"Maybe," said Spinelli. "What we're asking you is to go to the place and provide whatever information you possess to facilitate the work of the rescue squad. It'll take the bomb squad about six hours to finish their work. By then you'll be there, obviously under armed guard-that is, if you give your consent."

Colomba was filled with hope. She did her best to push that hope away, out of fear of jinxing herself, but she couldn't do it. She kept thinking of the children, praying they were still alive. "Of course I'll go, your honor . . . Anything you ask. But it's Dante you need, not me."

Spinelli flashed her a half smile. "He asked for you, Deputy Captain. Your presence is one of the conditions he set for being there. Among other things."

The other things were a Neapolitan coffeepot, a camp stove, and a sack of ground, freshly roasted single-origin arabica coffee from the Torrefazione Vittoria of Cremona, which he had been told was the best coffee roaster in the area. When she was escorted under armed guard to his hospital room, Colomba found him stretched out on the bed drinking his tenth cup with an ecstatic expression. She was handcuffed; he had a male nurse keeping an eye on everything he did. They didn't hug, but they did smile, and Colomba saw that he was beside himself with excitement.

"Did you hear, CC? They've found them."

"They're not positive," said Colomba.

Dante sighed in exasperation. "I am. Trust me."

"I will when you explain to me about the bluebird."

He flashed his sarcastic grin. "Soon. I don't want to talk about it before getting my thoughts organized. And I have to read a boring document in English that Roberto brought me this morning."

"In English?"

"Yes, and as a language, there's far too much of it around, I agree. I'd have already finished if they would let me have Internet access."

"You can forget about that," said the male nurse.

"You see? How are they taking us to Rome? In an armored car?"

"Helicopter."

Dante lost his smile. "Not a chance."

"It's an air ambulance. You'll be asleep the whole way. We'll sedate you here. And you'll wake up at the airport. With me right next to you," said Colomba.

Dante writhed on the bed. "I can't breathe, I need air."

"You'll get plenty of air on the flight, too much, even," said Colomba, tersely. "And try to remember why you're doing it."

Dante continued to writhe for another good minute, sweating copiously. "Okay. But I want to be sedated now; otherwise I'll change my mind."

"No problem," said the male nurse. "If that would make you shut up for a minute. I'll go call the doctor."

Dante was sedated, placed in a stretcher, and then loaded onto the helicopter. Boarding with him were Colomba, Spinelli, and three officers from the Cremona Mobile Squad. It seemed to Colomba that the flight lasted a lifetime, but just two hours later she was looking down on the asphalt of the Rome bypass highway as it rose up beneath her and then a ramshackle building surrounded by the earth-tone rectangles of the shipping containers, half-hidden in the trees. It was ten in the morning on the dot when they landed. Dante was brought to with an injection of stimulant. He leapt to his feet as if spring-loaded, running in his dressing gown and slippers straight toward the line of policemen surrounding the building. He was halted by the men of his police escort, handcuffed, and led with Colomba to see the director of operations, none other than Curcio, with his usual rumpled appearance.

"Signor Torre, at last we meet. Madame Judge . . ." They shook hands; then Curcio looked Colomba in the eyes. "Deputy Captain Caselli, I'm happy to know you, even if you might well wish you were anywhere but here."

"I wouldn't be anywhere else for anything on earth," she replied. "I understand you've taken my case to heart, sir. I've wanted a chance to thank you."

He shook his head. "Wait and see how it turns out before you say that. You're still in a state of detention. Madame Judge, are the handcuffs really necessary?"

"I'm afraid they are."

Curcio shrugged and spoke to Dante. "What can you tell us?"

Dante looked at the containers. They were old pieces of junk covered with graffiti and rust, arranged in an irregular fan shape, each some twenty feet distant from the next. Dante decided that they were even smaller than his silo. Narrower. He felt his breath catch, but the sedative still circulating in his blood placated him. "Have you opened them yet?" he asked.

"Not yet; we're waiting for the bomb squad to run some last checks."

"The young children won't give you any problems," said Dante. "But you'll have to sedate the older boys immediately."

"Why?"

"Because they've grown up in there. And they've learned the rules. You can't leave for any reason whatsoever. You can't even think of leaving. Give them chocolate. That's the reward."

