by Dale Nelson
Jack brought his pistol down to Mijo, who was to the side and facing slightly away. Jack had the drop, but it wasn’t a completely clean shot. Enzo was too close.
“I don’t want to shoot you,” Jack said.
“I don’t want you to shoot me either,” Mijo said in accented English.
“I also don’t want to be shot,” Enzo said, voice a bramble of nerves.
“What do we do here?” Mijo said.
“How about we don’t kill each other? Just walk away.”
“Okay.”
“I’m lowering my gun now.”
“Okay,” Mijo said. “Is it true? What you said about Aleksander? He’s going to be arrested?”
“There’s a huge manhunt on for him now.”
“Do you think they will get him?”
“If the police don’t get him, the mafia will,” Jack said.
Mijo nodded and set his gun on the ground. “I’m going to let him go now. Please don’t shoot me.”
“Look,” Jack de-cocked the pistol and lowered it but didn’t put it away.
Mijo pulled a tactical knife from his pocket, unfolded it, and split the zip ties binding Enzo’s wrists behind him.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” Enzo said, bringing his arms together, massaging his wrists and trying to bring feeling back into them.
“Is anyone else here?” Jack asked. “Any other security?”
Mijo shook his head. “Just me. The girls are in the house.”
Jack nodded. He’d deal with that situation in time. He walked over to Castillo and knelt next to him. The lawyer hadn’t moved. Mijo’s shot was dead center mass, probably snapped Castillo’s spine.
Jack looked for sympathy but couldn’t find it.
“The Commerce Bank was the target the whole time, you just didn’t know that’s where Bartolo stashed them, did you?” Castillo said nothing, but Jack could see the glimmer of recognition in his eyes. “That was the point to all this, wasn’t it? The diamonds were icing if you could get them, but it was more worth it to you to get whatever was in those safe deposit boxes, wasn’t it?”
“Very good,” Castillo said, his voice weakening.
“Paris, Venice, and the diamond job were just a smoke screen.” When Jack offered the theory to the FBI and DOJ lawyers earlier that day, it had been an educated guess, though he’d presented it as fact. No one called him on it. “I’m curious, when you learned that they were all in the same location, why did you still go through with it? Why not just let me go? I wasn’t a threat.”
Castillo laughed, and it quickly turned into a strained cough. Jack saw blood on the corners of his mouth. It wouldn’t be long now.
“You were always a threat to him.”
Jack didn’t want to waste Castillo’s final breaths on a pointless argument, trying to convince a dying man that he really would have just walked away. Not when there were answers he wanted.
“What was in the vault that was worth all this?” he said.
“Come on, Jack. We should go,” Enzo said, his voice was soaked in tension and strain. Jack understood his desire to get out of here. If his own experience was any indicator, Enzo had gotten a rough ride.
“What was in the vault?” Jack said, ignoring Enzo for a moment.
“It can’t do you any good,” Castillo said.
“I deserve to know what this was all about. Now, I can still save you, but I’m not going to lift a finger unless you tell me what you guys were actually after. I know the mafia controlled the bank, but I don’t know what they had in the vault. You tell me that, and I’ll get an ambulance here.”
Castillo coughed again, lines of tension and pain etched on his face. “It won’t help you.”
“It won’t help you either,” Jack snapped. “Aleksander is going to die in prison for this, and you’re going to die on the floor. Unless you talk.”
“The money laundering is worth millions a year alone.” Castillo paused to catch his breath. “That city is so corrupt,” he said and smiled. “Between the city officials and the Italian government, half of them are on someone’s payroll. People use the bank.” He coughed blood. “Everyone uses the bank. They pay the mafia a … like a tax. The bank is a safe. One big dead drop. They use the bank to manage the transactions.” Half seemed like a lot, but Jack wasn’t going to call him on it. “The real target was shipping. The mafia controlled a shipping company.” Castillo took in as deep a breath as he could, and it came out as a wheeze. “The owner was in their … in their …” he was struggling for words now, “in their pocket. The fools … they didn’t know what they had. Just charged protection money. That’s really what we wanted. The shipping.” Another pause. “The plan was to empty out the safe deposit boxes, take them, and trade it for the shipping company.”
