“Perfect,” he said. “The signal is strong.”
“It’s in the heel of his right boot,” she said.
“I won’t ask how you did that,” Rizzo said.
“Use your imagination.”
“Mimi, you’re a genius. And I love your outfit.”
He handed her an envelope. Impetuously, she opened it. There were five hundred Euros in it in cash, ten bills of fifty Euros each.
“Anytime,” she said. This was the easiest money she’d ever made.
“I’m off duty now?” Enrico asked Rizzo.
He gave the handsome young man a nod. “Just see that Mimi gets home safely,” he said. “Eventually.”
“Eventually,” Mimi said, hanging on Enrico’s arm now.
They all laughed.
Rizzo pulled away from the curb. Enrico took Mimi under his arm, and, mission accomplished, they went their own way for the rest of the night.
SIXTY
The formal way for the US government to persuade a foreign government to do something is through a démarche, which can be made either in Washington to the foreign embassy or in its capital or in both places at once.
It can be done at any level, up to and including “calling in” the foreign country’s ambassador for a senior state official to deliver the request or having the US ambassador approach the host country foreign minister or even prime minister.
In the case of the American couple who had been shot to death on a cold evening in January, the American government needed to be coy in its handling of the case. The Italians were already fuming over American handling of several intelligence issues, and there were still warrants out for several CIA agents concerning “renditions” carried out in Italy. Worse, the Italians knew that the CIA had embedded some excellent contacts in Rome right under their noses within the various Italian police agencies.
Hence, a prickly problem it was. The CIA station chief in Rome informally approached his contacts in Italian intelligence and began to exert whatever informal influence could be brought to bear upon the Roman police. The scandals about CIA flights with disappeared persons transiting Italian airspace did not make this any easier. Similar contacts were made in Washington through the Italian ambassador.
An additional complication was that the Italian government was, as always, a delicate coalition. Such requests reaching the public, or at least certain members of parliament, could actually blow apart the ruling coalition.
Nonetheless, the matter of Lt. Rizzo’s investigation went through the usual back channels. Rizzo felt he had made highly praiseworthy progress on the case. So when he found himself summoned to the office of the minister of the interior, he should have beamed with pride, expecting to be congratulated upon his fine work. But one never knew which way these meetings with bosses would go. Nor, in any way, could he expect to know where his investigation would be headed next.
SIXTY-ONE
Monday morning. Alex stood in the security line at JFK in New York, waiting to check in for her flight.
Time for everyone to be searched. She read all the signs. Every bag to be X-rayed. Take off your jacket. Take off your socks and shoes. High risk of terrorist attack. Drop your slightly used undergarments in a one-pint ziplock and turn them over to the baggage handlers.
Hey, got a steel pin in your hip? Take it out so we can check it.
What nonsense. Okay, okay. She knew she was anxious over this new trip, and she tried to cool it. But what was her country coming to? Give me your tired, your poor, your teeming masses, your fingerprints.
Signs, signs. Everywhere there were signs, as the old pop song went. Messing up the view. Messing up everyone’s mind. No cigarette lighters on the aircraft. No scissors. No knives. No booze. How about a numchuck or a Tai Chi sword?
Yeah. Long-haired freaky people didn’t need to apply, but they were actually going though the security line just fine. A woman who looked like someone’s great grandmother was being searched, however. A security person was examining her roll of lipstick. Alex sipped from a fresh bottle of cold water that she knew she was going to have to relinquish.
The fear had taken root all over America by now, planted by excessively reckless people in the government. Having been in Ukraine on the day of the RPG attacks, having had to fire lethal weapons at other human beings and shoot her way out, she knew what real fear was. She knew what it was like to be scared, to understand what a true threat feels like, to be a moment away from a painful death or perhaps permanent disfigurement if she acted wrong or was just plain unlucky. She knew what it was like to lose someone she loved in an attack that made no sense.
But on American soil, she didn’t want to live in constant fear. She resented the signs. Who the heck was going to make a bomb out of Scope and Pepsodent, anyway?
Alex took off her shoes, belt, and jacket and put them in one bin. Her computer came out of her backpack and went into another while the backpack itself went into a third. Then she dumped her wallet, change, keys, passport, and boarding pass into a fourth. Then she graduated to the hallowed grounds of a “five binner” as she dropped the black duffel bag stuffed with a week’s worth of clothes in the fifth.
A security person watched her uneasily, and she was ready for him to say something. She preempted him. “Why don’t we all just wear transparent plastic raincoats when we travel,” she said. “It would speed things up and make things much easier, wouldn’t it?”
He looked at her and muttered something about regulations. He was about to wave her through when a TSA agent stopped the screening counter.
“We’ll need to search this backpack,” he said to Alex. “Is this yours?
“What’s the problem?” she asked.
Whatever it was, it drew a second TSA person, a supervisor. They opened the bag and pulled the rest of her things off the carrier. How she longed right then to have a Federal ID, her old Treasury Department or FBI identification. But she was as naked and vulnerable as any other American.
The first agent reached in and pulled out a half-finished bottle of Diet 7-Up. He smiled, shrugged, and tossed it into a bin that was already overflowing with other half-dead plastics of liquid.
She smiled back. “Oops. Sorry,” Alex said.
“It happens all day,” the guy said. A job well done, that capture of a 7-Up bottle.
She repacked and pulled her backpack onto her shoulder.
What was the last thought of that song? Thank you, Lord, for thinking of me, but I think I’m doing fine.
Trouble was, Alex wasn’t so sure how her country was doing. Billions spent to inconvenience travelers, and where was the real fight against the real enemies of modern civilization? Just one woman’s opinion as she grabbed her duffel and hooked her backpack onto her left shoulder. She turned toward her gate.
At a newsstand on the way, she bought another drink and a paperback novel in Spanish, one of those Nobel Prize-winning South American works where the women turn into butterflies. Might as well get into the mood.
SIXTY-TWO
A few hours into the flight to Caracas, as the aircraft passed above the Caribbean, the pilot announced that passengers on the right of the plane could see Cuba. Alex glanced out her window, and sure enough, there it was, nestled in the blue water about a hundred miles to the east.
She had never been there, wished she’d be able to visit sometime, and took a long look as her plane passed. It was hard to believe the political issues at play. She felt sorry for the Cuban people, who had been under one oppressive regime or another for more than a century. When would the world again be able to celebrate the classic poetry of José Martí or the music of the modern-day Cuban trovador Silvio Rodríguez?