by Dana Haynes
Her breathing became ragged.
At almost three hundred feet above sea level she found the remains of a servants’ path, about a third of which was roughly paved with stones. Her progress improved. The gradient became much kinder.
The stone path led to a relatively flat pasture that canted gently toward the cliffs. Three black Arabian horses lived there that summer. They eyed her the way that toughs guarding their own turf eye any passing stranger, in any town on earth.
Beyond the green pasture was a narrow road of crushed white oyster shells, which wound its way amid sculpted tufts of emerald lawns and truncated bits of Greek statuary, a torso here, some disembodied heads there. Well hidden among the statuary were CCTV cameras. Daria had clocked them on her first approach, weeks earlier.
Beyond a freshly painted stable and a voluminous garage she spotted the great house, four stories tall, all weathered stone and rounded turrets and terra-cotta roofs. It was immense and formidable, designed to weather Mediterranean storms.
The breeze this high up was fresh and cool. Daria’s hair had dried straight back off her skull, strands tickling her shoulder blades. She nodded casually to the grounds crew, chatted with a few. Her Italian was good enough that she could do a Sicilian accent, and everybody down in the village and up in the converted castle assumed that that was where the mysterious Gatta Randagia was from. Israeli by birth, she could pass easily enough.
The house staff was less convivial than the grounds crew and eyed her with the exact same hostility as the Arabian horses. She nodded to a few of them, expecting and receiving no responses. She hadn’t bothered making friends in the great house.
Her stretched-out Violent Femmes T, ripped cutoffs, and battered sneakers drew an unctuous glare from Anton, chief assistant to Signore Giancarlo Docetti.
Anton certainly didn’t mind Signore Docetti having amorous dalliances. He’d have thought it odd for a financier of Signore Docetti’s stature not to have mistresses here and there.
He didn’t mind Ana, the current Signora Docetti, either. The young, tall, and angular beauty—almost thirty years younger than the signore—recently had made the climb from fashion runway to TV presenter. She was using trophy wife as a base camp before her final assent on Mount Hollywood. Anton didn’t begrudge her this. It was Italy.
And he didn’t even mind the romantic interludes of Gianni Docetti, the twenty-year-old son, the racing enthusiast and constant fodder for the more lurid Italian media. Docetti the Younger could (and did) sleep with whomsoever he wished.
Still, Anton did not like Daria, the solidly muscled stranger with the hobo’s clothes, tightly defined muscles, sun-bronzed skin, and jet-black eyes. Anton mistrusted the misfit.
Anton had yet to figure out whose romantic dalliance she was: Signore Docetti, Signora Docetti, or Docetti the Younger? Based on when the woman visited, anyone was possible. Any two were conceivable. Even, God forbid, the trifecta.
Italian, Anton might be. But even Italians draw the line somewhere.
* * *
A little girl. A soldier. The Gaza Strip. Bombs, blood. Callused hands, long pianist’s fingers, nails shredded and bloody, reaching for her. Scrambling for her. Diggers above, screaming for help. The smell of charred human. The life flickering and dying in a woman’s pitch-black eyes. Lips silently breathing apologies.
Gasping, sweating, eyes ablaze in sheer terror, Daria awoke.
She was not buried alive. She was not caked in blood and mud, ribs squeezed by debris. She was not straining for a hand always out of her reach.
She lay in a warm, king-sized bed, amid Egyptian cotton sheets.
She waited for her heart to stop thundering and eventually drifted back to sleep.
* * *
Afterward, Daria lay in bed with Gianni, Docetti the Younger, one hand behind her head, one naked leg bent, knee up, and listened to the youth with the creamy skin and rocker tattoos use hand gestures to describe the feeling of speed. Gianni sat up in bed, sheets spooled around his long, rangy body, and he dazzled Daria with his stories: the rush, the crazed fans, the gorgeous girls and equally gorgeous boys, the competitors giving their all.
