Extraordinary Powers

by Joseph Finder

  This much I knew, or thought I knew: Edmund Moore’s fears had been borne out. Toby had confirmed it. Something was going on, something involving CIA, something substantial and frightening. Something, I suspected, of global consequence. And it was accelerating. First Sheila McAdams, then Molly’s father. Then Senator Mark Sutton. And now Van Aver, in Rome.

  But what was the pattern?

  Toby had sent me to find out what I could from Vladimir Orlov. I had almost been killed in the process.

  For what?

  For learning something that Harrison Sinclair knew? Something he was killed for knowing?

  Embezzlement, elemental greed, was not an adequate explanation. My instincts told me it was something more, something much greater, something of enormous and pressing concern to whoever the conspirators were.

  And if I was fortunate, I would learn it from Orlov.

  If I was fortunate. A secret that certain people of immense power wanted kept secret.

  And as likely as not, I’d learn nothing. They would release Molly, I felt confident, in any case, but I would return home empty-handed. And then what?

  I would never be safe, and neither would Molly. Not as long as I possessed this terrible gift; not as long as Rossi or any of his cronies knew where to find me.

  Dispirited now, I left the café and found, on the winding main street, Via Roma, a small store called Boero, whose window displayed ammunition and hunting supplies for this hunting-obsessed region. The cases and boxes in the inelegant display bore such names as Rottweil, Browning, Caccia Extra. What I didn’t find there I managed to turn up in a much fancier hunting-supply store in Siena, a place on the tiny Via Rinaldi called Maffei, which boasted pricy hunting jackets and accessories (for those wealthy Tuscans, I imagined, who wanted to look fashionable while they went out for a day’s sport hunting, or who wanted to at least look like they hunted). Next, I arranged the transfer of a great deal of money from my old Washington account to an American Express office in London, and from there to Siena, where it was given to me in American dollars.

  Finally there was enough breathing room—and I had sufficiently collected my thoughts—to place a telephone call. On Via dei Termini in Siena I located an SIP office (the Italian telephone company) where, from one of the booths, I dialed an international number.

  After the customary clicks and hums and staticky interludes, the phone on the other end was answered on the third ring, as it was supposed to be.

  A female voice said, “Thirty-two hundred.”

  I said, “Extension nine eighty-seven, please.”

  Another click, and the timbre of the connection was altered almost imperceptibly, as if the call were being routed through some special, insulated fiber-optic cable. Likely it was: from a communications outpost near Bethesda, to a switching station in Canada (Toronto, I believe) and back to Langley.

  A familiar male voice came on the line. Toby Thompson.

  “The Cataglyphis ant,” he said, “goes out in the noonday sun.”

  This was a coded exchange he had devised, a reference to the Saharan silver ant, which is able to withstand temperatures higher than any other animal in the world, as high as 140 degrees Fahrenheit.

  I responded: “And they sprint faster than any other animal, too.”

  “Ben!” he said. “What the hell are you—where the hell—?”

  Could I trust Toby? Perhaps yes, perhaps no, but it was best to take as few chances as possible. After all, what if Alex Truslow were right and the Agency was infiltrated? I knew that the security precautions of the telephone connection, the multiple switchbacks and so forth, would give me more than eighty seconds before my location could be traced, so I would have to speak quickly.

  “Ben, what’s going on?”

  “You might want to fill me in, Toby. Charles Van Aver is dead, as I’m sure you know—”

  “Van Aver—!”

  As far as I could divine through the miracle of modern telecommunications, Toby sounded genuinely shocked. I glanced at my watch, and said, “Look into it. Ask around.”

  “But where are you? You haven’t checked in. We agreed…”

  “I just wanted you to know that I will not be checking in according to your schedule. It’s not secure. But I’ll be in touch. I’ll call back tonight between ten and eleven my time, and I want to be connected immediately with Molly. You can do it; you guys are wizards. If the connection isn’t made within twenty seconds, I’ll disconnect.”

  “Listen, Ben—”

  “One more thing. I’m going to assume your … apparatus is leaky. I suggest you plug the leaks, or you’ll lose contact with me entirely. And you don’t want that.”

  I hung up. Seventy-two seconds: untraceable.

