by Ward Larsen
THREE
Notwithstanding its vicious nature, the murder of Pyotr Ivanovic was handled with practiced discretion on the Isle of Capri. Long a jewel of Italy’s robust tourism industry, the island was a haven for the well-heeled, and the idea that one of its wealthiest visitors had been shot dead on his mega-yacht was something to be tamped down.
The local carabinieri, who had little enthusiasm for high-profile cases, took a guarded investigative tack. To begin, there was nothing that could be called a press conference—the few details that did escape were more along the lines of whispered insinuations. To his credit, the inspector in charge, a compact and circumspect man named Giordano, checked off squares in his investigatory ledger as best he could.
He began by securing the crime scene, which in this case meant locking down what was nearly an ocean liner. With the captain’s assent, the inspector ordered that Cassandra remain, for the time being, anchored precisely where the murder had taken place. He then set about determining who was responsible for the vessel, and with no great surprise discovered that Cassandra’s chain of title was so impossibly convoluted that its disposition might take months, if not years, to determine. With foul play all but certain, he arranged for a postmortem on the body, and only then shifted to the matter of notification.
Giordano’s attempts to locate Ivanovic’s next of kin were an exercise in frustration. He began with the ship’s safe, which was accessed with the help of the captain, and found it largely empty. There were no relevant legal documents, in particular a will, nor any suggestion of where such papers might be stashed. The crew were equally unhelpful—none of them could remember Ivanovic ever mentioning a blood relative. The inspector’s inquiries to the Russian embassy were met with indifference. Ivanovic’s lawyer, a man from Kiev whose bluster far exceeded his grasp of Italian law, and whose phone number changed with curious frequency, assured the inspector unreservedly that he kept in his possession papers granting him personal oversight of Ivanovic’s estate—and that if Giordano could somehow expedite certain documentations, a ten-thousand-euro “assistance fee” might land in his own account.
The inspector demurred. The phone number changed again.
Because even the most egregious of sinners deserved some manner of last respects, Giordano committed to a chain of phone calls, thirty-one to Russia alone, seeking guidance on what to do with Ivanovic’s body after the postmortem. In a hopeful moment, he discovered that the victim hailed from the tiny village of Milove, a tangle of dusty streets set tenuously on the Ukraine-Russia border. He even managed to reach the office of the town church, an Eastern Orthodox house whose deacon lamented that the name was regrettably common in town. No one admitted to remembering Pyotr Ivanovic.
Seeing his murder investigation faltering straight out of the gate, Giordano shifted his focus to the victim’s recent history. It took little investigative effort to confirm that Ivanovic was indeed one of the most pretentious, and presumably corrupt, oligarchs to rise from the ashes of the Soviet era—something akin to being the nastiest viper in the pit. This, the inspector realized, was perhaps a solution in itself: Such a notorious character would certainly have made enemies over the years. But how could he track them down?
Giordano decided to begin with the low-hanging fruit. He interviewed each member of the ship’s crew, Ivanovic’s dumbstruck security detail, and the lone female guest who’d been on board. He dutifully mapped out Cassandra’s anchorage that night, and with a diagram in hand, he pressed each of them for any sights, sounds, or intuitions to explain who might have put a very large hole in their former employer. The only result was a wasted day, Giordano getting nothing to pique his interest.
When he was finally out of questions, the inspector gave permission for nonessential crew and staff to depart with their belongings. A young and very pretty Russian girl, who seemed none too distraught—and whose duties on board had been made quite clear by the room steward, who in his interview had mimed certain salacious acts—was also allowed to depart. Giordano bid the woman goodbye in her stateroom, just before going off shift, and as he did so he could not ignore that her manner of dress was hardly that of a grieving lover. She was resplendent in fitted Dior above and Manolo below, and the makeup stand in front of the mirror showed signs of a heavy engagement.