That would be the firm that Guilia was caught up in, the one that brought her into Aleksander’s orbit.
Jack could see now why that would be much more lucrative than diamonds. A legitimate enterprise like that would be an amazing cover for international smuggling, which Aleksander would already have had the networks for. Guns, jewels, drugs, even legitimate but stolen items to be sold off elsewhere.
“Now … it’s … my … turn,” he said. “The diamonds.”
Jack knelt, putting his mouth inches from Castillo’s ear and ensuring that Mijo couldn’t hear him. “I took them from the bank before you guys got anywhere near it. I left just enough to make it look like that’s what Bartolo stashed there.”
Castillo coughed again.
“Tell me,” Jack said, rising to his full height. “On the plane, leaving Paris. You told me that you grew up dirt poor, the son of a grape grower. We talked about wine. Was that true?”
Castillo coughed again, and blood tricked out of his mouth. “No.” The lawyer’s body racked with a heave that Jack couldn’t identify another cough or a laugh. “Everyone in this house played you for something,” Castillo whispered roughly.
Jack left him bleeding on the floor and turned to Enzo. “Can you walk?”
Enzo nodded.
Mijo looked confused. “Aren’t you going to call an ambulance?”
“No,” Jack said. “He’s earned that.”
Jack and Enzo walked over to the garage door, and Jack opened it. He didn’t see the light fade from Castillo’s eyes.
“Did you find what we were looking for in the safe?” Jack asked as they crossed the driveway to the front door.
“Yeah, I think so,” Enzo said. “Castillo caught me just as I was opening it, must have heard me come in, or maybe the front door was alarmed, though I didn’t see one.”
“It’s okay,” Jack said.
“What are you doing?” Mijo said from behind them. There was worry in his voice, and Jack still had his gun. Jack realized that he might be fearing for Basia’s safety.
Jack stopped and turned.
“I’m just getting what we came here for. Aleksander has a lot of information on me and people that I care about. I’d like to make sure that’s safe.”
Jack turned and opened the door. Basia and Guilia were in the foyer. They must have heard the gunshot and were wondering what was going on. Judging by the looks on their faces, neither of them expected it would be Jack and Enzo at the door. Basia’s face slackened slightly when she saw Mijo’s towering form behind Jack in the doorway. Jack and Enzo stepped in and to the side. Basia ran across the foyer and buried her face in his massive chest.
“Oh, Mijo,” Basia said. After a moment, she turned her head so that it rested against his massive frame. She was crying too, but her expression was the one who had just been given morphine. And there was also love. Genuine love. He could see it in Mijo’s eyes as well.
“I have control of Aleksander’s bank accounts,” Jack said in low tones. “I’ll transfer money for you, as we agreed. The banks will be in Switzerland, so it will be harder to trace. Aleksander will never know.” He paused for a beat. “It will be ready for you in a few days. It should b
e enough to get a head start. But you need to go now.”
There was a black pit, and Jack knew he was standing on the edge of it.
But in the middle of all this evil were two people trying to escape it. Jack didn’t know either of their stories, and honestly, he didn’t care. Perhaps later he could guess at how either of them ended up in Aleksander’s orbit and, more importantly, in his control. Giving them a chance to run, to start over, felt like the right thing to do.
At least someone would make it out of this fucking mad house in one piece.
But seeing the somewhat haunted look in Basia’s eyes as Jack told them that Aleksander was still out there, he realized that no one was getting away clean or unscarred.
“What about the lawyer?” Mijo said.
“I think the police will be here soon. There’s no mistaking that gunshot.”
“I can take care of that,” Mijo said. “It won’t be the first body we’ve made disappear from this place. The police, they are friends. So long as they think Aleksander is still in charge.”
