by Trevor Scott
“Do you know anything about the man they picked up in Rome last night?” she asked.
“I was not in on the interrogation,” Vito said. “But I understand they got nothing from that man.”
“Of course not,” she said. “Your organization has certain rules and must follow them.”
“We all have rules. . . What do I call you?”
“My name is Elisa. That usually works for me.”
He nodded understanding. “What would you have done to extract something from this man?”
That was a damn good question, she thought. What would Jake Adams do? Anything necessary. But she couldn’t let this young officer know about Jake. “I’m guessing your agency will take over from here. Where’s your backup?”
Vito stared at her. Perhaps too long, considering the traffic. He turned back to his driving and said, “You have not been told?”
“Told what?”
“You have been authorized special authority to work on assignment with AISI,” he said.
Part of her wanted nothing less than that. But now she too would be forced to comply with certain rules. “All right,” she said.
“I guess you could say you work for me,” Vito said with a smile.
“You can say anything you want,” she said. “But if you ever say that again, I’ll neuter you. Capisco?”
Vito swallowed hard. “Si.”
“Don’t follow so close,” she instructed.
“Were you able to get a tracking device on him?” he asked.
She laughed under her breath. “What do you think? The man is not an idiot. I could not get within five meters of the man.” This was a lie.
“What about his phone?”
“He uses a disposable. And my guess is that one is somewhere on the bottom of the Adriatic.”
“I understand. Where do you think he’s going?”
“Central train station,” she surmised.
“Not the airport?”
She shook her head. “This guy likes to work with cash. You can still buy a train ticket with Euros.”
“Makes sense. Especially now.”
By this time they had traveled from the east side where the port sat to the central train station, which was a small sepia structure with multiple arched windows trimmed in white.
Zamir got out of his taxi and hurried into the train station.
“Hurry up and park this tin can,” Elisa said. “Just pull over and let me out. You can catch up to me.”
She got out and grabbed her bag from the back seat. Then she stepped swiftly toward the front entrance. If this man was in a hurry, then he must have been trying to catch a train that would leave soon.
Once she got inside, she saw her target walk away from the ticket booth and move toward the outer platforms. Another man had gotten to the ticket window first, but Elisa pushed the man aside and leaned into the window, asking for the destination of the last man.
“Roma,” the ticket agent said.
Elisa bought two tickets for the same train.
“It leaves in just a few minutes,” the agent said. “Platform Two.”
“Sorry,” she said to the man she had pushed. Then she hurried toward the platform just as Vito came rushing into the front door.
He caught up with her and now the two of them simply looked like a couple in a hurry to catch their train. They barely made it on the train before it slowly pulled away from the central train station.
They settled into a set of chairs facing forward, discussing openly how close they had cut it. She had no idea where Zamir was on the train, but she guessed she had a while to find him. The problem was, she would need to try to do something to change her appearance. This man wasn’t a moron. She had been on him in Athens, but from a longer distance. Then she had followed him to the ferry in Patras, had crossed the Adriatic with him, and now they were on the same train from Brindisi to Rome. Coincidences happened. But this was more than kismet.
11
Zurich, Switzerland
Derrick Konrad had traveled on the night train from Geneva following the man who had escaped their raid near the airport. He had no idea where this man was going, but he just knew that the man had to be aware of the raid and this guy was escaping. Konrad had two choices now. He could simply arrest the man and link him to the others, or he could follow him and hopefully lead him to someone higher up the food chain. Deep down, he had a feeling this man was preparing to strike in Switzerland—probably somewhere in the financial district of Zurich, where the strength of the country’s banks were headquartered. Here they could strike a blow to the rich and famous of the world. The one percent.
After the long train ride, his suspect had wandered in the early morning hours to a coffee shop across from the Zurich Hauptbahnhof, the main train station.
Holgar, his colleague from the Swiss Polizei, had gone to his apartment in Geneva, packed some clothes in a duffle bag, and flown to Zurich on a Polizei jet, getting there hours prior to his train arrival. The most important thing his colleague had picked up for him was his Carbamazepine to prevent seizures. He was down to just one pill on him, not thinking he would be leaving Geneva without warning. His epilepsy was controlled for now, but he never knew when a seizure would strike.
While his Polizei friend kept an eye on the suspect, he quickly got into the back seat of his friend’s car and changed his shirt after applying a heavy dose of underarm deodorant.
“Is our scumbag still drinking coffee?” Konrad asked.
“Yes, sir. His second dose.”
“Could you hand me the water?”
His associate kept his eyes on the café while he reached back with the bottle of water. Then he took a quick glance back as Konrad took his medication. Only a few people knew about his affliction, and that’s the way he wanted it to stay. He had discussed his epilepsy with Holgar one night while they staked out the three men in Geneva. Part of his involvement with INTERPOL was due to the fact that it was difficult for him to have a partner. Once they found out he might end up on the ground flopping like a fish during an important moment, nobody trusted him. But Holgar didn’t seem too concerned.
“When was your last. . .incident?” Holgar asked.
