The Italian Mission

by Alan Champorcher

  He stood up, stuffed everything back into the pack and began jogging again down the dirt road. Checking the tracker, he saw that the truck was moving on the outskirts of Siena toward what looked like a small rural settlement, perhaps a farm with several outbuildings. The read-out at the bottom of the screen said that it was 2.8 kilometers away. He could get there in half an hour if he hurried. The South Africans had killed a Chinese agent in cold blood. God knows what they might do to Jill, especially if they found out she was CIA. Hopefully, someone back in Langley had warned her not to carry her government I.D. Still, the South Africans would have ways of finding out her true identity. All they needed was a little time. He picked up the pace, kicking up dust clouds on the deeply rutted road.

  Five minutes of this and a sharp pain in his side stopped him cold. Bending over, he waited for the knife to stop twisting in his ribs. Running on a rubber track in nylon shorts was one thing; running through two inches of dust in hiking boots with a fifty-pound pack another. As his panting slowed, he heard the staccato coughing of an engine coming near. A small, three-wheeled truck chugged up the rise behind him. Without Conti having to so much as wave, the old farmer stopped, swung the door open and gestured for him to climb in. After taking a moment to catch his breath, he began to speak in Italian.

  “Gratie, gratie, I am in a big hurry.”

  The old man looked at him and laughed. “Who isn’t these days? I will take you as fast this old machine will go.” He patted the dash affectionately. “My uncle bought it in 1958. Still runs like a top.” Conti saw the vehicle’s insignia on the dash, a Poggia Ape. “Yes, the farmer continued, “this will keep going when I am in the ground. I will give it my grandson. My son is a lawyer — useless — but my grandson, he works. Only eighteen and his trees produced four truckloads of peaches this year.”

  Conti was half listening as he opened the tracker and checked the position of the South Africans’ truck. It hadn’t moved in the last ten minutes.

  “Can you take me to” — he squinted at the small screen — “Via Santa Caterina? If it’s out of your way, I can pay. A friend of mine is in trouble, and I need to get there right away.”

  The man reached into his breast pocket, took out a half-smoked cigar and, steering with one elbow, lit it. “You are American? Only Americans speak such fancy Italian. Of course I’ll help you. I was in the resistance in World War II, only a young boy but I carried a radio all over the mountains. Sixty kilos. The Americans came just as the Germans were about to pick us up. Otherwise, I’d be dead now.” He laughed, then puffed on the cigar and jammed his foot down on the accelerator. The small engine whined at a higher pitch, but Conti could detect no significant increase in speed.

  The farmer dropped him off a quarter mile from where the icon hovered on the GPS display. He walked quickly over a little rise, keeping in the shadows cast by the tall trees lining the road, until he came to a drive that climbed through lush vineyards. The computer screen indicated the truck was less than a hundred yards up the hill, but he couldn’t see it or the farm buildings from where he stood. He avoided the drive, ducking instead under several rows of vines and clambering over the ploughed soil between them, staying low.

  The buildings sat among tall plane trees at the top of the hill. The largest building was an ancient farmhouse, its various layers of brick, wooden beams and broken plaster fused together into a unified whole by centuries of sun and wind. Ten yards from the house a Quonset hut squatted, surrounded by a muddy field where half a dozen goats calmly munched on stacks of hay. The panel truck was parked on the other side of the hut. Muffled voices came from inside.

  Conti took the sniper’s rifle out of the pack, removed the clip and reinserted it properly. He propped the pack against the backside of a tree and crawled on his belly through the broken slats of a picket fence and behind the row of hay bales toward the hut. The goats watched his progress, chewing their dinner contentedly. When he reached the hut, he pulled himself up on its concrete block foundation until he found a narrow gap between the corrugated steel panels that allowed him to see the interior of the room.

  Jill sat strapped in a battered metal chair, eyes closed, head lolling to the side. Her ripped shirt hung around her waist, revealing a sports bra and several ugly red welts on her chest and shoulders. They’d wasted no time in trying to break her. The two South Africans stood nearby, one a short, heavily muscled man and the other thin and gangly with a shaved head. The stocky man flexed his massive arms and approached Jill.

