by Dale Nelson
His desire to see the man buried in the ground was visceral, real, and wholly justified. But Jack also knew that Aleksander’s value to international law enforcement was inestimable. The Pink Panthers had an uncanny ability to avoid capture, and when they were, they evidenced an equally uncanny ability to escape. Their prison breaks were nearly as daring as their heists.
Jack didn’t trust the Italians to keep him for long.
Either he was going to escape from prison because that’s what they did, or the mafia was going to kill him on the inside.
For these reasons, Danzig and Castro were already talking about extraditing him someplace that the mafia couldn’t get to and the guards a little less susceptible to bribery and extortion. That would be after he stood trial for trying to rob a bank.
And bribing numerous government officials.
And cops.
And judges.
Jack told Danzig about the trove of information he had in his backpack, though he was a little cagey on its provenance and how he came by it. He wasn’t handing it over, however, until he was certain that their deal was still in place. Jack wasn’t technically under arrest yet, so those things were still in his possession. Danzig told him that she was going to need to talk to the Justice Department since things had not gone according to plan but that she expected the agreement would be honored.
She actually thanked him.
“What you did was very brave, particularly considering the circumstances. Disarming that bomb,” she said, and her voice trailed off. It was clear that she didn’t know what to say next.
“I’m just glad it’s over.”
Danzig also chastised him for shooting Aleksander, saying that he could very well have been killed himself by one of the FBI agents who would have responded to the gunfire as a threat.
“Duly noted,” Jack said.
Jack walked over to where Enzo and Castro were talking. They looked like two old friends who hadn’t seen each other in very long time. Enzo was telling him about his olive orchard in Calabria.
“I’d like to see it some time,” Castro said.
“You should come down. We’ll all get drunk and go fishing. It’ll be like that time we went to—”
“It better not be,” Castro said, laughing. “I suspect that I’ll have some time on my hands after this.”
“What do you think is going to happen to you?” Jack asked.
“Honestly?” Castro fished a cigarette out of his pocket, tapped it, and lit it. “Either I’ll get thrown out, or I’ll get promoted.” He looked around. The lot was filled with police now, both Carabinieri and Guardia di Finanza. Italy hadn’t seen a day this violent since the late eighties. “I need to check in with some of my counterparts, and then I suspect I’ll need to get working on my reports.”
The three men embraced, and Castro departed.
It was nearing three now, and Jack was surprised that he hadn’t heard anything from Rusty or Vito. He texted Rusty but hadn’t heard anything back yet.
Jack had given statements to the FBI and a State Department representative, as well as each set of Italian law enforcement, recounting the events of the day (mostly). Danzig told him that he’d be able to go back to his hotel shortly and get some sleep but that they’d need to have a much more detailed debriefing later on. She was also sending him with a Diplomatic Security Service agent to keep watch over him, just in case there was anyone else from Andelić’s organization or the mafia that might like to try to take a shot at him. Jack knew it was also so that he couldn’t go anywhere.
He didn’t care. He wasn’t going to.
Enzo was asked to stick around for another debriefing with the Italian officials, but since he wasn’t involved in the bank robbery, it was limited to the events of that night.
Jack texted Megan and Hugh to tell them he was okay and that it was all finally over. He’d talk when he could.
There was a sound.
It was a faraway thing, like someone had buried a phone in a steamer trunk at the bottom of the ocean. No, he was at the bottom of the ocean. Somewhere deep and dark. A place without sound or thought. But he was rising now, floating, slowly at first but gaining speed quickly. It was becoming light. As some point on Jack’s ascent from the void, he understood that he was waking up. Clearly too soon. Even as he woke, he knew that he was still tired and needed more sleep.
Jack smelled coffee.
His phone was ringing.
Bleary-eyed, he looked at the phone. Jack rubbed sleep out of his eyes and looked at it again. The word “Danzig” came into focus. He answered it.
“Jack?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I’m here. What time is it?”
“Ten.”