Jack nodded. “Can you handle that?”
Mijo said he could.
Jack and Enzo exchanged a look. Enzo nodded and shuffled off slowly down the hallway in the direction of Aleksander’s office.
“What about the diamonds?” Guilia asked. “And your promise?” There was hope in her voice, but also something else. Expectation, perhaps.
Or assumption.
Jack paused before he answered and considered her. She, as much as anything, set him on this path so many years ago. Where would he have gone, what would he have become if he’d just followed Castro’s advice to run and start over?
Castillo’s dying words rose to his consciousness then. Everyone in this house played you for something.
“Bartolo lied about how much he got. They think it was about twenty million dollars’ worth of stones, but the police have those now.”
“That’s impossible,” she said. “I put them there.”
“But you never looked in the bag,” Jack said. “Did you?” He was confident that she had not. To do so would have opened up the possibility that she might take them for herself. She’d have been too scared of Bartolo for that. Instead, she’d done exactly what he’d told her to do.
“He said that he’d kill me if I did.”
Jack believed her fear. He also believed the threat. Bartolo was like that.
Enzo appeared back in the foyer. His gait was slow and uneven, as though he was walking through pain. Aleksander had beaten Jack with Mijo holding Jack’s arms behind his back, but Aleksander was a large, powerful man in his own right. Castillo was thin, bookish, and lean, though not athletically so. Mijo had delivered Enzo’s beating.
Jack thought about his transitory loyalty for a moment. They wouldn’t have gotten out of here without Mijo, but the man had also brutalized his friend.
“Let’s go,” Enzo said.
It wasn’t quite “bygones,” but it was close enough.
Jack took the backpack Enzo was holding so he wouldn’t have to carry it.
“What about me, Jack?”
Jack turned and looked at Guilia with a dead stare.
He held the gaze for several long seconds.
He turned and left.
Twenty-Seven
Jack and Enzo left Aleksander’s compound under the yellow streetlights and the bruise-colored sky above. They climbed into the Ferrari, Jack first because the driver’s side was right next to the wall and that door couldn’t be opened.
“You’ve really upped your rescue game,” Enzo said.
Jack checked his phone for any messages from Rusty. There were none, and Rusty was too savvy to ask for a status update, knowing Jack would provide one when he could. Jack texted to say they were en route to the airport.
Jack did see four missed calls from Danzig and one from Castro.
Those would be handled later. Now, he poured on speed. They made the airport in fifteen minutes. Jack parked the Ferrari outside the private aviation terminal and kept the keys and the parking lot ticket, just in case.
They met someone inside the small terminal, an airport employee, who Jack had spoken to when they arrived. He guided them out to the tarmac. The man made an attempt at small talk. After all, it wasn’t every day someone flew in on a charter for a ninety-minute ground stop.
They walked across the dark tarmac, the sounds of the airport all around them. In the far distance they could see the lights of Alicante, and the lights of the runway in the near distance.
The man wished them bon voyage and waved. Jack thanked him for his time and shook his hand.
The two old thieves climbed the stairs to the chartered plane that had a fixer, an older thief, and eighty million dollars in diamonds on it.
When they were seated, the flight attendant asked them if they’d like anything to drink, and Jack asked her about the wine selection on board. Enzo groused about their never getting to have beer. She offered him a Peroni. Rusty took a gin and tonic, and Jack split a bottle of Super Tuscan with Vito. Once they were airborne, she offered a light supper. Their flight time back to Rome would be just under two hours, putting them on the ground a little after midnight.
“Not that I mind the flight,” Vito said, holding his glass of wine, “or the service, but what did we go back here for?”
Jack realized that he’d never explained what they were doing here in the first place. Rusty knew because he’d gotten Enzo the flight to Alicante, and even though Vito had been in the car when Jack redirected them, all he said was “They had Enzo.”