“Two years, three months and four days,” Konrad said.
“How do you drive?”
“Very carefully.” He hesitated and then said, “I’ve learned to identify when a seizure might be coming on. So I pull over. I’ve had a lot of false alarms, but that’s better than the alternative.”
Holgar nodded his head in agreement.
Konrad zipped up his bag and went back to the front passenger seat. He glanced at his partner, who seemed a bit distracted. “You see, this is why I don’t tell people about my little demon. It changes our relationship.”
“I’m sorry, Derrick. I’m just tired. Seriously, it doesn’t matter to me.”
“But we must be there at all times for our partners,” Konrad said. “And I can’t give you one hundred percent certainty of that.”
“I’ll take your experience any day. You have a great reputation. You get the bad guys. That’s all that matters to me.”
“Thank you.” Konrad shifted his head toward the café. “What do you think he’s doing?”
Holgar shrugged. “Waiting for a contact?”
“Not likely.” He pointed behind him, across the street at the Hauptbahnhof. “Why stay here?”
“He doesn’t have a friend or associate to bring him a bag of clothes,” Holgar said with a smirk.
“That’s right. He left in a hurry without any baggage. But why stay here?”
Holgar looked confused.
Konrad filled in the blanks. “The coffee shop in the train station wasn’t open yet. It doesn’t open for another half hour. So, this guy is waiting for another train.”
“To where?” Holgar asked.
“That is the question of the morning, Holgar.” He raised a finger as he found his phone. Then he quickly call
ed a number from memory and waited. His contact in the Swiss Federal Office of Police finally answered and asked how things were going. Just great. He briefed the boss on their current situation, speculating on how the suspect might be catching another train. He made a crass joke about throwing the man off somewhere once the train got up to speed. Then Konrad asked the important question. When he did so, Holgar looked surprised. But the boss agreed with Konrad.
He got off the phone and shoved it back in his pocket.
“What did he say?” Holgar asked.
“He said you can work with me as long as I need you. Are you ready for a little adventure, Holgar?”
“Hell yes.”
“All right. Here’s the plan.” He detailed how they would layer their surveillance of this man. As far as Konrad knew, their suspect had no idea he was being followed. That would be their advantage. And he was determined to get to the bottom of this. Whatever this was.
12
Naples, Italy
Jake always thought that Rome was the heart of Italy. Naples, or Napoli to the Italians, was the rectum with leaky oily discharge. Garbage lay strewn everywhere, graffiti a ubiquitous display by would-be artists with too much colorful paint and no real jobs to distract from their real passion. Which was a shame, Jake thought. With the location on the sea and Mt. Vesuvius for a backdrop, Naples could have been the most beautiful city in Italy. Instead, it was like a morbidly obese man with smelly cheese lurking in the fat folds. But Naples also had the best pizza in the world, so there was that.
He had worked in Naples during his time in the CIA, thwarting a bombing in the 80s with his new friend Toni Contardo. At the time he didn’t realize the significance of that new relationship, or that it would develop into a love affair and friendship that would result in the birth of his first child, Karl. In the past fifteen hours he kept seeing glimpses of Toni, with her long curly black hair, until he realized the woman was not her and he felt like a total idiot, shaking his head as if wiping clear an etch-a-sketch. Of course, he didn’t mention this to his current girlfriend, Alexandra. But he sensed that she knew something wasn’t quite right with him.
The two of them had tried to track down the man that the Italian in Rome had given up after considerable persuasion. The guy wasn’t at his apartment. He had no traditional work, so they couldn’t track him down there. They had no choice but to wait out the man at his favorite pizza place across the street from his apartment.
It was late afternoon now and Jake had just finished one of those famous Napoli pizzas. He worked on his second Peroni beer, his back against the corner booth with a view of the front door and a back exit.
“Do you think that asshole in Rome gave us bad information?” Alexandra asked. She still had a couple of pieces of pizza left, and was nursing her first beer.
“I don’t think so,” Jake said. “I can tell when someone is lying to me.” But she knew that.
Jake had been able to get a passport photo of the man from his Agency contacts, but that was at least five years old. The guy could have changed his appearance by now.
“Have you heard anything from Russo?” she asked.
“You know he doesn’t have my cell number,” Jake said. Only a few people in the world had that.
“You protect your number like nuclear codes.”
His cell phone was probably more secure than nuclear codes. Every text going in or out was highly encrypted. Calls were run through multiple servers and could not be traced by even the NSA, the CIA, or the FBI. The GPS was deflected to various locations around the world. It currently had him somewhere in Peru.
“Just trying to stay one step ahead of the hackers. Or the internet marketers. Here we go. Coming through the door. That’s our guy.”
The man had not changed much from his passport photo. He even had the skinny beard and the black eye liner. Put a sail on the man and he would end up on Vesuvius in a stiff breeze.
They had discussed how they wanted to play the guy. Luckily the man in Rome had given them some inside information about the man’s desires. Pizza was one. Tall blonde women was another. That’s where Alexandra came to play. She pulled out her map of Naples and strut to the bar, pretending to be totally lost.
