“Over the past three years, Knobel’s won over the majority of small olive producers in the region. In that time, he has practically cornered the market for milling olives in Puglia. It wasn’t easy and it wasn’t done quickly, but his business has been on a steep upward trajectory. These days, even the most recalcitrant olive farmers in the region ship their product to Knobel’s plant, and with those greater efficiencies, they’ve seen their own profits grow handsomely.”
Sal said, “Enter Lester Albion.”
“Yes,” Daniela said. “As Albion’s share of the region’s groves has expanded, he’s acquired great leverage. My banker friend tells me Albion Olives, which is a subsidiary of Albion International, controls around seventy percent of the olives grown in the region, and their share is increasing all the time.”
“So he and Knobel are on a collision course,” Harper said.
“Exactly.”
Sal drew his smartphone from his trouser pocket, tapped and swiped his fingers across it, then said, “Mind giving me your Wi-Fi password? Want to google a couple of things.”
“Encantado,” she said. “Shall I spell it?”
Sal said no thanks, he could handle it.
“Where does Knobel fit in with the dark pools?” Nick asked.
Daniela gazed at him as though considering the question, but the silence lasted so long that it became awkwardly clear she had lost her train of thought in the thrall of Nick’s eyes. Her heartache exposed.
“Dark pools?” Nick prompted her quietly.
She blinked and shook her head and said, “Sorry, yes. Dark pools.”
“Let me guess,” Sal said, eyes on his phone’s screen. “Albion’s putting the screws to Knobel. Trying to dicker a better price for milling.”
“That would be expected,” Daniela said. “But Albion is employing more extreme measures.” She paused and looked at Harper. “Mind you, there is no other large-scale milling alternative in the region. The small mills are mostly gone now. Add to this the fact that long-distance transport of freshly harvested olives is far too expensive to be profitable. And not practical either, as olives should be milled within hours of harvesting.
“Another factor is that Knobel is not a wealthy man. Sandro tells me that everything he has is invested in the mill. Now the harvest is about to begin—under normal conditions, the milling in Puglia will commence in only a week or two. By the end of November, Knobel’s mill should be running day and night. So the time frame is very tight. Missing out on processing seventy percent of the local harvest would be fatal. Knobel knows this, and Albion knows this as well.”
“That’s some leverage,” Sal said.
“No,” Daniela said. “Closer to ricatto, blackmail. What Sandro tells me is that Albion recently made a proposition to Mr. Knobel. He wants to sell the entire tract of Albion Olives to Knobel. And he’s made an outrageous threat. If Knobel refuses to buy his groves, Albion will withhold this year’s crop from Knobel’s mill, let his olives rot on the ground, which means Knobel would be out of business by Christmas.”
“Hence the dark pool?” Harper said. “For the sale?”
“Yes, because if it were publicly known that Albion Olives was being offered for sale, particularly under these questionable circumstances, its stock price would plummet, as would the price of the parent company. Investors would be scared off. So the dark pool arrangement is the only way to make certain such a sale would keep the stock price stable. Sandro is aware of the arrangement only because Crédit Agricole is the lien holder on Mr. Knobel’s mill, and Mr. Knobel is negotiating a larger loan to purchase Albion Olives and had to explain his predicament.”
“This dark pool thing’s supposed to be secret,” Sal said. “But we know about it. How secret can it be?”
“We know of it,” Daniela said, “only because Sandro was willing to confide in me. Old friends, dear friends.”
“How much are we talking about?” Harper said. “What’s Albion asking for his groves?”
“I do not have the exact figure,” Daniela said. “For ethical reasons, Sandro could not go into that level of detail, but he assures me the price is surprisingly modest, considering the amount of land involved. The same as or possibly even slightly less than what Mr. Albion paid for it.”
“Doesn’t make sense,” Harper said. “Albion goes to all the trouble of buying up dozens of groves, puts the screws to the processor, and then sells the whole thing at the same price or cheaper. Why?”
“Yes,” Daniela said. “It’s quite mysterious.”
“There’s something else here, something we’re not seeing.” Harper took the last sip of her wine and set the glass aside.
“Manfred Knobel,” Sal said, staring at his phone’s screen. “Name like that, can’t be too many of them running around. Looks to me like these two Manfreds might be the same Manfred.”
“What’re you talking about?” Harper said.
Sal came over and presented the phone. An image of a rangy man with a mop of blond hair, well built, strong jaw, pale-hazel eyes.
“This is Manfred Knobel, owner of Bari Milling Works. The guy Albion is hustling.”
“So?”
Sal swiped a finger across the screen and showed her a different photo. A man with a blond flattop, wearing red shorts and a matching tank top, frozen at the precise second he cleared the pole-vault bar, muscles in his arms flaring, legs extended behind him, flying midair with the blue, cloudless sky above him, his mouth open wide in what looked like a scream of exultation.
“What do you think?” asked Sal. “Same guy?”
“Similar, yes. But what’s the point?”
“Manfred Knobel, owner of the olive mill. Guy with the same name, same jawline, he’s the Olympic gold medalist in the pole vault for Germany a few years back.”
“The Olympics,” Nick said. “Like Gerda.”
