by John Gardner
Bond sighed and shook his head, thinking poor Sukie, what had she done to deserve this?
As if reading his thoughts, the detective said that she would not have known what happened. ‘There one minute, gone the next – in the twinkling of an eye, as the scriptures say. If you have to go quickly that’s the way I’d like it. Boom and you’re out of it.’
The big cop and his partner were tramping towards them. One carried a clear plastic evidence bag in his hand. ‘This is the biggest thing they found.’ He stretched the bag out towards Pritchard. ‘Initials,’ he said cryptically.
‘Sure. You identify this, Mr Boldman?’
Within the bag, Bond could make out a blackened piece of metal. It was twisted, but the pattern was clear and visible. A letter ‘T’ entwined with an ‘S’.
‘Yes,’ he nodded. ‘It’s the clasp from her shoulder bag.’
‘Know it from the past, do you?’
‘She had it with her today. Big white leather shoulder bag.’
‘You seen her today?’
‘This morning.’
‘This morning? You saw her this morning? You didn’t say nothing about that.’
‘You didn’t ask, and I didn’t know what had happened.’
‘I think we ought to go downtown and have a little talk. What you think, Stew?’ turning to the larger of the two other cops.
‘Kinda interesting.’ Stew – a name that did not suit him – nodded sagely. ‘I think we should have a long and cozy talk downtown, yeah.’
Bond stood his ground. ‘No, I think we should go back to my hotel and have a short cozy talk during which I explain the facts to you. I’m with the team investigating the 747 that blew up on touch-down. I’m even working with the FBI.’
‘Yeah, I heard the Fibbies were there.’ A pause of a couple of beats. ‘You got any proper ID, Mr Boldman?’
‘If I can reach into my pocket without any of you guys getting trigger-happy?’
Pritchard nodded. ‘Do it real slow then.’
Bond felt for the secret pocket in the lining of his jacket and pulled out his official ID. The one in the little leather wallet, with the laminated card inside. Slowly he handed it over to Pritchard, who bent over to look at it in the light from the floods. ‘You’re a spook, eh? A frigging spook with a hundred different identities!’
‘Something like that.’ Bond smiled at him almost ingenuously.
‘A spook?’ from Stew.
‘A BAllen and Farmererbbrit spook.’
‘I’m beginning to feel a shade chilly.’ Bond retained the smile. ‘Tell you what. Why don’t we all go back and I’ll buy the coffee.’
‘So you’re no blood relation to the Tempestas?’ Matt Pritchard looked puzzled. They sat huddled together in the hotel coffee shop.
‘No, I met her first in ’85. She was being attacked by some thugs behind a filling station in France – but I’ve told you all that.’ Indeed, he had gone through all the non-classified pieces of the period when he had first met Sukie.
‘That would be after Don Pasquale needed her as a live-in hot water bottle to warm his old age.’ Stew sounded unconvinced and vaguely unpleasant.
‘If you mean it was after the Principe Pasquale Tempesta, her husband, had died, yes.’
Matt Pritchard gave a little snicker of laughter. ‘Principe, my ass.’
‘Well she’s certainly the Dowager Principessa . . .’
‘No more a minor Italian princess than Matt’s girlfriend is Princess Di. For a senior spook, Bond, you’re a little naïve.’
‘Look, we’d better come clean,’ Pritchard sighed. ‘Stew and I worked on details concerning the Tempestas for a long time. The FBI have all our notes, but we still carry a lot in our heads. You ever met the pair who are her stepsons by marriage?’
‘No, but Sukie certainly told me – and I believed her – that the family ran a perfectly kosher series of businesses. And from what I recall, my people in London checked it out.’
Pritchard gave a curt little nod. ‘Sure, mid-eighties we weren’t doing much, or telling people much about the Tempestas. Their operations were mainly in Europe anyway. I think we were on the point of infiltrating them. If you don’t believe me, there’s a Fibbie coming in who knows all about them.’