"The reward?" Curcio asked.

"For when we're good boys," Dante explained.

"Understood," said Curcio, trying not to shiver.

"And make sure Ruggero Palladino's parents come. And Luca Maugeri's father. Both of those boys are in there."

"You can't be so certain," Spinelli broke in. "And Stefano Maugeri is being detained under court order. We'd need the permission of the supervisory judge."

"Then send for his sister-in-law, Giulia Balestri." He dictated from memory her address and phone number.

Curcio took note. "If you're wrong, it's going to be a cruel trick to play on them," he said.

"I'm never wrong. Just ask your colleague."

The colleague was Colomba. She smiled. "He's wrong quite often, but he's not this time."

Curcio nodded and handed the sheet of paper with the names and details to Lieutenant Infanti, who turned purple when he saw Colomba. She ignored him, and he hurried away.

Half an hour later, a fiber-optic cable was inserted into the first shipping container. On the monitor they saw that it had been transformed into a minuscule prison, with its own chemical toilet. A filthy adolescent boy with long hair was shaking uncontrollably, standing with his face to the wall, hands clasped behind his back. Like a schoolboy being punished, thought Colomba.

Dante recommended having a single man go in, without uniform, without weapons. A paramedic with an especially reassuring appearance and a degree in psychology was chosen. He entered the container after one of the bomb squad men cut the detonator wires and pried open the door. The prisoner went on staring at the wall, pretending not to notice. At Dante's suggestion, the paramedic called him "son" and placed his hand on his shoulder. The prisoner screamed and began running in circles in the container until he could be detained and sedated. From an examination of his physical condition, the rescue team was able to determine that he hadn't been given food or water in the past several days.

As Dante had predicted, the younger children reacted less drastically, within the limits of their conditions. Dante recognized the symptoms of autism in three of the younger children and two adolescents, varying in gravity from individual to individual.

The fourth adolescent greeted his rescuer brandishing a piece of wood, but he lowered it immediately when Dante called to him from outside the container: "Stop, Beast!" The boy kneeled to the ground with his head between his hands.

Dante mentally asked the boy's forgiveness and felt filthy inside. Then he broke into tears, as did nearly everyone present and as did many viewers later that evening as they watched footage caught by a person with a cell phone in the adjoining fields.

The boy extracted from the ninth container was Ruggero Palladino, and his parents got out of the carabinieri helicopter just in time to give him a hug before the sedative took effect. The last boy was slightly pudgy, his eyeglasses held together with adhesive tape, and he was strangely calm. Luca Maugeri. When she saw him, his aunt Giulia fainted and had to be attended to by a doctor.

"It's over," Colomba told Dante, hugging him in spite of the handcuffs.

She couldn't have been more wrong, but of course she didn't know that yet.

26.

Colomba was taken back to the Cremona house of detention and Dante to the hospital, but their situations were quite different now. Colomba realized it from the number of officers who had gone back to calling her "deputy captain" and addressing her as "ma'am" instead of just "hey, you." Dante noticed the growing number of rubberneckers and fans crowding outside the windows of his hospital room, as the news of his role in rescuing the prisoners began to spread. If anyone had nominated him for the Nobel Prize or for sainthood, there would very likely have been a groundswell of support. There was also a drastic change in the status of Stefano Maugeri, who was released immediately once his son was found alive; there was also a corresponding change in the status of De Angelis, who was promptly and urgently stripped of all authority in the investigation of the Vivaro mountain meadows murder by the Superior Council of the Magistrature, Italy's highest judicial body. De Angelis held two press conferences in twenty-four hours: the first to denounce the decision, the second to announce his retirement from the judiciary to devote himself to a private legal practice; both press conferences were by and large ignored.

The investigations of Colomba and Dante were thus transferred to the Cremona district attorney's office; that office immediately ordered Dante's release and began laying the groundwork to do the same with Colomba once the German's arsenal was discovered, seven days after the plastic drums were opened. The arsenal was found near the Roman farmhouse where the containers had been hidden. Not only were there handguns and rifles of various makes and provenances, there was also twenty pounds of C-4 with the same chemical signature as that used in the bombing that had killed Rovere. Along with it was a floor plan of Rovere's apartment.

