‘That’s why they killed them? For Alaric’s gold?’
‘And why they burned their farmhouse too,’ nodded Cesco. ‘The drone still had their photographs on it, you see, so they needed to destroy it before anyone could find them and realise their significance. And yes, before you ask, I know for sure it was them who set the fire. I saw them at it.’
‘You what?’
His face blazed with shame. ‘I’ll tell you everything, I swear. Every shitty detail. But on the way, okay? Every minute we waste is more time for them to get away.’
‘One last question. Why me? Why not the police?’
‘They vowed to kill her if I went to them. You know how those bastards leak. But they also told me they’d let her live if I kept quiet until midnight. Bullshit. She’s seen their faces. But I asked myself, why midnight? What’s happening before midnight that these guys might care about?’
‘My press conference,’ muttered Baldassare. He felt a terrible agitation of the heart. Perhaps God existed after all. Perhaps, despite everything, He even listened to the prayers of desperate men. Or maybe this was merely the Devil having fun. There was only one way to find out. He turned to Sandro. ‘All our men, every last one. I want them out here now. Body armour, guns, crowbars, bolt cutters, whatever you need. We’ve got work to do.’
Chapter Eighteen
I
Baldassare had a helicopter at his disposal, but he rarely used it for raids. The noise it made too often gave their approach away to the very people they were after, giving them enough time to flee or hide. Even the option was denied him today, however, for his pilot Faustino had the weekend off, leaving them no choice but to take the three Land Cruisers instead.
His men suited up and came out one by one. Sandro brought with him a first aid kit, a clean white shirt and a tablet on which Cesco quickly found the farmhouse for them to punch its coordinates into their satnavs. Then they set off in convoy, the weight of the armoured vehicles making their tyres screech around the hairpins down to the main road. Baldassare was all-in now. He brought up Operation Trinity on his phone, intending to topple the first domino, but the way the car lurched around the bends made him feel quite sick, so he waited until they squealed out onto the road beneath before pressing send. The calls started coming in almost at once from the various chiefs – ostensibly to seek confirmation of the orders, but in truth to protest the lack of notice. He told them, with uncharacteristic brusqueness, to do as they were told. Then he turned to talk to the two men in the back seat. Sandro, like all his bodyguards, was trained in trauma management. He’d already stripped Cesco of his torn and bloodied shirt and now was plucking pellets from his arm and shoulder with a pair of tweezers. ‘How is he?’ he asked.
‘I’m fine,’ said Cesco.
‘I wasn’t talking to you.’
‘He’s fine,’ said Sandro. ‘None have gone too deep.’
‘Good,’ said Baldassare. He turned to Cesco. ‘You said you’d tell me everything.’ And, to his credit, Cesco did. Even as Sandro cleaned and dressed his wounds, he described how the ’Ndrangheta had kidnapped him and his sister fifteen years before, how he alone had escaped and fled to England before returning to Italy again. Baldassare barely even needed to prompt him. It all came flooding out, a confession as much as a statement, particularly once he reached the past three days, the time he’d spent with Carmen, his obvious pride at the breakthroughs she’d made, his shame at his betrayals. He was still talking when they reached Via Virgilio. He hurried through the end of his account then leaned forward between the seats, the better to direct Manfredo. ‘Next right,’ he said. ‘That track there.’
Manfredo barely decelerated, screeching the Land Cruiser into the turn up a dusty farm track. Baldassare had to hang on to the door handle as they jolted over potholes. The five-bar steel gate at the top was closed and padlocked. Manfredo glanced at Baldassare. Baldassare turned to Cesco. ‘How sure are you?’ he asked.
‘One hundred per cent,’ said Cesco.
‘Take it,’ ordered Baldassare.
