“I’m sorry if I’ve not exactly been normal lately,” he said, his voice choking a touch, doubtless from the aftermath of the lemon gelato.

“If I wanted ”normal,“ Gianni, do you think I’d be dating you?”

“No, I mean…”

The words dried up. He was terrible at this. He just hoped she got the message.

“Can I go back to my head now?” she asked. “This isn’t the right way to have a conversation like this.”

“OK.”

“And by the way-thanks for phoning.”

He heard her cut the call, looked at the empty Piazza Trilussa, and said, “You’re welcome.”

Then Gianni Peroni went back into the cafe, smiled at the girl, said thanks, and sat over a newly replenished bowl of ice cream thinking about what Teresa Lupo had said.

Laila stole something. Where? In the Pantheon, surely. Laila hid that something. Where? In the Pantheon. Where else?

He looked at his watch and thought about that miserable, florid-faced caretaker and the hours he kept. The place closed at seven-thirty. Maybe she’d been there already. But if that was the case why hadn’t she tried to get in touch? Wouldn’t she wait till the very last moment when there were hardly any people around? Or-and this thought appalled him-had she left the thing somewhere that meant she had to spend another night there to recover it?

The waitress was reading a magazine. He placed a ten-euro note on the counter and got up.

“Hey, kid,” he said. “You want to know why that boyfriend never calls you?”

The green eyes looked at him with steady, intrigued intent. “Possibly…”

“Because he’s a jerk. That’s why.”

WILLIAM F. KASPAR SAT in the yellow Fiat Punto he’d ripped off from the cavernous underground car park by Porta Pinciana, waiting, thinking, watching the steady, light fall of snow descend on the deserted Via Veneto, listening to nothing but static from the tiny device clipped into his ear. This could go on forever. Not that he was worried about being caught. The weather meant the car park was dark and dead and deserted. He’d been able to swap the Fiat’s plates with those of a dusty Lancia that hadn’t moved in days. Even when the theft got reported they’d be looking for the wrong car.

That was the kind of thing the old Bill Kaspar would have done. This recent carelessness wasn’t like him. He’d tested his luck in the Net cafe and, for once, got away with it. Still, this was bad. This was unlike him. He knew who he was: William F. Kaspar. He knew where he came from: Kentucky, a big old stud farm outside Lexington, where the horses flew like the wind across green fields that stretched forever, where family meant family, a tight, unbreakable bond of love, and you could get good whiskey straight from an illicit still if you knew where to ask.

Kentucky was where he’d grown up, where he’d loved his first woman. After college in Alabama (and the memory alone sent a Dan song, with its refrain about the Crimson Tide, spinning through his head), a Kentucky military academy had started him on the long, hard road to becoming a soldier, filled him with a love of the classical world through studying the campaigns of Hadrian and Caesar and Hannibal. A Kentucky congressman, no stranger to the covert world himself, had first marked him out as someone whose talents could be used outside a conventional military career.

Memories. Fading ghosts, blurring the line between reality and illusion.

It was a lost world now, a distant sea of faded, two-dimensional mental pictures. He couldn’t return there even if he wanted to. He’d assembled his team, the best team, the Babylon Sisters (shake it, his head said immediately, right on cue) and he’d screwed up, been betrayed, whatever. There’d been blood on the ground, the holy ground, on the floor of the ziggurat, gore tracing the outlines of the patterns there, a red stain on the filigreed stone tattoo Hadrian himself had once touched. He’d wrapped the corpses of his own men and women in that same pattern, trapped in something as mundane as camouflage webbing. Then, before he’d had the chance to go down with them, bad luck got in the way. Thirteen wasted years that changed forever what he was and what he could be.

A killer.

No, that didn’t worry him. Bill Kaspar had killed plenty in his career. Never unnecessarily, never without good reason. It went with the job. Sometimes it was the only way to stay alive. He’d killed in the jungles of Colombia and on the streets of Managua. He’d taken men down in Afghanistan and Indonesia. And the Middle East. He’d been there a lot, enough to speak good Arabic, Kurdish and Farsi. Enough to help him convince a few people who should have known better, men who, temperamentally, hated everything American, that he really could be on their side, put some weapons their way, provided they had the money and information to share.

He’d read every last book he could find on Hadrian, knew every twist and turn of his career all the way from Italica to Rome. Long before these new voices came to occupy his head, Bill Kaspar had thought he heard Hadrian talking to him sometimes, a strong, educated voice carrying across almost two millennia. The voice taught him lessons that kept a man like him alive. How it was impossible to fight battles on multiple fronts, which made it necessary, on occasion, to convert an enemy into a friend. How important it was to be a true leader, one everyone could look up to. And how the ambition was, invariably, more important than the achievement because, in the end, everything was dust and death and failure, a shallow, temporary grave in a foreign place far from home.

Hadrian had been rash sometimes, too, and arrogant. The mind that could imagine a building like the Pantheon had also seen fit to slaughter those who stood in his way. Kaspar had murdered Monica Sawyer brutally, his head full of screaming voices, feeling his power enter her body, and still he couldn’t quite work out why, still he knew that the patterns he’d painted with her blood, the holy frieze of interlocking shapes, was powder over a stupid misdeed, a disguise that failed to hide the enormity of the crime. Monica wasn’t a part of the endgame now playing out on the streets of Rome. She hadn’t-there was no avoiding the thought-merited that particular death.

He was Bill Kaspar. He could have prevented that, locked her in the bedroom with a gag round her overactive mouth, and stayed safe and warm in her apartment knowing not a soul could see there was anything wrong. He could have tried to explain to her that he was in his own frame of reference, an honourable man set upon an honourable mission. A man who had been abandoned, cheated, robbed, even here in Rome.

Bill Kaspar didn’t kill people because he wanted to. Only because he had to. Hadn’t he let Emily Deacon live that night? The bug was a long shot. He was lucky it provided anything. Or was his reluctance to kill a symptom of a greater problem? Had some unconscious part of his head now started to operate on its own, demanding a victim, any victim, just because it hated the idea of being cheated?

Hadrian, the brightest emperor of them all, the man who set limits to the empire, who said this far, no further, was crazy by the end and Bill Kaspar knew he couldn’t even hope to stand in the shadow of that colossus.

He wasn’t sure about any of this. He wasn’t sure it was worth worrying about either. What mattered was finishing the job. For the life of him he couldn’t think of any way he could do that without involving Emily Deacon. It was possible she was the key to the whole damn thing anyway, and that Steely Dan Deacon, in spite of appearances, in spite of the way Deacon had protested his innocence just before he died, had been in charge all along. Kaspar knew he was running out of alternatives. He didn’t dare hang around Net cafes anymore in case they were being watched. Steely Dan’s girl had to provide the answers. Somehow.