“Maybe. I only had a glimpse of him when he pulled his gun. But you can close your case on the one with the tape. His name is Danny Quintavalle, and he’s dead. The other one is probably dead too, but I couldn’t swear to it.”
Laura told him everything.
Everything, all the way back to the senator.
She spoke in Italian, so that she could be sure he understood every word.
As the jet descended toward Christopher Columbus Airport, she took him by the hand.
“One more thing.” She led him to the front of the cabin. She opened a closet. “These clothes are for you.”
Marco Sinatra stared, uncomprehending.
35
The ship was moored at Via Giovanni Bettolo. Loading was nearly complete. The captain sent a junior officer to make contact with him at the Trattoria Gazzolo. He had just finished a late dinner when the officer arrived.
The officer handed him a sealed envelope. “Captain say you read first.”
The note inside warned him that the man delivering the envelope was not aware of their relationship. The ship would be sailing at 7:00 A.M. on the day after tomorrow. However, there would be too much activity quayside for him to board close to that time. “If you still wish to sail with us, I will wait for you by the gangway at midnight tomorrow. Do not be late. Give Mr. Andreas your answer.”
“Please tell your captain I said yes,” he said.
The man left. He paid for his meal, downed the complimentary grappa, and left the restaurant through the kitchen. Outside, a flight of stairs led up to a single door, the entrance to a small apartment he had rented from the restaurant’s owner. It wasn’t much—water stains on the ceiling, bubbled wallpaper, filthy curtains—but he’d paid less for a full week than he’d paid for a single night in Geneva.
It had been a long run, and he was weary of it. Three tense days in Palermo, then endless weeks in that dung heap in Tunis. Only the last moves had been tolerable—Zurich, then Geneva—but it couldn’t go on. It was only a matter of time before some random street cop who’d seen the Interpol notice would lock eyes on him. The Mazzaras were under pressure from the Guardia. Pressure they’d brought on themselves—first by botching the grab on that Lockhart bitch, then by their stupid attempts to eliminate witnesses. To top it off, their second attempt to take out Lockhart, this time in Florida, had failed as well. He wondered if the FBI had caught up with her. How much did she know? What was she telling them?
The Palermo crew had limited resources. The family’s real money was in New York. They’d been bankrolling him in Tunisia, but he couldn’t stay there forever, and he couldn’t be effective wandering around Europe, burning up cash and not earning any. He knew how it worked. If he didn’t come up with a workable plan, they’d make a decision to cut their losses. That would include making sure he disappeared forever. He’d told them repeatedly that he’d be better off stateside, where it was easier to blend in. Where he could sit down with the capo bastone and lay out a new plan.
A plan that would make money for everyone.
It still mystified him. The whole Mazzara structure, with Antonio running everything from a jail in Milan, while his underboss, Gus Mazzara, ran the New York operation from the basement of a warehouse in Brooklyn, and his thickheaded cousin, “Taffi” Tafuro, ran the branch in Palermo. He’d even been told that the don, who was doing a life sentence, spent his ample spare time raising quail on the prison’s farm—a farm named after Al Capone.
It was like a bad mob movie.
But finally, a message had come back.
The don had agreed.
The U.S. crew would arrange some plastic surgery for him with one of their on-call doctors, get him a new identity and a passport, and send him back. He’d work out a new transport route, and start up again.
There’d been something else in the message—a garbled warning about watching out for a priest. Some priest from the Vatican who might be tailing him. He half-recalled a thin man wearing a clerical collar buying a ticket from the machine next to his at Cornavin station. But there were no priests on the train to Milan, and none on the train to Genoa. He’d walked every car, twice on each trip, just to be sure.
This time, he decided, he’d run the baby business from Bosnia. His associates there could be trusted to keep him protected. It was in their economic interests.
And he’d be closer to the action.
Twenty years ago, Sarajevo was on the verge of annihilation. Not now. The shrapnel spalling had been plastered over, the upscale restaurants were proliferating, and the klepe dumplings were the best in the Balkans.
