Dante heard the sound of the bulldozer grow outside the camper until it became deafening; then the first crash knocked him to the floor, so that the collar almost hanged him. He pulled himself to his knees, his head against the foam rubber mattress that reeked of his acrid sweat. There was another crash, this time not as violent but more prolonged.

They're crushing me, he thought, crazed with terror. He'd tried to wear through the plastic ties by rubbing them against the headboard of the bunk bed, but it was too smooth and the plastic was too tough: all he'd managed to do was make his wrists bleed even more profusely. He tried again, shouting and spewing insults at the man who was watching him via the webcam. There was a part of him that wanted to fall silent, to avoid giving that man any further satisfaction, but that was the rational part of his mind, shoved aside by the animal howling to be set free.

Another crash, but once again the camper remained intact. But it shifted on its wheels, creaking. The bulldozer was slowly shoving it.

Where? Where? shouted the Beast in his mind.

He understood when he felt the camper tilt toward the wall to which he was tethered. Dante rolled across the mattress and banged his head against the bunk bed above him, as the camper leaned over onto a forty-five degree angle, creaking and screeching. The table slid down the floor, the doors of the small cabinet on the opposite wall flew open, and a plastic trash bag tumbled out, ripping open as it hit the floor. A rat emerged from the garbage and started scampering wildly in circles, squeaking. The camper keeled over even farther, and Dante hit his forehead against the headboard; the resulting cut started streaming blood. The cabinet fell off the wall and burst apart at the seams; the plywood covering one of the small windows broke away. For an instant Dante saw the morning light through a film of blood and had a flash of irrational hope. I can get out that window if I can only reach it, he thought. I can save myself.

Then the bulldozer gave another shove and the camper slid downward, landing after a drop that lasted just a fraction of a second. The light from the small window was blocked out by a shadow that shot up from below like a reverse guillotine; the floor returned to an almost horizontal position. They had tossed the camper into a pit, into utter darkness. With his last glimmer of lucidity, Dante just hoped he'd die in a hurry.

The idea that had occurred to Colomba and Santini was very simple. In order to connect to Skype, the Father must necessarily be using a smartphone or a PC, and that fact reminded them that Tirelli had a laptop he always carried with him when he visited the scenes of various crimes. Both Colomba and Santini had seen it dozens of times. The laptop had a flash drive he used to connect to the Internet. Anzelmo identified it and tried to pin down its location: unfortunately, it, too, was turned off. That didn't mean that the PC wasn't connected to the Web, just that it was connected in some other way: an Ethernet cable, for instance, or else by Wi-Fi. Some computers had an internal GPS locator in case of theft, and it was possible to find out where they were if you knew the access code. But Anzelmo didn't know it, and in any case he seriously doubted that Tirelli would have activated it.

The cloud, he thought to himself. He connected to the server at the Institute of Forensic Medicine. Tirelli had a shared folder on that server to which he uploaded his expert reports, and it updated automatically whenever his computer was connected to the Internet. The folder had updated twenty minutes ago. Anzelmo, sitting at his computer in his underwear, high-fived himself and then tried to figure out where Tirelli, without even realizing it, had connected from.

Colomba and Santini were back sitting in the car, ready to take off the minute they got an answer.

"Even if we do find out where his PC is," said Santini, "that doesn't necessarily mean that Tirelli's anywhere near it. And if he is, it might not mean Torre's there, too."

"I know. We only have one shot. If we get this wrong, we'll do what you say," Colomba replied.

"If we get it wrong, we might be too late. Are you sure you're willing to take on that responsibility?"

Colomba shook her head. "No."

"But you're going to take it anyway."

"Yes."

"I'm glad I'm not in your shoes," said Santini.

Two minutes later, the phone call came in from Anzelmo. Tirelli's PC was connected to the Wi-Fi of a long-term parking area for campers and recreational vehicles.

35.

Via Pontina was the regional highway that ran from the EUR section of Rome to the little beach town of Terracina. The long-term RV and camper parking facility was located on Via Pontina just outside of the Rome beltway. It was a small facility, just twelve acres, nearly all of it covered with sheet-metal canopies under which the vehicles were parked in long orderly rows. A sign at the front gate-which opened automatically, powered by an electric motor, once you punched in a code on a keypad-announced that due to construction work currently under way, vehicles could be dropped off and picked up only between ten in the morning and six in the evening, instead of the usual hours of seven to midnight. "We apologize for the inconvenience." Perhaps that was why many of the parking spaces were empty, and it could also explain the appearance of general decrepitude. In the distance, in a fenced-off area invisible from the road, a bulldozer was moving piles of sand, pushing them into a large hole in the ground. Next to it, a cement mixer was turning, beside a stack of cement bags.

