by April Smith
“Just now.”
“Followed from where? By who?”
“From the police station, by a thug in a white van.”
I straddle a stool and toss back a few olives.
Nicosa frowns. “What does this mean, that you were followed?”
“Beats the hell out of me.”
“Did you call the police?”
“I told you. I was just at the police station. The Commissario refused to see us. He instructed the inspector to lie and say he was out of town. Maybe he’s the one who sent the guy in the van.”
“Are you drunk?”
“I’m taking pain pills. Knife wounds tend to sting.”
Nicosa puts down his glass. “I think it is best if you go back to the United States.”
“You’ve said that.”
“You make everything worse.”
“I’m trying my best to help. We can help each other, Nicoli, but we can’t be in denial about Cecilia.”
Giovanni looks up. “What are you saying about Mama?”
“Nothing,” says his father.
“Doesn’t he know?”
“Know what?” Giovanni asks.
“Your mother is missing,” Nicosa says at last.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“It was Palio. You were sick—”
“Where is she?”
“We’re not sure what happened,” I say. “But she disappeared two days ago, during the blessing of the Palio. Do you have any idea where she might have gone?”
“No!” says Giovanni angrily. “Papa? What is going on?”
I want to confront my nephew. Right now. I want to thrust the bag of cocaine in his face and ask him what’s going on, but he is still too weak.
“Where’s Mama?” he cries.
“See what you have done?” Nicosa demands.
“I’m sorry. I promise we will find your mom.”
I take my wine and leave the kitchen. My eyes are drifting closed. By the time I’ve climbed the endless marble steps to my room, it seems to have become so late in the day that all the reptiles have come out, and the balcony is alive with snakes of sunlight and shadow, whipping across the tile and up the walls, and the only way to escape them is to quickly get inside and climb on board the bed, which is rocking like a raft in the ocean.
I wake up in the middle of the night with the heart-stopping knowledge that there is a man in my room. The shutters are open and cool air is pouring in, along with monochrome brightness that shows the shape of someone near the door. Seconds go by. I don’t move. I still don’t move. Can he see that my eyes are open? Sweat builds under my back. He has the advantage.
A silent contest of wills. He is lifeless. I am frozen. My eyes adjust to the half dark. No weapons. Attack first. Bad hand. Let him come to you. Grab his head, break his nose across your knee. I smell him before he gets close. Metal. Dirt. Heavy sweat. The sense of coarse fabric and leather. He steps from the shadows and the stench becomes awful. Excrement, earth, and decomposing bones. In the anti-light his face is stubbled and dark, his eyes colorless. The rucksack drops to the floor. It’s what we call in the Bureau a WTF moment.
“Sterling? Is that you?”
He sits heavily on the bed.
A hoarse whisper. “Hello, cupcake.”
TWENTY-TWO
Sterling unties the bandanna around his head.
“Don’t turn on the light.”
My heart skips. I don’t need light to see that the gorgeous blond hair has been shaved off, and the bare scalp is impacted with dirt. He unfastens the field jacket with trembling fingers. Dried flakes of mud that have been carried who knows how many miles, across how many time zones, scatter over the linen sheets. The smell of recent death is undeniable.
He unfolds a rain poncho, meticulously spreads it on the floor, then empties the contents of the rucksack.
“What are you doing?”
“Better wash this stuff out,” he says slowly, as if in a dream, taking off his shirt and Under Armour.
“I’ll take care of it.”
Heeding the silent message, Don’t touch me, I slip off the bed and retrieve a robe from the bathroom. He continues to face away, as if he doesn’t want me to see his body. He used to eat breakfast in the nude, not give it a thought. Has he been wounded, a ladder of sutures up his chest?
Gently I slip the robe over his shoulders. I bend down, draw up the sides of the poncho and shoulder it, maybe too fast, because suddenly he is suspicious.
“Where’re you going with that?”
“I’m going to the laundry room to wash your stuff,” I reply patiently. “It’s in the family quarters, in the main building. Are you hungry?”
