by Aaron Elkins
“There are some fairly simple ways to differentiate animal and human bones,” he contented himself with saying. “I can recommend a book or two if you’re interested.”
“I don’t think so, thanks, not today.” The launch thudded gently against the Stresa dock and came to a stop. Caravale was the first to stand. “However, if any further skeletons turn up, I’ll be sure to call upon you.”
“Do that,” Gideon said. “Just make sure it’s sometime in the next week.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” said Caravale. He made a formal little bow to the three of them, grunted his good-bye, and pulled himself up onto the pier.
“Well, that certainly went well,” Phil said brightly.
Gideon made a grumbling sound deep in his throat. “Let’s go get some lunch.”
NINE
THE kidnappers’ answer came on Thursday morning, twenty-four hours after the advertisement had appeared. It was in the form of a padded envelope that had been slipped through the after-hours courier-delivery slot at Aurora Costruzioni’s field office in Intra during the night. The clerk who found it lying on the floor, seeing nothing on the front but VINCENZO DE GRAZIA in block letters—no business logo, no return address—was immediately suspicious. Following instructions from the carabinieri, she didn’t touch it, but called them at once.
Within minutes the envelope was dusted for fingerprints (none) and opened. Inside was a one-page letter folded around a cassette tape, both of which had also been wiped clean. The letter, envelope, and tape were placed in separate plastic sleeves for further examination and taken to carabinieri headquarters.
Half an hour later Vincenzo, working distractedly and intermittently at home on a proposal for a waste-water treatment facility near Bergamo, received a telephone call from Caravale.
“We’ve heard from them.”
“What?” Vincenzo put down the proposal. “How?”
“It came to your office in Intra. There’s a letter and an audiotape that’s supposed to be of Achille. Can you come in to headquarters to—”
“What do they say?”
“As far as we can tell, Achille is all right—”
“What do they say?”
Caravale took the last puff from his morning cigar and breathed out the smoke before answering. “They say ‘no.’”
SITTING opposite Caravale at carabinieri headquarters, Vincenzo mumbled his way through the brief message.
“‘We are not interested in negotiating. Five million euros only. Do not waste our time by telling us this is not within your means or that you need more time. On the upper story of your villa, directly over the front entrance, is a window that is now kept shuttered. If you intend to cooperate, you will open those shutters as a signal, and we will then give you final instructions and tell you where to wire the money. As soon as we have the money, your son will be freed unharmed. If the shutters have not opened by noon on Friday, we will assume you do not wish to comply.’”
He looked up at Caravale. “Friday. Tomorrow.”
The colonel nodded. “Yes.”
Vincenzo flicked at the sheet of paper with his fingernails. “Shutters, shutters . . . but doesn’t this tell us that the kidnappers are right there, on Isola de Grazia? Either that, or they have an accomplice—”
“No, not necessarily. The front of your villa is visible from the shore here. With a pair of binoculars, they wouldn’t have any trouble seeing the shutters.”
“Oh. Of course, yes.” He seemed to drift away, thinking.
“You want to finish the letter, signore.”
Stiff-faced, Vincenzo went back to it.
“‘In that case, your son will be killed at once. Preparations have already been made. This is our last message. You will not hear from us again.’”
He snorted and slid it back across the table. “I want to hear the tape.”
They were sitting in one of the interrogation rooms. A small tape recorder lay on the table. Caravale reached out and pressed a button. Vincenzo leaned in over it, shoulders hunched, head cocked. He had rushed over without slipping on a jacket, and with his shirtsleeves folded up over hairless, smooth forearms, he seemed to be vibrating with nervous energy.
“Papa?” The voice was tentative and frightened.
“Huh!” came from Vincenzo.
In the background they heard someone mutter, “Louder, kid.” There was a scraping sound; the recorder being moved closer.
“Papa?” Louder, much more intense.
Vincenzo nodded. “It’s him.”
“I’m all right . . . they gave me a Game Boy. . . .”
