The Italian Mission (25 page)

“How far to Palermo?” Conti asked.

The young man glanced over to Eyepatch, who nodded, before answering. “A little more than a hundred kilometers — twenty-five on the back roads, the rest on the highway. Two hours if we don’t have traffic.”

“Shit!” Eyepatch exploded as the road wove through a dense grove of trees alongside a stream. The car screeched to a halt. A large laurel tree stretched across the road. “You’ll have to move it.”

“Me? That thing weighs a ton and I don’t have a saw. I have a small hatchet in the trunk, but you’ll have to help me.”

Conti shook himself alert. A subconscious alarm, honed by years of negotiating sketchy roadblocks, echoed inside his skull. He sat up and scrutinized the tree lying across the road, one branch at a time. Something moved in the shadows. The glint of a rifle barrel.

He dived across the back seat, pulled the sleeping Lama down and lay on top of him. He yelled at the top of his lungs, “Down! Everybody down!”

The words had barely left his lips when a shock wave of automatic weapons fire hit the car, blasting the windshield and back window into flying shards.

40.

Jill sat in the lounge of Palermo Airport sipping a cappuccino and tapping her foot nervously on the tile floor. She’d already wasted ten minutes waiting for her CIA contact to show up. Finally, she called Mobley.

“Yes?” Whenever possible, he answered his secure number immediately — the rare politician who appreciated the importance of time in intelligence operations.

“Nobody’s here yet. Where’s my support? Conti could be lying in a field bleeding somewhere.”

“Calm down. They’re on the way. Should be there in five.”

“Good. Any news?”

“Things aren’t getting any better in Tibet. Chinese troop train within fifty miles of the capital. Crowds massing in the streets. Someone’s handing out guns to the locals. WWII Red Army rifles from a storage depot they broke into. The Ambassador tells me they’re more likely to blow up the shooter than anyone else.”

“More and more bizarre,” Jill said. “And the Chinese still don’t have a clue who’s behind it all?”

“Nope. They know the NSC had its fingerprints on it at one time, but I’ve convinced them we’ve shut that down. As to who is running the operation now, they’re as much in the dark as we are.”

“Well, only one way to find out, isn’t there? When I find Conti and the Lama, I’m bound to run into the bad guys again. If I can ever get the hell out of this airport.”

“I told you they’d be there in a minute,” Mobley said. “And they should have a good line on the location of the crash. The Italians tracked the plane until it dropped down between the mountains. The Chinese are also sending a team.”

“You want me to hook up with them?”

“No. The Ambassador swears they want to take the Lama alive, but I don’t completely trust them. They won’t want to risk another escape. You need get there first, find Conti and the Lama, bring them back to our office in Palermo ASAP and call me. Hopefully, they’re O.K.”

“God willing,” Jill muttered under her breath, as she watched an American in khakis and a polo shirt weave through the growing crowd in the lounge toward her.

“Ms. Burnham?” A good-looking, dusky young man — no more than thirty, Jill thought — sporting a purple Izod shirt and a buzz cut reached out a large hand at the end of a heavily muscled arm. “Lad Rodriguez. Sorry I’m late. We’ve been going over the data with the air traffic control people.”

Jill took his hand, bracing herself for a possibly crushing grip. It never came. Lad held her hand as though it were a baby bird. “Are you alone?”

“No, one other guy — an Italian contractor. Special ops expert. He’s got the car out front so we can get a fast start. The crash, um, landing site is about an hour and a half from here. If we don’t mind drawing attention to ourselves, we can get an escort and do it in an hour.”

“No, no escort, no attention. Let’s get going. We can talk while we walk. We’re not the only ones searching for these folks. Lad Rodriguez? I’ve seen you around Langley, but the name doesn’t ring a bell.”

As they hurried through the airport lounge, he said, “Real name’s LaDarius Washington. Can’t use it overseas though. Even in Italy, apparently, there are fans of Northwestern football. The management didn’t want me in the field because I was too well known. I made such a nuisance of myself they finally gave in, but they insisted on the name change. Couldn’t bear sitting behind a desk.” Lad caught himself. “Sorry, didn’t mean to …”

“No need to apologize. Not everyone can be licensed to kill. I’ll be happy to get back to my office in one piece. Which one’s our car?”

An hour later, they bounced around in the back seat of an Alpha Giulietta as it sped along the twisting mountain roads of central Sicily.

“Corleone,” Jill said, reading a road sign. “Is that …?”

“The one and only. Francis Ford Coppola was the best thing that ever happened to the place. Now it’s a vacation destination for Americans. You can get some tacky stuff there — Marlon Brando t-shirts, pistol-shaped pasta. Unfortunately, the mafia is still around — but they’ve mostly gone underground. Just a few years ago, the carbs caught Bernardo Provenzano there.
Il capo di tutti capi
. Tourism is one of the best weapons the locals have. The hoods hate the publicity. Kind of like us.”

Jill was only half listening. Are we almost there?”

“Soon,” the driver said from the front seat. “Getting close. What’s the plan?”