Bond turned to see Special Agent Eddie Rhabb coming through the entrance, shoulders forward and head down in his classic charging bull stance.
Matt Pritchard waved across the room. Rhabb acknowledged the wave, and walked quickly in their direction. He gave Bond a friendly nod, but immediately looked to Pritchard. ‘Is it true?’ he asked, his eyes darkening.
‘You mean the Tempesta woman?’
‘Who else?’
‘Yes, I’m afraid it’s all too true and your colleague here, Mr Boldman . . .’
‘Don’t you mean Bond?’ A friendly twinkle came into the FBI man’s eye.
‘Okay, there are no secrets from Fast Eddie.’
‘Just call me Eddie the Rhabb.’ He turned towards Bond. ‘I was looking for you. Left a message on your voice mail. Don’t quite understand why they’re going through me, but London needs to talk with you.’
‘About?’
‘I suspect the Tempestas. They want you to come to Quantico with me. Tonight if possible. You’d better check with London first, but they seem very keen.’ He sat and ordered coffee.
‘Bond here is an old friend of the Tempesta woman.’
‘I know.’
‘How?’ Bond asked sharply.
‘I just know. There’s not much about the Tempestas I don’t know. We had a request from your people back in the eighties. Wanted to know all the ins and outs of La Famiglia Tempesta. We gave them nothing at the time. Neither did our Italian colleagues. In fact we let them think the Tempestas were on the level.’
‘I’d swear Sukie thought everything was above board. She definitely believed that they were good, upstanding pillars of the community. Captains of industry.’
Rhabb chuckled. ‘Sorry to disillusion you, James – I can call you James?’
‘You can call me what you like, as long as you don’t call me Jim.’
‘Okay. Back in – when was it you met her, ’85?’
Bond nodded, then quickly told Rhabb about the meeting, and the dangers he had gone through with Sukie.
Rhabb nodded. ‘Right, back then we talked to nobody about the Tempestas. And I guess Sukie had no real picture of what was going on. The family rarely strayed out of Italy. If there was anything to be done in the USA they had other people who were sent in. I doubt if she was left in the dark for long though.’
‘Things didn’t seem to have altered. I spent a lot of today with her, and I certainly didn’t see any change. You know she was supposed to have been on that bloody aeroplane?’
‘Yes, and it’s possible that either the Tempesta brothers or some rivals set it up.’
‘She was frightened, I can tell you that.’ He explained his relationship with Sukie and how she had been about to move into the hotel with him. ‘Just after the briefing broke up this afternoon I found she had left a message on my voice mail. By then she was really frightened. Does the acronym COLD mean anything to you?’
He saw a movement deep in the FBI man’s eyes. ‘I’ve heard the word in connection with a lot of things. The Tempesta family and COLD would make a formidable alliance.’
‘Okay, just put me in the Tempesta picture.’
‘You’ll get a full briefing at Quantico.’ Rhabb appeared to be reluctant. ‘In short, the Tempestas are an organized crime family, but not strictly one of the old-time Mafia families. They do run a lot of companies which appear to be genuine, though I suspect the companies are there to wash dirty money. They’re very powerful in Italy, don’t have connections with Sicily, but control a lot of the stuff that goes down in Rome. The usual – prostitution, extortion, some nightclubs. The drug business and some clubs in the USA and UK are fairly recent: during the last few years that is. They’re be
coming more and more powerful, spreading their wings so to speak. Did you know they had money invested in Bradbury Airlines?’
‘Sukie indicated that to me this morning.’
‘Perhaps that’s why she wasn’t on the plane.’
‘Perhaps that was why Harley Bradbury wasn’t on the flight as well.’
Rhabb shifted in his chair. ‘Why don’t you check things out with London and we can get moving. They tell me the snow’s tapering off and they’re sending a chopper over to pick us up.’
Bond nodded and quickly left the table.
