End Games - 11 (38 page)

The allegedly drunk driver had meanwhile used the one telephone call he had been allowed to make to contact the house in San Giovanni in Fiore which was the incoming conduit for Giorgio’s communications network. Shortly afterwards, Dionisio Carduzzi was observed leaving his house and walking up the long, twisting main street of the town to Via del Serpente, part of the slum area of apartment blocks built illegally in the 1970s, many of them unfinished and unoccupied and all lacking double glazing and insulation and improperly positioned to face the full blast of the Siberian winds that dragged the temperature far below zero for much of the winter. Dionisio had entered the unit that contained Silvia Fardella’s address of official record, but his visit was a short one. No sooner had he stepped back on to the street than Nicola Mantega’s mobile in Cosenza rang and a woman’s voice said, ‘Check your mailbox.’ The yob who had apparently passed out in a shady corner of the entrance hall, clutching an empty bottle of limoncello, confirmed a moment later on his encrypted mobile that Mantega had done so. What
il notaio
didn’t do was inform the police of these interesting developments, but Aurelio Zen already had a copy of the missive in question in his hands. Stripped of its many orthographical errors, it read as follows:

I KNOW WHERE YOU LIVE NICOLETTA BUT IT’S TOO RISKY COME TO THE DAM ON THE MUCONE RIVER AT EIGHT THIS IS URGENT AND I KNOW WHERE YOU LIVE

Zen smiled unpleasantly as he put the note down on his desk. Right now Nicola Mantega must be wondering how in the name of God it had come to this, running his mind back over each of the steps which had brought him to where he stood now, on the brink of a precipice, yet unable to fault himself for a single one of them. It had all made complete sense at the time, so how on earth had he ended up having to drive off after dark to a rendezvous on a remote country road up in the Sila mountains with a drug-addicted psychotic who would slit his throat if he found out what Mantega had been up to in his collaborations with the chief of police and the late Martin Nguyen, and for that matter might very well slit his throat anyway? But Mantega would go nevertheless, because he knew that if he didn’t then sooner or later Giorgio would come to him. Better to calm him down now, deny Rocco Battista’s absurd allegations and press a large bundle of banknotes into Giorgio’s hand with the promise of more to come.

So the trap was set. Springing it, though, would be a delicate and complex operation, and Zen knew that he would only get one chance. He had therefore assembled a small group of hand-picked officials. Six of them, comprising Zen himself, Natale Arnone and four of the Digos agents, who had access to high-tech kit such as night-vision goggles, were to form the unit which tailed Mantega from the rendezvous point to wherever Giorgio was in hiding. In two separate but simultaneous operations, the residences of Dionisio Carduzzi and Silvia Fardella in San Giovanni in Fiore would be raided and searched and all persons present taken into custody.

Meticulous and detailed planning was the key to a successful outcome. The raids on the two homes in San Giovanni were relatively routine interventions straight out of the standard operating manual, needing only to be co-ordinated in time with each other and whatever events occurred after Mantega’s meeting with Giorgio. It was the latter event that was the wild card in the pack. Zen spent almost an hour poring over a large-scale military map of the area with Natale Arnone and the Digos agents, working out various scenarios and planning an appropriate response, but he knew that Giorgio was both canny and crazy, an impossible combination to finesse against with any certainty of success.

Mantega had been told to come to the dam on the Mucone river at eight o’clock that evening. This dam had been constructed shortly after the war to create an artificial lake beneath the heavily wooded slopes of Monte Pettinascura, one of the tallest peaks in the Sila range at 1,700 metres, and one of the most remote. Zen’s first step was to send one of the Digos men to the spot dressed like a hiker, to be dropped off by one of his colleagues as though he had thumbed a lift. He would not be part of the operation itself. His job was to walk up on to the foothills overlooking the Lago di Cecita, observe any activity at the scene and report back by radio. It was entirely possible that Giorgio might decide to arrive early and conceal himself until Mantega got there, or that one of his associates had been told to monitor any suspicious comings and goings in that isolated zone and warn his boss off if necessary.

