The Informant

by Thomas Perry

  Schaeffer didn't meet the Honourable Margaret Holroyd until he'd already had a fairly long career in killing. After a bad experience involving the Balacontano family, he had flown to England and retired to the picturesque and ancient city of Bath. He bought a comfortable old house and remodeled it in ways that would have horrified the architectural preservationists. He replaced perfectly functional old windows with arrays of glass bricks high on the walls that let in light but would frustrate snipers. He had unobtrusive, locked cabinets installed at various points in the house and stocked them with loaded firearms of several types. He had closed-circuit television cameras mounted on all sides of the exterior, and had impermeable steel doors on the entrances and on the room where he slept. When he had satisfied his sense of security, he settled in and began to live a quiet, solitary existence.

  At the time Meg Holroyd was a bored, aristocratic young woman who spent all of her time going to parties and outings with a shifting group of highborn young men and women who appeared to have known her since birth. The moment he first saw her he was captivated. She was not merely pretty. She had something far rarer. She was perfect. Her skin was like a baby's, but the shape of her face was a sculpture in polished ivory with delicate, straight features and brilliant, knowing eyes. She was well educated, witty, and clever. But as she freely admitted to him, she was a liar. She invented fanciful scandalous stories about her friends, neighbors, even national and historical figures.

  On the day she met him at an educational lecture in Bath, she made him take her to tea and told him she had been thrown out of the local antiquarian society. She had gone to the last meeting, where she'd announced that she had put a powerful Peruvian aphrodisiac in the punch, and set off an orgy. She said the power of suggestion had caused a mass shedding of clothes as the members helped one another to disrobe and became a tangle of limbs. The respectable ladies and gentlemen, believing themselves compelled by the exotic South American drug, had lost all inhibition. Later, they had voted her out of the scholarly society on charges of mass sexual assault and adultery-by-proxy.

  Her stories were always too outrageous for even a naive stranger from America to believe, but always amusingly recounted in the most vivid detail, with the names of the most unlikely people attached. He liked her stories for the same reason she told them—they should have happened. He became her favorite audience because he always listened patiently to the whole story before he laughed.

  It had been a pleasant existence for him until the day, on an outing with her friends to the races at Brighton, he had been recognized. It had been an unlikely accident. He had never been to Brighton before, and he was seen by a person who fit in there as badly as he did, young Mario Talarese from New York City. The Talarese family had a connection with the Cappadocia brothers, a pair of Sicilians who ran some gambling enterprises in London, and the Cappadocias had taken on New York underboss Tony Talarese's nephew as an apprentice. When Mario Talarese saw the man who was once called the Butcher's Boy, he made a terrible error. Instead of placing an international call to his uncle, or even talking to the Cappadocias, he had gone after the Butcher's Boy with only one of the Cappadocias' waiters, who carried a straight razor, and a British bookie named Baldwin who secretly had no interest in getting into a fight with anyone who had once killed for a living. Baldwin had been right to worry, because in an hour he and the others were dead.

  Afterward, Schaeffer had told Meg a lie of his own, that the men he'd just killed in front of her eyes had been Bulgarian secret agents who had recognized him as a CIA agent in deep cover. He said he needed to rush back to the United States for a few weeks to complete the mission the Bulgarians had been sent to thwart.

  It wasn't until he returned to England a few weeks later that she had told him she'd never believed a word of his lie. But she had also informed him that while he'd been gone, she had realized she was so unbreakably attached to him that she had no choice but to ignore his unsuitability and marry him.

  When he had left England, he'd assumed that his relationship with her was over, and he had never imagined she would ever consider marrying him. He was ten years older and of an incalculably lower social class. While he had enough money to remain idle and keep the old house he had remodeled, he didn't have enough to make him a plausible husband to the last direct descendant of a bloodline that people seemed to consider a part of the national patrimony. But when he found himself once again in the presence of the only woman who had ever fascinated him, and she seemed to be determined to marry him, he couldn't think of a reason to resist.

  When people asked him what he did for a living, he had always replied that he'd retired from a business that was so spectacularly boring that he couldn't bear to ruin a pleasant evening by talking about it. After he returned from the United States, he resumed that policy, and it continued to work.

  He and Meg had married as quietly as possible, with the Anglican priest who often figured in Meg's most ribald slanders presiding, and the pretty, plump Hartleby sisters, who were also prominent in the stories, playing their harps.

  Since their wedding ten years ago, they had lived a quiet, unobtrusive life in Bath. He kept up a few precautions. He could never allow himself to be photographed, so they had always stayed as far as possible from anyone who appeared to be a celebrity. They gave money to charities through a trust, but never attended any of the receptions, balls, or dinners that were intended to prime the donors for the next year. On the rare occasions when pictures needed to be taken, Meg would be in them alone. Photographers didn't seem to mind because, although she was approaching forty, she was still perfect.