Back in his room he operated the security locks on his briefcase and took out the small portable scrambling device which, when plugged into the modular telephone jack, bypassed the main telephone line and allowed direct secure conversation with a number of similar units throughout the world.
He unplugged the direct line, snapped the little package of electronics into place href="kindle:tad and then plugged the telephone directly into the other end of the box. Taking an autodialler from the open briefcase, he pressed the button which gave its little sequence of beeps and tones. The distant end rang. Then—
‘Duty Officer.’
‘Predator.’ He gave his field name. ‘Someone wants me to call them.’
‘Hold, Predator.’
There was a long silence and M’s drowsy voice came on the line. ‘You’ve met an old friend and now she’s dead, I hear.’
‘Correct.’
‘Has an FBI man called Rhabb been in touch?’
‘I’ve just spoken with him. He says you want me to go Quantico. True, sir?’
‘Absolutely. You’re in for a few surprises, I think. After Quantico, let me know your intentions before you do anything else.’
‘Roger, sir. That it?’
‘Go in peace, Predator.’
‘Thank you, sir.’
‘No peace for the wicked, eh?’
He heard M’s short laugh as he closed the line.
The journey to the FBI Training Establishment – which shared the Marine base at Quantico, Virginia – was uncomfortable and bumpy. Though it only took them some thirty minutes to get there from Dulles, the snow had not completely left the area and twice they flew through what looked like raging blizzards which threw the craft all over the sky.
They were met at the helicopter pad by a small group of agents and driven straight into the complex of red brick buildings which made up the training quarters, plus many other facilities. It was there at Quantico that much research was done, and there that the counterintelligence people kept sensitive assets when necessary.
There were quick introductions to hard, wary-looking men – Drake, Mulett, MacRoberts, Long, and a young woman who was known only as Pr the Princess
5
CONJUNCTION
Somebody switched on the overhead lights. For a few seconds, time seemed to stand still. Bond would have sworn it was Sukie Tempesta sitting in an armchair, then she seemed to dissolve and alter in what was a trick of the mind and the light.
The young woman who rose from the chair was nothing like Sukie, except perhaps for the stunning body which looked as though it had been poured into the running suit. The rest bore no resemblance to her. This girl was tall, rangy, long legs – like Sukie’s – but there it ended. Black eyes to match the raven sleek short hair; wide and generous mouth; high cheekbones and a patrician nose. Very Italianate, he thought immediately as she walked towards him, a smile of apology and a gesture – arms opening, palms upwards: the body language which said she was sorry. Then, her right hand came up towards his. A firm cool grip, her hand close to her body bringing them almost face to face.
‘Toni Nicolletti.’ She introduced herself. He caught a faint accent, just a trace, together with the unmistakable bouquet of Bal de Versailles catching his nostrils.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, his throat dry. ‘For a moment, I thought you were someone else.’ For a fraction of time a picture of Sukie again came sharp and brilliantly into his mind. It was as though the past had leaped into the present and he could feel and see her – smell her scent also – as they both stood on the deck of a hotel in Key West watching a spectacular sunset. That had been one real moment, just after they had shared great danger.
‘Why am I meeting this young lady?’ he asked, still inwardly shaken.
‘I think we should all sit down, and I’ll tell you exactly.’ Rhabb motioned with his right hand, inviting them to sit.
There were not enough chairs for all of them so some sat on the floor, ranged around Bond like a group of students ready to discuss some important lesson.
Eddie began, nodding towards MacRoberts, a big ginger-haired and bearded man who looked like a wild Scottish laird beamed in from a distant century. ‘Mac is our in-house Tempesta historian. He should start.’
MacRoberts’ voice was as gruff as his appearance, and he spoke quickly, bursting upon his audience like a series of great roiling breakers hitting a beach.
