When You Can't Stop (Harper McDaniel Book 2)

by James W. Hall

  The line was silent.

  “Derek?”

  “She’s not here. She left the company. She didn’t say why.”

  “You talk to her before she went?”

  Adrian could hear the kid sucking air like he was doing some kind of deep-breathing exercise that wasn’t going well.

  “Hey, what the hell’s going on?”

  “She left something for you.”

  “Lucia left something?”

  “A package. She said it was documents, important documents. If you were to call, I should get your address and have them overnighted to you immediately.”

  “Have you looked at these documents?”

  Again, Derek took too long to answer, a gulp, a sigh, still struggling with his breath.

  “I did not look, no, sir. She told me they were confidential. They’re all wrapped up in a bundle. I just left them like that.”

  “Where’d Lucia go?”

  “I don’t know, no one does. A little while after you left, she walked out the door, and no one’s heard from her since.”

  “Have either Bixel or Albion been by to ask about her?”

  “No, but they were upset she quit that way. I heard that much.”

  “Do they know about this package?”

  “No, no. Absolutely not. No way.”

  Working too hard to deny. If the kid was going to flourish at Albion International, he’d need to learn how to prevaricate a whole lot better.

  Derek said, “So if you give me your address, I’ll ship the package to you. If I get it to the mail service soon, you’ll have it tomorrow.”

  Adrian watched a flock of black birds settle into the nearest olive tree, maybe crows, maybe not. Black wings, silvery-gray bodies, black heads. Better dressed than American crows. Typical Italians.

  “Grande Albergo delle Nazioni Hotel,” Adrian said. “The room is in the name of Ms. Harper McDaniel. Ship it now, Derek.”

  He clicked off, confident that Derek would waste no time before passing on Adrian’s location to whoever was pulling his strings. Above all else, Derek was a company man. Adrian expected nothing less. Naff was never returning to Albion International, so if Derek inherited his title, fine. Just one word of advice, kid: don’t get too comfortable, and always, always watch your back.

  Maybe Harper’s plan was shaping up after all. Lure them one and all to her interrogation chamber, truss them up, and start grilling. He couldn’t anticipate the entire cast of characters, but he suspected there’d be several Albion people appearing in Harper’s adjoining room soon.

  He rose and headed to the door.

  While he was out, he would have to shop for zip ties, those quickie handcuffs, or else buy a ton of rope.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Bari, Italy

  Harper and Adrian sat in a back pew at the seaside Cattedrale di San Sabino. The basilica’s walls were pale-yellow limestone, so unadorned of embellishments and sacred icons that the chapel had the stark dignity of a convent.

  “I checked out of my hotel,” Naff said. “Found a room at yours.”

  “Why?”

  “Closer to the action. Got the suite across the hall from the adjoining room you set up. In case you need me, I used an alias, Steve Benson, room 408.”

  “That’s what you wanted to tell me?”

  Naff kept his voice low as he told her about his conversation with Derek and the likelihood of more Albion goons showing up in Harper’s adjoining room.

  “Good,” she said. “The more the merrier.”

  Then he described the message from Lucia Campos, the compliance officer at Albion. Her rush of nearly unintelligible words and phrases. Spittlebugs, a man named Dickens from an Albion lab in Texas, Lucia’s urgent insistence that Naff take a long look at Albion’s olive groves.

  “That’s it?”

  “I wish there was more, but no, that’s all she said.”

  “You call her back?”

  “No luck. Number’s no longer in service.”

  “What in the world are spittlebugs?”

  Adrian lifted his shoulders and said, “I have no idea what she was talking about. She sounded unnerved. Wasn’t making a lot of sense.”

  Harper watched a young father and mother and their two kids padding quietly down the main aisle, a guide book in the mother’s hands.

  Naff said, “I thought we’d work the docks first, ask around for this guy Dickens. Then, later, we can take a drive through the groves.”

  Harper said no, they should split up. He could go check out the docks, she’d return to Manfred Knobel’s mill, find out what he knew about spittlebugs, maybe get a better idea of which groves to target.

