Chapter 7
Carlo Bellini lived in a narrow house behind an auto repair shop, with a fig tree in the yard that reminded Lorenzo uncomfortably of his own, and he made no attempt to pretend he had been surprised.
He was a small man with enormous hands, the hands of someone who had spent fifty years lifting animals and feed sacks, and he sat across from Lorenzo at a kitchen table with a pot of coffee neither of them drank and answered every question without being pressed twice.
“You drove the van.”
“I drove the van.”
“You put the puppy inside the delivery gate.”
“Under the hedge. There’s a dry spot under the third bush. I checked it two nights before, when it wasn’t raining, so he’d have somewhere to lie down.”
Lorenzo set both hands flat on the table. “You turned a camera.”
“I turned one. The one on the gatepost. Just a few degrees, toward the wall.”
“And the second one.”
Bellini looked at him with something that was almost respect. “I looped it. Four minutes. The system takes a four-minute splice without an error flag if you know where to put the seams.”
“Four minutes.”
“Long enough to walk a dog through a gate and back out again.”
Lorenzo studied him. “How did you know where to put the seams?”
“Rocco taught me. Years ago. Back when the estate still ran on the old system.”
“And the access code.”
“Also Rocco.” Bellini turned his cup a quarter-turn on the saucer, an old man’s habit. “He gave me a set of legacy codes years ago. Before he disappeared. He said, keep these, one day I might need you to use them, and if I’m not there, use them anyway.”
Lorenzo leaned forward. “That system was replaced. Those codes were supposed to be retired.”
“I know. I tested the code two nights before I drove down there. From a portable terminal, in my own yard, expecting it to bounce.” He looked up. “It didn’t bounce, Señor Duca. The system accepted it immediately. Like the door had been left open for fifteen years and nobody had ever bothered to lock it.”
Lorenzo sat back very slowly.
“Which code,” he said.
“The administrator bypass for the Eastern Security Network.”
There had been three people authorized to preserve legacy access during the transition to the new system. That was not a guess. Lorenzo had signed the authorization himself, fifteen years ago, in a room with two other men, because the migration had been risky and someone needed a way in if it failed.
One of the three had died five years ago, in a hospital in Milan, of a stroke, with a wife and two daughters at the bedside.
The second was Lorenzo.
The third was Matteo Richi.
He ended the call with Vittorio outside the auto shop and stood in the street for a full minute with the phone in his hand, doing nothing, while a mechanic rolled a tire past him and a radio played somewhere behind the wall.
It would have been easy to let the conclusion arrive fully formed. Matteo had held the code. Matteo had known the route fifteen years ago. Matteo was still inside the house, still in the corridor, still smiling his easy familiar smile, still the man who had pulled Lorenzo out of the wreckage and slept in a chair outside his hospital room.
But suspicion is not proof, and Lorenzo had spent too much of his life watching men die because another man had mistaken a pattern for certainty.
He called Vittorio back.
“I want the complete access history for that code. Every authentication attempt preserved anywhere in the old system. Even archived backups.”
“That may take time.”
“Take what you need.” He paused. “And find Sophia Danalov before anyone connected to this estate knows she exists.”
He disconnected. Then he called the head of technical security and ordered a full review of dormant credentials, gave no reason, and instructed them explicitly not to revoke anything yet.
If someone had kept an old door open, Lorenzo wanted to know who still intended to walk through it.
Two days later, at eleven at night, with Leo asleep on his shoe and Mia and Elena long since gone to the west wing, Vittorio called back.
“I have the access history.”
Lorenzo put the phone on speaker and sat down.
“In fifteen years, that code has been authenticated twice.” A pause. “Once eight days ago, at 06:14, which matches Bellini’s delivery to the minute.”
“And the second time?”
Vittorio did not answer immediately.
“The second time was fifteen years ago, Señor Duca. At 01:14 in the morning, on the night your parents died.”
Lorenzo said nothing.
“It was used to purge the municipal traffic archive for the intersection where the ambush happened. Every frame of it. The system logged the purge and the operator terminal.”
“And the terminal.”
“The terminal ID maps to a desk in the estate security room.” Vittorio’s voice was very careful now. “The deputy chief’s desk.”
May you like
Lorenzo looked at the collar on his desk, and the mark of a dead man cut into the brass, and did the arithmetic he had been refusing to do for eleven days.
Fifteen years ago, that desk had belonged to Matteo Richi.
