by John Gardner
‘I got to know them very well. Then they gave me a job. Tested me out for a year. Now I run all their computer operations – and practically everything they own and do is on computer. I should say it’s on a huge network of computers, so I have my work cut out. I’m over here buying new hardware: Power PCs, so that we can work in both Macintosh and Windows environments. That’s become essential these days.’
‘So, you have access to the hard disk? You can provide almost anything?’
‘She certainly does,’ Prime cracked another of her rare smiles. ‘What Toni is doing has become invaluable, but it’s dangerous. She’s running a secondary series of lines straight out of the Tempesta computers. We’re getting almost every transaction, every document, spreadsheet, database as it goes onto their systems. And if we don’t get it straight away, we have all the passwords. Our people go in at night and hack their way aboard so that we can check on the updates.’
‘Sounds like fun.’
‘I do have another job that yields extra pieces of information,’ Toni Nicolletti’s voice sounded wicked and bubbly, as though she were teasing a man. For a moment, Bond thought she might be teasing him, Then—
‘I’m Luigi Tempesta’s mistress. Oils the wheels a bit and keeps things friendly.’
He recalled Sukie’s words in the hotel room near Dulles International.
‘I think one of their wives was in bed with him.’
‘Literally?’
‘Is there any other way?’
‘Which of the wives? Luigi’s or Angelo’s.’
‘Luigi’s. The lovely Giulliana.’
So, he wondered, was that the reason for Giulliana being unfaithful to Luigi with Harley Bradbury? Because she knew of her husband’s infidelity?
‘You see, James,’ Eddie spoke softly and, Bond considered, probably carried a big stick – possibly a baseball bat. ‘You see, Toni has provided us with a panoply of information. We now know where most of the Tempesta contacts can be located; we are aware of the names, addresses and telephone numbers of their most trusted soldiers – the hoodlums they use for strong-arm tactics. We know favourite methods, and the Attorney General’s office has been supplied with information that they are collating. In brief, we are only a few steps away from a very big showdown.’
Bond nodded, but said nothing. He wanted Rhabb to come to him with the information instead of the other way around.
‘Within the walls of this room only,’ the FBI man looked around, clasping eyes with everyone present, ending with Bond, ‘the Italian police are anxious to do the final bust. But we want them taken and brought to trial here in the United States. They are setting up one or two very worrying situations over here. Since John Gotti was put away, for instance, the Tempesta family has moved into New York. Slowly they’ll control a very large number of the old Gotti interests. Also . . .’ He was cut short of treeserbb by the ringing of a telephone.
Looking around, Bond saw there were two instruments in the room, set side by side. One red, the other black.
Eddie reached over and quietly answered the black telephone, his eyes swivelling towards Toni Nicolletti. ‘It’s your boyfriend.’
The girl went quickly towards the red phone and nodded, so that Rhabb replaced the black phone as she lifted the receiver of the red one.
‘Pronto,’ Toni said in a breathless voice, using the normal form of Italian greeting on a phone. She then launched into a low and long conversation in Italian, keeping up the same quiet tone she had used when answering. She had turned her back to everyone else in the room, but there was no doubt that this was a lovers’ dialogue. Of course she loved him . . . Couldn’t wait to see him again tomorrow . . . Yes, both her mother and father were well, but life was not the same without him. There was a lengthy pause as she listened to obviously endearing comments being made by Luigi Tempesta. Then she was able to speak again. Yes, her flight landed at Washington National at eleven o’clock tomorrow morning . . . Of course she understood it would not be wise for him to meet her, so who was he sending? . . . Dino would be good . . . She laughed a lot at his next comment and said that was ridiculous but she could cope with it. Then another long silence followed by her giving a startled gasp . . . You’re sure? . . . But I thought . . . Giulliana’s not here in the States, surely . . . No . . . No . . . Was he absolutely certain? . . . Yes, of course. You did that . . . I’ll wait to hear it all. Could the marriage be annulled? . . . Yes, she would wait to see what he had in mind.
