"Dibdin, Michael - Aurelio Zen 02 - Vendetta UC - part 05" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dibdin Michael)

The path ran up a shallow valley, between masses of
ancient brickwork emerging from the grass like weathered
rocky outcroppings. The signs and fences installed by the
authorities had imposed some superficial order on the hill's
chaotic topography, but this simply made its endless anom-
alies all the more incomprehensible. Nothing here was
what it appeared to be, having been recycled and can-
nibalized so many times that its original name and function
was often unclear even to experts. Although no archae-
ologist, Zen was intimately familiar with the many-layered
complexities of the Palatine, thanks to the Angela Barilli
affair.
The daughter of a leading Rome jeweller, eighteeen-year-
old Angela had been kidnapped in 1975. After months of
io6
negotiations and a bungled pay-off the kidnappers had
broken off contact. In desperation, the Barilli family had
turned to the supernatural, engaging a clairvoyant from
Turin who claimed to have led the police to three other
kidnap victims. The medium duly informed Angela's
mother that her daughter was being held in an under-
ground cell somewhere in the vast network of rooms and
passages on the lower floors of the Imperial palace at the
heart of the Palatine.
Unlikely as this seemed, the political clout wielded by
the family was enough to ensure that Zen, who was direc-
ting the investigation, had to waste three days organizing
a painstaking search of the area. The Barilli girl's corpse
was in fact discovered the following year in a shallow
concrete pit beneath a garage in the Primavalle suburb
where she had been held during her ordeal, but Zen had
never forgotten the three days he had spent exploring the
honeycomb of caverns, tunnels, cisterns and cellars that
lay beneath the surface of the Palatine. It was an area so
rich in possibilities that Zen could simply disappear into
the mathematics, leaving his follower to solve an equation
with too many variables.
When he reached the plateau at the top of the hill, Zen
turned left behind the high stone wall which closed off a
large rectangle of ground surrounding a church, and
waited for Leather Jacket to catch up. There was no one
about, and the only sound was the distant buzzing of the
helicopter. It had now moved further to the east, circling
over the group of hospitals near San Giovanni in Laterano.
No doubt an important criminal was being transferred
from Regina Coeli prison for treatment, with the helicopter
acting as an eye in the sky against any attempt to snatch
him.
Footsteps approached quickly, almost.at a run. At the
last moment, Zen stepped out from behind the wall.