Daria listened, amused. She had always liked athletes. She was intensely competitive by nature and was attracted to people who lived for challenges.
When he grew tired of talking, Gianni Docetti reached over and adjusted a stray strand of straight black hair behind her ear. She smiled up at him.
“Someday you’ll have to tell me about the nightmares, Gatta.”
She reacted without thinking. “I don’t have nightmares.”
Gianni smiled down at her. “You do. Almost every night we’re together.”
Daria squirmed in the sheets. “I wouldn’t worry about it.”
Gianni Docetti was very young and very self-centered. But he knew when he was being dismissed. He let her get away with it, leaning over and kissing her hard on the lips. Daria snuggled deeper into the covers, let the moment go where it would.
After they’d made love twice, Gianni took a shower. Daria slipped into a silvery silk blouse that smelled of Ana, the current signora Docetti. She buttoned as many buttons as the Italian version of modesty required, then stepped out onto a flagstone balcony that overlooked the sea. She borrowed Gianni’s mobile phone; she’d thrown away her own phone after last winter’s contretemps, well aware that a steeply increasing array of Western intelligence agencies would be monitoring her communications. In theory, none of those agencies knew about Casa Docetti.
Someday you’ll have to tell me about the nightmares.
For a while, after last winter’s illness, she had thought her childhood curse of nightmares was diminishing a bit. The reprieve hadn’t lasted, though.
She decided not to worry about it today. She used the international prefix for the United States, then called the one person she knew who might be willing to take her call. And not inform the CIA.
Six
Washington, D.C.
The last thing John Broom wanted to do was miss the staff meeting. He knew they were important. The chief of staff for Senator Singer Cavanaugh had informed John of this time and again.
Good service to the senator and his constituents began with good teamwork. And good teamwork required staff meetings. Lots of staff meetings. Long staff meetings.
John had assured Calvin Pope, the chief of staff, that he would make attending staff meetings his new priority.
He’d assured Calvin of this in February. Also in April.
As of July, that hadn’t happened yet.
John Broom had joined the senator’s staff in December, following a ten-year career as an analyst at the Central Intelligence Agency. John’s specialty at the CIA had been the study of weapons and weapon platforms, along with military and foreign policy. Anyone can read the papers and talk about a war that is raging. John could talk at length about the next war to break out.
His time at the CIA had ended with a flourish: an investigation into stolen canisters of recombinant influenza. It had resulted in John being sent into the field of play, where guns were fired. Lots of guns.
Prior to last November, John had never heard a gun fired in real life. After November, John vowed never to be near a discharged gun again. John liked to tell people, “It’s not that I’m a coward … no, wait. It’s exactly that. I’m a coward. No more guns.”
Thus, the new gig was perfect, a desk job inside the Beltway serving Senator Singer Cavanaugh, D-Louisiana, former war hero, former prosecutor, former FBI director, and longtime chairman of the Joint Committee on Intelligence. Precisely the kind of guy who needed to know about weapons, weapon platforms, military policy, foreign policy, and the next wars brewing.
At 10:05 A.M. Tuesday, John sat atop his cluttered desk in the Dirksen Senate Office Building, just north of the Hill, struggling to open a packet of peanuts. From his perch he could scan television channels on his desktop computer and Web sites on his tablet computer and keep an eye on
the door that he and three other staffers shared in the tight, ill-ventilated office. He also kept a thin Moleskine notepad open on his lap, jotting notes in his precise handwriting. His eyes flickered from image to image and occasionally back to The Wall Street Journal open on his desk. He also could see the few dozen Post-it notes he’d spread about, all with Really Important Information he was sure he would need at some point in his life.
He could see shadows in the office corridor before anyone reached his door. Ever since his encounter with guns (lots and lots of guns), John had favored being able to see doorways.
