Even if Mantega had been more alert, it was unlikely that he would have recognised the woman as the same one who had apparently been meeting someone off the flight that Tom Newman had arrived on two days earlier, or her partner as the driver of the delivery truck that had been involved in an accident at that very junction near the phone box the previous night. As it was, he barely noticed them. The last thing undercover agents did was to draw attention to themselves, while this couple were screaming their heads off and the centre of attention until a flash of stark, neutered light fixed the scene on the retina. A moment later the heavens resounded as though all the gods had farted at the same moment and hailstones the size of chickpeas started hitting the street, bouncing high in the air and battering Mantega’s skull.
He sprinted for the shelter of the phone box and rang Giorgio’s mobile. There was no reply, so he dialled the other number. Mantega didn’t know which phone this rang. Giorgio told him never to use it except in a case of extreme emergency, and he never had.
‘ Pronto?’
Mantega didn’t recognise the surly male voice, but it was hard to hear anything at all with the hail drumming on the metal roof.
‘Giorgio?’
‘Never heard of him,’ the male voice said in the abrupt, no-nonsense tones of the dialect Mantega had grown up with, and which he had heard from the lips of that lawyer from San Francisco named Peter Newman. Giorgio had told him that Newman had died. What the hell was that supposed to mean?
‘My name is Nicola Mantega. I’m a business contact of Giorgio’s. I need to speak to him urgently.’
‘Never heard of you either,’ said the voice. ‘You must have a wrong number.’
Mantega put down the phone in a state of profound anxiety. The number he had called was right there on the lighted display on the phone, and was identical with the one he had written down in his Filofax disguised with a string of random numerals. He looked out at the barren street, where the young couple were now engaged in a passionate clinch beneath the portico of a building opposite. There were no two ways around it, Giorgio had cut him off. He had been paid and dismissed, and would have to sort out any personal repercussions from the kidnapping he had arranged. In short, Nicola Mantega was in the most desperate situation in which any Italian can ever find himself. He was on his own.
The four men came to the Nicastro house just before three o’clock in the morning. A black Jeep Grand Cherokee, its numberplates removed, freewheeled silently down the main street, barely visible in the dim light of the sparse streetlamps hanging out on their brackets. Engine off and lights out, the vehicle came to a halt opposite the squat dwelling of concrete and terracotta brick infill faced with unpainted grout. It was a warm, windless night, the air fresh with scents awakened by the recent downpour, utterly quiet apart from the barking of a dog somewhere near by and the occasional rumble of thunder far away to the north over Monte Pollino.
One man remained with the vehicle. The other three, faceless in black ski masks, walked unhurriedly back to their destination. While one of them disabled the electricity and telephone connections running down the wall of the house, another picked the lock in the front door. In the event the door proved to be bolted as well, which annoyed the third man so much that he raised his voice to the others, telling them to get on with it and quickly. Then the creak of an opened shutter directed one of the men’s attention to a top-floor window across the street, where an old woman was looking down at them.
‘Back to bed, nonna!’ he shouted.
Since the element of surprise had now been lost, the man who had cut the power and phone lines fixed three small charges of plastic explosive to the top, middle and bottom edge of the door on the side where the hinges were and wired them together to a fuse before joining his companions a short distance away. When the blast went off all three ran back, kicked the door open in reverse and rushed inside, wielding powerful torch beams that cut the darkness like scalpels.
In less than two minutes, they had searched every room in the house. The only inhabitant who tried to put up a fight was Antonio, the fifty-year-old head of the family. He was subdued by a pistol shot to his left kneecap and beaten unconscious. The operation then proceeded as planned and without further interruption. The mother and her eldest son and two daughters were locked up in one of the bedrooms, after which the intruders turned their attention to Francesco Nicastro. He had not made any attempt to protest or resist. Indeed, he still looked dozy and lost in his dreams. The man who had spoken angrily earlier felled him with a massive blow to the face, then picked him up like a sack of barley and threw him on to the bed. He prised his jaws open and wedged the teeth on either side with chunks of rubber cut from an old tractor tyre. One of the other men gripped the boy’s tongue firmly with a pair of pliers while the leader sliced off a chunk of it with a razor blade. All three then clattered back down the stairs, got into the Jeep and drove away.
Across the street, Maria tried to block out the cacophony of screams emanating from the Nicastro house. The knowledge that her predictions had been validated brought no comfort. Her prayers had been powerless, she was powerless, they were all powerless. She walked in slow, painful steps down the stairs to the living room and the only phone in the house.
‘Send an ambulance at once,’ Maria told the emergency operator. ‘There’s been a terrible accident.’
Martin Nguyen’s driver had been unbeatable when it came to getting maximum respect on the autostrada down from Rome, but faced with the task of finding his way around Cosenza it rapidly became clear that he didn’t have a clue. The limo was much too good to give up — leather seats, tinted windows and a/c that really worked — but under the terms of the leasing agreement no one else was allowed to drive it. Martin’s solution had been to call a cab to the Rende International Residence, then slip the guy enough cash to have him park his vehicle and act as navigator for the clueless romano.
They reached the Hotel Centrale at twenty to five. The air was mild and welcoming, but it was still dark. Tom Newman was waiting outside, and he and Martin proceeded to Aeroscan Surveying’s base in the outlying southern suburbs of the city. Neither of the Americans had been able to get breakfast at their respective hotels before leaving, so Phil Larson instantly went up a notch in Martin’s estimation by having brewed up a pot of coffee and bought some pastries from a bakery that opened early. Once Phil had got through giving them a long story about some break-in the previous night — ‘Nothing missing, it looks like, but you know how you feel kind of violated?’ — Martin opened his aluminium briefcase and passed a thick sheaf of printed matter across the desk.
‘That’s the report of the team I’ve consulted,’ he said. ‘You can read the small print later, but their principal conclusions are clear and I want them implemented subito.’
Larson looked at him curiously.
‘I didn’t know you spoke Italian, Mr Nguyen.’
‘I was born in a country then called Indochina, where the official language was French. Later I was moved to the States, where I had to learn English, then in high school I studied Spanish. Italian is pretty much the same except for the make-up and the hairstyle.’
He went over to the map which took up most of one wall.
‘These are the areas you’ve done?’ he queried, indicating the shaded zones.
Phil Larson nodded.
‘Okay, ignore the whole rest of this section and concentrate on the upper valleys of the rivers off this map to the south.’
Larson looked doubtful.
‘Hell, we don’t even have charts for that area. You said to look at the confluence of the rivers and down in the flood plain where we are now. That’s what we’ve been doing. Of course a lot of this terrain has been built on in the last fifty years or so, like this place where we are now. If the site we’re looking for is underneath any of that, we aren’t going to find it anyway.’