by Thomas Perry
When the flight attendant had finally closed the forward hatch and brought the bar down to lock it, he was relieved. It meant that there wouldn't be four big men appearing in front of the cockpit door in a moment to drag him off the plane. Travel was always full of small obstacles and checkpoints that had to be passed through.
As soon as the plane taxied to the end of the runway and then hurtled over the pavement into the sky, he settled into the back of his seat and prepared to sleep. Sleeping whenever and wherever he could was something he had learned from Eddie when he was about twelve. "Never work when you're tired, kid. If you don't win by strength in the first couple of seconds, you have to win by stamina. You have to learn to keep resetting the clock so it's always morning for you. The other guy is so exhausted he's beginning to see things out of the corner of his eye, but you just got up."
Sleep was a trick. Just find a comfortable place, close both eyes, and mentally repeat some short, meaningless mantra a couple of times to clear the mind of distractions. Eddie had used the Lord's Prayer, but the boy had preferred writing the alphabet. He would write each letter by directing an imaginary pen in longhand until he was asleep.
After a disconnected and meaningless series of dreams, he awoke feeling rested and alert. He looked at his watch, saw that he had slept four hours, and adjusted it to Phoenix time.
While he was waiting in the airport in the morning, he had Googled the Silver Saguaro Ranch and found its website. He had taken the virtual tour and studied the maps and layouts. The place was a resort in a mountainous area with pine trees. There was a big building called the Lodge, which appeared to have two restaurants, a couple of meeting rooms, a huge open room with gigantic stone fireplaces on either end, and a wall that appeared to be all glass. There were stables and horse trails and hiking routes, and a lake with some canoes and a dock. The suites consisted of dozens of separate cabins, each with a bedroom, a living room with a bar, and a bathroom.
At the bottom of the home page of the website was small print saying the Saguaro was a Pure Gold Seam resort. He ran a Google search on the name and found that the president of the company was Sylvia Fibbiano. Of course. He was sure that she was the daughter of Jimmy Fibbiano, who had always had a construction company in New Jersey that kept changing its name every time it got to be well known. He had been fairly sure the Silver Saguaro Ranch must be owned by a Mafioso, or the others would never consent to meet there. He supposed any potential guests for the next couple of days would be told the whole place was rented out for a large wedding party or something, so there would be no outsiders around. The help would all be relatives and protégés of the Fibbianos, even if they had to be flown in from other Fibbiano enterprises. Fibbiano would have guards stationed around the perimeter of the place to prevent a breach or warn of a raid.
He could only hope that the men out there would be the usual big guys with the expensive suits and Italian shoes who ran the football betting sheets, and not a few lean and silent types who spent every fall in the woods stalking deer.
When the plane landed in Phoenix, he moved quickly. He went to the curb and got on a shuttle bus to the car-rental depot. While he was inside behind the tinted windows, he studied the crowd coming out of the baggage claim for familiar faces but he saw none. When he got to the depot, he rented a Nissan Altima in an unobtrusive gray and drove.
He stopped in a sporting-goods store and made some purchases. He bought a small backpack, a .308 Remington rifle with a ten-power Weaver scope, and three boxes of ammunition. On the way out he picked up a folding hunting knife with a flat handle that was easy to conceal and came open with a flick of his thumb.
His next stop was at a military-surplus store. He bought a pair of tropical-style combat boots, a light camouflage poncho with a hood, a camouflage tarp, a backpack-style water pack with a tube for drinking on the move, a set of water purification tablets, some salt pills, and a camouflage ventilated hat with a flap to protect the back of his neck from the sun. There was a high-tech section where he found a night-vision scope and a GPS unit. He picked out a set of U.S. Geological Survey maps of southern Arizona with altitude lines and landmarks. He needed to drive out Route 87, called the Beeline Highway, past Saguaro Lake in the Tonto National Forest. That seemed to be about forty miles. From there he had to take a turnoff and go farther out into the desert toward the pine woods and hills.
As he drove farther out of the city in the afternoon, he studied the country. His plans had become specific and certain. If the Justice Department managed to figure out where the meeting was, they'd block all the roads for miles before they moved in. There was no way that most of the old men would try to take off across country in a place like this. Chi-chi Tasso or Big Al Costananza would run about a hundred yards and die.
He found the turnoff past the lake, drove another fifteen miles on the road to the Silver Saguaro Ranch, and looked for a place to hide his car. He turned off the road onto a rocky, dry streambed that curved away into an area where the rocks were as big as small houses. He parked between two of them, stretched his tarp from one to the other over the car, and anchored it on both ends with rows of stones. He tossed some loose brush over the tarp to help disguise it from the air.
He put on his camouflage hat and boots, broke down his rifle, rolled the barrel and stock in his poncho to hide them, put the rest of his gear into his backpack, and set off on foot.
It had been at least ten years since he had engaged in the level of physical activity he was about to attempt. But in England he had kept himself in reasonably good condition as a precaution, and he routinely walked nearly everywhere he went.
