End games az-11 Page 5

  ‘I don’t believe you,’ Tom Newman said in a hard tone.

  Zen shrugged.

  ‘He would hardly have been the first Calabrian to have emigrated to la Merica. In fact he wouldn’t even have been in the first hundred thousand. But as it happens you don’t need to believe me.’

  He leafed through some papers and then passed across the naturalisation details of Peter Newman supplied by the consulate in Naples together with an Italian birth certificate in the name of Pietro Ottavio Calopezzati.

  ‘Are these official?’ Tom asked after reading them.

  ‘As official as can be. Your father assumed the name Peter Newman in 1969. Before that he was Pietro Calopezzati, born in the comune of Spezzano della Sila up in those mountains half an hour’s drive from here. Are you telling me that you are completely ignorant of these facts?’

  ‘Why would I lie to you?’ Tom Newman snapped. ‘I didn’t even know there was anything to lie about! Anyway, what’s all this got to do with the kidnapping? That’s what you’re supposed to be investigating. Who cares if my father concealed his origins for some reason?’

  ‘I care about everything that may be connected to the case, Signor Newman. One never knows what may turn out to be relevant. For instance, the Calopezzati were, until the political changes shortly after your father’s birth, among the richest landowners in Italy. At this point I have no information about the present state of the family finances, but the kidnappers certainly will. That may well affect the amount of the ransom they demand. I take it you have a mobile phone.’

  Newman stubbed out his cigarette.

  ‘It doesn’t work in Europe.’

  ‘Then you’ll basically be deaf and dumb over here, and as is often the case with those who suffer from those disabilities, people will take you for an idiot.’

  ‘All right, I’ll get one.’

  ‘Pass the number on to me immediately. Once the kidnappers make their move, it’s essential that we are able to react quickly. The gang will almost certainly set a timetable for further negotiations, and if they don’t receive a prompt reply they may well break off contact. At that point things can rapidly get out of hand, with terrible results.’

  Zen’s face clouded over.

  ‘Odd, your father deceiving you like that,’ he murmured. ‘I hope everything’s going to be all right.’

  The watcher outside Nicola Mantega’s office on Corso Mazzini was getting bored. Thanks to his work with the Digos anti-terrorist squad, Benedetto was an old hand at stakeouts despite his relative youth, and knew that boredom was a surveillance operative’s worst enemy. It eroded your concentration, imperceptibly but continually, and when something finally happened, your reflexes would be stiff and your reaction time sluggish. If the wait was long enough and the event sufficiently discreet, you might even miss it altogether.

  The night before, Mantega had been followed back to his villa by the motorcyclists, who reported that he had gone straight to bed. In the morning, a fresh team had tailed him back to the city in what was seemingly one of the ubiquitous Ape three-wheeled vans used by smallholders and rural tradesmen, but in this case powered by a very quiet 1.5-litre engine mounted in the covered rear cargo space. The target had spent the entire time since then in his office, in which an assortment of listening devices had been installed in the course of a nocturnal visit by members of the technical support group. Later in the day, the motorcycle duo had relieved the Ape team at the rear of the office building, while Benedetto kept his eyes on the front door from the specially equipped delivery van, which had been repainted green and given a fresh logo overnight.

  The end result of all this effort had been precisely zero. Mantega had left home and arrived at the office at the normal hour, and his phone calls had been entirely routine, relating to his work facilitating contracts, payments and legal issues for various nominally legitimate business enterprises. A total yawn, in short, and Benedetto was in fact yawning when Mantega emerged from the utilitarian 1960s office building shortly after noon. This was a perfectly reasonable hour for a libera professionista to begin winding down towards lunch, but two features of the situation immediately struck Benedetto. The first was that Mantega had changed out of the jacket, pullover and tie he had worn to work into decidedly unsmart jeans, an open-necked sweatshirt and work boots. The second was that instead of walking towards his favourite restaurant or driving off in the Alfa in which he had arrived, he got into a taxi which had drawn up near by a few minutes earlier. Benedetto started the van and radioed the others to get their MotoGuzzi going. The taxi headed east across the Crati river and then south, where the bikers overtook both the van and the taxi with breathtaking arrogance. A few minutes later, the front tail came through on the radio link.

