Santiago slipped the piece of paper into his jacket pocket. "The way I operate, they won't even see the dust I kick up."

"Be careful anyway."

"It'll cost you, you know that, right?"

"How much?"

"Four grand."

"Two. Then we'll see, depending on what you bring me. How will I pay you?"

Santiago gave him the number of a Peruvian prepaid card. Dante promised he'd wire him the money that day.

Santiago nodded. "But first there's something I want to know, hermano."

"Wasn't the rule always no questions?"

"If you're sleeping with a lady cop, the rules don't apply."

Dante sighed. He should have guessed that Santiago would be well informed. "I'm not sleeping with her. We're staying in the same suite. And she's on administrative leave."

"Yeah, but she's still a cop, though."

"Is that a problem?"

"No. You can do whatever you want. You're my friend, but you're not one of us." Dante nodded. "Still, I have to know why you didn't ask her instead of me."

"You said it yourself, that you're faster."

"Is that the only reason?"

"And because I don't trust her channels."

Santiago laughed. "Right you are. Never trust cops."

"But I trust her, and you might as well know it."

"So you're going to tell her about me?"

"Yes. But don't worry, there won't be any consequences." Not for you, at least, he added in his mind.

Santiago stood up, summoning his girlfriend back with a tilt of the head. She set down her umbrella cocktail and hurried over. "I never worry, worrying is for losers," he said.

"Lucky you."

"I'll write you soon."

"How soon?"

"I don't know, hermano. A couple of days."

"Santiago . . . I need something fast. Please."

Santiago looked hard at Dante's taut face and nodded. "I'll see what I can do."

After another hug, Santiago left, his arms wrapped around Luna. They looked like a pair of sweethearts.

Dante dragged himself into his room and fell asleep fully clothed, dead to the world. He slept only three hours because Santiago really had gotten straight to work. He'd sent his first results to the server that Dante used for this kind of thing. Once Dante saw them, he lost any desire to sleep.

12.

Colomba woke up at two in the afternoon and took a long shower, reviewing in her mind the events of the night before. She thought about Montanari's murder, Zardoz, and even the long stroll with Dante. She'd felt comfortable in Trastevere by night, comfortable in a way that hadn't happened to her with another human being in months. She wondered if she wasn't becoming fond of him. The idea worried her. She wasn't ready for a relationship with anyone, not since the Disaster. And after all, once this case was finished, she'd probably never see him again.

She put on the bright white bathrobe with the hotel's logo and went into the living room, where she found six dirty cups next to the espresso machine. Dante must have been up for quite a while already, and the Hindi music that wafted out of his room told her that he was already at work on something. The Bollywood background music coming from Spotify was his favorite for when he was on the computer, though Colomba couldn't really tell one song from the next.

She made a cappuccino and knocked on Dante's door with the cup in one hand.

When she opened the door, she was assaulted by the stench of cigarettes. Dante was sitting in the middle of the bed, his laptop balanced on his crossed legs, dressed in the same clothes he'd worn yesterday. The smoke was so thick that she had a hard time seeing. He'd put duct tape over the smoke alarm to keep it from going off. When he saw her, he turned off the music.

Colomba threw open the French door, though she cautiously left the curtains drawn. "Do you want to suffocate?"

"You told me that at night I'm supposed to keep the door shut."

"It's not night now." Colomba analyzed the quantity of cigarette butts in a glass on the table, then looked at his exhausted face and decided rightly that he'd gone all night without sleep, or something close to it. "Don't you need sleep?"

"I used to know a guy who never slept," said Dante.

"And what became of him?"

"Someone shot him in the head; now he sleeps all the time." He smiled, but it was clear to Colomba that he was tense.

"What's going on?" she asked, sitting down on the edge of the bed.

Dante rummaged in the pack, pulled out the last cigarette, and lit it, in defiance of Colomba's disapproving look. "I've got some information. And it's useful."

"What information?"