  Tonight he drove the fast, crowded highway toward Toronto, feeling the traffic mounting every second. As he went from Hamilton to Mississauga, he thought about Meg. He had no more business being married to her than to the Queen. She had simply been so willful and contrary that she had fallen in love with the worst man she had ever met and stuck with him without delving any further into the truth about him than to tell him his lies weren't fooling her. He could see her without closing his eyes. In the silence of the closed car, he could hear her voice.

  He could tell already that the way home to her was not going to be as easy or direct as it had been the last time. The ones who had come for him this time had not just stumbled on him. They had been searching. They had found him in Brighton, where Tony Talarese's nephew had found him the first time. That felt like a bad bit of luck; he and Meg seldom went down to Brighton because of the bad memory.

  He knew exactly what he had to do to make his way home. It wasn't hoping they'd forget. He had to make them think about him every day and every night until they hated Frank Tosca for bringing him into their lives again.

  11

  IT WAS GETTING to be evening, and Elizabeth was in the Justice Department basement staring at a computer screen. In the old days they had used a single big computer down here with a lot of terminals. In that era each morning's suspicious-death lists—her specialty—were printed on wide sheets of lined paper that were attached with perforated edges so they could be separated or left folded like an accordion. They'd been unwieldy, but much easier on the eyes than the bright, pretty screens of these desktops.

  The array of screens at this workstation constantly updated the status of each of the men the Organized Crime and Racketeering Division kept track of. If she had signed into these files from the computer in her office, there would be a record of it, but here the array was always on, and all she had to do was sit at this desk and wait. She watched, and the screen in front of her updated: Castiglione, Salvatore; Castiglione, Paul; Castiglione, Joseph, all checked in on a flight from Chicago to Phoenix, departing 8:14 P.M. All three of the brothers, the next generation leaders of the family, were leaving for Phoenix on the same plane.

  Ten lines down, she noticed another sudden change: a private jet operated by Aviation Interests, Inc., and leased to Garden State Engineering and Construction, had taken off from Newark with a flight
plan for St. Louis. Garden State was a Fibbiano operation. Everybody was heading west.

  Three lines up, an agent reported that Angelo LoCicero was just seen arriving at the airport in Detroit. Stand by for ticketing information.

  Everywhere on the display, the status entries for the heads of the families were being updated by the people assigned to watch them. It was evening, but still early even here in the Eastern time zone. She knew there was more to come because the Butcher's Boy had told her what was going to happen before it had begun. The old men were on the move, and they were on the way to a meeting, but she couldn't do anything to respond yet because she couldn't reveal to anyone how she knew. She would have to wait and let the movement go on long enough to be clear to anyone who looked at the data.

  The Butcher's Boy had told her the truth. She had been given a chance to watch the upper echelon of the Mafia gathering for a meeting, something that hadn't happened even once during her career. And it was happening quickly. Alphonse Costananza was in JFK waiting at the gate for a JetBlue flight to Las Vegas. He was the head of the family that ran Cleveland.

  Phil Langusto was already touching down at the airport in Flagstaff, Arizona. Salvatore Molinari was en route to Santa Fe, New Mexico. Giovanni "Chi-chi" Tasso had left New Orleans in the morning, but the surveillance team had not noticed his car leaving the city and had not yet seen him at an airport. Danny Spoleto had been seen in Albuquerque, and he was an underling for Mike Catania of Boston. It looked as though he was preparing to meet Catania on a later flight and drive him to wherever the meeting was going to be.

  Evening was shading off into an early, rainy night in Washington. She began to check the communication channels, the e-mails and faxes and the data updates, for some sign that any of the people who monitored organized crime activity had already put together the fact that this wasn't just one big player doing some unusual travel. They all seemed to be converging on a single point somewhere in the Southwest.

  She waited until she had fifteen big names on her summary screen, copied it, and attached it to an e-mail to be sent from her personal e-mail address. She typed in the address of Special Agent Holman at the FBI. He was the one who had been in charge of the night surveillance on Tosca, and when it was ordered stopped he had given her a chance to get it authorized by midnight. To Elizabeth that meant he was on duty at night. And he not only had behaved sensibly on that operation, but he would now be aware that the person at the Justice Department who had been right that time was Elizabeth Waring, and not her boss, the deputy assistant, who had made an unforgivable mistake in overruling her—a career-ending mistake for most people.

  She hesitated for a second and reviewed her decision. She had been privileged to have secret information of a sort that she would probably never have again. If the configuration of power had only been slightly different, acting on this information would have made her career. Law enforcement people had been waiting for fifty years for this kind of meeting to happen again, and now it was happening, but only she knew it. Somebody had to do something now, and it wasn't going to be the Justice Department.

  She typed, "Agent Holman: Please see the attached surveillance status updates snapshot 7:57 P.M. Has your office noted this sudden movement toward the Southwest? E. Waring, Justice Department Organized Crime and Racketeering." Then she slid the cursor back to the subject line at the top and typed, "URGENT. PLEASE ACKNOWLEDGE." She clicked on SEND.

  She stared at the computer screen, watching as the updates continued. At least a few of these men were at the centers of ongoing criminal investigations and must have their phones tapped. There were others who hadn't left their little kingdoms in years. But at this time of night she couldn't be sure there was anyone on duty except her who had the information collected in a single place and had the experience to form a single coherent picture of the way the movements of so many men in different cities had suddenly begun to coincide.

