by James Phelan
“I’m sorry I can’t tell you more, at least not yet.”
“It is fine; it was the expected answer,” Spiteri said, with an eyebrow raised. “One would presume it has something to do with this afternoon’s attack on your CIA safe house?”
“He may be involved.”
“Ah, well I think that unlikely,” Spiteri replied.
“How so?”
“You see, the four dead men in the downstairs of that house are all known to us,” the captain explained. “Well known. Heavy hitters, Camorra types, now plying their trade here in the capital. They were scum, born and bred. But they were good at what they did. Very good.”
“Do you know who they would have been working for?”
“Well, I am just a local police captain. You’d have to talk to the judicial department, for they are the only ones liaising with your CIA on this . . .”
“But you knew the men.”
“Like I said, that is all I know. They work for hire, no known long-term affiliation with any one person or group. That is what has made them difficult to pin down, and dangerous, for a long time.”
“Okay. Thank you.”
“And now you tell me one thing. One friendly cop to another.”
“I’ll try.”
“This man you are looking for,” the captain said. “Is he friend or foe?”
Somerville didn’t hesitate. “Foe.”
Seventy-four hours to deadline.
21
Entrees of grilled, stuffed calamari had cleared and the mains were almost finished. Veal for Walker, with a sauce of Prosecco, cream and mushroom; a side of assorted steamed vegetables. Clara had a bitter-leaf salad topped with grilled branzino.
“See, if I’d known what you were ordering for us,” Walker said, “I’d have insisted you get yourself something decent.”
“Decent?”
“More substantial.”
“Ah, Americans, telling the world what to do, and along the way making sure you glutton yourselves.” Clara smiled. “Perhaps you would like a large soda to go with your meal? Or a bucket of fries?”
“Touché.”
“Perhaps Italian women have different eating habits to their American counterparts?” Clara leaned forward, added, “Or perhaps it is just that you have not dated in a long while and have forgotten your manners?”
Walker smiled, checked the surroundings as he sipped water.
Clara’s voice changed tone when she said, “They’re out there, aren’t they?”
“Somewhere.”
“You’re worried.”
“I’m wary.”
“They are looking for you. Do they want you dead, like our friend Felix?”
Walker leaned back. “No, I don’t think they want me dead.”
“You don’t think?”
“They would have killed me if they wanted to. They’ve had chances.”
“Right. They just want information, as did the CIA men.”
“Exactly.”
“But they’re out there, looking for you, and here you are, on a date.”
“This is a date?”
“I mean—”
“I know what you mean, and I know what I’m doing,” Walker said. “Being normal. Blending in. Hanging around. The borders will be covered. Airports are impossible. They’ll presume I’m running, as fast and as far as I can. Meanwhile, I’m waiting right here, within the same city as that safe house, the embassy, Felix’s apartment.”
“So . . . staying put is sometimes a smart move?”
“And running away is often overrated.”
“Why were you in Rome?”
Walker looked around. He saw tourists, a few locals, the waiting staff. Smiles everywhere. A microcosm of happiness. Good food, wine and company. It was another world, one he had never had enough time to appreciate: always one foot out of it, always ready to flee.
Clara watched him closely. “Felix?” she said.
“Yes.”
“But you were not there because he is—was—your friend.”
“No.”
Clara paused, then said, “And are you lying about anything else?”
“No.”
Clara nodded.
Walker waited. He was probably being more honest now about his working life than he had ever been about it with Eve. Here, with this unknown woman, when all certainty of his next move was lost. It was an unaccustomed, uncomfortable realization, one he didn’t want to dwell on.
“Tell me one thing, and please be honest,” Clara said. “Were you there to kill Felix?”
“No.” Incapacitate him and cut the tiny chip from the back of his head, yes. Kill him, no.
Clara seemed to accept the truth in his answer. Then she asked, “What is next?”
“Next?”
“When will you know what your next step is?”
“Hopefully by the time I wake,” Walker said.
Clara watched him closely. “You will leave soon?” she asked quietly but clearly.
“Yes.”
“You must?”
“Yes.”
“And what do I do?”
“I think you should stay with friends. Out of town. Go to the countryside, like you said. Don’t go home for a few days. Just to be safe.”
“What will change in a few days?”
“Everything.”
Seventy-three hours to deadline.
22
Bellamy sat in his home office. His family was asleep. He had never been a big sleeper, and usually managed on four to five hours per night. Since his first serious job in Baghdad’s Green Zone in the days after Saddam’s fall, to heading his own company eight years later, he had held the firm belief that anything more than a few hours’ shut-eye per day was a waste of time.
Tonight he was not alone in his evening work. Opposite him sat an old family friend turned current business associate. Between them, a bottle of Old Forester Bourbon, two glasses, and a growing problem.
“What could Walker know?” asked Senator Anderson.
“We can’t afford to wait around to find out,” Bellamy responded. “We have planned for too long for this to go off track now. One slip-up this close and the whole chain could break. We’ve got to put a stop to this guy.”