  “You better tell us right now who you are and what you were doing in that clearing. Otherwise …,” he grabbed her hair and jerked her head upright. Jill opened her eyes but said nothing. He unleashed a backhanded slap, as vicious as it was unexpected. She still didn’t make a sound, just glared at him, hatred burning in her eyes, crimson blood oozing from her lip.

  As Conti searched the wall of the hut for an opening large enough to squeeze through, a car pulled up on the other side of the building. A minute later, a third man with an overgrown Fu Manchu mustache barged through the door. He surveyed the room, then strode over to the two men standing near Jill.

  “This is our little captive, is it?” He grabbed Jill’s face with a calloused hand and jerked it towards his.

  “Leave me alone or you’ll regret it!” Jill shouted.

  “Oh, American, eh? Why don’t you tell me who you’re working for, then? I doubt that you just happened to walk in on my guys in the middle of the woods as they were trying to, um … restrain a Chinese criminal.”

  “I don’t know anything about any Chinese. I had to pee.”

  “With a drawn pistol?”

  “I’m afraid of snakes.”

  “You know, I might believe you if you weren’t carrying this gadget. He picked up Jill’s watch from the table. “Not like anything you can buy in a store, is it? Very James Bond. I’ll be interested to see what it can do once you give us the code.”

  “I won’t give you anything.”

  “Oh, yes you will. I’ll ask again. Who are you working for?”

  “I’m on pilgrimage. Hiking the Via Francigena to the Vatican.”

  Mustache laughed. “In that case, you were going the wrong way. My boys saw you and your friend coming north on the trail this morning. O.K., enough messing about, we can’t stay here all day. Get out your tools, Tony.”

  The stocky man opened a toolbox and pulled out a metal file and a small bottle of liquid.

  “You wouldn’t think to look at him but my friend here is an expert manicurist. With a difference. He doesn’t stop when he reaches the finger — what’s that called, Tony? The sensitive part under the nail?”

  “The quick.”

  “Right. The quick. Just keeps going. Of course, he pours a little turpentine on it for lubrication. So, let me ask you one more time. Who are you working for?”

  Jill spat in his face.

  The man forced a thin smile. “Right, then. Proceed, Tony. You’d best tie her arms down a little tighter. One loop won’t be enough once the fun begins.”

  Tony took off his belt and wrapped it around Jill’s right forearm, fastening it more tightly to the chair. Then he twisted her index finger back roughly and began to file away at her nail. After only a few passes, the nail was flush with the tip of her finger. Then the file began to gnaw at the skin. Tony stopped for a moment, opened the bottle of turpentine and poured a little on the raw tip of the finger. Jill’s muscles went rigid as if she’d had an electric shock. She screamed.

  “Just getting started, aren’t we?” the leader lit a cigarette and blew smoke in her face. “Unless, you’ve changed your mind.”

  Jill gritted her teeth and said nothing.

  Conti watched in horror — it took everything he had to keep silent. Desperately, he searched for a way into the hut. A few feet away, he spied a steel panel with several bolts missing and carefully moved in that direction. He reached out and tested it. With a little leverage he could force it open eno
ugh to wedge his body through. He turned so that his back was against the hut, then pried open the loose panel. Squeezing through, he leapt onto the dirt floor, and pointed the rifle at the South Africans. “Drop your weapons. Now! Or you’ll all be dead in five seconds.”

  The man with the shaved head slipped a pistol from his belt, bent over and placed it on the ground.

  Conti took a few steps closer to the men. “Untie her.”

  Mustache nodded and the stocky South African untied Jill’s arms and legs from the chair. She rubbed her wrists, then stood up twisting her neck from side to side.

  “Pick up the pistol and come on over here,” Conti told her.

  She bent over and picked it up, but instead of crossing the room toward him, she turned to her persecutor, her face only six inches from his. Before he could react, she brought the butt of the pistol up and under his chin, knocking him savagely backward to the ground.

