Cait nodded.
“Cait, I need confirmation. This is important. Okay?”
“Yes, sir,” said Cait, with a mock military inflection to her voice.
This guy means business. He’s done this before, thought Cait, feeling confident with O’Donnell’s meticulous planning.
“Tony, you finished yet? Can I say something now?”
“Almost. One last thing. When I come out the front door, just turn and walk back the way we came to the main street here, where we are now. Look natural. I’ll meet you here. Don’t wait for me.
“And if you hear anything going on inside like a scuffle or a gunshot, leave immediately and call the Carabinieri.
“You got all that?”
“Yeah,” replied Cait, this time with a serious note to her voice.
“Good, now what did you want to say?”
“That street kid who I gave the euro to. He wasn’t right. He didn’t fit in.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, for starters, if he was begging, how come he had on a two-hundred-dollar pair of Nikes?”
“Yeah, I saw that as well,” said Ice. “Good catch.”
“But what disturbed me most were his eyes. I held his gaze for a split second, and he was hiding something. He was scared. It was as if he was looking round for someone.”
“Well, he’s gone now,” replied O’Donnell. “But he could have been a lookout. The Taliban used to use kids like that in Afghanistan.”
“What, you were in Afghanistan? I thought you were just some secret agent sort of dude working for ASIO,” said Cait, her antennae picking up on O’Donnell’s slip of the tongue.
“Cait, that’s another story. Like you said to me about your psychic stuff. Sorry, I shouldn’t have mentioned it. Just slipped out.
“But still, the kid reinforces my instructions to you about ringing me if anyone enters the street. You’re my eyes and ears, Cait. I’m relying on you to cover my back.”
“Don’t worry Tony, I’ll do everything you said. Now I know you’re some type of super-secret agent, your word’s my command.”
O’Donnell ignored Cait’s attempt at humor. He was in serious mode and totally focused on the mission.
“Right, that’s settled then. Now, repeat back to me every instruction I just gave you, word for word, then we’ll go in. It’s time for action.”
Ice listened at the front door of number eight. Nothing. Not a sound.
Gently nudging the door partly open with his foot, he instantly morphed into SAS mode: hyperalert, slightly crouched stance, centered, long muscles tensed, ready for action, eyes ever vigilant, searching for danger, right hand clenched like a deadly hammer, ready to lash out and strike as if it was a coiled snake about to lunge, left hand loose, prepared to grab.
His hands and feet were his weapons. Equally as dangerous as a gun or a knife at close quarters, Ice could take a man out with one punch.
He’d done it before. Many times.
Sergeant O’Donnell was in attack mode, lethal, deadly, a trained killer.
Quiet as a hunter stalking his prey, he stealthily crept down the bare hallway and checked the two rooms off to the left.
All clear.
Cigarette smoke wafted down from upstairs, catching O’Donnell’s attention, his senses going on high alert.
Someone’s up there.
Stopping at the base of the stairs, Ice tuned into the vibes of the house. No movement, no sound.
Not a good sign. Someone’s waiting for me upstairs.
Gingerly walking up the creaking stairs, he slowly crept forward, step after anxious step, expecting to be challenged at any time.
Reaching the landing, Ice looked around.
Nothing. Total quiet.
The door to the front room was partly closed. Ice tensed, preparing for action, then gradually pushed it open, cautiously peering inside, expecting to be challenged.
No one there.
But they had been, only minutes ago. A smoking cigarette butt was still smoldering in an overflowing ashtray sitting on the windowsill, discarded clothes were messily strewn around, a Qur’an sat open on the untidy bed, a prayer mat sat at an odd angle on the dirty floor.
The room was exactly how Dec had described it: filthy walls, bare floorboards, torn lace curtains, a bed in one corner, chair by the door, chest along the wall. And it reeked of smoke, mold, heady body odor and stale food.
Ice spun around quietly. He had to search the rest of the upstairs rooms . . . and found himself looking down the barrel of a Glock 17 9mm handgun, pointing straight at his head.
Bad move. Ice was the wrong person to threaten.