  “Split up,” Adrian said. “Sure, I get it. You’d rather work alone.”

  “It’s more efficient,” she said. “Don’t take it personally.”

  He eyed her for a few seconds, a skeptical cock of an eyebrow.

  “Maybe you’re hoping to cross paths with Gerda, and you don’t want me cramping your style when you take her down.”

  “Quit trying to save my soul, Adrian. It’s unbecoming.”

  He chuckled. “I guess I don’t make much of a moral guide, do I?”

  “If I needed one, you wouldn’t be my first choice.”

  He winced and looked around the quiet chapel, watched the family heading back down the aisle.

  “You religious, Harper? A believer?”

  “Not much of one.”

  “People seem to get comfort from it.” He nodded at the departing family. “Something to pass on to their kids—values, principles.”

  “Maybe loving them is enough.”

  Naff looked at her and nodded. “You know, for years I wondered what kind of father I would’ve been. I think now it’s probably best I never had to find out. Don’t have much of value to pass on.”

  “Your charming good looks, your wit.”

  “You’re too kind.”

  He rose from the pew, and she followed him out into the sunshine.

  “Before we split up,” she said, “besides these bugs, do you have any idea what else I’m looking for in the groves?”

  “I don’t know. Lucia just said that spittlebugs were the secret heart of the scam.”

  “Secret heart.”

  “Those were her words, yes.”

  “Does Lucia have a boyfriend, someone close, family?”

  “A mother in Portugal, but I don’t know how to reach her.”

  They agreed to check in by cell later that afternoon, then Adrian headed off to the waterfront, and Harper hustled back to her hotel, where she donned a pair of dark slacks and a sky-blue blouse, her conservative OLAF outfit of the day. She applied the crude makeup, put on the large-framed glasses, slipped her phone and wallet and ID in a small crossbody handbag, then wound her hair into a bun and left the hotel by a back stairway.

  She walked the ten blocks to Bari Milling Works and, when she entered, found Manfred Knobel with a wrench in one hand and a rag in the other, kneeling beside a stainless steel malaxer with its side panel open, exposing the collection spirals.

  The rest of the mill was silent, the workers gathered nearby observing the progress of the repair. Evidently, the malaxer was a crucial link in the process of converting fresh olives to extra-virgin oil, as the entire operation seemed to have been shut down until Knobel fixed it.

  When he looked up at her, Knobel was sweating and red-faced.

  “Yes? What is it now, Miss de Jong?”

  “I need to take a look at one of the groves Albion is selling you.”

  He wiped his hands on his rag and rose to face her.

  “Why?”

  “It’s the next phase of my investigation.”

  Pagolo had drifted over and was standing close by, his scowl directed at Harper. In his late forties, Pagolo was several inches shorter than she but at least fifty pounds bulkier. His arms were long and thickly muscled and bulging with veins—a body shaped by years of hard work.

/>   “There’s a lot of land. Do you have a particular area in mind?”

  “A man has been working in those groves, an American named Dickens. I want to see the place where he’s operating.”

  Pagolo hardened his stance and turned his face away.

  “I know of no one named Dickens,” Knobel said. “But there’s a lot about these lands I don’t know. Perhaps Pagolo can assist you.”

  Knobel turned to Pagolo and in rudimentary Italian asked if he knew of such a man named Dickens.

  Pagolo considered it for a moment then nodded grimly.

  “Sì, ha lavorato per il signor Albion.” He worked for Albion.

  “And where is Mr. Dickens now?” she asked Pagolo.

  “È scomparso, è partito senza dirlo a nessuno.” He disappeared without telling anyone.

  “When was this?”

  He gave her a noncommittal shrug. Who knows, who cares?

  “What was Dickens doing in the grove? What kind of work?”

  This time his shrug was sharp and scornful, as if being publicly interrogated by a woman was intolerable, a disgrace to his manhood.

  Knobel repeated Harper’s question, and Pagolo gave his boss a sleepy look of insolence.

