by Thomas Locke
Four men in each car. Straight off the same block as the group that had attacked out of the night and the rain.
Julio said, “Take the bags.”
“What?”
“We’re being watched. Do what I say. I’m gonna slip my arm in yours. Lay on you some sappy lines. No, girl, don’t look at the car. Look at me. That’s good.”
He wiped the rain from his face, not surprised to find his fingers were jumping to the same tune as his warbly voice. He linked his arm through hers, and the heat of that fine body steadied him enough to say, “When we get to the gatehouse, I’m going to kiss you.”
“Julio—”
“Wait, now, listen to what I’m saying. You’re going to slap me as hard as you can. Then you take off for the house. Alone. Here we go.” He pitched his voice up a notch as they passed the car, talking trash he didn’t bother to hear himself.
He felt the eyes drilling into him as he sauntered up to the villa’s entrance. Swung her around. Caught Elizabeth’s fear and defiance and tight anger. But she was a player. Oh yeah. She let him move in and watched him lower his face to hers. He tasted the honey of warm lips and cold, cold rain. And for a moment, one long shared heartbeat, he gave himself in to the pleasure of kissing her.
It almost made up for the English she put into her swing.
He staggered back toward the funicular, rubbing his face, amazed she hadn’t taken the skin off.
He could hear the men in the car laughing.
The tension in the two cars carried a deadly force. The four men in each vehicle had been intentionally mixed together. They knew each other, but none had worked together before. Especially not on a hit. In public. In what passed for broad daylight, in this season of perpetual tempest.
Half the crew were the Prince’s men. Half came from the man who controlled Como’s action. These men had arrived filled with their capo’s angry grief over losing his favorite nephew and heir apparent. The Prince and the uncle had appeared together with the strange blonde American woman, and together they had passed on the instructions. Attack the villa. Kill any opposition. Seize all who surrender. The more they captured alive, the higher their reward. But no one could escape.
Then came the astonishment.
They were to get in position. Work out precisely who was to do what. Climb from the two cars. Cock their guns. Then phone the American woman for the final green light.
If she said go, they had their orders.
If she said stand down, they were to return to the cars and back off.
If any of their crew started to attack the villa after being ordered to stand down, the rest of the team were to shoot him dead.
The men in the front car watched as a pretty woman with a very cold face walked past them. She was accompanied by a guy who was clearly much younger. The kid was talking a mile a minute in English. The man in the front passenger seat, the appointed leader of the two crews, cracked his window a notch. The kid was saying something about getting together later, he knew this great club, they could meet up with some friends, hit the scene. The woman said nothing. Her features were very tight, almost angry.
Then the kid leaned in and kissed her.
The men in the car laughed in unison as the woman hauled back and slapped the kid hard enough to shoot him halfway across the street.
The kid was still rubbing his face and gawking at the villa’s entrance long after the woman disappeared. Then he turned and stumbled back toward the funicular station.
The leader gave it another fifteen minutes. Then he pushed open his door and said, “Call the lady. We move out.”
46
Reese’s phone rang just as her car approached Como’s Palace Hotel. A man with heavily accented English said, “We are ready to attack.”
“Wait right where you are.” Reese cupped the phone and said to the driver, “Turn the car around.”
“Signora, this is a one-way—”
“Take the next left. There!” She shook the fist not holding her phone. The coin she had been holding for hours rattled about inside. She muttered, “Heads, we go in. Tails, we stand down.”
“Signora?”
“Nothing.” Reese opened her hand and revealed the tiny sweat-slick Euro penny. Tails. She said to the phone, “Stand your men down.”
“Signora, we can do this thing.”
“And I am telling you to stand down. Return to your cars. Pull back two hundred meters. Wait for further instructions.” Reese ended the call and mimicked, “ ‘We can do this thing.’ Why do men always turn orders into a macho challenge?”
The driver had been supplied by a lean, grey-haired Como thug who clearly thought little of the Prince and his men. “Signora?”
“Stop here a second.”
The driver was a bright young man who could not understand why his passenger insisted on changing her mind every thirty seconds. Since picking her up he had driven twice around the old city and once up into the hills, only to turn around just before they reached Brunate. She had ordered her American team to attack, then she drew them back from the brink, and now she had done the same thing with the Italians.
His gaze in the rearview mirror said he was certain the lady was over the edge and falling fast. “Very sorry, signora. Up ahead is the Duomo. No car can stop here.”
“Go, then. Make a circle around the city.”
“Sì, signora. Another circle.”
She hit the speed dial on her phone and asked Trace, “When can your team be ready to move?”
“What, again? No offense, but you’re acting a little nuts.”
“And you’re totally missing the point. I can’t explain it better than I already did.”
“Look, my men are having trouble with this random attack. If they think an assault is green-lighted, they get totally amped. When you keep pulling them back at the point when the deal should be going down, they lose their edge. I can see—”
“Just get them ready and go. And when you get there, you call for instructions.”