  ‘He paid off the cab in Casali and is now in a cafe opposite the station.’

  ‘Understood. I’ll take over.’

  At one time, Casali had been a small and undistinguished village on the main road south from Cosenza, but that highway had long been superseded by the autostrada and the community itself subsumed into the suburbs of the city. Its centre was a modest piazza completely clogged with parked cars. Benedetto left the van a block further on and then doubled back, apparently talking non-stop on his mobile. In reality he was moving his lips silently while his colleague from the MotoGuzzi crew briefed him on the current situation. Mantega was still in the bar, drinking a cappuccino which he had already paid for, a slightly unusual thing to do in such a humble establishment. He had not apparently made contact with anybody.

  After a brief glance inside, Benedetto took up position outside the bar, in the informal car park that the original piazzetta, a mere widening of the main road, had become. The bar was empty except for Mantega and three elderly men who looked as if they had been there since it opened. When Benedetto next looked — turning casually in the manner of a shiftless youth intent on his phone conversation — the target had emerged from the cafe and was now weaving his way rapidly through the ranks of parked cars, across the highway and into the station yard just as a diesel railcar emerged from the right and slowed to a halt. This was awkward. By the rule book, one of the others should have taken over at this point, but there was no time for that. Benedetto sprinted after him, narrowly avoiding an oncoming truck on the highway, and reached the platform just as the doors of the railcar were closing. He levered the rear one open and climbed aboard.

  There were about a dozen other passengers. Benedetto slid on to a seat at the rear. Fortunately, Nicola Mantega had chosen to sit facing forward and gave no sign of having noticed Benedetto’s presence. When the guard came round, both men bought tickets. In Mantega’s case, this involved quite a lengthy discussion, but the roar of the engine as they climbed the steep gradient out of the valley made it impossible for Benedetto to hear what was said. He himself bought a single ticket all the way, then went to the lavatory and made a number of phone calls.

  The back-up team at the Questura did their best, but it was an impossible task. There were twenty-six scheduled stops on the three and a half hour trip across the rugged interior of Calabria, twelve of which lay in the neighbouring province of Catanzaro and hence would require the co-operation of the authorities in that city, which was unlikely to be rapidly forthcoming at a time when most of their senior personnel would either be on the way home for lunch or at a restaurant. The metre-gauge railcar trundled along at no more than forty kilometres an hour, but on the winding, unimproved roads of that area even the MotoGuzzi would be hard pressed to maintain a better average speed. All Benedetto’s instincts told him that Nicola Mantega was headed for a covert meeting with the kidnappers, the vital link in the chain of evidence that would bring the dormant investigation to life, and eventually to court. But there would be further feints, dodges and cut-outs at the other end, and he himself, alone and on foot, could do nothing.

  In the end, it wouldn’t have mattered anyway. In addition to the scheduled stations, the train also passed a number o
f fermate facoltative, unmanned halts where it could be stopped by request to the guard. It was at one of these, located at the head of a remote valley which the line looped languidly around, that Nicola Mantega descended. There was an abandoned station, its windows and doorways bricked up, and a disused siding and goods shed. Behind this, a heavily overgrown dirt track rose up the bare hillside, presumably leading to the village that had given the station its name, but there was no sign of it or of any other human presence in the scrubby landscape. The railcar revved up its engine in a cloud of diesel fumes and then sidled off. Benedetto headed for the solitude of the lavatory and switched on his mobile and radio, but he couldn’t get a signal on the phone, the radio was out of range and anyway it was too late.

  Nicola Mantega stood motionless until the railcar was out of sight, then started to walk slowly up the dirt track. After about a minute, a distant sound attracted his attention. A black Jeep was making its way down the hillside towards him, disdaining the levelled track. When it was about five metres away it swung around to face uphill and an electric window peeled down.

  ‘ Salve,’ said Giorgio.