“True. What can I do?”
“Nothing. We’re doing it all, everything that can be done.”
“One man can’t stop this.”
“Of course he can. A man can do pretty much anything, if he’s driven enough.”
“Maybe you’re right.”
“Maybe? You’ve been on the Hill too long. One man can do plenty in the big wide world. And you’ve read his file.”
“The wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“That’s about the sum of it,” Bellamy said.
“His old man could have stopped us. God knows he tried.”
“We don’t have to worry about that SOB anymore. And soon, this Walker either.”
“We’re not in the business of killing Americans, Dan, you know that.”
“It’s the price you pay.”
“Excuse me?”
“Think of it as a tax.”
“For what?”
“For daring to live in the shadows.”
“I’m not living in the goddamned shadows, Dan, you are.”
“Okay,” Bellamy said. “But you’re a part of this. And you know as well as I do that secrets have a way of coming out.”
Anderson stopped himself from saying something and took another sip of his drink. “We’re so damned close to being on the other side of it all . . .”
“We’re going to be heroes, that much hasn’t changed,” said Bellamy, trying to reassure them both. “Rich heroes.”
“You’re already rich.”
“As are you. But we’re the haves; soon we’ll be the have-mores.”
Anderson chuckled. “Now you’re talkin’ my language.”
Bellamy raised his glass and leaned forward, and t
he senator clinked the crystal.
“To the future of American intelligence,” Bellamy said.
“To our future.”
•
Walker woke early. He moved silently from the bed, careful not to wake Clara. Her dark hair was spread out like a halo on the white sheets, the shape of her sleeping form precise, as though she had appeared from a Jack Vettriano painting. Peace personified and at the same time something worth going to war over.
Dangerous.
Walker showered and dressed. Drank a glass of water as he looked out the window at the city not yet awake. Watched as Clara turned over on the bed, as beautiful asleep as awake.
He left the apartment and walked down the street in the direction of the internet cafe. In the dark alleyway Walker entered via the rear door, itself sturdy but the lock defeated by a debit card in two seconds. His observations yesterday told him that the security system was simple, something available from RadioShack back home. The alarm was disengaged by a simple crossed wire. The digital cameras in the customer area—two, in opposite corners—were easily switched off in the office.
Walker switched on the internet router and then a PC, listening as it booted up; sounds he hadn’t heard in years—old tech, grinding away along silicon pathways outdated the moment it was designed, probably bought second-hand from an office and installed here for grimy tourists to destroy. Still, it did the job he needed it to do.
Accessing Intellipedia was completed in a matter of minutes: the USB inserted, the webpage accessed, the chat room opened.
He found his simple two-word line: OMEGA DOWN.
It was a code for help, to his old mentor, the man who had not only recruited Walker to the Agency but been like another father to him well before his own had died.
An answer was waiting: ALPHA CLEAR 4239–185.
Walker shut down the clunky machine and left the room, locking the rear door behind him. He made his way back to the apartment in a roundabout way, constantly checking to make sure he was not being tailed.
The streets were starting to brighten as people began their day.
Time to leave Rome.
Fifty-eight hours to deadline.
23
“Walker is back on the grid,” Zoe Ledoyen said. Formerly an agent with France’s Direction Centrale du Renseignement Intérieur, she had been recruited by McCorkell two years ago after he’d seen how good an investigator she was, and now in the absence of Hutchinson she was quarterbacking the situation-room efforts to find Walker. It was the first time she’d had to wake McCorkell at home.
“Where is he?” McCorkell asked into the phone, rubbing sleep from his eyes and switching on his bedside lamp.
“He is still in Rome. We have confirmed facial-recognition images from a traffic camera and a street security camera, two blocks apart.”
“How’d we get it?” He checked the time: 4:40 am in London meant it was 5:40 am in Rome.
“Trapwire,” Zoe replied. “Via the Guardia di Finanza. I got it through a Europol contact assigned there.”
“How old are the images?” McCorkell sat on the edge of his bed, scrunching his arthritic toes against the carpet. You’re getting old, Bill . . .
“About twenty minutes,” Zoe replied. “But we’re not the only ones who know.”
“Figures. Who else, besides the Italians?”
“The FBI agent who requested the Trapwire search.”
“Somerville?”
“Yes . . . wait . . . I have just received email confirmation that it has been accessed by another party: the CIA.”
“Does it say where their search request came from?”
“One moment.”
McCorkell walked to the kitchenette and put coffee on, the phone between his shoulder and his ear.
“Langley. Office of the Director of the Special Activities Division.”
“Okay, thanks,” McCorkell said, pulling on his trousers. “Get everyone up, keep Hutchinson in the loop, and book me on the next flight to Rome.”
Fifty-seven hours to deadline.
•
Walker had made as many mistakes in life as anybody else. He figured that an hour back at the apartment would not be one of them. At the time there seemed no harm—in fact, the opposite—in waking Clara on his return and spending the time as they had when they had returned from the restaurant: in a sweaty tangle that ended in her moans and his shudders and a sleepy aftermath.