  “Jill. No. That’s not necess ….” Before Conti could get this out, she’d kicked the fallen man hard, first in the ribs then, when he tried to roll away from her, in the kidneys.

  Finally, breathing heavily, she snatched her watch from the table, turned, and stalked across the room to Conti. As they all stood there in stunned silence, a thumping began to vibrate the metal roof of the hut. The mustachioed man’s grimace slowly morphed into a smile. Conti gripped and regripped the rifle in his suddenly sweaty hands, realizing a helicopter was about to land in the field next to the hut.

  12.

  “Let’s get out of here!” Conti grabbed Jill’s arm. “Nobody move! I wouldn’t mind shooting you all!” He kept the rifle pointed in the direction of the three men, pushing Jill toward the hut’s door. They slipped outside in time to see a black helicopter bounce to the earth in a fenced pasture behind the Quonset hut, then ran up a small hill next to the farmhouse, which led into a dense stand of woods. As they entered the trees, Conti turned and fired a few rounds into the side of the hut. The door, which had been cautiously opening, slammed shut again.

  Jill was running on the path in front of him when Conti stopped, skidding on the gravel. “Wait. Forgot the pack. Got to go back.”

  “No, don’t.” She clamped down on his arm. “They’ll kill you.”

  Conti hesitated for a moment, then nodded in agreement.

  Ten minutes later, they stopped and listened for pursuers. “I can’t hear anything except my heart pounding,” Conti gasped. “I think we’re O.K. for the moment.” They both collapsed to the ground. Just then, the helicopter flew low over the trees, circled, and headed off to the north. “I think they’re after bigger game.”

  He leaned over, gently pushed back the torn shirt that Jill held tightly wrapped around her shoulders and examined her wounds. “Not too terrible. Nothing that requires stitches anyway. Does this hurt?” He pressed gently on her ribs.

  “Ouch!” She flinched. Then she started to sob quietly.

  Conti rubbed her shoulders. “That was quite a performance back there. I’ll never accuse you of being a Langley wimp again.”

  She looked at him. “He was horrible, hurting me and laughing about it. I couldn’t control myself. I wanted to kill him with my bare hands.”

  “You almost did. Impressive uppercut. Where’d you learn that?”

  “Curves — the women’s gym in McLean. Better than the three-hour self-defense class we all had to take at the Agency. But I never thought it would feel like that.”

  “Like what?”

  Her jaws tightened. “So good.”

  “What do you want to do now?” Conti asked. “We can get someone up here to get you out. Maybe they can get a copter. You’d be back in Rome in an hour or two. I’m going to make my way back to the trail and head north. Those monks are going to need help.”

  “I’m going with you,” Jill replied. “I finally feel like a real CIA agent after twenty years. All I’d do back in Rome is worry about you anyway. But we’d better call Mobley and see what he thinks.”

  She put a code into the watch/phone/GPS, then dialed a number and waited for the call to go through. “Even has a speaker function.”

  “Well, well, well.” The speaker projected the world-weary voice of Mobley with surprising clarity. “Did you get kidnapped by the Chinese? Or were you just too busy to call?”

  “Your first guess is closer,” Jill responded. “And, by the way, you’re on speaker. Conti is here. I was kidnapped — but not by the Chinese. He saved my ass, so watch what you say.”

  “Kidnapped? No shit. By whom?”

  “South Africans.”

  “Aha. South Africans. I thought they might be involved in this.”

  Conti and Jill glanced at each other in surprise. “You did?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” Mobley said. “There’s a lot going on back here. Is there a chance anyone else can hear this conversation? Other than Conti, that is?”

  “No. We’re out in the middle of the woods. What’s up?”

  “I found out who you’re chasing. Brace yourself.”

  “Who is it?”

  “The Panchen Lama.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding!”

  “No. The authentic Panchen Lama. Second most important religious leader in Tibet. Been under house arrest in China for the past twenty-five years.”

