Smolin’s head moved, in further acceptance. ‘Vorobie and Oskin will have to know the truth, if there is going to be a public declaration.’
‘But no-one necessarily beyond them. A return to Washington can be the explanation throughout the lower levels of the ministries.’
‘It’s a convoluted scheme,’ protested the prosecutor, although not forcefully.
‘Which could work,’ asserted Danilov.
‘If it doesn’t, we could be made to look even more foolish.’
Me most of all, thought Danilov.
‘What in the name of Christ is going on over there!’ exclaimed the Secretary of State.
‘Not enough. Or maybe too much,’ said Leonard Ross. ‘I’ve spent most of the day back and forth with Cowley, trying to make sense of it.’ The FBI Director decided lateafternoon meetings at the State Department were preferable to breakfast sessions: Happy Hour bourbon was an improvement on coffee and eggs.
‘We’re to co-ordinate our statement with that from Russia, regretting the release of a suspect and agreeing the need for consultations?’ clarified Henry Hartz. ‘The two of them are seen publicly to fly in, to make it look kosher, then take off from another airport to Italy. All because every goddamned policeman and official in Moscow is crooked! Sure these two guys aren’t just building up their air miles?’
‘Cowley’s sure of the intercept: he’s bringing a lot of stuff back for the experts at Quantico. But he thinks what they’ve got already is good enough to move on, and I’m backing him. He’s an experienced agent and wouldn’t go off half cocked. I’ve already alerted my guys in Rome to get organised with the anti-Mafia people in Italy.’
‘It’s the worst of what we didn’t want to hear, Mafia worldwide,’ recalled Hartz soberly.
‘Precisely the reason to go with it,’ said Ross. ‘If we’ve got a chance in a million to bust something before it becomes established, I want to take it.’
‘I’ll cable the Moscow ambassador to release our matching statement as close to the Russians’ as possible,’ agreed Hartz. ‘We can duplicate from here as soon as we hear.’
‘You can buy things I want!’ said Olga, happily, offering the re-written list.
‘I’ll try,’ said Danilov. Would he be able to pad his expenses sufficiently to amass the $250 bribe for the Tatarovo apartment? Where was his much-vaunted integrity now? He waited until Olga went to the kitchen to make supper, before calling Kosov.
‘There’s going to be an official statement. It’s a disaster.’
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
They landed in Washington in the literal glare of orchestrated publicity following the announcement of Mikhail Antipov’s release, and the inevitable speculation that the investigation was soured from inter-nation rivalry and Russian inefficiency. Cowley and Danilov forced their way stone-faced through the press melee at Dulles airport to the waiting FBI limousine, ignoring the shouted questions. The expression wasn’t difficult for Cowley: as the car swept off the Beltway on to Memorial Parkway he thought how different his homecoming would be next time. There wouldn’t be a blaze of cameras then, and certainly not the convenience of a waiting limousine.
There was a straggle of photographers and one television unit at the vehicle entrance to the FBI headquarters, but the tightly restricted inner courtyard guaranteed an unrecorded arrival. That facility was why Henry Hartz, also unnoticed, travelled in from the more open State Department where the subterfuge could not have been maintained.
Cowley had brought all the tapes, but selected only the one referring to Sicily to play to the Director and the Secretary of State. Hartz did not attempt to hide his scepticism when it finished. ‘We’re way out on a limb with this.’
‘Which we’re doing without public awareness,’ pointed out Ross. ‘Any recriminations will bejust between us and the Italians.’ He indicated the other tapes and said to Cowley: ‘Why didn’t we get these earlier?’
‘They’re evidence of a crooked cop: didn’t become part of our case until this…’ He in turn gestured to the tape they had just played. ‘… I want Quantico to go through all the earlier stuff, for voiceprint comparison and sound and quality enhancement. I also want them to try to get a number, from the dialling, for us to work backwards to locate an address. Snow’s going to ship tapes back daily, from now on.’