The goodbyes and protestations of love took about another four minutes, then she replaced the receiver and gave a long sigh as she sat down.
Bond raised his eyebrows, giving Eddie Rhabb a quizzical look.
‘I’d better explain to our British friend,’ Rhabb began. ‘James, the only way we could bring Toni in for a debrief – and we do it every time she’s in the US – is to send her on a notional trip to Kansas to see her dear old Mama and Papa. We have a sweet elderly Italian lady in the Bureau who spends all her days in a room here eating, reading, sleeping, watching TV and waiting by a telephone with a Kansas number. We plug in another telephone when Toni’s alone – not often – so that she can pick up. If Luigi phones, as he does regularly, Mama says she’s somewhere in the house and that she’ll get her. She even goes through a ritual of calling for her, and sometimes has a nice little talk with Luigi.’
‘And Luigi doesn’t want to go calling with Toni? Meet the old folks in Kansas?’
‘Up to now, no. Luigi Tempesta’s usually a very busy man when he’s here.’ He turned his head towards Toni, ‘So what’s new?’
She took a deep breath. ‘He’s found out about his wife, Giulliana, and Harley Bradbury.’
‘How?’
‘Going to tell me tomorrow.’
‘Was he talking divorce there?’
‘He was talking something. From what he said it was a little more terminal than divorce.’
‘I don’t think we’re in Kansas any more,’ Bond muttered. Then— ‘How do you get her on a flight from Kansas to Washington National without alerting friend Luigi?’
‘We provide the paperwork. One of our people does the actual flight. You have to change at Baltimore Airline Pilots’ Association riIQ. Toni meets her, picks up the paperwork and gets on the flight. It’s always worked before.’
‘I hope it works this time.’ Bond’s eyes were on Toni. ‘I’m relying on you to get me into the Villa Tempesta. Can you do that?’
‘You’ll have to get yourself absolutely unbreakable and untraceable ID . . .’
‘We can do that,’ Eddie cut in.
‘Then, Mr Bond – James, may I call you James?’
‘Every time.’
‘We’ll have to set up some long-term friendship from way back, and you’ll have to find yourself in the area – the villa’s on the shore of Lake Massaciuccoli. You know where that is?’
‘About halfway between Pisa and Viareggio.’
‘Yes,’ she laughed. ‘I’ll give you telephone numbers and also there’s a way into the computer system that goes straight to me. Only to me. It’s simple and straightforward. Nobody else can get there. Nobody knows the password, except Eddie, so I’d rather give it to you in private.’
‘Well, we’ll leave you two together to work out the details.’ The FBI man looked pleased. ‘But, first, I’d like you to tell James here, the Tempestas’ favourite way of silencing people. Their all-time drop-dead method.’
Toni Nicolletti raised her eyes and locked into Bond’s eyes. ‘They’re very fond of explosives,’ she said. ‘Luigi likes to see people go out with a bang. He’s quite casual about it. Death seems to have no lasting meaning for him. In fact, he sometimes gives the impression that it’s something that happens to other people, but will never happen to him.’
They talked for a few minutes, then RhThen into an e
6
COLD COMFORT
Alitalia flight AZ 611, ex-JFK New York, landed at Rome’s Leonardo da Vinci Ai
rport at a little before seven on a cold morning, with fine drizzle blowing in waves like gunsmoke over the runways. Spring was going to be a little late this year, and seven days had passed since Bond had spent the best part of a memorable night with Toni Nicolletti in the guest room at Quantico.
He had nearly three hours to kill before his onward flight to Pisa, so he sat quietly in one of the many restaurants at da Vinci, sipping coffee and, forgoing his beloved toast, eating bread rolls with butter and jam. Around him the place bustled and the repeated announcement warning – the first five notes of Volare – became almost intrusive. Yet his mind drifted back to the night at Quantico and what he had learned.
There, with Toni, they had come up with what people in the world of secrets call a Legend – the outline of a past that was a deception. It would be up to people like Eddie Rhabb to make their story unbreakable: to insert false information about them into documents and databases so that, should the Tempesta brothers decide to take a look at the past, they would find everything for which they searched.
