by Karen Dodd
Nico had become friends with James Padwick, after meeting at a seminar on counterterrorism a few years ago. A former senior police officer within the Metropolitan Police, James had taken early retirement from the force after his wife, a Scotland Yard detective, had been shot and killed on the job. However, unable to settle at home, his path took a different direction, and now he headed up the security team at none other than Heathrow Airport.
“Great to hear from you, mate,” James said after they’d chatted a few minutes. “How can I help?”
Nico caught him up and relayed what Mifsud had said about Elle’s name not being on the flight to the UK.
“Your inspector there was correct,” James said after checking. “There is no Elle Sinclair on the manifest for that flight. Because her reservation was canceled.”
“Are you sure?”
“Absolutely. Do you want me to see if she rebooked on another one?”
“Please,” Nico said, and listened while James instructed one of his staff to run a search.
While he waited, Nico tried another angle. “What about Francesca Bruno? Is that name on any flights?”
He heard him typing. “No, nothing.”
Nico let out a quiet sigh of relief. He still hadn’t heard if there had been any sign of her having been at the vineyard. He only knew the police hadn’t found her when he and Mifsud were there.
But where was Elle? Surely she would have called to let him know if she’d changed her flight. He’d left her umpteen messages both during and after he’d been in the hospital.
His ears perked up when he heard someone in the background mention the name Sinclair.
“No, sorry, Nico,” James said. “It doesn’t appear that she’s rebooked.”
Why would Elle have cancelled her flight without letting him know? Nico’s gut churned as a whole new set of alarm bells went off in his head.
Nico thanked him and was about to hang up when James said, “Hang on. That’s odd.”
“What?”
“Sinclair traveled from Malta to London on the third of May with a child by the name of Massimo Calleja. Wait a minute, wasn’t that the surname of the prosecutor who was assassinated?” James asked. “Anyway, accompanying documentation shows she had a consent letter from the parent.”
Oh my God! She’d told Nico she hadn’t come to Malta until the day after Ariana was killed. And that she didn’t know where Max was.
“Then,” James continued, “she flew back to Malta on the eighth. Alone.”
The day after the Tropea bombing. Elle—not Francesca—had taken Max out of the country prior to the bombing. With Ariana’s consent.
* * *
Although a couple of painkillers helped take the edge off, Nico felt as if he’d run headfirst into a brick wall. After his conversation with James Padwick, he’d called Elle’s mobile repeatedly, each time pleading with her to call him back. But he knew it was futile. No matter what kind of spin he tried to put on it, he was out of theories that could explain her lying to him. James had reported what he knew to the police, and now all Nico could do was go back to his hotel and wait.
Unable to summon the energy to go down for dinner, or even to check on Gabriela, he replied to a few emails before collapsing into bed. He’d just turned out the light when his mobile rang. He snatched it off the bedside table.
“Nico, it’s James.”
“Have you found them?”
“Not that I’m aware of, but once they leave the terminal, it’s out of my hands. Listen, I’m not sure I should be telling you this, but after I’d finished with the police, something occurred to me. I’m sure you’re aware there are CCTV cameras all over the airport, inside and out.”
“Of course.” It was a sad commentary that with terrorism being so prevalent in many countries across the world, it was almost impossible to commit a crime without being caught on camera. A colleague in Singapore had told Nico that thanks to CCTV, criminals there have roughly eight minutes to disappear before being nabbed by the police. If only they had that in Calabria . . .
“Well,” James said, “I pulled the footage that covers everything coming in and out around the airport. People being picked up or dropped off in private vehicles, buses, hotel vans, taxis—everything. They come into different locations, but we have cameras on them all. It’s impossible to enter or leave Heathrow, even on foot, without being seen.”
“And?”
“We have confirmation that Elle Sinclair got into a taxi with a child matching Max Calleja’s description thirty minutes after her flight had landed on the third of May. He appeared to be going with her willingly.”
“You’ve reported all of this to the police?” Nico said.
“Of course. Obviously, the first place they looked was the address registered on her passport, but there’s no sign of her or the boy. I imagine they’re canvasing her neighbors as we speak. Presumably, all the police have to do now is find the taxi driver who picked up a tall woman with a small boy and find out where they dropped them off.”
“And pray to God she paid the fare by credit card rather than cash,” Nico said.
Chapter Nineteen
Despite the late hour, Nico threw on some clothes and headed to the Valletta Police Station. On arrival, he asked to speak with whomever was covering for Inspector Mifsud whilst he was in hospital.
“I’m very sorry, Sinjur Moretti,” the officer at the front desk said. “The acting inspector is tied up in another matter. I’m afraid it will be several hours before he can meet with you.”
Dismally, Nico looked around for somewhere to sit.
“There’s an all-night café across the street. If you like, I can call you when he’s available.”
Despite his exhaustion, Nico was actually hungry, so he headed across the street and ordered mushroom bourguignon and a salad. While he waited for his food to come, he fired up his laptop and started his search into Elle Sinclair’s journalism vitae.
