A Cold Flame: A gripping crime thriller that will keep you hooked

“Now, brothers, I ask you to speak. How shall we act? Where must we strike? Share with me the fruits of your wisdom. Who will put himself forward for the supreme and wondrous act of martyrdom and take then his reward in paradise, where he will be served by angels and his fifty virgin wives will attend to him as is his right, as is written by the Prophet, peace be to his name, in the Holy Qur’an.”

One of the company raised his hand.

“Yes,” said Ali. “Speak, Jibril.”

Fifteen

“We’ve been given a pretty open brief here,” Maroni continued leaning forward again over his notes. One document was headed in bold lettering “Combined Security Committee”.

“CSC want us to approach it intellectually and operationally, given the abundant expertise we have in both those fields. Which, as far as I’m concerned, means keeping your eyes and ears open and doing proper police work.”

He sat back then and looked up, scanning the faces gathered round the oval table in the conference room. He forced a wry smile. “I prefer the operational side myself but as you know I am always ready to hear your suggestions.”

“Ah, glad you could make it,” he said then as Rossi made his way into the meeting and grabbed a chair, more than a little late. “You know everyone, I’m sure. If not, get acquainted during the break.”

Rossi sat down opposite Carrara on the other side of the table.

“I had just been telling everyone here that you’re one of our top languages men, but Arabic’s not on your list, is it?”

“Not as yet, sir,” Rossi replied.

“Any suggestions as to how we might approach surveillance and intelligence gathering on the ground? The question’s open to you all,” Maroni continued, eying the gathered operatives one by one now over his rimless reading glasses.

“I was wondering,” said Carrara, “about the tech side. Is that all in the hands of the usual crew? The Telecoms Police and their, shall we say, ‘subsidiaries’? I assume their GIS mapping is going to be central, but what about our role? Do we have any added capabilities?”

“Well you can forget about ClearTech for now,” Maroni said, looking to close quickly on that score, “Judicial inquiry’s out on that one, as if you don’t remember.”

Rossi and Carrara remembered very well. They hadn’t been able to prove it but, during The Carpenter case, they had found enough to suggest that the outsourced computer forensics had been manipulated to keep them off the trail. Silvestre, an integral part of the RSCS but never one to see eye-to-eye with either Rossi or Carrara, had been seconded to assist ClearTech just before. They didn’t think it had been any coincidence.

“The problem,” said Rossi, cutting in, “as I see it, and from what I’ve gathered from Europol, and our French counterparts in particular, is that these groups, the radicalizers and the potentially radicalized, initially get together via chat rooms and forums. They sound each other out first and then they move onto secure encrypted platforms, things like Telegram. There’s very little you can do to intercept the coms.”

“Well at least you’ve been doing some homework, Rossi,” said Maroni. “But I think our lot are on to that and aware of the limitations of straightforward phone taps.”

“If they’re any good at all, they hardly even use phones,” said Rossi. “They use word of mouth, trust and community protection, couriers.”

“So what’s the big idea then? I assume you’re going to get to your point.” The surprise contribution had come from Silvestre. He had popped up at the corner of the table where he’d been slouching, lying low as usual. “I say we pile into the ghettos and stop and search till they’re sick of the sight of us. See a car with a couple of Arabs in, we turn it over. Send ’em a message, the murdering scum.”

“You’re assuming we’re dealing only with Arabs then Silvestre?” Rossi countered.

“You know exactly what I mean. Come down heavy on the lot, I say. Show ’em who’s boss. Take no prisoners. Flush ’em out of their holes.”

“But you use your head first,” said Rossi, “like Dalla Chiesa did with the Red Brigades. He played a long game, and he didn’t take any innocent lives doing it. If we go in like you’re proposing there’ll be an exponential growth of home-grown terror.”

“All right, gentlemen,” said Maroni, “let’s keep on an even keel here. This is neither the Wild West nor the Seventies or the Eighties. I was there for some of that and I knew the general, personally. So let’s leave it at that.”

“You can’t go antagonizing a whole community, if you don’t want a war,” said Rossi unable to resist the parting shot. “If you target them as Muslims it will be wholly counterproductive. That’s how their recruiters work, telling these kids that their religion is their common bond, regardless of their nationality. We’d be doing their job for them.”

“And the government doesn’t want the city in a lockdown scenario either,” said Maroni. “It’s bad for the economy, and God know’s it’s already on life support. The moment is delicate, gentlemen, very delicate. And there’s the Olympic bid to consider. There’s a lot of pressure on that front too, I don’t mind saying.”

Rossi shook his head.