  “Ha giocato con gli insetti.”

  Knobel made a face.

  “He played with insects? What does that mean?”

  “Significa ciò che ho detto.” It means what I said.

  “What kind of insects?” Harper asked.

  Pagolo turned his back on the two of them and called out to some of the workers gathered nearby. Harper couldn’t interpret his local slang, but the workers sniggered and a couple of them gave Harper lewd grins.

  “Was Dickens working with spittlebugs?” Harper said.

  Pagolo swung around and fixed her with a defiant look.

  “I want to see where Dickens was working,” Harper said to Knobel.

  “What the hell are spittlebugs?” Knobel said. “For god’s sake, what is going on here?”

  “I take her,” Pagolo said. “I know where Dickens stava lavorando.”

  Pagolo attempted to soften his snarl into a smile, but it turned his mouth into a lopsided mess.

  Manfred asked which grove Dickens was working in, and Pagolo said, “Il frutteto di Bellomo.”

  “Bellomo’s orchard?” Harper said.

  “Sergio Bellomo’s family owned the land before Albion purchased it from them. It’s a relatively small piece of land, but its trees are very productive.”

  “Dickens worked on il frutteto di Bellomo?” she asked Pagolo.

  He nodded, his eyes roving her body with cold appraisal.

  Manfred said, “I can spare Pagolo for the afternoon. Will that be sufficient?”

  She followed Pagolo outside to the parking lot, where he climbed aboard a dusty Jeep, an army-surplus model from several wars ago.

  He cranked it up, and before she was fully seated, the Jeep jolted into gear. He swung into the street and sped out of the industrial area of Bari, cutting in and out of the light city traffic with fierce abandon.

  The Jeep had no top, no doors, and no seat belts. Road dust kicked up into Harper’s eyes, wind buffeted her hair, tearing loose the bun. Pagolo jammed the shifter through the gears, mashing the clutch, the brake, and accelerator in a crazed pattern that lurched her forward or pinned her to the seat, then threw her sideways.

  Harper braced her heels against the floorboard and gripped the base of her seat to keep her balance as Pagolo rammed the Jeep ahead, passing a line of stalled traffic on the bumpy shoulder, then veering in to merge at the head of the pack of cars. Angry drivers honked at him, but Pagolo honked back and continued at his headlong pace past the last of the warehouses and auto-repair shops, plant nurseries, stone churches, apartment buildings, then into the countryside, where olive trees began to appear on the hillsides.

  Their weathered, gray-green trunks corkscrewed from the rocky soil, their limbs as gnarled and twisted as arthritic fingers. She’d read that trees in this area of Puglia might be a thousand years old, some so ancient the crusaders had seen these very specimens on their way to the Holy Land. Yet they were still producing fruit, the branches laden, the canopy lush. That something so ancient could remain so bountiful and so highly valued was an ecological miracle.

  Thickets of trees were scattered up and down the hillsides in every direction. Grove after grove interspersed with low, white-washed farmhouses and outbuildings. Sandy roads led off the main highway into the expanse of shadowy green orchards.

  Harper had been studying the Italian olive industry from afar, but those articles and books with their occasional photographs didn’t do justice to the majestic feel of the groves. That these trees were older than any living thing she’d ever seen before gave her a reverent flutter.

  They’d been driving for most of an hour when, without warning, Pagolo cut the wheel to the right, swerving between the limestone columns of an entranceway, and bumped onto a narrow track that ran beneath the outstretched branches of towering olive trees, whose trunks were thick and sinewy, warped by centuries of adaptation to droughts and floods and windstorms and the incessant predations of man. At an intersection of two sandy paths, Pagolo braked the Jeep hard and switched off the motor.

  “Dickens work here,” he said and waved an arm in a circle.

  Harper waited for him to say more or climb down from behind the wheel and lead the way, but he did neither.

  “I’ll look around on my own,” she said.

  “Fai con calma.”

