Jonathan paid the bill and ambled outside. He looked up into the sky, considering what to do. Going back to work with Doctors Without Borders was out; so was returning to the camp in Kenya. The thought struck him that he might never be able to practice medicine again. He would need to reinvent himself. But as what? And where? He shrugged and began walking.
“Signore, per favore.”
Reflexively, Jonathan quickened his pace.
“Yes, you, signore!”
Jonathan glanced over his shoulder and saw that it was the busboy from the café, the kid who had brought him his breakfast. He stopped and turned to face him.
“The woman you asked about. The lady with the beautiful hair. I see her.”
Jonathan dug out the photograph. “Her?” he asked, flattening out the wrinkles. “You’re sure?”
“She was here in April. She ate at the café every morning. She was German, I think, but her Italian was very good.”
“Do you remember how long she was here?”
“Three or four days.”
“Was she with anyone?”
“No, she always ate alone. Are you her husband or something?”
“Or something,” said Jonathan. “It’s important that I find her.”
“Did you talk to her hotel? She was at the De La Ville. It is a few blocks up the road.” The busboy smiled sheepishly. “I followed her one day when she left. I wanted to ask if I could buy her a drink.” He lowered his eyes, signaling defeat. “I didn’t have the courage to ask her name.”
Jonathan patted the young man on the shoulder. “No apology necessary. Thanks for helping me out.”
“She was a kind person. You know, decent. You could see it in her eyes. The first genuine girl I met in a long time. Before you go, can you tell me something?”
“If I can,” said Jonathan. “Sure.”
“What is her name?”
“Lara.”
“Of course I remember Mrs. Bach,” said the manager of the Hotel De La Ville, studying the picture of Emma and Jonathan on the ski slope. He was a short, fastidious man, dressed in an immaculate gray suit that contrasted with the lobby’s seedy decor. “But who are you?”
“Her husband.”
“Her husband?” came the skeptical response. “You are Mr. Bach?”
Bach. Another name to go with another identity. “Yes, I’m Mr. Bach.”
“From France?”
“No,” said Jonathan, taken aback. “I’m American, but my wife and I lived all over. Our last residence was in Geneva.”
The manager looked at him a moment longer, then walked behind the reception desk and punched a blizzard of commands into the computer. “Your wife checked in on April fifteenth. She was here four days, then she disappeared. Not a word. Not a call. I phoned the police, but no one has heard of her. Is she all right?”
“She’s fine. She had an accident while she was here and had to spend some time in the hospital. Do you still have her belongings?”
“I’m sorry, but I gave them to the other man who was here asking about her.”
Other man? No doubt the same person who’d checked her out of the hospital. “Tall guy,” tried Jonathan, fishing. “Dark hair.”
“No, in fact he was short like me. And older, with gray hair. He said he was her husband, too, but I did not believe him. Mrs. Bach is far too pretty for such a rough man.”
“What do you mean, rough?”
“He was not polite. A foreigner, but not like you. He paid the bill. Cash.” The manager crossed his arms, his brows raised in some Mediterranean mixture of apology, sympathy, and camaraderie. Women, he seemed to be saying. They could never be trusted.
“Do you know where he was from?”
“He spoke no Italian, only English, but with an accent. Maybe British. Maybe German. I really couldn’t say.”
Jonathan sighed, bitterly disappointed. “Well, thank you anyway,” he said, shaking the manager’s hand, then feeling stupid for doing it. For some reason he needed that contact. Putting on his sunglasses, he headed for the door.
“I do, however, have an address,” said the manager.
Jonathan spun and returned to the reception desk. “You do?”
“The man was very worried about your wife. He thought there might be other people inquiring about her. I got the feeling he did not trust her so much. Perhaps ‘suspicious’ is the better word. He asked me to contact him if anyone came to the hotel and asked about her.”
“And you said you would?”
“For five hundred euros, wouldn’t you?” The manager grew serious. “Do not worry. I will not tell him about you.”
“Thanks,” said Jonathan, not believing him for a second.
The manager went to his monitor and printed up a page with a phone number and the address Route de La Turbie 4, Èze, France.