  I strolled through the crowds along Via dei Termini, preoccupied, and found a kiosk that had a good selection of foreign newspapers: the Financial Times and The Independent, Le Monde, the International Herald-Tribune, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Neue Zürcher Zeitung. I picked up a copy of the Trib and glanced at the front page as I continued walking. The lead story, of course, was the German election.

  And a small headline below the fold on the left-hand side of the page read:

  U.S. SENATE COMMITTEE TO INVESTIGATE CORRUPTION IN CIA

  Wholly absorbed, I jostled a glamorous young Italian couple, both attired in olive green. The male, who was wearing Ray-Ban aviator sunglasses, shouted out some imprecation in Italian I didn’t quite understand.

  “Scusi,” I said as menacingly as I could.

  Then I noticed the headline at the top left: ALEXANDER TRUSLOW NAMED TO HEAD CIA.

  White House sources say that Alexander Truslow, a longtime CIA official who was acting director of the CIA in 1973, will be named as the new director. Mr. Truslow, who heads an international consulting firm based in Boston, vowed to launch a major cleanup of the CIA, which is being rocked by the allegations of corruption.

  Things had begun to make sense. No wonder Toby had spoken of a “grave urgency.” Truslow represented a threat to some very powerful people. And now, having just been named as Harrison Sinclair’s replacement, he was in a position to do something about the “cancer,” as he called it, which was overtaking the Agency.

  Hal Sinclair had been killed, as had Edmund Moore, and Sheila McAdams, and Mark Sutton, and perhaps—probably—others.

  The next target was obvious.

  Alex Truslow.

  Toby was right: there was no time to lose.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  At a few minutes after three in the afternoon I drove up to the stone quarry near where I had spent the previous night.

  One hour and fifteen minutes later I was seated in the front passenger seat of a beat-up Fiat truck, pulling up to the main gate of Castelbianco. I was wearing work clothes, heavy blue twill trousers and a light blue work shirt, well worn and covered in dust. Driving the truck was the gangly, dark-skinned young worker I’d met at the bar in Rosia early that morning.

  His name was Ruggiero, and he turned out to be the son of an Italian man and a Moroccan émigré woman. Correctly sizing him up as cooperative, pliable, and very susceptible to a bribe, I had found him at the quarry and taken him aside to ask for information.

  Or, rather, to pay for it. I explained that I was a Canadian businessman, a real-estate speculator, and I was willing to pay handsomely for information. Slipping Ruggiero five ten-thousand-lire notes (about forty dollars), I told him I needed to somehow get to the “German” in order to talk business—specifically, to make a generous (if somewhat illegal) cash offer for the Castelbianco property. I had a potential buyer; the “German” would turn a quick, easy profit.

  “Hey, wait a second,” Ruggiero said. “I don’t want to lose my job.”

  “There’s nothing to worry about,” I replied. “Not if we do it right.”

  Ruggiero supplied me with all the information I needed about the renovation taking place at Castelbianco. He told me that a member of the housekeeping s
taff dealt directly with the quarry, placing orders for marble and granite tiles. Apparently, the “German” was overseeing a rather thoroughgoing renovation; the crumbling wing was being restored with deep green Florentine marble tiles for the floor and granite for the terrazzo. He had hired expert stonemasons, real old-world craftsmen, from Siena.

  Ruggiero drove a hard bargain. It cost me seven hundred thousand lire—more than five hundred dollars—for a few hours of his time. He called his contact at Castelbianco and informed him that the last order of Florentine marble they had delivered, three days before, was short, as it turned out. An employee who’d since been fired had made a dreadful mistake. The remainder of the order would be delivered immediately.

  It was unlikely that anyone at Castelbianco would argue over the quarry’s willingness to supplement the earlier order, and indeed, no one did. In the worst case—if, somehow, Orlov’s staff became suspicious, tallied up the marble already delivered, and learned that no mistake had actually been made—then Ruggiero would simply say that he’d been misinformed. And nothing would happen to him.

  Minutes later we were at the gate of Castelbianco. The guard emerged from his stone booth, holding a log sheet on a clipboard, and approached the truck, blinking in the sun.

  “Sí?”