Four hours.
“Jack,” she said again. “I’m sending a car to get you right now.”
“Man, I really need more sleep if we’re going to—”
Danzig cut him off. “Jack, Giovanni is dead.”
Jack asked her what she said because what she said didn’t make any sense.
“Giovanni is dead,” she repeated. “His commander just called me. They found him at his apartment. The responding officer said it looked like a suicide, but that doesn’t … that doesn’t sound right. He wouldn’t do that.”
Giovanni was dead.
Jack had only interacted with Danzig a few times, though she’d been a more or less constant fixture in his mind since they crossed paths after the Carlton job. He felt like he knew her. She was hard-edged, tough, relentless. This was the first time Jack experienced any kind of humanity from her. Her voice was strained and raw.
Jack realized that Danzig’s friendship with Giovanni Castro was as real as his own.
“No,” Jack said softly. “He wouldn’t kill himself.”
“I knew you’d want to know right away. I’m sending a car.”
Jack hung up.
The DSS agent in his room, he didn’t remember the guy’s name, had sent down for coffee a few minutes before Jack woke up. Jack told him Danzig was sending a car, and he said he already knew. Jack showered and changed into a navy polo and dark gray travel chinos. Jack liked them because the afforded more flexibility than regular chinos. You could run in them if you had to.
Danzig met him at the embassy. She brought him into a conference room. Alison Reed, the DOJ lawyer from the day before, was there.
“Do we have any updates on Gio?” Jack asked.
Danzig’s expression darkened. “It’s confirmed. There’s a forensics team there now. Official word is death by suicide.”
Jack wanted to scream, or maybe cry. He wasn’t sure which. It was impossible to process thoughts.
“He didn’t kill himself,” Jack said.
“You sound pretty sure of that,” Danzig said, and just like that, she was a cop again.
Jack knew exactly what happened, or at least, he could make a very good guess. The mafia hit him. Either it was because he failed to protect the bank or to keep him quiet about it. They wouldn’t want him weighing his loyalty to them or his agency when it came time to make his report.
Jack could give Danzig the explanation. He knew that she would appreciate the closure, perhaps even need it. But to do so would undoubtedly tarnish Castro’s reputation in her eyes. Plus, it would become a matter of record if he told her in here. What would it do to this investigation if they knew that their chief liaison with the Guardia di Finanza was on the mafia’s payroll?
“The mafia had a guy in the bank,” Jack said.
“The bank manager, right?”
“No. I mean, the bank manager was on their payroll, but this guy was their security. Dangerous looking guy, expensive suit, and it was perfectly cut to hide his shoulder holster. I disarmed him. But Giovanni was the first cop on the scene, and he saw us leaving together. Maybe he thought Gio was in on it too. I don’t know. But I’m sure that’s the guy who shot him.”
“Was Giovanni in on this, Jack?”
Jack held her gaze f
or a long, slow moment. “Gio went a long way to protect me once,” he said. “He didn’t have to.”
Danzig gave him a sad but knowing smile. “And you would do the same for him, I think.”
Jack nodded.
“I have absolutely no idea what’s happening here,” Alison Reed said.
“No,” Danzig said, “you don’t.”
“But Giovanni didn’t have anything to do with what went down in the bank. He said he had me followed when I left the meeting yesterday. He was actually trying to enter the bank when I was disarming the bomb—I didn’t know it was him at the time.”
“It’s a good thing he showed up when he did,” Danzig said.
She left it at that.
Jack couldn’t tell if Danzig suspected Giovanni of anything, but it seemed that at least for now, she was going to accept Jack’s explanation as fact.
Jack and Enzo worked out a story that didn’t involve Rusty and Vito to describe their whereabouts before they left the construction lot, and Jack stuck to that during the debriefing. The one thing he changed was that he admitted to being with Castro when they attempted to arrest Andelić at his house when the firefight broke out. Jack thought that would help explain why Aleksander tried to kill them later on. He told Danzig that Castro told him to hide, saying that would be easier to explain than what actually happened. Jack went to his friend Enzo’s place. Enzo, who grows olives and Calabrian chilis, was in town trying to negotiate a deal to sell his crops to an export firm.
