‘Then we need to get out of here right now. Is it only you?’
‘Yes. No. There are two others. But they’re away until tomorrow.’
‘You’ll need to warn them anyway. Have you got their number?’
‘In my bag.’ She led him around to the kitchen door to let them in. Her purse was on the table. She slung it over her shoulder.
‘Oh,’ said Cesco. ‘We should take your phone too.’
‘Won’t that just lead them straight to us?’
‘We’ll take its battery out first. Then we’ll give it to Baldassare. He may be able to use it as a lure.’ She looked a little sick at this, as though the full truth of their predicament was only now sinking in. He took her by her hands. ‘We need to catch these bastards while we can,’ he told her, ‘or you’ll never feel safe again. That’s a horrible way to live, trust me.’
She met his gaze with perfect assurance. ‘I do,’ she said.
Chapter Forty
I
Carmen locked up the cottage then she and Cesco hurried together around to his bike. He handed her his helmet to put on. She gave him a look. ‘Not for safety,’ he told her. ‘To hide your face. You’re the one they’ll be looking for.’
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Yes.’ She strapped it as tightly beneath her chin as it would go, but it still kept slipping forward. She climbed on pillion, hugged her arms around him. The seat and casing were both still warm from his earlier drive. The bike shuddered when he started it. It wasn’t quite dark yet, but it was gloomy enough for the headlight. He eased them up the drive, making a slalom of the potholes. A navy SUV prowled slowly by as they reached the top. It had Dutch licence plates even though the men inside looked Italian. One of them held up his phone to photograph them as they drove past. Then they reached the next hairpin up and vanished.
Cesco gave it a moment then turned the other way. She could feel his heart pounding beneath his shirt. They leaned together into the sharp bends until the road straightened out at the valley floor. They approached the Bussento bridge. A second SUV was parked on its far side, hazard lights flashing. A man was standing in the middle of the road as if about to wave passing traffic down for help. Cesco must have noticed him for he braked sharply then turned left up an old sealed track that she hadn’t even seen.
The trees pressed close on either side. The track grew ever rougher, the ancient tarmac breaking up into a mosaic of crazy paving. They drove for perhaps two minutes before arriving outside a low industrial building in a small clearing, dark and closed for the night. Several narrow footpaths led into the woods, but none looked as if they’d take the Harley very far. Cesco stilled it and doused the light. He tried his phone but found no signal. They looked back down the track to see if they were being followed, but there was nothing but the normal chitter of night-time creatures.
‘What now?’ asked Carmen.
‘I don’t know,’ said Cesco. ‘Were those your friends from Cosenza?’
‘No. But they’re likely with them, though, aren’t they? At least two cars of them.’
‘I left Baldassare a message. He’ll get it soon enough. He’ll flood this whole area with police. I say we stay put until they arrive.’
‘And if those men come up here first?’
‘We’ll hear them in plenty of time. They’ll never find us in these trees. Not at night.’
‘Okay.’ Carmen gave a little shiver. ‘Thank God you came for me.’
There was a bench outside the building with a good view of the track up which they’d just arrived. He sat on it. ‘Of course I came. I gave you my word, didn’t I?’
Carmen settled beside him. ‘You did? When?’
‘That first afternoon. When I found you with Giulia and Vittorio.’ She sensed rather than saw him tensing. ‘I thought they’d killed all three of you. Then you twitched your arm. I knelt beside you. You opened your eyes and asked if they were gone. You said: “Don’t leave me.”’
‘I don’t remember that at all.’
‘I know. But you did. So I gave you my word that I wouldn’t, and you fell asleep again. As if you trusted me.’ He took a deep breath. ‘The thing is…’
‘Yes?’
Another deep breath, then a third. ‘Baldassare told you about me, yes? About who I once was. That I had a twin sister?’
She took his arm. ‘Yes.’
