White Hot Silence

by Henry Porter

  ‘Signor Samson, this is the father-in-law of Salvatore Bucco.’ He gestured to the man by the Maserati. The speaker was young, no more than thirty, and his voice was soft and lazy. ‘He wants to speak with you, but he must do this through me because he does not have English.’

  The Camorra had found Samson, and he had no doubt who had told them where he was going to be – Colonel Fenarelli. But whether as payback for keeping Anastasia’s phone from him, or simply as part of a hidden relationship between the Carabinieri and the Neapolitan underworld, Samson had no idea.

  ‘Go ahead,’ he said.

  ‘Niccolo Scorza is dead. We believe that Salvatore has been murdered also.’

  ‘A reasonable assumption, I’m afraid,’ said Samson.

  ‘Signor Esposito is afraid, too,’ said their interpreter. ‘He is afraid for his daughter and his two young grandchildren, and he is afraid for Salvatore, who is a good father and friend to us all.’

  ‘I understand,’ said Samson looking at Esposito. ‘But there’s very little I can do.’

  The younger man translated for Esposito and there followed a few murmured sentences. ‘Signor Esposito says you can lead him to the people responsible for this.’

  Samson looked at him incredulously. ‘Surely Mr Esposito knows much more about this thing than I do. Your organisation was paid to carry out the kidnap of an innocent charity worker. You know who paid you – I don’t. You know who told you to take her to a container vessel named Grigori at Taranto – I don’t. What can I tell you?’

  ‘Nothing was said about killing our two friends.’

  ‘Forgive me if I don’t show a lot of sympathy,’ said Samson slowly. ‘Bucco and Scorza murdered two migrants on that road – executed them like dogs. Then they took Mrs Hisami, presumably drugged her, and put her in a container. Did they give a damn about what they were doing? Did they think of the suffering they would cause? No, because they were paid a lot of money. And now they wind up dead. I cannot help you.’

  Esposito took his cigarette holder from his lips and held it about six inches from his face, squinting through the smoke. He was utterly unexceptional – jowly, thinning hair that was cropped short, bags under his eyes, a white shirt buttoned to the neck, a gold ring and bracelet. Except for the deadly, contemptuous expression in his eyes, there was very little to distinguish him from a cab driver in any European city. He spoke a few more sentences then replaced the cigarette holder between his lips and puffed.

  ‘Signor Esposito wonders why you have this attitude. He is suggesting an exchange of information – that is all. He does not threaten you. He wants only to help you.’

  ‘What information does he want from me?’

  ‘He says you do not have it now, but that you will have it soon.’

  ‘And what will he give me in exchange?’

  ‘He is going to tell you how to find the people responsible for your girlfriend’s kidnap.’ He smiled. ‘You see, we know a lot about you, Signor Samson.’

  ‘You talked to Fenarelli, right? I guess you also know that I’m employed by Mr Hisami to find his wife.’ His anger was rising, partly from lack of sleep but mostly from the revulsion he felt for these men. ‘You people organised the kidnapping and now you come to me complaining that your friends are dead. Why would I trust any information that you give me? Why would I feel any need to help you?’

  Esposito made an impatient motion to his interpreter, who handed him an envelope. ‘He gives you this and asks you to look at it now.’

  Samson opened the envelope and pulled out a picture of Adam Crane and the copy of an electronic transfer form for €2.2 million made out to a construction company called Arco di Ferro Cavallo in Turin and paid by Valge Kuubik, apparently an engineering firm based in Tallinn, Estonia.

  ‘You know this man?’ asked the interpreter.

  Samson shook his head. He wasn’t going to tell them anything. ‘This is dated two weeks ago. Why are you giving me evidence that will put you in prison?’

  ‘We are allowing you to see it. That’s all.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘The man in the photograph is called Shepherd – an English name – but we know he is from Ukraine. He is from our world. We want to know who he is and who is behind him. He is also – how do you say? – political.’

  ‘Did he arrange this payment personally?’

  Esposito understood what was being said and nodded.