She cut the connection and shut her eyes. For a moment, one brief instant, she gave in to the fear that gnawed at her gut. The worry that had left her feeling helpless for the first time since she’d started working for the Combine. The concern that she dared not share with anyone. What if their opponents could see around this corner as well? What if they could see probability as well as action? What if they already knew the difference between the ruses and the actual attack, even if she didn’t?
On the flight over, Reese had come up with only one option that might work. Might.
She could not know herself which attack to let loose.
Make all her actions random, even where she drove. Nobody knew when to go. Not even her. Until the very last minute.
She opened her eyes. The car’s interior did not hold enough air for her to breathe. She started to roll down the window when she realized that pedestrians had stowed away their umbrellas. Then she recognized the name chiseled above the entrance they were passing. “Stop the car.”
“Sì, signora. We stop.”
“I’m going for a walk. Wait for me back at the hotel.”
Irma waited while Charlie monitored Massimo phoning his girlfriend. When the Italian student handed the phone back to Jorge, Charlie told him, “That was as professional a job as it’s ever been my pleasure to hear.”
Massimo grinned. “You did not understand a single word.”
“I did,” Gabriella said. “You were perfect.”
“But what if the enemy was not listening?”
“These are pros. They’re tracking all our outgoing signals.” Charlie turned to Irma. “You need something?”
“Come with me, sport.” She led Charlie down the upstairs hall, and Gabriella followed. They entered the largest of the upstairs bedrooms. Irma walked them to the rear closet, hit the light switch, and said, “Ta-da!”
“Oh, man.”
“Tell me this is as cool as I think it is.”
&n
bsp; Charlie stood in the closet doorway and gaped. “This is amazing.”
Irma gave Gabriella a satisfied smirk. “Told you.”
“If our plan works, it’s because of you two. And this.”
Irma shook her head. “It’s your plan, sport. I’m just one of the grunts pulling duty.”
“No, Irma.” Gabriella rested a hand on the older woman’s arm. “You have made yourself a part of this. The plan, the goals, our work. Everything. How did you find this?”
“I was going over Charlie’s plan and scoping out the house. My mind kept returning to that cubbyhole by the chimney where you stuck me. I figured, hey, the guy who thought that one up had to be pretty sneaky, right? So maybe there were more.”
“But how did you find this?” Charlie said.
“I asked Gabriella.”
They were in the techies’ office, the largest of the top-floor chambers. Only this room, the bedroom on the villa’s opposite end, and the two chambers directly below them on the middle floor had real closets. The rest contained European clothes cupboards, tall mahogany chests with inlaid doors.
At the back of the techies’ closet was a second door, only about four feet tall and eighteen inches wide. When it was shut, there was no sign that it existed. It was operated by a latch set in the closet’s dusty corner. Beyond this second door was a room, five feet square, lined in raw brick and unfinished wood.
“I had forgotten all about them,” Gabriella said. “We played in here as children. My uncle showed me this when I was very little.”
Irma said, “Apparently at one time there was a network of tunnels that ran between the floors.”
“They were all shut up many years ago,” Gabriella said. “It happened when they rebuilt the walls to put in electricity and plumbing. Now there is only this and one other on the ground floor.”
Charlie shut the door. Ran his hand over the seamless wall. Hit the lever. The door popped open. There was no sound. “This is great.”
Irma did her best to hide her pleasure. “Shame about the tunnels.”
“This should do us just fine.” Charlie turned to the ladies. “Gabriella, it’s time to gather everybody.”
Irma started for the stairs. “I better go give Julio a heads-up.”
Reese entered the central Como bank where Byron McLaren had arranged to meet his wife. She really had no need to be there. Patel had been trying to raise Byron on his phone for hours. But she wanted to come have a look for herself, just to make totally sure the man had indeed vanished.
The building looked like a palace. A plaque on the wall claimed it had been built by some Renaissance prince for his mistress. Reese scanned the interior, decided she wouldn’t mind having somebody deed a place like that to her. The main chamber was a temple to greed. She could move in tomorrow.
Reese scouted the interior but did not see Byron. The man was well and truly off the grid. He was supposed to have called as soon as he met his ex. Reese had intended to time one of her possible strikes on the villa then, when their leader was trapped down here in the bank.
How they managed to spirit Byron away from the busiest bank on Como’s busiest street raised Reese’s worries to the redline and beyond.
She left the bank and started toward the old city’s pedestrian zone. Beyond that were the steps leading to the Duomo’s cloister. She spotted a couple of men eyeing her as she walked. They were extremely well dressed, well groomed. Late thirties, early forties, in the middle of some intense conversation, breaking it off to give her the eye. Keeping things in proper Italian order. She should definitely hang around there for a while after the job, see what kind of mess she could make of a few men’s lives.
Patel phoned. “I have bad news and worse news.”
“You’re paid to handle things. So handle.”
“Not this time.”
“In case you haven’t noticed, I’m in the middle of a big deal.” When Patel responded with silence, she said, “Okay. Hit me.”
“Weldon wants you to come home. Now.”
