Whiplash Read online

  Luo turned left outside the door, ignoring the queue for the taxis, which were lined in a chaotic, Italian-style jumble at the edge of the plaza. He walked along the stone sidewalk and out along the Piazza Esquilino, more an extended bus stop than a traditional Italian piazza. For a moment it looked to Nuri that he was going into either the cinema or the five-star hotel at the corner near the Piazza della Republica; Nuri would have welcomed either stop, since he wanted a chance to get a coffee and maybe something to eat. But instead Luo continued down Via Nazionale, moving easily among the throng of tourists and local residents.

  It was a clear day, pleasantly warm for March. A bright blue sky arched over the city, and the sun seemed to brush away the dust and grime from the facades and storefronts along the street. Via Nazionale had its share of hotels, but most of the shops here catered to residents, clothing and shoe stores butting up against a bookstore and the occasional tobacco store.

  “Am I being followed?” Nuri asked, muttering to himself. He was wearing a pair of video bugs attached to the back of his collar, scanning the area behind him.

  “Surveillance has not been detected,” replied the Voice.

  Nuri’s heart began beating faster as Luo continued down the street in the general direction of the Imperial Forum. Luo wasn’t a tourist, and the course was too direct to have been plotted merely to see if he was being followed. He must be meeting someone.

  Nuri quickened his pace and closed to within a half block. Luo crossed through the traffic near Villa Aldobrandini, then went down the narrow hill to a little street just above Foro di Augusto. Ruins spread out before him, Rome’s ancient past pulling itself from the dust. There were many lessons a man might draw from such a sight—the fleeting nature of wealth and power first among them. But Luo drew none, his mind far from the ruins.

  Realizing he was getting too close, Nuri stopped in the middle of the parking lot near Trajan’s Column. The column was a majestic, impressive sight, undiminished by the fact that it stood in front of a building and square undergoing renovations.

  “Who is that at the top of the column?” he asked.

  “Trajan’s Column,” replied the Voice. “Colonna Traiana.”

  “Is that Trajan at the top?”

  There was a pause before the voice answered.

  “St. Peter.”

  “St. Peter? How’d he get there? Isn’t that a Roman column?”

  This time the pause was longer.

  “The answer is not immediately available,” said the Voice, indirectly announcing the limits of its network memory. “Do you wish the matter researched?”

  “Negative.”

  The Voice’s admission of its limitations cheered him a little, making up for his lack of caffeine. Nuri walked along the parking lot, pausing to hear the pitch from a man selling picture books. He wanted ten euros. Nuri shook his head and started to walk away.

  “Five euro,” said the man, in English.

  Nuri hesitated, thinking the book would be decent cover.

  “Quatro,” he said, turning back. “Four.”

  The man said in Italian that he was driving too hard a bargain for a wealthy American.

  Nuri shrugged and started to walk away. He was a little annoyed that the man had responded in English rather than Italian; he felt his accent had been perfect.

  “Four euro, si,” said the man, holding the book out.

  Nuri stopped and reached into his pocket for some coins. The man began telling him a story as he counted the change, explaining in English that he lived in the area. Some years before he had been a woodworker, but his hands no longer cooperated: a fact obvious from their violent shaking as he took Nuri’s money.

  The man knew a great deal about the ruins, more than what was in the books. He offered himself as a guide, but Nuri merely shook his head and took the book. Turning to go, he remembered his question about St. Peter on the column.

  “Ah, the pope—1587,” said the man. He pointed at the book. “The story is there. The legend—when Traianus was taken up, yes? From the vault below, his skull was there. It told the story of his release from hell.”

  The explanation confused Nuri, but now Luo was getting too far away. Nuri thanked him.

  “I can tell you the entire story—if you want a guide—I am here every day,” said the man, calling after him.

  Up the street, Luo was nearly to the Coliseum, his pace as jaunty as ever. A long line stretched around the side of the amphitheater as visitors waited to get in. But he had a pass that allowed him to avoid the lines, and he walked through the group entrance, stepping through the metal detector without pausing to empty his pockets. The detector found nothing.

  Nuri headed toward the end of the line. As he reached it, a young man with a British accent stopped him and asked if he’d like to join his tour.

  “Twenty euros, and you beat the line,” said the young man. “You get right in. And you get a full tour.”

  “I beat the line?”

  “Yes, you come right in with me. Twenty euros.”

  Nuri unfolded a twenty from his pocket. The young man grabbed it hungrily—generally he had to bargain down to ten or fifteen this close to tour time—and directed Nuri toward a short, dark-haired woman standing near the entrance. Nuri went over, starting to get a bit anxious—if Luo was meeting someone inside, he wanted to be close enough to hear what was going on, or at least see who it was.

  “We can go right in?” he said to the woman.

  “Si, si,” she said. “We are on our way. Come.”

  Nuri started toward the gate with a dozen other tourists, a hodgepodge from Britain, Japan, and China. Tour groups were given special privileges at the Coliseum, and in fact at most of the attractions in Rome and Italy. If you were in a group, you could jump ahead of the line, entering at a prescribed time—or perhaps immediately, depending on the arrangements the group’s sponsor had made with the authorities.

