Free Dante's Numbers by David Hewson Page A

too…”
    “Touch nothing!” Quattrocchi roared. He pointed through into the cinema, where Prime was screaming on the screen again. The small, deadly spear had moved closer to its destination. “If we lose that, we lose him.”
    Josh Jonah walked up to the machine and peered calmly at the monitor. “I can read off the URL,” he said. “Are you ready?”

O NE KILOMETRE AWAY, IN THE FORENSIC LAB of the centro storico Questura, the same word was puzzling another law enforcement officer, though one from a very different agency.
    “Url? What's a URL?” Peroni asked.
    He thought they were in Teresa Lupo's morgue to stare at the head of a store window dummy and the curious death mask that had been attached to it. And to talk to Simon Harvey. At the age of fifty-one, with an understanding of the cinema industry which extended to no more than a few security duties at the Cinecittà studios over the years, Peroni felt it was time to become better acquainted with the working methods and mores of the movie business, such as they were. He had an inexplicable feeling they might come in useful, and that Simon Harvey was a man who could impart much worthwhile information on the subject if he felt so minded.
    No one answered his question. Harvey and Silvio Di Capua had exchanged a brief conversation, and the whole game plan seemed to disappear in smoke. While Teresa and her two young white-coated trainee assistants played halfheartedly with the head and mask—finding no new information—Di Capua and Harvey had gone over to the nearest computer and started hammering the keys, staring at the gigantic monitor as it flipped through image after image.
    “Will someone please tell me what a URL is?” Peroni asked again.
    “Universal resource locator,” Di Capua grumbled. “What I'm typing. Any the wiser?”
    “No. Enlighten me. How is this helping exactly?”
    “Gianni,” Teresa said. “If I'd been allowed to set up some kind of a crime scene on that stage… If we were in control in any shape or form…” She opened her hands in a gesture of despair. “We have nothing to work with. Nowhere to begin. If staring at a computer helps, I'm all for it. What else is there?”
    “This is my fault,” Harvey apologised. “I didn't mean to start an argument. It was only a suggestion.”
    The suggestion being, Teresa explained patiently, that they use the strange, unexplained Internet service owned by two American geeks who'd helped finance Inferno to try to find out what people at large were saying about Allan Prime.
    “Think of it this way,” Harvey went on. “Would you like to be able to tune in to every TV newscast around the world that was covering Allan right now? Every little net TV channel, every vid-cast, too?”
    Peroni shook his big, grizzled head. “Every what?”
    “If it gave us a clue…” Di Capua said. “I'd take anything. This thing…” He blinked, incredulous at the flashing series of moving pictures on the monitor. “… is unbelievable. I never realised…”
    “They bring stuff online before announcing it,” Harvey said. “It's all part of the hype. You never know what they'll turn up with next. You just have to tune in to check.”
    Teresa had her head bent towards the screen. Peroni felt like an unwanted intruder from a different century.
    “How the hell do they do it?” Di Capua asked, still in a state of awe.
    Harvey sighed. “I don't really understand it myself. From what they said, it's a mixture of reading keywords, transcribing speech, recognising faces…All the TV stations are now online and streaming. Add to that new video material. Blogs. Small web stations. I guess they have some way of consuming it all as it appears, reading it, then serving everything up. Google for video and audio, only ten times bigger, ten times faster, and deadly accurate. That's why they're worth a billion or so each.”
    Peroni cleared his throat. “This is so interesting. Is anyone going to find something for