Only after Giordano’s departure did she make her move, presenting to the crew of the launch six wardrobe cases, and keeping to herself a large, and evidently quite heavy, handbag. A young carabinieri lieutenant, one of the small rotating contingent who stood watch over the crime scene, insisted on inspecting the handbag at the foot of the gangway. Inside he discovered nearly one hundred thousand euros, in various denominations, and enough gold coins and diamond jewelry to fill a good-sized safe deposit box. After considerable shouting and gesturing, and in a hopeless mix of languages, Cassandra’s captain became involved. The woman claimed that the trove had been gifted to her by her beloved Pyotr. The captain alleged she was pilfering all of it, and that without the cash he would have no means of paying a skeleton crew to maintain the ship. An even more disjointed argument ensued until the lieutenant waved his arms demonstratively to impose his ruling: the woman could keep the jewelry, but the cash and gold were to be returned to the ship’s safe. Everyone recognized half a victory, and the deal was struck.
With the flurry settled, and on the second day after Pyotr Ivanovic’s death, only the captain and five crewmen remained on board to manage Cassandra. All were looking forward to an extended paid holiday on the Isle of Capri.
Refusing to admit defeat, Giordano changed course the next day. Using the ship’s log as a reference, he made inquiries along her months-long trail across the Mediterranean. In a call to Cannes he talked to a provisioning agent who claimed not to remember Ivanovic, but who told Giordano that he would be most appreciative if the inspector would forward his company’s name and number to Cassandra’s new owner whenever the matter was settled. An event planner in Monaco, who’d arranged a dockside party, angrily claimed to be owed damages for a ruined chocolate waterfall.
Through all his inquiries Giordano sensed not a tear shed nor a voice choked with remorse. It was as if every person who’d ever known the Russian, save for his ersatz attorney, had gone into hiding. For Giordano, it was a departure from his previous experiences involving the death of wealthy individuals. Long-lost brothers and mistresses typically came out of the woodwork, professing to anyone who would listen their closeness to the dearly departed. Bankers and creditors materialized like apparitions, stacks of legal documents in hand. Here, however, it was as if Pyotr Ivanovic, and everything he’d ever touched, was in some way contaminated.
And it was there, somewhere between a village church in Ukraine and a chocolate fountain on the bottom of Monaco’s harbor, that Giordano’s disjointed inquiries reached their end. Pyotr Ivanovic was known widely across the Mediterranean party circuit, throughout banking and legal circles, and had left a string of bitterly shorn mistresses. When it came to the matter of burying him, however, there was not a single volunteer to the spade.
The inspector was stymied. With his investigation fast grinding to a halt, he was left with a yacht impounded in his harbor, a body no one would bother to claim, and a supporting cast of vermin abandoning a ship that wasn’t sinking.
In what was only a fleeting thought, the senior inspector from Capri thought he perhaps should have taken the ten thousand after all.
* * *
Though Inspector Giordano would never realize it, his sputtering inquest into the death of Pyotr Ivanovic did stir one small pocket of interest. It surfaced, of all places, in a conference room in Langley, Virginia. A junior CIA analyst, who specialized in metadata filtering, made an astute correlation between the murder of Ivanovic and a separate inquiry at the agency. The connection was tenuous at best, but enough of a thread that she advanced it to her supervisor at their morning meeting.
To her surprise, the division chief, who had herself been
newly promoted, took a keen interest in the discovery. She asked specific questions about how Ivanovic had been killed. The only firm detail was as unusual as it was spectacular—by all appearances, he had been shot by a sniper. If the Italians knew more than that, they were holding their cards close.
In a decision the junior analyst thought speculative at the time—but one that months later would earn them both promotions—the division chief sent instructions to the Rome station to look quietly into Ivanovic’s death. They were to begin with AISI, Italy’s internal security agency.
Within twenty-four hours, the division chief from Langley, whose name was Anna Sorensen, was in the office of CIA director Thomas Coltrane.
Three hours later she was on the next commercial flight to Rome.