“Pretty simple, I hope.” Jill grabbed the handle above the window and held on as the car took a particularly fast corner. “Get there first — before the Chinese or … anyone else. Pick up our guy, Conti, the Panchen Lama, and anyone else who was in the plane, and take them to a safe place as soon as we can. Assuming no one is badly injured, that’s probably our office in Palermo.”

“O.K. If we need someplace closer, we have a safe house on the coast about twenty-five or thirty klicks from here. Used to be a base to monitor drug traffic from Africa. Now most of that comes through Eastern Europe. Unintended consequence of bringing down Soviet Communism. Anyway, the place hasn’t been used for years, but we can hunker down there and bring in a doctor if we have to.”

“Let’s hope we don’t have to. The Director is expecting us to call him tonight with Conti and the Panchen Lama in tow.”

Lad raised his eyebrows, “the Director, huh?” He spoke to the Italian sitting in the front seat, a map spread across his lap. “How we doing, Pio?”

“They lost track of the plane about ten miles east of here. Just the other side of
Castelprizzi
. Quiet little town. Nothing but sheep.”

Jill gazed out the window at the white dots on the emerald hills trying to distract herself. “Do they weave that beautiful Italian wool around here?”

The Italian turned toward her and grimaced. “Not here. We send the wool up north. They make it into Armani suits and get rich.” He rubbed his thumb and fingers together. “They know how to make money. We only know how to make spaghetti …”

His words were cut short by a volley of gunfire carried in on the wind through the open car windows.

“Automatic rifle shots,” Lad said, sitting on the edge of the seat and scanning the horizon. “Pretty close.”

“Damn it!” Jill shouted. “I hope we’re not too late.”

Another couple of shots rang out.

“Turn left there,” Lad yelled, pointing to a gravel road a quarter of a mile ahead. Pio mashed the gas pedal to the floor, and the tires screeched on the macadam.

41.

Sicily, Saturday Afternoon

“Let’s get moving!” Conti yelled. “We’re sitting ducks in here.”

The two Italians bent low under the dash, popping up to fire back at the ambush. From under the front seat, they’d dug a sawed-off shotgun and a pistol with a silencer screwed onto its barrel.

Conti opened the side door part way. A snare drum burst of bullets hit the metal door. He yanked it shut and dived back down into the well. “Jesus Christ! What the hell kind of weapons do these people have?” he yelled. “That sounded like a heavy machine gun.”

“
Breda
8 millimeter. German. World War II,” said Eyepatch. “The Torrentinos have two of them. The government offered a hundred thousand
lire
each to get them back in the sixties but those bastards hid theirs. We should have done the same thing. They’ve been threatening us with them for fifty years. Don’t try to hide behind the door. Those bullets go right through.”

“Does this happen often around here?” Conti asked.

“No. They don’t have enough ammunition. No one makes it any more. Every year they fire a few rounds into the side of our barn to show off. But they wouldn’t waste bullets unless someone was paying them.”

“That’s what I was afraid of. What can we do?”

Eyepatch said something incomprehensible to his younger colleague, who reached farther under the front seat and pulled out what looked like a billy club with a metal canister at the end. He held it up so Conti could see it.

The American did a double take. “Where’d you get that?”

“Those
facce di culo
aren’t the only ones who kept some stuff from the war. We have a box of these that the Germans left behind when they ran away. The Americans called them stick grenades.”

“Do they still work?” Conti asked.

“Made by the Krauts,” Eyepatch answered simply. “Okay,” he said to Conti. “When the grenade goes off, get out of the car and run down the hill toward the river. We can hold them off from there until our
soldati
show up.” As he spoke he punched a text message into his phone.

“Now!” he yelled, straightening up and firing a double blast from the shotgun. At the same time, the driver leapt out of the car and threw the grenade. Conti watched, transfixed for a moment by its slow, spinning arc, then grabbed the still-disoriented Panchen Lama and pulled him across the back seat. As the grenade exploded, sending tree branches, leaves, and bits of bark high into the air, Conti dragged the Lama to the bluff at the edge of the road and rolled him over it, then dived after him. The two Italians came staggering down the hill, cackling. “Got the sons of bitches that time,” Eyepatch spoke too loudly, his hearing dimmed by the grenade.

“No shit!” his younger colleague howled. He crawled back up to the ledge, cupped his hands around his mouth and yelled, “Fuck all you Torrentinos!” Then he slid down the hillside, laughing. When the Italians caught their breath, the younger one suddenly looked worried, “Christ. Do you think I killed any of them?”

“Their tough luck if you did,” answered the older man. “They shouldn’t have shot at us. Don’t worry. They won’t call the
carbinieri
. The barbarians will just throw the body over a cliff. Go back up there and tell me what you see.”

“What if they shoot me?”

“Hold up your shirt on a stick first.”

“No way. It’s Dolce & Gabbana.”

“O.K., idiot, take this.” The older man pulled a white silk kerchief out of his back pocket.

“Why didn’t you give me that in the first place?”

“It was from my sister’s daughter first communion.
Don’t get it dirty.”

The young man scrambled up the low hillside, found a branch, and held the handkerchief up in the air. A blast of automatic weapons fire shredded it to ribbons.