‘Pretty much.’
‘The difference between you and me is that you can get away with it because you’re a woman,’ Gallo sniffed. ‘When I do it, I get called a rude bastard.’
‘I wouldn’t say you were rude, sir.’ The words were out of her mouth before she even knew she was saying them.
His smile faded. Salvatore looked faint.
‘What can you tell me about this place?’ he snapped, motioning at her to follow him over to the altar.
‘What do you mean?’
‘The Pantheon. Is there anything I should know about it? Anything that might tie it to where we found Ricci’s body last night?’
She ran her hand through her hair, desperately trying to dredge up the highlights of some longforgotten lecture or text book.
‘It was built by Hadrian in about 125 AD, so there’s no obvious connection to Caesar, if that’s what you mean?’ she began with a shrug. ‘Then again, although it’s been a church since the seventh century, the Pantheon did used to be a pagan temple, just like the ones in the Area Sacra.’
‘Hardly conclusive,’ Gallo sniffed, patting his jacket down as if he was looking for cigarettes and eventually finding a packet of boiled sweets. ‘I’m trying to give up,’ he admitted as he popped one into his mouth. She noticed that he didn’t offer her one.
‘No,’ she agreed with a firm shake of her head.
‘Then what do you make of this?’
At a flick of his wrist, two forensic officers rolled away the screens. A body was lying on the altar, naked from the waist up. His bearded face was turned towards them, eyes gaping open with shock. Two gleaming white shop mannequins were standing at his head - one small and hunched, the other taller - staring down at the corpse with cold, vacant expressions. Both were unclothed, with moulded blank features and no hair, although the smooth hump of their breasts marked them out as female.
The taller mannequin had been carefully arranged so that her left hand was gripping the man’s hair and the right holding a short sword. The sword itself was embedded in a deep gash in the victim’s neck that had almost decapitated him. The blood had gushed from his wound, covering the altar and cascading to the floor where it had pooled and solidified into a brackish lake.
It was a carefully arranged, almost ritualistic scene. And one that, for a reason Allegra couldn’t quite put her finger on, seemed strangely familiar to her.
‘Who is it?’
‘Don’t you recognise him?’ Salvatore, looking surprised, had ventured forward to her side. ‘His brother’s always on TV. He looks just like him.’
‘Why, who’s his brother?’ she asked, wanting to look away and study the man’s tortured features at the same time.
‘Annibale Argento,’ Salvatore explained. ‘The Sicilian deputy. The stiff is his twin brother Gio, otherwise known as Giulio.’
‘Hannibal and Julius,’ Gallo nodded. ‘There’s your damn Caesar connection.’
‘What’s any of this got to do with me?’ she interrupted, wondering if she still had time to untangle herself from this mess before the media got wind of it.
‘We found this in his mouth -’
Gallo held up a clear plastic evidence bag. She knew, almost without looking, what it contained.
Amalfi Hotel and Casino, Las Vegas
17th March - 11.02 p.m.
Kezman’s private elevator opened on to a tennis court-sized room, rainbows cloaking the lush tropical gardens that could be glimpsed through the open windows where the floodlights shimmered through a permanent cooling mist.
Glancing up, Tom could see that the soaring ceilings had been draped in what looked like black satin, three huge chandeliers flowering from within their luxuriant folds as if they were leaking glass. The only furniture, if you could call it that, was a 1926 Hispano-Suiza H6. Parked about twothirds of the way down, it was a mass of gleaming chrome and polished black metal, the wheel arches soaring up over the front wheels and then swooping gracefully down towards the running boards, two dinner plate-sized headlights perched at the end of a massive bonnet like dragon’s eyes.
‘You’re here. Good.’
A man had come in off the balcony, a radio in one hand, a mobile phone in the other. Short and wiry, his olive skin was pockmarked by acne scars, his black hair shaved almost to his skull. Rather than blink, he seemed to grimace every few seconds, his face scrunching into a pained squint as if he had something in his eye.
‘Tom, this is Special Agent Carlos Ortiz.’ They shook hands as she introduced them. ‘I’ve borrowed him from my other case for a few days to help out.’
‘Welcome.’
Ortiz’s expression was impenetrable, although Tom thought he glimpsed a tattoo just under his collar - the number fourteen in Roman numerals. Tom recognised it as a reference to the letter ‘N’, the fourteenth letter of the alphabet, and by repute to the Norteños, a coalition of Latino gangs from Northern California. Ortiz had clearly taken a difficult and rarely trodden path from the violent street corners of his youth to the FBI’s stiff-collared embrace.
‘I hope you’re half as good as she says you are,’ Ortiz sniffed. Tom glanced questioningly at Jennifer, who gave him an awkward shrug. ‘Did you get the envelope from the State Department?’
‘Yeah.’ She nodded. ‘Let’s talk about that later. How long have we got?’
‘It’s set for midnight so…just under an hour,’ he replied, checking his watch - a fake Rolex Oyster, Tom noted, its second hand advancing with a tell-tale staccato twitch rather than sweeping smoothly around the dial as a real one would.
‘Everyone’s already in place,’ Stokes added. ‘I got six agents on the floor at the tables and playing the slots, and another four on the front and rear doors. Metro and SWAT are holding back two blocks south.’
‘What about the money?’ Tom asked.
‘In the vault in two suitcases,’ Stokes reassured him. ‘Unmarked, non-sequential notes, just like they asked. They’ll bring it out when we’re ready.’
‘Let’s get you mike’d up.’
Ortiz led Tom over to the car, which Tom suddenly realised had been turned into a desk, the seats ripped out and the roof and one side cut away and replaced with a black marble slab.
‘I guess rich people are always looking for new ways to spend their money, right?’ Ortiz winked.
‘Some just have more imagination than others,’ Tom agreed.
Ortiz removed a small transmitter unit from the briefcase and, as Jennifer turned away with a smile, helped Tom fix it to his inner thigh, hiding the microphone under his shirt.
‘If anyone finds that, they’re looking for a date not a wire,’ Ortiz joked once he was happy that it was secure and working. He checked his watch again. ‘Let’s go. Kezman asked to see you downstairs before we hit the floor.’
‘Any reason we didn’t just meet down there in the first place?’ Jennifer asked with a frown.
‘He thought you might like the view.’
They stepped back inside the elevator and again it headed down automatically, stopping at the mezzanine level, close to the entrance to the Amalfi’s private art gallery.
‘He