From Jake’s angle, he could see Alexandra turned away from the man, who was more than a little interested. He couldn’t keep his eyes off of her nice butt. She flicked her hair seductively and ran a finger across the map.
The subject couldn’t handle it. He got up from his chair and approached Alexandra. Jake couldn’t hear what he was saying, but he could see their expressions. She was damn good and the subject was being reeling in like a fish. Once the man nuzzled closer and pointed out something on the map, Jake knew they had him. Especially after Alexandra whispered something in the man’s ear, smiled, and turned, swaying her hips toward the bathroom. The guy looked around and then followed her.
Jake paid and headed out the back door to the alley. When he got outside, he noticed two things. First, darkness had almost set in. And second, Alexandra had their subject in a sleeper hold and he was struggling for air like that fish on the line. In a few seconds the man passed out in Alexandra’s arms. Jake patted the guy down, finding a gun and a switchblade.
“Did you at least let him touch your boobs?” Jake asked.
She shrugged. “He tried.”
They had parked their car in the back lot, so she dragged the thin man to the trunk, and the two of them threw him in roughly and quietly closed the trunk door on him.
Then they drove to an isolated location down by the commercial shipping docks. They had scoped out the location earlier in the day and guessed it would be a great place to interrogate someone.
Lights from the city glistened off the sea, giving tourists in the city a false sense of security. But Jake knew that darkness in Naples brought out every dirtbag from the underworld—from petty street criminals to those heavy hitters in organized crime. It was the most dangerous city in Italy and rivaled in the Mediterranean only by those in the south regions of North Africa and the Middle East.
When he stopped he saw that Alexandra was messing with her phone. “Are you checking on Emma?” he asked her.
“No. This is Russo. He said the Italians finally came and picked up Marisa at the hotel a couple of hours ago. He’s on the north end of Naples.”
Jake wasn’t entirely sure he wanted to continue working with a man from the Mafia. But he had to admit that the man knew Italy much better than Jake, and had a lot of contacts in Naples. “Did you send him this way?”
“Do you want me to?”
“Yeah. He might come in handy with the man in the trunk. He can name drop and let the guy know we aren’t with the authorities. It might speed up our work.”
The guy was still passed out in the trunk, curled up like a baby. Jake pulled the man out by himself, hoisting him over his shoulder with ease. Alexandra opened an old metal container that was probably no longer in use and had been used recently to store folded boxes awaiting recycling. The boxes filled the back end of the container, leaving them the front half.
Jake tried to set the man down gently on the metal surface, but he lost his grip and the man’s head bounced off the hard surface, waking him up. But now the guy was groggy and holding his head.
Alexandra pulled out a set of heavy zip ties and bound the man’s hands behind his back. Then she strapped his skinny ankles with another one.
“That’s good,” Jake said in German. “He isn’t going anywhere.”
She pulled out some other items they had purchased earlier in the day. They would first start with the soft approach. Then Jake would discover what the man feared most to exploit that as best he could. Most people feared basic elements—water and fire. But they also liked to keep various items, like teeth and fingers and balls and penile tissue.
First, they made sure to wake the man up and lit the container with a small portable light. Then Jake started to work up a sequence with various to
ols of destruction, from the man’s own switchblade to simple pliers. They also had a number of bottles of water and a butane torch. The man’s eyes got wider as Jake played with each item.
Alexandra got a call from Russo before they got started with their interrogation. She told him how to find them.
Moments later, Russo came into the container and gave a little whistle. In English he said, “Are you sure you don’t want to work for me?”
“You can’t afford us,” Jake said. “You want to start this with a few questions? It might save with the pain and disbursal of DNA.”
Russo pulled Jake out of earshot of the man. “How do you want to play this?”
“Play up your association with the Calabrese Malavita,” Jake said. “I’m guessing you can drop a few names that will scare the shit out of him.”
“Got it,” Russo said. Then he went to the man and lifted him off the ground by his shirt, setting him on his butt. He slapped him across the face about ten times before saying a word. Then he went into a quick diatribe with the man, which made it difficult for Jake to keep up. His Italian was good, but this was something else—like a father bitch-slapping a son to find out why he was tormenting his sister. Finally, Russo mentioned a couple of names, making the man’s eyes widen with fear.
Their subject started to cry like a little girl, tears streaking his face and snot rolling from his nostrils. Now Jake held Russo back and let the subject wallow for a moment. Alexandra found the rag they planned on using to water board the man, and she wiped the tears and snot from the man’s face.
In the end, it took just a few calm words from Russo to make the man talk. It turned out that family was very important to guys like Russo. When a lower-level thug is forced to realize the importance of keeping friends and relatives safe, the choice becomes quite clear. Talk or see the complete elimination of familial DNA from this Earth.
Jake and Russo stepped outside while Alexandra kept watch over the man.
“You think that’s all the man knows?” Russo asked.
“I think so.” And that was a problem. Someone had set up a highly compartmentalized organization.