If De Angelis had still been in charge of the investigation, he probably would have claimed that the German and Colomba were surely accomplices and perhaps even lovers, but luckily everything had changed. Colomba was released from prison on the morning of the eighth day but wasn't even given time to enjoy a breath of fresh air before she was hastily ushered into a briefing at the district attorney's office. Dante was the keynote speaker. It was going to be held on a sunny terrace. When Colomba saw him arrive in an impeccable black suit and with a cocky attitude, she understood that the audience was going to be treated to quite a show that day.

Dante stopped a few yards short of the table, waiting to make sure everyone was looking at him, smiled, lit a cigarette, and then shook hands all around, announcing his name each time. There were Curcio, Spinelli, her secretary, the forensic archaeologist from LABANOF who had performed the examination of the bones, and a man in his early sixties with a beard and a buzz cut, without a hair out of place. Colomba immediately identified him as a carabiniere. His name was Di Marco, and he was a colonel in the Internal Information and Security Agency, or IISA.

Dante shook his hand with an eager grin. "So they managed to talk you into it," he said.

"I hope this isn't going to be a waste of time," the colonel replied, grimly.

"Actually, that's exactly what you do hope," Dante observed and sat down at one end of the table, sliding to the center a pile of folders that he'd brought with him. "This is a short report that I drew up in the past few days, strictly as a memo. At the end you'll find a short bibliography concerning the principal topics."

Everyone took a copy: it was about twenty typed pages stapled together. Colomba already knew what was in it because Minutillo had given her an advance peek at the document before she was released from jail, to make sure she was prepared. If she hadn't lived through what she'd lived through in the past several weeks, she would have considered it a compilation of idiocies. Instead it all made perfect sense to her.

The man from IISA looked at the headline on the first page of the report and turned pale. It said: PROJECT BLUEBIRD.

"Let me remind you all that today's meeting is informal in nature and that we called it to give Signor Torre a chance to express his view of the events now under investigation by this district attorney's office," Spinelli began. "Can you briefly summarize what you think is at issue here, Signor Torre?"

Dante smiled. "In two words? National interest."

"Maybe we're going to need more than two words, in that case," said Spinelli, baffled.

"Let's start with the established facts. You'll find an outline on page two of your document," Dante began in an exaggeratedly affected tone of voice: the only thing missing was a pair of pince-nez glasses to make him look like a professor of days gone by. There was a rustling of pages. "In 1975," he went on, "the Church Committee of the US Senate certified that, beginning in 1950 and continuing at least to 1973, the CIA, with the cooperation of the FBI, carried out a series of experiments on behavioral control and the alteration of personalities by means of such drugs as LSD and barbiturates, physical violence, coercion, and sensory deprivation. The avowed purpose was to create agents capable of obeying orders even in defiance of their own free will, as well as to withstand interrogation. In their defense, they were afraid of the possibility that the Soviet Union might beat them to it," he added ironically. "They were hoping to use the agents against Castro, along with the exploding cigars."

"The Manchurian Candidate," said Roberta, the scientist from LABANOF.

Curcio looked at her in amazement. "You've heard of it?"

"They even made a movie about it," she replied with a smile.

"More than one," said Dante. "But those who have made serious studies of the topic consider that the declared objective was just a cover. It's impossible to force someone to kill if he doesn't want to; you can't make people obey posthypnotic commands like so many robots. And simply paying a professional killer costs less. Altering an opponent's personality, breaking it or deleting inconvenient memories, on the other hand, is far more useful for a government and its henchmen."

"Who were the subjects of the experiments?" asked Curcio, his curiosity piqued.

"First and foremost, thousands of US soldiers, who according to the rules of engagement were all considered to be 'volunteers.' They also used convicts from prisons, patients from hospitals and insane asylums, and unsuspecting citizens selected at random. In particular, among those who were given LSD without their knowledge, there were numerous suicides, acts of self-mutilation, outbursts of violence, and long-term cases of psychosis. We know that in one case all the clients of a house of prostitution were drugged and brutally interrogated, in the sure knowledge that none of them would file a complaint. In another case, a substance that was designed to trigger psychotic episodes was dispersed as an aerosol spray in the subway."