  The rotor blades were whirling slowly to a halt as the three men stepped down from the Bell 412. To the west, just above the line of mountains that cradled the city, the sun was also powering down for the night, but on the ground the temperature was still over a hundred. Flanked by the pilot and technician, Phil Larson headed towards the metal box that Aeroscan had hired as a temporary office facility. It stood on the cracked concrete paving that also served as a landing pad, right alongside a skeletal concrete structure that had obviously been abandoned for years. It looked as though someone had set out to build a factory or a supermarket and then changed his mind or run out of money half-way through.

  None of the men talked. They were all stupid from the heat, filthy from the dust kicked up by the backdraught, jittery from the continual noise and vibration of the helicopter and looking forward to stripping off their work clothes and getting back to the hotel as soon as possible. So Phil wasn’t real happy when his phone started to ring. Even worse, the screen displayed Anonimo in place of the caller’s name. He had learnt that this meant an out-of-area call, almost certainly international and probably from head office. The damnedest thing about operating in Europe was the time difference. Just as you crawled out of the galley after a hard day at the oars, the eager beavers back in the States were arriving at the office all caffeined up and keen to show their mettle.

  ‘Phil Larson.’

  ‘Phil? It’s Martin Nguyen.’

  ‘Hi, Mr Nguyen.’

  ‘Phil? Phil? Are you there?’

  ‘Sure I’m here.’

  ‘I can’t hear you, Phil! Can you hear me?’

  ‘I can hear you fine, Mr Nguyen. Maybe there’s a problem with the connection.’

  ‘Phil? There must be a problem with the connection. I’ll call you right back.’

  Oh no you won’t, thought Phil, speed-dialling another number.

  ‘Hi, Phil.’

  ‘Hi, Jason,’ replied Phil, pushing open the door. Jason looked up at him in surprise and made to clam his cell.

  ‘Leave it on!’ Phil told him. ‘I need to block an incoming while I unwind.’

  After a quick rinse in what they called the sewer shower, Phil emerged wearing his street clothes. The others were all set to go. Phil told them that he’d be along later, retired to his office and scrolled down on the mobile till he hit ‘Rapture Works’.

  ‘Martin.’

  ‘This is Phil, Mr Nguyen.’

  ‘Finally! I’ve been trying to get you for almost half an hour. Where the fuck were you?’

  Phil was not a serious student of human nature — too many variables — but Martin Nguyen had always struck him as being the nearest thing to the electrical circuitry that he loved and understood. Now he sounded like some goddamn chick. What was up?

  ‘I had to take another call, Mr Nguyen. Our aviation fuel distributor didn’t deliver on schedule and we’ve only got fifteen hours’ supply left. Anyway, I’ve sorted it all out. The gasoline’s going to arrive tomorrow, trucked in from…’

  ‘I don’t want to hear your goddamn life story, Larson. Report progress.’

  ‘Well, we’ve been working twelve-hour shifts and getting through around a hundred kilometres each day.’

  ‘But you haven’t found anything.’

  ‘You’d have heard if we had.’

  ‘So how long is this going to take?’

  ‘No way to tell, Mr Nguyen. We might find it first thing tomorrow, or it might be at the far end of our last beat.’

  ‘How can we speed up the search?’

  ‘We can’t. The ultrasound waves require a given amount of time to penetrate down into the ground and reflect back up to the receiver. The duration of each wave bounce represents a physical constant. If the forward motion of the monitoring vehicle exceeds the envelope created by that constant, the information returned is worthless.’

  Martin Nguyen’s hiss echoed down the line.

  ‘Then we need to grow our resources. Hire another helicopter.’

  ‘Choppers are no use without the hardware.’

  ‘Have extra units shipped over.’

  ‘Well, you’d need to talk to head office about that, Mr Nguyen, but I think it might be a problem.’

  ‘You mean a challenge?’

  ‘No, I mean a problem. The scanner we’re using was originally developed for military purposes, in highflying planes or drones. The civilian variant, operable at low altitudes, is still in development, but Aeroscan was able to get hold of a beta release prototype for use on your project. It’s a beauty, works just great, but as far as I know there aren’t any more available right now.’

