No Mortal Thing: A Thriller (59 page)

Her breathing was calm. The shouts far beyond the cave entrance were rarer and more distant. The drone of the helicopter placed it further away – he thought it was now over the village, searching there. Sometimes he heard the kid whistle for the dogs, but not close.

After he had shown his hand, and hadn’t blinked in the power of the beam, he reached behind his head, found where the spider or the soil had touched him and scratched. He brought his hand back to the front, showed his empty palm, then rested it on his knee, leaving the penknife, blade open, on the cave floor. A flattened cigarette packet lay near to the knife, saved from decay by its plastic wrapping, and there were slivers of silver foil from chewing-gum. He must show neither fear nor impatience.

They couldn’t come out of the cave without passing him, dead, incapacitated or alive. He didn’t smile at the torch beam when he had eased the discomfort on his neck because to try to make easy contact would demonstrate weakness. He didn’t play poker, had never sat in a smoke-filled room with a tumbler of Scotch and gambled with cards. It was about bluff. He would wait and however long it took, he would see the face of the old man and learn how greatly he had taxed him. It seemed that nothing was more important to Jago than seeing the jaw, cheeks, mouth and eyes of the
padrino
, and moving on from the monochrome image. When he had seen the face, learned the damage he had done, the power would have been transferred to him. He could wait.

The wind had freshened behind him. Jago fancied that old leaves danced. He heard the first patter of rain.

Jago had come of his own free will to a far corner of Europe and sat in a cave. He was sheltered from the coming storm and outside – in the mountains, coastal towns and hard-to-locate villages – were the organisers of the greatest criminal clans anywhere in the world as he knew it. The heat of the day had gone and the chill had settled under the low ceiling. The rain would soon surge and the drips would fall. When he put on his torch he would look into the face of the old man who was responsible for what had happened in the cave – and much else. He could have smiled at the thought of it, seeing the pain he had caused, the confusion he had brought down on the clan, but he kept his expression wooden and passive.

He no longer heard the helicopter. The shouts had died. The wind blew more fiercely and would scatter a carpet of leaves over the path they had taken, where their footprints might have shown. The rain would further degrade the scent they had left. He waited, the torch loose in his hand. He thought the old man’s breathing had regained a regular rhythm. Perhaps he was over the experience of darkness in the dungeon. Jago wondered how long she could hold the pistol’s aim.

Consolata came back to the squat. It was late but another meeting was in progress.

She stood at the door and watched them for a moment. Then Pietro gave her the dismissive wave that meant he had seen her, but that she should not interrupt – and that she had no part to play in their deliberations. She felt wretched, awkward in the clothing that had been wished on her, which was too large. She would tell no one. She went down the stairs and into the basement storeroom. Her bed was in the corner, beside the line of filing cabinets. Her pillow was under a poster of the group holding a big anti-Mafia banner when they had marched in Rosarno. She saw her bag. She didn’t think it had been searched: they had ignored her. She wouldn’t tell them of going to a park, dumping leaflets and finding a boy, or of taking him to a place of danger, or of facilitating the killing of a family heir, or of being rejected, humiliated. Her secret.

She stripped. At that time of night, to save money, the water was cold and the heater off. She took a cold shower, shivering and flinching under the spray.

Consolata dressed. She saw the radio she had once left on so that she could monitor every news bulletin. She put it into a cupboard. She went upstairs and found a computer still switched on in the room next to the one where the meeting continued, and began to fill in the electronic diary with events in the coming days that supporters could attend. She thought she had leaped for the stars, but had fallen into the gutter. Nothing had altered. She felt broken by the power she had confronted, but would go back to war, armed with leaflets: someone had to.

They were the last to board. They sat together, the engines gained power and the plane started to taxi. The storm was close and the pilot wanted to be airborne.

It was rare for Carlo to engage in small-talk, but he asked, ‘Much on this weekend?’

