by James Becker
Bronson’s Italian was fluent, and hiring the mid-sized Peugeot was a reasonably simple process. Quicker than he had expected, he was handed the keys and directions to the car rental parking area. A few minutes after that, he pulled up outside the door of the arrivals hall to allow Angela to place her bags in the boot and climb into the passenger seat of the car.
‘How far do you want to go? Today, I mean?’ Angela asked as she did up her seat belt.
‘All the way, if possible,’ Bronson replied.
‘It is a hell of a long drive, though,’ said Angela.
‘I know, but I won’t be happy until we’re back in the UK and this is behind us. Anyway, while I’m driving you can get started on working out what that inscription is all about.’
The built-in satnav steered them through the outskirts of Milan until they picked up the ring road, the Tangenziale Ovest di Milano, to the south-west of the city. Near the district of Pero, Bronson turned on to the Autostrada Serenissima, which ran almost due west towards the French border. Driving through Switzerland would have been a shorter route, but he didn’t want any possible problems at the border, and thanks to Schengen there were no border controls of any sort between Italy and France.
While they drove, Angela talked, partly to rehash what they knew about the putative temple, the obliterated inscription and the killings, but mainly, Bronson knew, to keep him awake as the seemingly unending tarmac of the autostrada unrolled in front of them in the early morning. Simply staring at it was hypnotic, and there was surprisingly little traffic at that time of the day so any kind of an external stimulus was a bonus.
They made it into France and as far as an autoroute service station beyond Lyon before Bronson finally admitted defeat.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘but that’s it. If I try to drive any further I’m going to fall asleep at the wheel.’
‘There’s no hotel here,’ Angela pointed out, ‘so shall we just stay in the car?’
‘Unless you’ve a real problem with that, yes. I just need to close my eyes for a few hours, and then we can get on the road again.’
They ate the last of the sandwiches Angela had bought at the airport in Milan, then reclined their seats as far back as they would go and closed their eyes.
Bronson was snoring in minutes.
24
Milan
Stephen Taverner had enjoyed a much more comfortable time. The bedroom in the hotel was a decent size with a surprisingly luxurious en suite bathroom. The facilities passed him by, though, as all he could think about was getting some sleep.
In fact, he didn’t get anything like as long a sleep as he had been hoping: just after nine thirty that morning he was awakened by a knock at the door, and he stumbled over somewhat groggily to find out who it was. When he peered through the security spy hole he saw a man standing there in a white coat with a laden trolley beside him.
‘I didn’t order room service,’ Stephen said.
The waiter replied to him through the closed door in passable English.
‘I know that, sir,’ he said, ‘but we have a problem in the dining room and so all our guests are receiving a complimentary breakfast in their suites.’
For a second or two Stephen hesitated, the lure of the still-warm sheets in the bed competing with the appetizing prospect of fresh coffee and warm pastries. Then he released the safety chain on the door and turned the handle.
The instant he did so, the door was pushed open violently from the corridor, the side of it catching him a glancing blow on his head, which sent him staggering and tumbling to the floor. By the time he had recovered his senses, the waiter had pushed his way into the room along with the trolley, and was standing looking down at him, the white coat discarded behind him. Another man, heavily built, wearing a dark suit and exuding an air of menace, stood beside him, and both of them were holding automatic pistols of some kind, each equipped with a bulky suppressor. Behind the duo stood another figure, much smaller and slight. He, too, was dressed in a black suit that even to Stephen’s untutored, and at that moment also largely unfocused, eyes, looked extremely expensive.
Stephen glanced to one side, wondering if he could possibly escape, but the room door was already closed and the security chain in place. The lethal inevitability of the situation dawned on him and filled him with panic.
For several long seconds, none of the three men spoke, just stared down at the frightened archaeologist, their expressions impassive. Then the small man stepped out from behind his two companions and took a pace forward.
‘My name is Mario, and I have been asked to obtain some information from you, Mr Taverner.’ His voice was soft and refined, his English perfectly fluent. ‘If you wish to avoid a considerable amount of pain it will be in your own interests to tell me what I need to know. Matters like this can always be handled in at least two ways, and I’m extending to you the courtesy of letting you choose which.’
Taverner suddenly felt a warm dampness at his groin and realized that he had wet himself, the unmistakable menace implicit in what the man had just said simply terrifying him. He also realized in that moment of crystal clarity that he really should have taken Bronson’s advice and registered at the hotel under a false name and paid for the room in cash. But he had been mentally and physically exhausted when he’d arrived and hadn’t really taken Chris’s words very seriously – handing over his credit card and signing in with his real name had just seemed easier all round.
The man who’d been wearing the waiter’s jacket noticed the change in colour of the pyjama bottoms Stephen was wearing, and a smirk appeared on his face.
‘What do you want to know?’ The archaeologist’s voice quivered with emotion. ‘I’ll tell you anything I can. Anything I know,’ he added.
