Anzelmo had run after her. "Have you already forgotten we had a deal?"

Colomba ignored him. A woman's voice burst out of the intercom, and Colomba answered immediately. "I'm locked out without my keys. Could you let me in, please?"

"Caselli . . . are you listening to me?" Anzelmo had said, feeling that she was treating him like a fool.

The front door buzzed open, and Colomba had lunged through it, stopping only to examine the names on the mailboxes. The other two cops had looked at him in bafflement. "She's not supposed to come with us," one said.

"You want to tell her that?" Anzelmo replied.

The other cop took a step back. "No."

Following Colomba into Montanari's apartment were Anzelmo's two partners and, bringing up the rear, Alberti and his partner.

"He's not here," said Colomba, putting her gun back into the holster on her belt.

Anzelmo, who'd checked out the bathroom, too, also holstered his regulation weapon. "I'll have a search warrant issued," he said.

"You think he caught a whiff of something?" asked one of the two partners. "It's two in the morning."

"Maybe he saw us at the clinic," Anzelmo replied.

Colomba started wandering around the apartment, inspecting the place. "I don't think he packed his bags." She glanced over at the one ramshackle armoire in the room, the door shut tight. "Do you have a pair of gloves?"

Anzelmo rolled his eyes. "Caselli, considering you're not even supposed to be here, you're making a hell of a lot of noise."

"Gloves," she said again.

One of Anzelmo's partners tossed her a box of single-use gloves. Colomba put on a pair and opened the armoire, looking around carefully. It seemed to her that there were no significant gaps between the items of clothing. When someone went on the run in a hurry, they always left a considerable mess behind.

"Look here," said one of the two other cops. He'd opened the pantry, revealing a small pull-out desk with a laptop computer. The laptop was hooked up to a MiniDV player, which took the discs used by the video camera they'd confiscated.

"If he's on the run, he didn't come home before leaving," said Colomba. "Otherwise he'd have taken it with him." She stood up and opened the screen of the laptop, which lit up, displaying the Windows start menu.

"Don't waste time on that," said Anzelmo. "I'll take everything to the lab. Then I'll tell you what they found, if you want."

"Can't you do a preliminary on-site examination?" asked Colomba. "We have to wait here anyway, in case Montanari comes home."

"I thought I'd just leave a squad car here," Anzelmo replied. Still, he took a quick look at the contents of the hard drive. "He has a video-editing program but no videos. He must store them online somewhere. Or on some removable storage device. Still, if the content went through the computer at any point, we'd find traces of it."

"Can you do that here?" Colomba inquired.

"No. First we'd have to do an overall backup and make a copy of the content that's on there now. Anyway, I'm no expert. There are some things I leave to the technicians."

Colomba gave him a level look. "Aren't you a hacker or something like that?"

"Should I be?"

"You're from the Special Internet Crimes Division, you spend all your time on computers."

"You're a homicide cop, and you spend lots of time with dead bodies. Does that make you a pathologist?"

"Excellent point." Colomba shut the computer and pulled the plug out of the wall.

"If you're planning to take it away somewhere, I swear that this time I'll handcuff you to a radiator," said Anzelmo.

"Just downstairs."

They got into Colomba's minivan. She and Dante sat in the back, Anzelmo turning to watch them over the seat back.

Dante had one hand on the trackpad and had started opening and closing folders.

"What are you doing?" asked Colomba, who at a certain point was able to keep up with his rapid movements.

"I'm looking for a program run log, so I can find out how they've been used recently."

"I could have done that myself," Anzelmo objected from his vantage point over the seat back, peering down and trying to see something.

"Afterwards I'll let you play with it for all the time you like," Dante said, tolerantly.

"I want him to see what he can figure out," said Colomba.

"Is he a hacker?" asked Anzelmo, mockingly.

"No, but he found the video camera."

"But we weren't looking for one," Anzelmo said defensively.

Dante snickered. "Which is exactly the point . . . Okay. Montanari signed on to the Internet using Tor."

"What's that?" Colomba asked. She knew how to use a computer, but when things went over into the realm of the technical, she no longer understood.