“All right,” Daniela said. “You’re going to have to tell me now. Who is this Gerda?”
Gerda moved through the dark, listening for guard dogs and peering up at the high castle walls, scanning for CCTV cameras. Heard no dogs, saw no security devices. The village that fanned out below the castle was quiet. Only a single jukebox in a bar down the hill several blocks away. It was playing an American tune about drunks. “Margaritaville.” And there was the distant hum of the highway, the chirr of crickets, a small dog yapping mindlessly from more than a mile away.
Lights still burned in two of the second-story windows.
She wedged her body through the hedge that rimmed the castle walls. Came out the other side and stood still with only ten feet of open ground between her and the massive front door.
She slipped across the exposed space and flattened her back against the rock walls. Took a deep, slow breath. Felt the heat rising to her face. The door was to her right, only a yard distant. She set the wine bottles down to free her hands. She had removed the corks from the bottles, dampened the Spanish flags with gasoline, then crammed them into the spouts. Her hands reeked of the gasoline, but she hadn’t washed them because she might need to dampen the rags again before she breached the entryway.
She reached across the span of stone wall and tried the door latch. It was open, unlocked. The foolish inhabitants were feeling safe in the belief that they’d escaped Gerda, thrown her off the scent. Now they were holed up inside a fortress on a hilltop. Perfectly secure, or so they thought. But they were wrong. They had not escaped. They were not safe.
Gerda wasn’t certain if there was sufficient wood and flammable material inside a stone castle. If there was not, then at the very least the smoke and flames from her petrol bomb would flush them all outside, and in the confusion and panic she would finish McDaniel.
She drew back from the door, picked up two of the bottles, cradling the third under one arm, recrossed the open perimeter, and ducked into the nearby bushes. She would wait. Wait until all the lights went out inside the castle, till everyone was asleep. It would not be long. Then it would
be finished.
She was so close. Her pulse racing as it had years ago on the final stretch of the fifteen hundred meters, the closing event of the decathlon. Exactly as it had been when Tatiana Zyablikova pulled alongside her, challenging her down the home stretch. Gerda’s heart roared, 150 beats per minute, 160, her focus fixed on the finish line, legs a blur beneath her, arms pumping, Gerda flying ahead of Tatiana, ahead of the pack, toward victory, so close. So very close.
SIXTEEN
Castillo de Aranjuez, Canena, Spain
Almost midnight, alone in her bedroom, Harper didn’t disrobe. She extinguished the light and lay atop the embroidered bedspread and stared up at the darkness.
Against her chest she clutched the photograph of Leo and Ross. She didn’t need to look at it again. The image was achingly clear in her memory, their last minutes together, the night they parted, the words, the looks, the gestures, the quality of light in the living room as they said their good-byes, words they did not know would be their final ones.
In the darkness, she set the photograph on the bedside table.
She calmed herself by listening to the night sounds. The sifting of wind through open windows, the creak of timbers, the scuttling of vermin across the attic floor. For a while she heard a jukebox in the village below, song after song, some she recognized, American rock. The jukebox was quiet now, the bar closed. Even the dull hum of traffic from the distant highway, the rumble of transfer trucks had fallen silent. For a while, she heard an owl’s mournful hooting and the baying of a moonstruck dog, then those sounds too faded to nothing.
Two hours later, she was still awake and listening to the cavernous hush of the thick walls. A cool dampness seemed to seep from the stone.
Harper rose, slipped on her shoes. She carried her suitcase and camera bag into the hallway and shut her bedroom door.
Nick’s room was two doors down. He was a deep sleeper. So deep that when they were young children and shared a bedroom, Nick used to frighten Harper because he never budged all night. Not the slightest shift in position. He lay on his back, arms tight against his sides, legs straight, no pillow. A defensive strategy he’d acquired during his two years in the Russian orphanage. Use the smallest space possible. Don’t dare disrupt the boys to your left and right. Never draw attention to yourself.
Setting down her suitcase and camera, Harper put her hand on the door latch of Nick’s room.
With a gentle touch, she opened it and stepped from one darkness to another. Light shone through a crack between the shades. A slender band of moonlight spanned the white sheets at the head of the bed, illuminating Nick’s black hair and, pressed against it, the flawless, satin skin of Daniela’s cheek. She was nestled against his right side, and her left arm was slung across his naked chest.
She listened to Nick’s slow, rhythmic breath and Daniela’s melodic snuffle. Harper felt her way along the wall, encountered a straight-backed chair, stepped around it, eyes adjusting slowly to the gloom. On the far wall she found another chair, then a chest-high dresser, and with her right hand she wandered its surface, bumped a ceramic saucer, then, with a delicate touch, explored its contents. A few coins, a leather wallet, and the fob for the Fiat’s ignition key.
She pocketed the key and retraced her steps, opened the door, and stood listening to the lovers sleep. The cadence of Nick’s breathing was slower and his tone deeper than Daniela’s, but their rising and falling notes seemed to harmonize as flawlessly as rhyming couplets.