‘I know you will,’ Mario replied. ‘That has never been in any doubt. Let me start very simply by asking if you know where I can find’ – he broke off for a moment to look at a piece of paper he took from his pocket – ‘a woman called Angela Lewis?’
Stephen shook his head and the small man’s face changed instantly, the indifferent, slightly benign, expression replaced by one of unmistakable hostility.
‘Do you mean you don’t know or you won’t tell me?’ he asked. ‘There is an important difference.’
‘No, no,’ Stephen stammered. ‘I really don’t know. I mean, I know what she intended to do, but I’ve no idea where she is at the moment.’
‘Don’t try to be clever with me, Taverner. Just answer the question. I’m asking you politely at the moment, but that can always change. In an instant.’
‘Look,’ Stephen said, ‘all I know is that Angela and her ex-husband decided not to fly back to Britain but to drive there. I couldn’t face doing that – I was just too tired – so I came to this hotel to get some sleep and then fly back this afternoon. I don’t know if they hired a car and are still driving or if they’ve stopped to sleep in a hotel. Or they might have changed their minds and stayed somewhere here, or even taken a train out of Italy. I really don’t know.’
He was babbling in his eagerness to convince his unwelcome visitors that he was telling the truth.
‘We flew together from Kuwait City to Alexandria, then from Cairo to Sharm el-Sheikh and finally to Milan, but we separated in the arrivals hall at the airport. The last time I saw them they were standing together and talking. But I swear I have no idea where they are now.’
The three black-suited men stared down at Stephen, and for a moment or two none of them responded. Then Mario nodded.
‘This woman’s husband, or ex-husband, I think you said. Does he have a name?’ he asked, taking a pen from his pocket and preparing to write on the paper he was still holding.
‘Yes, yes. His name is Chris Bronson.’ Stephen didn’t even hesitate in implicating Bronson.
‘Spell that for me.’
Stephen did so, and the small man put away both the paper and the pen.
‘That’s better than nothing,�
� he said, almost to himself. ‘If he hired a car, he must have used a credit card and produced his driving licence. We can work on that.’
He reached back into his pocket, took out the piece of paper again, wrote something else on it, then tore off a strip and handed it to one of the men standing behind him. He switched to rapid-fire Italian, clearly issuing instructions, and when he’d finished the man nodded once, holstered his pistol after removing the suppressor, and left the room.
After the door had closed behind him, Mario glanced around the room before looking back at Stephen’s cowering figure.
‘Do you have a camera, Mr Taverner?’ he asked.
‘What?’
‘It’s a simple enough question. Just answer it. Do you have a camera?’
‘Yes, I do. It’s in my case, over there.’
‘And I see your laptop is already out and on the desk. Good.’
Mario looked back at Stephen.
‘There’s just one other answer I need from you,’ he said. Then he asked another question that made no sense at all to the frightened archaeologist.
‘Yes, of course,’ Stephen replied when he realized that the Italian was expecting an answer. ‘We all did,’ he added.
Mario nodded, took the paper from his pocket again, presumably to check that he had covered everything he needed to do, then replaced it and nodded again.
‘Now I don’t think we need to detain you any longer, Mr Taverner.’
A wave of relief washed over the terrified archaeologist.
‘I would hate you to be late for your next appointment,’ Mario added, with a wintry smile.
‘Appointment? I don’t have any appointments.’
‘Oh, I think you do, Mr Taverner. In this case, you have a very important and final meeting. With your maker.’
Stephen’s eyes widened in horror as he realized what the man was saying, but before he could move, or even say anything, Mario made a single gesture and his companion took a half step forward, aimed his pistol at Stephen’s chest and pulled the trigger. A simple execution.
The weapon coughed once, the noise sounding like a heavy, wet slap, and the archaeologist slumped backwards as the bullet tore through his heart. For good measure, the gunman fired twice more, once into his chest and the third bullet through his forehead.
Then he calmly unscrewed the suppressor from the end of the barrel and slipped it into his jacket pocket and replaced the pistol in his underarm holster.
‘An easy morning’s work,’ Mario said in Italian. ‘Pack up his laptop and charger, then find his camera and check for anything else that could contain images.’
Before the two men left the room they took half a dozen photographs of the dead man, including close-ups of the bullet wounds. The contract that had been accepted by them had been quite specific in a number of details, but the two most important conditions were that any piece of electronic equipment capable of storing images was to be recovered and then sent by courier to an address in Baghdad, and unambiguous photographic evidence of the termination of the principals was to be supplied before the agreed payment would be released.
The problem was that because the targets had split up, he had only been able to fulfil a part of the contract, and the probability was that the Lewis woman and her ex-husband were now beyond the reach of his criminal organization. But at least he hoped he would be able to start following the trail and establish how the two people had left Milan.
It would be fairly easy to find out if they had hired a car, if Taverner had been right in his belief, and his contacts in the carabinieri would be able to provide both a description of the vehicle and the registration number. In that case it could possibly be traced as it made its way through France. Of course, tracing it and stopping it were two entirely different matters, but that would not be his problem.