“We need to think like they do,” said Rossi. “Try to understand what these young guys want, and they will be young, for sure. Then we can isolate them within their communities, get them to rat on each other once they realize it’s in their interests. And we can take advantage of the fact that there aren’t any true no-go areas in Rome yet, at least not like in Brussels and Paris. We can still manage this situation.”

Inspector Katia Vanessi had raised her hand to speak. New to the team, and the only woman on RSCS, she was an as yet unknown quantity as far as Rossi was concerned.

“Every domestic terrorist act is underwritten by a prevailing sense of social injustice validating if not the means then certainly the end.”

Rossi adjusted his position from a half slouch to interested. He could see Maroni was growing impatient.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I get the point but we are not the UN here. We are not delivering global solutions for the hard done by. We are trying to stop Islamist extremists planting bloody bombs in our city!”

But Rossi wasn’t going to let it go yet.

“In its day,” said Rossi, “the Red Brigades had a wide support base, and they did have a certain Robin-Hood quality, at least initially. But is that the case here? Putting bombs in public places?” he said, letting his own open question hang in the air like incense. “To me, it smacks more of fascism – the disdain for the masses for the advancement of a private agenda.”

Katia appeared to have let her attention wander for a moment. Rossi waited, expecting a personalized response that didn’t come as she continued to make unhurried but assiduous notes.

She had heard a lot about Rossi and was working out as she wrote how best to comment on his little speech. Yes, she’d heard about his intellect, his unusual background, his barely concealed disdain for authority, and his reputation for getting results, often against the odds. Well, she reflected, dotting a final i on her notepad before laying down her pen – he seemed to be able to talk the talk at least. She raised her hand.

“Well, Inspector Rossi,” she said, giving him her firm and confident attention now, “that’s a nice little story but, given your experience on the ground, what do you propose we actually do about it?”

Sixteen

Jibril wiped the steam off the mirror to make sure he didn’t cut himself with the new razor. Olivia had been surprised. Yes. Very surprised. So, she was finding out that he wasn’t quite as shy and reserved as she had thought him to be. And he had made the first move. Well, really the first move had come from her and not just the invitation. That had been an open invite. But giving him her phone number as she had a few weeks earlier. Then the other stuff. Picking him out with her eyes every time there was a question that needed answering. She was drawn to him. And he’d let it happen whether he had needed it or not. It was true that she would be part of his cover but he realized he had wanted it too. So, in a corner of his battered heart, perhaps not all hope was lost. Some innocence maybe still thrived. And the others must have known too. But what of it. The class favourite? The teacher’s pet? He’d already learnt about that from his own school days in the village and after. Days that had finished so abruptly, so cruelly.

He stopped himself. Have to keep focused. He rinsed and wiped his face with a towel then slipped his shirt on and adjusted the collar so that the chain hung around his neck against his skin just above the topmost fastened button. He smoothed his chin with one hand. His beard was gone but he’d never really got used to having it. When the rebels had first tried to reimpose the old ways on the men in the village, his father and uncles and many others had laughed at their attempts, calling it out as the harking back to some failed distant ideal, their new-found love affair with ideology, with ancient Wahabist rules and certainties.

Yet things had changed somewhat since then, and Jibril had also lived a little in the true believers’ shoes. Now that his journey had brought him to the point where he’d understood the need for decisive action, such symbols were only that: symbols and nothing else. He’d made his case and made it well. He had bided his time with the brothers. In his hour of need they had been there for him. This much was true. He was strong, had always been, but embracing his religion and its comforts had helped him to be stronger. He had felt weakness when he had first come to Rome. Fatigue and hunger, but the strength of true brotherhood had quickly lifted him. There were decent, honest brothers who acted in good faith, but there were those, he knew very well, whose minds and hearts dwelt elsewhere. Such was life. But he was taking control in that regard too and the younger ones knew it.

So, as he had explained, first, you had to fit in. Be like those of the country where you are a guest, or be their idea of how you should be. Play to your strengths, exploit their weaknesses. Ali had protested strongly and some of the others hadn’t been so sure either at first, but as he spoke, building an argument with patient explanation, he had begun to convince them even as he had convinced himself. The more attention you bring to yourself by your difference and your separateness, the more chance they will have of hunting you down, spotting you against the horizon. It was urban camouflage, brothers. Then you could strike unseen when the time was right. But only then. Haste was a fool’s game. Our revolution wears no watch, so it can come at anytime, when least they expect it. Let them sweat it out while we, with cool heads and focused determination, construct the perfect plan.