“Yes, ma’am, I am hungry.”
“I’ll bring you something. There’s soap and shampoo in the shower. Is it okay if I leave?”
“Go on.”
“You’ll be okay?”
“I just said so, didn’t I?”
In the night, cold wind rakes through my hair. I carry Sterling’s combat clothes in the poncho like contraband. I would rather burn them, but they are crucial to him, to his other self. As I cross the torchlit courtyard, goose bumps rise at the thought of the silent monks who would have been at prayers in a few hours, shuffling through the dark to kneel on the unforgiving floorboards. The workings of the human mind haven’t changed over the centuries: in the perilous hours just before dawn, everything our rational minds have been telling us flies up and away to the realm of the gargoyles.
Shoving rancid woolen socks and bloodstained camos into the washer, and later, assembling a he-man sandwich out of a kilo’s worth of salami, mortadella, mozzarella, and roasted peppers on an entire loaf of bread, I try to draw the shredded realities of the present together. As relieved as I am to see him whole, I know something has happened to Sterling. I have no idea how deep it goes, or how he found me, why he came back, or how long he will stay. It could be overnight. He could have deserted and be on the run, or about to be reassigned. Putting all these unidentified conditions alongside my sister’s disappearance makes my knees go weak. I sit down on a kitchen chair, immobilized.
I suppose it is something like panic. It makes no sense to start evaluating a relationship at four in the morning, when the man has shown up out of nowhere, hostile and disoriented and not himself, but that’s where my stubborn mind keeps going. True, I had become impatient with his comings and goings, but there was something comforting, even pleasurable, in the delayed satisfaction of his return. Until tonight, his reappearances had been smooth and hearty — he had been as happy as I was to recharge with some robust sex, bittersweet chocolate cake for breakfast, the afternoon in a hotel bed, sleeping, reading newspapers, watching movies, staring idly into each other’s eyes. From the glimpse of the bones poking through his back, it looks as if he has dropped ten pounds, which is a lot when you weigh one-fifty. From the deadness in his voice, it sounds as if he’s not feeling the deprivation in his body — or very much at all.
I had a bad gut reaction when he took off the bandanna. He looked less like a warrior than a hardened killer. Security operatives are hired to protect, not fight — although it doesn’t always work that way. Some of my best friends at the Bureau are snipers, but lord knows, they don’t do it for the money. How well do I know Sterling McCord and what kind of assignments he will accept? How long and hard will I stand by? It is troubling to realize these are the same irksome questions I’ve been asking myself about Cecilia. She made a deal with the devil when she married Nicosa, and a deal with the mafias (same thing) to keep her clinics alive. Maybe she’s escaped to a safe and happy place in the arms of ’Ndrangheta. How well do I know her? What makes me qualified to save her from her own life?
When I get back to the room with the food, Sterling is clean and showered and dead to the world, lying across the bed in the bathrobe as if he’d literally just dropped. Wedging into a valley at the edge of the mattress, I try to roll him over, but he kicks out, slashing my le
g with a jagged toenail. I debark to the chaise. It isn’t much of a sleep, awakening with the roosters and the light and filled with a million questions.
All of which will have to wait, because Sterling sleeps for the next sixteen hours. I dash to get his stuff out of the dryer before anyone else wakes up, and I keep the bedroom door locked. Finally, sometime around sunset, I return to find him fully dressed — and from the lavender vapor in the room, having showered again — wearing clean jeans that fit too loosely, a T-shirt, and a baseball cap, and buckling on his watch. The sandwich has evaporated. My laptop is open on the desk.
“Don’t you get Internet in this hooch?”
“Depends on the time of day.”
“It just cut out on me,” he says sullenly. “We’ve gotta go.”
“Where?”
“Meeting a buddy.”
He slips on a pair of blue Oakleys the color of the Florida gulf. We exit the room into the billowing evening.
“Are you okay? Are you done with the mission?”