The four of them were seated in the center of the small plane on rotating captain’s chairs that were all turned inward so they could face each other. The flight attendant was near the front of the aircraft, but Jack kept his voice low anyway. “Andelić has a pretty substantial amount of blackmail on me. I had a look at this stuff while we were taxiing. He’s been able to attribute a lot of jobs to me over the years. He wasn’t entirely correct, but there’s enough here that if this ever fell into the FBI’s hands, they’d be able to start an investigation. The rest of it is information he’s collected on the identity I live under and people that are close to me. I need the latter for the deal I made with the FBI.”
“The deal you did what with?” Rusty said.
“My original plan was to set Aleksander up so that the FBI and Castro’s Financial Guards would take him down before robbing the bank. But when Castro told us about how many cops and judges the mafia had on their payroll, he said that he thought it’d get buried too easily if they arrested the gang before they went into the bank. Now, I think the entire point was to get them into the bank.”
“Why would Castro want that?” Enzo asked.
Jack had to be careful here.
When Castro was undercover back during the School of Turin days, he, Jack, and Enzo had been running buddies. Enzo was surprisingly ambivalent when he learned that Castro was actually a cop. He actually thought it was funny as hell. Enzo had an amazing gift to take life as it came to him, something he’d learned after his too-expensive wife left him for being a thief despite her being what drove him into that life in the first place. He held no animus for Castro. He’d later told Jack that he thought Castro was just doing his job and if the School couldn’t sniff it out, they all deserved it. Of course, he’d escaped because Jack tipped him off.
Vito wasn’t so lucky.
He got five years in prison for his role in their escapades in Turin.
Hopefully, twenty million would mollify him a bit.
“Castro knew who really controlled the Commerce Bank.”
“How’d he know that?” Enzo said.
“They were paying him to keep it quiet.”
Vito spat something about Castro’s mother that Jack didn’t even want to translate in his mind. Then, in English he said, “Mother fuck.” Swearing in a second language required a finesse that Vito never quite picked up. “Cops shouldn’t get to be fucking
dirty,” he said too loudly.
“Will you keep it down?” Rusty said.
“Seriously, Vito.”
“You can’t trust a dirty cop,” Vito said, a dog with a bone now.
Rusty turned his head to hide his smirk.
The irony playing out on several levels here was entirely lost on Vito.
“Anyway,” Jack continued, “I think Castro was trying to serve these guys up. He probably figured the Cannizzaro family would be more efficient than the Italian justice system.”
Vito was still seething, but mostly it was impotent threats about what he’d do to Castro if he’d ever get his hands on him.
“So, what’s the plan, Jack? I assume you’ve got some unfinished business in Rome?”
The original plan had been to fly the diamonds to Switzerland where they could be more safely hidden until they were sold. In reality, they wouldn’t be able to move that many at once. Instead, they’d sell a fraction every year, probably five million or so, to wholesalers in Europe. Jack had considered contacting Ari Hassar about moving a larger quantity. Either way, they could at least count on a relatively low risk annual income of about a million dollars each for a long time to come.
“Well, Danzig confiscated my passports. So that’s an additional complication. I’ve got access to one, but it’s in Switzerland, so that doesn’t help me.”
Jack did have a second clean passport at the place he kept in Tuscany, in a small safe hidden in the floor. Rusty knew it existed, but not where it was. Anyway, Tuscany wasn’t readily accessible right now, so it did him little good for their immediate needs. Jack gave Enzo a look when he mentioned the one in Switzerland, and he picked up on it, saying nothing about the other location.
“You shouldn’t have gone to the fucking cops, Jack. That was a dumb thing,” Vito said.
“Vito,” Jack said, keeping his voice low and out of earshot of the flight attendant. “I’d be looking at seven to ten years for the job in Paris. None of you have a distribution network for stones. And Vito,” Jack shook his head, “you haven’t fenced anything in twenty years. Without me, you’ve got a fistful of shiny rocks. So, it’s in all of our interests to keep me out of jail.”