He began the hike tentatively, and as his muscles warmed up and loosened in the late summer heat, he worked harder. It was midafternoon when he started, and he wanted to get as far as he could while he had light. He would be virtually invisible from the air during daylight, but at night his body heat would show up on infrared sensors, and his outline would be clear in the amplified green glow of a night-vision viewer. He ran a hundred yards, then walked a hundred yards, then repeated it. The ground was gravel with a few spiky plants and rocks of every size from a pea to a car.
The desert heat made his body seem heavier, as though gravity had been augmented somehow, but he pushed on. When he was walking, he drank, checked his position with the map and GPS, and judged his progress toward the dark silhouettes of the distant hills. He could easily tell he was gradually climbing into higher country. By the end of three hours he had noticed that the vegetation was thicker, with a few woody plants with leaves, and soon there were stands of pine. He moved to the inside of the groves for shade and cover.
Before the fifth hour the sun was low in the sky and he judged he was getting close to the ranch. He found a copse in the middle of a pine woods, half covered by a rock shelf and sheltered by trees that had grown close to it. He crawled under the shelf, opened his pack, and sorted his gear. He assembled his rifle, loaded it, then put another five rounds in the spare magazine and put it into his pocket. He rechecked the adjustments of the scope and mounts to be sure they were in the midrange—essentially the factory setting. He would have liked to zero in the rifle before he tried to do anything risky with it, but that had been impossible. He would have to move in as close as he dared, fire his first round, and adjust to improve the precision of his aim. He plotted his route to the ranch and identified a mountain as the landmark he would still be able to see later in dim moonlight.
He drank more water, lay down, and slept for a time, then awoke in the dark. He looked at his watch. It was ten o'clock in the evening. He took with him his night-vision scope, his rifle and ammunition, and his camouflage poncho. He left everything else in his pack and pushed it far back under the rock shelf.
The night was quiet in the dry, rocky hills. The birds that had sung at twilight were all quiet now. His own footsteps seemed to be the loudest sounds. Now and then some small animal skittered away into the brush ahead of him. After another
quarter mile he would stop occasionally in cover, take out his night scope, and study the next stretch of visible ground before he stepped into it. He searched for the shapes of men waiting for an intruder, and then for electronic devices that might have been installed around the perimeter of Silver Saguaro Ranch.
He saw nothing and heard nothing that indicated men had been here. Probably anyone on the path he was blazing would have traveled on horseback, but he could see no signs that horses had been up here. As he approached what his map indicated was the last ridge before the ranch, he became more wary. There could easily be men posted up on the high ground watching the approaches to the resort.
He knelt in some fragrant brush, put on his camouflage poncho, concealed his rifle under it, and looked through his night scope. He saw pale green rocks and trees, black sky, pale green clouds. He looked, he waited, then moved ahead to a higher plateau with a few jagged rock outcroppings on it. He sat in front of an outcropping, spread his poncho so he wasn't shaped like a human being, and stared through the night scope, looking down the slope toward the ranch.
A hundred yards ahead there was a fallen log on the ground, a big pine that had once stood at the edge of the nearby stand. After a few seconds he saw part of it move. It moved again and he made out the shape of a head, a shoulder, and then the whole shape separated itself from the background. It was a man lying down, leaning on the log, and staring up the mountainside in his general direction.
He had to find a way past this sentry. If he passed far enough to the left or the right, he might avoid this man's notice, but there would be others stationed at intervals. One sentry was like one ant—an impossibility. He studied the area with his night-vision scope, but he couldn't see a good way around. He also knew that it would be foolish to leave an armed enemy behind him. Getting past him on the way out, after things had happened, might be impossible. But if the man was dead, this spot would be clear.
Schaeffer moved to his right, away from the sentry, and slipped into the pine woods. He felt extremely lucky that the trees up here were pines. The ground had a thick, soft carpet of fallen needles, and he could walk without making a sound. As he circled back to the left, he considered the proper method. Shooting the man would bring the rest of the watchdogs. Cutting his throat would be difficult to do without some sort of a struggle and the chance of being soaked with the man's blood. The best way would be a ligature. He pulled the cord from the neck of his poncho, tested its strength, and then looked for the right sort of branch as he moved in the woods. When he found it, he used his knife to carve it into two pieces, each about an inch thick and four inches long. In the center of each he carved a groove, then put the knife away. He tied the ends of the cord to the handles, keeping the cord in the groove. Now the cord was about two feet long with a sturdy handle on each end.
He moved on through the woods, looking in his scope until he could see the sentry again. The sentry was staring up at the slope of the hill, watching for intruders. Schaeffer began to advance toward the sentry. He stayed low, but moved steadily, and soon he was directly behind him, on the other side of the log. He gripped the handles, crossed his wrists, and dropped the loop around the man's neck. He tightened it and kept it tight. The man struggled to get the cord off his neck, then to reach for the hand that held it. But Schaeffer pulled backward hard and set both feet against the fallen tree trunk.