FOUR
If the Italian township of Vieste could be distilled to a single theme, it would be that of light. Even at the height of autumn, sun splashes carelessly across a smooth Adriatic, its reflections capturing a city whose white stone walls seem to lift from the sea. Like most towns on the right-hand shore of Italy, Vieste is a place with a history as hard as its calcified cliffs, where Turkish corsairs plundered and pirates marauded, and where quarreling popes battled for dominance. Altogether, an incongruous heritage for a town whose very name invokes purity itself, drawn from Vesta, the Roman goddess of hearth, home, and family.
David Slaton kept a steady pace as he navigated narrow sun-washed lanes. Were he not preoccupied, he might have paused to appreciate the structures around him. The sidewalks, walls, and arches he saw were cut from local stone, everything square-edged and functional. As a stonemason, his range of expertise had expanded greatly in recent years. Indeed, he was reaching a point where he thought he might be able to distinguish any city in Europe based on a single representative building. On that pastoral Monday morning, however, the stonework of the southern Adriatic coast was not his priority. The tradecraft Slaton was engaged in was an altogether different variety, one whose success was measured not in what caught the eye, but rather what escaped it.
He drew little notice from the locals, although his sandy hair and Nordic features spoke of a gene pool to the north. He stood over six feet tall and carried a discernibly muscular build—not the inflated thickness developed in a gym, but a more functional, blue collar version. Testament to the stone craftsman he occasionally was.
He’d stepped onto Vieste’s main pier twenty minutes ago with an uneven gait, sea legs being an unavoidable consequence of three weeks on a small boat navigating open ocean. The awkwardness wore off quickly, and he moved now with a purpose. He mixed languidly with the crowds in busier sections of town, and more quickly where traffic was sparse. He did nothing to draw attention, and little escaped his eye. A car traveling with deliberate slowness passed uneventfully, and a pair of men loitering near the post office he quickly deemed harmless. So too, the bored guard at the entrance of a bank, and a helmeted delivery driver on a scooter. In each instance, information logged, evaluated, and filed into a mental bin that, were it to have a name, might be labeled: nonthreatening. There was of course an alternate bin, but that was thankfully empty. As it had been for months.
The reasons for his caution—there were two—lay a mile behind him in the cabin of an Antares 44 catamaran anchored in the town’s blue-aqua harbor: his wife and young son.
They’d slipped into port at first light, Windsom riding a following breeze, and set anchor inside the long breakwater. Dawn was Slaton’s preferred hour for arrival into any port. It allowed some daylight for navigation, always desirable when approaching an unfamiliar anchorage. It was also invariably a time when senior port captains and customs administrators lingered at their breakfast tables. When Windsom’s anchor had struck bottom an hour earlier, it did so with its usual symbolism—in that moment, the two realms in which Slaton and his family existed reached their necessary, and always awkward, intersection. Civilization on one hand, and their commitment to escape it on the other. It had been that way for more than a year, and so far they’d muddled through. A month at sea, then venture ashore to resupply, and perhaps, if things went smoothly, to eat a meal they hadn’t cooked themselves and sleep in a bed that wasn’t moving.
This morning, in keeping with their private protocol, Christine and Davy had stayed behind on Windsom while Slaton set out in the launch toward shore. Customs and immigration procedures required that he present the ship’s papers and all three passports. The documents he carried were something less than legitimate, but forgeries of such high quality that they’d never been challenged. At least not in Kuala Lumpur or Mykonos, and certainly not in the Maldives. Every destination, however, had its idiosyncrasies.
Slaton had researched things beforehand, and from a cruising reference manual he’d extracted what should have been an eminently simple process. Vieste, being a minor port of maritime entry, kept no dedicated customs facility, nor was there a standing port office. The only obligation was to report Windsom’s arrival in Italy to the local police precinct.
And there his problems began.
He found the precinct building easily, only to discover that it had been abandoned due to damage from a recent earthquake. A notice posted at the entrance stated that, while repairs were being made, a temporary office had been established on the opposite side of town. Vieste being a compact place, Slaton set out on foot and reached the correct district in fifteen minutes. There he encountered another roadblock—quite literally. The street in question was under repair, and barricades denied access to the temporary address. Slaton rounded the block, and soon encountered signs directing him to the new station. Then a third sign contradicted the two he’d previously seen. Slaton drew to a stop on the sidewalk. Apparently the carabinieri’s coordination with the ministry of highways, or signage, or whatever directorate was in charge, had gone wildly afield. It reminded him of stories he’d read about World War II, when partisans across Europe altered road signs to confuse the invading forces.