At seven in the morning, on the stretch of road overlooking the vehicle storage facility, the truck traffic was already intense, while pedestrians were virtually nonexistent. The watchman, a fifty-year-old Romanian who spoke Italian poorly and in general didn't talk much at all, was sitting in the guard's booth next to the front gate. He was alternately watching the screen connected to the two video cameras trained on the road and the television set showing an old movie. The watchman's name was Petru, but he was generally known as "Dumbo" on account of the cauliflower ears that were a legacy of a short and inglorious career as a boxer; his orders were to keep people out and turn a blind eye to whatever his boss was doing on the far side of the parking area. Illegal construction, maybe. Or maybe he was burying toxic waste. Something nasty, but Petru didn't care. He was paid not to care.

The intercom buzzed. On the screen, Petru saw a man and a woman; he had a mustache, she had red hair. They buzzed again. Petru pushed his chair over to the window, opened it, and leaned out. "Closed!" he shouted.

The couple outside didn't seem to hear. The man buzzed the intercom again. Petru sighed, got up, and left his booth, shivering in the cool morning air. In the booth he had a little electric heater that he kept turned up to maximum. "Till ten, we closed. There's sign!" he said, walking over to the gate.

The woman reached her hands through the bars and slammed him toward her and against the gate, banging the nose he had broken in his last bout as a professional, when some guy ten years younger than him had flattened it and shoved it practically up onto his forehead. The man pulled out a pistol and stuck it in his face. In his other hand he held a cop badge and ID.

"Open up," the woman ordered.

The Father was sitting in one of the abandoned trailers about thirty feet from the excavation. When a customer left a vehicle or trailer-usually relatively worthless-and vanished, the storage facility would clean it up and try to sell it. If it was too old and beat up, it was simply hauled to the edge of the parking area, to what was known as "the elephants' graveyard." The trailer the Father was sitting in was one of them, and it still bore the marks of the family it had belonged to: the walls were dotted with decals of children's cartoon characters, and in one corner a wooden cradle sat gathering dust. The Father's computer was wedged atop the kitchen sink, and on the screen streamed the images of Dante's dying torments, beamed in through the Wi-Fi network.

The Father stood watching, in silence, without moving a muscle in spite of the ache in his legs. Observation was the essence of the work he did, the art he'd honed over decades of unbroken experience. When he imagined himself, he saw an unblinking eye, capable of reading every secret, whether kept by the living or the dead. In his other line of work, which he had built as a sort of house of reflecting mirrors, he used only a fraction of this skill of his, but it had already been enough to elevate him well above the average level of his competition, so careless and imprecise, so incapable of paying attention to details. His cover occupation gave him a sense of peace. The material he was working with was inert now, devoid of any twitches or rebellions. There was no battle of the wills when it was time to insert a thermometer into a cadaver's rectum or extract a heart from a chest cavity. The struggle had already taken place elsewhere, and what was laid out on the autopsy table was the loser's remains. By studying the causes of death, the Father was actually searching for traces of the life that had been abandoned there. The marks of habits, dietary preferences, hidden vices and sins. He sniffed at the scents, he caressed them bare-handed. When no one was watching, he kissed them to savor their tastes. But there was nothing that could truly chase away every last shadow, let him know everything. Each time he was forced to stitch up a corpse and relinquish it to the morgue, the Father felt as if he were being asked to give up a fascinating book he'd only just begun to read.

It wasn't until he went back to his real life that his senses sharpened and he felt rejuvenated. Because the secrets of a live and reactive mind were infinitely greater than those of a slab of meat just starting to decompose. It was a constant clash with the uncertain and the unforeseen; there were no clearly marked roads. His subjects could rebel against him or love him, let themselves die or try to kill him. At first, that is-until he'd finally shaped them into their definitive form, the form he had decided upon.

Dante had told him he felt power in domination, but the Father rejected that accusation. He was simply an artist who loved his work, because at the highest levels, art and science both aspire to beauty. To the absolute.

He brightened the screen a little. The battery-powered lamp inside the camper continued to work, as did the webcam, but it wasn't as powerful as the Father would have liked. Part of Dante's face was in shadow now, and he couldn't see his expression as clearly as he would have liked. All he could glimpse was his mouth, open in an attempt to gulp down the air that was beginning to be in short supply.

When the first load of sand was dumped onto the camper, Dante began battering the back of his head against the wall, maybe because he hoped to lose consciousness. But he'd soon run out of strength. He'd almost stopped moving entirely, aside from the spasms in his legs. Still, he was conscious, and his eyes were open. The Father was saddened that he couldn't look into them.