‘It’s not like anything else, being a twin. It’s not just that you do everything together, though you do. It’s that you’re a part of a larger organism. Like marriage is supposed to be. Parenthood. It comes with responsibilities as well as joys. After we were kidnapped… They didn’t beat us or starve us or even threaten us much, but it was horrible all the same, and it would have been a million times worse without her. We gave each other strength, not least by vowing to one another that, whatever happened, we’d see it through together. In a perverse kind of way, I was even a little glad. It was my chance to prove myself her protector until our grandfather came through for us. Because I was certain that he would. He was a god to me. Far more so even than my own father. I was terrified yet at the same time I never truly believed that he’d fail us – let alone that he would kill himself or that our family would be slaughtered like that.’
‘Oh, Cesco.’
‘The days passed. Even being a hostage becomes routine. One night they put something in our food. I woke feeling nauseous and woozy. It was pitch black. The floor was swaying. There were fumes and an engine. We were on a boat. Some kind of hold on a boat. And stripped naked too. My head was fuzzy but terror is like a slap. I could hear Didi beside me. I butted her shoulder with my head. She muttered groggily then fell asleep again.’ He began weeping as he talked; in the moonlight, Carmen could see tears glittering on his cheek. ‘My wrists and ankles were tied, but the floor was wet and the rope was slick enough that I managed to work my hands free. But before I… before I…’ He couldn’t manage any more, however. He sat forward and rested his weight upon his knees.
She squeezed his arm. ‘You don’t have to tell me this, Cesco.’
He took a deep breath and pulled himself together. He sat back up and wiped his eyes and cheeks with his hand. ‘I do,’ he said. ‘I really do. At least, I have to tell someone, it’s been eating away at me too long. And, if I have to tell someone, I’d like it to be you. If that’s okay?’
‘Of course. Of course. Go on.’
‘Before I could untie Didi, the hatchway was unbolted and opened. Two men jumped down. I feigned unconsciousness and held the rope behind my back as if my wrists were still tied. They didn’t notice. They heaved us up and laid us on the deck beside a pair of old car engines tied by lengths of chain to a pair of empty body bags. They were chatting about some football tournament, as if it were nothing. They started with Didi, zipping her up inside. They assumed we were both still out cold, so they turned their backs on me. I grabbed the rail and hauled myself overboard. The boat was cruising fast enough that they were twenty metres away before they could bring it around. They shone their lamps and torches every which way. But the sea is a bitch to search at night, they kept looking in the wrong places. I managed to untie the rope around my ankles. That was when the bigger of the two men lifted Claudia up by her hair. He had this huge knife that he put against her throat.’
‘Oh Christ,’ said Carmen.
‘His companion came to the railing. The shorter, thinner one. He cupped his hands around his mouth. “Your sweet sister,” he shouted out. “Your beautiful brave sweet sister. Please don’t make us do this to her. Come back and we can talk. Just talk. You both can live, I give you my word as a man of honour.” Claudia was wide awake by now. The pain of being picked up by her hair, I guess. She realised what was happening, she kicked and fought and screamed. She screamed out my name again and again and begged me not to leave her. “Don’t leave me, Gio,” she cried. “Please don’t leave me. Not like this.”’
Carmen wrapped her arms around him, held his head against her chest. �
��My poor Cesco,’ she murmured. Then, unable to stop herself, even though she already knew the answer, she asked: ‘What did you do?’
‘I left her,’ he said.
II
Noah’s heart pumped like overworked bellows as they turned onto the main road and then drove for five minutes or so around the periphery of the lake. He feared calamity around every corner. The bellows somehow began pumping even harder when Dov turned off the road down the private track to the dam, turning off his lights and pulling onto the grass verge out of the CCTV camera’s field of view. But, even as he feared he couldn’t bear it any longer, a peculiar sensation overcame him, his senses so overloaded that he entered a kind of out-of-body fugue state in which he observed rather than was himself, freeing him from fear.
