Gun Metal Heart (9 page)

They walked through the almost deserted main hall of the Dirksen Building. A uniformed guard at the front desk nodded. Singer nodded to the guard. “How close is Wendy?”

The guard blinked in surprise. “Sir? My wife?”

“She's due?”

John watched—thunderstruck—as the guard reeled. “Ah … yes, sir. My wife's due tomorrow, sir. We're…”

Singer Cavanaugh patted the man on the shoulder. “Your first?”

The guard said, “Yes, sir.”

Singer turned to John. “Man's here doing his duty. His wife's dilating. Swear to God, John, I wish the antigovernment people would spend one day—one day—watching real people do their jobs.”

He turned to the guard. “Get some rest, son. I'm not joking. You're gonna need it.”

He limped out the door, John in his wake.

“Daria?” the senator said over his shoulder.

John said, “I trust her. With my life. But I don't want her anywhere near you or your office. Her heart's in the right place, but she's a hand grenade in high heels.”

Singer laughed. “Keep looking into this thing. Take whatever precautions you think are necessary. But you let me worry about the office, son.”

 

Eleven

Florence

Daria and Diego had a couple of hours to kill before the engineer from Rome arrived. They went back to the new hotel. Daria knew from the past that Diego had rules about sleeping with business partners, so instead she took a quick nap, then joined him for cappuccinos and croissants, not far from the famed Ponte Vecchio and within sight of the tip of Giotto's famous tower.

He stirred a packet of brown sugar into his coffee. “Ideas?”

Daria watched the parade of tourists. “There was a painters' van in the alley outside the hotel. I leaned against it and used my thumbnail to pull back a temporary, magnetic sign.”

Diego said “Surveillance.”

“Hmm. Serbs or not, I can't say. But they were either there for your engineer or for you.”

The Mexican placed his cowboy hat carefully on the small metal table, brim up. “We got a play?”

Daria cupped his hand on the table with her own. She smiled. “I'm a simple girl. I say we blunder in and see what happens.”

Diego dug euros out of his jeans pocket. He nodded once. “Let's play.”

*   *   *

Tuesday afternoon, the lobby of the Hotel Criterion de Medici was all but vacant. No guests checked in or out.

The lobby had black-and-white parquet floors and tastefully done murals of grape leaves and golden Tuscan fields. A largish aquarium burbled. A seating area included a low leather couch and a matching chair, a coffee table, a TV, and an array of tourism magazines artfully fanned out. The two people working the concierge desk wore navy blazers with golden emblems over their hearts.

A woman stood at the door, wearing a lavender sweater set, skirt, and hand-stitched Gucci pumps. She held a portfolio binder clutched to her chest in both arms. She was blond, very pale, with eyes so crystalline blue as to appear almost silver.

She tucked a strand of ice-blond hair behind her ear and spoke into the mic embedded into her wide, ornately carved bracelet. Her Serbian was flawless. “Time to intercept?”

Her man on the Ponte Vecchio responded. “Hyundai's nearing the bridge. Ten minutes to get through the crowd.”

She turned and nodded to the two behind the concierge desk. They checked the Russian SR-2 Veresk semiautomatic weapons under the counter.

*   *   *

Half a block away, the white van with the magnetic logo waited. Owen Cain Thorson kept his eyes on the shrouded building to the left of the hotel. The buildings shared a wall.

“Through there,” he said. Derrick Saito and Jake Kenner followed his eyes. “She'll get into the hotel through there.”

“Yeah.” Kenner chewed a massive wad of gum. “Looks good. We wait for her in there?”

“Saito and me. You stay with the van. Let us know if you see her out front.”

“That's a big ten-four, man.”

Owen Cain Thorson turned and looked intensely at his friends. He looked cool and calm, but a muscle near his jaw joint pulsed.

“Either of you get a chance to grab her at gunpoint, do it. She looks like she's bolting, it's okay to take her down.”

Saito said, “Got it.”

“It's all right to beat her. It's all right to wound her. But guys? I get some time with her. One on one. You'll get a chance to do … whatever you want to do. For as long as you want. But in the end, I kill her. Are we crystal?”

