The woman behind the counter was starting to stare now. She had a little “serve you right” smile on her face. Joel Leapman couldn’t be that popular around here, Teresa thought. But maybe Cy Morrison wasn’t either.

Morrison walked a little way away from the desk to get a touch of privacy. “Listen,” he said in a low, furious voice, “I’m not interested in what Joel Leapman thinks. I don’t work for him. I’m damned if I’m supposed to clean up whatever mess he leaves behind either. Just give me the things and it’s done.”

“No,” Teresa snapped. “I’m not having him screaming at me because you fouled up again. I want to see them in there. If they turn up missing again he’s going to go ballistic again and I don’t want that coming in my direction.”

“Dammit!” Morrison yelled. “Since when did you get the right to give orders here?”

She took out Emily’s security card and waved it in his face, keeping the photo side away from him, hoping, hoping. “Since Joel Leapman told me to go see ”that moron Morrison,“ gave me this and told me not to let go of this stuff until I saw it safely on his desk with my own eyes. Now, do you want to accompany me there? Or should I just find my own way? God knows,” she lied, “I’ve seen enough of that place and that man these past few days.”

Cy Morrison peered at the security card. Someone like Joel Leapman wouldn’t give these things out lightly, Teresa guessed. It had to mean something. Still, Morrison ought to at the very least check the photo, and some inner reminder of that seemed to be just beginning to work its way into his consciousness.

“Plus,” she improvised, wondering if she was going to foul up here, and what trying to talk your way into a secure office in the US embassy meant for your career, “he needs these urgently.”

Teresa Lupo dug deep into the bottom of the box and retrieved one of the bags she’d taken from the apartment the previous day.

“This was yesterday’s woman,” she said. “You heard about that? Turns out she was American too. Maybe I’ll be calling you to pick up her corpse before long. She was decapitated,” Teresa said, getting his attention on the bag. “While wearing this nightdress.”

The scarlet garment lay in a large evidence bag, the bloodstains black and stiff beneath the plastic. Morrison eyed the bag sideways. He looked queasy.

“Of course if you want to take responsibility yourself…” he managed, “I’d just have to tell Leapman you’d done that, you understand. So if it went missing, if anything got tampered with, damaged, lost, altered in any way which meant it couldn’t be used in a court of law…”

Scaring men was fun sometimes, she thought. A skill to be cultivated.

“You do know about rules of evidence, don’t you?” she demanded. “You do understand what happens if this doesn’t get handled in exactly the right way? If one thumbprint goes in the wrong place?”

“Frankly,” Morrison muttered briskly, “I don’t give a shit. If the guy gave you his card, go wherever the hell you want. And find your own damn way out too.”

With that he stormed off, in the opposite direction, away from the office she wanted, the one just round the corner and down the hall.

Teresa Lupo whistled a little tune as she walked there. Then she ran Emily Deacon’s ID through the security slot, waited for the lock to retreat and walked in.

She’d been thinking this through all the way there, phrasing the right message, tweaking the nuances. She’d had an uncle who took her hunting once, when she was a kid. She’d hated the entire experience. All except for the dog. The wonderful dog who was as lovable as they came but could flush out a single pheasant in a field of corn just by scenting where the bird lived and emitting a single bark in its direction.

A minute. That was all it would take to type a simple e-mail, swiped with Emily’s ID card to authenticate it as genuine, mark the message as urgent as hell, hit Send and stand back to see what happened.

She hammered the keyboard with her fat, clumsy fingers.

“Now run, you bastard,” Teresa Lupo said to herself and hoped to God this made a difference. Those hard canisters she felt as she hugged Emily Deacon’s scared, skinny body kept popping pictures into her head of what they could deliver on her cold, shining table if anything went wrong.

“That was a piece of cake,” Teresa Lupo whispered to herself. “You should do this more often.”

The box lay on Leapman’s desk now. Rightfully most of the contents belonged to him. But not the nightdress from the apartment. She had just brought that along as a last resort, for effect. And that was evidence of her own, something she could need for a crime that remained in the jurisdiction of the state police.

“Wasted on these people,” she sniffed. “All of it.”

They’ll know, too, she thought. When the dust settled, Leapman would be able to look at that odd box on his desk, retrace her steps, work out how this was done.

“What the hell?” Teresa Lupo murmured, then picked up the evidence packet with the blackened, stained silk shift, dropped it in her bag, went out and called a cab for the centro storico.

“LOOK AROUND YOU, gentlemen. Enjoy the view.”

Costa had placed the phone on the empty chair next to Emily. Now they crowded close to it, listening to Bill Kaspar’s voice crackling out of the speaker, clear and determined.

“Can you imagine being in a hellhole like that, watching your buddies going down one by one, clinging to a piece of webbing as if it could keep out the fire? All because some asshole you thought you could trust wants a cut of the action?”

“We get the point,” Leapman grumbled.

There was a pause. “OK. I hear you. The man from the Agency. Or wherever. Right?”

Viale made a gesture to Leapman: Pursue this.

“Listen, Kaspar,” Leapman continued. “It doesn’t matter who I am. All I want to do is make sure you understand something. We know what happened. Washington’s got no doubts. Not anymore.”

“You think you know-” the tinny voice interrupted.

“You got screwed! Live with it! You’re not the first. So you and your people went down there. That’s tough. In war you get casualties.”

Kaspar waited before answering. It was a scary moment. “We were ”casualties“?”

“You and lots of others. Except they let it go. I don’t know. I don’t get…”

Leapman was struggling. Viale sat down and stared at him, disappointed.

“You don’t get the symmetry,” Kaspar said calmly. “Understandable. I guess you needed to be there.”

Leapman fought to get a grip on himself, glanced at Emily, then said, “Look. Dan Deacon fooled us all. You, me, Washington, everyone. We never even began to guess until a good way through all this. I’m sorry. Is that what you want to hear?”

The voice on the phone-hidden somewhere they could only guess at-sighed. “Ignorance-such a rotten excuse. Being smart’s not about when or where you’re born, you know. It’s about who you are. That’s history, man. The guy who built that place you’re in-he was called Hadrian, a little history for you there. He could fight battles. Run empires. Think about life. He could sit right where you are now and imagine a whole cosmos in his head.”

Leapman blinked hard, looked at Viale and made the “crazy” sign with his right index finger.

“I slept above his mausoleum last night,” Kaspar continued. “I thought I’d dream about him. I didn’t. It was just the same damn shit I always hear. Which doesn’t make sense, since they’re all supposed to be dead now. You follow?”

“So we’re going through all this because of your dreams, Kaspar?” Leapman asked. “Are you listening to yourself? That’s how crazy people sound. That’s what-”

The voice from the tinny speaker cranked up several decibels. “Crazy! CRAZY! This seem crazy to you?”