Manfredo nodded and kept his foot down. The bull bars and sheer weight of their Land Cruiser tore the gate from its hinges and knocked it flat. They rattled over it as a pair of Rottweilers away to their left barked furiously and hurled themselves impotently against their wire mesh cages. They pulled up in a line in the cobbled courtyard of a small white farmhouse with two outbuildings. No sign of anyone, nor any vehicles. ‘Stay here,’ Baldassare told Cesco. He and his men spilled out of their cars, guns at the ready. They bellowed exhortations to give each other courage and to unnerve anyone inside. Manfredo pounded on the front door. Aldo smashed it with a sledgehammer. They ran in, spread out. Baldassare vaguely noticed a strong smell of heating oil as he went into the kitchen. There was stale coffee in the percolator and the dishwasher door was open, half stacked with plates. But there were no photographs on the fridge or walls, no bills or postcards, no sign of family life.
‘In here,’ shouted Aldo.
Baldassare ran through. It was a kind of computer room with two monitors on the wall playing five-second clips of CCTV footage from different cameras while local police radio channels played in the background. Cesco was right. This was it, the missing cell he’d been hunting. But too late. The bastards had already fled. They hurried upstairs. Four beds were unmade, four wardrobes filled with clothes, four sets of toiletries in the bathrooms. He took out his phone to call in forensics to glean what information they could, to search for hidden chambers and the like. But it was a desperate hope and his heart turned to lead inside his chest.
Then, in the roof space above, the first bars of ‘Ancora tu’ began to play.
II
With three hours to kill at Rome Ciampino before her flight down to Lamezia Terme, Zara bought herself a slice of cake and an iced tea at a café, took them to an empty table. She opened up her laptop and began drafting an email to Carmen Nero, explaining who she was and how she’d been in Sorrento for a talk when the story of Alaric and his tomb had—
A man came to stand beside her. He coughed into his fist for her attention. ‘Excuse me,’ he said. ‘Is this seat taken?’
She glanced up to gesture it was all his, then returned to her struggle with the email. As a child, her parents had instilled in her a loathing of false witness so fierce that it had ultimately rebounded on them all, causing her rift with them and her entire community too. She’d managed to overcome it to some extent in social situations, but it still made her profoundly uncomfortable. As a result, she couldn’t get the tone right. She’d think she had it only to read it back again and be dissatisfied.
‘Off anywhere interesting?’ asked the man.
She looked up again. Sunshine turned the window behind him into a light box. All she could see was silhouette. Then he came into better focus. Late thirties, athletic build, a navy blazer over a white silk shirt open at the collar. He had short spiky black hair, two-day stubble and that cockiness that some men have, tricking you into thinking them handsome even when they’re not. ‘Lamezia,’ she said.
‘Huh.’ He took a small swig from a bottle of beer, set it back down. ‘On your own, then?’
‘My husband’s gone to arrange our hire car.’
He glanced down at her ring finger and grinned. ‘Liar,’ he said. ‘If you don’t want to talk to me, just say so.’
‘I don’t want to talk to you.’
‘See. How hard was that?’ He took another swig. ‘So, work or pleasure?’
She sighed, slapped closed her laptop, returned it to its bag. She stood and walked away, pulling her suitcase behind her, its wheels bumping over the uneven flooring. But then, when she reached the café exit, she couldn’t help but glance around. He grinned at her and raised his beer. She scowled and went in search of a screen on which to check her flight, even though her gate wouldn’t be announced for another hour yet. She found an empty seat then resumed her efforts at the email, looking up every time a man walked to
wards her, worried that it was him. But he didn’t reappear.
The longer she worked on the damned email, the less certain she became. In search of inspiration, she revisited the discussion board. Carmen had posted an update the night before, including photographs of some new friend she’d made and of the Busento river as taken from their balcony, watermarked with the name of a well-known booking website. She visited it now and searched Cosenza rentals until she found the apartment in question, along with its calendar and precise location.
And it was only a short walk from her hotel too.
III
Cesco had no weapon or body armour, and he was so sore from the shotgun pellets that it took him a good minute to pull on the clean white shirt Sandro had brought him. He went inside the farmhouse to find everyone already upstairs. He was on his way to join them when a mobile phone began to play. He recognised the tune instantly from last night, and for a moment he froze, recalling the whoomp that the device had made, the fireball that had erupted up the stairs.
