There was a driver and the driver’s escort, big men, armed with filled holsters and belts that sagged with kit. There was a communications kid, looked no more than nineteen, who carried a steel box and Lukas saw that it was chained by the handle to his wrist. There were six ROS, and Castrolami. A pecking order existed as they loaded into the minibus. The driver and his escort were together. The communications kid and Castrolami were side by side, the link and the decision-taker, there were the men who would make an entry, if it came down to the desperate uncertainty of a storm, and there was Lukas, who was without status and quantifiable expertise and had been there so many times before.
They left piazza Dante.
Lukas sat across the aisle from Castrolami and the communications kid. A map of the Sail was spread out across the investigator’s knees and he used a pencil torch. Lukas gained an impression of the enormity, complexity and threat posed by the building. He did not wish to talk.
He turned away from the map and stared out of the window at the passing streets. It was, he reflected, a city with some of the finest architecturally designed churches in Christendom, which contained some of the greatest works of art, sculpture and painting ever created. There was the beauty of the bay behind them and the crude majesty of the mountain. Sophistication, intellect, culture and glory encircled the minibus. All he had seen of them was the view over the rim of the crater when he had received the warning of hidden and violent danger. There were no such contrasts in Baghdad, or in the mountains and jungles of Colombia, or on the great plains of Afghanistan. The cafés seemed full, and the bars, and outside two restaurants he saw people standing on the pavement in what apologised for a queue, waiting to be given a table. It was so goddam normal.
Castrolami pushed the map of the Sail towards the communications kid, left him to fold it. He asked Lukas, ‘When we get there, what do you want?’
‘To be as close as possible.’
‘What do you do first?’
‘I try to make some calm,’ Lukas said. ‘It’s not always easy but it’s a good place to start.’
Castrolami looked into Lukas’s face, and a slow smile spread. ‘Do you have that buzz in you, the adrenalin pump? Is it going? Riding towards the location, not knowing what you’ll find, and…’
Lukas shrugged, then said, droll, ‘Worst you can find is a dry house. A dry house is where they were, it’s the one they’ve quit. Sheets and blankets, a hell-hole for a cell, food and mountains of cigarette butts, but gone. That’s a dry house. I don’t often get sex, don’t often fire a handgun, and I’m a small-town boy from a trailer park with a mongrel’s pedigree, so I guess riding towards the location is sort of ecstasy, orgasm and cartridge discharge. Yes, the pump’s going a bit.’
‘Do we have a good environment or a bad one?’
He looked out of the window again. The road was clogged with traffic and a horn blasting wouldn’t have helped, or a siren, or the lights. The driver wove, looked for weaknesses in the jam, and the ROS guys didn’t talk but worked on their kit.
Lukas said, ‘If it isn’t a dry house, and if the boy’s still alive, the location’s about as shit as it gets – but, then, none of them comes easy. A big deal? You have the girl nailed down. None of them comes easy.’
18
When there wasn’t much worth saying, Lukas usually stayed silent.
Castrolami seemed tight, knotted, and would have had cause. They had left the city and climbed on to the plateau area inland, to the east, and the dense housing was behind them. The ground opened: scrub, rubbish, abandoned construction, more scrub, more rubbish, more half-finished projects, and more scattered lighting. The traffic blockages of the old city were back down the hill. Lukas saw the towers.
He was near to making progress calls on his mobile, but not yet. He was not one of those who went off radar and only called in when he had success or failure to report, but he wouldn’t call unless he had hard information. At Ground Force Security they paid his wage and put a roof over his head; if he didn’t have them, he might just have to ship out and go back to Charlotte, a trailer park, a wife who might tolerate him if he was around to do handyman jobs and a son who would ignore him. He’d eat doughnuts and fries, drink grape juice, maybe hike some Carolina trails, and worry about a Bureau pension that had been cut short in contributions and would keep him light on cigarettes. He wouldn’t walk away willingly from his employer, and he would call when he had information.
