by Andy McNab
Inside, the Aeroporto di Napoli Capodichino couldn’t seem to make up its mind whether it wanted to be a designer boutique and sushi franchise or a bus station. But, being Italian, it didn’t give a shit. I liked that.
I helped myself to a fistful of leaflets at the hotel reservation desk in the arrivals hall and circled the twenty I thought Dijani would be most likely to stay in. They were all on or near the waterfront. I started calling them in alphabetical order from the nearest payphone. It was a long shot, but still worth a try.
The Continental was first on my list. It seemed suitably grand and had a commanding view of the castle and the western side of the bay. Whatever, the receptionist didn’t recognize his name.
By the time I’d had the same response from the next fourteen on my list, I was flagging. Number sixteen was the Paradiso. Another negative. Maybe Dijani didn’t feel the same way about the afterlife as Hesco had. The seventeenth was the Romeo. I tapped in the number and repeated my request. By now I sounded like a recorded message.
‘I’m extremely sorry, sir. You’ve missed him. Mr Dijani was staying with us last night. He checked out earlier this morning.’
‘You don’t know where he went, do you?’
She was even more apologetic. ‘I’m afraid we can’t share that kind of information, sir …’
It wasn’t the best I could hope for, but it wasn’t the worst either. It told me I was on target. It also told me that the clock was ticking on whatever these fuckers had planned.
I took the shuttle to the car-hire area and was handed the keys to a white Seat Leon twenty minutes later. It had just two hundred Ks on the clock and was so factory fresh that some of the interior was still coated with plastic wrapping.
Keeping my Nick Savage passport and driving licence, and a bundle of euros in my jacket, I put the rest of my cash and Nick Browning’s ID in a plastic bag under the spare tyre in the bottom of the boot, then replaced the lining. I got behind the wheel, opened Frank’s map at the large-scale grid of Naples and aimed for the city centre.
I navigated my way to a two-storey underground car park in the Via Shelley where there was loads of neon and twenty-four-hour security, and none of the wagons looked like they’d been recently looted. I slid Hesco’s laptop under the driver’s seat, pocketed the binos, left the day sack in the boot and stuck a couple of hairs across the crack when I’d closed it.
Luca didn’t want me to show up at the Il Diavolo office, and I wasn’t about to argue with that. Given the kind of hard-nosed journalism they were known for, it was bound to be a target. He’d asked me to come to the back of a mate’s mattress store on the Via Annunziata instead. Unless he was just short of sleep, it meant he was already on high alert. He’d fixed for us to meet at 19:30, which gave me about six and a half hours to kill.
My plan was to familiarize myself with the lie of the land around the RV, recce the Romeo, then head for the docks. I’d kick off by checking the unloading bays for Nettuno containers and try to bring myself up to speed with the latest rumours on the people-smuggling circuit.
I’d bounced around on the cobblestones on the drive in. Now I was on foot I realized they were everywhere, in all shapes and sizes. Either the town planners were in the quarry Mafia’s pocket, or they believed you couldn’t have too much of a good thing.
The merchants along the Via Annunziata seemed to feel the same way about budget bedding and kids’ clothes and toys. Every single shop sold one or the other. And the magic was clearly working. The pavements were crammed with people. Wagons were double-parked up one side, leaving zero tolerance for the one-way traffic. I made a mental note to keep the Seat where it was. A quick getaway would be out of the question here.
One of the things I loved about the Italians was that they never changed their style for anybody. Apart from the massive yellow and grey façade of the local church, the whole street needed a power spray, and a pile of rotting rubbish had spilt across the pavement opposite, but nobody seemed to care.
Luca’s mate’s store was thirty beyond the overflowing wheelie-bins on the right-hand side. I wandered past, looking in most of the windows, as you do when you’re hoping to pick up a nice bargain to take home. A good few doorways and open-fronted workshops provided cover for both concealment and surveillance.
I didn’t stay long. It made no sense drawing attention to myself. I headed to the Romeo via a choggy shop in the back-streets where I replenished my stock of previously enjoyed Nokias.