They showered together, and then Walker dressed. By 7 am he was waiting by the kitchen’s open balcony window watching the street below come to life, filling with people buying coffee and breakfast and getting to work and beating the rush. He glanced at Clara in the bathroom, naked in front of the mirror, her small bag containing make-up next to her as she lined her eyes.
Walker tensed as he heard a noise in the tiny hall outside.
Getting louder.
Footsteps.
•
Il Bisturi received his nickname during a training operation with the French Foreign Legion in Madagascar where he killed a man with a surgical scalpel in a bar fight. The scalpel had been pulled on him, and he was of the opinion that if you pull a blade then you are prepared to kill or be killed. The man had been their battalion’s chief medical officer, and Il Bisturi had been on the run ever since.
The thing he had hated most during his six years of service with the Legion was the lack of sleep. He was a man who liked sleep. So, when he had been woken earlier with an alert, he was curt but courteous. Being an hour’s drive from the scene of Walker’s last sighting, he placed a call to those who had survived the previous day’s mishap at the CIA safe house.
For those men, it was a chance to make amends. He made it clear to them that failure a second time would not be tolerated, and that if they were not killed in the advent of mission failure, then they would be, by him, in their sleep, in the near future.
24
Walker quietly closed the bedroom door without alerting Clara, and moved to the door of the apartment and listened.
A pair of feet shuffled outside, the floorboards creaking. Not heavy. Not trying to be especially quiet. A slightly uneven gait.
Walker exhaled.
The landlady.
Walker opened the door.
She stood there, slightly stooped with age, a tray of breakfast in her hands.
“Buon giorno,” she said, her little round face full of smile and age lines.
“Good morning,” Walker replied, letting her in. She set down the wooden tray on the table and spread her hands out over her offerings: a French press of coffee, buttered toast with scrambled eggs, a bowl of sliced fruit, a jug of milk. Perhaps her version of an American breakfast.
“You stay another day?”
“No, thank you,” Walker said, handing her a hundred euros. “We will leave in a couple of hours.”
“No, no, too much,” the lady protested at the money but Walker refused its return, and she made a sign of prayer for him and exited.
Walker took the tray into the bedroom. Clara sat on the bed, the white sheet covering her left leg and contrasting against her tanned skin. He poured coffees and sat next to her.
“You will leave today,” Clara said, curling her legs up and turning to face him, taking her coffee and resting the cup on her raised knees.
“Yep.”
“Where to?”
“I’m not sure,” Walker said. That wasn’t the truth, but he felt it would be better for her in the event she were questioned that she would not have to lie for him.
“You are not sure, or you will not tell me?”
“A bit of both.” 4239–185. Latitude and longitude, Walker thought. And the coast was clear.
“Why not stay another day?” she said quietly, smiling. “With me. Here. In bed.”
“I wish I could,” Walker said. “But I can’t. I have to keep moving.”
She was silent, then nodded. “Okay. I will walk you out.”
•
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“I’m getting nowhere with State,” Hutchinson said to McCorkell over the phone from across the Atlantic. “I even used your name to get through a few doors. It’s like Walker never even worked here.”
“Meanwhile, it looks like we’ve lost him in Rome,” McCorkell said. “The guy has vanished. A ghost. FBI and CIA have got a whole bunch of resources at play, alerts at all exit points. He’s either gone to ground, or slipped out undetected.”
“For Walker, Italy’s an easy place to do either.”
“Which makes me think: I’d like to know if he’s operated there before, if there’s some old contacts he might be working with.”
“I might get further with Langley. I’ll let you know how I go,” Hutchinson said. “First, I’m stopping in at Crystal City.”
“What’s there?”
“A State overflow office,” Hutchinson said. “The human-resources department managed to get the name of the person who signed for his life-insurance check for his wife.”
“I’m guessing that was his boss,” McCorkell said.
“I’m going to find out.”
“They might want their money back.”
“Tell ’em Walker’s alive?” Hutchinson asked.
“With the amount of heat on him now, they’re bound to know already.”
“I don’t know . . .” Hutchinson said. “Things were ice cold at State.”
“Ever the optimist.”
“Realist.”
“Good luck with that.”
“Thanks.”
“And, Hutch?”
“Yeah?”
“The wife, too. Speak to Walker’s wife. He may have been in contact.”
“On it, boss.”
•
Walker and Clara passed the corner of Via Toscana and Via Sicilia near the internet cafe, and turned toward the busy Corso D’Italia. Local traffic on the road, and tourists on the sidewalk.
Clara stopped and smiled at him.
Walker sighed.
“We can go together, to my friends,” Clara said, her arms linked around his waist, her head rested on his chest. “They have a little farmhouse near Palermo; we can catch a train or bus there. Drink wine. Relax in the sun. Sleep. Or not sleep . . .”
“In another life, absolutely,” Walker said, resting his chin on her head. “Another time.”