‘So that’s it,’ he grumbled, once Dov had brought him up to speed. ‘We have to hold off until this professor has been and gone.’
‘And if he finds it? What then?’
‘Do you have a better idea?’
‘I do. But it means moving fast.’ He explained what he had in mind, the implications for them both.
Avram grunted when he was done. ‘Are you serious?’ he asked.
‘I’m the one taking the big risk,’ pointed out Dov. ‘All you stand to lose is a few pennies.’
‘They’re not your pennies.’
‘Nor my election neither.’
‘Fine,’ said Avram. ‘You do your part. I’ll do mine. But call me the moment you get back out.’
II
It was ninety minutes before Rosaria turned up, riding a new Ducati, at the head of a small posse of young toughs on gleaming white Vespas. She stood up her bike a few paces from him and took off her helmet as she walked towards him. But there was no tumble of long black hair this time. She’d had it shaven into a crude black flat top, as though a landscape gardener had laid a sod of scorched turf upon her scalp. Gone too were the designer clothes, replaced by dirty baggy jeans and a weathered leather jacket with ripped-off sleeves, perhaps to show off her new ink. She wore black lipstick too, and studs through her nose and lower lip, as well as lines of silver rings in either ear, as if she intended to hang a pair of shower curtains from them.
‘You haven’t changed one bit,’ he told her.
‘Fuck you too. What are you doing here?’
‘I need a favour.’
Rosaria snorted incredulously. ‘You? A favour? From me?’
‘Yes. Me. A favour. From you.’
‘The only favour you’re going to get is walking out of here alive.’
‘We used to be friends.’
‘We used to fuck. And you ran drugs for me. That’s all.’
Quite true, this, though it had taken Cesco inexcusably long to realise. Specifically, it had taken until that afternoon when one of Rosaria’s brothers and two of her cousins had turned up at her flat. They’d learned somehow that she’d found herself a new toy boy, and so – being the kind of people they were – they’d had him checked out to make sure he wasn’t undercover. His lack of a past had thrown up red flags, so they’d forced him at gunpoint into an SUV with tinted windows and had driven him out to the notorious Horseshoe housing estate in Secondigliano, where they’d strapped him to a chair for a gunpoint interrogation. Terrified, he’d confessed to his life of petty fraud and thievery. They’d checked it out as he’d talked, finding traces of him under his various aliases. A humiliation for himself, a grand entertainment for them. But his venality had pleased them too.
It had made him one of them.
Any interrogation reveals a certain amount about the questioners. That was how Cesco had learned who these men were, that Rosaria was the niece of a Camorra boss. He’d found out, too, that – alongside her studies – she’d been running the gang’s stable of whores and pushers off Piazza Nolana. That was why she’d come so often to his bar. More particularly, it was why she’d parked her Ducati in that garage every day: it had a hidden compartment beneath its seat, through which she’d delivered new product and taken out earnings. And it was why she’d picked him up too – because, with the summer holidays almost upon her, she’d needed a dupe to carry on muling for her.
‘If that was all I was to you, why have your brother make me propose?’
Her eyes popped. ‘Propose? You? To me?’
‘Ask him if you don’t believe me. It was that or end up in the bay.’
‘That little bastard,’ she muttered. But then she focused back on Cesco, more furious even than before. ‘So that’s why you ran, eh? So as not to marry me?’
‘It wasn’t you I ran from. It was your brother. Your family. I’m not that kind of man.’
‘Yet here you are.’
‘Like I said, I need a favour.
‘Go on.’
‘A gun. A box of shells.’
‘A gun!’ she scoffed. ‘You’d only shoot your own balls off.’
‘You’d be surprised,’ said Cesco. This too was true. His grandfather had put in an underground shooting range at his villa, for his guards to practise in. Cesco had so loved it that, for his twelfth birthday, his father had given him a Beretta U22 Neos of his own to keep down there, and he’d taught him how to use it too. He’d been a natural, as it had turned out – so much so that the Critelli brothers had started eyeing him up for jobs; because no one paid much attention to a fourteen-year-old kid on the back of a moped. It hadn’t occurred to Cesco until much later, but he’d since come to believe that one of the factors in his grandfather turning pentito had been his horror at the thought of him becoming another Critelli hit man.