The hotel was a shiny glass-and-steel monster about eight blocks from where I’d left the Seat. It looked like it had made the journey from another planet and come in to land beside the hydrofoil pier. I could see why Dijani fancied it. It had great views across the harbour and the water, and was so stylish it made your bollocks ache.
Hoping that my jeans and jacket would be mistaken for shabby chic and my six-day growth for designer stubble, I strolled inside. I kept the baseball cap on. The wound on my head was still livid enough to put people off their lunch, and that made it an identifying feature.
I headed straight for the lift. I wasn’t in the mood for see-thru table football or a visit to the screening room and the virtual golf driving range. As I was being propelled soundlessly to the restaurant and bar on the ninth floor, I heard Frank’s voice again: ‘Italian design, German hydraulics …’ His favourite combo. I just wished his elevator chat didn’t keep drowning out the other stuff he must have told me. I knew he had a place near Brindisi. Had he mentioned Naples?
It was the maître d’s pleasure to guide me to the corner table on the roof terrace. He showed no disappointment when I ordered a club sandwich and Diet Coke instead of Beluga caviar and Stolichnaya. He was too chilled for that. Or maybe he wasn’t on commission and didn’t give a shit.
I got some designer water and crusty bread down my neck as I waited for my order, and gave the binos some exercise. I could see a fair distance along the main, which fringed the port, but pointed them at Vesuvius first because that’s what everyone else in the world must do. The cloud had lifted a fraction. The mixture of heat haze and pollution softened its outline and turned the buildings that surrounded its lower slopes to gold.
When I’d finished the token sightseeing I adjusted the focal length and zeroed in on each of the quays that lined the seafront. There was no shortage of Maersk and ZIM and Christian Salvesen container ships, and plenty of passenger liners closer to me. On my second sweep, I spotted a lone Nettuno cargo vessel in the distance.
My club sandwich and Coke arrived, and between mouthfuls, I scanned the fence that separated the main from the outer parts of the dock. There were any number of ways through it, where either the chain-link had surrendered to time and repeated attacks by the salt spray, or simply been ripped apart by whoever wanted to get in and out without troubling the security detail.
I left a pile of cash on the table when I’d finished most of the sandwich and all the Coke, including the ice and slice of lemon.
When I stopped on my way through the foyer to ask Reception if my old mate Adel was around, I got the same answer I’d been given on the phone.
I summoned up my biggest shit-eating grin. ‘He told me he’d be here quite often over the summer. He’ll be back any day now, right?’
The guy behind the desk was as warm and friendly as TripAdvisor could have wished for, but he wasn’t about to give me access to the future plans of the Romeo’s elite guest list either.
It was time for me to rejoin Planet Earth.
I crossed Via Cristoforo Colombo and turned left. It didn’t take long to move from the Gucci end of town to where the real people hung out. A few were wrapped in minging old blankets, sleeping bags and sheets of cardboard up against the wire. A bunch of others sheltered in the lee of one of the storage depots. The woman running the flower stall close by didn’t give them a second glance. She’d seen it all before.
I remembered having a chat with a lad in the 82nd Airborne who’d once been a Los Angeles
street cop in South Central. He told me that crimes whose victims were hookers or crack addicts or hopheads – or simply below the breadline – were classified as NHI. No Humans Involved. These sad fuckers would come under that heading for sure.
I didn’t expect any of them to have come in off the boats from Africa or Eastern Europe. The asylum seekers would either be locked up in an immigration facility, or legging it north as fast and invisibly as they possibly could. But maybe they could tell me if Minerva rang any bells, or if anything unusual had been happening around there.
I stopped by the second group of dossers I came to and asked if any of them spoke English. A few five-euro notes brought forward a young guy with zits, bad hair and a piercing who nodded a lot and said, ‘Si, si, si …’ but his version of English turned out to be nowhere near the same as mine. Whatever had come out of the bottle he was clutching was probably to blame.
A few of his mates clustered around me, but only because they liked the look of the euros. They stank of piss and none of them had anything useful to say in any language.
