Brotherhood Beyond the Yard (The Simon Trilogy)

by Sally Fernandez

  “Bravo.” Enzo smiled.

  “Is it true that the duke did not want to have to fight his way through the crowds, nor tolerate the smells emanating from the butchers establishments located on the bridge?”

  “Exactly,” Enzo replied. “Therefore, after the Corridor was constructed, they removed the butcher shops and replaced them with goldsmith shops, which remain there to this day.”

  “I know it was considered an amazing feat for its time, but aren’t there many who feel it destroyed the character of the original design of the Ponte Vecchio?”

  “I’ve heard those comments, but those who have been in the Vasari Corridor and have seen the collection of over a thousand portraits and paintings dating back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, think differently,” Enzo espoused. “And did you know that Vasari had to get permission from the owners of the buildings, those the Medici didn’t own, so the Corridor could be built through each of their towers?”

  “You have me stumped, Enzo. Please continue.”

  “Make note of the odd turn we make after passing over the Ponte Vecchio. It is because the Mannelli family, one of the owners of the towers, refused, and Vasari had to build the Corridor around the tower.”

  “Fascinating, bravo to you,” Hamilton jested, returning the smile.

  While taking pleasure in sharing their prowess with history, they spotted the woman entering the door to the Corridor with a group of about twenty people. As they stood chatting, they were also eyeing the others in the group assembling in the west hallway, but none so far fit the description of Simon.

  “I have a strong feeling she is planning to meet Simon in the passageway.” Hamilton presumed.

  “It’s logical, given the difficulty to access the Corridor. The timing had to be perfect. Otherwise, she could have met him at a number of other locations,” Enzo offered.

  The last of the group entered the Corridor.

  Enzo again flashed his badge to another attendant standing guard at the entrance. This time he signaled the attendant with a finger over his lips to be silent.

  Ignoring Enzo’s gesture, the attendant whispered in rapid Italian, loosely translated, “You won’t find any criminals in there. The guide is a well-known curator from the Uffizi Gallery.”

  After they had passed through the entrance to the Corridor, Hamilton noticed the guard had secured the door behind them. Now he knew the only exit was at the other end of the Corridor, in the Boboli Gardens.

  They followed the group down a long stairway, and then turned left, then right and another left, to begin their tour over the shops on the Ponte Vecchio. Crossing over the Arno River they walked past stunning paintings from the Medici collection, on both sides of the Corridor. Hamilton and Enzo, forced to ignore the magnificent renaissance art for the time being, focused solely on the woman. Her height and hairdo made her easy to spot at the head of the group, which was fortunate because the GPS, which had worked perfectly out-of-doors, stopped receiving a signal.

  “These thick walls are known to cause problems, especially with a cell phone. Thankfully, mine is on a police radio frequency.”

  “I’m not overly concerned. We know the only way out for her is at the other end, where the Carabinieri are waiting,” Hamilton remarked.

  Enzo and Hamilton then began to focus on the male faces, scanning them carefully, readying themselves to pounce on Simon. It was difficult to sift through the crowd, but after three or four glances, it was obvious he wasn’t among them. There wasn’t a man or a woman, other than the guide and the woman they were following, who appeared to be over the age of twenty.

  As the group turned left to cross over the Ponte Vecchio, Hamilton and Enzo could see her more clearly. This section of the corridor, characterized by a series of panoramic windows, faces west, looking out over the Arno. At that time of the day, with the sun low in the sky, light streams in illuminating the corridor. They spotted the woman still in the lead, behind the guide, but they couldn’t see if she was carrying the satchel.

  “Simon is not in the crowd. It is just a group of students, led by the guide and the woman,” Hamilton observed.

  They continued to keep a safe distance, but were still able to hear the guide giving his spiel, in English, about the history of the Vasari Corridor and the importance of the art it houses.

  “Call the Carabinieri and tell them to detain everyone when they exit the Corridor. Caution them to be circumspect. We don’t want to alert Simon, should he be lurking in the crowd. And also remind them he is dangerous,” Hamilton whispered. “Have the Carabinieri also locate the attendant who was manning the entrance to the Vasari Corridor and detain him as well.”

  After a few more twists and turns in the Corridor, they arrived at the Boboli Gardens. The woman exited along with the others. As instructed, the Carabinieri held the group off to the side.

  Hamilton and Enzo, the last to exit, were alerted by the Carabinieri that she did not have the satchel, nor was anyone else in the group carrying a case that fit the description. Quickly, they looked again at all the men, hoping they had made a mistake, but there was no Simon.

  Rapidly Enzo instructed the Carabinieri to take the woman, the guide, and the attendant to the Questura, the local police station, and hold them for questioning, but to release the students.

  Then a cold reality set in as Hamilton and Enzo realized the woman must have passed the package to someone in the Corridor.

  That someone must have been Simon.

  Concluding their last hope of capturing him was to double back, they ran through the half-mile Corridor, maneuvering through the twists and turns. Next to the entrance door at the opposite end, laid the satchel they had pursued.

  Enzo gasped. “The money is gone! The only thing remaining in the satchel is the tracking device in the zippered pocket.”