That’s where he should have set up the first time.
He unlocked the door to his apartment.
When he stepped in, the first thing he saw was a tall man standing by the window. He was wearing black shoes, black trousers, and a gray clerical shirt and collar.
A priest was standing in his apartment.
“What are you doing in here?” Nelthorp’s right hand inched toward the Beretta tucked in his waistband. He hesitated, not quite ready to pull a gun on a man wearing that collar.
“He’s with me,” came a female voice.
Sarah Lockhart stepped out of the bedroom.
She glanced past him. “And so is he.”
The blow came from behind.
He was unconscious before he hit the floor.
* * *
A face full of cold water brought him around.
He was tied to a chair. He struggled against his bindings, but there was no give.
Sarah Lockhart’s face swam in front of him. “Duct tape is so clichéd, don’t you think?” she said. “My friend here much prefers electrical cord. And he’s very good with knots.” He looked up to see the hazy figure of a man standing behind her. “Oh, I’m sorry. Meet Rolf. He came along to help me with the questions. And this gentleman”—she gestured to Nelthorp’s left, where the priest was sitting at the kitchenette table holding a small digital device—“is Father Marco. He’ll be recording the proceedings.”
“What proceedings?” he croaked.
Water was still dripping from his hair and face, and a reddish stain was spreading down his shirt. “Let me help you with that,” Laura offered. She pressed a tea towel against his head. “It’s okay. The bleeding’s almost stopped.” She held up her hand. “How many fingers do you see?”
“What proceedings, Sarah?”
“Oh, that’s not my name. But don’t worry about that. Worry about your knees.”
“My knees?”
“Yes. I’ll explain in a minute. But first, here’s what we know. We know that while you were busy smuggling fake auto parts for Dominic Lanza, you were also smuggling stolen babies for Antonio Mazzara. You told Mazzara about your deal with Lanza, but you didn’t tell Lanza about your deal with Mazzara. Big mistake. Then, when the Guardia and I were closing in, you thought it would be a good idea to eliminate me. So you arranged that boneheaded attempt to snatch me off the street in Catania. When that didn’t work, you tried again in Florida. What was it, Conrad. Schoolboy petulance? Upset because I wouldn’t sleep with you?”
“I had nothing to do with that.”
“Which part?”
He stared back at her and said nothing.
“Not talking? That’s okay. I’ll talk for you. You’ve been operating a network. You call your people recruiters, but they’re just criminals. Fraud artists who go into the refugee camps in Hungary and all across the Balkans, and probably in Turkey as well. They convince desperate mothers that they can offer their babies a better life. But that con doesn’t work too often, so for backup you employ crews of kidnappers who get the job done anyway. Of course, your victims are people who have lost everything in the Syrian civil war. In other words, people whose complaints fall on deaf ears. And, of course, there are always a few unaccompanied minors to snatch for sale into the sex trade. But those kids are just a side bonus. For you, the cash cow is the black market baby trade.�
��
“You know so much, what do you need from me?”
“Well, you see, Father Marco has that little state-of-the-art recorder running, but so far the only information on it has come from me. So now it’s your turn. You’re going to tell us everything we don’t know. You’re going to give us the names of your recruiters, the names of all those women you’ve used as nannies, the names of every Ikaria captain who’s involved, and the names of every Mazzara family member you’ve been working with. And you’re going to tell us why you just happen to be in Genoa at the same time as the Olympic Dawn. We looked it up—it’s one of Ikaria’s container ships.”
“I won’t be telling you any of that.”
“In that case, let me tell you about your knees.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Your knees are the most vulnerable joint in your body. They don’t have the protection of a ball and socket, like your hip, but they carry all of your weight and they absorb the impact when you walk, run, or jump. Did you know that sports doctors actually call knee joints the Achilles’ heel of professional athletes?”
“Why are you—”
“Have you ever heard of Roland Lewis?”
“No.”