"That's never been proved," said Di Marco.

Dante grinned his sarcastic grin. "True, in part because in 1973 the CIA director, Richard Helms, ordered most of the documents on the experiments destroyed. Other documents were intentionally misfiled, and finding them turned out to be very challenging, even for the investigators. In spite of that, there are at least twenty thousand pages of documentation in the possession of the US Congress, and they're now declassified and freely accessible thanks to the Freedom of Information Act."

"Might I ask you what any of this has to do with what we're working on now?" asked Spinelli.

"I'm afraid I'm going to have to come to that by steps, if you'll forgive me," Dante replied. "In any case, what the CIA scientists were working on was at first known as Project Bluebird, just like Sialia sialis, the state bird of New York; in 1951, however, the project changed its name to Artichoke, because the idea was to 'peel away' layer after layer in the subjects' minds, the same way you might do with the leaves of an artichoke."

"Nice image," Curcio muttered.

"Then the name was changed again to MKUltra, a more neutral term. I believe you know the meaning of the word 'ultra,' Colonel."

Di Marco nodded imperceptibly. "It dates back to the Second World War. The highest level of secrecy."

"According to the findings of the Church Committee, there were more than a hundred and fifty subprojects that fell under the jurisdiction of MKUltra, all of them funded separately."

"Just for the sake of the historical record, did this vast deployment of resources lead to any useful results?" asked Spinelli.

"Not according to the CIA. According to several scholars, however, including Naomi Klein, the results of MKUltra are at the foundation of all modern torture techniques used by special forces around the world."

"Signor Torre," Spinelli replied, "what you're telling us is certainly fascinating and no doubt well documented. But we're talking about a long time ago, in a different country."

"And the project was shut down in 1974," the colonel pointed out.

"In the United States, perhaps," said Dante. "In the rest of the world . . . there are no reliable data. And what information there was has been destroyed."

"In the rest of the world?" asked Curcio.

Dante nodded. "After the Church Committee, the US Congress ordered the cessation of all experimentation on American citizens. But it made no mention of foreign citizens. Yet there was an entire section of the project that focused on experiments outside the United States, and we know for certain that experiments were done all over Europe, even though the only surviving records concern two experiments undertaken in, respectively, France and Canada. The section that operated overseas was called MKDelta." He smiled. "Sorry, but the military lacks imagination."

"Especially when the military is asked to listen to fairy tales," said Di Marco. "Do you realize what you're telling us?"

"Everything I've set forth here is documented."

"But the idea of tying MKUltra to what happened to you is pure conjecture." Di Marco looked around the table at the others; Colomba looked back with all the malevolence she could muster. "Does anyone really believe that the CIA was behind what happened to Signor Torre?"

No one spoke.

Dante narrowed his eyes. "Do you remember what was going on at the time, Colonel? The Western intelligence services feared that Italy was about to be lost to a communist revolution, and they were ready to do whatever was necessary to prevent it."

"It was a terrible time," Di Marco admitted.

"And terrible times demand terrible solutions, evidently."

"However, nothing that you're talking about has been the subject of any judicial investigation," Curcio broke in. "We'd know if it had. The way we learned about other crimes committed by the deviant intelligence services."

"Do you really think we know everything that happened?" asked Dante. "And what we're talking about was a small, controlled experiment, the security for which was run by a few men selected carefully from the ranks of the Italian army, men like Ferrari and Bellomo, under the German's orders. And with only twenty guinea pigs, an assortment of children and adults, isolated, tortured, and stuffed with psychotropic substances by a scientist who called himself the Father, the director of the project, in collaboration with the German. One director whose expertise was security and who may have come out of the intelligence services; another whose area was the scientific aspect, as it were, and who was a civilian."

"We don't have any records showing that Bellomo and the others were in the army," said Spinelli.

"That's understandable if the top ranks of the military-or, more plausibly, someone in the top ranks of the military-preferred not to have the record show such a thing. If the German's team really had no links to the army, how do you explain the story that Pinna told Rovere just before dying?"

"Pure delirium," Di Marco replied.