‘I’ve a boy at college in Dresden. We’re due to go down and help him move to a new student hostel.’ Fred grimaced. ‘And I’ve papers to look at for a court appearance on Monday, vehicle theft. And you?’

‘Nothing much. My partner’s bought a new greenhouse, self-assembly from a flat pack. I hate them. And I’m behind with my expenses, not that they’ll add up to much. Also there’s a training course, ethnic diversity, on Monday that I have to read up on. I’m knackered, a bit vintage for all this. But it’s been fun.’

The surveillance team checked into Control.

They were not asked how they were, what they had achieved, whether they’d enjoyed the ready-to-eat rations, whether they’d fucked up or were heroes of the republic. They dumped their kit, were told where to go on Monday morning. There was a whiteboard on the wall, and they saw their names on it, beneath ‘Scorpion Fly’. That would have been cleaned off by the morning. Some of the kit went into the store, the weapons to the armoury . . . They’d drive together, find a beer somewhere, talk about something else.

The prosecutor had been to see the place, the hole leading into the bunker, and had declined to crawl inside. He was driven home and would be fresh in the morning to start his investigation into a family in Monasterace.

The aircraft had not been up for long. The flight path would take it north along the coast, then over the Bay of Naples and into Rome’s airport, Leonardo da Vinci.

Jack, or Giacomo, had been hustled on board by the lawyer.

There was a party of bird-watchers behind him and behind them the two men he had seen talking to his boss, Bent Horrocks, who had brought – according to the lawyer – catastrophe to the venture. He would ask few questions and would strenuously attempt to answer none. He assumed he would be met by the Flying Squad or the Crime Agency and would dedicate himself to seeming stupid, ignorant and amnesiac. He listened. Always one loudmouth on a plane who thought any opinion he held was valuable and wanted to share it. Jack couldn’t help but listen.

‘. . . I’m very pleasantly surprised . . . Did I say that on the bus? Well worth repeating, don’t you know? It seemed quieter, less hassle, in Reggio than usual. I didn’t feel threatened in any way. Maybe they’ve got things under control, the authorities, and the criminals are on the run. Not before time. It all looked pretty normal to me, just like anywhere . . . and the birds were wonderful. I’m thinking, and I’m never afraid to admit, I’m wrong, that all this talk of organised crime, corruption, violence may be overstated. Bloody newspapers – you know what I mean. Maybe it’s a myth . . . It’s been some of the best migratory birding I’ve ever known. That’s what’s important.’

He thought of Bent climbing awkwardly into the front passenger seat of the City-Van, touching his hair because he was off to an important meeting and wanted to look his best, and shivered. He looked behind him. The man with the mouth was quiet, eating a sandwich. The heads of the two guys behind the tripod crowd were lolling. He wondered how they could sleep, after what they’d done.

Water dripped from the roof of the cave.

The wind blustered outside. The damp clawed at his skin. He sensed the waiting was over. Thunder burst around them, funnelled through the cave entrance – the storm must have edged closer. The lightning flash lit them: he saw the girl and her father – one of her arms was around her father’s shoulders and the other was at her side, the hand in her lap. The pistol was beside her but she wasn’t holding it. The cave was in darkness again, except for the light of the torch, thrown on him and hiding them.

Jago wondered how long he had sat there, with the full beam in his face, since she had put down the weapon.

He held up his own torch, the bulb and the glass facing the roof of the cave, and switched it on. It would have to compete with the flashlight that was balanced on the stone floor beside her hip. The two of them were at the very back of the cave, close to the old mattress. He thought it would have split years before, its innards used by mice and rats for their nests. He thought he had seen the chain but was sure he had spotted the bucket.

