by April Smith
“Who tipped off the Barbettis?”
“We think it was Martin Barbetti, the owner of the restaurant,” Dennis says, a pained expression crossing his face.
“But?”
“But we can’t find him. He disappeared.”
Poor fawning, obedient Martin. He will never be found, unless someone initiates a sweep of the English countryside for tanks of lye. I pick up my rucksack with a questioning look at the FBI legat.
“Tell me when it’s over,” Dennis says. “Just don’t get caught.”
THIRTY-EIGHT
Somewhere on the southern coast of France, a Volkswagen hatchback is stolen. Later that night it will arrive in Siena, driven by a young Serbian woman operative whose combat name is Delilah.
Over the next few hours, the Oryx team will continue to infiltrate Italy, entering the country by different routes. This is to avoid being tagged by the mafia rats who have day jobs as customs agents. As a further precaution, the team will never be together at the same time and place. Being former military, they are trained in exactitude; once the whistle blows, it is as if their body clocks are locked into synch. At 11:48 p.m., when Delilah makes initial contact with Zabrina at the wine bar, the former Special Forces explosives expert, combat name Ripper, who lent us the flat in London, is touching down at Reggio di Calabria airport, at the very tip of the mainland.
The trickiest part was finding an operative who could pose as a drug addict friend of Zabrina’s. Atlas decided she should be young and female, and came up with the Serbian woman who stole the Volkswagen, who has been through so many wars she can sleep during a gun battle. Her task is to have Zabrina vouch for her so that she can gain entry to the apartment. Once inside, she will locate Cecilia and transmit that information to Sterling, who will oversee the operation from a mobile command center.
Zabrina is the wild card, as Delilah discovered the first time they met, at the wine bar in the Medici fortress. We needed them to be seen together by witnesses who could verify that the two are tight. When Delilah showed up she said in English, “I just got in from Florence,” and Zabrina responded correctly: “I love Florence.” While she poured wine, Delilah chilled at the bar. Later, they danced with some Brits who were high on amphetamines, boasting about having dropped “the world’s strongest legal party pill.” The club lights flashed, music pounded, and Zabrina disappeared with the English boys. Delilah spent the night in the Volkswagen, searching for her new best friend, who had ended up in Quinciano, eighteen kilometers away. The pills were legal in England — if you happened to be a veterinarian. They contained an anti-worming drug used on animals. “Blew my head off,” Zabrina explained.
We wanted to believe Zabrina was trainable. She seemed to enjoy playacting; it appealed to her exaggerated sense of self. We ran through techniques I learned at the FBI Academy — role-plays, in which Sterling was the Puppet. When he grabbed her forcefully, shouting, “Who is this new little piggy, and why should I let her in?” Zabrina forgot it was an exercise and started to cry. Another time she wanted to know when we would give her a gun. Wasn’t she supposed to shoot the Puppet?
Sterling reported to Atlas that the girl was too unstable to carry a mission in which the lives of both the victim and Oryx employees were at risk. We considered ditching the entire approach and going back to all-out tactical, but then her cousin, Fat Pasquale, texted to say a new shipment of cocaine was in. The timing was right. Atlas decided we were “green to go,” but insisted that we stick to the plan and play it inside the apartment. If we tried an assault in the tightly packed complex, we could not contain the danger to civilians. He assigned Chris as backup firepower. Working with a stopwatch, we calculated that all we needed from Zabrina was thirty seconds of rationality.
From that time on, Delilah stuck close — did not even allow Zabrina to go to the bathroom alone — and kept her clean and sober, except for a couple of Percodan for abdominal pain, until they got into the Volkswagen for the drive to Calabria. I hopped a commercial flight to Reggio di Calabria. Sterling and Chris had already left Siena in the mobile command unit — a van outfitted with tactical video allowing them to see several actions taking place at once; a Cougarnet communication system working on an encrypted FM signal; weapons; cash; phony passports; changes of clothes; ammunition; medical pack.