The doorway was filled now by an intern, one of four they had that summer. She was twenty, cute, black, petite, and dressed as professionally as her meager budget would allow. She rapped tentatively on the door before entering, a laptop clutched to her chest, a lapel pin that logged her as a staff member glistening under her dark black, chemically straightened hair.
“John?”
“Hmm? Oh, hi, ah…”
John knew the interns’ names, of course. He had written them down on one of his Post-its, in order to memorize them. Piper, Paige, Bryce, and Ryder. Easy. Two guys, two girls. Two black, one white, one Asian. Tulane, Louisiana, U–New Orleans, Notre Dame, and Northwestern. Straight, straight, straight, and bi. Liberal, liberal, liberal, and bemoaning the fate of Leon Trotsky. Too young to contemplate as bed partners. (Also, again, two of them guys, not John’s flavor, but hey, he didn’t judge.)
John Broom was a man who could talk to you at length about the Treaty of Westphalia. Memorizing four names—as his dad always said—wasn’t rocket surgery.
He smiled at the intern. “Hi, Bryce.”
“It’s Piper.”
John thought, Crap! “I know. What’s up?”
“I wanted to let you know it’s ten o’clock.”
He smiled. That was considerate of her. There were only three wall clocks in the crammed office, plus a half-dozen computers, all of which displayed the time. His eyes flickered from TV monitor to tablet computer to The Wall Street Journal. “Thanks. Hey, did you get that itinerary for the Soviet thing?”
She blinked in surprise. “Soviet?” She’d been born after the Wall fell.
John looked up. “The People’s Democratic Blah-Blah thing.”
“Oh. I think you asked Ryder for that. What is it?”
John thought she’d just called herself Ryder. “Ah, it’s a new party in Novosibirsk. They’re making some electoral inroads around Kiev. There’s a big gathering coming up. I wanted to know who’s speaking.”
Piper seemed to absorb that. “Is it important?”
John smiled at her. He used his teeth to try to open the peanut packet. “I don’t know.”
“Oh. Anyway, it’s ten.”
“Okay.”
“Here.” She summoned a bit of confidence and stepped fully into the office, hand out. John handed her the packet of peanuts. She set down her laptop, deftly split it open, and handed it back. “Is that what you’re working on now? The Soviet thing?”
“Where?”
She blinked around the room. “Well … here.”
“No.” He ate a handful of peanuts, offered her the packet. She shook her head. John nodded to the newspaper. “The Journal has an article about the president pushing for a larger presence of the Navy’s Fifth Fleet in the South Pacific.”
He waggled the tablet computer in the air. “Sky News is reporting that a Spanish transit union is scheduling a nationwide strike.”
He ate a mouthful of peanuts and nodded to the TV screen. “And an Egyptian court wants the military to reopen the border with Gaza, but the military is balking, which is just plain weird.”
He chewed his peanuts. He shook his head. “Weird…”
Piper had been staring at his eyes but hurriedly looked away when John realized she was still standing there. “Um … why?” she said, “Why weird?”
John offered her the packet again. This time, she took a single peanut. He said, “Which one?”
“Any of them. Why does the senator need to know about them?” She ate her single peanut.
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
John shrugged. “No. He might not. I won’t know until I look into them. If he doesn’t, well, no loss. If he does, I’d rather have talking points before he needs them than after he needs them. You know?”
“Sure,” she said. “That’s why you’re missing the meeting?”
“Which meeting?”
“The ten o’clock meeting.”
John said, “Is it ten o’clock?”
Piper thought about a half-dozen replies but bit them all back.
John stood up and retrieved his suit-coat jacket from the back of his chair. The jacket was matte black and the lining tamale red. It was the precise same red as the swirls of his tie. The red also appeared as a thin line in his pocket square. Piper, Paige, Bryce, and Ryder played a kind of drinking game in the evening, based on what color combinations John Broom would wear the next day to work, and whether the lining of his jacket, or his pocket squares, would match his ties.
John gathered his tablet computer and the intern gathered her laptop.