“I’m surprised. He was the goon you and your people paid to dissolve my body in acid and flush me into a Florida swamp. But he went back on his word. Kept me alive for a couple of months.”
Nelthorp stayed silent.
“Anyway, poor Roland’s knee had an unfortunate collision with my foot, and now he’ll be on crutches for a very long time. Probably forever, unless he can afford a replacement operation. But today, we have something far more effective than my dainty little foot.”
She stepped to one side. Rolf was holding a three-foot-long steel wrecking bar. The hardware store label was still attached.
Nelthorp gaped at the bar, and then looked at the priest. Father Marco was sitting calmly at the table, adjusting a control on the recorder.
“You’re not going to torture me in front of a priest.”
“Oh?” She turned. “Father? Would you prefer to leave?”
“The Inquisition’s methods were brutal,” the fake cleric replied in Marco Sinatra’s beautifully accented English, “but our Mother Church never shrank from its duty. I will gladly hear Mr. Nelthorp’s confession.”
“Nice bluff!” Nelthorp growled.
One swing of the wrecking bar and Conrad Nelthorp quickly revised his opinion.
It was after midnight when he finally stopped talking.
36
“So you let him go.”
Laura, Renate, and Rolf were seated in the cabin of the Gulfstream. They had just taken off from Teterboro on the final leg of their long flight back from Genoa to Florida.
Laura was still feeling the strain from the arrival in New Jersey. United Nations passport or not, there was no way she could have risked an international landing in Florida. Her face was on FBI Wanted notices across the federal system, and slapping on a bit of makeup wasn’t going to change her appearance. So they’d flown back to Teterboro, where Renate had been on hand to make sure everything went smoothly for the arrival of the secretary general’s “Special Adviser on Syria” and her bodyguard. Renate had been magnificent. She’d accompanied the Immigration officer onto the jet, and immediately engaged Laura in a deep discussion about her just-completed mission to Damascus, letting the officer hear just enough to intrigue him—and distract him—while he processed their arrival. Laura had known exactly what to say because she and Renate had rehearsed the conversation over an encrypted satellite phone connection while the Gulfstream was crossing the Atlantic. By comparison, getting her off the plane at Kendall after a domestic flight would be painless.
“Lanza was telling the truth. This was a Mazzara racket, and Nelthorp never told Lanza about it. He gave us quite a lot on the network contacts at the European end. He knew the names of a few recruiters, but mainly he worked through ethnic gang leaders—Bosnians, Croatians, Albanians. At one time, they were all rivals, but money talks and now they’re working together. He said the nannies don’t get paid. They do it for a chance to land in the States without a visa. There’s no shortage of women in Eastern Europe who would do anything for a chance like that. The problem is, he claimed he doesn’t know anything about the network in the U.S. He says he’s just the wholesaler, that the Mazzaras run the retail side of the operation. We got everything on tape. Marco kept the original, but he uploaded the interview onto my phone. But it’s going to take time to backtrack from what we know to what we don’t.”
“You’re sounding like a cop again. Our first job is to clear you of the charges, remember? And you’re saying he didn’t give you anything that can help us over here.”
“Just one thing. Before we got to him, Nelthorp had already decided to come back to the States to regroup, using help from the New York Mazzaras. He didn’t want to risk landing at Logan or JFK. Even with his Stockton passport, some alert Immigration officer might recognize him from the notices, or he could get nailed by facial recognition software. We don’t use that software at seaports, so he was coming by freighter.”
Renate nodded as she made the connection. “But the ship’s not going to Boston or New York. It’s heading for Miami—which means he knows it’s safe to land there.”
“That’s right. He knew about Bailey, and he knew he’d been killed, but he said Gus Mazzara told him not to worry, that they had someone else in place. That’s why we let him board the ship. To identify the second agent.”
“And the broken kneecap? How was he going to explain that?”
“A fall on some stairs. Rolf bought him crutches.”
From Rolf, a quiet chuckle.