Sandpoint, Idaho

Todd Brevidge waved to the walls of screens, which showed a bustling, sunny streetscape. “Look at the detail. The filigree on the building. Here, see? And you'll notice…”

He pointed to the upper-left-hand corner screens of the full wall. “No loss of focus in the corners. The image is sharp throughout. The lens that allows for that? Developed for NASA. We have the patent on that.”

The brass from American Citadel administration had picked plush black leather seats with attached drink tables. The buyers, Mr. Smith and Miss Jones, remained standing. Once Cyrus Acton realized that, he, too, stood to watch the demonstration.

Brevidge lifted his walkie phone to his lips. “Give me the van.”

In the control room, Bryan Snow sat in a high-backed swivel chair with left-hand and right-hand trigger grips, and he adjusted both. The twin grips looked like the weapons grips on an American warplane. His two pilots manned their stations. Snow had been most specific in his designs for the control room. He could see every screen, plus both technicians, without hardly turning his head. He could touch all three elevated keyboards without reaching. Arrayed before him was an arc of plasma screens, each exactly ninety-four inches from his face.

Most were black. One was lit. It showed the same urban scene as the wall of screens in the observation room: a tight, curving alley and three-story buildings of old stone and aging brick.

Snow used the trigger grips as the image on his one lit screen shifted. He glanced through the narrow window into the observation theater. The wall-sized screen therein mimicked his screen.

*   *   *

Daria Gibron was no one's idea of a world-class strategist.

When walking into a blind situation, she sometimes liked to imagine the scene was a snow globe: best thing to do is turn it upside down and shake it a bit, see what changes.

She knew Diego's first priority would be finding Vince Guzman. Daria had no problem helping with that, but she had some passing understanding of
Skorpjo
, and she feared Guzman could be beyond rescuing. The White Scorpions hovered in the nebulous space between terrorism and organized crime—a Talibanized mafia. Daria had no love lost for their ilk. She didn't know what the bastards had targeted to steal, but she had a gut sense that Europe would be a little better off if they failed. And for the foreseeable future, Europe was her home.

She and Diego once again approached the famous bridge, which was packed shoulder to shoulder with pedestrians. They could just see the roof of the rented Hyundai, slowly approaching from behind them.

Daria wore her new sundress and gladiator flats that laced around her ankles. She hitched the little black backpack over one shoulder.

Diego said, “We do this, you want my gun?”

“The Colt? Please! I'd hurt my back just trying to lift that bazooka.”

Diego absorbed that, his lips thinning. She took the man's arm.

“Don't worry. A gun will show up if I need one. They always do.”

He shook his head and gave her an almost smile. It was more emotion that most people got from him.

Daria said, “Did you clock the thug on the bridge?”

“Muscle shirt, scorpion tatt?”

“Poor lad looked bored. Shall we make introductions?”

They split up without discussing it.

The guard's inner forearm tattoo was obvious from twenty paces away when he lifted his left hand and spoke into a wide metal wrist cuff. Daria surfed a tide of tourists, tacking closer to the watcher and, now, to the slowly creeping Hyundai with the electrical engineer and her team.

When the car was parallel with the Serb watcher, Daria skittered out of the crowd. She drove the sole of her strappy sandal into the man's knee, hyperextending the joint. The pain was excruciating. He crumbled, but Daria danced forward, into his path, partially catching him and keeping him vertical as she whipped off his wrist mic. From her new angle, she could see the man wore an earjack with a twisty wire that dove down his back into his muscle shirt.

Daria caught a glimpse of the woman driver of the Hyundai, who frowned at the flow of tourists around her vehicle.

Diego appeared as if by magic. He wrapped one fist around the man's neck and held him up and out like dry cleaning.

Daria made the universal
roll-down-your-window
sign, and the driver, unsure of what was going on, did so.

“Hallo.” Daria spoke Italian and bent at the waist to made eye contact with the four people, including a very large and elderly woman in the front passenger seat.

The woman leaned forward and squinted through very thick glasses. “Mr. Diego? What is going on here?”

Diego shook the Serb and the man's head bobbed. “Bodyguarding.”

