White Shotgun (41 page)

Nicosa takes the boy into his arms. Giovanni sobs against his shoulder.

“I thought you didn’t love me.”

Nicosa’s fingers grip his son’s hair. “What insanity is that?”

Ruthless and lawless as the mafias are, in a weird way, they are the only ones to depend on in a world of betrayals. I am sorry—sorrier and sadder than I can express at that moment in the abbey kitchen—that Cecilia, her husband, and their son became so isolated and distrustful, they turned to the enemy instead of to each other. That’s the insanity.

“I thought they took Mama for a hostage because if they took me, you would not pay the ransom.”

“I love you.” Nicosa rocks him.
“Ti voglio bène, ti voglio bène, non era mai qualunque domanda.”
He looks over the boy’s head at Dennis. “Now you see my humiliation.”

“Dennis?” I say. “Can we talk?”

We walk outside to the courtyard.

“We need time. We’re on the verge of getting Cecilia back. Can you keep Nicosa under house arrest? Thirty-six hours is all I ask.”

Rizzio scans the open gate and unprotected boundaries of the abbey.

“Security will be a bitch.”

“Put him in the tower.”

Dennis smiles at the thought. “You know this whole thing started because of an egg fight?”

“You lost me.”

“The massacre in London. Your photo popping up on the bad guys’ network. Even your sister’s abduction. I’m serious, there was an egg fight in Calabria between two clans of ’Ndrangheta—the Ippolitos and the Barbettis—that has resulted in over a dozen murders that we know of.”

“How does it tie in to London?”

“It was a birthday party for the Ippolito family. That’s why they targeted the restaurant. We traced the cell phone calls to the shooters from Calabria. The calls originated from leaders of the Barbetti clan in a town called San Luca, where family feuds go on for decades. This one started out at one of these little carnivals, with kids throwing eggs. The enemy comes back throwing fireworks. Now two young men are dead, and the revenge killings commence—over twenty years and three countries, including a shoot-out in Germany where four people are killed. The Ippolitos left to escape the warfare, but it followed them to London.”

“Who tipped off the Barbettis?”

“We think it was Martin Barbetti, the owner of the restaurant,” Dennis says, a pained expression crossing his face.

“But?”

“But we can’t find him. He disappeared.”

Poor fawning, obedient Martin. He will never be found, unless someone initiates a sweep of the English countryside for tanks of lye. I pick up my rucksack with a questioning look at the FBI legat.

“Tell me when it’s over,” Dennis says. “Just don’t get caught.”

THIRTY-EIGHT

Somewhere on the southern coast of France, a Volkswagen hatchback is stolen. Later that night it will arrive in Siena, driven by a young Serbian woman operative whose combat name is Delilah.

Over the next few hours, the Oryx team will continue to infiltrate Italy, entering the country by different routes. This is to avoid being tagged by the mafia rats who have day jobs as customs agents. As a further precaution, the team will never be together at the same time and place. Being former military, they are trained in exactitude; once the whistle blows, it is as if their body clocks are locked into synch. At 11:48 p.m., when Delilah makes initial contact with Zabrina at the wine bar, the former Special Forces explosives expert, combat name Ripper, who lent us the flat in London, is touching down at Reggio di Calabria airport, at the very tip of the mainland.

The trickiest part was finding an operative who could pose as a drug addict friend of Zabrina’s. Atlas decided she should be young and female, and came up with the Serbian woman who stole the Volkswagen, who has been through so many wars she can sleep during a gun battle. Her task is to have Zabrina vouch for her so that she can gain entry to the apartment. Once inside, she will locate Cecilia and transmit that information to Sterling, who will oversee the operation from a mobile command center.

