Gun Metal Heart

by Dana Haynes

  “I think so, sir.”

  Antic leaned forward, his thin neck elongating. “For too many centuries our people have been known as the keepers of grudges. A people who believe in the thousand-year-old feud. During the war, Skorpjo was a plague on Bosnia. Horrible, horrible war crimes. That this organization still exists in Serbia is terrible. But…” He raised one arthritic finger for emphasis. “The White Scorpions are not officially part of the Serbian regime today. They have been thoroughly denounced.”

  John had produced his Moleskine notepad and pen. He looked up and smiled. “‘Officially?’”

  Antic’s eyes gleamed behind his round glasses. “Good, Mr. Broom. You pay attention to details. Officially, Skorpjo are just hoodlums. But they still carry out orders for some of those in power in Belgrade.”

  “Who?”

  “I would start by keeping an eye on Dragan Petrovic. A member of the Serbian Parliament.”

  John wrote the name phonetically. “I assume this Petrovic would deny any knowledge of Skorpjo?”

  Antic shrugged and puffed out his lower lip. “Of course! Mr. Petrovic is a man beyond reproach. A statesman, yes? He has impeccable taste, a beautiful wife, three lovely daughters. Such a man would know nothing of these hooligans.”

  John spoke fluent Diplomat. “Naturally.”

  “And if you were to get to Belgrade to ask him, I’m afraid he would be unavailable. Doubtless, Mr. Petrovic is quite busy these days.”

  “Busy?”

  The old man nodded gravely. “Dragan Petrovic has been promoted to acting foreign minister of Serbia. After the untimely death of his predecessor. In a hotel in Florence, Italy.”

  John sat, his pen hovering over his notepad. Diego grunted, shook his head a little.

  John said, “Holy shit … sir.”

  Zoran Antic laughed and reached across the table and patted the back of John’s hand. “Yes. As you Americans put it so poetically, Mr. Broom. Holy shit indeed.”

  Washington, D.C.

  The director of the CIA sat in the overstuffed chocolate leather chair in Senator Singer Cavanaugh’s office and sipped the senator’s coffee. It was 6:00 A.M.

  Singer stood leaning on his cane. “The Gang wants to be sure we’re getting the full report on this mess in Italy. You understand.”

  The director nodded. “Absolutely, Senator.”

  The Gang of Nine is the unofficial top echelon of decision makers on Capitol Hill when it comes to military and intelligence issues. They included the ranking Democrat and the ranking Republican in both the House and Senate; Singer Cavanaugh, as chair of the Joint Intelligence Committee; and the ranking Republicans and Democrats of the House Intelligence and Senate Intelligence Committees.

  The director leaned forward, elbows on the knees of his Saville Row suit. “As soon as the Agency knows anything, we will pass it on to you. Guaranteed.”

  Singer sipped from his own cup. “And you’ve no word on this Daria Gibron?”

  “Not that I’ve heard. But I think the Mossad is taking point on tracking her down. She was an Israeli intelligence asset originally. The Israelis are looking into what role she may or may not have played in the Florence thing.”

  “So when you find out about her…?”

  “I will call you, Senator.” The director put extra emphasis on the words I and you, as opposed to our agency and your office.

  Singer said, “Fine, fine. Thank you.” His desk phone rang.

  The director stood and handed the older man his cup, buttoning his suit coat. “We appreciate the support we get from you on the Hill, Senator.”

  Singer’s phone rang again. “Of course. Say hello to Marjorie for me.”

  “I will, sir. Oh, she attended the gala that Adair organized for Johns Hopkins last week. Said it was a helluva time. A helluva time.”

  The phone rang a third time. The director of the CIA glanced toward it.

  Singer set down the cups on his desk. “I’ll let her know. Thanks again, Bruce.”

  “Any time, sir.”

  The phone rang a fourth time.

  Singer drawled, “You might wanna get that.”

  The director blinked. “Senator?”

  The phone rang a fifth time.

  Singer limped around his desk. “The phone. I think it’s for you.”

  As he settled himself into the desk chair, the director tentatively reached for the senator’s desk phone, paused, then picked it up and identified himself.

