With the suspicion, the adding of the parts, came realisation of a truth.
The apartment was searched, stripped bare.
The camera was found.
The cables from the camera led to the recording box.
The recording box and its loaded tapes were lifted from the hidden recess.
The wire that ran from the recording box to the audio microphone, the pinhead type fitted to the outside wall, was ripped clear.
And he stood. None of the men, the clan foot-soldiers or Salvatore, seemed aware of him as he left his chair and the television. He took a last glimpse at the screen. It was afternoon scheduling, too late for the midday film and too early for the girls to be topless; they wore flimsy one-piece swimming costumes and pranced cheerfully. He did not, of course, bolt for the front door. He went down the corridor.
He did not know what he had achieved in his recent life.
Could not know to what use the handlers had put the information he had supplied.
He understood that the men who swarmed in his apartment were, almost, in shock at what they had found, and that time was short for him. Soon enough heads would clear and thoughts would focus. He went down the corridor towards his bathroom.
‘Duck here. Can you speak?’
‘Wait one-’
Lukas was in the corridor, had passed the main desk, where his ID was checked, had been through the metal detector, and turned. It raised eyebrows that he went back through the doors and on to the street, then into the square. He made for a central point, and it didn’t concern him that he had intruded into the middle of a soccer game. The kids buzzed round him.
‘Shoot.’
‘It’s like you’ve been on the dark side of the earth.’
‘Nothing to report. Didn’t report because I had nothing.’
‘I’m not nagging.’
‘I didn’t report because I had nothing to report. One-syllable stuff.’ The ball came by him and he hoofed it away. The kids clapped. ‘There’s no intelligence. There are no assets that anyone will share. Every agency here is fighting a breezy turf war. The contact, my door-opener, thinks the spooks are less than frank. Duck, how many times we heard that? But it’s just his reading of body language. I have nothing to do. I can’t advise on negotiation because we haven’t reached that status. I can’t suggest how a rescue might be launched because we don’t have a location. There’s no role for a co-ordinator if no negotiation’s in place, and there’s nowhere for a storm team to assault. Sorry and all that, Duck. That’s pretty goddam obvious. It’s frustrating.’
‘You want to hear about something?’ The voice rasped in Lukas’s ear.
‘What is it?’
‘Could I try you with a snatch off the Niger Delta, about sixty klicks into the Gulf, an oil-flow platform? Yanks, Canadians and three Brits. What makes it different is that local workers were killed when the hostage-takers came on board the rig so they can’t simply be paid off. The temperature’s hot. Chevron have the rig and their security people asked for you. I’m merely passing it on.’
‘You could tell them I’m spoken for, regrets and all that.’
‘Any idea how much longer?’
‘It’ll move fast.’
‘Too fast for you?’
‘Maybe.’
He liked Roddy ‘Duck’ Johnstone, trusted him and was appreciated, and he thought the call didn’t yet have purpose. It was peculiar for the boss not to needle in on a point without preamble – without crap.
‘I’m just throwing past you the second call on your time. The German Red Cross have contacted us. They have people in western Afghanistan, round Herat, and they’ve lost a field worker. Well, not actually lost him, just don’t know which warlord has him, and if he goes into the hands of the AQ… Well, they asked for you.’
‘Like the man said to Chevron,’ Lukas answered.
‘That you’re spoken for?’
‘That I’m spoken for. I feel kind of obligated to stay with this, let it run its course.’
‘Not getting soft and sentimental in your old age?’
He heard a brief grim chuckle. No one who knew him would ever accuse him in seriousness of either.
‘Hope not.’ Lukas bridled, and the ball was back at his feet. The kids stayed off him and he did a shimmy, kicked for goal. Wide. Lukas thought hostage co-ordination was easier than kicking footballs.
‘Don’t take this as impertinence, but can you see yourself making a contribution of value?’
‘Hope to. Will try to.’
‘A good kid?’
‘I didn’t do the legwork. You did,’ he said softly. Lukas wouldn’t put down his boss. No one had ever labelled him sarcastic… and he thought of those he had searched out, the close-up witnesses: the hotel manager, the fish-seller, a priest with a knapsack of guilt.
‘It’d be nice to bring him out.’
‘Yes. I have a desk to get back to.’
‘I’ll tell them you’ve work in hand – not available for the Niger Delta. Tell them you’ve things stacking up, not available for Herat. Damn you, Lukas, because you never give me anything. He’s an ordinary kid with an ordinary background, yet I think he’s special. It’s what people say and-’
‘The desk calls.’ Lukas rang off. He understood why the company boss, the God almighty of Ground Force Security, should waffle on about a ‘good kid’ and ‘nice to bring him out’. In the company there were people from differing law-enforcement and military backgrounds, and personal involvement was regarded as suitable for the fairies, not for them. But the matter in hand involved the fate of a kidnap victim, not pipeline security, not close protection for an ambassador, not convoy escort up a road blighted with culvert bombs. Kidnapping was different. It had a particular status with the people of this company, all levels, and of every other company in the same trade. He understood why his boss had put saccharine on the assignment, would have known there was no possibility of Lukas pulling out from Naples and taking a flight to Lagos or heading to Kabul. Almost the boss had pleaded with him for a best effort. He’d never done that before. He’d trawled the boy’s background, had done the parents, the guys who lived in the east London house and maybe some people the boy worked with. Most important, the boss had been lined up by a guy, one-time Special Forces, who did close protection for the company in the dark corners where the money was earned and where the risk of getting lifted was greatest. They were all, in this trade, bound together like blood relatives. All that made sense to Lukas, but there was something more – as if his boss had been well hooked… Funny thing, the emotion business: he could feel emotional about a complete stranger. Lukas didn’t do emotion – if he did, he could be slashed, minced. Great to feel good when the hostage walked to a helicopter or an armoured Humvee, a luxury of indulgence. And when the hostage didn’t walk, but stank from the sun, the flies swarmed, and was carried away in a black bag, emotion would wreck him. He needed the protection of apparent indifference… but it had gotten harder to play-act.
He had seen bad things in his time, and been party to them, and a tear had not fallen from his eye. Might be time to quit when it did. Should have felt calm, but didn’t. Should have felt on top of his game, the acknowledged expert in the field, but didn’t.
He went back inside, walked through the operations room and took his chair in the annexe. Quiet and respectful, he asked what was new, and was told that nothing was.
Two rats came close. They didn’t approach the body but blood had spurted from the mouth on impact.
Salvatore saw the rats when he craned out of the bathroom window. They had realised Davide had gone through the window a full half-hour before, and from three floors up each of the men who had looked at the man lying with his head at such an angle had pronounced death. They had gone on with the search. More had arrived. There was a capodecine , bustling with urgency, there to see at first hand the scale of an intelligence failure in the midst of the Sail, a comando piazza, who traded off that walkway, came to check on the parameters of that failure, and two magazzinieri who warehoused on the third level. There was an aquirento, the principal buyer for the clan. All came, from the walkway, to try to measure the limits of a small disaster. They had gone.