Killing Ground (8 page)

He dialled the number, he threw the switch that activated the scrambler.

Isolato, isolated, was a cruel word for the captain of carabineri. His daughter was growing up in Bologna. He was isolated from her, saw her twice a year at best, three days at a time, and spoke briefly on the telephone each Sunday evening. That was isolation. But it was the general who had taught him the true meaning of the word isolato. The general, hero of the counter-terrorist campaign against the Brigate Rosse, prefect of Palermo, had been ridiculed, sneered at, whispered of, isolated and shot to death thirty-eight days after Giovanni Crespo had joined his staff as liaison officer.

They were all isolated, all the condemned men, before the gunfire or the bomb. To stay alive, living and breathing and fucking and drinking, he thought it most necessary to recognize isolation.

His call was to an unlisted number in Rome, a quiet side-street office on the Via Sardegna, to the desk of the DEA's Country Chief.

"Vanni here. Go secure, Bill.'

He was asked to wait out. He heard the clicked interruption on the line. The voice was fainter, with metallic distortion. He was told he could speak.

'Just wanted to know how my friend was, whether my friend had optimism . . .'

He was told the young woman was 'OK, nothing special'. He was told she was

'predictable' and that she had taken time 'to think on it'.

'You know, Bill, we don't even have a name for this. It is ridiculous, but we don't even have a name. So, we don't have a file, that's good, and we don't have computer space, that's better, but we should have a code name, do you not think?'

Giovanni Crespo, aged forty-two, captain of carabineri, member of the specialist Reparto Operativo Speciale team tasked with securing the arrest of Mario Ruggerio, would never speak a confidence even on a line scrambled with state-of-the-art electronics. On the island he trusted no man. In his life he trusted only one man. He had taken the letter posted by Angela Ruggerio, sister-in-law of Mario Ruggerio, to Rome and to the one man he trusted. The detail of the matter was not shared with his own people, for lack of trust of his own people. He had taken the detail of the matter, the link, to Ins friend.

He was asked what he thought.

I 'Helen. Helen of Troy. Bill, when all else failed, in Italian we would say uccello da richiamo, I think your word is "decoy", yes? The decoy behind the walls. The way through the gate. Codename Helen, for when we talk, Bill. But, Bill, it is to be kept close.'

II It was authorized in Washington. Herb had authorized it. Yes, he knew Herb. He was told it should be kept closer than a choirboy's 'sphincter, and the Country Chief's laugh rang in his ear, pealing as if from inside a box of metal.

'Is that dirty talk, Bill? Hey, but, Bill, we keep this close. You call in. when you have something, something on Codename Helen. It's bad here at the moment, so quiet. There is nothing to touch, nothing to feel, nothing to see. When it is quiet, then I have the anxiety. You tell him, he gives the Codename Helen a good kicking because I need her here, just tell him.'

The one man that he trusted, that Giovanni Crespo would give his life to, was Axel Moen.

'Bill, he is moving, climbing. Did you see that a bad bastard from Agrigento went missing? Old style, old school, so conflict was inevitable It is the lupara bianca, the disappearance. Between him and the top place, where he will try to be, is only the Catania man, that's what we hear. If he gets to the top place, our friend, then there is a time of maximum danger, perhaps for many people, when he would seek to prove himself. Bill, I have a big anxiety. The only way for our friend to prove himself is to kill

. . .'

When she pushed her scooter out of the lean-to shed and buttoned her anorak and slipped on her helmet, she saw him look up and wipe the windscreen, and she saw him start to manoeuvre the car. She thought of the young mother, the addict, in Intensive Care.

They were the ragazzi, the kids, the boys. Though the magistrate called them, always, the ragazzi, three of them were aged over forty, and one was two years off a fiftieth birthday. The fifth, Pasquale, was the only one of the ragazzi still clinging to youth. The party, orange juice and a cake, was in the kitchen. The kitchen was for cooking and doubled as the communications room and rest area for them.

In the depths of the apartment, away from the closed door of the kitchen, a telephone rang.

It was as good a party as was possible on orange juice and chocolate cake. No alcohol. No alcohol was allowed on duty, nor for five hours before starting duty.