Earlier in the evening, when she’d brought her luggage inside, Harper had scouted the exits with a plan in mind. Now she navigated a hallway near the kitchen and found her way to a rear door that led to the parking area in back. She shut the door behind her and slipped through the darkness to the Fiat and clicked the doors unlocked. She set her suitcase and camera down. Then stopped.
She turned slowly and peered into the shadows. She’d heard a flicker of noise she couldn’t identify, perhaps the scuff of shoes on the pavement or, Christ, she didn’t know, maybe she was simply registering a shift in the barometric pressure.
But she felt a human presence. Marco’s training kicking in. Her flesh prickling, an electric tingle in her muscles. She held still, hands rising to defend or attack.
“Going somewhere?”
Sal stepped forward, his pale shirt glowing with moonlight. “Thought you might be jumping ship, so I been waiting out here just in case. Off to Puglia, I suppose. Leaving us behind to fend for ourselves.”
“You’ll be fine,” she said.
“If this is how you want it, guess there’s not much we can do. Can’t hold you prisoner, force you to accept our help.”
“I have to do this, Sal.”
“I know you do. But alone?”
“If it were your wife and child who were murdered, would you invite me along to help settle the score?”
Sal was silent. Somewhere nearby a car crunched across gravel.
Sal said, “So go. You don’t need my blessing. Go on, get your justice or revenge, or whatever you decide to call it. But when you’re done, come home, all right? Come home.”
She hesitated for several breaths, then stepped close to Sal, and he opened his arms, and Harper came into the embrace. His arms felt frail against her, but he held her in a solid bear hug for a few hungry seconds. Her face against his neck, inhaling his musky scent, balsam and lavender, some liniment he used on his papery skin. A hint of lime from his fading aftershave.
When they parted, Sal hung his head, staring at her feet. “You got Nick’s number. You’ll call if you need us.”
“I will,” she said.
She loaded her suitcase and camera bag in the backseat, climbed behind the wheel. She U-turned in the parking area, and as her headlights washed across him, Sal gave her a thumbs-up and a half-assed attempt at a smile.
Harper wound through the narrow village streets, rolling downhill till she located the lighted thoroughfare that led north to the highway. Earlier that afternoon, on their way into Canena when they’d exited the Andalucía highway, she remembered seeing a Shell station at the foot of the exit ramp. A sign out front promoted its all-night comedor. A sit-down diner for the long-haul truckers on the adjacent expressway.
She pulled up to the pumps and, as she filled the Fiat’s tank, looked back to the village of whitewashed houses that climbed the hillside. On the summit, Castillo de Aranjuez was silhouetted against the first gray light of dawn. A gracious fortress whose mistress lay entwined with Harper’s brother. It gave her some trifling satisfaction that, even if her self-appointed mission accomplished nothing else, at least it had brought those two lovers back together.
When the tank was full, she parked the car in a space in front of the diner. As she shut off the engine, her headlights lit up a young man bent over the newspaper vending machine by the front door. Taking out yesterday’s unsold papers and replacing them with a fresh stack of the morning edition.
When he shut the glass-front box, Harper could see the front page less than ten feet away. A photograph, the face of a man.
Her pulse stumbled. She killed the headlights and got out.
She dropped two coins in the slot and withdrew a copy of the Diario de Sevilla and carried the paper into the brightly lit diner and took a seat at a booth by the window. She laid the newspaper on the table and studied the man’s face.
The photograph had been taken a year or two ago. The man was fresh faced, his hair neatly combed, and he was wearing a well-pressed shirt. But it was him. Definitely him.
Ángel’s tattooed partner. The scrawny, wolfish man from the alleyway in Sevilla. According to the paper, his name was Ricardo Ramírez. His body had been found yesterday afternoon in Calle Jamerdana in the Santa Cruz district. Cause of death: strangulation.
Buried in the ten-paragraph story about Ramírez’s death and the rising murder rate in Sevilla was a reference to Ricardo’s close friend, a man named Ángel Gallardo, an unemployed carpenter. Señor Gallardo w
as said to be assisting the police in their investigation with important eyewitness testimony.
Gerda had completed her task. All she needed to do now was put some distance between herself and the castle on the hill. Then she would text her boss and give him the good news.
She worked her way back through the sleeping village, down the hill to the main road, and back toward the highway. The stink of gasoline was still on her hands, a problem she would remedy at the first public bathroom she encountered.
Her spirits were deflated, a familiar emotion after a mission achieved, a victory complete. It had always happened the moment she crossed a finish line—the initial thrill died and withered quickly, replaced by a dull melancholy, a blankness in her heart.
For a day or a week or even longer, she might cast about in that gloomy state. After the Olympics the despair had gripped her for months and gradually deepened until she was all but immobilized. The black mood lasted until the moment she realized she had another job to accomplish—the obliteration of Tatiana Zyablikova, the drug-assisted Russian who’d finished three points ahead of Gerda in the Olympic decathlon.
Plotting Tatiana’s death, then carrying out the plan, had revitalized Gerda and reminded her of the transcendent power of killing. For even as a teenager, when she’d committed her first murder, it had produced a thrill beyond any elation she’d ever known.
When You Can't Stop (Harper McDaniel Book 2) Page 12