  ‘Okay. You say you’re working twelve hours a day. That’s only a fifty per cent effort. Get your company to fly out more people, hire another pilot — maybe another gas supplier while you’re at it — and keep going right around the clock.’

  ‘I hate to tell you this, Mr Nguyen, but it can’t be done. This is strictly visual navigation. We’re flying at less than a hundred feet in a complex environment on the outskirts of a major city surrounded by mountains on three sides. We’re working the flood plain now, but some of the side valleys on our survey chart are barely thirty feet across near the bottom. No aviation instruments could cope with that. The authorities have been pretty co-operative so far, but they’d never let us operate between civil dusk and dawn. Apart from anything else, we’re supposed to be selecting prime locations for a movie shoot. How can you do that in the dark?’

  That hiss again.

  ‘So, worst-case scenario, when is the latest we’ll know whether there’s anything there?’

  ‘About a month, if all goes well.’

  ‘That’s way too long.’

  ‘I don’t know what to tell you, Mr Nguyen. I didn’t think this thing was time-dated.’

  ‘The situation has changed. The director of the movie we’re using as cover for the operation now wants to start shooting next week.’

  ‘So? He won’t bother us none.’

  ‘No, but you’ll bother him. He’ll wonder what this helicopter is doing all day, patrolling up and down when he’s trying to set up a scene. When he asks around, he’ll be told that it’s surveying locations for scenes in his movie. Bullshit, he’ll say, I never asked for anything like that.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Mr Nguyen, this is way beyond my area of competence.’

  ‘All right, let’s see how competent you are, Larson. You don’t have a month any more. You have barely a week, so you’ll have to prioritise.’

  ‘On the basis of what criteria?’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  Phil sighed.

  ‘Mr Nguyen, our project chart is posted right here on the wall of my office. I’m looking at it now. What I’m seeing is a large-scale map of the area divided into fifteen-metre-wide strips. Those that have been completed are shaded in
— apart from today’s, because I haven’t had a chance yet. All the remaining strips look pretty well identical to me. I don’t even know what we’re looking for, except it’s a man-made structure buried somewhere down beneath the riverbed. You’re now asking me to favour some sections of the survey over others, so I’m asking you who are the good guys and who are the bad guys. They don’t seem to be wearing their hats.’

  ‘Don’t get flippant with me, Larson!’

  ‘Sorry, Mr Nguyen. The heat must be getting to me. Plus everything’s a whole lot tougher since Newman went AWOL. Just yesterday this Italian guy comes around wanting to know what we’re doing and where’s our authorisation from the city. At least I think that’s what he was saying, his English wasn’t too good. I gave him the agreed cover story but he wanted to see the paperwork. I don’t know where those permits are. Never even seen them. And I sure as hell can’t deal effectively with people like that in a foreign language. That was what Pete Newman was for. I do electronics.’

  Another, briefer silence.

  ‘I’ll be there tomorrow,’ Martin Nguyen announced.

  The isolated stone barn had evidently lain derelict for years, but still smelt strongly of sheep and manure, interwoven with more recent layers of rot, damp and mould. The floor was of beaten earth and the windows filled in with roughly mortared blocks of terracotta brick. Once Giorgio had closed and bolted the massive door, the darkness was broken only by peeps of light from the roof, whose flat stone slabs had shifted over the years. He turned on his torch and suspended it from a loop at the end of a length of rusty wire attached to the main roof-beam, so that it dangled down like a domestic light fixture, then he moved away into the shadowy depths at the fringes of the building.

  It was only now that Mantega realised there was another odour present. It was the smell of fear, and the fear was his own. A couple of days after Peter Newman’s kidnapping, an envelope had been deposited in the letter box of Mantega’s villa. It was unstamped and addressed only with his name. The note inside, printed by a typewriter in block capitals, gave detailed instructions to be followed in the event that meeting in person proved to be necessary. Mantega had followed these to the letter, and Giorgio had duly shown up at the designated station on the secondary line to Catanzaro.