Whiplash

The fact that he had just celebrated his seventy-eighth birthday had nothing to do with the decision.

Alerted to the shooting, Reid had arranged to obtain information from the Italians on the investigation. An FBI liaison officer had been dispatched to the local headquarters. The FBI agent worked routinely with the CIA on terrorist cases, and had been instructed to forward updates to Reid.

“The shooter was a woman,” said Nuri. “Short hair. MY-PID didn’t get enough to ID her.”

“Yes, I’ve checked. But you might look at some of the online video sites and see if you can get a better image.”

“Good idea.”

“You looked pretty scared in the images, Nuri. It shakes my confidence in you.”

“I wasn’t scared. I’d just been shot in the damn chest at point-blank range.”

“Your bulletproof armor did its job.”

“How many times have you been shot in the chest?”

The answer was twice, but Reid, realizing he’d pushed a little too hard, said nothing.

THE YOUTUBE VIDEO SHOWN ON THE NEWS DID NOT INCLUDE a good image of the actual shooter, but a search of similar videos turned up three other videos of the same incident. Nuri, looking at the images in the hotel’s business center, forwarded the information to the CIA’s technical people via a blind e-mail address. By the time he got over to the embassy to follow up, they had sent the image to the FBI liaison in Rome, who managed—with some difficulty—to persuade the local prosecutor to let her compare the image to those captured by various security cameras around the Coliseum. Only about half of the possible cameras had been working, and only a half dozen of those were co

Nuri shook his head. The next time she saw him, she’d aim for the head first.

The woman had gotten off at the next stop, Cavour.

Nearly six hours had passed since then, but Nuri had decided to stay in Rome at least for another day, and if that was the case, he might just as well take a shot at finding her. So he went over to the Metro stop and began placing small video bugs, hooking them into the MY-PID circuit and hoping that the video would catch a glimpse of the woman. The bugs were about the size of a small bead on a woman’s bracelet. They attached to a wall or other surface with a tiny piece of a gumlike sticker. The small size meant their integrated batteries lasted only a few hours, and they needed a larger transponder to pick up their signals and upload it to the satellite network. But they were nearly invisible, and provided video quality on par with the typical laptop or cell phone camera.

From the Metro stop, Nuri bugged a number of hotels, then left bugs on lampposts and buildings. Hungry, he was about to go across the river to a Sicilian restaurant he remembered from an earlier visit when the Voice told him it had a possible match.

“How possible?” he asked. His stomach was growling, and he could almost taste the caponata di patate.

“Facial bone structure matches. Height is within five percent. Hair is different.”

“That could be a wig,” Nuri told the computer.

“Assumption ca

“No kidding.”

He walked over to the area where the computer had spotted the woman going into the Hotel Campagnia. It was a mid-level place, used by foreigners mostly, about evenly split between business people and tourists. He scattered a few more bugs around, and contemplated whether it would be useful to call the FBI liaison and try for a list of the guests. As he did, the Voice warned him that the subject was coming down into the lobby.

Nuri went across the street to a café and ordered a glass of wine. The woman paid her bill, then had the clerk call her a taxi to take her to Fumicino, better known to Americans as Leonardo Da Vinci International Airport, which was just outside of Rome.

He might have called the FBI liaison then, to get her name, but even if the Italians cooperated—an iffy proposition—it would have taken hours. Instead, he took matters into his own hands, swiping the pocketbook of the woman sitting next to him as her back was turned.

He slid it under his shirt and crossed the street.

“Sfortunate!” he yelled, rushing in. “The lady dropped her pocketbook.”

“C’e?” asked the clerk.

“The woman, who just got in the cab.”

“Who?”

Nuri described her. “Where was she going?”

“The airport.”

“Did she have a cell phone?”

The clerk looked baffled.

“I could call her,” Nuri explained.

The clerk bent over to the computer and pulled up the registration. “There is no cell phone.”

“What’s her name?” Nuri asked. “I can page her.”

He pulled out his sat phone quickly, fearing the clerk would want to do it for him.

“She was pretty, wasn’t she?” added Nuri.

“Ah, yes. Margaret Adamoni.”

“Her name was Margaret Adamoni,” said Nuri, repeating the name for the Voice. “Did she say which terminal?”

The clerk couldn’t recall.

“Check the wallet with me,” said Nuri, “so we can’t be accused of stealing money.”

The clerk agreed, and in short order they discovered that the wallet belonged to someone else entirely. Nuri, pretending to be embarrassed, made a quick exit, then grabbed a taxi to the airport.

There was no Margaret Adamoni registered on a flight out of Fumicino, but the MY-PID tapped into the international flight registry, which used computerized passport IDs to screen for possible terrorists and other suspicious persons. Discarding people traveling in groups and examining flight profiles, it found three possibilities. After buying a ticket, Nuri checked two out at the gates. He missed the third.

That, of course, turned out to be his subject: Bernadette Piave, who’d just gotten on her plane for Athens, Greece, when he reached the gate. He went back to the ticket area, bought a ticket for the next plane, and booked an Alitalia flight two hours later.

It was only as he was waiting that the Voice turned up an interesting tidbit from a file maintained by Interpol: Bernadette Piave was believed to be a pseudonym for a woman named Meg Leary. That was the extent of the file there.

The CIA had its own file on Leary. It was restricted; not even the Voice could access it. So Nuri had to get help from Reid.

Meg Leary had been born in 1969 in Belfast, Ireland, the daughter of a convicted Irish Republican Army bomb maker and a woman from Dieppe, France. A short time afterward, Meg’s mother disappeared, and she was raised by her father’s family, shuttling back and forth between different uncles, aunts, and grandparents as the family members spent time in prison for their alleged roles in the Northern Irish “troubles.” Given her family history, it was not surprising that she had her first run-in with authorities at age thirteen; she was arrested for allegedly spraying a Protestant home with submachine gun fire. The Protestants in question were prominent “provos”—essentially the Protestant equivalent of the IRA—though that didn’t prevent Bernadette from serving jail time. Her rap sheet grew from there to include armed robbery and a variety of weapons charges, all before she was eighteen.

She was arrested a few days before her eighteenth birthday on suspicion of murder—a member of the family she’d first shot at when thirteen—but the evidence against her proved insufficient. That was the last time the British criminal justice system had anything to do with Ms. Leary. Officially, at any rate.

Reports from the various agencies charged with dealing with Northern Ireland stated that she had “apparently reformed.” There were rumors that she had been drummed out of the IRA, or that she was never a real member in the first place. In any event, she hadn’t received so much as a traffic ticket in the twenty-five years since.