‘What do you want it for?’
‘What do you think?’
‘You’ll have to do better than that.’
‘Okay, then. I used to have a sister.’
‘A sister? But you told me…’ She stared at him a while then shook her head. ‘I never knew you at all, did I?’
‘No.’
‘Okay, then. It’ll cost you one thousand.’
‘I’ve only got six hundred. Six hundred is the rate.’
‘Not from me, it isn’t. From me it’s one thousand.’
‘Fine. When? Where?’
‘Midday tomorrow. The Horseshoe. Ask anyone on duty. They’ll tell you where to find me.’ She gave him a final look of scorn and sorrow then returned to her bike. She pulled a tight turn and led her posse off. He watched them out of sight then texted Baldassare to push tomorrow’s meeting back until later in the day. Then he headed back to the parking garage for his Harley to set off back to Pozzuoli.
III
The Potenza hiking superstore had everything Dov could have wished for. An inflatable black rubber dinghy with a wood-slat floor, a foot pump and a four-stroke outboard. A helmet and a strap-on lamp, two torches and plenty of spare batteries. Waterproof boots and gloves. A climbing harness, two coils of lightweight rope and a set of spring-loaded cams to fix to fissures in the rock. A neoprene suit to keep him warm and dry. A utility belt, a dozen energy bars and a waterproof camera with embedded light and an extensible selfie stick. Then he settled up with the cash Avram had given him for incidentals.
They was no way to fit it all in the back of the Renault, so he and the assistant stripped it of packaging, folded down the back seats and moved the front seats as far forward as they’d go. Even so, the hatchback wouldn’t close until they strapped it in with rope and some orange mesh. Then he set off back to Sicilì, taking it nice and slow. It was dark by the time he arrived. The parking area was empty, as was the grotto. It took him four trips to lug all his equipment down the passages to the river’s bank. He changed there into his neoprene suit, boots, gloves and safety helmet. He inflated the dinghy, attached the outboard, packed it with everything he needed. Then he climbed in and set off upstream, churning out a pale phosphorescence of wake.
Bats flickered in the gloom. Shadows moved at the periphery of his vision. He shone his torch this way and that, searching the walls for Gothic graffiti. He held his camera underwater on its selfie stick, checking the footage every few seconds. He found nothing. The river was fast yet mostly smooth, except in the few places where fallen rocks rippled or even breached the surface, where he slowed to a cautious speed. The noise of rushing water grew louder and louder, until the thunder of it drowned out even his outboard. A pale blur ahead resolved into a kind of cataract as the Bussento cascaded down a steep ramp of tumbled rocks. He secured the dinghy to a knob of rock with his mooring rope then shone his torch this way and that, looking for some way forward. But, even if he made it up the cataract, he’d only reach – as best as he could tell – the foot of a monstrous waterfall that lay beyond.
Any previous expedition would almost certainly have stopped here, as indeed Athaulf and his Visi
goths would have too, had they even been here in the first place. Yet a mischievous voice whispered inside his head: How could he know? How could he know for sure? After all, he was not some amateur cave diver. He was a veteran of Israel’s Sayeret Matkal, the greatest commando unit in the history of the world.
The familiar euphoria filled him, that godlike cocktail of recklessness and invulnerability that came from knowing you were the best at what you did. He pulled on his climbing harness and belt then loaded himself up with two coils of rope, his set of cams and a rock hammer. He strapped his helmet tight beneath his chin, turned on its lamp. He found solid holds on the wall then set off sideways, crabbing above the cataract as it raged beneath him like a maddened Cyclops, grabbing at his ankles with its spume. He fitted cams into the fissures that he found, threaded through a coil of rope. The overhang still strained his fingers and his biceps. He was out of practice, and unfit. But at last he reached the top of the cataract and the foot of the waterfall – a fat and ragged sinkhole some six or seven metres high, down which the entire Bussento thundered like down a drainpipe in a storm. He studied it in his torchlight, watching closely for paths and patterns. He ate a pair of energy bars, washing them down with water scooped up from the torrent. Then he set off, anchoring himself to the cracks in the wall.