Danzig said that it was lucky for Jack that he happened to be here but didn’t press the point.
As to how Aleksander learned their location, Jack said he didn’t know. He wanted nothing more than to dime Guilia out, but that would open too many holes to fill in his story. Danzig was giving him an incredible amount of leniency, and Jack knew better than to push it. He said only that he knew Aleksander was out looking for him.
The debriefing was short. It was clear that neither Jack nor Danzig was particularly invested in the effort. There was shock that needed to wear off and grieving that still needed to happen.
Jack didn’t learn about Rusty until late that evening when he was having dinner at the hotel under the watchful eye of a DSS agent. Enzo had spent his day trying to find where in the hell Rusty and Vito were hiding out. Rusty called Jack from the hospital.
Vito shot him, stole the diamonds, and left him for dead.
“He told me to tell you he hoped you understood,” Rusty said.
Jack’s head swam.
He was so far from understanding anything.
But this would go down as one of the worst days in his life. One of his oldest friends was dead, another nearly so, shot by another.
And eighty million dollars in diamonds gone into thin air.
Rusty was shot twice on the other side of the bridge where Jack and Enzo were having their showdown with Aleksander. Hell, it probably happened about the same time. Amazingly, Rusty was shot while parked at a stoplight in shadow of the Ospedale Generale Santo Spirito, which was on the next block. A cab driver saw the shooting, pulled Rusty into his car and brought him the half-block to the emergency room door. Rusty got medical attention within minutes of the shooting, and that had almost certainly saved his life. Because he was traveling under a forged Swiss passport, they didn’t notify the US Embassy that an American had been involved in a shooting, so Danzig never learned about it.
Rusty was sedated for most of the day. He didn’t come out of it until late afternoon.
“I’m sorry, Jack. No one has ever gotten the drop on me.”
“You’re alive,” Jack said matter-of-factly. “Focus on getting better, and when you do, we’ll do what needs to be done,” Jack said in a quiet voice, as far from the DSS agent in the hotel suite as he could be.
“I’m sorry,” Rusty said again.
“Rusty, don’t be. This is on me. I should have seen this coming. Never occurred to me that this was a long con. I got played. You rest up. When you get out, we’re going to get the son of a bitch.”
“Okay.”
This whole thing was more twisted than a box of snakes, and Jack knew he’d likely never unravel the full truth.
They never figured out who was following Rusty.
Jack guessed that Vito might have been working with someone and decided to do Rusty himself when Rusty lost the tail. Or it could have been the mafia. He knew Guilia called Aleksander to tell him that Jack was flying back to Rome out of spite because he had spurned her. She might have called Salvatore Cannizzaro too, just to cover her bets or get revenge because he walked out on her. That’s exactly the kind of thing she would do.
Not that it mattered.
What did matter was getting his eighty million back.
Jack shook his head.
The School of Turin.
Hugh Coughlin arrived that day. He said that he wanted to be here in person for the deposition and any further negotiation. He’d been in the air when everything with the bank went down. It took a little while for him to get caught up.
“I’m sorry you had to fly here,” Jack said.
“Don’t worry,” Hugh told him, “I’m billing you for the ticket. Business class is something these days, isn’t it?”
They started early the following day at the embassy.
Jack turned the materials he’d collected from Aleksander’s safe, minus the overtly incriminating parts. Danzig didn’t ask where he got it. Of course, since the US Government was prosecuting Andelić, the provenance of those documents was less relevant. But Jack surmised she figured the fewer questions asked, the better. It painted a very compelling picture of the significant measures Aleksander went through to compel Jack into committing crimes for him. It also provided some interesting, if now somewhat irrelevant, backstory into his involvement in the original embezzlement scheme concocted with Reginald LeGrande.