The towers speared up and alongside them there were big shoeboxes laid on their sides. Way back, when he was young in the Bureau and there was a shortage of personal-protection guys for an overseas detail, he had taken a short straw and had gone in the director’s entourage to a terrorism conference in west Berlin. There had been a chance of a day across the other side: they’d been bussed through the Wall, and he had seen the forests of towers on the outskirts of the eastern sector. Lukas could live in an attic apartment under the eaves off the rue de Bellechasse in the heart of a great old city, or he could live in a cabin up high in a treeline – like the guy at Ruby Ridge had. He couldn’t have lived in a tower block in east Berlin, or one out on the darkened flatlands east of Naples. Castrolami had hold of his sleeve and tugged at it, then pointed at the map. The pencil torch caught the outline of the big block, and Castrolami pointed out through the window. It was massive. It was indeed a sail. The towers now seemed dwarfed by it. The lights from windows etched in its shape. There seemed to Lukas to be a hull to the building, then what was almost forward decking and then twin sail shapes rose, climbed high.
They were close now.
What Castrolami had not asked him: could he maintain the same hunger for his work as in the past when his reputation was made? Did he have the same fascination for the techniques that would undo his opponent?
Inside the minibus there was the murmur of the comms kid’s voice as he spoke into a button microphone. His metal-lined case was open and dials were lit. Twice a separate microphone was passed to Castrolami and enveloped in his ham fist as he spoke. There was the scrape of weapons being armed. He thought the Tractor was the leader, the Bomber was the joker, and that the world’s roof would have to collapse before the Engineer contributed.
A contested entry was a disaster. Lukas knew it – they would all know it. He thought the place would be, from Castrolami’s plan, like a gopher warren of tunnels and entries, exits, climbs and descents, like the ground squirrels used. The navigation was done by the driver’s escort, who would lean back and whisper into Castrolami’s ear. He had said, himself, that he needed to be as close as was possible to the hostage and the hostage-taker, and he didn’t think it needed saying again. He had seen a sign, crazily askew, for the via Baku: he wondered what the connection might be between an asshole corner of southern Italy and the capital city of Azerbaijan, but doubted it mattered. Another sign told him they were on the viale della Resistenza. The torch flashed on the map and the pudgy finger pointed to the location.
They were slowing.
Lukas felt the tightness in his gut – always there when the action came near.
Castrolami said, quiet but breathy, ‘It is unlikely we will be met with armed resistance, but it is possible. If we are, stay close to my back. You do not show anyone your voice, your accent – damn Yankee. We may be confronted with passive opposition, crowds, abuse, heckling, man-handling. Stay close to me, hold on to me. I expect barricades, steel gates, blocks to slow us – the Ingegnere will deal with them, and for hostile people we have the Bombardiere. We attempt speed, but we do not know what we find and we do not have the luxury of time for reconnaissance. What do you wish to say?’
‘I’m here. I can give advice if it’s wanted. I don’t impose.’
Castrolami punched his arm, a good hard jab, made it hurt, and it seemed to Lukas a gesture of affection – might have been respect. There was no call for respect.
The minibus came to a stop.
They had rocked on to a pavement and the weight h
ad broken a slab. The roll had barely stopped when the Trattore had slid back the side door and was out. There was a stampede.
Lukas had never jumped with a parachute. He had been on an aircraft from which men had jumped, at night, over a targeted farm where a contract worker was reported to be held. What had lasted with him was the sight of the dispatcher by the open hatch as he booted the guys out and into the void. The driver’s escort had that job. Half of the ROS guys, then Castrolami and the comms kid, the rest of the ROS guys, and Lukas. The escort’s fist caught him, as if he was the runt of the damn litter, threw him forward and he cannoned first into a big backpack, then the one with the bolt-cutters damn near speared him with a handle. He steadied himself against Castrolami’s backside and most of the wind was squeezed out of him. He gasped. He was in his forty-eighth year – did that matter? Maybe not the statistic, but he didn’t run on pavements or do gym sessions, and guys with a childhood heritage of trailer parks didn’t play tennis. He’d never had the time or inclination to learn golf, and mountain hiking was more a dream than real. He felt old. He sucked in air – felt old, feeble, but there was no young bastard pressing up against him. Why could Ground Force Security rent out the services of Lukas, a hack who had seen better days? Because negotiators and co-ordinators were happy to work a Stateside beat or to be in London or Berlin, but declined postings to Mosul, Jalalabad or Medellín, any goddam place where there were shit, flies and a building like the Sail – and a wretch who was looking at a knife or a pistol.