With lightning-fast speed, O’Donnell cocked his head slightly to the left at the same time as he rammed his right arm up hard under his assailant’s right wrist, forcing the arm upward. In the same movement, Ice thrust his left hand over the top, grabbing the Glock and disarming his attacker. Continuing in a fluid motion, O’Donnell forcefully twisted his opponent’s right wrist backward, forcing his opponent down toward the floor. Smashing the tip of his left elbow into the side of the man’s face as he dropped, loosening more than a few teeth, Ice broke the man’s jaw.
Following his movement down, Ice twisted the assailant’s arm over his right knee, dislocating the elbow and breaking the ulna and radius.
The man slumped to the floor, screaming in agony, his mangled arm lying useless at an odd angle to his body.
Kneeling over the top of his attacker, Ice delivered two quick blows to his head, and his attacker was out cold.
Twelve seconds from go to whoa.
Thump!
Ice’s head lunged forward violently, his world momentarily lost in a world of starry blackness. A baseball bat in full swing had smashed into his neck, clipping the base of his skull. There had been another person lurking in the second room upstairs, and he had come to the rescue of his fallen mate.
Cait heard the scuffle inside, her attention immediately drawn to the house. As instructed, she was standing guard out the front, talking to a phantom on her cell phone.
The wooden front door burst open with a crash and the street urchin from before rushed out at full speed. Hitting the pavement, he spun on a dime and bolted up the street, leaving Cait in a quandary: Do I take off and pursue the boy, or do I hold my ground?
Cait momentarily held firm.
Looking back at the house, Cait knew something bad was going down. This hadn’t been part of O’Donnell’s pre-op brief. Without a second thought, she disregarded Ice’s instructions and rushed through the open front door.
And there he was. Tariq. Cait recognized him in a heartbeat.
He was in full flight, running flat out down the hallway toward the back door.
“Tariq . . . stop!” yelled Cait, taking off to pursue him.
Crash, thump, bang . . .
A man with a baseball bat in his hand came tumbling down the stairs, taking the steps two and three at a time, tripping over his feet in a desperate attempt to escape.
Meeting Cait at the base of the stairs, he took a swing at her head.
Cait reacted instinctively, sensing the dangerous weapon in her peripheral vision.
Time slowed as her grandmothers urgently whispered to her, “The bat, Cait . . . stop the bat.”
As her assailant suddenly started moving in slo-mo, the baseball bat swinging through the air toward her skull, about to land a crushing blow that would take her out, Cait ducked. The weapon harmlessly passed by, hitting the top of the stair rail with a whack, destabilizing the man.
Reacting instinctively, Cait thrust her arm out toward her attacker, palm outward, and directed a forceful blast of white energy at him. Lifting him half a meter off the floor, the short and dumpy but well-muscled man shot backward through the air for two meters, landing in a twisted jumble of limp arms and legs halfway down the hallway.
Unconscious. His left arm at a weird angle, obviously broken. Blood pouring from hi
s boxer’s nose that was now squashed flat on his face, a crimson pool of blood spreading out on the floor framing his head.
Cait stood her ground and looked down at the pathetic wretch lying in front of her.
“And you thought you were so tough, arsehole,” she said bitterly, panting as she centered herself.
O’Donnell had heard the commotion on the ground floor and grabbed the gun, bolting down the rickety stairs in time to see Cait’s assailant flying backward though the air and faceplanting into the wall before landing in a heap, unmoving.
Not a groan, not a twitch. The small, overweight man was motionless.
Lifeless.
As Cait’s words registered, Ice was so taken aback with what he had just witnessed that he found himself fixed, immobile, glued to the spot. In his years of combat and killing in war zones all over the world he’d never witnessed anything quite like what had just happened in front of him.
“I . . . ah . . . how did you do that?” O’Donnell managed to mutter, mouth agape, eyes wide with shock and amazement.
Cait gave O’Donnell a steely glare that would frighten a lesser man into submission, her heart still pumping wildly as the adrenaline surged through her system.
“I told you at the start, I can look after myself. I’m a weapon when I’m crossed.”