He walked back across the hall into his room and picked up his phone off the nightstand. It was new. New second-hand. A decent model about whose provenance he hadn’t been encouraged to enquire. It would give him relative anonymity, linked as it was to a new identity. He would need it for everything legitimate now. There was work lined up, hopefully. He would talk to Olivia about that tonight. She would help and had already proved invaluable as a key to opening the intricacies of Italian society. She was always keen to know how he was “getting on” and whether he was going to get his permit to stay. Well, the story he would recount was that he had every intention of making a go of it and she was an attractive young woman with many of the qualities he admired. Somewhere, behind it all, if he hadn’t been at war, she might have even truly touched his soul. But he had no time for that. Not now. Not after what they had done to him.

Perhaps they made an unlikely couple: an Italian woman and a Nigerian man. A teacher and an illegal immigrant with false papers? But he was also a care worker now, a social assistant. Once that was his identity it would not seem so strange. And that was where he was heading, on a fast track, and there was plenty of work to be had. These Italians didn’t lock their old people away like they did in some countries, but instead paid carers to shoulder the drudgery of looking after them. And yet they complained about the numbers of foreigners, the hordes of stranieri they had to put up with.

This Christian nation. Love your neighbour, said Christ. But where was their gospel now? When I was sick, did you care for me? When I was in prison, did you visit me? He thought then of Victor, his friend murdered in Rome some six months before. He recalled their many long discussions before they had been separated. But in those days, so much of it was theory while theory had now become practice. Reality now had grown harsh. “Remember, Jibril,” Victor would say, “when the day comes, what He will say to those on his left. ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels’.” Well, they had killed him – his own Christian brothers – and they would have to pay for it.

“So, my friend,” he said out loud, as if someone might be there to hear him, “who is the devil now?”

Seventeen

The atmosphere in the conference room was tense. The press wanted answers, wanted a story, but they weren’t getting much change out of the eight-strong panel of stony-faced city officials and law enforcement chiefs facing them in the grand hall of the prefettura’s renaissance palace. Security was high and the press had arrived in numbers, among them Elena Serena, sent by Iannelli to do the public work he couldn’t risk undertaking. She had taken up a position near an exit and had set up a tripod stand with a video camera to stream the whole proceeding back to Iannelli. She had opted to use the local WI-FI but it was just her luck to have found the only spot where the signal was shaky.

“So, we are under attack?” The question came from a staff reporter on The Post. The journalists were hammering the same nail again and again, but the panel was resisting.

All eyes turned to the City Prefect, Roberto Cavalleggio. It was his job to guarantee public safety and coordinate between the Home Office and local government.

“As I think my colleagues have already made clear, it was an attack,” he replied, adjusting and leaning into the microphone almost as if in an attempt to find some shortcoming in the hardware that might distract attention from his own. “A vile and cowardly attack, I might add.” He paused, perhaps to weigh his words or to emphasize some greater gravitas. “It is not clear whether this is part of any concerted campaign or an isolated incident. I can say, however, that the police and the security services are working flat out, night and day, to find the perpetrators and bring them to justice.”

“What do you know about the level of technological sophistication of the device?” a reporter called out from the back of the room. There was another brief pause as, after comments off mic and various sideways glances, the prefect indicated that the question would be taken by the head of the state police, Fulvio Martinelli.

“From what the forensic police have been able to ascertain so far, it would appear that it was a fairly rudimentary device but lethal nonetheless. It was designed to inflict maximum casualties without requiring a major logistical operation.”

Elena looked up from where she had, until then, been jotting random notes. Rudimentary? It certainly wasn’t the impression she’d had, and she’d got the low-down from Iannelli who had been on the scene early. He had said all the evidence pointed to C4, high-grade military plastic explosive and a high-spec timing device. He and she had kept that to themselves for now, though. From the front row, it was a RAI TV journalist’s turn to quiz the prefect.

“We’ve been hearing from the Police Federation recently that in the last few years there has been a chronic lack of funding for the security budget to face an increasingly sophisticated terrorist threat. In the light of these comments, are you able to provide assurances that the public’s safety will be guaranteed? In concrete terms, what is being done?”

An ashen-faced prefect suppressed something akin to a stifled yawn or a sigh as he prepared to speak.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he began, assuming a tone both informal yet recognizably patrician, “as I continue to reiterate, everything in our power is being done. Rest assured,” he continued, glancing up at the crowd just long enough for the flashes’ brief frenzy, “that no stone will be left unturned and no effort spared. With specific reference to the question regarding our resources, let me say this.” He reached for a pair of reading glasses, then taking a sip from his glass of mineral water, he looked down to where he appeared to have a speech of sorts prepared. “Regardless of the resources and hardware at the disposal of its law enforcement personnel, no city can ever be 100 per cent safe, just as no other daily action we take can be in 100 per cent safety. The moment you set foot outside your apartment you are inevitably exposed to risks. You are, incidentally, statistically exposed to a great many more risks within the four walls of your home. However, when you do venture out onto the streets of your city, what we can do and what we are striving to do is to reduce

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