Chocolate cake was permitted, and orange juice. The baby, Pasquale's first, had been born in the small hours of the morning and he had come straight from the hospital to start his duty. And they larked and fooled like kids and boys and there was spilled juice on the floor and broken cake on the table, and the birth of a baby and the pride of a father were celebrated. He had bought the cake himself, and the juice. If he had been a part of them, truly a member of the team, then they would have collected among themselves and bought the cake and the juice. He was too young, too recent, to have been wholly accepted, and his work was under continuous probationer assessment. It could have been that they resented his youth, there were some on the qualification course who said that the reflexes of a younger man were sharper than those of older men . . . He tried to be a part of the team.

The telephone no longer rang.

And those who had three children and four children and two children, and the maresciallo who was the oldest and had teenagers, competed with the horror stories of parenthood to bludgeon Pasquale. The black execution humour of his fellows played, mocking, around Pasquale's ears, the tales of the sleepless nights and the changing of shit-filled diapers and vomited food and a swallowed I/D card and the little hands that climbed a chair to produce the condom packet from the bathroom cupboard that was displayed to grandparents, and . . .

The laughter died. They heard, all of them, the footfall beyond the kitchen door.

All faced the door, like ragazzi, like kids and boys caught in a moment of guilt. He seemed with his eyes to apologize, as if he deeply regretted the intrusion into his own kitchen, into their communications room and rest room. They had started the party, opened the orange juice, cut the cake, because he had told them he was not returning that evening to the Palazzo di Giustizia, now lie shrugged in his self-effacing way and brushed the greying hair back off his forehead and muttered that he must return to his bunker office. He held his briefcase in his hand and his raincoat was draped on his shoulders.

There was the snap of the maresciallo's radio, to alert the military In the street.

Crumbs were brushed off a Beretta M-12S 9mm pistol, juice was shaken from the barrel of a Heckler & Koch MP-5 machine gun. The vests of kevlar plates, proof against small-arms fire and light shrapnel, were heaved up from the floor beside the oven by Pasquale, one for each man.

There was the clatter of the weapons being armed.

Left in the kitchen, debris on the table, half-drunk glasses of juice, half-eaten slices of chocolate cake.

They went out of the apartment and towards the door. The woman who lived across the hallway scowled, and the bodyguards gave her the eye and the finger because she had twice written to in newspapers to complain of the danger in which she was placed by lliving in proximity to Dr Rocco Tardelli. They went fast down two flights of stairs, in front of him, beside him, behind him. He was a small figure, hemmed in between them, skipping to keep pace. They iwere not his servants, nor his messengers, nor his cooks, they would never be his true friends. They had not volunteered to protect his life, but been given the assignment.

Out on the street the soldiers shrieked their whistles for the traffic to halt at the far junctions. Two of them were out of the main lobby and into the cars and hacking the engines. Guns drawn, the maresciallo in front of him, Pasquale behind him, the magistrate was bustled to the open door of his armoured Alfa. As if he were pitched inside, as if he were a parcel to be despatched ... The sirens blasted. The tyres screamed.

The Alfa and the chase car hit the first junction and swerved right, scattered the cars and scooters ahead. They were not the servants or the cooks of Dr Rocco Tardelli, nor were they his true friends, but each of them in his differing way felt a fierce loyalty to the small man low on the back seat of the Alfa who struggled, through his heavy horn-rimmed spectacles, to read a file as the car bucked, braked, accelerated and weaved. The other teams, those assigned to other investigating magistrates, regarded them with pity. They were the escort of the magistrate who worked stubbornly and persistently towards the capture and conviction of Mario Emanuele Ruggerio. They were the ragazzi of a 'walking corpse'.

A tremor of a voice from the back of the Alfa. 'I understand you are to be congratulated, Pasquale. Is the baby well, is your wife well?'

His mind churning the procedures of 'cover and evacuate' and 'defensive of life only'

shooting patterns and 'fight or flight' mode, Pasquale muttered, 'Very well, thank you, Dr Tardelli.'

'You will be leaving me?'

'No, Dr Tardelli.'

'Because you now have a baby?'

'Please, Dr Tardelli, you distract me . . .'

When she pushed the scooter up the drive and parked it in front of the garage doors and took off her helmet and shrugged her hair free, she saw him slowing in his car. She thought of the baby of seventeen days, hooked to tubes, shivering in a glass box.

'Did you read the man's file?'

'I did.'

'Did you like what you read?'

