by JC Ryan
Rex knew what he had to do, and it didn’t include hauling the injured woman around on the back of his motorcycle. He had to see to her safety before he could go any further, but Naples wasn’t the place. She’d still be in danger if she was spotted anywhere in the city.
“You’re going to have to stay here, and under no circumstances will you show your face outside these walls,” he told her. “I’ll get enough supplies to keep you comfortable for a few days, and I’ll be back to move you to a safe place. Promise me you won’t go anywhere.”
“I promise,” she said.
He wasn’t sure he could believe her. If she was still there when he returned with groceries and whatever else she’d need for a few days, maybe she wouldn’t betray him. If not, he wouldn’t look the same when he got back to Naples anyway.
Two hours later, Sophia had food and other supplies for a week, two new off-the-rack dresses and sundry other clothing and underclothing, and some trashy romances to read.
She’d asked him how he knew her size. He’d guessed wildly, but to maintain his persona, he just gave her a sultry look. No answer.
Immediately after delivering what Sophia needed, he was on the bike back on the way he’d come the day before. With no telephone contact for Catia, he needed to get to her in person and ask for the help he required.
When he made it to Rome, he felt as though it had been a week since he’d walked into the restaurant that morning. His hands were sore from the punishment he’d given them while disabling the thugs at the hospital, and then gripping the motorcycle controls for the past two hours. His backside wasn’t in much better shape. He wasn’t used to riding a motorcycle anymore. He would have liked to hole up in a hotel and recuperate, but there was no time.
Instead, he went straight to Catia’s apartment building. He went through the rigmarole of asking the server for her and waited.
When Catia appeared, her face told him she was surprised to see him again so soon.
“What is it, Marco?”
“I need your help.”
Catia said nothing. She looked at him and waited for an explanation of what he wanted.
He explained that he had to get an injured woman to safety, before he could continue with his mission. Could she put Sophia up somewhere to recover from her injuries, and then help her to disappear?
“Go on.”
He gave Catia just enough background for her to understand the urgency as well as the risk. He was asking a lot, and she let him know it.
“The Camorra! Marco, do you know what you’re mixed up with? They’re bad news.”
“Tell me about it,” he drawled with a smirk. “Yes, I know.”
“You’d be better off poking a stick into a hornet’s nest.”
Rex didn’t reply.
“All right, I know you won’t tell me more. I’ll help your woman.”
“Not my woman. A woman. I’m the one who put her in danger, so that’s why I’m responsible.”
Catia told him the address where she wanted him to deliver his package the next evening. Then she asked, “How will you get her here?”
“Leave that to me. I’ll be there with her tomorrow night.”
They said goodbye and Rex got back on his bike and rode back to Naples. He wanted to get to the safe house under the cover of darkness.
All the way he thought about how to get Sophia out of town. His conclusion was that no one would be looking for her on the back of a motorcycle. It would be dicey, but the best he could do was basically strap her to his back and scoot for Rome.
The next night, shortly after ten, he delivered a frazzled Sophia to Catia at an MI6 safe house in Rome and immediately turned back, his fifth trip in three days between the two cities.
Chapter Twenty-One
Naples
FROM SOPHIA, REX had names and addresses of the head of the Beneduce-Longobardi clan, part of the Camorra. But she knew next to nothing about the deal Matthew Benedict had discovered before his death. There wasn’t much in the file, either, only that Benedict said he suspected it was an arms-for-drugs deal, and that it was to take place soon, which Sophia also told him. There wasn’t any time to lose.
The two mobsters he’d disabled and left in the hospital shower knew his face, so he’d dyed his hair back close to his original color and gotten rid of the contacts before he left Rome for Naples. Now he was also allowing a scruff of beard to grow, though it wouldn’t be making a big difference for a week or so.
He found a hostel to stay in. His flashy clothes remained in the saddlebags. Instead he wore the denim pants and tee he’d bought for rough work. If the mission took more than a couple of days, he’d need more, and he didn’t want them to be new, so he kept a lookout for a second-hand store.
It was going to be prudent to find a new place to sleep every night, and not only within Naples, but in nearby towns. The trouble with that was the commute. Sorrento, for example, offered plenty of out-of-the-way hostels and private rooms that should be safe. But even though Sorrento was a suburb of Naples, it was an hour from the port, where all the action was and where Rex needed to be. Nearer, he couldn’t be certain he wouldn’t be vulnerable to the Camorra finding him. They were certainly looking.
Rex had another problem, as well. Within just a day or two, he had too much of a good thing. Sophia had given him more than a dozen names. He couldn’t effectively follow all of them, and what he found with more modern means — by tracing their phone numbers, bank accounts, and internet activity — turned up even more. It was too big a job for one man.
Until then, he’d been circumspect about reporting back to the Old Man. He didn’t really have anything to report, except that he was working on it. But now he needed a surveillance team to help. Taking extreme care to avoid being followed, he went back to his storage unit and retrieved the secure satellite phone. It was dangerous to have it on his person, in case he was taken like Benedict had been. Naturally, it had to be charged before he could make a call. Another hour or more of no progress.