Ross remained looking at his agent, as if he were going to continue the criticism. Instead, to Danilov, he said: ‘This crooked cop a friend of yours?’
‘He succeeded me, on promotion,’ said Danilov guardedly. He’d expected some sort of conference, but not to be in the presence of the FBI Director and Secretary of State: he wasn’t overawed, but frighteningly aware of being out of his depth. If it was ever discovered in Moscow what he was doing, nothing could save him: he hardly deserved to be saved.
‘Why target him? You know he was dirty?’
‘He made an obvious approach to me.’
Hartz waved generally around the office and the city beyond. ‘You think he’ll go for all this?’
‘There was another meeting, not on tape. He hasn’t named a Family but it’s obvious who he’s talking about. He wants to introduce me. Just before I left Moscow we spoke on the telephone. I said I might like to take up his offer when I get back. He said his friends would be very pleased, and that they would help me any way I wanted.’
‘You record that, with a prior explanation to protect yourself?’ demanded the former judge.
‘No,’ admitted Danilov.
‘Let’s hope he didn’t: if he did, you’re dead.’
After today – this encounter – he could be anyway, Danilov thought.
Cowley and Danilov left the FBI building by freight elevator and flew to Italy from the totally secure Andrews Air Force base on a loaned CIA plane equipped like no other Danilov had ever seen or imagined possible. The entire fuselage was divided between a lounge, actually fitted with satellite-transmitted in-flight television as well as the predictable movies, and a minuscule but functional bar which adjoined a dining area with full-sized chairs set at a full-sized, white clothed table at which they were served steak and California chardonnay from a closed-off galley. Beyond that were three divided sleeping sections, each with a full length bed, bordering closets and bathroom annexes. They both got six hours’ sleep.
Their arrival at the closed-off military section of Rome’s Fiumicino airport was frenzied, swarming with uniformed and plainclothes police. It was not until they were halfway towards the city, wedged in the middle of a horn-blaring cavalcade, that they became properly aware with whom they were travelling. The FBI station chief re-introduced himself as Barclay Smith: it was Smith, who was a thin, immaculately dressed man given to languid hand and arm movements, who introduced the plainclothed Italian in the front seat as Guiseppe Melega, the investigating colonel of the Interior Ministry’s anti-Mafia division. As he did so Smith said: ‘Don’t imagine all these outriders are for you: Colonel Melega is currently number one on the Mafia hit list.’
‘Maybe we should have taken the airport train,’ said Cowley. Why the fuck were they bothering with all the non-leak security in Moscow and Washington to become part of a circus like this, in the very place where they needed the most discreet security of all!
‘Much safer,’ agreed the DEA agent. ‘But no-one’s life is complete until they’ve had a ride in an Italian police car at a hundred miles an hour in traffic’ David Patton was a plump man cutting himself in half with a belt fastened too tightly around a lightweight suit that had long ago been defeated by pasta and Italian heat. That heat was troubling the man now, making him glow pink.
Everyone was at the early-curiosity stage Danilov had come to expect, looking at him as if they expected him to have one eye in the middle of his forehead or six fingers on each hand. He wished he could have satisfied them with some physical oddity.
Melega twisted to smile confidently from the front seat. ‘Everything is in place: it will be a perfect trap.’
He talked directly to Danilov, enunciating good English with elaborate slowness, as if talking to someone of limited intelligence.
Cowley’s concern at the security of the operation only partially lifted when the Italian planning was outlined in detail in Melega’s screened, bomb-proofed and electronically guarded headquarters. The man insisted only five people in total in both his controlling ministry and his anti-Mafia division knew a meeting of the Moscow Mafia and the Sicilian Cosa Nostra was anticipated. The two names from Kosov’s car telephone – Zimin and Zavorin – were on watch lists at all Italian air and sea ports. The reason had been disguised from Customs authorities by the order being issued through a ministry totally unconnected with Melega’s division. Five helicopters, each capable of carrying a fifteen-strong Carabinieri assault force, were on two-hour standby: so, too, were three naval patrol boats, which could transport a total of seventy-five men. To prevent any suspicion of a specific operation on a Mafia-dominated island, no additional officers had been drafted to Sicily itself, but there were fifty mainland Carabinieri who could be mobilised and helicoptered there in under four hours. None had yet been warned of their selection. Detectives and undercover operatives already on the island were listening to informers and sources, but not asking any questions to hint prior knowledge. Obviously there was no watch list for Zimin or Zavorin at either of Sicily’s Palermo or Catania airports: all incoming arrivals, apart from holiday charters, had to be routed through Rome.