  “Yes…? Admiral? How the hell … the Pentagon said…? The budget is … A secret hold on what?”

  The director stood, frozen. Singer used the side of his rough, calloused thumb to open the seam on an envelope and unfold the letter therein. The director listened. His face changed from pink to red to scarlet.

  Singer began reading the letter in the envelope.

  The director said, “I’ll handle it … I said: I’ll handle it!”

  He slowly hung up the phone.

  Singer held the letter in one hand and tapped it with the fingernails of the other. It was cheap paper, the kind found in any store. “Constituent mail. Nothing like it. Here’s a woman in Ville Platte wants trees dug up along her street because their roots are raising the sidewalk pavers. But the city says ‘no.’ So she writes her senator.”

  The director of the CIA clenched his teeth so hard they ached. He withdrew his hand from the receiver and realized it was damp with sweat. He steeled himself, then spoke without separating his teeth. “Gibron was at the hotel. We suspect she was trying to steal an aeronautic prototype. We’ve examined the bodies and know she didn’t die inside. She went to ground, but she’s subsequently been spotted hitching a ride to the town of Turin, about six hours ago. IASI will pick her up for questioning. Our Rome station chief is en route, to participate in her interview.”

  Singer raised his bushy eyebrows. He had deliberately sat down when the other man was standing, so as not to tower over him. It was a trick Singer had picked up as a prosecutor: make the other guy think he’s in the dominant position.

  “No kidding! Bruce, that’s fine. Thank you.”

  The director felt sweat prick his forehead and his upper lip. “That budget line item…”

  Singer said, “Which line item?”

  “The one…” There was no way he could say, the black budget line item we didn’t think you knew about. He willed himself to breath. “Nothing, Senator.”

  “Anyway, thank you again, Bruce. You’re a lifesaver. I’ll be sure to tell the president.”

  The director chanted to himself one … two … three … then cleared his throat. “Thank you, Senator.”

  He walked stiffly to the door, moving as if his knees had forgotten how to bend.

  Singer returned to reading about the sidewalk-destroying trees of Ville Platte.

  * * *

  It was just 4:00 A.M. Mountain Time. Colonel Olivia Crace had left the observation area to get some coffee and a bowl of oatmeal. She had no idea how long the day to come would last. The salesman, Todd Brevidge, and the American Citadel board members were nowhere to be seen at that hour.

  She avoided the observation lounge and strolled confidently into the control room, rolling up one sleeve of her pale denim shirt.

  Bryan Snow and his two in-house pilots blinked up from their screens as she entered the darkened room. One of the pilots had plugged his iPod into the PA system and was pumping out classic Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.

  “Status?”

  Someone turned down the music. Snow and the pilots exchanged glances. The chief engineer said, “Didn’t know anyone was still up.”

  The basement air was stuffy from hours of work and poor circulation, but Snow hadn’t noticed it until that moment.

  Crace stared at him and began rolling up the other sleeve with careful, symmetrical folds. She had asked a question. She would wait for an answer.

  It took Snow close to six seconds to realize her greeting had been in the form of a question
. “Oh. We’re nearly there. The truck. It’s nearly there.”

  Colonel Crace mulled the information. “Where?”

  Snow adjusted his voice wand and tapped a key on one of the three keyboards before his chair. “Away Team: Hit your GPS, please.”

  He turned to one of his in-house pilots. “Gary, bring it up, please.”

  With a few clacks in the otherwise quiet control room, one of the screens before Snow’s chair lit up. It showed a map of northwestern Italy with a red dot near the town of Turin. The map showed a mountainous region to the west, then a portion of southeastern France.

  Snow’s chair sat in the center of a dais, ten feet in diameter and six inches higher than the rest of the room. Crace stepped up onto the dais next to his chair.

  “Traffic?”

  “Yeah. It’s slowed down the truck. Doesn’t matter, though. We have two complete suites of Mercutio and Hotspur drones. We’ve sent one suite of both ahead of the truck. They can stay airborne for three hours. If the truck hasn’t caught up to them, we just send those drones back and swap them out with the other suite while the first group recharges using the truck battery.”