He did it slowly. Jago was not some explorer landing on a beach of what would become a French territory in the Pacific Ocean, an Australasian coast or the edge of any part of the unknown world. He didn’t need to say that he carried no weapon, had only beads and a Bible in his pocket. He thought they would have judged him because the pistol was down. He did it slowly, but with purpose. It was all about bluff. If his were called he would be shot – acceptable risk. The sort of risk that the traders lived with, not the investment analysts. The alternative? Perhaps the civil service – Environment, Food and Rural Affairs or Work and Pensions. Or industry, if he was lucky. He might open a tea room in the Cotswolds or trek off after water sources for the nomads of the sub-Saharan deserts of Africa. The torch edged across the roof of the cave and the wetness glistened. He saw more drips forming after others had fallen. His beam, fainter, came down behind them. They were where the child had been. And there was the ring. The beam wavered as he adjusted it. It caught the old man first.

Nothing special. Rather ordinary. It seemed a pasty face, not the deep colour of old stained wood. There were bags under the eyes, the lips were thin and the stubble was sparse, irregular. There was no indication of wealth and confidence, or of an old man who looked after his appearance, his health, except in the eyes. Jago thought the eyes betrayed him. They were dull. He wondered what would make the man laugh and bring a sparkle to those eyes. He had a long, hard look at the face. If he’d sat next to the man on the U-bahn or a Central Line train in London, he wouldn’t have considered him worth engaging in conversation, giving the spiel of the sales team, dropping a card into his hand. The lack of lustre in the eyes told the truth. The old man, head of his family, wouldn’t have cared if Jago Browne was dead or alive, would have stepped right over him, then forgotten him. The eyes said it.

He shifted the torch beam. She had the pistol in her hand now. Jago didn’t know whether it was cocked, whether the safety was on. She didn’t aim it. His light, poor by comparison with theirs, caught two small blemishes on her skin, one at the centre of her forehead and one on the left side of her chin. He assumed them to be blood spatters, that she had killed someone at close range and that most of the blood had soaked into her clothing, which had been burned. Her face was different from her father’s. There was life in it, and interest. A strong face, with a hint of a mocking smile. She raised the pistol. Two hands on it. He thought the searchers had gone and the helicopter was far away. He switched off his torch and lost sight of her.

Jago didn’t know whether she was playing with him, teasing or taunting him or whether she still had the aim, if a finger was against the trigger and if she had started to squeeze. The torch-light burned his eyes, and he saw nothing. The storm built to a frenzy.

He didn’t know if he would register the flash before the bullet hit him. But Jago dared to hope, and waited to be answered.

After the autumn gales and deluges, it was a hard winter in the Aspromonte. Local people, the elders in the communities, said it was the harshest in living memory. Small villages, towards the peaks, were cut off by blizzards, and several farmers lost pigs because they couldn’t feed them. But, with wonderful inevitability, spring followed the thaw, and wild flowers proved their ability to survive deep frosts. The trees sprouted blossom and foliage, the vines prospered and the olive groves showed promise of a fine harvest.

The winds from the east had been vicious and the snow had come from leaden skies across Berlin. A park near Bismarckstrasse had been carpeted, and each day the employees of a private-wealth section at a bank had struggled to get to work. There was a new favourite among the girls, a Norwegian-born young man, who had settled effortlessly into the foreign-exchange programme. Spring broke, and the crocuses were blooming in the beds in front of the iron benches in a small open space.

In autumn, winter or spring, the same criminality taxed the HMRC people working out of Dooley Terminal at the British container port of Felixstowe. Drugs came in, and the trafficking of weapons and children, for paedophiles, continued with few interruptions. Foul weather blew in off the North Sea, and those rummaging through Continental lorries and trailers were cut to the bone by the cold in the open-ended hangars. Going to work required commitment – but a driven man required no nudge. He pursued a target through days of rain, sleet and ice into the first days of the new optimism that came with the warmth.

A café where the open-air chairs and tables were bathed in strong sunshine was a good place to meet for two irregular colleagues, associates in kind. The prospect of such an occasion could be said to have sustained the pair through five and a half harsh months.