  Yes, she would take her time, with or without his permission.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  The Bellomo Grove, Bari, Italy

  Harper jumped down from the Jeep and followed the road that stretched ahead of where they were parked. She peered into the snarl of branches laden with ripening fruit. Penetrating deeper into the grove, she stayed on what seemed like the main artery. Twice she glanced back to see Pagolo still sitting in the driver’s seat. He’d lit a cigarette and was blowing the smoke up toward the sky, a cell phone pressed to his ear.

  Harper followed the sandy path around a broad curve, hearing something off to her left, a soft clicking. She halted, but with a brisk breeze from the east rattling the leaves all around her, it was difficult to pinpoint the source of the sound. She listened intently, homed in on its direction, then ducked beneath some spreading limbs and pushed forward toward the faint noise.

  A few feet later she stopped and listened again, but the clicks had ceased. She waited another moment, then turned and was heading back to the road when she heard it once more, louder this time, like the warning ticks of a Geiger counter.

  Harper swung back beneath the limbs, pushed aside low-hanging branches, and followed the noise another ten yards into the shadowy depths of the grove.

  As she stopped to get her bearings, a black bug the size of a dime landed on the sleeve of her blouse, then another landed near the first, then a third appeared a few inches away from the other two. She raised her arm to examine the creatures, but all three flicked away before she got a decent look. She stood still and gazed around her at the dense foliage, still hearing the clicking nearby.

  Another bug fluttered past, and Harper shot out her hand and nabbed it from the air. Pleased to discover her reflexes remained butterfly quick.

  She pinched the bug lightly and looked it over. Its black hard-shelled body was marked with three garish orange stripes running across its width. Its hind legs were bright red and its tiny feet black, its head blunt with the glowing scarlet eyes of a miniature demon.

  She committed its markings to memory in case it escaped, then she cupped the bug in her left hand, felt its legs thumping against her palm. With her free hand she unzipped her bag and dug out her leather cosmetic pouch, drew open the zipper, and tucked the bug inside the pouch and zipped it shut.

  She waded through a tangle of branches, following the sound until she stood in a small opening in the trees. A swarm of insec
ts identical to the one she’d caught were flicking from branch to branch all around her. A cyclone of bugs.

  She noticed the leaves where they were clustered were brown and withered, the branches appeared to be scorched. She stepped close to one of the brittle limbs and snapped off its tip. The few olives still clinging to the branch were stunted as if this isolated section of the tree had been burned by frost.

  She tucked the damaged twig into her bag and headed back to the Jeep, but when she rounded the wide curve, it was gone. She kept walking until she reached the rutted intersection where Pagolo had braked to a stop. His smoldering cigarette lay in a shallow groove in the dust. She called out his name but heard nothing more than the rattle of wind in the leaves.

  Inside her bag, her phone made a squeal she didn’t recognize. She dug it out and saw the alert warning from her security camera back in the adjoining hotel room.

  She tapped the camera icon and, after a short delay, a video began to stream. In real time, she watched Gerda Bixel prowling the suite, a dark scarf dangling from her right hand. Gerda ran her fingertips across Harper’s hanging clothes, then walked to the open suitcase and bent close and ruffled her fingers across the folded garments as if sprinkling poisonous fairy dust.

  She walked on, moving out of the camera’s range, deeper into the room, possibly as far as the balcony doors, then came back into view, entered the bathroom, stayed for several seconds, then returned to the living area and surveyed the space left to right and back again. The video image was so sharp Harper could read the wired look in Gerda’s eyes. A woman primed to kill.

  The image blinked once and turned to white fizz. The connection lost. Only one bar of cell phone reception remained, then that bar vanished. No way to call Naff and alert him to Gerda’s presence. She could only hope Gerda would still be lying in wait when Harper returned to the hotel.

  She tucked her phone back in her bag and called out Pagolo’s name again. This time he answered, stepping into view down a narrow side path.

  “Boss want speak.”

  “What boss?”

  “On phone, boss need speak you.” Pagolo pointed to his right toward a path through the olive trees.

  Harper approached, closed to within ten feet. Wary, not trusting the bland look in his eyes.