  Jill and Conti stared at the phone, dumbfounded. Conti spoke for the first time. “That’s crazy. We don’t know even know what he looks like — or if he’s still alive. Nobody’s seen him since he was five years old.”

  “The Chinese Ambassador himself visited me half an hour ago. First time he’s ever come to Langley. Apoplectic. Somehow the Lama escaped from his compound in Sichuan. They moved him there a few years ago because they thought he was becoming friendlier to their point of view. They’d planned to introduce him to the Tibetan public next year — as a modern leader who sees things their way. Everything was going according to plan. Until he disappeared last week.”

  Conti rubbed his temples. “And now he’s running around the hills of Italy in the company of some radical monks? If it’s true, the Chinese must be petrified there’ll be trouble back home.”

  “It’s already started. The Ambassador told me that the ‘splittists’ — that’s what they call the Tibetan nationalists — are hacking into the Chinese Internet spreading the rumor — well, the news — that the Panchen Lama had escaped from China and is about to lead them in an uprising for independence.”

  Conti whistled under his breath. “Jesus!”

  Mobley went on. “A monk incinerated himself today in Lhasa. And there have been some small demonstrations. A few Chinese-owned stores looted. They aren’t exactly acting like Buddhists. And the political fallout is starting here in Washington too. I’ve gotten calls from half the Foreign Relations and Intelligence Committees.”

  After a moment of silence while they processed this new information, Jill spoke up. “Why in the world are the South Africans involved?”

  There was no answer for a moment. Then Mobley said, in what seemed like a chastened tone. “Yeah, the South Africans. I’m working on that. Just stay out of their way for the time being. Gotta run. White House is on the line. Stay on top of this and don’t talk to anyone but me.”

  13.

  Jill disconnected. “That was strange, wasn’t it?”

  “What?”

  “Mobley’s not telling us everything he knows. Not by a long shot.”

  “But what he did tell us is incredible. The Panchen Lama on the loose. Imagine if they can’t get him back.”

  Jill fussed with her now buttonless camo shirt, finally tying the tails together in a sort of Caribbean look. “I had an in-depth assessment of Chinese strategy done last month. They’re staking a lot on Tibet. It’s key to their development plans for the next century. Minerals of all sorts — and water, that’s the big thing.”

  “Water?”

  “The rivers that supply most of Asia rise in the Himalayan plateau. It’s a giant freezer sto
ring fresh water for the entire continent. And, of course, the population isn’t getting any smaller. Whatever the shortages are now, they’re going to be much worse in fifty years. The Chinese realize it, even if no one else does. Water will be more valuable than oil in the future. Whoever controls it will control Asia. The one thing that could screw up their plans would be a resurgence of the Buddhist theocracy in Tibet. Led by the real Panchen Lama.”

  Conti nodded. “They appointed their own Panchen Lama, didn’t they? When they put the guy we’re chasing under house arrest?”

  “Yes, but no one in Tibet thinks their man is legit. The people will follow the real Lama if he suddenly appears on the scene.”

  Conti stood up and brushed the dust off his pants. “We’d better get moving. I’d like to put some distance between us and this place. What was Mobley implying about the South Africans? He said he thought they might be involved.”

  Jill stood up too, holding her ribcage and wincing. “I think he knows who they are, or at least suspects. There are only so many paramilitary groups in the world capable of fielding this kind of operation. They’re either government intelligence agents or private security consultants. The official intelligence units generally coordinate with us, so I imagine it’s the latter — consultants. As you know, most of them have worked for us at one time or another.”

  Conti led the way, following an overgrown path down the hill. “Yeah. The sons of bitches are always getting in the way. We’d be trying to quietly scope out the Taliban buddies of some local warlord only to find out the Blackstream boys or one of the others had scared everyone off. The CIA isn’t in charge of shit in the field. And some of these consultants don’t know shariah from Shakira.”

  Jill sighed. “Washington’s the same. A million and a half top-secret clearances in D.C. Every time I go to the Starbucks, I wonder if the thirty-year old behind me in line reads my confidential reports. Ridiculous. And what do they add?”