‘Bomb!’ he yelled. ‘Everybody out!’
They all turned to look blankly at him. He yelled again then turned and fled, hoping to communicate urgency with panic. It worked a treat. They came after him, scrambling out the front door even as it triggered. The whole roof seemed to lift up. Windows shattered and shards of glass flew everywhere. A torrent of flaming kerosene spilled down the stairs and splashed like molten lava out into the courtyard, driving them further and further back, threatening to engulf the Land Cruisers until they reversed them away. Then they stood in silent awe as the inferno consumed the house, destroying any evidence that they might have hoped to recover, and any secret chambers too.
The thought that Carmen might still have been hidden in there somewhere was unbearable to Cesco. In a daze, he followed the others as they checked the two outbuildings, if only to give himself something to do. The first was empty. The second contained a banged-up dump truck and a black van. Back outside, he wandered too close to the caged Rottweilers. They went crazy, hurling themselves at their wire mesh, trying to get at him with such savage fury that he lost his nerve and turned back. But then he stopped and took a second look.
The two cages were set either side of a gate into the field beyond, almost as if they’d been put there to intimidate. Except there was no ‘as if’. That was exactly why they were there. A little dizzily, he walked between them to the gate, ignoring their wild rage. A meadow ran all the way down to the road. It was rocky and patchy in places, though covered elsewhere by tall grasses and bright wild flowers. Hardly prime land, yet not only had the owners grown tall thick hawthorn hedges all around it, they’d built a high wall at its far end too, fitted with a steel gate, barbed wire and CCTV cameras. All that and the Rottweilers too. And not to protect the tomb either, because they hadn’t even known it was there.
Suddenly he was a fourteen-year-old boy again, waking groggy from chloroform to find himself and his twin sister Claudia lying bound and gagged in the back of a van. The rear doors opening abruptly. A glimpse of starry sky. Slung over the shoulder of a burly man who’d reeked of stale sweat – a smell that for years had triggered panic attacks whenever he’d caught a whiff of it from a passing stranger. Lugged across a rough and stony field, not unlike this one. A hatch lifting. Steps down into darkness. A dank dungeon with rusted bars and ancient graffiti scratched into its damp walls. The dirt floor and rotten mattresses. The squalor of that metal bucket. All relics of the ’Ndrangheta’s kidnap era.
The ’Ndrangheta had moved on to more profitable activities. But the lairs were all still out there. Lairs that might still be in use, say for storing drugs or guns. Lairs that might show up on Google Earth, looking just how an ancient tomb might look. Numbly, he took his phone from his pocket, but its screen was too small for his purpose. What he needed was the tablet on which he’d located this farmhouse for the satnavs. He turned and raced back up to the courtyard, yelling as he went.
IV
Baldassare was mostly a peaceable man, but hatred consumed him as he gazed at the conflagration. It wasn’t just the destruction of precious evidence, it was that someone had clearly been watching in order to trigger the firebomb at the precise moment it would cause maximum casualties.
Shouting behind. He turned to see Cesco running wildly into the courtyard yelling for the tablet. Sandro was using it to film the fire, but Cesco snatched it from him. Something in his urgency rekindled a flicker of hope in Baldassare’s chest. ‘Talk to me,’ he said, hurrying across.
Cesco didn’t even look up, too busy bringing up Google Earth, zooming in first on the farmhouse then on the field beneath. ‘That feature the Suraces spotted on the satellite photographs, then again with their drone. The one Carmen found for herself this morning.’
‘What about it?’
‘It’s not Alaric’s tomb at all. It’s something else altogether. That’s why the Suraces had to die.’
It took Baldassare a moment to understand. Then his skin tingled. How could he, of all people, have been so blind? ‘Can you find it?’ he demanded.
‘If you give me some fucking space.’