I backed off and carried on past a row of warehouses and several stacks of empty containers, until I reached where the real security began – five-metre-high railings topped with razor wire, which separated nosy fuckers like me from the working parts.
I paralleled it as far as the boat I’d spotted from the Romeo, with ‘NETTUNO’ painted across its side. When I was near enough to be able to read the lettering on its arse end as well, I could see it wasn’t Minerva. This one was Juno. But I decided to get as close as I could and try to grab a word with one of the crew.
Juno was moored beneath three cranes mounted on a giant mobile gantry. There was a lot of very energetic unloading going on. I couldn’t believe how many containers you could fit on one of those things. So it took a while for me to grab anybody’s attention. And even when I did, I was given the finger the first two times.
Ten minutes later another couple of guys came down the gangway. They were younger and bouncier than the ones who’d exited earlier. Judging by their banter, they seemed to be more in the mood for a chat. I gave them a wave and they wandered over to my stretch of railing.
‘Parliamo inglese?’ It was pretty much the only Italian I knew.
One of them shrugged his shoulders and looked embarrassed but the other nodded. ‘Sure. Who doesn’t?’ His accent carried more than a hint of American. Maybe he’d spent some time with the US Navy, or watched a load of Hollywood movies.
‘I’m on the lookout for a mate of mine who’s working on one of your boats.’
‘Ships.’
‘What?’
‘We call them ships.’
Fair one. I remembered telling Stefan we called bullets rounds. ‘Whatever. Not Juno. Minerva.’
His eyes lit up. ‘Lucky guy. She’s, like, awesome. Not massive, like some of those Maersk monsters, but the newest ship in the fleet. Word is she’s on her way back from the Bosphorus, along with Diana and Vesta.’ He grinned. ‘Kind of funny naming container vessels after Roman goddesses, don’t you think? I mean, they’re cool, but you wouldn’t call them beautiful.’
‘Will she park right here?’ I indicated Juno’s slot.
He shook his head. ‘Anything from the east goes east. Brindisi, I guess. Bari, maybe. Head Office would tell you.’
I was staying well away from there. For now, anyway. I needed to keep my powder dry.
I thanked him and turned to leave.
‘It’s “berth”, by the way.’ He couldn’t resist correcting me again. ‘She doesn’t park, she berths.’
I went back through the first available hole in the chain-link fence and took a wide loop to the parking garage, running through the usual anti-surveillance drills en route. The hairs were still in place on the Seat so I picked up my day sack and headed for the RV with Luca.
3
I walked up the steps to the yellow church’s entrance. They gave me a vantage-point diagonally opposite my target. I scanned the length of the street while appearing to concentrate hard on the laminated cards that introduced tourists to the history of the basilica and the paediatric hospital that were part of the complex. Back in the day there’d been an orphanage too.
I gave it ten minutes. No one seemed to be paying me too much attention, or bending over backwards to avoid looking at me at all.
A young couple was pointing at stuff in the window of Luca’s mate’s store and I joined them as they went inside. I spent some more time trying to decide which pillow to go for, then made my selection and took it to the till. As soon as the lad behind the counter heard my voice, he motioned me towards the back office.
I caught a stream of turbocharged Italian when I was still a couple of paces away from the door. The room was filled, floor to ceiling, with ledgers and fabric samples, some on wire hangers, some just piled on whichever work surface was nearest. A guy in his late thirties with tortoise-shell glasses on the top of his head sat facing me, waffling into a mobile.
Luca’s dark hair was longer than it had been when his Il Diavolo mugshot was taken. It was almost shoulder-length. He wore a brown moleskin jacket, immaculate jeans and a crisp white shirt. His feet were up on the only desk, and a laptop open on his knees. There was no air-con in here, and not much air, but he looked like he never broke sweat.
I had, big-time. I took off the baseball cap and wiped a small river of it off my forehead.
He waved me towards one of the two remaining chairs without pausing for breath. After a lot of ciaos and one or two bellos he pressed the red button, slid the laptop and the phone on to the table beside him and swung his feet to the floor.
‘You must be Nico.’