‘Right, you’ve heard some of this already, Mr Bond, but I’ll take it all from the top. The Tempestas were around at the time of the Borgias, and they were a family rooted in sin even then. During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, they managed to survive the treacheries of both Cesare and his sister Lucrezia, probably because they never became involved in the more violent passions of the Borgia family. They “owned” commercial Rome by the late fifteenth century: and by that I don’t mean they were leading traders – merchants, buying and selling men, owners of ships and the like. Back in those days the Tempestas were controllers, and they still are.’
MacRoberts went on for maybe half an hour, tracing the rise and rise of the Tempesta family. How, with guile and subtlety, they had gathered an army of experts around them: men who were experienced in the ways of commerce and men who were – as MacRoberts put it – ‘Very good at breaking heads.’
He continued. ‘Their basic plan was t out of sightAFbbo grant what we would now call insurance policies, and, as we all know, the gap between insurance and extortion is very narrow. The fine print on their offers to cover losses on goods, carried by sea or land, amounted to the simple tenet, “You pay us large sums of money – up to fifty per cent of the value of your cargo – and we will see to it that your ships are safe, and your carriages and wagons go unmolested.”
‘If the money did not get paid on time, a ship would go down with a loss of cargo; or an overland train of wagons would be attacked and robbed. The Tempestas sat in their fashionable houses and raked in money so that the wheels of commerce could turn without hindrance.’
Without rushing the story, the FBI man showed the way in which, during the nineteenth century, the Tempestas began to run everything within the confines of Rome, from whores to places where visitors could eat, rest their weary heads, and move through the streets in safety.
‘They became the only organized crime family to rule Rome and, at the same time, remained respected. The Cosa Nostra, when it came, stood no chance of taking over. By the 1920s Pasquale Tempesta was given the title of Prince, hence Principe Pasquale Tempesta. Together with his family, he was both loved and hated, while it was common knowledge that his power, and therefore the power of those close to him, was paramount.
‘In many ways he was the most charming of men, yet an upcoming Mafia Don was barbecued in the garden of one of his many villas, and the man’s lieutenants met various terrible ends. Even the so-called Honoured Society did not have the stomach to go after him. The police crackdown against organized crime began around 1984. Quietly in Italy, and softly over here. Pasquale’s sons became over-ambitious and started to attempt a colonization of parts of the United States. By ’84 we were already working on putting in our own penetration agent. Pasquale was dead by then. The estate had been well split, and the sons Luigi and Angelo appeared to be spreading their wings. That, Mr Bond, is why your people got nowhere in their search for the truth.’
There had been a period of time when both the
Italian authorities and the FBI had genuinely discussed attempting to draw Sukie into their operation: especially after they discovered that she truly had no hint that the old man she had married was a man of evil power. In the end they had decided against it on two counts. First, Sukie had no training in the black arts of deception. Second, they were unsure if she would play along with them.
MacRoberts said, ‘There was always the danger that she would be naïve enough to go running to her stepsons with tales out of school.’ He turned towards the woman agent they called Prime, handing over the story for her to tell.
Bond estimated Prime as being in her mid-thirties. Clear skin, hardly any make-up, neat and short blonde hair and the coiled spring body of an athlete. ‘I had done a lot of courses before they brought me in,’ she began. ‘Five years in the field at our office in Atlanta with courses sandwiched in between. Then I came here to Quantico. I was on the Training Selection Team, and to my mind that was a very big deal.
‘I was brought into the picture regarding the Tempesta family, and asked to look out for someone we might possibly train as a penetration agent. Three weeks after being given the assignment, Toni Nicolletti walked into my office.
‘I had a gut reaction in the first five minutes of the interview. She’s a second generation Italian American with a lot of links to Rome, has a degree in computer sciences from Georgetown University, and wanted to work undercover. A very gutsy lady.’ S Nicollettitadhe looked across at Toni, flashing her a quick smile. ‘So we put her through the normal course with a lot of other studies. We really pressurised her.’ Another glance at the lovely Toni. ‘She went in around the spring of ’85, and has provided gold from the first.’
‘What do you do for the Tempesta brothers, then, Toni?’ Bond gave her a look of admiration.
