‘I assume that’s Eddie Deacon.’
Lukas made his first contribution. ‘It is.’
‘He has been beaten.’
‘He has.’
‘If he still lives, he is on the third level of the Sail building in Scampia. It is not my expertise but I would suggest there is no more difficult place inside the state from which to extract a prisoner.’
Lukas said, ‘I don’t intrude, gentlemen, I don’t push or impose my opinions. I’m here to give help if I’m asked for it.’
Castrolami said they would go in five minutes, not a suggestion but a demand.
Lukas knew them now by their familiar titles. The bustle broke around him. He had little to take, nothing of consequence other than his laptop. Some that he knew of made occasional trips into Baghdad or Bogota, for the FBI, DoD or a contractor and travelled with their bespoke flak vest, blood and sterile dressings. Lukas had never bothered. Neither did he have manuals to refer to because everything he needed, and half a ton more, was in his head, but he regretted that he had no fresh socks or underwear in the rucksack.
They had discarded their given names, were identified by those their colleagues used for them. The Tractor, the Engineer and the Bomber were loading big kitbags. There was no more talk of military survival kit, water-resistant socks, small strengthened hacksaw blades and fishing hooks. Lukas had learned how they would operate at the first wave of an ROS assault. The Ingegnere would take off a door or blow out a window for entry. The Bombardiere would put in a handful of XM84 stun grenades, the ‘flash and bang’ gear – the flash was up to seven million candela and the bang 180 decibels. The Trattore would lead the storm guys inside. Lukas had seen it done in practice and for real, sometimes the practice was fouled up but the actual thing went a treat. At others the practice was perfect and the actual a disaster. What the Tractor, the Engineer and the Bomber did was a definition of the old ‘inexact science’, but so was Lukas’s work.
Lukas hung back in the annexe. He heard Castrolami talking in the operations room. The small team, which would fit into one large minibus, would travel to Scampia ahead of a larger squad. Only when the initial group was in place would the numbers for securing a perimeter be deployed. Lukas understood. It was about security, about maintaining secrecy. He thought it a harsh world in which police officers and paramilitary men couldn’t be trusted – might have a place on a gang leader’s payroll.
A last brief act was played out in the annexe. The psychologist announced defiantly that he could monitor, observe, contribute from the operations room. The collator gave as his opinion that he was better employed close to his big computer and his archive. Lukas felt that the reputation of the Sail lay on them. He was not invited. Neither was it suggested that he should find a quiet corner and get involved in basket-weaving. He wasn’t accused of imposing himself. Lukas was on board.
He thought, and it suited him well, that he was barely noticed as they hiked out of the annexe and skirted the side wall of the operations room, the far side from the banks of screens and the illuminated map. Castrolami was given a brief bear-hug by a superior, while others slapped the arms and shoulders of the ROS guys in encouragement. Lukas was offered no warmth, no good will, and flitted out. Apprehension burgeoned. He had seen the face, in monochrome, of his opponent. Had been there so often, looking into a face and wondering which well-trodden path to take to consign the face to the rubbish heap. Had been there so often – was concerned, again, that the magic moment was dulled. God, let it not be said that, almost, he was bored with all the faces.
There was a driver and the driver’s escort, big men, armed with filled holsters and belts that sagged with kit. There was a communications kid, looked no more than nineteen, who carried a steel box and Lukas saw that it was chained by the handle to his wrist. There were six ROS, and Castrolami. A pecking order existed as they loaded into the minibus. The driver and his escort were together. The communications kid and Castrolami were side by side, the link and the decision-taker, there were the men who would make an entry, if it came down to the desperate uncertainty of a storm, and there was Lukas, who was without status and quantifiable expertise and had been there so many times before.
They left piazza Dante.
Lukas sat across the aisle from Castrolami and the communications kid. A map of the Sail was spread out across the investigator’s knees and he used a pencil torch. Lukas gained an impression of the enormity, complexity and threat posed by the building. He did not wish to talk.
He turned away from the map and stared out of the window at the passing streets. It was, he reflected, a city with some of the finest architecturally designed churches in Christendom, which contained some of the greatest works of art, sculpture and painting ever created. There was the beauty of the bay behind them and the crude majesty of the mountain. Sophistication, intellect, culture and glory encircled the minibus. All he had seen of them was the view over the rim of the crater when he had received the warning of hidden and violent danger. There were no such contrasts in Baghdad, or in the mountains and jungles of Colombia, or on the great plains of Afghanistan. The cafes seemed full, and the bars, and outside two restaurants he saw people standing on the pavement in what apologised for a queue, waiting to be given a table. It was so goddam normal.
Castrolami pushed the map of the Sail towards the communications kid, left him to fold it. He asked Lukas, ‘When we get there, what do you want?’
‘To be as close as possible.’
‘What do you do first?’
‘I try to make some calm,’ Lukas said. ‘It’s not always easy but it’s a good place to start.’
Castrolami looked into Lukas’s face, and a slow smile spread. ‘Do you have that buzz in you, the adrenalin pump? Is it going? Riding towards the location, not knowing what you’ll find, and…’
Lukas shrugged, then said, droll, ‘Worst you can find is a dry house. A dry house is where they were, it’s the one they’ve quit. Sheets and blankets, a hell-hole for a cell, food and mountains of cigarette butts, but gone. That’s a dry house. I don’t often get sex, don’t often fire a handgun, and I’m a small-town boy from a trailer park with a mongrel’s pedigree, so I guess riding towards the location is sort of ecstasy, orgasm and cartridge discharge. Yes, the pump’s going a bit.’
‘Do we have a good environment or a bad one?’
He looked out of the window again. The road was clogged with traffic and a horn blasting wouldn’t have helped, or a siren, or the lights. The driver wove, looked for weaknesses in the jam, and the ROS guys didn’t talk but worked on their kit.
Lukas said, ‘If it isn’t a dry house, and if the boy’s still alive, the location’s about as shit as it gets – but, then, none of them comes easy. A big deal? You have the girl nailed down. None of them comes easy.’