  “Direct me,” he muttered to the Voice as he passed the metal detector.

  “Proceed twenty paces straight ahead.”

  Nuri walked down the main corridor, passing the displays of ruined bits of columns, mortuary plaques, and statues. He went through an arched opening—vomitorium was the proper name—and came out onto the main aisle circling above the arena area. He walked forward, pretending to look at the ruins, but in fact scanning for Luo.

  He couldn’t see him.

  “Direct me,” he said.

  “Reverse direction,” said the Voice.

  Confused, Nuri followed the directions to a door just off the main corridor inside. The Voice told him to open the door and go down the stairs inside, but the door had an alarm on it, apparently not included in whatever schematic the computer had accessed.

  Nuri reached into his pocket for his key chain. On the chain was a small card that looked like the sort of tag one held against a credit card reader when making a purchase; not coincidentally, it carried a Visa logo to reinforce that impression. Pressing his thumb firmly against the middle, he slid the card along the doorjamb, waiting to hear a buzz in his headset. As soon it buzzed, he pushed through, the alarm temporarily deactivated.

  The corridor opened onto a darkened staircase. Nuri found a banister at the right and descended slowly, listening as he went.

  “Turn left,” said the Voice, directing him down a tunnel-like corridor. A dim blue glow of natural light shone toward the far end, where it met another hallway at the right.

  Nuri paused, considering whether he should proceed. While he wanted to know why Luo was here and who he was meeting with, being discovered following him would be counterproductive, and very possibly fatal.

  Being detained by the museum security people wouldn’t be helpful either.

  Nuri opened the book he’d bought, paging through until he found the Coliseum. He folded it open, and glancing at the illustrations, began walking forward through the corridor, pretending he was somehow following the book. He was in the center area of
the Coliseum, the basement beneath the arena where animals and gladiators waited before the games. You didn’t have to be very superstitious to think the place was thick with ghosts.

  He heard voices as he approached the first corner. He stopped, folded over the page in the book, then plunged forward, holding the tour guide out as if he were using it to relive an ancient scene of life and death.

  There was no one there. The voices echoed against the thick stones of the massive structure. The sounds were odd and distorted; he couldn’t tell what the language was, let alone pick out individual words.

  He started walking again. The corridor opened up—

  “Direct me,” he told the Voice.

  “Proceed forward twenty yards.”

  Nuri took two steps, then stopped, considering how much distance he should keep from Luo, and whether he might not be better off circling around. The ruins were a maze of small rooms and alleyways; he could probably slip very close to him without being seen.

  He turned and started down a small passage just behind him. Nearly two thousand years before, the passage had held the cages for lions brought back from Africa especially for the anniversary games held in honor of Rome’s founding. A winch and pulley located on the wall just behind him had been used to haul the cage up to the level just below the arena floor. There, its open third side allowed the animal to escape. Sensing freedom, the lion would trot up a ramp into the open air, confronting a pair of terrified Christians, who were promptly torn apart by the starving beast for the amusement of the crowd.

  All of this was recounted in the book Nuri was holding in his hand, but he had no chance to contemplate it, or even read it. For as he walked down the passage, two gunshots, very close together, echoed loudly through the stone archways of the Coliseum’s basement. He spun and dropped to his right knee, watching as a figure ran past in the corridor.

  All he caught was a fleeting glimpse. He rose, his instincts telling him he should follow. But as he took a step, another instinct took over; he jerked himself backward, diving around the low, ruined wall to his right. As he hit the ground, the shadow that had passed returned, pumping two shots in Nuri’s direction. The bullets missed, but their ricochets sprayed stone splinters and dust. There was a scream above, and another shot. Nuri dove through an opening on his right, rolling into a small room as the figure with the gun ran into the passage where he’d just been.

  Nuri leaped to his feet and ran from the room. He turned left, running toward a stage that had been erected opposite the gladiators’ entrance to the arena.

  The shooter followed. Nuri ducked to the right, into another small alley connecting the rows of rooms, flattening himself against the wall. The footsteps continued, then suddenly stopped.

  Nuri looked up and saw a half-dozen tourists standing on the ruined steps opposite him, staring down in horror. He slipped to the ground and turned the corner, hoping to catch a glimpse of the gunman as he ran off.

  He saw him, or rather, her—a young woman dressed in baggy green khaki slacks, with a wide top and a knit cap pulled over her head. She wasn’t running. She had stopped and was looking directly at him.

  She started to pull the gun out from the holster beneath her shirt where she’d just tucked it.

  Nuri jerked back into the corridor, about to run—only to realize that his escape was blocked off by a wall. He’d turned into a dead end.

  2

  Washington Metro

  AT ROUGHLY THE SAME TIME NURI LUPO WAS SCRAMBLING in the dust of the Coliseum, Colonel Danny Freah was scrambling down the platform at the Alexandria stop of the Washington Metro, heading for the train that had just stopped and opened its doors.

  The car was crowded. He slipped in next to a tall woman in a powder-blue pantsuit a few feet from the door, trying to squeeze himself into the tiny space as more passengers crammed in behind him. The doors slapped shut, then opened, then closed. The train started with a jerk, and he just barely kept himself from falling into his neighbors.

