“Better photo on the Indiana license for Mr. Jim Schroeder,” Wulf said. “Before he ate too many fries chez Black and Swan.”
Her stomach growled, but she forgot about it when beautiful columns of numbers appeared on the screen and one of the tentacles squeezing her chest unwrapped. While she wrote, her eyes darted from the phone to her notes to Wulf.
“Here’s a credit card for John Sullivan. Guess he doesn’t like to redo those J-S laundry tags.” Wulf dropped to his haunches next to the bound man. “If you’re coming round, Jack, let me reassure you. I’m a law-abiding type of guy.” He spoke barely above a whisper.
She strained to hear his next words while scribbling numbers.
“Ask people who know me. I’m easygoing. Fun-loving. Except for one thing.”
He was no longer the gentleman who’d wined and dined her. He had the same hair, same shoulders and same clothes, but this Wulf came from the part of the army that ended lives with precision. She came from the part that saved them, and the difference had never been so stark.
“One thing pisses me off.” He spoke to the prisoner. “People who spy on me.”
Suddenly she was very glad she hadn’t requested his personnel records after their first meeting in the cafeteria. “Finished.” The postcard covered with numbers trembled in her hand.
As Wulf left the bound man and returned to her, he switched to a smile. “Do you have a phone too?”
She nodded, then stopped, but it was too late.
“A disposable?” He held out his hand. “I need it.”
His stare compelled her to pull it from her purse.
“Yours should be clean. At least until Jack’s missed and someone starts checking where his phone last registered its location, and then finds other phones on at the same place and time.”
“How can someone—”
“Hack phone company records? Easily, but these people probably won’t have to.” As he spoke, he tapped keys and waited for someone to answer. “I’d call the billing department with a story about my daughter losing my phone and say it has the number for my boss’s vacation house. I have to find it because I’ll lose my job if I don’t tell the boss his wife is coming up a day early. Maybe drop a reference to his young blond assistant, and how much I need to keep this job because my wife’s been laid off.” The worry in his voice made her want to give him whatever he asked, even though she knew he was fabricating the story.
On the phone, he greeted someone named Lorenzo. Their Italian conversation flew too fast for her to catch more than Ostia and Roma and ciao before he hung up.
“Everything’s squared.” He popped the SIM cards from both phones. “Of course, Black and Swan’s so connected, they can probably tell the U.S. embassy to send the Italians a terrorism investigation letter of interest.”
She froze, hands in midair reaching for her phone, but Wulf stuffed it in his pocket. Whatever a terrorism investigation letter was, she didn’t want to be named in one. She was an American and an army officer. Things like extraordinary rendition or secret CIA prisons couldn’t happen to her...could they?
“If we’re named to the Italian government,” Wulf continued while he gathered the man’s papers, “we’re playing high stakes poker.”
Chilled in her short-sleeve shirt, she stared from the bound man to Wulf. The fear she’d battled all morning became much closer to panic. She didn’t want to spend another minute with the mystery man and the threat he represented. “Let’s go. Leave him and call the police later. Anonymously.”
“I made arrangements to dump him until we figure out the who, what and why.”
“That’s kidnapping. Won’t it make this even harder to explain?” She had to draw a line. “We can’t do that.”
“Who do you think will report our buddy Jim missing?” His eyes flicked over to the prisoner. “I doubt he brought family on this trip.”
Chapter Fourteen
“This guy had three identities and a semiautomatic. He’s no tourist.” Wulf’s voice was steady, his tone as rational as if they were discussing the probabilities of medical outcomes, but it wasn’t enough to convince her to abduct a man.
“It feels like we’re committing the crime.” She couldn’t ignore her roiling stomach. “I don’t understand what—or why—”
“Fine.” He threw his hands in the air. “My team’s investigating Afghan heroin shipments. Black and Swan is moving the junk in empty cargo containers. Before flying to Rome, I tracked a load to a ship in Karachi that’s due next week in Albania.” His eyes didn’t break contact with hers. “We think the smugglers killed a warrant officer who discovered an earlier cargo.”
“Then this is absolutely a police matter. We have to—”
“You think the army wants this publicized? That army resources, even inadvertently, are smuggling drugs? A soldier here or there with a duffel bag of hash, that’s one thing, but tons of heroin sent around the world on cargo ships courtesy of American taxpayers?”
Despite growing up reading Nancy Drew, she’d never had an urge to become a crime fighter. She was a doctor, and that made her job crystal clear.
He wasn’t finished. “We haven’t figured out how high up the corporate chain this goes. Black and Swan’s too politically savvy to take on lightly. So no police.”
Her head throbbed with the scale of what Wulf had revealed. The crazy-afraid part of her argued against his story, but her eyes couldn’t erase the man, the identifications and the gun.
“If we stick together, we’ll get out of this.” He pulled several bills from his pocket. “First, I want you to buy a couple beers at the snack bar.”
“Beer?” What was he thinking?
“I intend to haul our man to his car without being seen, but if someone stops us, we’ll pretend he’s drunk. For that, he needs to stink of beer.”
So he didn’t have a black helicopter on speed dial. But she didn’t have a better plan, so she might as well do her part.
By the time she reached the snack bar’s patio and dozen café tables, her doubts about Wulf’s plan had increased. With the Scandinavians departed for the next stop on their itinerary, this was arguably the busiest part of Ostia Antica, and the only place she could find a telephone.
A family eating gelato sat at the only occupied table. The father and the older child, a boy of eight or nine, seemed to be competing to blow paper drinking straw wrappers into an empty cup. The mother scooped a blob of berry pink off the front of her daughter’s sparkly T-shirt. Speaking to them was completely, utterly off-limits to a person with problems that included guns and drug smugglers.
Inside the café, a grandmotherly cashier sat by the register reading a magazine. If Theresa had gone to New Jersey for leave, she’d be shopping with her mother instead of staring into a refrigerator while mentally rehearsing how to ask for the polizia.
Between the crook of her elbow and her chest, she stacked two waters and two brown bottles of Italian beer. If she called the police, Wulf would undoubtedly vanish into the air, leaving her to be questioned while the authorities sorted out the facts.
The U.S. embassy would assist a captain in the United States Army, wouldn’t they?
When she thumped her purchases on the counter, the cashier barely looked up. The magazine cover showed a scantily clad woman and a glaring headline about the ministro della giustizia, the Minister of Justice. If she was arrested, would reporters from magazines like that camp out at her mother’s house? Would they discover her stepfather’s business connections? News scrutiny would ruin her life, and her mother’s. Carl, who, despite how he made a living, loved her, would go down too.