'Not particularly, if you need to know.'

The Country Chief, Ray, stood at the partition wall that blocked off Dwight Smythe's work area from the open-plan office. He had been a guest observer the whole of the day at a symposium organized by the British Home Office to talk through international co-operation on organized crime - and the day had been crap, the papers read before lunch by a Russian and a Spaniard and the paper read after the buffet by a Brit from the National Criminal Intelligence Service had been shit. The papers had been a recitation of seizure statistics and arrest statistics and asset-confiscation statistics, and he'd reckoned them garbage. The papers were garbage because they did not go to the core problem of taking out t lie men who mattered, the men who made it happen.

Complacency was a crime in the Country Chief's Bible, and that day there had been more complacency on show than food on the buffet table. He envied Axel Moen, didn't reckon Axel Moen suffered too many symposiums.

'You want to go work in La Paz, Bolivia?'

'No.'

' He did. You want to get yourself into firelights where they need body bags afterwards?'

'No.'

' He did. You want to lift a bad man in Miami, testify to a Grand hiry, find out then that there's a video of you going into court and that the Cali people, the cartel guys, have the video and have your lace?'

'No.'

'You want to wear a Smith & Wesson, you want to look over your shoulder, you want to go to Palermo?'

'No, no, no.'

He could be affable, the Country Chief, Ray. He could tell a good lory at the Christmas party. He could charm the asses off the inspection teams. He could make a sour-minded man smile. He was affable when he cared to be. His voice had a crunch, trodden-down hosted gravel.

'You don't want it, Dwight, so keep your bad-mouthing to yourself.'

'What I'm saying—'

'Don't.'

'You goddam hear me, Ray. What I'm saying, we are professionals and we are trained and we are paid. The young woman that he's got his hooks into - hear me, because I didn't just take time on the computer for Moen's file, I went into current assessments of La Cosa Nostra, down in Sicily, that's a killing ground - the young woman is an innocent.'

The Country Chief, a moment, softened. 'Maybe, Dwight, you sell us all short, maybe we're all thinking like you. And maybe we should all clap our hands and sing our hymns and get on our knees and thank our God that He didn't give us the problem. Have you got the budget figures for last month? Trouble is, it's a good plan. Might not, but might just get to work. Bring the budget through, please.'

When she looked from the window, she saw him lying back, eyes closed, in his car. She thought of the grief of a retired major and how he would writhe in self-guilt. She thought of the body on the trolley.

Anyone who knew her or worked with her would have described Mavis Finch as a difficult person. Her family was up north, she had no friends in London, there was no one who would have shouted her corner. Those who lived in the same block of two- and one-bedroom maisonettes in a south-west suburb of the capital would have spoken, if asked, of Mavis Finch's complaint flow about the noise of their televisions, about their pets, about their litter, about late visitors. Those who worked with her in the bank in the Fulham Road would have spoken, if asked, of Mavis Finch's carping criticism of balance sheets produced late, of account errors, of extended lunch hours, of days taken for minor illness. She was unloved and unliked by both neighbours and work colleagues. To the more charitable she was someone to be pitied, to the less charitable she was a vindictive bitch. But the life of this lonely thirty-seven-year-old woman, without a man or a child or a friend or a hobby, was governed by a rule book. The rule book laid down the volume of her neighbours' televisions, what pets could be kept, when their litter should be put out, up to what time visitors were permitted to come banging on doors . . .

It was because of the needle eye of Mavis Finch for the pages of her rule book that Detective Sergeant Harry Compton, S06, took an early dinner in the hotel fronting onto Portman Square. Her rule book for conduct in the bank on the Fulham Road extended beyond matters of lateness, delays, mistakes, sickness. Regarded by her managers as best kept distant from customers, it had been, the previous June, a combination of holidays and pregnancies and sickness that had forced them to detail Mavis Finch to counter work. It was because she had been at the counter, mid-morning, nine months before, that DS Compton, Fraud Squad, toyed with a cod mornay in the dining room of a five-star hotel. Probably, Mavis I inch, that long-ago morning, would have been alone among the counter clerks in having read in full the texts of the Drugs Trafficking Act (1984), the Criminal Justice Acts (1988 and 1993) and the Drugs Trafficking Offences Act (1994). The Acts, taken in lotality, made it obligatory for a bank to disclose