Danzig pulled Jack aside before they started.
“Burdette, I need a word.”
Hugh stayed with him. Danzig eyed the attorney. “Alone,” she said.
“Over my dead body,” Hugh said.
Jack put a hand on Hugh’s shoulder. “It’s okay, Hugh.”
Danzig waited for Coughlin to leave before she continued. “Originally, I was going to spring this on you today, but given everything that’s happened, that doesn’t feel right. Everything we negotiated before the bank is still in play, and the government is going to honor that agreement.”
“I feel there’s a ‘but’ here,” Jack said, without mirth.
“I have to charge you with something. There are some politics at play that I’m not going to get into, but if we don’t, the deal we made for the Ritz isn’t going to stand.”
“I don’t understand,” Jack said.
“I don’t expect you to, and I don’t really have time to explain it. Suffice it to say that there are some powerful interests who wanted to see you prosecuted for the Ritz, and they aren’t particularly concerned about anything that happened in Italy. They could make trouble for both of us. So, in order to make our original deal still work, I have to charge you for passport fraud. I confiscated three counterfeit passports from you. There’s no way I can knowingly let that slide.”
That, Jack realized, was why she was so willing to accept the trade the other day. Because she knew that she still had a charge she could stick him with. Each count of passport fraud was punishable with up to seven years in prison.
“I’ve already spoken to the Alison Reed. We’ve recommended probation. She called it in to a federal judge last night, and he signed off on it. You’ll have a felony conviction, but you’ll stay out of prison. Given your history and potential as a flight risk, the judge is going to ask for supervised probation for ten years. You will not be able to leave the United States during that time.”
“Okay,” was all Jack said.
“But because you went undercover and were in mortal danger the entire time, I’ve called off the IRS investigati
on I started on you. I’m not going to go after your business, and I’m not going to try to bankrupt you. I’m going to look the other way on any offshore banking that might be happening.”
Danzig avoided the term “money laundering” for reasons that were obvious to them both.
“I’ll trust that you will repatriate that money as soon as you return stateside and that this marks the end of your criminal career.”
“Thank you, Katrina,” Jack said after a long moment.
Guilt was playing into this, Jack knew. Giovanni told him that she brought him into this, that she had called him when she first learned that Jack was involved in the Ritz, trying to convince him that Jack must have been the one to steal the Al Thani Collection. If Danzig never made that call, Giovanni would still be alive.
It was the first time he’d thought about Viktor Petrić in days.
He’d given Danzig Viktor’s name, which meant he had helped bring several major cases to closure.
The felony conviction would sting, but Jack would get over it. It was better than the twenty-one years in prison he could have gotten, had things not broken differently.
As they were about to walk into the conference room, Danzig said, “Jack, when you get home.”
“Yeah?”
“Change your name. Become Frank Fischer. Be a wine maker, live your life. Forget everything about Jack Burdette.”
Easy for her to say. She didn’t just have six pounds of diamonds stolen out from under her.
Jack said nothing but thought on that as he walked into the room.
Not being able to leave the country for ten years was going to make it harder for them to find Vito and their diamonds.
Difficult, but not impossible.
If there was one thing that Jack Burdette knew how to do, it was how to disappear.
Thirty-Four
Aleksander Andelić was shackled to his prison hospital bed at the wrists and ankles. He’d been transferred here to the Regina Coeli Prison in Rome’s Trastevere neighborhood, where he’d been admitted after being initially treated following his three gunshot wounds. There were two armed guards immediately outside the door who would be signaled at the first sign of trouble. An officer in the Guardia di Finanza stood behind him. He’d been thoroughly vetted in advance to make sure there was no possibility that he’d been compromised, as had anyone assigned to this detail. The guard was there as a matter of courtesy to their Italian hosts and because Italy, not the United States, was the injured party here. But it was Danzig and the FBI that had arranged everything, and the various governments agreed they should run point.