Sachs, however, didn’t do what Fatima hoped. She ignored the buggy and went into a combat shooting stance as the woman dug for her phone to call the mobile wired to the detonator.

“No, Fatima, no!”

Above them, screams pealed from the top of the castle, fifty feet above her, where tourists had seen the carriage go into the water.

Fatima yanked the phone free. It was a flip phone. She opened it, looking down at the keypad, reaching a finger out.

Amelia Sachs inhaled, held her breath and squeezed the trigger. Three times.

Chapter 66

Non siamo riusciti a trovare nulla,” the scuba diver said.

Ercole Benelli translated. The man was sorry but he and his colleagues in the Italian navy had found nothing in the water below the looming castle.

“Keep searching,” Lincoln Rhyme said. He, Ercole, Sachs, Spiro and Rossi were near the spot where Fatima had shoved the carriage into the water, in the shadow of the blunt, ruddy castle. Curiously, much of the entrance route to the edifice, centuries old, was disabled-accessible.

The diver nodded and walked backward along the pier—he wore flippers—then turned and, stiff-legged, strode into the water. Rhyme glanced at the half-dozen eruptions of bubbles on the surface of Naples Bay from the aquatic search party below.

A wail sounded to their left, a woman’s keen of despair. The sixtyish-year-old matron pointed at Sachs and fired off a vicious fusillade of words.

Ercole started to translate but Rhyme interrupted. “She’s upset that my Sachs here was so devoted to stopping a terror attack that she ignored a drowning baby. Am I in the ballpark?”

“Ballpark?” A questioning frown.

“Am. I. Correct?”

“You are close, Captain Rhyme. But she didn’t raise any question of devotion to stopping the villain. In essence she accuses your partner of being a child killer.”

Rhyme chuckled. “Tell her what really happened. If it’ll shut her up.”

Ercole gave the woman the story—a very abbreviated version of the full tale, which was that it wasn’t a baby in the carriage, but a doll.

Sachs had known all along that Fatima’s and Khaled’s little girl, Muna, was not in the carriage. When she’d been to the Capodichino Reception Center earlier that day, after Fatima had vanished, Sachs had seen Muna in the care of a neighbor, in the vacant lot beside their tent. And among the boxes inside their tent was an empty carton that had once held—from the picture on the side—a dark-haired doll, the size of a large baby. Sachs had caught a glimpse of the toy in the carriage.

A clever diversion. Rhyme had to give Fatima credit.

He glared at the agitated tourist until she fell silent, turned and left.

Prosecutor Spiro approached. “Have they found the phone yet?”

“No,” Rossi told him. “Five divers in the bay. But nothing.”

This was the object of the navy divers’ search. They hoped to recover the SIM card from Fatima’s new phone and track Gianni’s or other numbers that might lead to him, to Ibrahim, or to whoever within the Italian anti-immigrant movement had hired them to derail the pro-immigrant legislative proposal in Rome.