He sprang up, gave me the world’s warmest handshake and clapped me on the shoulder. Close up, his cheekbones and chin looked like they’d been carved out of granite, then polished, and his piercing blue eyes missed nothing. ‘All clear?’
‘Yup.’ I nodded. ‘I stopped by the church to make sure.’
‘Ah, yes. The Santissima Annunziata. Did you see the infamous ruota?’
‘The revolving basket in the wall? I just read about it. Is that shit for real?’
‘Sure. Desperate mothers used to put their babies in it. The nuns plucked them out once they were inside, washed them, labelled them, baptized them. And saved their souls, of course.’
‘Where I come from, they just dumped kids they didn’t want in carrier bags or wheelie-bins and did a runner.’
He chuckled, not knowing that I was speaking from personal experience. ‘They had to close it down when people started forcing their unwanted teenagers into the basket as well.’
There had been plenty of times when the woman I called Mum must have wanted to do that with me.
‘But enough social history. Pasha …’ He held out both hands, palms up. ‘Pasha says the most terrible things about you.’
‘Pasha is a very smart guy.’
‘And Anna is your … partner?’
‘You know her?’
‘I worked with her in Libya. Brilliant journalist. Incredible woman.’
I wasn’t expecting that. I probably should have done. The Middle East connection. Their world was a small one.
‘And che bella …’ His eyes sparkled. ‘Very beautiful, of course. You know, she always reminds me of the blonde one in Abba.’
‘Me too.’ I hesitated. ‘We’re not … together any more. Still mates, but … you know how it is …’
He nodded. ‘I know how it is.’
He did, too. I could tell by the look in his eyes.
He cleared a pile of fabric samples off an electric hob and fixed us both an espresso. As he completed the ritual and handed me one in a small thick glass with a metal base and handle, we talked about the people-trafficking drama.
I took a sip of my coffee. ‘I read your Mafia piece.’
‘The Sicilians have been making a fortune out of this shit since the Third Balkan War. And the Georgians, and the Russ
ians – from Moscow and St Petersburg. The Albanians, too. They are all over here.’
‘Do they have a subscription to Il Diavolo? They must love you.’
He smiled ironically and chewed at the corner of his lower lip. ‘It’s true to say that I’m not very popular with some of these guys. And having seen Pasha’s latest email, it seems that you’re not either.’ He rotated his laptop in my direction, lowered his glasses on to his nose, tapped the keyboard and brought up a series of photographs. None of them was posed. They all looked like they’d been snatched through car windows or from darkened doorways.
And they all featured two men, one of whom I recognized immediately. Shiny head. Sharply tailored suede jacket. Black skinny jeans. I hadn’t been near enough to admire his snakeskin cowboy boots when I’d seen him getting out of Hesco’s wagon at Aix-les-Bains. Or advancing towards me at the Adler construction site. Or rubbernecking outside what was left of Laffont’s bank yesterday night. But I was now.
I glanced up from the screen. ‘Do you have names?’
‘Of course.’ He pointed a finger at the bald guy. ‘Meet Elvis Uran.’ Then the other one. ‘And his kid brother, Rexho.’
I took a closer look at Rexho. He was a hairier, bearded version of the fucker I’d dropped beside the concrete pit. Same eyes and nose. No stiletto scar, but a badly burned neck instead.
And they both shared Hesco’s taste in rings.
‘I was told they want to kill me.’
‘Then I’m very glad that we are keeping in the shadows, Nico. These men are from Lushnja. And the Lushnja Mafia are the worst of the worst.’
I thought about what the Omani waiter had said about Mr Lover Man being a true believer. Hesco telling me that Allah had given the thumbs-up to drowning the refugees, and using jihad in his password. ‘They’re Muslims, right?’
Luca shrugged. ‘Along with more than half their fellow countrymen. Why do you ask?’
‘These arseholes may not be wandering around with detonators in their trainers, but they’re starting to smell like Islamic State to me. And everywhere I’ve been lately, IS fans have been up to some kind of shit. It’s going to happen here sooner or later.’