"It's a program that renders online connections anonymous," Anzelmo replied.

"That's right," said Dante. "And with it you can find sites you wouldn't be able to otherwise."

"The darknet," she commented.

"Oh, please . . . only journalists use that term."

Anzelmo nodded. "On anonymous sites, once you get access, you can buy things online that are illegal in nearly every country on Earth. Weapons, drugs . . ."

"And child pornography," Colomba summed up.

"True, although most people use Tor only to download pirated movies," Dante pointed out. "We don't know what servers Montanari signed onto, much less where he kept his shit. But . . . let's see . . . he has a PayPal account. And a payment receipt to Leonard McCoy, an American, through a virtual credit card issued from the Cayman Islands. Ten thousand euros. That's something. I can't see any of the other transactions without his password."

"Do you think this McCoy exists?" asked Colomba.

"If you're going to use your real name, you might as well use a normal credit card," Dante replied. "It's the alias of one of his buyers."

"Do you think he was selling the footage?" Colomba probed.

"What do you think he was doing with it?"

"Maybe he liked watching them," said Anzelmo.

"Were there pictures of kids in the house, even innocent ones? On the walls, on the fridge?" Dante wanted to know.

"No," Anzelmo replied.

"Toys, children's clothing, kiddie comic books?"

Colomba shook her head.

"But he has four different apps for online casinos. He's a compulsive gambler, he needs money."

"Anything else?" asked Colomba.

"He just has one Skype profile. But he hasn't used it in the past six months. And he doesn't have a subscription for local numbers."

"Why did you think he might?" Anzelmo asked.

Dante and Colomba exchanged a glance but said nothing. "But he did use a chat program," said Dante.

"Can you see what he said?"

"No. He erased that. The last person he chatted with today is named Zardoz. And I have the IP address he connected from."

He showed Colomba a string of numbers that revealed the identity of the server being used by whoever it was that had contacted Montanari; then he punched that string of numbers into the browser on his iPhone to see its provenance. "It's a Tor server," he said after a short while. It seemed to be taking him some effort to speak, as if he'd been distracted by a sudden thought.

Colomba spoke to Anzelmo. "Is there a way to establish Zardoz's identity?"

"No, because the Tor server deletes the connection logs," Anzelmo replied. "But maybe Montanari knows who he is. Let's wait until we catch him, and then he can tell us."

"Can I speak to you privately?" Dante asked Colomba.

She looked at Anzelmo.

"If I go, I'm taking the computer with me," he pointed out, clearly offended.

Dante handed it to him without even glancing in his direction. "Be my guest."

Anzelmo took it and got out.

"What is it?" asked Colomba once they were alone.

"Have you ever seen the movie Zardoz?" Dante asked.

"Never even heard of it."

"It's a sci-fi flick from the seventies, with Sean Connery."

"He's a hot guy."

"He's over eighty . . ."

"He's still hot. Well?"

"The film is about a society in the future dominated by a false god who calls himself Zardoz, a character inspired by the Wizard of Oz. He appears to his subjects as an enormous mask with a thunderous voice, which is a sort of spaceship."

"Does this have anything to do with us?"

"Yes. Zardoz demands a specific tribute from his subjugated people. Wheat. The slaves fill the flying mask with wheat at the beginning of the movie. The mask is nothing less than a flying silo, CC. Zardoz is the Father. And Montanari can take us to him."

8.

Sabino Montanari was sitting in his methane-powered Fiat Stilo, parked next to a pylon under the bypass highway, opposite the staircase leading up to the Tiburtina station. Until just two years ago, he'd owned a Mercedes, but he'd gambled it away little by little, same as had happened with the apartment he'd purchased when the cards were still running right for him. Now he lived in a one-room rental so far from the clinic that it took him two hours to get there every day. Two fucking hours of his life wasted every morning and an hour to get home in the evening. He thought about it all the time. Every day. He'd dreamed of quitting his regular job once and for all, once he'd set aside a bit of money, but things had gone the other way.

That's why he'd started up with the videos, even if that shit turned his stomach. The video camera that he'd smuggled into gynecology, sure, every once in a while that yielded some interesting material . . . but pediatrics? Pure shit. It's just that videos of women with their legs spread brought in nothing. If you tried to put them on the market, at the very best you might find someone willing to trade videos. But kids . . .