"About Zardoz. I gave everything I knew to an acquaintance and told him to dig around online."

Colomba felt the sudden urge to grab Dante, lock him in a trunk, and let him kick and twist. "Who's this acquaintance of yours?"

"His name is Santiago Hurtado."

"Not the guy from the Cuchillos, surely?"

Dante nodded yes.

"Do you have any idea who they are?"

"CC, that doesn't matter right now."

"Like hell it doesn't matter. We arrested Hurtado two years ago, with four of his friends, for stabbing a guy. And the only reason he got off is because three witnesses swore that he was snorting coke at a club at the time."

"Right."

"And now you decide to send him confidential information about a murder and kidnapping investigation?"

"In his way, he's a man of his word."

"Honor among thieves," said Colomba sarcastically. "How did you meet him?"

"Can we skip that part?"

"No. We can't."

Dante shrugged his shoulders: he didn't want a fight, and once again Colomba understood that his thoughts were elsewhere. "If you insist. Minutillo was Santiago's lawyer. I gave him a hand tracking down the witnesses you just mentioned."

Colomba seethed with indignation. "Then that means it's your fault."

"Santiago is no longer a Cuchillo in the narrow sense of the word. After what happened, he got out of drug dealing."

Colomba folded her arms. "That's a big consolation . . . No, sorry. I don't want to interrupt anymore. Go on with your story."

"He's always been something of a geek, and he discovered that he was really good at getting into the computers of people who want to keep others out of them. And now that's what he sells."

"From drug dealer to hacker. Just the fact that we're using him could send us both to prison, you know that, right?"

"Luca Maugeri is in the hands of a monster. You do remember that, don't you?"

"The Ministry of Justice's Special Internet Crimes Division . . ." said Colomba without much conviction.

"Is that supposed to be a joke?"

"What did he find out about Zardoz?" she asked brusquely.

"That he's burning his bridges. All the sites that Montanari used have been burned to the ground."

"Burned to the ground?"

"The server hard drives have been erased. Santiago doesn't entirely rule out the possibility that he might still find something, but it's going to take time."

"Is that all?"

"No. He found out that about two months ago Zardoz penetrated the server of the local health service. Just a few days after the Maugeris' son was examined at the clinic."

"Is it all so easy?"

Dante shrugged. "With what he used to punch into the health service site, even you could have done it."

"Why? What did he use?"

"A malware spybot, a cute little spy app that installs itself on the server and transmits data remotely back to whoever installed it, allowing them to find the system passwords and so on. According to Santiago, it's identical to what the Chinese hackers used to get into Apple's servers."

"I doubt that Zardoz is Chinese."

"You can download that kind of software from the Web, no problem. All you have to know is where to find it. It's just that he's very well informed. He's a professional. Or else he has a professional working for him, the way Santiago works for me. And he used a similar kind of software."

Colomba thought it over for a while. "So Zardoz didn't trust Montanari enough to ask him for information about the boy. He took care of that himself."

"But the boy's file didn't provide enough information to identify him."

"How do you know?"

"I called the director of the local health clinic. After what happened, he was much more cooperative. I got him to give me the lists."

"Did you pass yourself off as a cop?"

"Not directly."

Colomba shut her eyes. "We're getting deeper and deeper into the shit."

"From the lists that the medical director sent me, it was possible to identify the names of the children who had taken part in the school medical examination program, but there are no pictures, physical descriptions, or indications of date or time. And there were over three hundred children."

"So how did Zardoz manage to find the right one?"

"The same way I did. I discarded the little girls and the boys on whose files there was a father's signature."

"Because Luca was taken in by his mother. You can see that in the video," said Colomba.

"Exactly. That left twenty names. I discarded the ones with a female doctor."

"Because you can see the doctor in the video, too . . ."

"Which left fourteen. I called those fourteen people this morning before you woke up."

"And?"

"Four of them got a phone call from Zardoz."

Colomba's heart skipped a beat. "Holy Christ," she whispered.