Cabal - 3 Read Online Free PDF

apparently absorbed in the stupendous view, and fired off an endless series of questions about where the Spanish Steps were and which hill was the Aventine and whether you could see the Coliseum from there. Grimaldi had known he had better things to do than play the tourist guide, but his pride in knowing Rome so well, being able to identify each of its significant monuments, had been too great. It was such a thrill to point out the principal attractions of the Eternal City with languid, confident gestures, as though he were the hereditary landlord.
    Besides, his quarry was in plain view, standing by the railing a little further round the balcony, chatting up that classy number with the white silk headscarf who had been all alone on the balcony when they arrived. Grimaldi didn’t blame him! He might have had a go himself if he hadn’t been on duty. Not that he’d have stood a chance. It looked like she might well go for the Prince, though. They were standing very close together, and their conversation looked unusually animated for two people who had only just met. Meanwhile he was stuck with this northerner and his dumb questions. ‘And is that the Quirinale Palace?’ he whined, pointing out the Castel Sant’ Angelo.
     
    The next time Grimaldi had looked across to the other side of the balcony, the Prince and his pick-up had disappeared. Abandoning the inquisitive tourist in mid-sentence, he clattered down the steel ladder leading to the precipitous stairway, crazily slanted and curved like a passage in a nightmare, which led down to the roof of the basilica. The cupola was riddled with such corridors and stairs, but most had been sealed off, and those open to the public were clearly signposted so as to send visitors on their way with the minimum of delay or confusion. There was nowhere to get lost, nowhere to hide. Minutes after leaving the lantern, Grimaldi was down in the nave of St Peter’s, and knew that he had lost the man he had been given strict orders to keep in view at all costs.
    It was clear what had happened. The whole thing had been carefully set up. While the Vigilanza man’s attention was distracted by the supposed Comunione e Liberazione truant, Ruspanti had been whisked away by his female companion. They could be anywhere by now. Grimaldi wandered disconsolately around the basilica, where preparations for the evening Mass were in progress. He was merely postponing the moment when he would have to report back to headquarters and reveal his failure. Then he caught sight of the woman in the grey tweed coat and white silk headscarf, and began to feel that everything might turn out all right after all. When the man in the suede jacket turned up a few minutes later, he felt sure of it. The two did not look at each other, but they were aware of each other’s presence. They were a unit, a team. Only Ruspanti was still missing, but Grimaldi now had no doubt that the Prince would also reappear in due course.
    And indeed he had , although not in quite the manner the Vigilanza man had imagined. It certainly wasn’t the perfect outcome, from his point of view, but on the other hand it could have been worse. Rather than going on bended knees to Luigi Scarpione, his boss, and admitting that he had fallen for a trick which shouldn’t have fooled an untrained rookie, he had found himself summoned to the Secretariat of State, no less, in the Apostolic Palace itself, next door to the pope’s private quarters, a sanctum sanctorum guarded by a hand-picked élite of the Swiss Guards, where the riff-raff of the Vigilanza were not normally permitted to set foot. Not only had he set foot there, he’d actually met the legendary Sánchez-Valdés face to face.
    Normally, the special security unit to which Grimaldi belonged liaised with the Curia through the archbishop’s secretary, Lamboglia, a cold and charmless man who received minions in his anonymous office in an obscure building off Via del Belvedere, in the Sant’