They decided that Bond would use his real name, for it was possible that Sukie had told someone within the family that she had known him in the mid-eighties. It was also quite probable that the late Pasquale Tempesta’s widow (‘The child bride,’ as Toni said she had been known within the family) had shown someone photographs of herself with him. They had taken enough at the time when they spent R&R together after the terrible dangers they had faced when extracting his housekeeper, May, and M’s PA, Moneypenny, from captivity.
They decided Bond must have done a stint at Georgetown University, lecturing to the computer sciences classes over one semester. It was there that Toni had met him, and had a brief affair with him, long before she had been chosen to work for the Tempesta family.
For her part, Toni would mention that she had bumped into her former lover on the flight out to Kansas City. When she told him that she was working for the Tempestas, he had volunteered the information that he knew Sukie, and that they had been, as he put it, ‘very close’. Naturally, Toni had invited him to drop in on her should he find himself in either Rome or Tuscany.
As they lay together on the bed in Quantico, Bond started to fill in any blanks in their story.
‘Sukie wanted me to join her in Italy,’ he said. ‘Now I find the FBI want me to do the same thing. Why?’ Really he was simply thinking aloud, but Toni Nicolletti picked up on it straight away.
‘Eddie, as well as all the other things he does, works mainly for the Bureau’s Special Operations and Research Department,’ she told him. ‘He’s had an agenda of his own ever since that horrible BD 299 incident: after all, he knew you were coming over to represent your organization almost before anyone else. FBI Counterintelligence has a dossier on you and I suspect it contains details of your link with Sukie. He’ll probably tell you why he wants you at the villa, but I’m almost one hundred per cent that Eddie was put onto the case as a stalking horse, to cut you out from the rest of the experts. You must have worked out that he suspects the Tempestas of being the major force behind the bombs on 299. It Georgetown UniversityriIQ’s their style.’
‘But you have no firm evidence of that?’
‘I only know they had a big investment in Bradbury Airlines, and that Harley Bradbury was finding it difficult to keep dividends flowing back to them.’
He thought for a minute, then said that for the Tempestas to carry out such a cold-blooded and ruthless act of terrorism was somewhat like cutting off their noses to spite their faces. ‘If they did arrange this, then why? They would have known that any disaster of this magnitude would almost certainly reduce their chances of recouping money from their investment. Bradbury’ll be hard pushed now. With something like this happening, he’ll possibly go broke.’
‘I didn’t say they were responsible, but they have partners, and those people are more interested in paybacks of a violent kind.’
‘Who’re you talking about in particular?’
‘I’ll let Eddie tell you. In fact, I don’t know if he will, particularly if he’s sending you into the Tempestas’ lair. He probably thinks you should go in cold, so to speak.’
‘Cold,’ he muttered back, and she smiled, leaned over and kissed him, then whispered, ‘You’ve got it.’
Eddie Rhabb was patiently sitting waiting for Bond when he finally got to the canteen. ‘You two must have got on very well,’ sarcasm dripped from his mouth and eyes. ‘Don’t blame you, buddy, but we haven’t got all day – or night.’
‘Takes time to create a Legend.’
‘Sure.’ Rhabb was almost diffident. ‘So, what you come up with?’
Bond told him, and the FBI man shrugged his bull-like shoulders, his head dropping. The body language was of a man on the offensive. Take no prisoners, it said. ‘We can fix all that. Better take a photograph of you and do some magic on the computers. The wizards should be able to take a few years off both of you and we’ll insert them somewhere. The University records are a piece of cake as well. You can be sure either Luigi or Angelo will send one of their people to check you out. Just hope they haven’t already done it. From the time when you met Sukie, I mean. Those guys try to cover all the bases and they’re clever as a barrel-load of monkeys.’
He ticked off all the paperwork they would need to keep up the deception, then Bond came in with the question at the forefront of his mind. ‘Toni wouldn’t talk to me about this, Eddie, but I have some concerns.’