‘Stand back,’ ordered Baldassare. ‘Give him room.’ But he himself stayed at Cesco’s shoulder, watching transfixed. The map loaded. There were the roofs of the farmhouse, its outbuildings and the farm track. A pulsing red dot appeared, courtesy of the tablet’s GPS, to show their own precise location. But it was the meadow beneath that Cesco zoomed in on. He swept the screen this way and that, looking for the telltale feature he’d just spoken of. Suddenly he stopped. He zoomed in on a patch of earth then turned the screen to Baldassare for confirmation, but Baldassare couldn’t see a thing. Cesco double-tapped the spot to place a turquoise marker pin in it, and now he saw it too: a rectangle of earth, a fraction paler than its surrounds, and with an extra dogleg at one end, as if for steps, and whose sides and ends were all too straight to be natural.
He grabbed the tablet from Cesco and set off running. The Rottweilers went berserk as he passed between them. He barely even noticed. The gate was bolted and padlocked. He vaulted it like a fifteen-year-old, then sprinted down the meadow slope, holding the tablet out in front of him so that he could watch the slow convergence of his own pulsing red dot and the turquoise pin that Cesco had just added, trusting to his feet not to let him down. He slowed and then stopped as the two finally came together, heaving for breath and his heart aching like a towel being wrung dry. His men now all arrived, and Cesco too. Maybe he’d already explained it to them somehow, because there was no need for orders; they all went straight down onto their hands and knees to search the ground.
‘Here!’ yelled Sandro. ‘Over here!’
Baldassare ran across. A rusted iron ring lay hidden in the long grass. Sandro stood up and heaved at it and an almost perfectly camouflaged trapdoor reared up on well-oiled hinges. His men stood back in fear of gunfire, but Baldassare had no time for such caution. He barged his way between them, sprinted down the brick steps into the gloom. There was a landing halfway down. The steps turned at right angles. A thin young man in a black balaclava appeared on it, holding a gun in his wildly trembling hands. Baldassare slammed him into the wall with his shoulder then turned the corner and sprinted onwards even as a second man arrived at the foot, his face also concealed by a black balaclava, his left arm clamped around the neck of the American woman, a knife against her throat.
As a teenager, Baldassare had briefly joined his local boxing club. The coach there had at first expressed high hopes for him, thanks to his quick feet and eyes and hands; but after a fortnight he’d told him he’d never be any good so long as he remained squeamish about hitting people in the face. There was nothing remotely squeamish about the punch he threw now. It had every bit of his weight behind it and it connected with the man’s nose and upper lip in a crunch of bone and flesh that smashed his head backwards and made the knife fly from his grasp. He didn’t even slow to check on him or Carmen, but leaped over the
m into a chamber with a battery lamp on its floor, every detail of it familiar from the proof-of-life clips these monsters had been sending him each night for the past two months.
There was the table, the key upon it. He fumbled it in his haste to pick it up, but then he had it again, feeding it into the lock with both hands and turning it and hauling open the cage door even as his wife shrieked out his name again and again and his daughter burst into tears and then his arms were around them both, the warmth of them, the aliveness, the unbearable relief, the three of them howling in unison together, howling out their joy and fear and nausea and release as they fell to their knees in that cramped and noisome cell.
Chapter Nineteen
I
Cesco held back again as Baldassare and his men rushed down the steps into the site. They were professionals – armed, trained and equipped with body armour; he’d only get in their way. There was shouting now from below, but so confused that it was impossible to know what it meant. Then two of Baldassare’s men emerged, hustling between them a handcuffed thin young man with blinking eyes. Two more bodyguards followed shortly afterwards, frogmarching a second youth with blood clotting into a red goatee around his mouth and chin. Then came Manfredo, his arm around Carmen’s shoulders, and the relief so overwhelmed Cesco that he squatted down on the ground and bit the knuckle of his index finger.
They turned away from him, uphill towards the farmhouse. Carmen never once looked back. He considered going after her, to make sure she was okay. Except that wouldn’t be the reason. It would be to let her know that, despite his numerous betrayals, he’d come through for her in the end. And that was too self-serving for his pride to bear.
The Sacred Spoils Page 17