Èze. A tiny medieval village carved into the mountainside overlooking the Mediterranean on the Côte d’Azur, a few kilometers from Monaco. Jonathan had driven through it, but never visited. It hardly seemed like a headquarters for a clandestine service that had employed Emma. Then again, he knew better than to be surprised.
Above the address was printed a company name: VOR S.A.
It was the same name given on the hospital bill.
52
“We tracked down the phone.”
“You’re sure?” asked Den Baxter of the Evidence Recovery Team.
“Oh, yeah. We’ve got it, all right. And there’s more, boss. You’d best get over here as soon as you can manage.”
Baxter checked his wristwatch as he ran up the stairs leading to the London Metropolitan Police’s forensics laboratory. It was just shy of nine. It had taken the Met’s team of technicians less than a day to piece together the fragments of the circuit board recovered at 1 Victoria Street and identify the make and model of the mobile phone used to detonate the car bomb aimed at Russian Interior Minister Igor Ivanov.
Twenty-one hours and forty-one minutes, to be exact.
Baxter kept track of such things.
Alastair McKenzie was waiting at the door to the lab. Baxter noted with pride that the man was wearing the same clothing as the day before. He smelled like last week’s garbage, but so what? Cleanliness might be next to godliness, but it didn’t do a thing to solve an investigation.
“Nearly killed myself getting over here,” said Baxter, taking McKenzie’s hand in his own and nearly crushing it. “Better be worth it.”
McKenzie’s answer was a tight smile and a direction to follow him.
Baxter entered a conference room and found a team of white-coated techs waiting. “Right, then,” he said. “Let’s hear it.”
“Keep in mind that we had bugger all to start with,” said Evans, the chief of the forensics squad. “Two grotty little remnants of the circuit board that Mr. McKenzie was kind enough to bring us, and that was it. We used a bit of epoxy to piece the board back together, cured it in the autoclave, and here’s what we came up with.” Evans handed Baxter a warped chunk of sky-blue plastic shaped like a wee pistol. “You can see the place for the screen, and here’s where the microphone goes. What gave it away was the placement of the antenna feed pad. Only Nokia puts it there. We had a look at their manuals and straightaway saw that it was a model 9500S.”
“Entry-level model,” piped up one of Evans’s assistants.
“Give ’em away free with a two-year subscription plan,” said another.
“But what’s most important,” continued Evans, “is that the 9500S is brand spanking new.” He took back the reconstructed piece of circuit board and held it up to the light for examination. “Problem was that we didn’t have the entire serial number. Now, every circuit board gets its own number. Costs the manufacturer a penny more, but it keeps out the counterfeiters and helps law enforcement in the bargain. This particular board showed a 4-5-7-1 and a 3. We checked it against the prototype and saw that it was missing the first two numbers. Here’s where we got lucky. I call
ed my counterpart over in Helsinki and we conferenced the boys at Nokia. Turns out that very few of the phones using these new circuit boards have been sold as yet. In fact, the only buyer is Vodafone. The lads at the company were only too glad to be of service, provided we kept quiet about its being one of their customers who planted the bomb.”
Baxter said he would do his best to keep the company’s name out of the news, but if it came to trial, the circuit board would have to be admitted as evidence.
“Fair enough,” responded Evans. “Here’s where the story gets interesting. Vodafone’s been selling the phone exclusively in the UK for the past two weeks. According to their records, phones manufactured with a circuit board ending in 4571 were sold in three metropolitan areas: Manchester, Liverpool, and London. My boys spent half of yesterday and all of last night calling every sales outlet and checking to see who did or didn’t have phones with the serial numbers in question. Turns out that neither Manchester nor Liverpool has placed their wares on the shelves yet. That left London, where batches beginning with 12 through 42 were delivered. Because it’s a new phone, the people at Vodafone were conducting what they called ‘a soft rollout,’ meaning they put a few on the shelves here and there to see if anyone liked the ruddy things. The warehouse manager looked round and confirmed that of batches beginning with the numbers 12 through 42, he still had 28 through 42. That means only batches 12 through 27 were gone. To make it short, we kept calling and narrowed down the place of sale of the phone used to detonate that bomb to three locations: Terminal Five, London Heath row; the Vodafone store on Oxford Circus; and an independent sales agent in Waterloo Station.”