  She had given Holman the key, the way to see it. A field agent who saw one capo heading from New York to the Southwest might not perceive what was up. But if Holman saw that fifteen important men were headed there on the same night, he would have the sense to know this wasn't typical.

  She had no proof that Holman was on duty right now. But after being married to an FBI agent for nearly eight years, she was pretty sure there would be someone next door in the J. Edgar Hoover Building alert enough to read a communication that was marked URGENT by a ranking official at the Justice Department.

  The screens kept updating, the current entries blinking out and new, longer ones appearing. There must be at least twenty small surveillance teams working tonight, each of them convinced they were seeing their subjects behave in ways that they seldom did. It was also clear that none of them, so far, knew that all the others were having the same experience.

  The FBI was taking a very long time answering. Her boss in the Justice Department was deaf to her requests. But somebody had to start mounting an operation to find out what this meeting was about and who was going to attend who wasn't already being watched, or it would be too late. The meeting was clearly going to take place in the Southwest. It would probably be somewhere outside the major cities. Maybe the Arizona State Police were the next best group to call. But the meeting still could be somewhere else. She couldn't be sure that, just because the old men had flown to Phoenix or Tucson, they would stay there.

  Until she was sure where the meeting was, calling state and local authorities was a waste of time. Until then, going through the federal agencies would make the most sense. DEA? No. It would be hard for them to justify a raid unless there was some evidence of drugs. ATF? No again. Treasury would have been very interested in the tax implications of certain supposedly middle-income men being identified on tape as the heads of crime families, but that would be the IRS's problem, and the IRS wasn't capable of mounting this kind of operation.

  Her BlackBerry rang. "Waring."

  "Miss Waring, this is Special Agent Holman."

  She realized she was smiling. "You got my e-mail."

  "Yes. Are these real-time reports from agents in the field?"

  "That's exactly what they are. My section monitors them, but at this time of the evening there isn't anyone I know of who is seeing all of them at once."

  "Except you."

  "Right. Usually our people run through them every morning at seven. But I was here catching up on some things, so I checked. As you know, there's been some unusual activity lately surrounding Frank Tosca, and I wanted to see if he's been spotted. But sometimes you don't see anything unless you can see everything."

  "Do you think this sudden movement of the capos is what it looks like?"

  "I think it is. I think they're gathering for a general conference. If we could only move quickly enough, we'd get a modern version of Apalachin, with the Citizens of the Year from thirty different cities on some ranch together making agreements about what happens for the next fifty years. Or what I'm saying could be wishful thinking."

  "The reason I called you on the Tosca thing is that I knew who you are. You're known to be competent and cooperative and, more to the point, you're right a lot. I also met your husband a couple of times years ago, and I can tell you he was highly respected here. What do you want the Bureau to do?"

  There it was again. The Bureau's insularity never went away. They all thought of the FBI as a separate entity, not a part of anything else. The fact that it was part of the Justice Department seemed to them to be just a convenience, a place to park. By virtue of her marriage she was a friend, and her competence made her a provisional ally, but only until she disappointed them.

  "What would I like the Bureau to do?" she said. "I'd like you to take the information I've given you—that the heads of the families are going to the Southwest on the same day—and treat it as though you got it through your own sources. Then give it the level of priority and importance the Bureau considers appropriate."

  "That's all?"

 
"I have confidence that will be adequate."

  "This is the sort of discovery that brings promotions, and you're handing it over to me. Do you mind my asking why?"

  "You recall that the surveillance I requested on Frank Tosca was overruled by the deputy assistant AG. For the moment, at least, a request for a full-court press coming from me would not be approved. I think this is an opportunity that our side must not miss."

  "Don't you think the evidence you sent me speaks for itself?"

  "Evidence speaks to people who pay attention to it. The Bureau will do the best job with this, so it's yours. Good luck."

  "One last question, and then I'll let you go. How would you proceed?"

  "The first thing is to find out exactly where they're going. I would pick two of the small players—say, Dominic Locarno and Sonny Rosanti—and figure they'll be getting rental cars somewhere, probably Phoenix. Make sure the rental company gives them cars with global positioning systems and trace them. If it's a big meeting, the little guys will arrive first. That shows respect, and the big guys send them ahead to sniff around. Then the big guys get to make an entrance." She paused. "At that point it's still a cheap, low-profile operation. If I'm wrong about all of it, then some data analyst at Justice just got jumpy and started imagining the remote farmhouse again. It happens over here about once a year."

  "Here too."

  "Let me know when you can."

  "You'll be the first."

  12

  ELIZABETH HAD JUST ended her call with Agent Holman when her cell phone rang. She realized it must be one of the kids. It was nearly twelve, much later than she had expected. She looked at the phone's display for the number of the caller, but it said nothing. "Waring."

  "Did you find out where it is?" Of course it would be him. Who else would it be at this hour? The kids had gone to bed.

  "Where what is?"