The moment he had enough charge to finish a call, he snatched the phone up and speed-dialed the Old Man.
“I need three men.”
“Good morning to you, too. Nice to hear from you.” The Old Man’s sarcasm didn’t faze Rex. They knew each other well enough.
“Thanks. When can my team be here?”
Rex endured one more sarcastic remark from the Old Man about his terse communications, and then the answer he needed: “I’ll have three to you within eighteen hours.”
They agreed where he would meet the team members when they arrived.
“Good.” Rex ended the call with nothing more, his protest at what to him was unnecessary social chatter. Less than a minute later, he was out of his hotel room and on the way back to the storage unit to put the phone back in storage.
Inconvenient? Certainly. Necessary? No doubt about it.
While he waited for his team to arrive, he made what progress he could with intel on the head of the clan. Over the next eighteen hours, they arrived, one by one, and they met up in the same way.
He met the first one at the Pompeii exhibit inside the Museo Archeologico Nazionale. Two hours later, the two of them connected with the second new arrival at Caffe Mexico, which Rex thought was incongruently named.
There Rex had an espresso he figured would keep him awake for at least three days.
The three of them found accommodations in separate but nearby hostels before Rex collected the third from Naples International Airport. He was the only one to arrive by air, and ironically the last to arrive. They met the others at a dingy and none-too-clean ristorante, where they had dinner while Rex briefed them on the problems.
One of them, the latest to arrive, was a tech specialist. He had everything with him that he’d need to hack into the clan leader’s internet activity, and from there into his henchmen’s computers and phones. He would set up a secure virtual network between his laptop and Rex’s. The other two would u
se cell phones only, as they’d be on the move. They were street-surveillance experts. They’d follow various targets as the situation developed.
There was only one situation of interest. Rex knew and informed the others that they’d no doubt stumble upon activity they’d like to interfere with. Protection rackets, prostitution, drug deals, smuggling – whatever nefarious dealings the Camorra was involved in. They were to ignore it all. The only thing Rex and CRC were interested in was the arms-for-drugs deal Benedict had uncovered. Anyone directly involved in it would be directly or indirectly responsible for Benedict’s death.
Top priority: stop the deal. Second: kill anyone involved in their colleague’s death. The latter would no doubt take care of much of the other stuff they’d uncover, anyway.
For the first two days, the tech specialist worked to crack the clan head’s computer network. He’d get bits and pieces and send Rex and the other two to follow this person or that and eavesdrop on their conversations. But the deal was evidently compartmentalized. Enough so that it remained a big, dark mist, with activity going on all around it, but nothing that penetrated the fog.
By the third day, Rex was drawn from the street surveillance to make a virtual map of the comings and goings of the dozen people whose names Sophia had given him, along with a dozen more they’d discovered since setting up the surveillance. The one fixed point was the one they code-named Grosso, short for pezzo grosso, big piece or big shot. He seldom left his home, and when he did, security was so tight that any followers were soon left behind.
Nevertheless, the number of messages flying to and fro in his computer network made it plain that he was calling the shots, the big shot indeed.
The content of those messages remained a mystery.
“He’s using some kind of encryption that my programs can’t crack,” the tech specialist reported. “All we can do is follow the people who get them and try to see what they’re doing.”
But what they were doing apparently contained some misdirection. One would go to a bank, stand in line for fifteen minutes, and then leave without making a transaction. Meanwhile, one of the others who weren’t being followed would make progress and report it to Grosso. It almost seemed as if they knew they were being followed, and deliberately led the followers somewhere insignificant.
Rex asked the team members if they could have been made.
“No! We’re the best in CRC at this. They can’t possibly know we’re following. Sometimes we get to where they’re going before they do.”
Rex trusted his team, though. If they said they hadn’t been detected, then the precautions the Camorra people were taking were just that – precautions, preventative misdirection.
This state of affairs went on for four more days, and then the tech specialist intercepted the biggest coms package he’d seen yet.
“This has to be it,” he said. “And now there’s a way in. These are numbers,” he said, pointing out some strings of nonsense on the screen. “See? Here and here,” pointing “it’s the same string. And this.” Here he pointed to a longer string. “I think that’s a ship name.”
“It’s Greek to me,” Rex said, unconsciously making a witticism, since he could read a bit of Ancient Greek and could have made a stab at translating if it really had been written in Greek.
“To me, too, but I’m going to put my decryption routines to work on the number strings. Maybe that will give us a key to cracking the whole thing.”
Rex knew how to work the software, but it wasn’t in his wheelhouse. Interesting, though. He watched as the tech specialist fed in the strings he thought were numbers. What went on in the background was a mystery. What came out on the screen was a jumble of big numbers, and some of them appeared to be monetary values.
From there, it was a matter of applying common sense. Before long, they had the details of how much of what was going to be exchanged for how many of something else. With those details, feeding the encrypted message back through the software gave them a few words. Seven iterations later, they had the big picture.