‘You do? What kinda concerns?’
‘I simply got a feeling about you, Ed. A feeling that you were at the crash investigation for a special purpose.’
‘Oh, yeah? What purpose?’
‘To reel me in.’
Rhabb grunted.
‘Sukie was talking about me going to Italy with her. Then she was murdered and you came along and suggested we come on a little trip here. This turns out to be a journey to meet your penetration agent. I need to know why you’re all so keen on putting me in the same jar with the Tempesta brothers. You want to talk to me about that?’
Rhabb lifted a hand and curtly ordered more coffee. ‘Sure. Sure I’ll talk to you, but I’d have thought you could work that out for yourself. Why not try, James?’
‘You don’t like Brits, yet you’ve manipulated me very professionally. When it all goes down and things are set up for me to go on the grand tour to Italyo prisoners,tad, I’ll be taking my instructions from my chief in London, not you. You realize that?’
‘He already knows we want you to go in.’
‘Ah.’
‘I talked with him for a long time yesterday. Damn it, you know I did. James, you’d better be sure here and know that I always cover my ass. I wouldn’t countenance the idea of you going out among those scumbags unless the necessary authority had come from your boss. Got it?’
Bond nodded. ‘Good, so were you at Dulles because you knew I was coming in? You also knew I was an old friend of Sukie Tempesta?’
‘Sure I knew. At first I was concerned that perhaps the late Principessa was up to some tricks with you. When they converted her into meatloaf in that car, I even had a momentary thought that you could have been involved.’
He paused for breath and, Bond suspected, to calm down. When he spoke again it was almost a whisper. An old trick designed to make the subject strain to listen, and assure that the message was taken in loud and clear. ‘We’re all a mite paranoid about this,’ he began. ‘The Tempesta business, I mean. I wouldn’t give a toss if they kept it all in their own country. Let ’em cause whatever chaos they like over there. But when they begin to raise their flags here, well, that’s a different ballgame. And they are moving in. They’re also a very sophisticated organization, and in the long run they make the old five families look like Mother Theresa, Pope John Paul, and all the saints rolled into one.’
‘So why do you want me to play Daniel in the lions’ den?’
‘I don’t know why the late Principessa wanted you. She could’ve h
ad altruistic reasons, though I doubt it. Me, I want to use you as bait, though I guess you already suspected that.’
‘I had a feeling that Sukie was using me.’
‘Not that I wanted to do the same?’
‘I think that’s what really worries me. You want me there for some reason. She wanted me there for another. I’m anxious that the lines don’t get crossed up.’
‘Yeah, so am I, because that is a distinct danger. Let me tell you, James, that Toni Nicolletti is not just feeding us good information, she’s doing another job for us.’ He raked through his short curly dark hair with splayed fingers. ‘Lookit, here’s the deal. The Tempestas are poised on the brink of taking over some very big concerns here in the US. We want them, and we want them bad. We could do a deal with the Italian authorities – no problem. But we’ve gotta fess up to it; if we did that, the thing would be split down the middle.
‘I suspect that if we picked up Luigi and some of his folk here while Angelo was collared in Rome or Tuscany, it’d be years before we could put all the pieces together and get them into court in the same country. Toni’s trying to get them both to come over here, and she’s doing it very subtly. They have to think it’s their own idea. Or at least they must believe it’s the one way they can settle some of their problems – and they’ve got at least one huge entanglement here in the States. I hope you might be able to assist her in getting them both to come over. They’re canny bastards. One time Luigi comes. The next time it’s Angelo, and so on.’
‘What’s the big problem? What did you call it, their huge entanglement over here?’
‘I don’t know if you’d want to hear it.’
‘Try me.’
‘They’ve got into bed with a double-headed monster.’
‘COLD?’
Rhabb almost jumped out of his seat. ‘What d’you know about COLD?’
‘Not a damned thing. I just heard the name. I gather it’s an acronym.’
‘Okay. Let me spell it out for you. COLD stands for the Children Of the Last Days.’