They were running, except the driver and his escort who were left behind.
Lukas didn’t play at heroes, was separated from Castrolami’s back by a cigarette-paper thickness. He saw, past the big shoulders, the shadows in a dark doorway. Lukas thought, then, there was brief negotiation, a few seconds, two or three exchanges, and the shadows were done and the way ahead was clear. There were pounding feet, and he imagined the heavy boots encasing water-resistant socks, and more boots behind him, which was as welcome a sound as any. The Tractor had a flashlight in one hand, turned it on. In the other he held a handgun. He wore a vest, and had a machine pistol slung on a strap looped at his neck. His chin jutted. No debate, negotiation or discussion. The Tractor led them through – as if he was crossing a water-filled ditch or rode a sand berm – and men made way for them. Lukas was given no explanation, but he factored that their entry on to a staircase was not impeded. That was a little victory, minimal, but a victory of sorts.
The smell of the place hit him.
The flashlight, used intermittently, guided him up.
He would do the best he could – had no more to offer.
It was as if a signal had been given from the base of the stairwell and sent on up to the floors above. The flashlight caught men and women, children with them. They were dressed, the smaller children in night clothes, and carried cases and bundles. One child had a puppy clasped to his chest, and others had prime toys. He sensed the mood of evacuation – as if a deck was cleared. There was no eye-contact between those on the stairs coming down, stumbling under their loads, and those going up, bowed under the weight of the kit. Two groups not acknowledging each other. Lukas thought he did dirty work: it was work that decent people should not be asked to perform. He went up the stairs and Castrolami’s shoulders bounced in front of him.
Eddie wondered where the noise had gone. Salvatore talked. ‘They pay me well – because I am the best. I am expert and I am valuable. I have accounts in banks in Switzerland and in Liechtenstein. I do not know where that is. There is another account in Andorra. I have never been there. I am twenty-four years old and I have much money and many accounts.’
He should have heard noise. The keenest sounds he had heard had been when he was brought up the staircase, hooded, and when he was taken down a long corridor and voices had been muffled behind doors and windows, with televisions and music. Men had shouted, women had laughed, kids had squealed and dogs had barked, yapped. He had heard less when he had run and realised that the corridor was a walkway, an aisle between boxed apartments. There was a knife on the table near the door, close to Salvatore’s hip, and he had a pistol in his hands.
‘I can buy what I want. I can go to any shop in Naples and I can buy anything. I want jewels for a girl, I can buy them. I want a suit, I want shoes, I want a car. I have the money in banks. They pay me because of my worth. They want me, the Borelli family. They can have me but they must pay. I think I have a million euros in accounts, and perhaps it is more. One day I will go to the coast, not Italy. One day I will go to France – they have told me, the family has, of Cannes and Nice, and I will go there. I think I will have many girlfriends when I go to France, because I will have money and I can buy anything.’
He could not recall so clearly the sounds of the walkway when he had fled along it before he saw – under the washing – the barred gate, closed. Eddie, then, had been on his toes and running at speed, despite the stiffness in his legs, knees and hips from being tied down, and the burden of the chain and ankle shackle. He had heard sounds then: shouts of pursuit, the gasp of his breath, doors slamming in his face, a kid’s obscenity as he charged past a window – and there had been the loudness of the television in the room where he had taken refuge. Now he could hear nothing. It was as though quiet carpeted the air round him. Salvatore’s shoes slithered on the flooring and his voice droned in the accented English as he played with the pistol and aimed it at points on the wall. Eddie thought there was in the eyes something demonic or manic or lunatic, something that was plain bloody mad. He realised it: he was the only audience the man had, maybe had ever had.