  ‘Did he come to Napoli?’

  They shook their heads. ‘Signor Esposito met with this man in Austria.’

  ‘How did he get to you? People don’t just call up your organisation.’

  ‘A lawyer in Napoli who works with us. He knows nothing of this man, except that he has connections.’

  ‘So you didn’t check him out – you didn’t bother to find out if you were being set up. You didn’t think to wonder why you were delivering the woman you kidnapped to a Russian ship. You just wanted the money, so you asked no questions, right?’

  A car came up the ramp then reversed the moment the driver saw their group. Esposito took no notice but launched into a stream of invective, gesticulating with his cigarette. Samson knew enough Italian to understand that he was telling the younger man to give him something.

  This was a piece of paper with several numbers printed on it. ‘What is this?’ asked Samson.

  ‘Bank-account numbers.’

  ‘Where did you get this?’

  ‘You say we don’t check people out, but we do. Mr Shepherd was followed after his meeting with Mr Esposito to a club called the Erotische Palast. This came from his wallet.’

  ‘I take it I can keep these?’

  ‘But you must tell us what you find out from them, or we will find you. I give you this card. You can call anytime.’

  ‘Don’t threaten me,’ said Samson sharply. He took a couple of paces towards Esposito. The two bodyguards moved quickly to intercept him, their guns aimed at his head. Esposito smiled and muttered something that the young man translated. ‘He says you are not a good investigator because you have not even asked him where to find your girlfriend.’

  Samson stepped back to lean on his car. The bodyguards lowered their weapons. ‘Okay, where the hell do I find her?’

  ‘Russia. And they will keep her there as long as they want – until Mr Hisami does what they say.’

  ‘You know what they are demanding in exchange for her freedom?’

  ‘Shepherd, he said that they want something from Hisami. And they have many secrets about Hisami. But we do not know what this is.’

  ‘Why did he tell you so much? You were just contractors.’

  ‘A man talks when his wine has a little extra something,’ said the young translator. He gave Samson a card with a telephone number scrawled in biro at the bottom. ‘The lawyer – he will find us.’ They climbed into the Maserati and unhurriedly turned to take the ramp down. As the car passed Samson, Esposito gave him one last pitiless look.

  CHAPTER 13

  She was lying down in a long box. Her hands were tied in front of her and her mouth was sealed with tape. She could rock sideways and touch the sides of the box with her elbows and the top with her head. The confinement horrified her. She began to breathe rapidly but told herself to calm down. They hadn’t killed her so they obviously wanted her alive. However, they had hurt her as they hauled her from the top of the container, tearing muscles in her left arm and shoulder, and these now burned with pain. She blinked and realised that her right eye was nearly closed with a swelling. She remembered that one of the men had slapped her across the face as she struggled to keep hold of the phone, only relinquishing her grasp to hurl it between the containers so they’d never see the numbers she had dialled. But she had no idea where it landed.

  Now she kept telling herself, ‘Cool it, Anastasia. Control yourself!’ She tried to distract herself by thinking of Samson, his voice steady and calm, and his promise to come for her whatever it took. That gave her something to hol
d on to. He would do it! This is what he was good at, and he never gave up. He was like a tracker dog. And she knew he still loved her. She had heard it in his voice in those few seconds on the phone. He always spoke to her like that, as though they were in bed. She consciously summoned up images of their time in Venice, their love-making and the pleasure they took from the same things – sweet wine from the Veneto, with biscotti on the coldest day of their trip, the sound of a child practising the piano in an upstairs room overlooking a bridge, that sunlight through the mist which made them both gasp. Samson had said that, if he lived in Venice, he would have to try to be an artist, however hopeless. She had laughed. She hadn’t expected him to be quite so sensitive to everything they were seeing. In one gallery, where they were almost alone, they stood in front of a painting of the Flight into Egypt and he had wondered out loud if this was the first picture of a refugee crisis. He was attracted to the details of paintings – the line of laundry in a Canaletto, the columbines and lilies in the foreground of a hunting study, the goldfinch on the Virgin’s hand. He was very observant and rarely missed anything, in life or in art. It was so unusual that his appreciation of a painting was sparked by minute details rather than grandiose themes, and she had loved that in him.