• • •
Immediately on arrival there is an obstacle. When Zabrina and Delilah, covertly trailed by Chris, reach Little City and cross the bridge to the far sector, they are stopped by a rambunctious block party taking place in the courtyard between two divisions of the housing unit. Several hundred people in undershirts, shorts, housedresses, and bathing suits are carrying on — grilling food, drinking, dancing, and fighting. Children are running wild. When Zabrina and Deliah appear, a silent alarm seems to ripple through the population; heads turn and eyes slide their way as they continue to the apartment.
Little kids scramble over junkies stoned out on the steps; an encouraging sign that it is business as usual, until they discover that Fat Pasquale isn’t there. At the store? Out murdering someone? Who knows? Lounging on the folding chair, keeping watch over who is permitted to enter the pharmaceutical lab, is a different obese guy, wearing a bandanna around his head and slicing a cantaloupe into quarters on top of a cooler with a very big knife. Zabrina explains in southern dialect that she is Fat Pasquale’s cousin. He looks at Delilah — big-boned, big-chested. Sunglasses perched on a baseball cap; bushy black ponytail. Fake plastic Louis Vuitton rucksack. Almond eyes. Inviting smile. Skintight jeans.
“Who is this?”
“A friend from the university.”
“You vouch for her?”
“I vouch for her.”
Without getting up, a wedge of cantaloupe stuck in his mouth like an obscene grin, he sticks a foot out and pries the door open with dirty toes.
“Bullrider, we’re at yellow,” Delilah murmurs into the transmitter under the cap, meaning they’re at the last position of cover and concealment. The last point at which they could still turn around and nobody would know they were here.
The kitchen may be exactly as Zabrina described it — the tulip tiles, the sink where the woman chopped tomatoes — but the Puppet is not at the table. Instead there is another joker fooling with the white powder and syringes, and a terrified porcino who gets up and runs. The dealer reaches for a shotgun propped against a chair. Delilah assassinates him with a single shot from a silencer-equipped Beretta. She draws a weapon from a hidden compartment in the rucksack, pulling on infrared goggles, moving down the hall, trusting that Chris, thirty seconds behind them, has taken out the guy with the cantaloupe.
Just like in the shoot house, the first one in is always right. Delilah, in the lead, saves the porcino’s life by shoving him into the bathroom and shouting for him to get down and shut up. Then she is at the locked bedroom door, behind which the infrared image shows a human figure.
“Bullrider, I see the hostage!” Delilah says. “What is the order?”
“Move to green and execute,” Sterling answers from the command unit in the van.
Chris sets a charge and they blow the door to Cecilia’s room.
Sterling, parked a block from Little City, copies Delilah’s report that they have breeched, and conveys the order to execute to two other operatives who are stationed in a warehouse several miles away, where a light helicopter has been standing off — the team having agreed at the training run in England that airlifting the victim to safety was the best way to get her out. The warehouse doors open, and the little bird rolls out on skids, rotors already turning. Within fifteen seconds it is airborne.
At the same time, Ripper, who has been enjoying a panino in a café across from the van, leaves the table and ambles toward an alley, where he punches a number on a cell phone. As he passes, a small box clamped to a gas line fizzles and explodes with an unremarkable pop.
Delilah and Chris rush the bedroom, finding Cecilia curled up in a corner, shivering
like a dog, her arms covering her head. They pull her to her feet and say the prearranged words:
“Nicoli Nicosa sent us. We’re going to get you out.”
Cecilia’s face screws up and she makes sounds. She is trying to cooperate but can hardly walk. Chris lifts her onto his shoulder.
“We’re in control of the hostage and coming out,” Delilah reports as they exit the front door of the apartment.
Here there was always a problem. We could figure no way out of the apartment except the way they came in—but there would be no time to check whether the planned escape route was clear. Despite our misgivings, that job had to be done by Zabrina. As soon as Chris defeated the lookouts, she was to exit the apartment, turn right, enter a dead-end hallway, and open the door to the roof.
Chris and Delilah get through the front door of the apartment with twenty seconds to make it to the point of contact with the helicopter — past tenants and junkies potentially clogging the second-floor walkway. But these people have witnessed too many mafia shootings to hang around and gawk. When they see the man with the bloody melon rind smile slumped in the chair, and hear sirens from the gas explosion, they scatter.