“Welcome back to the real world,” he said under his breath.
He spotted a café nearby, walked over, and struck up a conversation with an idle waiter—Italian was one of his better languages, although he spoke it with a Swiss accent, a vestige of his schooling as a young boy. The waiter explained that a water main had cracked, and that most of the businesses on the street had been forced to relocate.
“The carabinieri?” Slaton inquired.
“Yes, they were here for a time, but had to move like everyone else. I heard they are now near the old church.”
“Which one?” Slaton asked. Saying that something was near a church in Italy was like saying it was next to a pub in England.
The waiter gave instructions, each turn demonstrated with carving motions of his hands, that sent Slaton uphill, and some distance away from the harbor.
It went that way for another half hour. A schoolteacher on her way to work told him the police had gone back toward the piers, although she too said something about a church. A shopkeeper had seen a group of police cars near the fish market, while a young mason prepping for a day’s work on a tile roof—a man whom Slaton innately trusted—told him the carabinieri had set up shop in a wing of the old Catholic school. The roofer’s parting words were perhaps the most telling Slaton had heard all morning: Welcome to Italy, my friend.
He would happily have asked a policeman for directions, but he’d yet to encounter one—staffing at this time of day, he knew, would be at its low point. He toyed with the idea of manufacturing a minor crisis, perhaps calling in a domestic disturbance on a certain street corner, and letting the carabinieri come to him. The concept had a certain appeal, but came with complications. Chief among them at the moment—Slaton didn’t have a phone. He and Christine kept no standing telecom account, which was a requirement these days for those on the run—the must-not-have accessory. Indeed, one of his regular chores upon coming ashore was to replenish their supply of burner phones.
Slaton was three streets ab
ove the wharf where his runabout was moored, staring forlornly at yet another church, when his frustration gave way to alarm. Less than a mile distant, at the far end of the protective breakwater, he saw Windsom swinging serenely on her anchor.
Lashed to her stern was a small boat.
A boat he had never seen before.
FIVE
It could have been anything. An overzealous port official or a marine mechanic looking for work. A neighborly welcome from another boat. Perhaps the police were more competent than expected, and had boarded Windsom for a customs inspection. Those were the best-case scenarios. Bleaker possibilities governed Slaton’s response.
With one look at his distant inflatable runabout, he realized his dilemma. If anything ominous was taking place, he was in a deep tactical hole—as things stood, he was facing an approach to Windsom not only unarmed, but with no hope of surprise. It was an unacceptable equation, meaning he had to change a variable.
For an assassin—in essence what Slaton was, despite his attempts to leave that life behind—it is an essential skill to employ a weapon. By extension, the ability to acquire firepower when empty-handed is every bit as fundamental.
He had actually once given a lecture on the subject during a brief stint at Mossad’s academy—teaching fledgling field operatives improvisational means of finding weapons. The most obvious choices—military and police arsenals—came with obvious limitations. Such facilities were generally well guarded, and in most cases, anything stolen was quickly missed. The more immediate problem: As Slaton stood looking down at the docks of Vieste, he’d already spent nearly an hour trying to locate the nearest police station, and he knew of no nearby military base. That being the case, he progressed to the more imaginative chapters of his old lesson plan.
He ran downhill to the pier where his runabout was moored, and on reaching the seawall Slaton skidded to a stop. His gaze settled on two waterside bars. Both were obviously closed, and he ran a quick decision matrix. Gun laws in Italy were strict, but it was reasonable to assume that the owner of a waterside bar might keep a handgun beneath a counter to protect cash drawers or encourage destructive brawls to be taken outside. The problem—liquor was valuable, which meant that the strength of doors and windows on closed saloons, rustic as they might appear, often rivaled those found on banks.