  His intonation and accent were such that, had we been a few hundred miles to the north, I could quite easily imagine him saying “Da?” with just the same brusqueness. With his close-cropped yellow hair, his healthy, ruddy complexion, he was unmistakably of Russian peasant stock, the sort of complaisant, beefy thug so often employed at the Lubyanka.

  “Ciao,” Ruggiero said.

  The guard nodded with recognition, made a check mark on the visitors’ log, glanced at the load of marble slabs we were hauling, then saw me.

  And nodded again.

  I gave him the barest shrug of acknowledgment and scowled as if I could hardly wait for this shift to be over.

  Ruggiero revved the engine and guided the truck slowly between the massive stone pillars. The dirt road wound past a few small stone houses with slanted roofs, which I assumed belonged to workers. Chickens and ducks roamed the tiny brown yards in front of the houses, chortling and honking angrily. A couple of workers were spreading white powder from a large sack of fertilizer over a sparse patch of lawn.

  “His people live there.”

  I grunted, not wanting to ask who “his people” were, if indeed Ruggiero knew.

  A small flock of sheep was scattered on a hillside on our left. They had slender pink faces, quite different in appearance from any sheep I had seen in America, and bleated suspiciously, in chorus, as we passed.

  Up ahead, the house loomed. “What’s it like inside?” I asked.

  “Never been inside. I’ve heard it’s nice, but a little rundown. Needs work. The German got it cheap, I heard.”

  “Good for him.”

  We rounded a bend above a narrow ravine, passed another low stone building. This one had no windows.

  “Rat house,” Ruggiero said.

  “Hmm?”

  “I’m joking. Half joking. It’s where they used to keep the food garbage. It swarms with rats, so I stay away from it. Now they use it to store stuff.”

  I shuddered at the image. “How do you know so much about this place?”

  “Castelbianco? My friends and I used to play around here when we were kids.” He shifted into neutral, coasted the truck up next to a terrace where several hunched, sun-bronzed middle-aged men were cutting and fitting limestone tiles in an ornate pattern of concentric circles. “In those days, when Castelbianco belonged to the Peruzzi-Moncinis, they’d let kids from Rosia play here. They didn’t care. Sometimes we helped out with chores.” He reached behind to the backseat, pulled out two pairs of coarse canvas gloves, and handed me a pair. As he pulled at a lever that mechanically lowered the load of marble to the ground, he said, “If you get someone to buy it from the German, try to find someone who’ll get rid of the barbed wire. This place used to belong to the whole comune.”

  He jumped out of the cabin, and I followed him around to the back, where he began to lift marble slabs and set them gently down in a neat pile near the terrace.

  “Che diavolo stai facendo, Ruggiero?” one of the masons shouted, turning toward us and waving a hand, asking what the hell he was doing.

  “Calmati,” Ruggiero said, and kept working. Take it easy. “Sto facendo il mio lavoro. É per l’interno, credo. Che ne so io?” Just doing my job, he was saying. I joined him in unloading the marble. The thin slabs, rough on one side, smooth and finished on the other, weren’t heavy, but were fragile, and we had to set them down carefully.

  “No one told me anything about a delivery of marble,” the same mason, who appeared to be a foreman, continued in Italian, his hands gesticulating. “The marble was last week. You guys fuck up or something?”

  “I just do what they tell me,” Ruggiero said, and gestured to the house. “The last delivery was short, so Aldo offered to make it up. Anyway, it’s none of your fucking business.”

  The mason picked up a trowel, smoothed a line of cement, and said resignedly, “Fuck you.”

  We worked in silence for a while, lifting, carrying, setting down, finding a rhythm. I said quietly, “The guys know you, huh?”

  “He does. My brother worked for him for a couple of years. Real asshole. You want us to finish unloading this stuff?”

  “Almost,” I said.

  “Almost?”