The river roared by him like an underground train in a tight tunnel. One misstep and the weight of it would rip him from the wall and smash him against the rocks beneath. He’d be dead before he even knew it. The knowledge didn’t frighten him, however. It simply made him concentrate all the more fiercely. And it filled him with an extraordinary exhilaration too.
He’d never felt quite so alive.
His progress was blocked several times. He didn’t push his luck, but rather retreated until he found another path. The cold burned his cheeks and nose. It wormed its way inside his gloves, made sausages of his fingers. But finally he hauled himself up onto the sinkhole’s topmost lip and stretched out on his back on a narrow strip of rock at the foot of a large new chamber, the beam of his helmet torch sweeping over the ceiling high above him as he stared upwards, first in puzzlement, but then in disbelief.
Chapter Thirty-Five
I
It was first light by the time Dov made it back to his embarkation point. He could see the faint grey of it around the grotto mouth. Lugging everything back to the Renault would take four trips, greatly increasing the chance of being seen. And he’d be wretchedly unlucky if anyone else came down here today. He changed back into his clothes, deflated the dinghy and stowed it and his other gear out of reach of the water. Then he hurried back up and out to the Renault. He disposed of the orange mesh and rope in the trees, replaced the seats as they’d been before, then set off looking for a signal for his phone with which to call Israel. ‘I’ve found him,’ he announced, when Avram answered. ‘I’ve found Alaric.’
A beat of silence. ‘You’re sure?’
‘I’ve found a large chamber at the top of a waterfall a kilometre inside the caves.’ He wanted to sound matter-of-fact, as though it was the sort of thing he did every day, but he couldn’t manage it, the triumph was too much. ‘It has gemstones hammered into its ceiling and a huge block of white marble embedded in the floor beneath the river. If that’s not Alaric’s tomb, what the hell is it?’
‘Do you have pictures?’ asked Avram.
‘And footage too. I’ll encrypt it all and send it through when I get a chance.’
‘This marble block? The one beneath the water. Can we get at it? Can we get at it to open it?’
‘We?’ asked Dov drily.
‘Damn right, we. Do you think I’d miss an opportunity like this? Well? Can we get at it? Assuming it opens, that is. Without letting in the river.’
‘You don’t ask much, do you? It’s been underwater sixteen hundred years. I think we can assume the river’s already in.’
‘Not with what’s at stake. If we should damage it unnecessarily…’
‘Fine,’ said Dov. ‘I’ll go check something out and let you know. How about at your end? Is everything arranged?’
‘I’ve booked flights, if that’s what you mean. My usual charter from Tel Aviv to Corfu. Then a completely separate one from Corfu to Sorrento. We leave here before noon and will be with you around three p.m. Italian time.’
‘Good. I’ll have Yonatan get in touch direct. Sort out the details between yourselves. Me, I need to grab some sleep.’
He drove through Caselle in Pittari, then on a few minutes more before turning off the main road down a track of fresh black tarmac that wound through woods down to the shore of Lake Sabetta. There were two buildings on the far bank that – save for the bank of satellite dishes on their roof – looked more like Swiss mountain chalets than a hydroelectric plant; yet that was what they were, reachable only by the road that ran along the curved top of the dam wall, protected by a security gate, ‘Keep Out’ notices, barbed wire and CCTV.
He parked out of the camera’s field of view to encrypt his footage and photographs and send them to Avram and his partner Yonatan. He got out. A lame piebald dog yapped at him. He feinted to kick it and it whimpered piteously and limped away, burrowing beneath a loose flap of wire fencing.
The morning was silent save for birdsong and the gush of a mountain spring he couldn’t see, decanting both the recent rains and the spring thaw into the lake. It seemed very full to him, close to the top of the dam wall. A rowing boat was pulled up on the grassy bank. There were no lights on in any of the buildings, no vehicles in the car park. Small hydroelectric plants like this often ran unattended, he knew, being monitored and run from a command centre elsewhere.