Daria said, “My name is Daria Gibron. I'm Diego's friend. The fellow in his hands is a member of Serbian organized crime. A gang of his is awaiting you at the hotel.”

The
Skorpjo
watcher gasped for breath. “Fucking … whore…!”

With no real effort, Diego shoved the apparently weightless man forward and down, bouncing his forehead off the Hyundai's bonnet. His eyes rolled up into his skull. Most tourists had noticed only the traffic congestion caused by the unmoving car. But some of them began to see the action. A murmur shot through the crowd.

Diego gave Daria a little apologetic shrug. “Don't know what he said. Sounded rude.”

The elderly woman struggled to lean forward, her jowls quaking. “Mr. Diego, I don't understand. Who is this woman?”

Daria answered for him. “In the American parlance? The cavalry.”

Gabriella Incantada turned stiffly to the men in back. “I knew something was wrong at the hotel. I knew it!”

“Dr. Incantada, more mafia types are waiting up ahead. They plan to steal your invention. Mind you: I've no idea what that is. But we think they have a friend of ours. Now, may I take sixty seconds to make a suggestion that could benefit us both?”

*   *   *

The Criterion is a small, intimate hotel. Daria knew that the thieves' plan had to include getting Gabriella Incantada and her team isolated from the hotel staff. That most likely meant the second-story conference room, which would be soundproofed for audiovisual presentations. During yesterday's walk-through of the alley, Daria had noted the livery building under renovation to the left of the hotel. She figured that to be the thieves' likely exit. That's how Daria would have pulled off this particular caper.

Her best bet for finding out what happened to Vince Guzman, and screwing with the White Scorpions, was to get the engineer and her creation bottled up inside the hotel and to grab someone higher up on the food chain than Mr. Muscle Shirt on the bridge—the man fairly screamed off-the-rack ruffian. Which meant convincing the Serbs that all was well until they could get into the hotel and up to the conference-room floor.

Daria outlined her plan to Gabriella Incantada, who was surprisingly accommodating. Daria took the driver's hat and blue blazer, which were oddly mismatched with the bright yellow sundress and sandals. She couldn't very well ask the driver to doff her trousers midway across the Ponte Vecchio. Although, to be honest, she had made racier suggestions in equally crowded venues. Just never in the middle of a fight.

Everyone got back into the car except the well-paid driver and the now unconscious hoodlum. Daria would have loved to keep the ear jack, but she didn't speak Serbian and couldn't see any advantage in keeping it. Both the bracelet and the power pack arced gracefully into the Arno River.

Daria got into the compact and drove to the hotel. The white van with the painters' logo was there again.

*   *   *

Inside the painters' van, Jake Kenner spoke into his earjack, the microphone dangling from a wire. “Engineer's here. No sign of Gibron.”

He registered that the engineer's driver was a woman; he looked at her without truly seeing her.

On the second floor of the livery building, Owen Cain Thorson hit his comms. “She's coming. Eyes open.”

Sandpoint, Idaho

Todd Brevidge stepped to the south-facing wall of the observation lounge and touched two large, square, flat drawers that resembled nothing so much as the sliding trays in a city morgue. He inserted a titanium key into a slot between the two drawers, turned it counterclockwise 90 degrees, then typed in a command on a recessed keypad.

The two drawers
snicked
open. Todd pulled them all the way out.

Inside one sat a sort of model airplane that resembled a hawk. It was almost a foot long, and had a two-foot wingspan.

Todd reached into the other drawer and pulled out a hummingbird.

“Folks?” He beamed around the underground observation room. “Meet Mercutio.”

The whole thing fit on the palm of his hand and was more or less the size of a can of beer. It wasn't a hummingbird, of course. It looked a bit like the Apollo mission moon landers of the late 1960s, or maybe a shuttlecock, but one with four arms that stuck straight out an inch. At the end of each arm was a flat plastic doughnut, and inside each doughnut hole was a tiny plastic propeller.

“Our primary competition is building micro air vehicles, or MAVs. I'm told their small surveillance MAVs are the size of, oh, a large microwave oven. Here's ours. It's—simply put—better.”