“Yeah, I can see that now.” Ice was more than impressed. Cait had just graduated at the top of her class. She’d passed the initiation and was now officially on the team.
“But how exactly did you do that? That guy must weigh over two hundred pounds, and you just threw him through the air as if he was a rag doll.”
“If I told you, you wouldn’t understand. Not yet. Maybe one day.”
“And Cait, I take everything back. I don’t understand any of it, but you were one hundred percent correct. Tariq was here, upstairs.”
“I know, I saw him running out the back door when this lowlife tried to take me out with a baseball bat. Otherwise I would have chased him.”
“Well, lucky you didn’t. He’s a desperate man, an experienced terrorist, and likely to do anything. You could have been seriously injured. Or even killed.”
“Tony, no one—and I mean NO ONE—crosses me or my family and gets away with it. The last person who tried that is now six feet under.”
O’Donnell was flabbergasted. One more time. How could this seemingly innocent young girl be so ruthless and lethal? It added yet another layer to the conundrum that made up Cait Lennox. Even his SAS mates were not that complicated.
Soldiers? Yes. Trained killers? Yes. Battle hardened? Yes. But only the toughest of the tough had that cold-blooded, callous streak that he was beginning to realize Cait possessed. She was a born killer.
Put a L115A3 8.59mm in her hand and she’d make a deadly assassin, he thought to himself.
Except from what he had just seen, Cait didn’t need a rifle to kill. She could take out a target with a stare and a hand movement.
“Cait, we need to secure the two men, sweep the scene, then call the Carabinieri.” O’Donnell was back in official mode.
Time to close this out.
“I’ve got a contact there. I promised to keep Primo Capitano Constanzo in the loop. I’m sure he’ll be very interested with these two.”
O’Donnell had only one problem with this. How was he going to explain all the broken bones and other injuries, as from an outsider’s perspective it would look like an overkill.
Cait stood in the doorway of the front bedroom on the top floor, still pumped from taking out the man at the base of the stairs. Teeth clenched, fists tightly grasped, adrenaline charging through her body, she was überalert, taking long slow breaths, her temporal pulse pumping, senses heightened.
She was at one with the moment.
Staring vacantly at five drops of fresh crimson blood on the wooden floor in front of her, Cait became lost in a vision, drifting, absorbing the energy of the room as she opened her mind and allowed perception to metamorphose.
Violence, aggression . . . planning. They’d been devising a way for Tariq to leave the country. And there had been someone else here! A spiteful, ambitious man who took his orders from another. He only had three fingers on his right hand . . .
“Cait, look at this,” said O’Donnell, cutting short her vision by calling her over to check something that he had picked up from the floor.
Stepping into the room, instead of walking directly over to O’Donnell, Cait did a circuit. Passing the chair on her left, she took in a dirty pair of slacks and a discarded striped shirt that had been messily thrown over the arm. A pair of dusty worn leather sandals lay one on top of the other under the chair.
That’s the shirt Tariq was wearing when Dec and I first saw him in Catania, Cait remembered.
She touched the shirt and had an instant flashback to Tariq’s coal black, evil eyes that returned her stare when their vision had locked and she jumped inside his head. The hair on her forearms stood on end like a forest of soft down at the memory.
“That man is pure evil,” Cait said softly to herself, as if she needed to reinforce the memory of Tariq and the carnage that the car bomb had caused.
“He’ll be lucky to see the week out,” she prophesized.
Stopping at the bed, she leaned over to pick up the open Qur’an that was laying on top of the sheet.
“Don’t touch that,” said O’Donnell urgently. “It’ll have fingerprints all over it that the police will need.” He’d been silently observing Cait from the other side of the room, watching her work the crime scene as she came over to him. She was a natural, falling into a rhythm that belied her lack of experience and years. It was as if she’d been born to undertake forensic work.
Cait pulled the top sheet back on the bed, exposing a mattress only, with no other bedding apart from a crumpled, yellowing pillow. The mattress was filthy and sweat-stained, with a large brown blotch in the middle and was strewn with food crumbs.
“How can people live like this? I mean, that bed is absolutely disgusting,” Cait said.