‘I will go to France, to the Mediterranean, and I will buy an apartment – a penthouse – with cash and I will go to a showroom and buy a car and again I will use cash. In the morning I go to the bank and I sit down, and I authorise transfers from Liechtenstein and Andorra and other places, and then they go to get my money from their store in the basement and we fill a suitcase with my money and then I go to the real-estate office and to the showroom. I will find new friends and new girls. Maybe this is in one year, or three years, and maybe it is tomorrow after I have… I will go to France. I speak good English – the best, yes? I will speak good French. I have many enemies here, but they will never find me when I have gone to Cannes or Nice. There I will be unknown and I will have much, very much money. I have the money because of what I do well. I kill well.’
The shadow spun on its heels and the feet came close to Eddie’s face and the shadow crouched. A little of the light from a window, thrown up by a streetlamp, orange, caught the pistol’s barrel and rested on it. It was three or four inches, less than six, from Eddie’s forehead. He stared at it and kept the focus of his eyes on the needle sight at the end of the barrel and could see the finger, just, on the bar protecting the trigger, and the finger slipped from the bar to the trigger stick. He wondered then if his bladder would burst, whether the urine would squirt into his trousers, fill the groin, make it steam hot. The finger moved from the trigger. He did not know if the safety catch had been on or off. What had he thought of? Had had a modicum of seconds to reflect. Had not thought of his parents, or his house friends, or anything noble, had not thought of Immacolata – had worried that he would mess his trousers. Had hated the bastard, and anger caught in him.
‘I think, when I have gone to France, that many in Naples will remember my name. The kids will, women will. They will remember that I was a big man in Forcella and in Sanità and here in Scampia, and that I had respect. No one in Naples, I promise it you, would ever dare not to give me respect. I will be written of for many years, in the Cronaca and in the Mattino, and I will let them know that I live – go to Germany and send a postcard, go to Slovakia and send another. The police do not have the brains that I have and they will not find me. I will be written of in the papers and they will put my photograph there, because I have importance, and I have respect. I will never be taken. Do you understand me? I will not be taken alive.
’
Eddie was still lying on his side. He had lost sensation in his hands from the tightness of the plastic at his wrists, and he thought the welts at his ankles were raw and his vision was through the slits of his swollen eyes and his lips were broken and the bruises throbbed, and he hated and felt the growing anger. The man, Salvatore, circled him, held the pistol in two hands and aimed it down, but the shadows of the fists were too dark for Eddie to know if the finger was on the bar or on the trigger, and the man laughed – cackled. Eddie thought Salvatore didn’t hear the silence around them. Himself, he didn’t know why the quiet had come.
*
The first gate on the walkway of the third level was chained and padlocked. Washing had not been taken off the wires, some of it still sodden and some of it nearly dry. The wet sheets, towels and shirts clung to their faces as they went forward. It was as if the evacuation was complete. Nobody came and nobody moved: no men from a clan, no families quitting, all gone, faded into the evening, and most of the lights with them. The clothes and bedding hung out to dry threw long shadows. No radio had been left on, and no television. They were wary of the silence, and the Tractor went on the balls of his feet.
Lukas saw, looking past Castrolami, a cola can lying abandoned on the walkway a few yards short of the steel-barred gate that had chains and a heavy-duty padlock securing it. The cola can was in the centre of the walkway. He was in Baghdad. There was a street, emptied, silent, where kids didn’t play, men didn’t stand on steps to smoke and talk. There was a street with a Sprite can tossed on to the path, and the patrol would use that path. There was a private, first class, of an airborne outfit and he was point on the patrol, and the Sprite can was in front of him and he was near to it. There was a first sergeant leading the patrol, walking with Lukas – doing acclimatisation – and the man’s yell had damn near shredded the clothes and the vest off Lukas’s back, and had stopped the private, first class, dead in his tracks. It had been explained – an empty street, no people, no traffic, was the tell-tale sign of an ambush. A trashed can was on a path and grunts always, did it always, kicked a can that was in front of them. A can could hold a quarter-kilo of plastic explosive and a detonator operating off a tilt switch could fire it when it was kicked, and it could take a leg off the point man and the balls off the one following him, and maybe some eyes… Lukas burst forward.
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