“They still have them?” asked Baxter, who by now was perched on the edge of his seat, nearly driven mad by the wait.
“The store at Oxford Circus has all its phones with the serial numbers in question, and so does the sales agent in Waterloo Station.”
“So our phone was sold at Heathrow,” said Baxter.
“Five days ago, to be precise,” said Evans. “A cash transaction, I’m sorry to say.”
“The name? Was there a name?” He knew the answer. There had to be. Law required people to supply a name and identification when purchasing a mobile phone.
“Total nonsense, as was the address.”
“Dammit.” Baxter’s heart sank.
“Still, we do have some news that might be of use,” continued Evans.
“A number?” declared Baxter, rising out of his chair, fists clenched. “They sold the bloody phone with a SIM card, didn’t they?”
“SIM” stood for Subscriber Identity Module. It was the SIM card that gave a mobile phone its number as well as recording all information about calls placed to and from that handset.
“Not one SIM card, Mr. Baxter. Three.” Evans handed him a typed sheet.
Den Baxter grabbed it as if it were a lifeline. He thanked Evans profusely, then turned his attention to McKenzie. But instead of appearing happy, Baxter wrinkled his face in disgust. “We’re done here, lad. Get home now and take a shower. You smell like a rubbish bin.”
53
Jonathan ducked into the kiosk across the street from the Hotel De La Ville and purchased two newspapers, the Corriere della Sera and the International Herald Tribune. On its front page, the English-language paper carried a follow-up article about the London bombing. Jonathan was mentioned as an accomplice to the attack, but thankfully, there was no picture. The Italian paper carried a shorter article about the attack on an interior page. The latest Italian political shenanigans generated more than enough scandal to fill the headlines. Finished checking the papers, he tossed them into a trash can and headed down the main street, the Largo Plebiscito.
In the short time he’d been inside the hotel, the seaside town had sprung to life. Besides drawing visitors to view its ruins, Civitavecchia functioned as the main port of call for Mediterranean cruise ships visiting Rome. Earlier he’d counted no fewer than four liners docked in the harbor, and another three anchored at sea. It seemed that half the men and women crowding the street carried travel bags emblazoned with the name of one cruise line or another. Like mice fleeing a fire, they spilled out of hotels and tour buses and taxis and scurried toward the docks.
Threading his way through their ranks, Jonathan kept a sharp eye out for police. It was likely that Lazio had supplied them with a copy of Emma’s hospital admittance form. A savvy investigator would surmise Jonathan’s course of action and send men to scour the area. Jonathan paused, scanning the street. But it was far too busy to tell if anything was askance.
Ahead he saw the sign for the Hotel Rondo. Passing the hotel, he closed his fingers around the paper bearing the address of the man from France who’d rescued Emma from a Roman hospital and paid her hotel bill. VOR S.A. of Èze. But who was the man? And was he the same person Jonathan had glimpsed in the Rondo years ago? Jonathan had no doubt but that their relationship was professional. Why else would he foot her astronomical bills?
Apart from the address in France, Jonathan knew nothing more about him than that he was older, gray-haired, and spoke English with either a British or a German accent. Was he the person who had contracted her to carry out the car bombing? And if so, had Division’s attempt on her life been an effort to stop her? Jonathan could assume that if he was the “friend” Emma had come to visit in the first place, then he, too, must be an enemy of Division’s.
Still, one question held a key to all the others.
Who was Lara?
Somewhere in the distance he heard a tire squeal. A door slam. He stopped on a dime and searched up and down the street. He saw nothing to disturb him. Nerves. He wiped his forehead. Ahead, a sign pointed to the railway station. The nearest terminus to Èze was Nice, a seven-hour ride by train. He could not risk being cooped up in an enclosed space for so long. There had to be another way.