“I can’t miss this meeting,” he told her. “It’s important. Calvin places a lot of importance on team meetings.”
“He does,” she conceded.
“It’s bad form to miss these meetings.”
Piper nodded.
“Really, missing the meeting would be bad.”
John’s phone vibrated while they were still six paces from the senator’s conference room door. John whisked it out of his trouser pocket. He frowned at the extra-long overseas number on display.
“John Broom.”
The voice on the other end said, “Hallo, Mr. Broom.”
John froze. Piper took two steps before she realized he wasn’t moving. She turned back.
John gulped.
The voice on the line said, “Is this a bad time, p’raps?”
Piper raised her eyebrows.
John held the phone against his chest. “Tell Calvin I’ll be missing the meeting.”
* * *
Daria felt the breeze, salty and warm, off the Mediterranean. Anton brought her an iced Sorrentine limoncello and a dull glower.
She smiled as the voice over the international call said, “Thought we agreed to use first names.”
“Right you are. Hallo, John.”
“Hi, Daria.”
“Surprised to hear from me?”
Gulls arced overhead, not flapping their wings but riding the thermals.
“I was not part of that bullshit with the CIA,” John Broom shot back quickly. “I hope you know that. I fought hard for them to understand that you weren’t the bad guy. That you saved lives. Lots of lives.”
“I do know that, John. Just as I know that the CIA, and the other agencies, agreed to leave me alone so long as I stay low and don’t interfere.”
She sipped the icy drink. She listened to the two beats of silence. John said, “Uh oh.”
She barked a quick, musical laugh. “’Fraid so. Friend of a friend might be in trouble. I’m getting involved.”
She hooked one bare heel up on the seat of her chair.
“You need any help?”
“A bit, and I wouldn’t bother you, but some rather bad players appear to be in Florence. They shouldn’t be. This isn’t their patch. D’you know of the White Scorpions?”
One of the gulls dive-bombed the flagstone balcony, a baleful eye on Daria’s sunny yellow drink. “The old Yugoslavia?”
She was impressed. “Ten for ten. Serbia, to be precise. Paramilitary death squads during the Yugoslav civil war.”
“They’re in Florence?”
“Apparently.” She closed her eyes to dredge up the details Diego had shared. “There’s an engineer from Rome named Gabriella Incantada. She hired a friend of mine to protect something she invented. She was planning to sell this thing—
don’t know what it is, alas—at the Hotel Criterion in Florence. My friend said Skorpjo blokes started showing up.”
“In Italy?”
Daria said, “Quite. And while I’ve no idea who Gabriella Incantada is, nor what she invented, my friend said it’s military in nature. A weapon, he thinks. Possibly—”
The voice over the phone line said, “Avionics control suites. Interfaces for aircraft.”
Daria grinned and sat lower, knee raised higher. “And you know that…?”
“Because I looked it up while we were talking. Gabriella Incantada makes aviation control circuits.”
“Splendid.” She sipped the drink. Gianni Docetti appeared from his bedroom, wearing a towel low around his hips and a broad smile. His muscled body had about 5 percent body fat and maybe fifteen tattoos. He carried a rolled-up map. He laid it out on the table before her. It displayed the topography of northern Italy.
“Not so splendid. First, I’m no expert on Serb gangsters, but they’re supposed to be a force in Central Europe. Florence isn’t their turf. Second, I think they go in for the kidnap-and-ransom game, plus murder for hire, knocking over banks, drug trade, prostitution. But weapons-grade avionics?” He paused as if thinking. “Yikes.”
“Indeed. As you say: Yikes.”
Gianni picked up his own drink and swigged it. He ran a hand through his wild mane of sun-bleached hair and inhaled the salty sea air. He studied the map, one blunt finger tracing the straightaways and noting the wicked switchback hills.
John said, “Okay. Daria? I’m on this thing. Can I get back to you on this line?”