  As we worked in silence, I surveyed the house and grounds. Up close, Castelbianco was no palazzo; it was large, and in its way magnificent, but at the same time shabby and in disrepair. Perhaps a million dollars of renovation would restore it to a grandeur it hadn’t seen for centuries, but Orlov was barely spending a fraction of that. I wondered where he had gotten the money, but then, why should the former head of Soviet intelligence not have found clever ways to pocket some of the unlimited budget he once controlled, divert hard currency funds to Swiss accounts? And what was he paying his security guards, who might number half a dozen? Not much, I suspected, but then, he was providing these fellows asylum, protection from the arrest and imprisonment they’d face back home in Russia for having so faithfully served the now-discredited KGB. How quickly things had reversed course: the feared, mighty officers of state security, the sword and shield of the Party, were now hunted down like rabid dogs.

  But it bothered me that I had been able to get into the grounds of Castelbianco so easily. What sort of security was this for a man in fear for his life, a man driven to strike a deal with the head of the CIA to give him protection, like some shopkeeper in Chicago buying protection from the minions of Al Capone?

  The security was modest: there appeared to be no snipers, no closed-circuit cameras. Yet this made a certain sense. His real security system was his anonymity, which apparently was so successful that even my own employers didn’t know where he was. Too much security would have been a … well, I could not help thinking “red flag.” Too thorough a system would have attracted undue attention. An eccentric rich German might employ a few guards, but too sophisticated a system would have been risky. So I was inside, and according to the information I had received, Orlov was inside, too. The problem was, how was I going to get into the house? And more to the point, once inside, how would I get out?

  For what must have been the twentieth time, I mentally rehearsed my plan, and then signaled to my Italian accomplice to put down the marble slabs and follow me.

  * * *

  “Aiutatemi!”’ Help me! “Per l’amor di Dio, ce qualcuno chi aiutare?” Knocking wildly at the heavy wooden door that opened directly from the outside to the kitchen, Ruggiero was bellowing, “For the love of God, can someone help me?” His right forearm was a frightful mess, a long gash bleeding profusely.

  Squatting in the bushes nearby, behind a rusty set of metal barrels that held food refuse, I watched. A noise inside signaled that someone had heard his desperate k
nocking. Slowly, with a squeak of the hinges, the door swung open to reveal a rotund old woman wearing a green canvas smock over a shapeless floral-print housedress. Her brown eyes, small circles in a large mass of wrinkles beneath a wild flyaway mane of gray hair, widened suddenly when she saw Ruggiero’s wound.

  “Shto eto takoye?” she said in a high, scared voice. “Bozhe moi! Pridi, malodoi chelovek! Bystro!” What’s this? she was saying in Russian. My God, come in, young man!

  Ruggiero replied in Italian: “Il marmo … Il marmo é affilato…” The marble is sharp.

  She was, I presumed, the Russian housekeeper, perhaps a servant who had worked for Orlov in his days of power. And as I anticipated, she behaved with all the motherly concern of a Russian woman of her generation. She naturally wouldn’t have guessed that Ruggiero’s wound had not been caused by an accident with the sharp-edged marble tiles but had instead been created by me, using stage makeup from a shop in Siena.

  Neither did the poor woman suspect that the instant she turned her back to direct this young Italian man into the kitchen for first aid, someone else would jump from the bushes to subdue her. Swiftly, I clamped a chloroform-soaked rag over her mouth and nose, smothering her scream, and supporting her large, awkward body when it went limp.

  Ruggiero quietly closed the kitchen door. He glanced at me, alarmed, no doubt thinking: what kind of “Canadian investor” is this? But his assistance had been bought and paid for, and he would not let me down.

  From his childhood days playing at Castelbianco, Ruggiero had known where the entrance to the kitchen was. Already, as far as I was concerned, he had earned his money. When I pulled the coil of slender nylon rope from my overalls, he helped me tie the housekeeper up, taking care that the rope not chafe her, and placing a gag in her mouth, secured by rope, for when she came to. Then, silently, he helped me move the unconscious body from the onion-fragrant kitchen into the large pantry.

  He shook my hand. I gave him the final payment, in American dollars, and with a quick nervous smile, he said, “Ciao,” and was gone.

  A small, dark set of stone steps led from the kitchen up to a dark corridor, off of which appeared to be unoccupied bedrooms. I crept noiselessly, making my way by feel as much as anything else. Somewhere in the house I heard a faint buzzing, but it seemed quite far off, as if from miles away. There were none of the normal noises a house makes, though, even an ancient castle such as this.