  She trawled through these memories again and again for new details, but she kept on coming back to their extraordinary closeness in bed, something she’d never experienced with anyone else before or since. Samson was at ease with himself physically, unself-conscious and undemanding. She didn’t feel guilty about thinking of those times, in the same way as she hadn’t felt remorse – merely a sense of loss – when she dumped him for Denis. The images of Samson were what she needed right now and she would hold on to whatever kept her panic at bay. Damn Denis. Where the hell was he when she needed him?

  They’d given her a shot when they took her down from the containers. She had the same chemical blur in her brain as she’d had when she woke in the container, and her stomach churned, though that was possibly the motion of the ship. She dozed, but halfway between consciousness and sleep, her mind filled with terrifying thoughts of being left in the box for months, like the British hostages in the Lebanon she had read about. She forced herself to stay awake and tried to interpret the sounds that occasionally came to her, yet these never included the voices of the crew she found herself yearning for.

  It was impossible to tell how much time had passed – maybe twelve or fifteen hours. Maybe more. She became aware of things quietening down. She sensed less motion in the box, and the ship’s engines, which seemed to have been going flat out since she had come round, created less vibration.

  She waited. If they wanted her alive, they would have to feed her and give her water, so they must come. And they couldn’t leave her lying in her pee. Nobody does that. She waited and waited, then, much later, she heard footsteps reverberating in the space around the box. Before she knew it the lid was lifted and the beam of a torch was run over her face and she had to screw her eyes shut. ‘Please,’ she said. ‘Please get me out. I won’t run. Please!’ Two men grabbed her by the shoulders, but she screamed so loudly when they wrenched her injured arm that they let her go. They consulted, put their hands under her back and legs, lifted her up and swung her round so that her bottom rested on the side of the box and her feet touched the ground. She slumped forward, determined not to faint from the pain. ‘Just hold on. I need to get my breath. I’m feeling sick.’ The throb of the engine was much louder and there was a smell of machinery and urine. She looked around. There were three of them. They didn’t speak, but from their few words she already knew they were Russian. She looked down. The box she had been held in was labelled ‘Safety Equipment’.

  They frogmarched her up a companionway – her legs were still numb and she could barely walk – and then up two more flights of stairs until they were out in the open. It was night – a whole day had passed. She gulped in air and begged them for water, but they didn’t seem to understand and kept her moving until they reached the light flooding from the open door of a cabin. They pushed her in and forced her on to the bed. Expecting the worst, she began to shake her head and shout, ‘No!’, but one of the men cut the rope that bound her wrists and gestured to food and water on the table. Another picked up a heavy wrench that was propped up just outside the cabin and hit the handle on the inside of the door until it sheered off. They left without a word, slamming the door and locking it behind them. Something heavy was dragged to block the doorway and a man was left on guard outside. She heard him muttering and smelled his cigarette smoke for the rest of the night.

  She ate the bread, sausage and apple that had been left for her and sipped the water, while revolving her shoulder. It was not until she stood under the dribble of warm water in the tiny shower room that she realised that she was in Zhao’s cabin. All his possessions had been cleared away and there was nothing to say that he had ever been there, but the mirror in his shower room had been missing the bottom-right-hand corner and so was the one she stood in front of. She had completely forgotten about the strange little chef and begging him to send an email to Denis’s account. Did he manage to send it? Had he been caught and murdered and his body heaved over the side, like the others? She considered the possibility that they had chosen his empty cabin to make a point – attempting to suborn any member of the crew would result in death.

  She dried herself and washed some of her clothes in the sink, kneading suds from the tiny bar of soap while looking at her scratched and battered face. She barely recognised the haunted reflection that stared back at her. But she was alive and she had talked to Samson and he was going to find her.

