David Hewson - The Sacred Cut

He put his hands on her shoulders, stared into her face, shook her, hard. “Dan took the money too, Emily! No one made him. No one made any of them, not on his team. If that fool Kaspar hadn’t started shooting, they’d all have been in and out of there and no one the wiser. One team rich, smart and in on the deal. The other poor and heroes and still with their consciences. It’s a dirty world. You’re telling me you never noticed?”

Costa saw the sudden grief in her face. The way her finger tightened on the button.

“I don’t believe you,” Emily Deacon insisted.

Fielding pushed her away. She didn’t protest.

“Then why did he come back and say nothing?” he asked. “Why didn’t he come back and start asking some questions about what went wrong?”

“He didn’t know!” she screeched.

Fielding gripped her shoulders again, peered into her face with glistening eyes. “You’re too smart to believe that,” he said after a while. “Aren’t you?”

Emily said nothing. She just stood there, shaking her head, staring at him, furious.

“Think about it,” Fielding continued. “Dan did nothing because he was on the payroll, Emily. Everyone on his team was. Before they even went in. Not that it was the money. In the beginning anyway. The others, yes. Not him. Not me.”

“Then what, Fielding?” she wondered. “You’re telling me this was all some moral decision too?”

Thornton Fielding looked, for a moment, as if he’d forgotten the deadly armament strapped to his body. He was mad with her, furious she didn’t get it.

“You’re so young,” he spat at her. “You really have no idea.”

“Tell me.”

He closed his eyes for a moment, shook his head, clutched the deadly vest to him. “Dan and I had been working together off and on for years. Since Nicaragua. We’d spent all that time throwing all manner of dirty shit at dirty situations. And you know what? It never cured a damn thing. We were just so sick of being part of that machine, deciding who was right, who was wrong. Sick of the fact that so many of yesterday’s friends turned out to be tomorrow’s bad guys. Your dad had this huge sense of duty, but duty has to be earned somehow by the people above you or you start to question it. His got used up in the end. We both felt that way. And that’s the real killer.”

He looked at Leapman, and there was disgust in his face. “In that kind of situation either you become like him-an automaton who does what he’s told and doesn’t think twice-or you become the enemy. There is no in between. We’d taken the money, but the truth is we’d have done it for free. We didn’t want the war to spread. There were all these lunatics saying it had to go on, all the way to Baghdad. As if we were a liberating army, bringing peace and joy and freedom to the world. Babylon Sisters wasn’t about Kuwait. It was about being there as a forward base once the hawks back home persuaded Bush to go all the way. You get me?”

She was listening, struggling to take all this in.

“Emily,” he pleaded, “you have to understand. No one needed to get hurt. Dan had arranged for us to get our guys taken, along with him. They’d all be freed, unharmed, later and no one would be the wiser. A straightforward deal. Except…” He sighed, hung his head, stared at the stone floor. “We didn’t bring Bill Kaspar in. Dan and I talked about it but in the end we just didn’t have the guts. We thought he and the rest of them would lie down once they saw what they were up against. We didn’t think he’d feel the urge to make nine people dead heroes. So Dan and his crew had to watch a bloodbath, knowing they couldn’t do a damn thing to stop what was going on. And then-”

“Then what?” Emily asked, livid.

“Then you find yourself facing painful choices. It wasn’t Dan’s fault. Not mine. Not Kaspar’s, really. It was just a stupid idea that began as a good one. A couple of tired spooks dragging out some peacenik idealism we thought might stop the world from tilting even further out of balance. Stupid. Dumb as they come, and when those Iraqis came back to each and every one us after the war, kept calling, kept asking for more, threatening to expose us if we didn’t go along with them, we found out exactly how dumb.”

She was shaking her head. “Dad wouldn’t-”

“He did!” Fielding cried. “We all did. There wasn’t any alternative. It was either go along with what they wanted or see every last one of us in jail or worse. Until Kaspar got out, of course. And you know the funny thing?”

There was a sudden look of bitter hatred on his face. “By then it didn’t matter. If Bill Kaspar hadn’t come a-hunting, all of this would have just slipped out of sight. Except,” he added sourly, “when you started waking up in the middle of the night sweating from the memories.”

There was activity beyond the big doors. Brisk, bossy Carabinieri voices.

Fielding nodded at the button and took several steps back. “So you want to press that, Little Em? If it makes you feel good, go ahead.”

“Oh, Thornton,” she said immediately. “It will make me feel so very, very good.”

Emily Deacon hit the button and Thornton Fielding’s vest lit up like a string of firecrackers. Costa was over to her in a flash, trying to drag her down to the cold, hard floor.

She fought him, watching Fielding all the time. “Don’t worry,” she murmured. “Kaspar’s broke. It’s just Coke cans, sand and a few detonators. And a little fertilizer for the one I got to throw. You’d be amazed what I’ve learned over the last couple of hours.”

Thornton Fielding did a fiery little jig around the heart of the building then, when the detonators fizzled, fell to the ground in a crumpled, sobbing heap.

Nic Costa looked into Emily’s face and a part of him was convinced he knew what she saw at that moment. An image from a different time. A young girl dancing with her father’s best friend, not knowing what darkness lay beyond the bright white room in which every happy memory seemed to exist, and how difficult it was to see into the mind of another human being, even one you thought you knew and loved.

“Nic,” she said with a sudden, bright efficiency. “Inspector Falcone. Gianni. Are you ready?”

“Of course,” Falcone replied, then grimaced at the dejected figure of Thornton Fielding crawling underneath the grey eye of the oculus. “I think,” he said to Leapman, “that belongs to you.”

There was an expression on Falcone’s face Costa didn’t recognize. Finally, he put a name to it: astonishment.

They followed her to the bronze slab doors, helped her pull the right one back on its ancient hinges. A flood of policemen poured into the hall, asking questions, waving guns, shrinking back as Falcone barked at them about this being a state police show.

“Come with me,” Emily said.

Costa and Peroni walked behind her over to the office. She took out a key, unlocked the door and let them in.

There was a well-built, craggy-faced man there, in a caretaker’s uniform that was one size too small for him. He was leaning back in a chair, feet on the desk next to a mobile phone and a small radio, laid out in a precise line parallel with the edge of the surface. An old and dusty copy of Dante’s Inferno lay in front of him, open at the page.

William F. Kaspar took out the radio earpiece, looked at the three of them, nodded to Emily and said, “As I always say, improvisation is the key to everything, Agent Deacon. Nice job. I’m proud of you.”

He waved the book at them. “Mind if I keep this? I found it in here and, to be honest, I don’t think it’s one of his.”

He pointed to a figure bundled into the corner, gagged, hands tied behind his back, wearing a grubby vest and underpants. Peroni recognized the florid-faced caretaker and stifled a laugh.