The convoy of vehicles that would form a box around Mantega’s Alfa were scattered around Via Piave, Viale Trieste and Piazza Matteotti by six o’clock. A Digos agent on the roof of an adjacent building was watching the private courtyard where the car was parked. The air was oppressively close and muggy down in the valley, while over the mountain range that was their destination stacked thunderheads loured and scoured the sky. A bad silence, against which the squeals and grunts and yelps of the traffic were powerless, had saturated the streets. Zen felt his energy drained and his will sapped, but there was nothing to do but wait.

In the end, Mantega did not leave the building until shortly after seven. This meant he would have to drive fast, which was good news. The vehicles and drivers at Zen’s disposal could easily keep up with anything that wasn’t airborne, and if Mantega had to keep his hands on the wheel and his eyes on the road he was that much less likely to notice that his supposedly lonely pilgrimage up into the mountains actually had more in common with the convoy enveloping the Popemobile when the Supreme Pontiff, in his infallible way, decides to pay a visit to the shrine where the cult of a miracle-working saint is celebrated. The lead man astride the MotoGuzzi played a classic hand of hiding in plain view, aggressively harrying the Alfa on the many tight bends and spectacular viaducts of the
superstrada
leading up from the river valley to the heights above, tailgating the luxury saloon with his headlamp blazing and making little darting movements that were blatantly obvious in both of Mantega’s rear-view mirrors before roaring out to overtake and vanish in the manner of motorcyclists the world over, only to slacken speed as his machine demonstrated that it had more zip than stamina on the long, steep gradients, and eventually be passed himself in turn, at which point the whole game started again.

The sweeper on the team was in the modified Ape van. His job was to ensure that the Popemobile didn’t have an alternative escort provided by Giorgio, and to take care of them in a suitably convincing manner if it did. The filling in the sandwich was provided by a vehicle that even Zen found interesting, despite not giving a toss about cars for the simple reason that the city in which he had grown up was one of the very few civilised niches on earth where they didn’t exist, any more than horses had before them. Back then, if you wanted to go riding, you had to row over to the Lido. Even now, if you wanted to go motoring you had to go to Mestre. And no one in his right mind would ever go to Mestre.

But this item of Digos equipment had caught Zen’s attention. As they proceeded up into the mountains, he elicited from the driver and his colleague, who were seated in the front, that the chassis was the military version of the Ferrari Laforza all-terrain vehicle and the engine – ironically enough, given their quarry – a specially tuned Alfa Romeo V6. There were six seats inside, as well as ample space for any extra gear, but the exterior bodywork was as near as makes no difference an exact replica of the cheap Fiat vans used by provincial tradesmen and wholesalers all over the country, to which no one ever paid the slightest attention. At the moment it was painted bright blue with yellow lettering which proclaimed that it belonged to Scatamacchia Formaggi e Salumi.

There was only one logical route for Nicola Mantega to get to his destination in time, so when they were past the summit a few kilometres from the Camigliatello exit, the MotoGuzzi put on a surprising turn of speed on the downward gradient, overtaking with some panache and surging ahead so far that it was able to take the turn-off while the Alfa was out of sight around the long bend behind. The driver swerved left and then right under the slender stone viaduct that carried the abandoned railway line across the ravine, turned off his lights, donned night-vision glasses and waited in the straggling outskirts of Camigliatello for Nicola Mantega to catch up, reporting in the meanwhile via the mouthpiece attached to his helmet.

Things almost went wrong when Mantega turned the opposite way, up into the village, to buy a packet of cigarettes and knock back a coffee. But Natale Arnone had been tracking the relative distance and direction of the transmitter attached to the Alfa, and the Laforza was able to park unobtrusively opposite a mini-market and wait for Mantega to proceed, at which point the convoy reformed. Because of this delay, it was now sixteen minutes to eight, of which it took
il notaio
another fourteen to cover the remaining stretch of twisty country road in the rapidly failing light. By the time he reached the dam, the motorcyclist had cut the power and noise of the MotoGuzzi’s engine to the absolute minimum, then turned it off and free-wheeled down a path leading to the lake which Zen had identified from the map earlier. He then ran back along the shoreline to the dam, climbed up near to the roadside and reported in when Mantega’s car came to a halt in a lay-by on the other side of the road. Once again, there was nothing to do but wait.