As he tightened the strangling cord and the man lost consciousness, Schaeffer thought about strangulation. As he had thrown the loop over the man's head, the man had done the wrong thing instinctively. He had dropped the objects in his hands and used both hands to try to pull the cord away from his throat, then to wrench his attacker's hands off the cord. Before he could change his tactic and reach down for the gun in his jacket, his brain had been denied oxygen for a couple of minutes so he was already weak and dizzy. A few seconds later he was unconscious. What amateur killers didn't realize was that strangling took patience. The amateur might consider the job done right about now. But to be sure the man wouldn't start breathing again and regain consciousness after he was gone, it was necessary to deny him oxygen for much longer. Eddie Mastrewski had always insisted on seven minutes.
While he held the cord tight and waited, he watched and listened. There was no sound up here except the whisper of wind in the tall trees. He studied the view up the hill from here so he would be sure to come back past the dead sentry instead of some live one. He looked down at the sentry. He was about thirty years old, wearing new blue jeans and a black shirt cut like a cowboy's, with snaps instead of buttons. He was beginning to lose his hair prematurely, with a receding hairline and a bare spot at the back of his head about the size of a silver dollar. On his feet were a pair of clean, new hiking boots.
Schaeffer held both handles in his left hand, touched the man's wrist, and felt for a pulse: nothing. He unwrapped the rope, found the man's wallet, and looked inside. His driver's license was from New York and said he was Raymond Agnetti. There was a thick layer of hundred-dollar bills, so Schaeffer took them. Agnetti's jacket was lying on the log beside him. When he lifted it, he felt the weight of a gun. He took it out and looked at it in the moonlight. The etching on the slide said it was a Springfield Armory XD. He'd never seen this model before, and so he knew it must be new. He released the magazine and saw it held about sixteen nine-millimeter rounds in a double stack. He pushed it back in and put the pistol in his belt and its spare magazine in his pocket.
He found Agnetti's cell phone in the coat, but he had no radio for talking to all the other guards at once. Schaeffer turned the phone off, put it back in the coat, dragged the body into the low brush at the edge of the pine woods, and covered it with branches from a broken sapling. He retrieved his gear and went on.
Moving slowly and carefully, he made his way down the hill toward the ranch. There were clearly marked hiking trails now, and he stayed in the woods that bordered them. After a quarter mile he saw the complex and realized why the families had posted guards up the hill. The hill offered a good view of the whole re-sort. He kept moving downward looking below for ways to accomplish what he wanted to do.
When he was only a few hundred feet from the populated area, he stopped and surveyed it. From the website he recognized the Lodge, a big, barnlike building with a high roof and big windows. He could see there were many men inside it right now. Parked beside it on the side away from the main entrance were three big white Fibbiani trucks marked GOLD SEAM CATERING, with white-coated hotel staff walking back and forth unloading supplies.
There were cabins along a network of paved roads surrounding the lodge. Many cabins had cars parked in front of them, and quite a few had lights glowing in their windows. There were small knots of men who had gathered to talk at various places along the paths to the lodge or on the wooden porches of the cabins. The thing that struck him as he looked down on the scene was that every human being he saw was male. This was not the sort of conference where they brought wives and girlfriends. It looked like a military encampment.
He found a small level space on the hillside that served as a foothold for some spiky plants, sat down, and spread his poncho on the plants so his body was under it, and its shape merged into the brush. He trained the rifle scope on a group of men standing near the lodge and studied them, then moved the rifle to other groups, searching for familiar faces. It took him several more minutes before he found one he knew. It was Gino Castelletti, an old caporegima from Brooklyn. He was fat and stooped now, and Schaeffer judged he must be around seventy. His hair was so thin that it looked like lines drawn on his bald head.
The five men standing around him listening to him talk were all about twenty-five to thirty-five years old, and Schaeffer didn't know any of them. At one time he had known a great many made men across the country and a fair proportion of the bosses. But nearly all the faces he saw tonight were new. It had been twenty years ago when he had last been around people in the families. Even the oldest of these soldiers had be
en children then, ten or fifteen years old. None of them had ever seen him.
There were few of the older men in evidence outside the lodge. A lot of the men who had known him were probably dead by now, and others had been convicted of something and been given those comical sentences of four or five hundred years, as Carl Bala had. There were probably two hundred men gathered at the resort tonight for the conference where one of the topics was his death, but he guessed there were fewer than forty present who had ever seen him.
He carefully made his way down the hill after stowing the rifle, the scope, and the poncho underneath a ledge. He picked his way between thick bushes and rocks, trying to stay as invisible as possible. At the edge of the resort and up a short drive by itself was a cabin with a dim light glowing in a window and a rental car parked beside it. He went to the back of the building and looked in the window. There was a bedroom, and he could see a suitcase open on a folding stand and some clothes hanging in an open closet. He went to the woodpile, picked up a piece of firewood, wrapped his hat around the end to muffle the sound, broke the upper pane of glass, reached in, and unlocked the latch, then climbed in.