“Why would he cooperate? As soon as he went aboard, he could have tipped off the captain, and got him to pass a message to the contact in Miami.”
“Marco gave him a choice.”
“Our cop priest.”
“We couldn’t ask Father Giardini to sit through a kneecapping. And it was better to have Marco there. A cop we can trust.”
“Interesting cop. What was the choice he gave him?”
“Work with us or be arrested. Marco told him he’d be held in Ucciardone Prison in Palermo while the different regional prosecutors argued about who would try him first. He rattled off a bunch of charges in Italian and I translated. Nelthorp’s no fool. He knew he’d last about two days in that prison before the Mazzaras found out he was there and arranged to have him killed.”
“But he’s on the ship now, and Marco isn’t. He’s free to tip off the captain.”
“We told him if he turned on us, we would know, and Marco would send an audio file of our little interview to the Mazzara boss in Palermo, who would be sure to send it to his capo bastone in New York.”
“Nice. So, assuming he keeps his word, what happens after he lands?”
“The Mazzaras will send a car for him. It’ll be waiting at the Bayside Marketplace. It’s right next to the port. We follow them, snatch Nelthorp back, and he tells us who landed him.” She glanced at Rolf. “The thing is … I’m not sure we have the manpower to pull that off without attracting police attention.”
“We don’t. And what would we do with Nelthorp once we have him?” She noticed their expressions. “But you have a plan.”
“Two plans,” Rolf replied. “Plan A … since we can only trust Nelthorp up to a point, we try to get separate verification of who clears him. We get eyes on the ship when it arrives.”
“How do we do that?”
Laura supplied the answer. “Immigration officers go out on the pilot boats. That way they can clear the crew before the ship ties up. They usually send one of the officers who works the cruise ships on Dodge Island, but there’ll be no way to identify who that is until it’s too late. We talked about positioning someone with a camera and a long lens to video the officer who disembarks after the ship comes alongside. But then we had a better idea.”
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br /> “What?”
“Plant someone on the pilot boat. I have a CI at the pilot station on Lummus Island. Javier Espinal. He’s a helmsman. I’ve used him before.”
“You can’t use him now.”
“I think I can. He had a small legal problem—his wife and daughter were illegals. They were about to be deported. I helped him get that fixed.”
“You’d have to meet him off-site.”
“There’s a place we always met. A coffee bar in Little Havana. If we get a message to him, he’ll be there.”
“He could turn you in. Help the FBI set up a trap.”
“He won’t. He calls me his salvadora.”
Renate thought about that. “And plan B?”
“Talk to Lanza. Let his people intercept the Mazzara escort, grab Nelthorp, and get us the Immigration officer’s name,” Rolf said.
“Lanza would just have Nelthorp killed.”
“He might make a deal to let him live.”
“Laura, don’t you need Nelthorp to help clear your name?”
“Maybe. But if he makes it to New York, we’ve lost him. Either the Mazzaras find out he ratted and they kill him, or he disappears on his own. At least Dominic Lanza might agree to keep him on ice in return for us exposing the baby-smuggling network and getting a bunch of Mazzaras arrested.”
“And if not?”
“That’s why we have plan A,” Rolf growled.
“And why we can’t tell Detective Jardine about plan B,” Renate stated flatly.
Silence.
“There’s someone more important than Nelthorp,” Laura said.
“Who?”
“A baby. A real baby with a fake name. Gisella Pelizon. She’s the baby who was never delivered to the Edens. If her birth date on the fake paperwork is close to accurate, she’s now about seven months old.” Despite her determination to stay calm and focused, Laura couldn’t suppress the urgency in her tone. “That little girl is somebody’s daughter, and because of me—because I talked Marco into letting her go on that ship—she’s lost! We need to track down the Mazzaras’ bogus adoption agency. It’s called Engender. It’s not in any phone book. We need to find their baby salesman, and expose all those so-called respectable people who are raising kidnapped babies! But most important, we need to find Gisella. And when this is over—” Her voice caught. “When this—”
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