Two cars passed in the ensuing period of time, during which the darkness became absolute. The registration numbers of both were noted and checked against records at the Questura, but they appeared to belong to harmless local residents. No one will ever know what Mantega thought as their headlights appeared in the distance, swept across the vehicle where he sat listening to the radio and smoking cigarette after cigarette, but time in Calabria has its own rhythms which cannot be hurried. In the end he was rewarded when a black Jeep pulled up alongside the Alfa Romeo. According to the Digos agents watching the scene, the driver was a woman in her thirties or early forties, later identified as Silvia Fardella. After a brief parley, Nicola Mantega got into the Jeep, which turned right on to a steep minor road leading up into the mountains and disappeared.

This was the crunch, and it could hardly have been worse from an operational point of view. Zen had to make an instant decision which might prove disastrous. He finally ordered the motorcyclist to remount and track the Jeep as best he could. It was a risk, but Mantega might well have other preoccupations at this point and ballsy bikers were two a penny up here in the Sila high pastures. He then called off the other Digos officer on the ground and the Ape van behind and told the driver of the Laforza to proceed slowly and with due caution. Eight minutes passed before lightning freeze-framed the thickly wooded landscape and a thundercrack shook heaven and earth, followed immediately by rain that broke on the windscreen like surf, overwhelming the wipers. Aurelio Zen finally relaxed. Now, he knew, everything would go well.

Next the man on the MotoGuzzi called in to say that the Jeep had turned off the paved road and taken a dirt track leading up still more steeply into the forest. Giorgio was presumably waiting at some spot high in the wilderness above, just as Maria had predicted, and there was nothing for it but to go after him, hoping that the deafening violence of the torrential rain would force any watchers to take shelter and also cover the sound of the Laforza’s engine. The headlights could be dispensed with, thanks to the high-tech Digos toys – or so Zen assumed until on one particularly tight reverse curve of the precipitous, contorted and now seriously flooded track they unaccountably started moving sideways rather than forwards.

‘Shit!’ yelled the driver. ‘Landslip’s washed out half the road.’

The vehicle slid gently downhill for some distance before coming to rest.

‘Can you get it back on the track?’ asked Zen.

‘Maybe,’ the Digos agent replied. ‘But I’d have to use full revs and they’d be bound to hear. I say we continue on foot and hope it’s not too much further.’

Zen was aware that this was an attempt to democratise the decision-making process, but he couldn’t fault the man’s thinking.

‘
Andiamo!
’ he said decisively.

The rain had diminished slightly for the moment, but there was little comfort once outside the vehicle. One of the Digos men produced a hooded torch whose pinched beam was the only point of reference in the darkness, and the other three followed him up what was now to all intents and purposes a river-bed. It rapidly became clear to Zen that he was falling behind, and eventually he came to a halt. The others had disappeared, leaving him in the dark. He was also ludicrously dressed for the occasion, in his office clothes and smooth-soled leather shoes that were already drenched and spouting water with every step. He found his key-ring and switched on the brilliant stiletto of light attached to it. The trees to either side looked monstrous, the trunks twenty metres or more in circumference, the last remnants of the primeval forest which had covered the area for hundreds of thousands of years. There were still wild cats here, he had heard, and wolves.

Not unlike the man who had been baptised Pietro Ottavio Calopezzati, Zen started up the cruelly steep and rutted track and all things considered was making good speed when a flash of inconceivable intensity imprinted the entire surrounding landscape on his retina and the sky squealed and drummed its feet like a gutted animal. An instant later the downpour began again in the form of pebbles of hail pockmarking the molten mud ahead. Zen began running, slipped on a sheet of exposed rock and tumbled over what seemed a cliff, landing on a steep slope where he rolled over and over again before coming to rest against the trunk of one of those giant trees. The hail continued to fall deafeningly on the foliage all around, but where Zen lay the ground was covered with a deep bed of pine needles that remained dry. He heard distant gunfire – one shot, then two almost together – and got to his feet, but immediately tripped over a varicose cluster of roots. His key-ring went flying, and the miniature torch with it. There was nothing to be seen except the glittering array of stars above, each one hard, determinate and precise, but his nostrils were full of ancient odours, dense and strange, familiar and benign.