  It was six in the morning when Denis Hisami was brought from his cell in the Manhattan Correctional Center, which he shared with a notorious author of a pyramid scheme for whom he had formed an abiding dislike, and another man, who claimed he had been wrongly identified by Immigration and Customs Enforcement as an illegal Jamaican immigrant. Jim Tulliver and Sam Castell were already there when he was led into the interview room and placed in the chair opposite them with what seemed like unnecessary force.

  Castell went first. ‘We’ve got another hearing – not sure when but I expect you to be released with a tracker. I’m sorry, but we had to tell the judge about Anastasia because that was the only thing that made her reconsider. ICE still says you are a risk, but they won’t specify what kind – a flight risk or a terror risk – so it’s hard to argue with them. Both are ridiculous, and the judge has lost patience with ICE because they won’t produce their evidence. But I think you’ll be out of here in about thirty-six hours.’

  ‘Make sure it happens,’ said Hisami. ‘Who did you talk to?’

  ‘Senator Shelley Magee.’

  ‘And what did she say?’

  ‘She is concerned, naturally, but she asked where all this is coming from. Why has it happened to you? She’s, like, anxious about the stuff going on below the surface. She wants to know who’s involved before tangling with it.’

  ‘Shelley always was a shrewd politician.’

  ‘But she wants to help. She really does.’

  Hisami shrugged and shifted his attention to Tulliver. ‘Okay, so tell me about Anastasia. You obviously have news.’

  ‘She somehow managed to make a call to Samson from the vessel. She tried you first, we suspect, but we don’t have access to your phone so there’s no way of telling.’ He let that hang in the air and gave his boss a look. Hisami wasn’t going to react. He’d never give Tulliver access to his phone. ‘So they were able to identify the vessel and get an exact fix on its position, and they tracked it through yesterday,’ continued Tulliver, watching Hisami carefully. We tried our damnedest to get the boat intercepted. But the State Department didn’t lift a finger. They said there was no proof that Anastasia was on the boat, despite the phone call and Zillah getting all the evidence together about the boat, its departure from Taranto, intercepts and satellite imagery. Without their backing, the Pent
agon wouldn’t help. The boat passed through European waters into the Black Sea, but the only way we could get the Europeans to act was with the help of the US Ambassador to the EU, and of course she wouldn’t move without instructions from State. And it didn’t help that your wife is no longer a European citizen. The British offered help, but the nearest Royal Navy vessel was five hours away, and by the time the captain was ordered to intercept it was night and the Grigori was practically in Russian territorial waters.’

  ‘And she made no more calls?’

  ‘Not to Samson. I don’t know about your phone. We weren’t allowed to bring any mobile devices in here, so we can’t look at yours now. We do need to do that, at some point.’

  ‘I’ll be out tomorrow.’ Hisami thought for a few seconds. ‘If they’ve taken her to Russia, there is, of course, little hope of getting her out.’ He looked down, feeling more helpless than he could ever remember. His failure to take Anastasia’s advice in the first place had preyed on his mind all night, and now, finding himself incapable of helping her, even to the extent of picking up the phone when she had no doubt fought with all she had to make the call, he questioned his fitness as a man and as her husband. He should offer protection and security but had been found wanting.

  ‘So we can expect some kind of demand,’ said Tulliver. ‘Do you have any idea what that will be?’

  Hisami sucked in air, making a hiss with his lips. ‘That won’t come, Jim. They won’t make contact. Forget it.’

  ‘How do you know that?’ demanded Castell, eyes darting between the two men.

  ‘Just accept that there won’t be a demand, if Denis says so,’ said Tulliver sharply.

  ‘But Russia!’ said Castell. ‘What the fuck is going on, Denis? Why Russia?’ He shook his head idiotically and looked to Tulliver for help. Tulliver ignored him.

  ‘All you have to worry about is getting me out of here, Sam. Just stick to that, and leave the rest to me and Jim.’

  ‘And TangKi?’ asked Castell. ‘What do I do about that? The board doesn’t know Crane is dead yet. The London media has mentioned a guy called Shepherd, that’s all.’