第 43 页

‘Upper lip.’ He nodded. ‘Three shots.’

Rania was looking about her, her quick gray eyes reflecting both bright sun and her heart’s dismay. ‘Please be careful. Look.’

Sachs saw what the woman indicated: in a vacant area next to the tent a half-dozen women sat on impromptu seats like tires and railway ties and water cartons, holding babies. Other children – from ages two to ten, or so – ran and laughed, lost in their improvised games.

‘Clear the area as best you can. Quietly.’

Rania nodded to Anton and he reached for his radio.

‘No,’ Sachs said fast. ‘And turn the volume off.’

Both he and Rania silenced their units and gestured to other security people. The officers did their best to shepherd people away from the tent. As soon as the officers moved on, though, the empty space filled with the curious.

Sachs glanced at them. Well within stray bullet range.

Nothing to do about it.

She asked Rania about the layout of the interior of the tent. The woman replied from memory: clothes neatly folded in cardboard boxes against the right wall, a dining area to the left. Prayer rugs rolled and put away. Three beds – one for the adults, one for their daughter, and a spare. Separated by sheet-like dividers.

Hell, good cover.

And the daughter, Muna, had a number of toys given to the family by volunteers. Rania remembered them scattered on the floor. ‘Be careful not to trip.’

‘Suitcases or trunks that someone might hide behind?’

Rania gave a sad laugh. ‘Plastic bags and backpacks are the only luggage these people bring with them.’

Sachs touched Ercole’s arm and he looked down into her eyes. She was pleased to see his own were confident, balanced. He was ready. She whispered, ‘You go right.’

‘Destra, yes.’

Drawing her pistol, Sachs held her left index finger up in the air then pointed it forward. He too drew his Beretta and then she gestured to the door and, with a nod, pushed inside, moving very quickly.

Khaled Jabril gasped and dropped his glass of tea, which bounced on the Tyvek floor, scattering the steaming contents everywhere. Sachs stepped over the toys – and the boxes they had come in – and quickly swept aside the divider sheets. He was the only occupant.

Khaled recognized Sachs, of course, but he was still groggy and disoriented from the drugs. ‘Aiiii. What is this?’

Sachs motioned Rania inside, then said to Khaled, ‘Your wife. Where is she?’

‘I don’t know. What is going on here? Is she all right?’

‘Where did she go? And when?’

‘Please tell me! I’m frightened.’

It was clear he hadn’t known about his wife’s mission when he’d been interrogated, though Fatima might have explained later. But, after Sachs gave him a synopsis of Ibrahim and Gianni’s plan of using her as an apparent terrorist, it was clear he was taken completely aback.

His initial response was a gasp of horror. But then he was nodding. ‘Yes, yes, she has not been herself. She has not been acting in a normal manner. Someone forced her to do this!’

‘Yes, probably.’ Sachs crouched across from him and said in a firm tone, ‘Still she’s going to hurt people, Khaled. Help us. We need to find her. Is she in the camp?’

‘No. She left an hour ago. She was going to be buying some things for Muna. At the shop here in the camp or maybe at one of the vendors outside. I don’t know if she said more. She might have. After my incident, after what happened to me, my mind is very, you would say, uncertain. Confused.’

‘Does she have her phone?’

‘I suppose she does.’

‘Give me the number.’

He did and Charlotte McKenzie, listening over speaker, said, ‘Got it. I’ll send it to Fort Meade, see if they can track it.’

Sachs asked the refugee, ‘Do you remember if she’d met with anyone recently? Did anyone give her anything?’

He frowned. ‘Perhaps … Let me think.’ He actually tapped his forehead. ‘Yes. She got a package. It was tea from her family.’

Rania’s stern but pretty face tightened in a grimace. ‘Yes, I remember.’

He pointed to a locker. ‘I think she put it in there.’

Ercole opened the lid and handed Sachs a brown cardboard carton.

Sachs held the box to her nose.

A sigh.

‘This too,’ Ercole said. He’d found plastic wrapping for a cheap mobile phone, but not the label that gave the phone’s number or details of the sim card; Fatima had taken that with her.

Pulling on her headset, Sachs speed-dialed a number.

‘What?’ came the abrupt response. ‘We’ve been waiting.’

‘She’s not here, Rhyme. And she got a delivery: C4, maybe Semtex. Like the others, looks like a half kilo. And another phone. For the detonator.’

Mobile phones had supplanted timers and radios as the most popular way to set off explosive devices.

