Free Dante's Numbers by David Hewson Page B

me to look at?”
    Teresa stepped back and gestured at the screen. “Take your pick.”
    What enthusiasm he had left swiftly dissipated. The monitor was crammed with moving pictures the size of postage stamps, each with odd graphs and a geographical location.
    “Allan Prime's a star,” Di Capua observed. “When someone like him disappears, it's a big story.”
    Peroni leaned forward and found himself wishing he could rewind the clock to enter a simpler, more straightforward universe. Each postage-stamp video represented a TV channel, usually news, seemingly issuing some kind of bulletin about the Prime story. The BBC in London. CBS in New York. A channel in Russia. Somewhere in Japan, Australia, the Philippines… “This can't all be live…”
    Harvey nodded. “Pretty much. With Lukatmi, if it's going out real time, it's being relayed by them that way. With maybe a few seconds' delay, that's all.”
    Peroni felt he could soon start to lose his temper. “This is of no use to me whatsoever. How many channels are there, for pity's sake?”
    Di Capua hammered some keys and said, “More than four hundred sources have run a story on Prime in the last hour.”
    Peroni watched as the monitor cleared again, then very slowly came back to life, painting a set of new tiny videos on the screen at a snail's pace.
    When the images returned, they were all the ones Peroni expected. Local and national news channels, familiar presenters reading from their scripts, all with images of the missing actor and shots from the park and the production of Inferno. A counter by the side of the screen was some kind of popularity meter. The audience seemed to be running at seven figures and rising, most of them for a single video channel, one that was blacked out at that moment.
    “Why can't we watch the one that's top of the list?”
    “It won't load for some reason,” Di Capua said, trying something with the keyboard. “Too many people watching it, I imagine. Or maybe their fancy computer system can't cope.”
    “I want to see it…” Peroni began, and then fell quiet. Teresa's deputy had made the black window occupy the full screen of the path lab monitor. As he watched, the empty space filled, line by line, with a real moving image.
    They all crowded round to see. It was a man in fear for his life, trapped inside some cruel and ancient cast-iron head restraint. The digital stopwatch imprinted by his neckline turned from 28:31 to 28:30 , and the seconds kept on ticking. Allan Prime's eyes were as large as any man's Peroni had ever seen. He looked ready to die of fright even before the bright, shining spear with the blood-soaked tip reached his head, which surely would happen soon. Within less than thirty minutes or so, this strangely hypnotic little movie, the most personal Prime had ever made surely, seemed to be saying.
    Teresa leaned over Di Capua and said, “Get me more detail.”
    Harvey's eyes were glazed, filling with tears. Peroni looked at him and said, “You don't have to watch this. Why not go and sit somewhere else? I'll come for you when there's news.”
    “I've got to watch it,” the movie man croaked, then dragged up a chair.
    There was no caption. Only the image of the terrified actor, the time ticking away, and, by the side of the video, the digital thermometer that was the popularity counter. It was now flashing red. Peroni stared at it. Allan Prime's dying moments seemed to be the most sought-after thing in the world at that instant. A real-life drama being watched by a global audience that was growing into the tens of millions and swelling by the second.
    He pressed a finger against the screen and indicated the area behind Prime's quaking head. “There's something there, Silvio. Can you bring it up?”
    The pathologist's hands raced across the keyboard. Prime's features began to bleach out. From the dark background it was now possible to make out some kind of shape. Di Capua tweaked the machine. It was a painting,