She’d gone to Iraq as a war correspondent for the BBC after 9/11. Living in a war zone might explain skills such as expertly breaking into apartments without detection and driving as if to elude capture. Nico recalled Elle telling him she’d left the BBC because she refused to abide by their personal safety precautions. However, the article indicated they had summoned her back to London and, after a brief desk job assignment, they fired her.
The next reference he could find was when she started freelancing for the UK’s Guardian newspaper. He scratched his head. Not only would that have been an enormous drop in pay, but there was a six-month period before that where she appeared to be unemployed. That was an awfully long time between jobs for such an accomplished journalist. He searched for any more links that might come up with her name. Nothing. For half a year, it was like Elle Sinclair had dropped off the face of the earth.
Nico read on. She seemed to have surfaced at the Guardian as suddenly as she’d disappeared. Judging by the multiple-page spreads devoted to her exposés, she’d made a rapid transition from war correspondent to reporting on white-collar crime. The criminals she’d investigated were like the Bernie Madoffs of the world. Many of whom were in prison serving life sentences, in part, because of her reporting. Pretty impressive stuff.
He clicked on more links to Elle’s investigative pieces. One in particular had garnered her an award. That must have put her front and center in people’s minds. A lot like Ariana. Before he knew it, he had multiple tabs open on his laptop, each link taking him down a different rabbit hole.
Then he saw it.
He’d clicked onto the Sun’s website. He leaned in and rubbed his eyes, sure they were deceiving him. It wasn’t possible. But there she was, in living color. He clicked on the video. There was no mistaking the visibly inebriated woman kicking a bouncer who was trying to prevent her from cutting in line outside a popular nightclub in Soho. Nor the man with her, who was attempting to keep her from rendering the poor bouncer a eunuch. The shock on the man’s face when Ell
e turned and struck him with her purse was only eclipsed by his pained expression when the police arrived to break up the melee. The caption that accompanied the video read: Married Journalist Caught in Tawdry Affair. The man being bashed about the head? The infamous journalist Nico had yet to meet— Vincenzo Testa.
Nico thought back to the conversation with Elle as they drove back from Mdina after she broke into Anna Braithwaite’s apartment. At the same time she told him she’d never heard Ariana speak of Francesca, she said she’d never met Vincenzo Testa. He bit the inside of his lip as he replayed the video again, and vacillated between disbelief, hurt, and rage. How could Ariana have trusted this woman? But then again, why had he?
Much as he hated to do it, time was of the essence, and he needed to find out everything he could about Elle Sinclair. The only way he knew how to do that was to dangle the bait and hope he got a bite.
While he ate his meal, Nico made a couple of calls and had a trace put on Testa’s mobile phone. After which he called Vincenzo Testa’s wife. It took less than fifteen minutes for the reporter to contact him.
“You son of a bitch,” Vincenzo Testa railed when Nico answered. “How dare you call my wife! What do you want?”
“Calm down, Signore Testa. I only want to chat.” Nico felt a twinge of guilt that he’d intimated to Testa’s wife that he was concerned for her husband’s safety, but it had the desired effect.
“You said you’d call me back after you arrived at your destination,” Nico said, then waited patiently while Testa blustered on a few more minutes. “Where was it you said you were going?”
“Cut the bullshit, Moretti. I didn’t tell you where I was going. Now, before I call the police, not to mention your employer, what is it you want?”
Nico looked at his watch. He’d kept Testa on the line for the mere seconds needed to trace the journalist’s whereabouts. “Relax, all I want is to ask you some questions about Elle Sinclair.”
“That crazy bitch. What about her?”
“That’s funny. She said she’d never met you. But that’s not true, is it?”
“You already know the answer to that, or we wouldn’t be speaking.”
“Your wife said you have a new baby. Congratulations. Girl or boy?” Nico didn’t give a rat’s ass, but he wanted to keep him on the phone a few seconds longer. He’d asked Sergio to arrange to have the call tapped.
The anger in Testa’s voice suggested that, if given the opportunity, he’d reach through the phone and strangle Nico. “You scared my wife half to death. She thought something had happened to me.” His tone was steely. “You have thirty seconds to tell me what you want or I swear to God, my next call will be to the authorities.”
Sergio’s chat message popped up on his computer.
Testa is in Istanbul. Arrived two days after Ariana Calleja’s assassination and hasn’t left since.
Shit! After seeing the video of Elle and Testa together, he’d thought Testa might somehow have been involved in Elle’s deceit and Max’s disappearance. Nico ran his hand over the stubble of his two-day-old beard. Where to go from here? Testa was a new father. Maybe that was the angle. He swallowed his pride. “Mr. Testa, I apologize. I think we may have got off on the wrong foot. I need your help.”
“You call my wife and frighten her half to death and you want my help? Have you lost your mind?”
“No, but I think I might have lost my perspective.” It was now or never, before he hung up again. “Were you aware that Ariana had a son?”
There was a long pause. Nico felt the need to fill it, but as a prosecutor he was an expert at using silence to give defendants just enough rope to hang themselves. Now, however, he was desperate. “You were a friend of Ariana’s and you’re a new father. Please, Max is missing and I need to know if Elle ever spoke of him or saw him in your presence.”
“Oh, my God.”