They got out and quietly closed their doors. They opened the hatchback, pulled on ski masks and gloves, strapped on backpacks. Dov took the sledgehammer, Yonatan the chainsaw. They filed in silence to the fence. Dov lifted a loose flap of wire. They slithered beneath. There was moonlight enough to cross the dam without torches. Perhaps it was only his imagination, but Noah could feel the heady shiver of the massive turbines turning far beneath his feet. They reached the far bank, made directly for the larger of the two buildings. Its door was alarmed and locked, but Yonatan was ex-Mossad and they were inside within a minute.
Motion-sensitive lights flickered on. Yonatan turned them off again while Dov disabled the CCTV. They closed the window shutters then turned one light back on. ‘Okay,’ said Dov to Noah. ‘Over to you.’
The room was arrayed like the bridge of a ship, with two rows of desks facing a wall of large screens, all off. A semicircular command console in pride of place was equipped with a confusion of buttons, dials and switches. Noah walked over to it. At once, his nausea returned. He was at home with schematics. He understood code. Give him software to tinker with, he could make it dance waltzes. But physical structures like these were alien to him. He looked desperately around at Dov and Yonatan, hoping to explain himself, but they were already engaged on their own task, spray-painting the walls with gleeful slogans.
Save the Arno goby!
Capitalism is death
Environment before profit
And when we’ve destroyed this planet, what then?
Noah swallowed and focused on the console. He could do this. All he had to do was shut the sluice gates and stop the turbines. It would take time to complete, but the procedure itself was simple enough. There was even a helpful diagram on the console itself. On the other hand, the regional command centre might see it happening and try to override it. There was a pair of glass-fronted server closets against the right-hand wall. He studied their configuration then simply switched off both communications servers, hoping it would be attributed to a glitch of some kind. He turned on the wall screens. They showed live data and CCTV feed from the sluice gates and turbines far below. He returned to the central console and started the shutdown. Orange warning lights at once began pulsing on the walls. Dov came across to check his progress. ‘All done?’ he asked, tossing away an empty spray can.
‘You can’t be serious,’ protested Noah. ‘I’ve barely started.’
‘What else needs doing, then?’
Noah looked from the console up at the screen. The sluice gates were already beginning to close. When they were done, the river would stop running. Yet somehow that seemed anticlimactic. He said: ‘This whole building, it’s like the dashboard in a car.’ He pointed at the CCTV feed. ‘If you want to make sure the river stays stopped, I’d need to get down there and—’
‘No time,’ said Dov. ‘And we only need a few hours.’
‘Okay. Fine. He took a deep breath. ‘Then have at it.’
Dov grinned. He pulled on a pair of insulated gloves, grabbed his sledgehammer then set about smashing the server closets and every other piece of electronic equipment in sight, while Yonatan used the chainsaw to slice through all the cabling, sending sparks flying. In five minutes, the room was a scrapyard.
‘Enough,’ said Dov. ‘We need to go.’
They jogged back across the dam, scrambled beneath the fence and up to the Renault. They stripped off their gloves and masks, tossed everything in the back. Then they set off back up the track, waiting until they were at the main road before turning on their headlights. They drove briskly but not too quickly back around the lake. They saw not a glimmer of the police anywhere. Now that they were safe, Noah hugged himself and rocked back and forth. It was all he could do not to laugh, but it kept leaking from him anyway in odd little snorts that made Yonatan glance around. ‘You okay, mate?’ he asked.
‘I’m fine, yes,’ said Noah. ‘It’s just, that was so fucking cool.’
‘How about that?’ grinned Yonatan. ‘Our man likes a bit of the good stuff after all.’
Noah nodded, he didn’t trust himself to speak. Start giggling now, it would ruin everything. But screw the army! This was the life.
This, right here, this was the life.
III
Tomas and Guido were still twenty minutes from Sicilì when the latest batch of photographs came through from Massimo and his crew. Night had now fallen, so that the pictures of old crones had largely been replaced by middle-aged men in checked shirts and heavy jackets. On autopilot, he flipped straight past a young couple on a motorbike. Then he went back again. The woman was wearing a helmet so that he couldn’t see her face. But the man…
He showed it to Guido. ‘That pig’s arse,’ he muttered. ‘What’s he doing there?’