They could tell Achille’s throat was clogging up, and a moment later he was bawling. “Papa, they’re going to kill me if you don’t pay them! I know they really mean it. I don’t want to d—”
That was all. Vincenzo listened for a few seconds longer to see if there was anything more, then threw himself angrily back against his chair. “You call that ‘all right’? I don’t.”
“What are you going to do?”
An uneven laugh. “I’m going to pay them, what else?”
“The entire five million? You have it?”
“I’ve made arrangements for it. A telephone call to Milan is all that’s needed.”
“Listen, Signor de Grazia . . .”
Vincenzo waved him off. “I know what you’re going to say.”
“Do you? I was going to say that Achille could already be dead.”
“The tape . . .”
“The tape could have been made days ago, right after they got him. My advice—”
“Your advice,” Vincenzo said through narrowed lips, “was to offer them a million euros, and we see how that worked out, don’t we? Will you stand in my way if I try to pay the ransom?”
“No, it’s up to you. But you’re operating in the dark. You’re liable to be out five million euros and still not get your son back.”
“Let me be frank, Colonel. I will be out nothing but the deductible and the interest on the loan. That I can afford. It’s my insurer that will be out the five million euros. Am I willing to risk Argos’s money on the chance of getting my son back alive? What do you think?”
“I think—”
“What would you think if it was your son, not mine?”
“I would—” Caravale stopped and dipped his chin. He knew what he’d think, all right.
“Good,” said Vincenzo, taking charge now. “May we go back to your office? With your permission, I’d like to use your telephone to tell my man to open the shutters.”
The call was made to Isola de Grazia at 10:22 A.M. At 10:24, Clemente opened the shutters. At 10:55, “Signor Pinzolo,” the name that Caravale had chosen for his role as negotiator, received his first, last, and only telephone call. The police technician who recorded it quickly ran the tape up to Colonel Caravale. “I think the call was made on one of those throwaway phones, Colonel. That’s not good.”
Vincenzo, in the act of leaving, sat down again and both men listened to the message, heads bent, ears pricked.
“Bank of Rezekne, Latvia,” the weird, gibbering voice said. “R, E, Z, E, K, N, E.”
“Damn,” Caravale muttered. Whoever it was had used an electronic voice distorter, one of the new generation that processed the sounds through an encoded chip and put them back out in a digital format. Next to impossible to trace. Voice prints wouldn’t work. Voice stress analyzers wouldn’t work. Chances were, they wouldn’t even be able to tell if it was a man or a woman.
“Account number. One. Eight. Eight. Zero. Five. Two. Nine. Six. Two. Seven. By tomorrow.”
When it was clear that there was nothing else, Caravale turned off the machine.
Vincenzo was shaking his head, laughing again, this time in perplexity. “For God’s sake—Latvia?”
MAJOR Massimiliano d’Este, deputy chief of the carabinieri ’s financial crimes unit, also laughed when Caravale called him after Vincenzo had left.
“Latvia
?” he said over the telephone from Rome. “A numbered account? Well, they know their business, I have to give them that.”
“It’s going to be hard to trace?”
“It’s going to be impossible, Tullio. Compared to Rezekne, those banks in Liechtenstein or in the Cayman lslands—they’re open books.”
Latvia, he explained, was a recent entry in the anonymous banking field. In its all-out effort to attract business from persons interested in what it euphemistically referred to as “asset protection” or “tax optimization,” it had installed the strictest confidentiality laws in the world. The banks themselves often didn’t know their clients’ real identities. And unauthorized disclosure of information about accounts or account holders was a felony. Only on proof of a criminal act by the client could the records be opened up. The Latvian—”
“Well, what the hell do you call kidnapping and murder?” Caravale demanded.
“I said ‘proof.’”
“I have two men dead. I have a boy kidnapped and held for ransom. That’s not enough proof for you?”