  “Simon must have been behind us all the time. He had perfectly timed his entrance into the Vasari Corridor and his exit out the same way, making for a clean escape,” Hamilton reasoned. “After fifteen years, I was finally within several feet of Simon, and now he has vanished again,” he said in anguish.

  His heart sank as the severity of the situation overwhelmed him. His feelings were indescribable, but with great despair, he said, “I’m not sure it will serve any useful purpose, but let’s go to the Questura and question our trio.”

  —

  First, Hamilton interviewed the Uffizi guide, who spoke English.

  “My name is Eugenio Bresciani and I am a curator at the Uffizi Gallery. I was giving a private tour to a group of students, at the request of Professoressa Ducale. Is there a problem?”

  Evidently, he had received a call from her the day before, requesting the private tour and specifying a time the group would be available.

  “The professoressa is a good friend and I was happy to accommodate her.”

  “I’m sorry for the inconvenience. You are free to leave,” Hamilton said apologetically.

  “Buonasera,” the guide said as he bade them farewell.

  They then spoke with the attendant.

  Mocking Enzo as they entered, he asked, “Did you find any bad guys?” Enzo translated, and then conducted the attendant’s interview using the questions Hamilton provided. “Did anyone else enter the corridor other than the group of students, before or after Director Scott and I arrived?”

  The attendant explained that the professoressa said her colleague was going to be slightly late. “She asked me to allow him to enter and direct him toward the group. He arrived about five minutes after you did. I found it odd that this man didn’t join the group, but left only a few minutes later.”

  With a feeling of dread, Hamilton showed the attendant the photo of Mohammed al-Fadl.

  The attendant confirmed he was the colleague.

  It was Simon.

  “Grazie, può andare.” Enzo thanked the attendant and told him he was free to go.

  Professoressa Simona Ducale was the next person to be q
uestioned, and fortunately, she spoke English.

  They discovered from the guide that she was a professor of art, teaching classical drawing and painting at the Florence Academy of Art. They asked her about the satchel, first telling her that they knew she had picked up the money from the bank and left it in the Corridor for Simon.

  “I was only helping an old friend, someone I had known many years ago,” she stated brusquely. “I ran into him at a café a few days ago.” She shrugged.

  Slowly her story began to change, along with the sound of her voice.

  After another hour of interrogation, she finally admitted she met Simon at his hotel and then spent the day and night with him in his room.

  “Simon is staying at the Hotel Galileo on Via Nazionale,” she revealed hesitantly.

  Hamilton suspected her relationship with Simon was more intimate, and he took the opportunity to ask her one last question, which he knew would seem odd to the others in the room, but he forged ahead anyway.

  “Did you notice a tattoo on either of Simon’s wrists?”

  “I can testify to the fact that Simon has no tattoos anywhere on his body,” she answered nonchalantly.

  Hamilton knew that would have been his link to La Fratellanza, the LF tattooed on the underside of his wrist.

  They had extracted all they needed from her, and released the professoressa.

  —

  Hamilton and Enzo rushed to the Hotel Galileo, near the Piazza San Lorenzo, only to find his hotel room unoccupied.

  As the forensics team searched the room for evidence, Hamilton stood emptily glancing out the window with thoughts of the other apartments in Cambridge and Menlo Park, and feared they’d find nothing.

  Astonishingly, the view from the room was the Banca Nazionale, the bank they had been staking out for the last four days. Off to the right he could see the park bench he and Enzo had occupied. “Simon had been watching us all the time and then must have followed us into the Vasari Corridor,” he lamented.

  As expected, there was no other evidence of Simon having been in the room, except for the concierge’s positive identification of the man in the photo—the photo of Mohammed al-Fadl.

  27

  THE POSTSCRIPT

  Oddly, the director was feeling an unusual sense of calm. All told, he was unsuccessful in apprehending his nemesis—he was a day away from ending his personally rewarding career—and he was about to telephone the president to mislead him once again.

  First, there was one other call he felt compelled to make.

  “Congratulations on your promotion, Director Bishop.”

  “Condolences would have been more appropriate,” Noble replied.

  “Bad news, my friend—Simon escaped.”

  Hamilton told him how it all came crashing down: the woman, the Corridor, and the empty satchel. He then reviewed what he planned to tell the president, primarily, that Mohammed al-Fadl had escaped and with the TSAR funds.

  Of course, Noble knew that the TSAR funds were safely tucked away in several accounts in Zurich, where he personally transferred them. Hamilton had made the decision that the funds should remain in Zurich until the situation was resolved.

  “I was able to confirm our suspicion that the president was planning to siphon some TSAR funds for his own special social programs, and unless you’ve decided differently, he will have to report those funds as actually missing, not expropriated,” explained Noble.

  “What irony.”

  Nodding in agreement to himself, Noble continued. “According to Paolo, the president already had a planned statement reporting that the General Accountability Office made an accounting error, based on inaccurate numbers given to them by the Treasury.”

  “I see he is already playing defense on the assumption I wouldn’t be able to retrieve the funds,” Hamilton concluded.