Farther down, Zabrina is faithfully at her post, holding the door to the roof. Chris lopes up the steps with Cecilia draped around his neck in a fireman’s carry. All three break out of the stairwell to the roof and open sky as the helicopter appears and stabilizes.
Chris lowers Cecilia to her feet. In the whirlwind of debris she sees the figure of Zabrina in the midst of the pandemonium — a hopeless drug addict, who somehow, impossibly, miraculously, came back to this hellhole to save her.
An operative is lowered on a rope. There is a harness at the end. Cecilia sags against Delilah as they force her legs into the straps.
“Her too!” she murmurs.
Zabrina, stunned by the noise and impact, tries to hold her long hair back from whipping painfully across her eyes. Voiceless in the earsplitting drone, Cecilia struggles and reaches toward the girl.
“Take her! She’s coming, too!”
Chris shouts, “Don’t worry, we’ll take care of her.”
They muscle Cecilia into the harness and buckle it. The operative places his body over hers.
“No! Wait!”
“You’re safe! I’ve got you!” he shouts as the chopper lifts and banks away with the two of them still dangling.
Zabrina watches as they’re dragged across the sky. Delilah remembers her wide-eyed stare of awe, met by Cecilia’s downward look of anguish. Without hesitating, the two Oryx operatives were already securing a rope to an iron stanchion they’d identified on Google Earth, and tossed it over the side of the roof. It will be easy to rappel down and become lost in the confusion created by the gas line explosion. Delilah is already over the top. Chris is calling to Zabrina to get her ass over there, when the roof door bangs open and Fat Pasquale lumbers out, followed by a dozen half-grown boys who spring ahead like wolves.
“Vieni qui!” Chris yells at Zabrina. “Now!”
Slowly Zabrina hooks her hair behind her ears with a dreamy gaze, as if it were a summer night and she was standing at a fountain with her friends.
“Now, you stupid bitch!”
“I will be okay,” she says with a soft wave of the hand. “I am family.”
One quiver of hesitation and Chris would have gone back, but she emphatically turns from the route of escape. She makes her choice. He disappears over the edge. One jerk from below and the rope is unloosed and drops to the street.
The helicopter is gone, and with it, the wind, the whole episode. Heat rises off the tarred rooftop. The sky is bleached white, empty. Fat Pasquale keeps coming, weapon sighted. Zabrina fingers the plastic bags of powder she snatched off the kitchen table, safe inside her pockets. She gives an innocent shrug, as if she, too, is a victim in this, but he keeps on coming, up to point-blank range, until he is close enough for her to see the ripples in his sweat-soaked forehead, and look into the cold eyes of her cousin.
Zabrina smiles and says, “It’s me.”
THIRTY-NINE
When I arrive at the airport in Reggio di Calabria, the last stop on the mainland of Italy, I am met by a barrel-chested, forty-year-old Englishman wearing sailor’s whites. He has a wind-burned face and sun-bleached red hair going up his arms. We drive urgently, almost wordlessly, to the harbor. Once we had identified ourselves as Oryx, there was little interest on either side in getting-to-know-you. The only thing that matters is the clock.
There is plenty of action at the terminal where hydrofoils and ferries make the twenty-minute crossing to the island of Sicily. It being the high season, the ferries run 24/7. This is good, as the plan is to blend in with the boat traffic. At a private marina farther up the seaside promenade, we board the Miramare, a seventy-foot megayacht chosen by Atlas for its speed and large rear deck — a good target for a helicopter put-down. There are two other Oryx people as crew, a full-scale operating room with an Italian surgeon and a nurse, a one-hundred-horsepower tender in case of the need for evasive action, and a cache of arms. It takes forty minutes to clear the harbor and another hour to reach cruising distance from the coast. Once the navigation system confirms that we are at the coordinates, the skipper cuts the engines and we put out fishing lines, like any well-heeled party on holiday. Moments later, we receive the radio message from Sterling that the helicopter is on its way.