‘What are any of them doing there, oh my brother?’ he replied. Yet the question was a good one, and it made him uneasy, like the creaking of lake ice at start of thaw. Something was going on, to bring all these people here. Something he didn’t understand. Yet he was good at sensing traps, and this didn’t have the feel of one, so he set it aside for the moment and called Massimo back to let him know his target and to give him his orders. Then he nodded for Guido to up his pace a bit, so that they could reach Sicilì themselves in time for the capture.
The capture and the kill.
Chapter Forty-One
I
There was nothing Carmen could say to Cesco that didn’t sound trite and inadequate. What use to tell him that he’d only been fourteen at the time, or that he’d most certainly have been murdered too if he’d gone back? He knew all that already, and yet it didn’t help. How could it? She held him instead, stroking his hair, offering him time in the darkness to compose himself. ‘How did you get back to shore?’ she asked gently, when she judged it right.
He was silent so long, she feared she’d pressed too soon. Then he began to talk. ‘I always was a strong swimmer,’ he said. ‘It was summer, the water was warm. I could see a lighthouse on the shore. I aimed for it until the current swept me away. Then I picked out other lights instead. I swam for hours. It was almost dawn when I reached land. I was exhausted, I couldn’t even stand. There were rocks. I remember cutting my hands and feet on them, how the saltwater burned. I reached a small beach with a few holiday homes behind it. I was completely naked, like I said. I found some clothes hanging out to dry on a line. I stole a T-shirt that fitted me like a ball gown, and a pair of shorts that I had to clutch with both hands to stop them from falling down. One of the back doors was open. I sneaked into the kitchen for some string to hold them up. There was a bowl of coins by the front door so I filled my pockets then went into town looking for a payphone. But I passed a newspaper kiosk before I found one. There were photos of my family splashed across all the front pages. Their bodies in the restaurant. My parents, my grandmother, my little cousin Romeo. That was how I found out.’
‘Oh my poor Cesco.’
‘I guess that was why they’d decided to get rid of me and Claudia. They didn’t need us any more. But I was too terrified to care about reasons. I just wanted to get safe. But how? My friends were all ’Ndrangheta. Every policeman I’d ever met had been on the take. There was only one
person I completely trusted. My mother’s best friend from school, a woman called Emilia. Her father had moved to Oxford to help his brother run a restaurant there. She’d stayed on to become a teacher, then had married another teacher at her school called Richard Stone. They had two kids: Arthur, a year older than me and Didi; Lizzie, a year younger. Not twins, but about as close as you can get. They came out to stay several times. We all got on really well, and it was a cheap holiday for them. Anyway, I trusted Emilia absolutely. She was so obviously good. You know how it shines in some people?’
‘Yes. I know.’
‘So there I was, desperate for help. I called international enquiries and somehow got the number for her school. She was there, thank God. She was… I can’t tell you. She got on a flight to Naples that same evening and drove down to pick me up. We flew back to England the next morning, with me on her son’s passport. We had the same colouring, and who looks that closely at a boy travelling with his mother? She and Richard took me in. The whole family were incredibly kind. I mean incredibly kind.’ Carmen could feel the tears welling again inside him. ‘They wanted to adopt me officially but I had terrible nightmares about those men finding out and coming after me so we did it covertly instead. They confided in their head teacher. She helped us arrange it all. It worked fine for the next few years, until I left school. Then it became a problem. Applying to university or for any proper kind of job meant risking the truth coming out. That wouldn’t be bad just for me. It could have been ruinous for everyone who’d helped me too. Plus, to be frank, I was homesick. I missed Italy. I missed the language. I missed the sun. So one day the whole family went to visit Emilia’s parents. I feigned sickness and stayed behind. I wrote a thank-you note then borrowed Arthur’s passport, packed a bag and flew out. I stayed up north, as far from Cosenza as I could get, and I got by doing odd jobs and conning people. But of course that meant having to move every so often. And with each move I came a little further south.’
The Sacred Spoils Page 30