  Crace stared at the one lit screen. She rested a hand on the back of his chair. Bryan Snow stiffened when he felt the chair swivel an inch.

  “Why heavy traffic? It could be a factor.”

  Snow said, “It won’t be. Probably. You know, there’s a coffee machine in the break room. We can feed all the images into the observation lounge.”

  Crace said, “No thanks.”

  Snow inhaled, then swiveled his chair toward her. He knew it would swing the seat back out from under her hand.

  “We’d prefer you observe from the observation lounge.”

  Crace turned and looked down at him. “Why?”

  Snow couldn’t say, because Major Arcana could contact me at any time. He stared directly up into her laser-precise vision. “Because I want controllers in my control room and observers in the observation lounge. Because that’s the way my team and I operate. Colonel.” He gave it a pause before adding her rank.

  Crace appreciated straight talk. She made him wait a couple of seconds, then crooked one corner of her lips into an almost smile. “Fair enough.”

  She stepped back down off the dais, and Snow silently exhaled. As she moved to the door, Colonel Crace spoke over her shoulder. “Let me know when the birds reach Gibron.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Also, find out what’s going on in Turin that…”

  Her voice faded. She stopped walking.

  Snow turned to her.

  She spun. “Turin?”

  “Yeah. Like in ‘Shroud of…’ I think. I don’t know—”

  Crace marched back to him. “Bring up a news site. An international news site.”

  One of the pilots said, “We monitor all breaking news, as well as law enforcement and public safety Web sites, ma’am. We—”

  She said, “Get me ESPN. Or Fox Sports.”

  One of the pilots began banging away at his keyboard. Seconds later a monitor blinked to life and quickly turned to a sports cable channel.

  The other pilot squinted at the screen. “Wait. That’s … is that Turin?”

  Crace nodded. “It’s the Tour.”

  “Tour?”

  “Tour de France.”

  Twenty-Three

  The Tour de France doesn’t start in France. Not most years. It starts elsewhere, like England or Belgium or, that year, in Italy.

  That year’s Tour featured twenty-three teams. Each team had nine bicyclists. Each rider was wearing a transceiver low on his back, with an earjack that let him communicate with the team captain, as well as with the team managers traveling by car or motor home behind the two-hundred-plus scrum of riders called a peloton. The riders also could communicate with ancillary spotters who rode motorcycles in front, behind, and, quite often, amid the peloton.

  Besides having talented and attentive drivers and riders, each team of bicycles and motorcycles and cars had its own communication frequency.

  The Tour de France is one of the most widely covered sporting events in the world. That year’s tour included credentialed newspaper, magazine, radio, television, and Web-based journalists from six continents and twenty-eight countries. It was estimated that one in five television microwave trucks in all of Europe was assigned to the Tour. The military and civilian airspace above each stage of it had to be carefully controlled by NATO to clear space for the helicopters, which would range from six to sixteen per day.

  Fixed-wing airplanes also provided coverage.

  In an increasingly homogenous journalism world, fans could watch the race online or on TV in virtually any language. That meant each team of journalists competed against the others. And each team used its own communications frequencies.

  After the previous decade’s terrorist attacks on the United States, England, and Spain all law enforcement, military, and intelligence agencies had determined that big public events like the Tour were especially vulnerable. For the Italian stage of the Tour, every public safety agency in a two-hundred-kilometer radius was on high alert. Every agency had personnel in the field or in the air. And each agency had its own frequencies.

  It was estimated that each stage of the three-week tour would field anywhere from twenty thousand to forty thousand fans. Sometimes they lined the straightaways between the villages. Sometimes they braved the cold and wind of the uphill half of the mountain stages, waiting for the monolithic peloton, its two hundred bikes, ancillary motorbikes, and follow cars to lug past them, churning slowly, defying gravity. Sometimes the thousands of fans filled the villages to overflowing. For the townspeople along the route traffic would transform sleepy villages into bustling metropolises and back again, all inside twenty-four hours.

  One in eight fans along the route would use Twitter. One in nine would use Facebook. One in seventeen would use Instagram. And one in 1.3 carried an active cell phone.