Zabrina is the wild card, as Delilah discovered the first time they met, at the wine bar in the Medici fortress. We needed them to be seen together by witnesses who could verify that the two are tight. When Delilah showed up she said in English, “I just got in from Florence,” and Zabrina responded correctly: “I love Florence.” While she poured wine, Delilah chilled at the bar. Later, they danced with some Brits who were high on amphetamines, boasting about having dropped “the world’s strongest legal party pill.” The club lights flashed, music pounded, and Zabrina disappeared with the English boys. Delilah spent the night in the Volkswagen, searching for her new best friend, who had ended up in Quinciano, eighteen kilometers away. The pills
were
legal in England—if you happened to be a veterinarian. They contained an anti-worming drug used on animals. “Blew my head off,” Zabrina explained.

We wanted to believe Zabrina was trainable. She seemed to enjoy playacting; it appealed to her exaggerated sense of self. We ran through techniques I learned at the FBI Academy—role-plays, in which Sterling was the Puppet. When he grabbed her forcefully, shouting, “Who is this new little piggy, and why should I let her in?” Zabrina forgot it was an exercise and started to cry. Another time she wanted to know when we would give her a gun. Wasn’t she supposed to shoot the Puppet?

Sterling reported to Atlas that the girl was too unstable to carry a mission in which the lives of both the victim and Oryx employees were at risk. We considered ditching the entire approach and going back to all-out tactical, but then her cousin, Fat Pasquale, texted to say a new shipment of cocaine was in. The timing was right. Atlas decided we were “green to go,” but insisted that we stick to the plan and play it inside the apartment. If we tried an assault in the tightly packed complex, we could not contain the danger to civilians. He assigned Chris as backup firepower. Working with a stopwatch, we calculated that all we needed from Zabrina was thirty seconds of rationality.

From that time on, Delilah stuck close—did not even allow Zabrina to go to the bathroom alone—and kept her clean and sober, except for a couple of Percodan for abdominal pain, until they got into the Volkswagen for the drive to Calabria. I hopped a commercial flight to Reggio di Calabria. Sterling and Chris had already left Siena in the mobile command unit—a van outfitted with tactical video allowing them to see several actions taking place at once; a Cougarnet communication system working on an encrypted FM signal; weapons; cash; phony passports; changes of clothes; ammunition; medical pack.

• • •

Immediately on arrival there is an obstacle. When Zabrina and Delilah, covertly trailed by Chris, reach Little City and cross the bridge to the far sector, they are stopped by a rambunctious block party taking place in the courtyard between two divisions of the housing unit. Several hundred people in undershirts, shorts, housedresses, and bathing suits are carrying on—grilling food, drinking, dancing, and fighting. Children are running wild. When Zabrina and Deliah appear, a silent alarm seems to ripple through the population; heads turn and eyes slide their way as they continue to the apartment.

Little kids scramble over junkies stoned out on the steps; an encouraging sign that it is business as usual, until they discover that Fat Pasquale isn’t there. At the store? Out murdering someone? Who knows? Lounging on the folding chair, keeping watch over who is permitted to enter the pharmaceutical lab, is a different obese guy, wearing a bandanna around his head and slicing a cantaloupe into quarters on top of a cooler with a very big knife. Zabrina explains in southern dialect that she is Fat Pasquale’s cousin. He looks at Delilah—big-boned, big-chested. Sunglasses perched on a baseball cap; bushy black ponytail. Fake plastic Louis Vuitton rucksack. Almond eyes. Inviting smile. Skintight jeans.

“Who is this?”

“A friend from the university.”

“You vouch for her?”

“I vouch for her.”

Without getting up, a wedge of cantaloupe stuck in his mouth like an obscene grin, he sticks a foot out and pries the door open with dirty toes.

“Bullrider, we’re at yellow,” Delilah murmurs into the transmitter under the cap, meaning they’re at the last position of cover and concealment. The last point at which they could still turn around and nobody would know they were here.

The kitchen may be exactly as Zabrina described it—the tulip tiles, the sink where the woman chopped tomatoes—but the Puppet is not at the table. Instead there is another joker fooling with the white powder and syringes, and a terrified
porcino
who gets up and runs. The dealer reaches for a shotgun propped against a chair. Delilah assassinates him with a single shot from a silencer-equipped Beretta. She draws a weapon from a hidden compartment in the rucksack, pulling on infrared goggles, moving down the hall, trusting that Chris, thirty seconds behind them, has taken out the guy with the cantaloupe.