His phone rang. It was Yonatan, the ex-Mossad agent with whom he’d founded Gordian Sword, a business intelligence outfit explicitly designed to solve the problems their competitors dared not touch, by the simple expedient of cutting straight through them. ‘Is this footage for real?’ he demanded.
‘It’s for real.’
‘Shit. I can hardly believe it.’
‘I know.’
‘What do we do?’
‘Get your arses over here, that’s what. Avram’s already arranged the flights. Deal with him directly. We’ll need at least five men, apart from ourselves. And one of them should be Noah.’
‘Noah?’ He sounded doubtful. ‘He’s hardly mission material.’
‘I’m aware of that,’ said Dov. Their client list was almost exclusively made up of oligarchs and others who didn’t much care about cost, only about effectiveness and discretion. So they’d made the decision from the outset to recruit only the very best, typically battle-hardened veterans of Mossad or Dov’s own elite commando unit the Sayeret Matkal. But Noah Zuckman was an exception. He was elite in his own way, with a very particular skill set, yet he had no experience of jobs like this.
But they were going to need him tonight.
The reaction set in on his drive back to Sicilì. His adrenaline ebbed, letting the exhaustion in. His eyelids were barely slits as he rolled down the cottage drive. He made his way unsteadily through the kitchen door, then to the bedroom. Zara woke to the noise he made. She rolled onto her back and held the sheet up to her throat with puppy paws. ‘Where have you been?’ she asked.
‘I told you. Briefing our lords and masters.’ He put a hand to his mouth to hide a huge yawn that briefly cleared his head of tiredness. ‘That meant Wi-Fi and privacy. So I took a room in Policastro.’ He unbuttoned and stripped off his shirt as he talked, tossed it on a chair. ‘You’ve no idea the hornet’s nest we’ve kicked up. One crazy, crazy night.’
‘How so?’
‘Avram called the prime minister. I don’t know what he told him, but now he seems to be convinced the Menorah is as good as found.’
‘Oh hell. It’s nothing like—’
‘I know. I know. I tried to explain. But you know what men of destiny are like. They think everything’s meant. Anyway, they’ve agreed a plan of sorts. The Italians are
always short of money. So we’re going to have one of our cultural fronts offer funding in exchange for certain rights over anything that’s found. But we need an archaeologist of international standing to lead our side of it. The prime minister wants you.’
Her eyes went cartoon wide. ‘Me?’
‘Would that be a problem? I’d have thought it an honour.’
‘It is. It is. It’s just, I have a job, I have students.’
‘The timetable is up for discussion. What matters is getting the Italians to sign on before Carmen’s professor can mess it up. Our cultural attaché is flying down this afternoon. We’re going to show him Caselle and the Grotto. Then we’ll fly back to Rome with him tonight for a meeting at the Ministry of Culture first thing tomorrow.’
‘When does he get here?’ asked Zara.
‘Three. Sorrento Airport.’ He sat on the bed to take off his socks. ‘That’s a good ninety minutes from here, so we’ll need to leave around one.’
‘And Carmen?’
‘Spin her a story. Tell her that, as nothing will be happening here until her professor arrives, we’ve decided to visit Amalfi after all, spend the night in Positano.’
‘What if she wants to come?’
He laughed. ‘On our romantic getaway? Get real. Anyway, doesn’t she have some friend coming this afternoon?’
‘Oh yes. I forgot.’
‘Settled, then.’ He pulled back the sheet, climbed in beside her. ‘Now get the fuck out of here. And take Carmen with you. I don’t care where, just so long as it’s quiet out there. But make sure you’re back by twelve thirty, ready to go.’
II
Breakfast in Cesco’s pensione consisted of stale toast, cold coffee and a text from Baldassare agreeing to postpone his meeting until late afternoon, though asking in return that it be shifted further south, as he needed to be home in good time for the celebratory dinner his daughter planned to cook that night, an occasion he could hardly miss. How about five p.m. in Buonabitacolo? Cesco checked it out. It was only an extra half-hour’s drive, so he replied that it would be fine.
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