  “Hank told Paolo he suspected the Treasury was slow in producing numbers because they were covering up their own slush fund, which notion he passed on to President Baari.”

  “He really knows how to stir the pot.” Hamilton snickered.

  “Hank also alluded to the premise that the Treasury’s accounting system was shady at best, but allowed the confusion could be attributed, in part, to the process itself.” Noble further explained that it was his understanding the bailout funds provided to the banks were in exchange for warrants, in the form of certificates. That gave the Treasury the right to purchase shares of bank stock at an established price. If the stock price exceeded the set price, the profit would be returned to the taxpayers via the Treasury.

  “So the prevailing question is—whose profit is it?” Hamilton jeered.

  “The problem intensifies in that any attempt to track the warrants, the stock prices, and the flow of money in all directions, was a nightmare, to say the least.”

  “One has to wonder if that confusion were part of the overall strategy,” Hamilton posed.

  Despite this, the thrust of Baari’s speech to launch the blame game, in the end, the accounting error, a colossal one at that, was likely to go unchallenged. “It will be forgotten by the limited attention span of the American public, much to their detriment.” Hamilton sighed. “One day we’ll make it right,” he promised. “If anything should happen to me, before that day arrives, you know where to find the flash drive and the memory sticks.”

  “You may be in Florence, but other than that you’re not going anywhere, my friend.”

  “I tried to state the case as clearly and completely as possible, to give it authenticity, and not sound like the ramblings of an old man. Noble, there are still so many unanswered questions lingering in the back of my mind.”

  “They are probably the same questions rolling around in my head, left unanswered,” Noble responded. “For example, how many Simons and Baaris are in our midst?”

  “Was it all just about the money?” asked Hamilton.

  Noble reminded him that La Fratellanza created the “game” to satisfy their intellectual appetites without recognizing Simon’s motives. “But there had to be more to it,” he insisted.

  Both of them believed there was a huge void of unanswered questions that engendered a belief there was a grander and more sinister plot yet to unfold.

  “Is Simon only the tip of the iceberg?” Hamilton questioned.

  “There has been speculation that the Muslim population in the U.S. was increasing exponentially, and by the year 2048, the U.S. would be a Muslim country. Even the Catholic Church has expressed some concern that in five to seven years, Islamism could be the dominate religion of the world.” Noble reported. “Chances are there are some terrorists in the mix.”

  “A frightening thought,” was Hamilton’s reaction.

  “Is it that implausible?” Noble replied.

  “I think not.” Hamilton quoted Muammar al-Qaddafi, who was caught saying, “We don’t need terrorists, and we don’t need homicide bombers. The fifty-plus million Muslims in Europe will turn it into a Muslim continent within a few decades.”

  Noble repeated, “I ask again, how many more Simons are embedded throughout the world?”

  “All these questions are too frightening to contemplate at the moment,” Hamilton cautioned. “For now, Simon has vanished, the other co-conspirators have been silenced, and the president is under control.”

  Noble held the phone to his ear and listened to Hamilton on the other end of the line as he continued to defend his decision, repeating the same sermon he had given many times before.

  “You know as well as anyone, my career has been devoted to the protection of the American people. Despite my misgivings, I was convinced it would have been devastating to the country if I were forced to bring down the president, especially after the dire effects of the financial crisis. As hypocritical as it may seem to others, my only course of action was to maintain as much stability as possible until the country found its bearings.”

  “Does that include protecting the TSAR funds?” Noble asked.


  Knowing Noble knew the answer to his own question, Hamilton ignored him and continued to proffer that if he did expose the president, he believed it would provide an invitation to the terrorists to step into the breach. That led him to the inevitable conclusion to remain silent, so the president could complete his term, and possibly run for reelection.

  “It is not my role to interfere with history, although some would say I tinkered with it slightly, but it was for objectively just reasons.”

  In an effort to let Hamilton know he made his point, Noble assured him. “I have always supported your reasoning and I will stand by your decision.”

  Evidently, it was not assuring enough, and Hamilton continued, but this time it was as though he knew he was making his final appeal.

  “Our country is incredibly resilient. It has managed to struggle through some of the most difficult economic and social times. I have the utmost confidence that the American people will be equally resilient when this information comes to light. The timing, however, is without question the most critical factor, but it will be the one I will take to its conclusion,” Hamilton assured Noble. “For sure there will be new crises, some perhaps brewing beneath the surface today, but those challenges, my friend, will be yours.”

  “Thank you, Hamilton,” Noble responded with a hint of sarcasm.

  “Let’s stay in touch, and perhaps you will plan to visit me one day. I must now call the president.”

  —

  With a bit of awkwardness, the director called the president on his private line and informed him that, regrettably, Mohammed al-Fadl had escaped with the TSAR funds, an obvious fabrication.

  “Mr. President, there is nothing more I can do, although Interpol will continue to hunt him down,” he said honestly. Then with less sincerity, he allowed, “Perhaps they will be able to retrieve some of the funds, but it will take time.” Receiving no response from the president, the director took the opportunity to pour a little salt in the wound. “You might find it advantageous to begin crafting a statement to explain the lack of accountability of the funds, before anyone else discovers they are missing.”