  The people around him, all on their way to work, barely noticed him. The lone exception was a black woman about half his age, who thought he reminded her a little of her father, albeit a slightly younger version.

  Danny, who had no children himself, might have been amused had he been able to eavesdrop on her thoughts. His own, however, were much more practical. It had been a while since he’d been in D.C., let alone since he used the Metro, and he wasn’t sure if he’d gotten on the right train.

  “I can get to the Pentagon from here, right?” he said, looking at the woman in the powder-blue suit.

  “You would have done better to figure that out before getting on the train, wouldn’t you?” she answered.

  “Then I would have missed the train.”

  “Wouldn’t you have been better off in the long run?”

  “Maybe yes, maybe no. I have a fifty-fifty chance, right? Assuming I found the right line.”

  The woman looked him up and down.

  “Most colonels are not gamblers,” she said. “They tend to be conservative by nature.”

  “There’s a difference between gambling and taking a calculated risk,” said Danny. “This is taking a calculated risk.”

  “I suppose.”

  Danny laughed. “Is it the right train?”

  “I suppose.”

  The train arrived in the sculpted concrete station a few minutes later. As the crowd divided itself toward the exits, Danny spotted several people in uniform and followed them toward the restricted entrance to the building. As the crowd narrowed, he found himself behind the woman in the powder-blue suit.

  “So I guess this was the right stop,” he told her.

  “I didn’t say it wasn’t.”

  “You said you ‘supposed.’ Like you had some doubts. But you work here, so you knew.”

  “You ‘suppose’ I work at the Pentagon,” she told him.

  Danny looked for a smirk or some other sign that she was kidding with him. But she wasn’t.

  Mary Clair Bennett did not have much of a sense of humor. She had spent the past twenty-two and a half years working for the Defense Department, and if she’d laughed at a single joke in all that time, the memory of it had been firmly suppressed.

  In the days before titles were engineered to replace pay raises, Ms. Bennett would have been called an executive secretary. Her personality fit the words perfectly, combining efficiency with more than a hint of superiority. Ms. Bennett—she was a particular stickler for the title—had always felt that being a little chilly toward others enhanced her position with them. While her two nieces might have argued passionately on her behalf, few people would have called her a particularly warm person. Even her sister, who lived out in Manassas, found she had very little to talk to her about when she came for her biweekly visits.

  “Well, thanks for getting me here,” Danny said as they reached the security checkpoint.

  Ms. Bennett rolled her eyes. He smiled to himself, amused rather than annoyed, and joined the line for visitors.

  The line led to a sophisticated biometric scanning and security system, recently installed not just at the Pentagon, but at most military installations around the country. More than a decade and a half earlier, Danny had presided over the system’s precursor, developed and tested at the nation’s premier weapons test bed and development lab, the Air Force’s Advanced Technology Center, better known as Dreamland. That system had essentially the same capabilities as the one used here. It could detect explosives and their immediate precursors, scan for nuclear material, and find weapons as small as an X-Acto blade.

  The system checked a person’s identity by comparing a number of facial and physical features with its stored memory. The early Dreamland version had been somewhat larger, and tended to take its time identifying people; it would have impractical dealing with a workforce even half the size of the Pentagon’s. In the fifteen or sixteen years since then, the engineers managed to make it smaller and considerably faster.
The detectors were entirely contained in a pair of slim metallic poles that rose from the marble foyer floor; they connected via a thick wire cable to the security station nearby. Each visitor walked slowly between the poles, pausing under the direction of an Army sergeant, who raised his hand and glanced in the direction of his compatriot at the station. The station display flashed a green or a red indicator—go or no go—along with identifying information on the screen.

  One couldn’t simply visit the Pentagon; his or her name had to be on a list. Even a general who didn’t have an office here needed a “sponsor” who made sure his or her name was entered into the system.

  “Please wait, sir,” said the sergeant as Danny stepped up to the posts. “We have to recalibrate periodically.”

  The more things change, the more they stay the same, thought Danny. Such pauses had been common at Dreamland.

  Then, the process could take as long as half a day. Now it took only a few seconds.

  “Please step forward,” said the sergeant.

  “Good,” said the second sergeant at the console, waving Danny through. Then he caught something on the screen. “Whoa—hold on just a second.”

  Startled, Danny turned around.

  “Um, uh—you’re, uh, Colonel Freah.” The soldier, embarrassed by his outburst, stepped awkwardly away from the console and snapped off a salute.

  It was unnecessary, since they were inside, but Danny returned it.

  “This here’s a Medal of Honor winner,” said the sergeant, turning to the other people on line.

  Now it was Danny’s turn to be embarrassed. One of the civilians spontaneously began to applaud, and the entire line joined in. Danny put his head down for a moment. He always choked up at moments like this, remembering why he had gotten the medal.

  More specifically, remembering the men he couldn’t save, rather than those he did.

  “It was…a while ago,” he mumbled before forcing a smile. “Thank you, though. Thank you.”

  “Yes, sir. Thank you, sir,” said the sergeant nearest him.