He continued walking down the hill, hoping to lose himself in the throngs along the docks. Rental cars were out. Hitchhiking was off the list. The only way would be to—
It was then that he heard the siren drawing near. It was close enough to make him jump, but before he could mark its distance, it cut off in midwail. He looked over his shoulder and noted a commotion two blocks down a side road. A man in a dark blue uniform and navy jodhpurs was pushing his way through the pedestrians. Two men followed him, hoisting a riot-control barrier. The men were carabinieri. Behind them came a squad of officers, moving authoritatively, submachine guns strapped to their chests, peaked caps pulled down low over the eyes.
Jonathan cut to the side of the street, taking up position near a coffeehouse. A line extended out the door, and he slid behind the waiting customers. He looked on helplessly as policemen positioned the barriers across the street. Their leader was speaking into a walkie-talkie, and it was apparent that he was coordinating his actions with someone else. Jonathan retreated along the street, hugging the storefronts.
Again he heard them before he saw them. A man’s shrill voice barking commands. Then, the sighting of the blue uniforms.
Panic rose in his throat. Jonathan hesitated, not knowing which way to go. Finally he turned and began to jog back down the hill. Instinct told him to get to the docks, where he might lose himself in the masses. As he neared the bottom, a navy Alfa Romeo marked with police insignia drew to a halt 20 meters away. Several more police cars pulled in behind it. Jonathan glanced over his shoulder and saw a line of uniforms advancing toward him. Retreat was no longer an option.
There were no side streets branching off to his right or left, either. He looked down the hill. The main coastal highway ran directly behind the police cars. And across the four-lane motorway began the embarcadero, which skirted the sea as far as the eye could see to the north and south. Traffic was congested, a stuttering procession of automobiles and buses belching exhaust into the humid morning air. He stood frozen as policemen piled out of the cars and milled about. All the while the tide of tourists and pedestrians flowed around and past hi
m.
What would Emma do?
Jonathan knew the answer immediately. There was really no other way.
Drawing a breath, he continued toward the police. He didn’t lower his head. He didn’t look away. He was wearing sunglasses, a baseball cap, and that was it. The front door of the Alfa Romeo opened and a svelte blond woman stepped out. She was dressed in a black pantsuit and white T, and she wore dark aviator sunglasses, but he knew her the moment he laid eyes on her. DCI Ford.
He watched as she scanned the crowd, flying right past him. Her head stopped and shot right back. She took off her sunglasses and, with less than 20 meters between them, locked eyes with Jonathan.
Jonathan darted a glance over his shoulder and saw a forest of blue uniforms, then he looked at Kate Ford and started to run. He ran straight at her, straight toward the Alfa Romeo, where at least three policemen were huddled in conversation, none of them paying either him or Ford the least attention.
“Ransom,” she called, but her voice was weak, too full of surprise to elicit shock, let alone attention.
Jonathan brushed past her. And as he did, an ungoverned lick of anger flared inside him. He was incensed at the sight of her, enraged by her unexpected presence, unable to comprehend the reason for her tenacity. He’d told her he had nothing to do with the bombing. Why did she persist in thinking otherwise? Rashly, he tossed a solid forearm that caught her square in the chest and sent her tumbling onto the hood of the automobile.
He could only guess what happened next. He wasn’t going to stop and find out. Concerned about her well-being, the other police would gather around her solicitously, granting him a precious few seconds, a precious few meters. He did know that the jab had felt damned good.
“Ransom!” The voice was louder now.
Accelerating, he jumped the concrete barrier and ran onto the motorway, dodging the slow-moving vehicles and dashing to the far side. A long line of cars and trucks waited to pass through a manned gate and be granted admittance to the sprawling dockyard complex. He made to his right, skirting the line of cars and running past a guardhouse. A ship’s horn blared long and loud. A hundred meters ahead, a jumble of passengers had begun disembarking from a liner. At the next dock, a platoon of cars was thundering up a loading ramp and into the belly of a ferry. Farther on, a train rolled on slowly, piled high with containers. Everywhere delivery trucks, mopeds, and taxis zipped back and forth.
Rules of Vengeance Page 29