“Yes to both.”
“I won’t ask a lot of questions, but I’m curious to know how you found me,” I say, as we hurry down the marble stairs.
“Word got through.”
Instead of crossing the courtyard he grabs my arm, and we go the other way, ducking underneath the staircase and around the back of the family quarters where the pine forest comes down to the stone wall. Following in his careful footsteps over the scrub, it occurs to me that maybe Sterling believes we are on reconnaissance, that he has truly lost his mind. We pick up a deer trail that comes out into an olive grove on the neighboring farm. From here it is fifty meters to the road. This must be the way he gained entry in the middle of the night.
A well-used black Fiat is waiting on the shoulder. Sterling opens the door, and we climb in.
“You’re late, you cunt,” says the driver.
“Ana, this is Chris.”
Seeing Chris is a shocker.
“I know Chris!”
Chris is the English bartender from the Walkabout Pub.
“And I know Ana!” he echoes mockingly as we take off.
“How do you know Sterling?”
“Never saw the lad before in me life,” says Chris. “He was out there on the road, trying to pick me up.”
“Fuck off.”
Chris pulls a serious face and seeks me out in the rearview mirror.
“Everything green?” he asks Sterling.
“Good to go.”
“Well then, no worries.”
“Chris is former SAS,” Sterling explains. “Now he’s also an operative for Oryx.”
I see it. The buff body. The detached observer who stays out of the limelight, placed in a job that positions him to know every English-speaker in town.
“Chris told you I was here?”
“I saw you were having troubles,” the bartender says. “The missing sister and all.”
“Thank you, sir. You could have also told me that you work with Sterling.”
“Normally we’re mum around the girlfriend — but now I discover you’re not the girlfriend, you’re FBI.”
“You’re the girlfriend,” Sterling intones, folding his arms and hunkering down under the Oakleys.
This gets a tiny smile out of Chris.
“Just think,” he says. “If an RPG hit this car right now with the three of us in it, what a total bummer for covert ops.”
“Not for Oryx. We are a hundred percent deniable.”
“The girlfriend isn’t.”
“According to the FBI,” I say, “officially, I’m on vacation.”
“Enough of that kind of talk,” Sterling mutters. “Bad juju.” We are down off the mountain and turning onto the main road to Siena.
“Anyone care to say where we’re headed?” I wonder.
“I’m going to my day job,” Chris says. “Pouring drinks for alcoholics.”
“We’re going to the pub,” Sterling interrupts. “To try to get on the damn Internet.”
“What for?”
“There’s an e-mail from Glasgow, which I couldn’t open.”
“About a job?”
“About you.”
In the back room of the Walkabout, under the crude map of Australia, Sterling’s gaunt face is lit by the glow of Chris’s laptop. He is accessing a secure site referred to as the Circuit, available only to private military contractors — a cyber version of the old soldier-for-hire magazines — where buddies are located and private military companies are rated by operatives as places to work, the way consumers rank can openers on Amazon.
No worries, as Chris would say, since nobody posts under their real name. They use handles, just like in the field. Sterling’s handle is Bullrider, but he’d kill me if I ever called him that, like the old superstition about never letting a woman board a sailing ship. Talk about bad juju.
While Sterling works the Internet, I am banished to the bar, to stare at another motorcar race on the flat-screen, interrupted by a news update describing the disappearance and suspected kidnapping of medical doctor and socialite Cecilia Nicosa, wife of the well-known coffee king. I stare with fascination at the inner and outer confluence of events: at the moment her image appeared I was making a list of people who could tell me about Cecilia’s associates and routines. This is how we do it in the big leagues: interview everyone who might have been in contact with the subject twenty-four hours before the abduction. The hospital staff. Giovanni’s teachers. The parents of Giovanni’s friends. The ladies I met at the party. The ladies she cooks with at contrada headquarters. Donnato’s advice makes sense: skirting the authorities may be the most direct route to finding her.