“For me, yes. For the Latvian Court of Justice . . . mm, no. You’re out of luck, Tullio. Maybe two years from now you’ll squeeze a little information from them. Even then, I doubt if they’ll be able to tell you who the account holder is. Or was; I expect he’ll close the account and disappear the minute he gets the money. Wouldn’t you?”
Caravale shook his head. Where did he go from here? There were no leads, no voices to try to trace (except for that indistinct “Louder, kid.”), no evidence that could be physically linked to them, no vehicle to put a tracking device on . . .
He sighed. “Well, thanks for your help, Massimiliano.”
“Next time you envy my assignment in Rome,” d’Este said, “just remember that I have to deal with this kind of frustration every day.”
“Who said I envied your assignment in Rome?” Caravale said.
AFTER four days spent with the travel group, Gideon was getting a little desperate. It wasn’t that the Pedal and Paddle Adventure itself had been unpleasant—the leisurely days of kayaking and sightseeing from Arona at the south end of the lake up past Stresa and through the Borromean Islands had been relaxing and fun, at least until the rains had hit that morning, and the food had been decent. The bicycling was still to come, a two-day trip to and around little Lake Orta that would conclude the tour, and Gideon would probably give that a skip, especially if the rain kept up. Even the camping accommodations, truth be told, hadn’t looked too bad, although the well-equipped, two-and four-person platform tents were usually set up in the midst of smelly, lumbering RVs packed with French- or German-speaking families loaded with noisy kids. And while Phil had asked Gideon to help out once or twice, the duties had hardly been onerous.
He’d been able to stick to his clean-bed, private-bath stipulations by driving out in the rented Fiat to meet the group every morning, spending the day with them, then getting a taxi back to the morning’s starting point—they covered only five or six miles a day, so it was easy enough—getting back into the car, and returning to the Hotel Primavera in Stresa for a solitary, enjoyable glass of wine, usually at a sidewalk café, and a good meal in one of the town’s many restaurants. Everything seemed to be working out just fine.
Well, almost. By day four he was feeling a bit like a fifth wheel—unneeded and maybe a little in the way. Or it could have been that he was simply getting restless. Gideon was one of that unfortunate breed who could take only a few days of pure vacation at a time before he began to get twitchy. He needed something to do. Classes had been out for almost two weeks, and it had been two months since he’d finished his last forensic case. He wished now that he’d brought a paper or a course curriculum to work on, although he knew that there would have been no way to do that without hauling a great load of research materials to Italy with him. And regardless of how much he brought, the items he would turn out to need wouldn’t be among them; he’d learned that through experience. Still, that didn’t prevent him from feeling vaguely guilty and at loose ends.
The tour members, by and large, were pleasant enough—mostly middle-aged, travel-experienced couples from around the United States, appreciative and undemanding. However, as he soon learned, the Prime Law of the Classroom—in every group of students, no matter how delightful otherwise, there must be one whose mere presence makes you cringe—also applied to tour groups. (This law, as all professors knew, was so immutable that even if you were lucky enough to somehow get rid of the offending member, another would invariably come forward in his or her place.)
In the case of the Italian Lakes Pedal and Paddle Adventure, the inevitable fly in the ointment, or maybe it was the straw that broke the camel’s back, was Paula Ardlee-Arbogast, one of the few singles and the quietest and most retiring of the group—a stick-thin, flat-muscled woman of forty-five who kept pretty much to herself. But on the fourth day, after Gideon had helped the group stow their kayaks in the racks at the Campeggio Paradiso “camping village”—jammed, as they all seemed to be, even on a wet, gloomy day like this—and after he’d taken his now-customary “quality time” walk alone in the rain with Julie along the lake, Paula approached him respectfully just after he’d called for a taxi from the public telephone. He was seated, soaked to the skin despite his windbreaker, at a covered picnic table, waiting for it to arrive.
She hesitated. “Am I bothering you?” She was wearing a plastic raincoat, but she looked as waterlogged as he was. Dripping, ginger-colored hair hung in strings beneath the brim of a transparent rain hat.