She froze. “He’s pulling me out?”
“We’ve intercepted an alert sent out by the Guardia di Finanza. That’s Italian for serious police. They’ve issued a circular calling for you to be arrested. They have your photograph.”
“This can’t be happening.”
“Weldon says to leave it in Trace’s hands and come home.”
“Trace will drive this straight into the ground.”
“Weldon says—”
“Is he there in the Vault?”
“No, but—”
“You haven’t found me.”
Patel’s whine was so practiced, she suspected he had been waiting for her to say those very words. “Weldon could fire me.”
“Do it. Please.”
“You owe me.”
“I know.”
“You owe me a lot.”
“I said all right, Patel. What else is there?”
“Surveillance cameras are up and running. The villa is surrounded, including the hill above it. But we can’t see as much as we should. There’s a wall, and beyond the walls are so many trees it’s like trying to penetrate—”
“I know about the walls and the trees.” She and Trace had driven around the villa while his men had set up the cameras. “Have you seen anything?”
“A pharmaceutical company’s delivery van came and went about an hour ago. And a Como market delivery van. Bread and milk and vegetables. Otherwise, nothing.”
“Maybe we could appropriate the vans, use them for breaking in. Feed the names and addresses to Trace. Anything else?”
“Well, there is one thing. We just intercepted a cell phone call. One of the students who vanished after their visit to Milan called his girlfriend.”
“I thought you said all their phones were down.”
“They were. But we kept up the monitoring. And right after Weldon stormed through here, one of them popped onto the grid.”
“Did you insert our package?” They had managed to obtain a pirate copy of Chinese software developed by their military in time for the Beijing Olympics. The software rode the signal into the phone like an electronic parasite. Once embedded, it gave the operator total control. Even when the phone was off, monitors could continue to use it as a bug.
“Of course.”
“Can you confirm the signal originates inside the villa?” If the phone had GPS capacity, even if it was not activated, the phone could be used as a homing beacon, precise to within half a meter.
“That was the first thing I did. He called from the northeast corner room.”
“Okay. Okay.” Her mood brightened with the day. This could be the break they had been looking for. “Tell me what you heard.”
“The student apologized to his girlfriend for being out of touch. He complained about rules the Hazard guy had set up, like the only place they were allowed to phone from was through the main computer. Their technicians had accessed a phone system in Hong Kong. But the problem is, they have to stand there next to the technicians to make their calls, and this student Massimo hates how they can hear—”
“Patel.”
“What.”
“Skip the windup.”
“Well, you asked. Then he said that they had failed. They could not perform what they had been brought to the villa for. He was really upset, this student. He said that the professor couldn’t ascend either or look—”
“He said what?” Her shout turned heads as far away as the Duomo.
“That the woman—he called her the professor—she couldn’t ascend. And the man Hazard couldn’t either. So they sent the students out, or tried to, and Massimo and the other students tried but they couldn’t help. But we don’t know for certain—”
She cut the connection, then shouted her rage and her triumph to the sky. Only one thing made sense. Her randomness had clouded their ability to determine the future’s course.
Reese speed-dialed the phone. When Trace answer
ed, she said, “We’re going in now. Repeat, now.”
The guy responded with total boredom. “And I’m telling you my guys are still worn out from your last theatricals.”
“This is not a drill. We are going in!”
“This is for real?”
“The enemy is blind. They can’t follow our attack!”
The tension in his voice rose to match her own. “Where are you?”
“Three hundred meters and closing on foot.”
“We’ll meet you in front of the hotel. Hurry.”
47
Julio said, “I counted two rides. An Alpha Romeo like the one we got parked in the stables. And a stud-ugly sedan called a Lancia thirty meters farther down the hill.”
He and Irma were crouched by the window of Julio’s room, in Brunate’s only hotel that overlooked the road leading to their villa. The cramped little single was tucked under the eaves. They could not stand upright and see out the window.
Irma said, “Yeah, I scoped them on the way over here. Four in each car. All local. We still haven’t found the Combine’s team.”
“Maybe they didn’t show.”
“Oh, they’re here, all right. Charlie got a call from his pal on the local force. That guy Alessandro is totally stand-up. He and a buddy put the handle on Gabriella’s ex-husband.”
“Sure, the rich dude.”
“Yeah, him. The guy told them the woman Charlie saw in Texas is here. Her name is Reese Clawson. Charlie’s certain she wouldn’t travel without her team. He says they’re Delta.”
The window was so narrow they could both look out only with their shoulders touching. Close enough for Julio to pick up Irma’s taut eagerness. The lady was back in full cop mode. Like it was totally cool, going up against Delta.
Irma caught his sideways glance. “What.”
“Nothing. Not a thing. How did you get here without them seeing you?”
“Over the stable roof, around the cliff on a ledge, through the neighbor’s gardens, and out their gate. Not bad for a retired old lady.” Irma was dressed in a pair of sweats made grimy by her little trek. Ten minutes ago she had popped up in Julio’s doorway, grinning with wicked anticipation.