“Excuse me?”
“Please tell me that evil woman hasn’t done something to Max.”
Chapter Twenty
When the call came in from the police station, Nico let it go to voicemail. He was alarmed Vincenzo Testa thought Elle could have been involved in Max’s disappearance. Consent letter or not, she appeared to have gone to great lengths to hide the fact that it was she who had taken him out of Malta.
Additionally, whether it was out of guilt, or genuinely wanting to seek justice for Ariana’s murder, Testa offered to share her research files—everything he had—with Nico.
Despite their bumpy start, Nico had the distinct feeling the journalist had waited a long time to unburden himself. He volunteered that his colleague, Ervio De Rosa, was already in Istanbul working on a story when Ariana was killed. They’d considered returning to Italy until things died down, but their security team advised against it. So, Testa had gotten on a plane and joined him. There had already been several threats on both men’s lives, but Testa assured Nico they were committed to carrying on Ariana’s work under Journalists for Justice.
“I don’t need to tell you, Signore Moretti, Ariana was dealing with some very dangerous people. Be careful. You’ll see from my materials that many of them, including members of organized crime groups, have far-reaching tentacles. Heads of state, corporate CEOs, and many others in high places literally have been controlling Malta’s economy for decades.”
Testa cleared his throat. “I’m very sorry about the lambasting Ervio and I gave you in our exposé after you lost that big corruption case.”
“Unnecessary, and please call me Nico.”
“Very well, thank you. In all fairness, I think the reason we were so hard on you was that we’d both been in close touch with Ariana. She’d had multiple threats on her life, and as I was one of the few people who knew she had a child, I worried about her and Max’s safety.”
“I understand. Can you tell me more about how you knew her?”
“Of course. I loved Ariana like a sister,” Testa continued. “We met in a journalism course when we were undergraduates. Had it not been for her encouragement and fierce dedication as a prosecutor, I’d never have been able to nail that series I did on the ’Ndrangheta a year or two back.”
Nico remembered the piece well. It resulted in a huge takedown of several key players in the ’Ndrangheta—the most dangerous Mafia clan, some would say, in the world. They made the Sicilian mob look like choirboys.
“It was after that, that Ariana asked me to help with some of the exhaustive research she needed for her investigation into Malta’s private bank. I don’t know if you’re aware, but the bank has some highly questionable clients. Ariana was an equal-opportunity crusader. While she never actually named them, in several interviews she made it quite clear who she thought they were.”
Nico’s ears perked up. Was this what she was about to announce before she was killed? “Do you know any of their names?”
“No, but I do know that somewhere there is a list, and that her office was planning on making a big announcement last Wednesday, the day after Ariana died.”
“Are you aware that Italian police have charged two men with her assassination?” Nico asked. “Wouldn’t that tend to suggest the bombing was connected to someone in Italy rather than Malta?” Having said that, he knew that Calabria also had its share of oligarchs and despots. His office was currently working a case that involved Russians who were aggressively buying up real estate including restaurants, hotels, homes—and in some cases, entire villages. Had Ariana identified certain individuals in Malta who were also players in Italy? Is that why she was killed in Tropea? Nico shuddered at that thought.
“Those two men they arrested are nothing but paid thugs,” Testa scoffed. “With all due respect, catching them makes the Italian government look good and takes the heat off Malta. While it’s possible they carried out the bombing, I guarantee you it was at someone else’s behest. Someone who had a lot to gain by killing Ariana.”
“Do you have any thoughts on who that would be?”
“Not de
finitively, no,” Testa said. “But as you’ll see in the research notes I’m about to send you by encrypted email, there is no shortage of potential candidates.”
Eventually, the subject of Elle came up again. Although curious about what Testa had to say about her, Nico hadn’t wanted to interrupt him while he was so forthcoming about Ariana.
“Elle and I first met when we were both covering the Iraq war,” he said. “The constant tension and danger that we lived under eventually stretched many of us beyond our limits. And we did things we would never have imagined doing back home.”
“I can certainly understand that.” Nico knew of several men and women who had come back from Iraq suffering terrible PTSD.
“It’s not something I’m proud of,” Testa said, “but after being under siege for twenty hours following an ambush on our Humvee, Elle and I sought solace in each other’s beds. I just chalked it up to the circumstances that we’d had a one-night fling. I was married and didn’t plan for it to happen again.”
“Did you tell her that? Elle, I mean.”
“I did, but it would seem she had other ideas.”
A tingle went down Nico’s spine—the hairs on his arms stood on end. “What do you mean?”
“I was weak,” Testa replied, “but we were living through strange times. Even when I was able to make calls back home to my wife, she didn’t fully grasp the horrors I’d witnessed.”
Nico didn’t imagine anyone did unless you’d lived it. It was almost certain Testa would have suffered emotional issues after he returned home.
“So, for two more months in Iraq, Elle and I had an on-again-off-again affair. We reported for different news organizations, but we were often embedded in the same military vehicles. We were almost ambushed once, and her quick thinking saved my life and that of my cameraman.”
Nico could see that. With Elle’s quiet, focused demeanor she’d likely stay calm under fire.