He shifted his gaze from the screen to his camper's window. About thirty feet away he saw the bulldozer, halted at the edge of the pit. The driver was staring at him, awaiting instructions. His name was Manolo; he'd been with the Father from the very beginning. Chosen by him personally, not the dreck that the German recruited. Even if he'd put away enough money to live very well, the Father had held on to the long-term parking facility he'd inherited from his parents.

With a sigh, the Father decided that the time had came to say farewell to the last vestiges of the most productive and astonishing period of his life. He caught Manolo's attention and gestured for him to cover up the hole.

Santini handcuffed Petru to the desk. Colomba leaned toward him. "Where's Tirelli?"

"Who?" asked Petru.

"Old man. Skinny. Long hair."

"Not know," Petru replied.

Just then, the sound of the bulldozer's engine revving higher came from a distance. Instinctively, Petru turned to look in that direction.

"He's there," said Colomba, heading for the door.

Santini started after her, but that's when Petru caught him off guard. Until that moment, the Romanian had put up no resistance, but now he rose to his full six foot three inches and ripped the desk apart. A two-foot chunk of wood dangled from the handcuff; Petru brought it down on Santini as he was still turning around. Santini managed to dodge fast enough to avoid the blow to his face, but the sharp chunk of wood drove into his thigh and nearly ran it through. He collapsed to the floor, clutching his leg and screaming in pain, unable to grab his weapon.

Petru had acted without thinking. He just wanted to run and get away. Now that he'd injured a policeman, all the more so. If they caught him this time, it wouldn't be like before. He wouldn't get out again. He'd die in prison, just as his brother had. He charged straight at Colomba, who was standing in front of the door, windmilling his enormous fists. She stepped lightly aside and bashed him hard in the face with the swivel chair Petru had sat in all night long. One of the wheeled legs caught him right in the Adam's apple, and the Romanian fell to his knees, both hands clutching his throat, suddenly red from the struggle to breathe.

Colomba kicked him in the face. Petru raised his hands. Colomba kicked him again, wounding his eye, then rushed over to Santini and pulled the keys to the handcuffs out of his pocket. Santini had unfastened his belt and tied it above the wound, applying pressure to stop the blood, which was spilling out in copious amounts. In the meantime, he cursed in a low voice.

Colomba unlocked Petru's other handcuff, and this time she fastened it to a metal pipe, jerking her prisoner's arm until he slithered the proper distance. "If you try to get out of here, I swear I'll kill you."

Petru turned his swollen face downward and remained seated on the floor.

Colomba went over to Santini. "Are you going to die?" she asked.

"No, I don't think so."

"I'll leave him with you. Call the others, okay?" She slid Santini's handgun out of his holster and ran outside.

Santini breathed slowly, doing his best not to pass out.

Colomba headed straight toward the noise of the bulldozer that reverberated through the metal canopies. As she walked past the last row of parked vehicles, she found herself in an area that looked more like a junkyard than a long-term parking facility. There were dented carcasses of campers and rusted trailers, broken picnic tables, skeletal beach umbrellas, tangled knots of cables, charred firewood, broken camp chairs. At the edge of that area was a field where sparse yellowed grass grew among the scrub and the tree stumps. Back toward the fence that separated the parking area from an adjoining untilled field, she saw the bulldozer, which was dumping a bucketful of sand into what looked like a long ditch.

Into what looked like a grave.

Colomba leveled her arm and aimed her gun at the driver. "Halt!" she shouted. She was twenty-five feet away from him.

The driver took shelter on the floor of the bulldozer's cab. Colomba watched as the door cautiously opened, letting the barrel of a weapon protrude. She lunged for the shelter of a camper spangled with tiny flowers, just seconds before the first burst of automatic fire. It was a Kalashnikov, a weapon that before now Colomba had only seen displayed on evidence tables as confiscated goods, never being aimed at her with intent to kill.

The bullets chopped away the corner of the camper as if it were made of paper, and Colomba huddled into a crouch. Under normal circumstances, she would have awaited the arrival of reinforcements, but she couldn't, not without getting some news about Dante's condition. She tried the camper's door handle. The door opened easily.

She dived inside, hoping to find a better vantage point from which to aim at the man on the bulldozer and catch him off guard. She realized she'd made a mistake when she glimpsed a movement behind her out of the corner of her eye. She barely had time to whip around before he'd slammed his laptop into her face, twisting it two-handed like a baseball bat.

Colomba lost hold of her gun and felt something breaking in her mouth. Then she saw nothing, heard nothing; she stopped breathing, her lungs two empty sacks.

"I swear I didn't want to do it, Colomba," said Tirelli and lifted the computer again. "I've always been fond of you."