Danilov pointed out that everything hinged on the two Chechen Family men travelling under their identified names in the first place, and flying direct to Rome in the second. From Moscow, even if they did keep their own names, they could arrive at any airport in Europe, travel on to Italy by train, bus or car and cross to Sicily by sea with practically no risk of detection. Although it meant dangerously spreading still more widely the two names, it was agreed Drug Enforcement Administration officers at American embassies in the relevant capitals create a watch list at the most likely transfer airports.
And they waited.
There were daily conferences, away from Melega’s possibly monitored office, in restaurants and hotels and ‘safe’ houses. At each, Cowley passed on what they received through the American embassy on the via Veneto, close to where he and Danilov were living, at the Bernini Bristol. Kosov’s car-phone interception continued to provide incontrovertible evidence of the man’s corruption, but nothing more about a visit to Sicily of two Moscow gangsters. Quantico established the voice on the first day of the interception was the same as that on the only tape discussing Sicily. The Sicilian tape had been enhanced to the point of destruction: none of the additional words, six in all, had added any useful material. The American technicians had been unable to decipher a trace-back number from the dialling tone without an identical Russian telephone: Snow had sent from Moscow a duplicate of every car telephone openly available in the city, which included two French and one German, but it was going to take time. If Kosov’s equipment was adapted from a European import of which they did not have a copy, a comparison was virtually impossible. Swiss police had not come up with any further information about the Russian named Ilya Nishin; neither had the FBI.
Each evening Patton and Smith tried to entertain them, which was an experience for Danilov and a comparison for Cowley, from his earlier tour of duty as the FBI resident in Rome. The first week Cowley said nothing seemed to have changed in six years, to which Patton replied laconically that nothing had changed in Rome for two thousand years, which was why it was called the Eternal City. Most nights they finished at bars along the via Veneto, which was hardly typically Italian but a place where they all felt comfortable, despite the prices. Never once did Cowley get drunk: several nights he did not drink at all. In the middle of the second week Barclay Smith, who did get drunk most nights, insisted he’d waited a long time to say it but it looked to him like either a bum steer or the bastards had been and gone without them knowing about it. Patton mumbled that he thought so too. Neither Cowley nor Danilov felt like arguing. At the end of that week there was the first suggestion of impatience from Washington, in a personal message from Leonard Ross to Cowley asking how much longer he felt the stake-out justified. There was no indication in the cable of political pressure, but Cowley guessed there was some when Melega raised virtually the same query at that day’s conference. The question created the first worthwhile discussion between them for more than a week, opinion ending almost equally divided between the called-off theory and the been-and-gone suggestion.
‘It was always on the cards it would be a blow-out,’ said the world-weary Barclay Smith. ‘How many of these things ever come up with a result? One in ten? One in twenty? Like Caesar said, we came, we tried, we fucked up, so let’s call it a day.’
Cowley refused to, immediately. Danilov argued against it as well, both accepting they were clutching at straws because there was nothing else to clutch at, anywhere. Danilov finally got his hair cut and bought three new shirts. He considered another jacket but decided to save the money: he’d already converted his lire advance into $200, and thought he could accumulate the complete bribe for the Tatarovo apartment from incidental expenses. He saw a watch he would have liked to buy to replace the one which rarely worked, but ignored that purchase for the same reason.