Just like in the shoot house, the first one in is always right. Delilah, in the lead, saves the
porcino
’s life by shoving him into the bathroom and shouting for him to get down and shut up. Then she is at the locked bedroom door, behind which the infrared image shows a human figure.

“Bullrider, I see the hostage!” Delilah says. “What is the order?”

“Move to green and execute,” Sterling answers from the command unit in the van.

Chris sets a charge and they blow the door to Cecilia’s room.

Sterling, parked a block from Little City, copies Delilah’s report that they have breeched, and conveys the order to execute to two other operatives who are stationed in a warehouse several miles away, where a light helicopter has been standing off—the team having agreed at the training run in England that airlifting the victim to safety was the best way to get her out. The warehouse doors open, and the little bird rolls out on skids, rotors already turning. Within fifteen seconds it is airborne.

At the same time, Ripper, who has been enjoying a
panino
in a café across from the van, leaves the table and ambles toward an alley, where he punches a number on a cell phone. As he passes, a small box clamped to a gas line fizzles and explodes with an unremarkable
pop
.

Delilah and Chris rush the bedroom, finding Cecilia curled up in a corner, shivering like a dog, her arms covering her head. They pull her to her feet and say the prearranged words:

“Nicoli Nicosa sent us. We’re going to get you out.”

Cecilia’s face screws up and she makes sounds. She is trying to cooperate but can hardly walk. Chris lifts her onto his shoulder.

“We’re in control of the hostage and coming out,” Delilah reports as they exit the front door of the apartment.

Here there was always a problem. We could figure no way
out
of the apartment except the way they came
in
—but there would be no time to check whether the planned escape route was clear. Despite our misgivings, that job had to be done by Zabrina. As soon as Chris defeated the lookouts, she was to exit the apartment, turn right, enter a dead-end hallway, and open the door to the roof.

Chris and Delilah get through the front door of the apartment with twenty seconds to make it to the point of contact with the helicopter—past tenants and junkies potentially clogging the second-floor walkway. But these people have witnessed too many mafia shootings to hang around and gawk. When they see the man with the bloody melon rind smile slumped in the chair, and hear sirens from the gas explosion, they scatter.

Farther down, Zabrina is faithfully at her post, holding the door to the roof. Chris lopes up the steps with Cecilia draped around his neck in a fireman’s carry. All three break out of the stairwell to the roof and open sky as the helicopter appears and stabilizes.

Chris lowers Cecilia to her feet. In the whirlwind of debris she sees the figure of Zabrina in the midst of the pandemonium—a hopeless drug addict, who somehow, impossibly, miraculously, came back to this hellhole to save her.

An operative is lowered on a rope. There is a harness at the end. Cecilia sags against Delilah as they force her legs into the straps.

“Her too!” she murmurs.

Zabrina, stunned by the noise and impact, tries to hold her long hair back from whipping painfully across her eyes. Voiceless in the earsplitting drone, Cecilia struggles and reaches toward the girl.

“Take her! She’s coming, too!”

Chris shouts, “Don’t worry, we’ll take care of her.”

They muscle Cecilia into the harness and buckle it. The operative places his body over hers.

“No! Wait!”

“You’re safe! I’ve got you!” he shouts as the chopper lifts and banks away with the two of them still dangling.

Zabrina watches as they’re dragged across the sky. Delilah remembers her wide-eyed stare of awe, met by Cecilia’s downward look of anguish. Without hesitating, the two Oryx operatives were already securing a rope to an iron stanchion they’d identified on Google Earth, and tossed it over the side of the roof. It will be easy to rappel down and become lost in the confusion created by the gas line explosion. Delilah is already over the top. Chris is calling to Zabrina to get her ass over there, when the roof door bangs open and Fat Pasquale lumbers out, followed by a dozen half-grown boys who spring ahead like wolves.