”

He scrolled down and read the third message, posted at noon, again from “WillFK@whitehouse.gov.”

Well hang me high and stretch me wide. Just when you think you made somethin“ idiot-proof they come along and invent a better idiot. Can’t keep those fingers still, can you, Billy Boy? All this cuttin‘ has turned your mind, brother. Call home, brother. Reel yourself in. Nothin” smells worse than an old soldier gone bad. There’s mercy waiting here if only you got the sense to ask for it. Least that way you get to stay alive.

Oh and by the by. What did Laura Lee ever do to you, man? She took a bullet in all that mess back then. So how come she gets dead now and Little Em walks away without a scratch? You turn weakling when there’s a WASP around? Or are you just going soft in your old age?