“Of course not,” he said. “Sit down, get out of the rain.”
She sat on the bench across from him, shoulders hunched, hands clasped in her lap, screwing up her courage. “This is fantastic!” she surprised him by gushing. “I can’t believe I’m actually here talking to you.” Her eyes were stretched wide. “I read your book.”
“Oh, did you?” Gideon asked. He had two books to his credit: A Structuro-functional Approach to Pleistocene Hominid Phylogeny, a 400-page text now in its third edition; and Bones to Pick: Wrong Turns, Dead Ends, and Popular Misconceptions in the Study of Humankind, a popular treatment for the general reader, published last year. Whenever a stranger would come up to him and say “I read your book,” he had a pretty good idea which one they were referring to. Not that it happened often enough to do anything but please him.
“I thought it was absolutely fascinating.”
“Thank you.” Bones to Pick, all right. “Fascinating” wasn’t a word likely to be applied to A Structuro-functional Approach.
“Especially the chapter on the contribution of demographic factors to the demise of the Neanderthals. I’m very interested in the Neanderthals.”
He blinked. Amazing. The woman had actually read A Structuro-functional Approach! Other than graduate students and professional colleagues, this was a first. “Well, thank you,” he said, this time with complete sincerity.
“I wanted to ask you—uh, do you have a minute?”
“Sure, I’m just waiting for a taxi to show up. What did you want to ask?” A professor through and through, he was always ready to talk about his subject with an interested audience.
“I wanted to ask your opinion of the EBE-interference theory.”
“Um . . . I’m not sure I’m familiar—”
“The theory that EBEs interfered genetically with hominid evolution seven hundred thousand years ago? You see, because wouldn’t that explain why the Neanderthals died out so suddenly? That they were simply a genetic experiment that didn’t pan out, so that the EBEs gave up on them and replaced them with us?” She was burbling excitedly away now, rattling out more words than he’d heard her speak in all four days put together. “I mean, couldn’t it be that all we are is a kind of new, improved-model android that’s doing the EBEs’ work without our even being aware of it?”
“Well, now . . .”
“I’m sure you know about the briefing paper that was submit
ted to President Clinton from the Science Advisory Committee in 1994, that the government tried to hush up, and then there was President Eisenhower’s Executive Memorandum, NSC 5410—” She made herself stop speaking the way a child does, clapping a hand over her mouth. “I’m talking too much. It’s just that I’m so excited. Anyway, what do you think?”
“What,” Gideon made himself ask, “are EBEs?”
“What are—?” She couldn’t believe it. “Extraterrestrial biological entities. EBEs.”
“Oh,” said Gideon, “those.” He threw a glance over her shoulder, hoping for the appearance of the taxi, but no relief was in sight. “Well, truthfully, the evidence is somewhat . . . scant.”
“Oh, no, we have their own word for it.”
“The Neanderthals?”
“No, of course not,” she said, laughing. “The EBEs. I went to a talk in April—this was back in Iowa—by David Moody, who’s been abducted three separate times by EBE research craft—he’s written a wonderful book about it, with some amazing photographs—and he told us that Garnoth-Thoth—oh, I’m sorry, Garnoth-Thoth is their chief life-form scientist—told him that they’d interfered—that was Garnoth-Thoth’s word, ‘interfered’—with the proto-human genome at that time, and I just don’t know whether to believe it or not, because, I mean, Garnoth-Thoth hasn’t always been truthful, so that’s why I wanted to know what you thought about it.” She stopped, out of breath.
“Well, frankly, Paula,” he began slowly, not wanting to offend but not wanting to give any credence to this depressing nonsense either—not wanting to have this conversation at all, in fact. “My own view—” He brightened. “Oh, darn, here’s my taxi. I’m afraid I have to go.”
“That’s all right, Dr. Oliver,” she said agreeably. “There’s plenty of time. Maybe I can catch you at lunch tomorrow? There’s so much else I want to ask you.”