‘A bomb? Are we the target here?’ Rania asked Sachs in a grim voice.

Those in the Questura had heard and, after a brief discussion, Rhyme answered, ‘No, very unlikely. The whole point of the plot is to sabotage the immigration legislation in Parliament. That means Italian citizens have to be hurt, not refugees.’

Khaled found his own mobile and asked, ‘Should I call her? Try to talk her out of this madness?’

Rhyme and Spiro, she could hear, were debating this.

But McKenzie came on the line. ‘Never mind. Meade says it’s dead. They’ll keep monitoring but I’ll bet she tossed it.’ Then the woman said, ‘Wait. They’ve got something.’ There was a pause and Sachs could hear computer keyboard clatter. ‘This could be good. The NSA bot just logged a call to the coffeehouse in Tripoli from a burner mobile in Naples that was just activated this morning. It’s still live.’

‘Gianni?’ Sachs asked.

Rossi said, ‘If we are lucky. Where is it?’

McKenzie called out longitude and latitude, and a moment later, after some keyboarding, the police inspector said, ‘At the Royal Palace. Downtown Naples. I’m sending a team there now.’

CHAPTER 61

Luigi Procopio, for this job known also as ‘Gianni,’ was presently leaning against his car parked on the edge of the plaza in front of the Royal Palace of Naples, the massive and impressive structure that had once been home to the Bourbon kings, when they were rulers of the Two Kingdoms of Sicily, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Procopio loved his Italian history.

Procopio came from the Catanzaro district of Calabria, a region south of Campania.

Calabria is the very tip of the boot of Italy. This region is known for its fiery pork paste, stoccafisso dried cod and many types of preserved foods, owing to the hot climate, which traditionally meant that meats and seafood should be cured to avoid spoiling.

Calabria is known too for the ’Ndràngheta, the famed organized crime outfit. The name ‘’Ndràngheta’ means ‘loyalty,’ and it was a well-known fact that the six thousand members of the organization were true to their comrades, who made up the 150 or so small cells within Italy. But that didn’t mean that members might not strike out on their own – they could, and did, as long as no conflicts of interest existed.

This was especially the case when the member was affiliated not with a crew in Calabria itself but with one of the satellite operations, such as those in the UK or the United States. The ’Ndràngheta had, in fact, been active in East Coast criminal activity for more than a hundred years. A gang in Pennsylvania mining country had extortion and protection rackets in the early 1900s, and the organization had been involved for years in US drug and money-laundering operations, often working with transplanted members of the Mafia and Camorra, as well as local Anglo and Caribbean gangs. (Senior ’Ndràngheta officials in America were reportedly angered by The Godfather, as they felt the Mafia was far less glamorous and clever and ruthless than they were.)

Big, dark, hairy and intimidating, Luigi Procopio was one such freelance operator. His good language skills, military and trade union contacts, and willingness to do whatever he needed to had let him carve out a specialty as a middleman, putting together deals among interests in southern Italy, North Africa, Europe and the United States.

His instinct let him walk the delicate high-wire between self-interest and the ’Ndràngheta’s, and he’d become successful.

Anywhere there was money to be made, Procopio had a presence: the old standbys, of course, arms, drugs and human trafficking, as well as newer twenty-first-century markets.

Say, terrorism, for instance.

He had just called Ibrahim at the Happy Day coffeehouse in Tripoli to update him on the developments here in Naples, and was now smoking and looking over the massive square.

Glancing up the street he happened to see black vans and marked police cars speeding his way. Lights were flashing but the vehicles’ sirens were silent.

Close, closer …

Then the entourage zipped past him, not a single driver or passenger looking his way.

Instead, the law enforcers sped across the square and skidded to a stop in a semicircle around a trash container. They jumped out, highly armed men and women, and scanned about them for their target.

Which was, of course, him.

Or, to be more accurate, the mobile phone on which he’d just called Ibrahim. Procopio had left the phone live in a paper bag at the foot of the trash bin. A young Police of State officer carefully examined the container – a bomb was a possibility under the circumstances – and then found the phone. He held it up. One officer, apparently the commander, shook his head, undoubtedly in disappointment, if not disgust. Other officers looked at nearby buildings, surely for CCTV cameras. But there were none. Procopio had made sure of that before leaving the bait phone.

He now stubbed out his cigarette. He had learned all he needed to. This, in fact, was the entire point of the call to Tripoli. He needed to see just how far along the police had come in their investigation.

So. They knew about Ibrahim’s existence, if not his name, and that there was an operative here. And they were scanning the landline and mobiles.