He had already instructed his man to begin checking with the car hire companies, and it shouldn’t take too long for the results to come in. With his influence, things tended to happen immediately. He’d told his man to initiate checks on all rentals for the two hours after the Sharm flight had touched down, to allow time for them to have passed through customs and immigration. Only if that produced no results would he start asking questions at the railway stations in the city.
Less than ten minutes after Stephen had been shot, the two dark-suited men walked out of the hotel and across the street to where two other men waited in a black Alfa Romeo saloon, the smoked-glass windows making it impossible to see who was inside it.
‘Give me a phone,’ Mario said, as the Alfa nosed its way out into the traffic, another Alfa following a few yards behind it.
The man sitting in the front seat beside the driver opened the glove box and took out a pair of latex gloves, which he pulled on, and a mobile phone. He unclipped the back, checked that a SIM card was already inserted, slid a battery into position and replaced the back panel. Then he switched on the mobile and passed it back.
The small man consulted the piece of paper again and pressed the buttons on the keypad to dial a mobile number in Iraq. All the phones used in this kind of third-party operation were burners – cheap mobiles purchased in bulk from a wholesaler – and the SIM card inserted in each of them would be used to make exactly one call before being disposed of, and no numbers were ever programmed into their memories. Each mobile would only be used half a dozen times before being dumped as well. Members of the Mafia who needed to make telephone calls memorized the appropriate numbers, and if additional numbers had to be used, as in this case when the organization was carrying out a contract on behalf of another group, then those numbers would be written down on small slips of paper. Paper could be burned or swallowed in an emergency, but data stored electronically on almost anything could always be retrieved, and that was a potential problem.
‘We have had partial success,’ Mario said when his call was answered. ‘We have located and spoken to the man in question and obtained what we needed from him.’
Calls from one mobile to another were essentially encrypted, but like all people involved in criminal activities, the small man was always circumspect in what he said. You never knew when information might get into the wrong hands.
‘But the lady and her husband had already left. We believe they decided to continue their journey by car, and I should be able to confirm that this morning. Do you still wish to speak to her?’
The man in Baghdad paused for a moment while he digested this unpleasant piece of news.
‘Did you get an answer to my other question?’ he asked.
‘I did,’ Mario replied, ‘and he said the answer was yes. In fact, he said everybody had done so.’
Khaled cursed briefly and fluently in Arabic, then switched back to English, their only common language.
‘Very well,’ he said. ‘In that case I will certainly need to reach her. Do you know anybody who could talk to them on my behalf?’
‘Possibly, but finding them will not be easy, and it might be better to wait until they get home. I definitely have friends there who could contact them.’
That was about as clear a statement of intent as Mario was prepared to say on an open line: he knew that trying to find the targets in France would be difficult, perhaps impossible, but once the Lewis woman reached Britain, she would probably think she was safe and certainly wouldn’t feel the need to hide. So eliminating her there would be comparatively easy, a simple matter of locating her house or apartment and then subcontracting the killing to an organized crime group based in Britain.
‘I’ll have to think about it,’ Khaled said, after another pause. ‘If I decide that that is the best option would you be able to organize it?’
‘Of course. There will be some additional expenses for my friends, but I presume that would not be a problem.’
‘No.’
Moments later Mario passed the phone back to the man in the passenger seat. He snapped the back off the mobile, removed the battery and took out the SIM
card. He produced a small pair of scissors, snipped the card into four pieces and dropped them out of the side window one at a time as the vehicle sped through the streets. Then he took a small plastic packet containing a new and unused SIM card, opened it, slid it into the slot in the phone, and replaced the plastic back before putting the phone back into the glove box, along with the battery. Simply having the battery in place offered at least the possibility that the mobile could be tracked, even if it wasn’t switched on, which was why the phone was only powered up for the time it took for the call to be made. Finally, he peeled off the latex gloves and put them and the remains of the SIM card packet into a small plastic bag that he would dump later.
Before long the small convoy reached its destination, a large and palatial villa set in extensive grounds surrounded by a high wall topped with razor wire a few miles to the north of Milan.
In an air-conditioned room built into the basement of the property and protected by solid concrete walls and a steel door that would resist anything short of a rocket-propelled grenade, a trusted and experienced computer specialist oversaw the IT facilities of the Milan family of the Cosa Nostra.
Mario walked down to the computer room and handed the operator a piece of paper on which he had written two names: ‘Angela Lewis’ and ‘Chris Bronson’.
‘I need their addresses, where they work, and a couple of decent photographs of each of them.’
The operator glanced at the sheet and shook his head.
‘Lewis is a pretty common name,’ he said. ‘Is there anything else you can tell me about her?’
‘She probably works in London,’ Mario said, ‘and she’s an archaeologist.’
The operator nodded.
‘Then it shouldn’t be too difficult,’ he agreed. ‘How soon do you want this?’