Kids were pure gold.

For the most part, the children remained fully dressed and the pediatricians just looked at their tonsils. Only occasionally did they take off their T-shirt or, even more rarely, drop their trousers to allow their nether regions to be checked. But he could sell that footage for a hundred euros a minute, and there was always someone willing to buy, even after the free preview. Then Zardoz had shown up. His account was a number assigned by the system, and Montanari had no idea what his real name might be. The system told him only that he'd been on the server for more than a year and that he'd made purchases without problems from vendors who were still operating. That was important information; it gave Montanari a reasonable certainty that the man wasn't a cop from the Ministry of Justice trying to set him up. Zardoz had purchased a couple of minutes; then he'd made an offer that was almost too good to be true: the whole video for a flat fee of ten thousand euros. Montanari knew that there were very rich individuals who frequented the site, but there weren't many clients who wanted to spend it all on a single vendor; they tended to be looking for variety. Instead Zardoz wanted even the dead footage, the parts where the mothers said hello to the doctors and that sort of thing. Montanari had remained skeptical until the money had actually been credited to his PayPal account.

Jack off till you die, he'd mentally wished him as he uploaded the file, but Zardoz had come back for more. And then he'd come back for even more. In the end, Montanari had tapped the guy for thirty thousand euros, half of which he'd basically burned on a green card table in the back room of a butcher's shop in the space of a month. That was the only reason why, when Zardoz had requested a face-to-face meeting, Montanari had even considered the possibility. Which ran contrary to every rule of survival, as anyone who did business on the Internet knew very well. When he sold, Montanari did so through a server in some other part of the world, and he signed on to it via a high-security connection. It was easy once you knew how. He'd learned the technique from a guy who'd skinned him at Texas Hold 'Em and who sold amphetamines on the Internet. He didn't even know who his clients were, the man had told him. He took an order, he waited for the money, and when it came in, he shipped the merchandise by courier, using a nonexistent company on the return address. The secure connection could be rented for just pennies, again online. You passed through a server that made you anonymous. Even if the Ministry of Justice did put you under surveillance, it could follow your trail only that far and no farther. Beyond that point you became invisible.

Meeting clients in person, on the other hand, was like playing roulette. If the wrong number turned up, there could be a cop waiting for you. But the buyer had come up with a request that was typical of people like him: he wanted an exclusive on what he was buying. An exclusive on what Montanari was selling. So he was going to provide Montanari with a sealed video camera along with the money. Montanari had suggested he drop it off for him somewhere, but the buyer had refused. The device was too expensive, too risky if someone else stumbled on it. They'd have to meet. Montanari had considered rejecting the offer; then the thought of the money that Zardoz had promised him this time-another forty thousand euros, all at once-had won out over his caution. And if he turned out to be a cop . . . he had nothing on him and he kept all his stuff online, on an anonymous virtual disk. Even if they'd arrested him, they wouldn't have found any evidence against him.

Zardoz had made an appointment to meet at one in the morning. Montanari still had ten minutes to wait and was starting to feel sleepy. In the middle of an extended yawn, he noticed someone in the rearview mirror walking toward his car. From that distance he couldn't make out the face, he could just see someone who looked tall, wearing an expensive-looking raincoat buttoned up to the neck. When he knocked on the window with a gloved hand, Montanari understood that it was him. He lowered the window. "Yes?" he said, keeping it noncommittal. Even the description that he'd given of himself had been intentionally generic. The location was the only thing they had specified.

"I think you're waiting for me," said the man in the raincoat.

"Maybe," Montanari replied.

"Zardoz. Let me in, and we can talk about money."

Montanari hesitated. Zardoz's voice was cold and courteous. He'd expected a slobbering sex fiend.

He clicked the door lock, and once Zardoz got in, he saw that he was an old man. A rich old pervert, he thought.

The old man looked him in the eye. By the light of the streetlamp, his eyes glittered electric blue. "It was very kind of you to agree to meet me on such short notice," he said.