It was the next Wednesday that an excited Colonel Melega announced rumours from two independent sources in Palermo – like the Moscow tape, insufficient when separate but intriguing when put together – of a forthcoming meeting of Mafia leaders. A third source, from Catania, confusingly suggested it would be between Sicilian and American dons, with no mention of Russians. Two of the informants put the timing within the next seven days.
On the Thursday, the priority cable to the Rome embassy from the Paris DEA office reported a Maksim Zimin and an Ivan Zavorin transferring from an incoming Moscow flight to an Alitalia service. The alert was so prompt there was still an hour before the Alitalia plane landed at Fiumicino. By the time it did, Colonel Melega had established the Russians were booked for their second transfer connection, still confidently under their own names and with only a ninety-minute stopover, on the local flight from Rome to Palermo. When it took off, six of the new passengers were members of Melega’s anti-Mafia squad, the two Russians already secretly photographed and identified from the immigration documents they had surrendered in Rome and upon which both were described as company directors.
Melega, Cowley and Danilov and the other two Americans were already in Palermo airport even before the Rome departure, flown in by one of the helicopters. Thirty additional Carabinieri had also been airlifted in: the rest of the hurriedly mobilised squad were crossing to the island by naval patrol boats, bringing a variety of unmarked cars all fitted with Sicilian, not Roman, registrations.
‘Here we go!’ sighed Cowley, watching the passengers file off the internal flight. In a brief moment of professional satisfaction he forgot his personal destruction was moving inexorably closer. He soon remembered.
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
It was not until the two Russians eventually collected their much transferred luggage that the watching policemen realised there was a third, clearly an underling from the way the cases were casually handed to him to carry. In the delay of disembarkation Melega had already collected the passenger list: the obvious third name was Boris Amasov. The Italian was embarrassed the identification had not been made earlier, from the Alitalia arrival in Rome: everyone else in the group felt it should have already been realised, too, but there was no spoken comment.
It was difficult for Danilov to defer to the authority of Colonel Melega, although he knew the Italian had to command an Italian operation, with the rest of them allowed as little more than observers: he suspected the Americans were nervous, too, of their complete dependency. Melega flurried about in constant movement and conversation, juggling – sometimes literally – between landlines and mobile telephones and various subordinate commanders ensuring the sur
veillance remained absolute, but the rest of the group fell virtually silent, speaking only to make necessary contributions: neither Smith nor Patton attempted the wise-cracking cynicism Danilov had come to regard as endemic among American law enforcement officers.
They didn’t form part of the motorised observation: Melega maintained contact from their radio car. When the Italian announced the Russians had booked into the President Hotel, on the via Francesco Crispi, Cowley snorted a laugh and said: ‘I don’t believe it!’
‘What?’ demanded Danilov.
‘The American capo di tutti capi, Lucky Luciano, always stayed at that hotel when he came to Sicily, after being deported to Italy from America after the war. He re-formed from there the Mafia that Mussolini had crushed!’
‘They’re treating it like a pilgrimage!’ declared Danilov, more interested in practicality than history.
‘And re-forming the Mafia into something even bigger,’ said Cowley.
‘Much bigger,’ announced Melega, two hours later. By then they had booked into the Politeama Palace on the Piazza Ruggero Settimo, further back from the seafront than the Mafia hotel, in which Melega had installed four officers purporting to be tourists. Melega made the declaration the moment he returned from a contact meeting with them.
‘What?’ demanded Patton.
Melega, enjoying centre stage, read unnecessarily from a slip of paper. ‘John Vincent Palma. Born April, 1943. Given address Waterbury, Connecticut.’
‘Go on,’ encouraged Cowley.
‘He booked into the President Hotel three days ago,’ said Melega. ‘Reservation is for four more nights. Tonight he had dinner with Maksim Zimin, Ivan Zavorin and Boris Amasov: pasta, with veal to follow. With four flasks of Chianti. At this moment they’re toasting each other in grappa.’
His voice distant, Patton mused: ‘The rumour from Catania was that it was to be an American-Sicilian meeting.’
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