It would be total phone silence for the time being.

He settled into the car’s comfortable seat and started the engine. He wanted to find a café and enjoy another cigarette, along with an aperitivo of a nice Cirò red wine, and some hard, dried Calabrian salami and bread.

But that would have to wait.

Until after the bloodshed.

CHAPTER 62

The street was colorful.

Some tourists, but also many people who seemed to be true Neapolitans – families, women with strollers, children on bicycles … and preteens and teen, boys and girls. They strutted and shied and revealed themselves, wearing proud boots and bold running shoes and high heels and patterned tights and languid shirts, and they displayed, with understated pride, their latest: necklaces and clever purses and anklets and eyeglasses and rings and ironic mobile phone covers.

The flirts seemed harmless and charming, the youngsters innocent as preening kittens.

Oh, and the view: beautiful. Vesuvius ahead in the distance, the docks and massive ships. The bay, rich blue.

But Fatima Jabril paid little attention to any of this.

Her focus was on her mission.

And pushing the baby carriage with care.

‘Ah, che bellezza!’ the woman of a couple, herself pregnant, cried. And, smiling, she said something more. Seeing that the Italian language wasn’t working, she tried English. ‘Your daughter!’ The woman looked down into the carriage. ‘She is having the hair of an angel! Look, those beautiful black curls!’ Then, noting the hijab her mother wore, she paused, perhaps wondering if Muslims believed in angels.

Fatima Jabril understood the gist. She smiled and said an awkward, ‘Grazie tante.’

The woman cast another look down. ‘And she sleeps so well, even here, the noise.’

Fatima continued on hiking the back-pack higher on her shoulder. Moving slowly.

Because of the crowds.

Because of her reluctance to kill.

Because of the bomb in the carriage.

How has my life come to this?

Well, she could recall quite clearly the answer to that question. She’d replayed it every night falling asleep, every morning rising to wakefulness.

That day some weeks ago …

She remembered being pulled off the street in Tripoli by two surly men – who had no trouble touching a Muslim woman not a relation. Terrified and sobbing, she had been bundled off to the back room of a coffeehouse off Martyrs’ Square. She was pushed into a chair and told to wait. The shop was called Happy Day. An irony that brought tears to her eyes.

An hour later, a horrific hour later, the curtain was flung aside and in walked a sullen, bearded man of about forty. He identified himself as Ibrahim. He looked her over stonily and handed her a tissue. She dried her eyes and flung it back at his face. He smiled at that.

In Libyan-inflected Arabic, a high voice, he had said, ‘Let me explain why you are here and what is about to happen to you. I am going to recruit you for a mission. Ah, ah, let me finish.’ He called for tea and almost instantly it arrived, carried by the shopkeeper, whose hands trembled as he’d set out the cups. Ibrahim waited until the man left, then continued, ‘We have selected you for several reasons. First, because you are not on any watch lists. Indeed, you are what we call an Invisible Believer. That is, you are to our faith what a Unitarian might be to Christianity. Do you know what Unitarian is?’

Fatima, though familiar with much Western culture, was not aware of the sect. ‘No.’

Ibrahim said, ‘Suffice to say moderate. Hence, to the armies and the security services of the West you are invisible. You can cross borders and get to targets and not be regarded as a threat.’

Targets, she thought in horror. Her hands quivered.

‘You will be assigned a target in Italy and you will carry out an attack.’

She gasped, and refused the tea Ibrahim offered. He sipped, clearly relishing the beverage.

‘Now we come to the second reason you have been selected. You have family in Tunisia and Libya. Three sisters, two brothers, all of whom, praise be to God, have been blessed with children. Your mother too is still upon this earth. We know where they live. You will fulfill your obligation to us, complete these attacks, or they will be killed – every family member of yours from six-month-old Mohammed to your mother, as she returns from the market on the arm of her friend Sonja, who will die too, I should say.’

‘No, no, no …’

Ignoring the emotion completely, Ibrahim whispered, ‘And now we come to the third reason you will help us in this mission. Upon completion of the assignment, you – and your husband and daughter – will be given new identities and a large sum of money. You will get British or Dutch passports and can move where you wish. What do you say?’

The only word she could.

‘Yes.’ Sobbing.

Ibrahim smiled and finished the tea. ‘You and your family will travel to Italy as refugees. A smuggler I work with will give you details tonight. Once you arrive, you will be taken to a refugee camp for processing. A man named Gianni will contact you.’