Date, time, location – everything they needed to intercept the shipment, except that it was huge. A much bigger operation than they’d expected it to be.
Rex contemplated, for a while, calling in more help, maybe from MI6 who could send in a team of special force operators, but he discarded the idea. It was going to take too much time to jump through the hoops to get that organized.
The full details were plenty to use in the interdiction plan. Those details, including that the merchandise of both types would be brought together into one large warehouse for exchange on big tractor-trailer rigs, revealed a cocky attitude on the part of the bad guys. They were practically doing it under the noses of authorities, and they were highly confident of their success.
Of course, those authorities are probably on the Camorra’s payroll.
The date was most useful of all. The completion of the deal was four days away, more than enough time for Rex and his team to arrange a nice little surprise.
Rex went in alone first. The warehouse was virtually empty, and there were no guards, though it was locked. Naturally, the locks were no challenge to Rex. The guards wouldn’t have been, either, but it was best this way. No witnesses to his intrusion, and no dead guards to alert the other side. It would take only about half the materiel from his cache to rig it with enough explosives to drop the warehouse in on itself.
The real bonus, though, was the old tanker that took up the back wall of the warehouse.
It looked like it hadn’t been moved in years. One tire was flat, but the other seventeen were in shape to move it, if they didn’t move it far. Rex had an idea for what to do with it, if he could pull it off. It would all depend on whether he could hot-wire the old rig. That would depend more on the condition of the engine than on his abilities. He’d rather do it at night, but that might attract more attention. He decided it would have to be done during the day.
To accomplish his goal – stealing the truck and taking it to be filled with LP gas – would require a distraction from this warehouse. Rex finished his inspection of the warehouse and returned to where the tech specialist was set up.
“Call the others. I’m working on a plan.”
By the time the two came in off their surveillance duties, Rex had it. Rather than trying to start the old truck, one of his team would steal a fully-loaded LP tanker and fill the container from it. Then he’d return the tanker, wipe it down, and aside from the missing gas, no one would be the wiser. While his team member was doing that, the tech guy would maintain a lookout on the network and the other surveillance guy would watch the warehouse. Rex would set the charges throughout the warehouse.
“The beauty of this, guys, is that some of the weapons side of the transaction is in the form of ammunition and explosives. With all the steel in that building, the trucks, and the cargo, blowing that warehouse is going to cut anyone inside into a thousand pieces with the shrapnel.”
“And anyone standing too close,” someone pointed out.
“True. But the exchange will be at night. There shouldn’t be any innocent bystanders.”
“I’d still be a whole lot more comfortable with a cellphone triggered detonator,” the team member argued.
“Works for me. If there’s anyone within a few blocks who isn’t part of the deal, we can chase them off. Just don’t get caught too close yourself. Because I’m not waiting until any of them start to leave to light up the place,” Rex said.
“Understood.”
At the suggestion of the tech specialist, he rigged some cameras inside, next to Rex’s explosives. One day before the deal was to go down, they were ready and just waiting for D-Day. As the hours rolled past, they were all on edge. If the Camorra members were smart, they’d be examining that warehouse for just the sort of surprise Rex had arranged. But it was their domain, they obviously didn’t expect any trouble, and the surveillance cameras saw nothing of the kind. The warehouse remained emp
ty as a pauper’s pocket until three hours before the specified time.
At that point, everyone but the tech specialist left to take up their positions. They’d calculated the distance shrapnel might be thrown, and they had an hour to sweep the surrounding area for homeless people making the seldom-used block of warehouses their homes. They were dressed as police, so they could authoritatively order them out.
As it turned out, the precaution was unnecessary. The only people any of them saw turned out to be Camorra members, intent on the same purpose. Evidently, they didn’t want any witnesses to that night’s doings. Rex’s men stayed out of their sight and out of their way. By nightfall, they were confident there weren’t any innocent bystanders left who would get hurt.
As H-hour approached, they took up positions in concealment to watch the excitement. Rex was in touch with the tech specialist, who transmitted the camera feed to his cell phone. In his other pocket was the cell phone that would trigger what, for the people inside the warehouse, would be Armageddon.
Rex had to hand it to Grosso. His operation was smooth as a baby’s bottom. Precisely on time, six eighteen-wheelers approached the warehouse. Three came from the direction of the docks; the others from the opposite direction. Besides the drivers, each truck was accompanied by a guard in the passenger seat and two escorts, one on each side. The escorts left their vehicles outside in the parking lot and walked in with their trucks, automatic weapons cradled in their arms.
It appeared no one trusted anyone else.
When the warehouse doors closed, Rex had to rely on his feed from the cameras inside to tell what was happening. Of course, there was no sound. He watched one of the guards take charge. The angles were bad, and the cameras didn’t have the best resolution, but unless he was mistaken, that was Grosso himself, or his twin brother, or one of Grosso’s sons. Someone high in the organization, anyway.
Who knew someone in his position would attend a party like this in person?
Rex shook his head. Big mistake, asshole.