Colomba jerked her head away just in time, and the computer shattered onto the floor. The pain of that movement restored control of her breathing. She reached out and grabbed Tirelli's wrist; he'd lunged forward and lost his balance. The wrist was thin and frail. She yanked it toward her, and Tirelli fell upon her, as if into an embrace. He tried to struggle, but his strength was nothing compared to Colomba's; she wrapped him in her grip, glaring at him with blood-sheened eyes.

"Where's Dante?" she whispered. She was having difficulty moving her mouth; something crackled in her jaw like broken glass.

"It's too late for him, Colomba."

She tackled him onto the floor. He was as light as balsa wood. She climbed on top of him and let blood and saliva from her shattered lips drip onto him. "Where."

"In the hole."

Colomba got to her feet and retrieved her gun. She was seeing double. "Get up," she muttered.

He obeyed. She got behind him and braced her left arm around his throat. "Walk," she said.

"What are you trying to do?" asked Tirelli.

She squeezed, he fell silent. She forced him out the door, out into the open air. The man on the bulldozer saw them, and, as Colomba had hoped, he held his fire.

"Tell him to drop his weapon," Colomba ordered. She'd have done it herself, but she couldn't: the pain every time she uttered a word was terrible.

"He won't do it. Survival comes first, Colomba."

"Tell him."

He obeyed.

The man on the bulldozer got to his feet, still holding the rifle, but no longer aiming it in their direction. "I'll go away from here!" he shouted.

"No," Colomba murmured.

"She says no, Manolo," Tirelli shouted.

"I have to go away from here! I don't want to have anything more to do with this bullshit."

"No," Colomba whispered again.

"Be reasonable, Colomba," Tirelli said.

"No," she said again.

The man on the bulldozer seemed to understand. He suddenly jerked the rifle up. Colomba did the same thing, over Tirelli's shoulder. They both fired at almost the same instant. Half of Colomba's bullets hit their target. Manolo fell backward off the bulldozer, tumbling onto the tread.

Two of Manolo's shots passed through Tirelli's chest and hit Colomba in her left side.

She felt as if she'd been run through with needles of ice. She let Tirelli drop but managed to stay on her feet. She looked down at him, sprawled on the ground, his chest ripped open at the sternum. The blood had pumped out in gushing spurts and was now forming a broad puddle beneath him, as he alternated between rapid panting and breathlessness.

The Father was dying, and he knew it. Someone would lift him up off the ground and cut him open on a metal autopsy table, and they'd study him the way he had done with hundreds of men and women, some of whose lives he had been responsible for ending.

But they wouldn't understand, the Father thought with his last spark of life. They'd never understand who he'd been. No one would understand his dream.

The last thing the Father saw before dying was a pair of terrible green eyes.

36.

Colomba staggered unsteadily away from the Father's corpse. At a certain point along the seemingly endless path, she let her pistol drop, and she herself almost fell to the ground.

When she got to the edge of the pit, she realized that there was an entire camper buried in it. She could see only part of the crushed roof, and through it she could see a heap of sand. If Dante was in there, he was dead. He had to be.

Colomba jumped down onto the camper. It was less than a yard down, but the effort was almost enough to make her pass out.

The bullets actually served as hemostatic plugs, but she was still losing blood, and the pain in her face had become monstrous. She dropped down into the opening and landed on the pile of sand, sliding down the side until she reached the far end of the camper, the only part still clear of detritus. Grains of sand got into her throat and eyes. She coughed, and the pain was so bad that she wept. She wept in great racking sobs, entirely forgetting where she was until she could finally lift her head and saw a human figure illuminated by a dim green night light. All that emerged from the sand was part of his chest and his head.

Dante was tied up with a dog collar, and he was desperately stretching toward her, trying to make it across the sand but unable to move.

"CC," he said in a voice that seemed to come from beyond the grave. "I knew you'd come."

Colomba crawled toward him and hugged him tight, without speaking. When the first responders arrived, that's how they found them.

EPILOGUE.

It took two months before Colomba and Dante recovered from their injuries and their imprisonment. In those two months, the investigation into the Father, known by his everyday name of Mario Tirelli, continued, though without clearing up all the mysteries that the case had raised. Whoever his contacts and financers might have been, he hadn't written their names down anywhere or confided them to a living soul. Any relations he might have had with the CIA or the Italian army were categorically denied, and the only thing worthy of note in that connection was that a retired Italian general blew out his brains with a collector's piece, a pistol from the Second World War. According to his personnel files, he had been the commanding officer of the barracks where Bodini had served before leaving the service and becoming, for many years, the only guilty party in Dante's kidnapping.

There were more suicides. The managing director of the foundation that had run Silver Compass turned on the gas in his apartment, killing himself after stabbing his wife to death. Murder-suicide, the investigators decided, even though there were newspapers that theorized murder-murder, plain and simple.