Sterling calls me over. I take my limonata. He is eating a chocolate bar and drinking water.
“This is something you need to know,” he says, very serious. “It comes from a solid source, a Scotsman I knew in Fallujah. He quit the private contracting business and he’s back home, on an antiterrorist unit with the Glasgow police. He gave me a heads-up through the Circuit on the investigation into the attack in South Kensington. Being an honest cop, he first asked what in hell I was doing at a multiple homicide in London. When Oryx confirmed that I had been leaving on a mission, he e-mailed this photo. It was taken just before the shooters opened fire.”
Sterling flips the computer around to display a blurry-but-discernable picture of me in front of the London restaurant, Baciare, staring at the camera and looking plenty annoyed for having been catcalled by a jerk in a Ford. You can see Sterling in the background, heading off, wearing the rucksack.
“Where did this come from?”
“The investigators got it off a cell phone belonging to one of the three men who were detained at the Glasgow airport, off an Interpol no-fly alert originating from the Met. Three Italian nationals, trying to get to Rome through Cairo.”
“I’m aware of them. The FBI legat was here yesterday. He told me they had three suspects in custody.”
“Did he say anything about the bad guys being in possession of a picture of you?”
“No. Maybe he didn’t know,” I say. The failure of different agencies to talk to each other is a given these days.
“Oh, honey. He knew.”
To prove it, Sterling highlights the list of forwards on the screen. The Glasgow police had sent the photo to Inspector Reilly at the Metropolitan Police, who forwarded it to Dennis Rizzio. Sterling peers disconsolately over the bar of light rimming the laptop.
“That honcho in Rome is holdin’ out on you. He’s playin’ you for something.”
I do not reply.
“Why do you suppose that is?”
“It’s SOP at the Bureau,” I say bitterly. “Keep the field agent in the dark. Withhold information, so the Bureau maintains total control over everybody’s actions.”
I can barely speak. Why didn’t Rizzio tell me about the photo? Or, earlier, that Cecilia was paying bribes?
“Meanwhile,” Sterling says, �
��here’s the puke that shot up those kids.”
Mug shots appear on the screen. Three awfully young and stupid-looking men in their twenties. The names mean nothing, but I do recognize a face: the scowling eyes, long face, heavy and ruler-straight eyebrows. He looks remarkably like the drawing made by the sketch artist in Scotland Yard. Amazing how they can do that.
“That’s one of them,” I say. “The one I saw in the Ford.”
Sterling leans back and pushes up his baseball cap.
“We’re fucked.”
“How so?”
“What you just did.” He nods toward the screen. “Identified the bad guy.”
“Why’s that?”
“Security contractors have their own networks; you have yours, the criminal clans have theirs. According to my Scots friend, this picture went out on multiple servers that feed the terrorist networks. That means your face is on all the mafia websites, which also reach into Bulgaria, Turkey — basically wherever they do business, which is all of eastern Europe and North Africa, for a start. My contact says the Met thinks the attack in London was a reprisal shooting. The target was someone in the restaurant.”
“Someone at the birthday party?”
“That’s their theory. But the point is, the bad guys have your picture. You are not only a witness who can ID them, but also I’m sure that by now they know you’re Bureau. They want you as a bargaining chip, or to take you out of the game. Which could explain the knife attack in the Campo.”
He closes the laptop, leaving us in the ubiquitous red glow of the Walkabout Pub. We go out to the bar just as the TV news bulletin announcing the disappearance of Cecilia Nicosa comes up again.
“They’ve replayed that thing five times in the past half hour,” I sigh. “Worse than a mattress commercial.”
Sterling stares at Cecilia’s picture on the flat-screen. “You look a helluva lot like her.”
Long curly hair. Flat high cheekbones. Almond eyes. She has darker skin and definitely a different style — in the TV photo she’s on a yacht, smiling and windblown, large black sunglasses on top of her head, wearing a multistrand gold choker woven with jewels, like Queen Nefertiti cruising the Nile.