  Which meant the cell towers were pushed far beyond endurance long before the first racing bike arrived.

  The Tour de France did not tour.

  It raged.

  Sandpoint, Idaho

  Bryan Snow attacked his keyboard. His two in-house pilots attacked their keyboards. Everyone leaned forward. The first acrid taint of flop sweat began to fill the control room.

  Colonel Crace stood on Snow’s dais and watched the screens. Her hands formed fists.

  “Nothing!” Snow growled, and paused to wipe sweat off his upper lip. “Nothing. Jesus … nothing.”

  One of his pilots turned and, even in the bad lighting of the hidden subbasement, he looked pallid. “Confirmed,” the pilot said. “As soon as the drones hit that goddamned race! All comms are off. We got nothin’. We are blind, deaf, and dumb.”

  Northern Italy

  Daria watched the sky. There were no clouds, but the sky was filled with helicopters hovering between five hundred and one thousand feet, and with propeller-driven airplanes flying higher.

  She stared through borrowed aviator glasses, but it was so bright she still squinted.

  She had seen two hawks. And three hummingbirds. But that had been an hour earlier. They were nowhere to be seen now.

  It was too hot to wear leathers, but Daria still wore the fuchsia-and-black uniform of Team Tarantola. The form-fitting bodysuit—leather trousers, tight leather bomber, riding boots—featured no fewer than ten company logos. Daria had gone into battle many times, but she had never before done so as a walking billboard for Amstel Beer or Barclays Bank.

  Riders on the Tour de France do not wear leather, but the aides on motorbikes do.

  Daria had explained to Gianni Docetti why she needed to ride one of the ancillary motorcycles during the race. It had taken some effort and flirtation to convince him.

  Daria then explained it to team manager Paco Montoya. It had taken some talking and, admittedly, some threats regarding her hinted-at relationship with the U.S. Drug
Enforcement Administration. She knew the right names to drop, she sprinkled the verb doping liberally, and he quickly saw the light.

  Now Daria was assigned as a support rider. She would drive one of the team’s tough little Moto Guzzi motorbikes while a small-boned but steady-handed Basque named Estebe carried a small video camera and sat behind her. They would ride slightly apace with, and sometimes ahead of, the peloton, shooting live video of the route and looking for obstructions or potential hazards or fans too stupid to get out of the way of the oncoming wall of riders. The video feed would be transmitted back to Paco Montoya and the coaches of Team Tarantola.

  Daria would ride the one route in all of Western Europe that could keep her away from the eyes and the ears and the bullets and missiles of the micro-drones.

  * * *

  Not eighty meters to her left, a tempest rocked another group of participants: Team Rostelecom.

  The Russian-telecom-financed team figured to do well in that year’s Tour de France. The team had a world-class leader, exceptional secondary riders, a great manager, and one of the best fat-cat sponsors in all the world: Rostelecom, provider of more than 50 percent of the long-distance telephone service in Russia.

  Despite that, the manager of Team Rostelecom sat in a Winnebago a mile behind the starting line pounding the walls and screaming obscenities in Russian. He had just lost communications with two of his outriders: men on Kawasaki motorcycles.

  * * *

  Behind a closed service station in Turin, Owen Cain Thorson and Jake Kenner pulled on leather jackets in the cream-and-teal colors of Team Rostelecom. The outriders wouldn’t wake up before being found and transported to a hospital. By the time they did recover it would be too late for authorities to do anything about it.

  Kenner kept one eye on Thorson. “You lost a lotta blood, dude. We should—”

  Thorson gingerly slid on a motorcycle helmet, pulling outward on its edges as it slid painfully over his swollen cheek and oozing, possibly septic, ear.

  “Pink and black,” he rasped. “She’s wearing pink and black.”

  “Yeah. I seen her.”

  Thorson was sweating, but then he’d been sweating since they left the safe house in Florence. His skin looked pinkish, and he radiated fever. “Hundreds of bikes,” he said. With his swollen cheek, it came out hunners abikes. “Dozens of motorcycles. Thousands of fans. We hit her in the mountains. Don’t worry about what I said earlier. About my talking to her. I don’t need to talk to her.”