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.With nowhere to go, heturns, looks right at me, and then steps or stumbles? backwards off the cliff.I am howling with rage, and I believe I am prepared to follow him into thevery jaws of Hell to exact my revenge, but strong arms pull me back and avoice says, You can stop now, Lara.It s over. I lean on Rob s shoulder andcry.We leave Esther and Tabone looking over the edge of the cliff to the brokenbody I know must be on the rocks far below, and we go back to the place whereAnna Stanhope lies.A doctor from the crowd attends to her, and I hear thecomforting wail of a siren nearby.For a minute her eyes open and she sees me.She reaches for me, and with surprising strength pulls me down to her.Thenshe laughs a little, coughs, and grasping my hand very firmly whispers, Thereis no fool like an old fool. FIFTEENMy gorge rises.When will this end? My people have been enslaved, betrayed,converted, deserted, patronized, anglicized.They ve fought other people sbattles, died for other people s causes.Leave them be.Let them choose theirown future.Those who worshipped Me best. So what have we got? Rob asked.It was the day after the disastrous event,and we were sitting once again in Vincent Tabone s office. We ve got a real mess, that s what we ve got, Tabone replied morosely.Hesighed. But perhaps you were hoping for more detail than that. Indeed, Rob said. Like who, what, where, why, and how, for starters.Something a little more concrete than mess, or Lara s contention that it wasGalizia in a fit of ambition. Well, we ve got one of the who, at least, Tabone replied.He slapped aphotograph on the desk in front of us.It was fuzzy but recognizable. MarekSidjian, alias Victor Deva, along with a long list of other aliases.NotItalian, but a master of disguise, and someone who seems to have acquired manyconvincing accents along the way, to say nothing of passports.We believe helearned his craft with the Russians in Afghanistan.He is a suspect in othersimilar plots, some unfortunately more successful than this one.Do you recallthe shooting of an Italian businessman, a banker, in broad daylight on acrowded street in Milano just a few months ago? We both nodded. He s a suspect in that, and others like it I ve been working with Interpol,and Rob with U.S.and Canadian authorities, all night, and we ve learned agood deal about how Sidjian operated.He was not only the killer, but quitethe businessman, the one who dealt with the clients, and who used his charm toinsinuate himself into a position to carry out the deed.He actually studiedacting, wouldn t you know? Perhaps he should have stayed with it.On the faceof it, at least, he would have been good at it.Usually he had an accomplice,an assistant, which brings us to cousin Francesco, whoever he is.I ll havesome photos coining in soon I d like you to look at for me, Lara.EssentiallySidjian was a hired gun.I do not believe that he selected targets himself,Page 90 ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.htmlnor do I think he had any particular political agenda.He was not burdened byany philosophical or religious convictions that I can see.He was just a thug.He did what he did solely for the money. We know, thanks to Lara, that Marek got into Malta from France, disguised asa priest& I keep kicking myself that I didn t remember him sooner, I interjected. IfI d realized he arrived in disguise, I d have known there was something wrong,even if I didn t know exactly what it was. Don t do this, Lara! Rob said sharply. You said yourself you only saw himin profile, and you saw him when you d been up all night on the flight over.In fact you d been up for almost twenty-four hours straight! But I couldn t let it go. My friend Alex said we should have known, in a way,about Victor, because of the name he chose for himself.In the ancient Romanand Persian cult of Mithra, a Deva is a creature of darkness, vice, andsuffering
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