Later, from the vantage point of a weathered redwood deck on the California coast, it will strike me that these events could never have taken place on our side of the world, not in the easygoing Pacific Ocean — lazy, and flat as a sheet. Not in America, where everything is known. I was something of a baffled passenger on that mystery cruise, just as I had often been mystified by the secrets of Siena. Now, standing on the rear deck of the Miramare, feeling the vibration of the motors and staring at the foamy wake as it fans out and is lost, I try to make the pieces of this voyage fit, but ultimately, there is no rational explanation for why, at any minute, a woman who was a stranger, and is now my sister, will come out of the sky at the end of a rope.
But rational things are not what make you cry, and I begin to cry even before the helicopter appears; in fact, as soon as Sterling radios that Cecilia is on the way. Not from the release of emotion even hardened agents feel when a victim is returned to safety — the abducted child back in the arms of the mom — but a calm, almost imperceptible letting go.
When I left my grandfather Poppy’s house to go to college, I had been conditioned to expect that being cared for would always come with a side dish of punishment. One day a pair of new sneakers would appear under the bed, and the next day he would open the door and hit me across the face because I had kissed a boy. Forever after, I wrapped myself in isolation to avoid being smacked. I didn’t know the sentence was of my own making, and that it could be absolved as quietly as a bird flying off a branch.
On the yacht there is nothing but action and noise — slicing rotors, whipping water, angling for position, and radio squawks — but inside me a tranquil space has opened. The side doors of the chopper slide apart and human faces peer out: Cecilia and the other operative, whose body protects hers as they are lowered to the deck. She is hanging limp, and for a gut-squeezing second I think she is dead, but when the crew unbuckles the harness she stands on her own. The operative is winched back up, the helicopter angles away, and Cecilia and I are safe in each other’s arms. The wind mixes our tears and tangles up our hair. I allow my sister into my heart.
The engines catch and the huge vessel kicks up speed, rock-solid and comforting. The nurse and doctor help Cecilia slowly down a flight of polished teakwood steps to a living room suite with enormous windows looking out at the bright green ocean, and a white sectional couch thirty feet long.
Stripped of the helmet and rescue gear, she is almost unrecognizable, as if she’s been in a horrendous car accident. Her face is swollen in uneven contusions. She is filthy, emaciated, with an ugly g
ap in her front teeth, her lips caked and peeling. The muscles in her arms have atrophied, and everywhere her skin is splotched and bruised. They take her vital signs and say her blood pressure is high and she is dehydrated.
“We’ve got her! She’s here!” I tell Nicosa, and put Cecilia on the phone.
“Sto bène. Ti amo. Com’è Giovanni?”
She speaks in hushed Italian. Nicosa is confined to the abbey under house arrest, but Giovanni is waiting in the small coastal town of Agropoli, where a launch will take him out to the yacht. Cecilia is only able to speak to her husband in two-word sentences. She has no tears, maybe none left.
I sit beside her on the couch while the nurse administers an IV.
Cecilia puts a hand on mine. It sits there, light as a sparrow.
“They left the girl behind.”
“Zabrina?”
“Is that her name?” she murmurs tiredly.
The doctor prepares a syringe and injects it into the IV line. Clear liquid moves through the tube into her bloodstream.
“She’s my patient, and she’s very ill,” Cecilia says, before the dark.
Chris repeated the code words to Atlas in London: “It’s been sorted. We’ve given them the good news.” After setting off the diversionary explosion on the gas line, Ripper, in cleanup position, moving in the opposite direction of the confused crowds, gained entry to the rearmost courtyard of the Little City, where the crack house was situated, and climbed the steps to the roof. There he saw the body of Zabrina Tursi, shot in the chest at close range. Fat Pasquale, balancing heavily on one knee, was attempting to recover the bags of cocaine from her pockets when Ripper took him out with an easy head shot. He lined the pack of boy-criminals who were loyal to Fat Pasquale up against a wall, and made them wait there in the sun while he disappeared down the steps and locked the door to the roof, abandoning them to the buzzing corpses.