“And it stinks.”
Passing the overflowing ashtray on the windowsill, still with a half-finished butt complete with a long silver tail of ash hanging on the end of it, she looked down and saw a bunch of scrunched-up candy wrappers on the floor.
Cait looked over at O’Donnell quizzically.
“Yeah Cait, that’s what caught my eye outside in the street. The discarded candy wrappers under the window. Dead giveaway that someone was upstairs and throwing them out the window.”
Ice played with the mobile phone that he’d picked up off the floor, holding it in a discarded cloth and turning it over and over in his hand as he spoke, playing with the phone as if it was a keepsake. He’d tried to access its recent calls but the phone was locked.
Damn!
“Tony, take the phone out of the cover. Look behind it.” Cait had a gut feeling that something was there.
Jackpot!
A Banco di Sicilia credit card belonging to a Marco Rizzo was sandwiched at the back between the cover and the phone. Carefully removing the card by its edges so as not to leave any foreign fingerprints, O’Donnell pulled out his own phone and took a picture of the front and back of the card, then replaced the phone and card back in the cover and put it down on the floor where he found it.
“I’ll run the card through the database when we get back and see what I can find out about whoever owns the phone. Unless it’s stolen, this Rizzo character has to be involved with Tariq somehow.”
“Which makes him a bad guy, huh?” said Cait.
“Yep. Sure does,” replied O’Donnell. “And the bad guys always make mistakes. The likes of you and I have to be smart enough to pick up on them, or they’ll just slip by. And it looks like Rizzo just made a big one.”
Cait smiled. For the first time, O’Donnell had used the plural collective “you and I” when talking about the case. He’d finally brought her on board the team.
�
��I’ll have to call the Carabinieri. Have a final look around, but leave everything as you found it. This is now a crime scene.”
“Paul, what can you tell me about Marco Rizzo?” O’Donnell had run Rizzo’s credit card details through the ASIO, Interpol and Europol databases and got a hit.
At Paul’s suggestion, the two of them were having a midafternoon aperitif in an out-of-the-way, nondescript bar in Catania. O’Donnell’s gut instinct was telling him that if he could nail Rizzo it could help him crack this case right open. Then when he joined the dots and established a significant cross-reference on the various databases between Rizzo’s name, Cara di Mineo and the Cosa Nostra, there were just too many interconnections to ignore.
This Rizzo person was in this up to his eyeballs.
And O’Donnell knew he had the perfectly placed person to help him out in Paul. A web of intrigue involving refugees from Libya, people smuggling, organized crime, corruption at the highest level, international money laundering and a link to terrorism made Paul Jones a real Johnny-on-the-spot. He was the ideal man to contact. Paul was smart, well connected, had significant political clout and understood the shady side of hot money flows. Already on ASIO’s books, having Paul sniff around for him in the refugee camp wouldn’t arouse any suspicion, and who knew what intel he would be able to uncover.
“Well, for starters, Rizzo has Cosa Nostra written all over him,” said Paul. “He’s the Mafia stooge who’s running Cara di Mineo, and he—or should I say ‘they’—are ripping the place off blind. He’s a really nasty piece of work.”
“Yeah, I remember you mentioning at our lunch in Pozzallo about the link between the Cosa Nostra and the missing aid money. It’s all fitting into place and pointing in one direction.”
“The Mafia?” questioned Paul.
“Does a bear shit in the forest?” replied O’Donnell.
“Well, I know I’ve said it before,” continued Paul, “but follow the money trail and you’ll find the Mafia at the end of it, usually with their noses well and truly in the money trough.”
In actuality, Paul was only too willing to help O’Donnell. To him this was so much, much more than secret agent, clandestine intelligence gathering. Seeing this to a conclusion wouldn’t only help him bring significant world attention to the Cosa Nostra and add weight to his claims at Care the World that there was major corruption occurring, but he also had an important ulterior motive: Dec. The weight of the boy’s injuries still rested heavily with Paul, and now that Dec was blind, well, it made him even more determined to see the bastards brought down.
The Cait Lennox Box Set Page 67
