It wasn't until he returned to England a few weeks later that she had told him she'd never believed a word of his lie. But she had also informed him that while he'd been gone, she had realized she was so unbreakably attached to him that she had no choice but to ignore his unsuitability and marry him.
When he had left England, he'd assumed that his relationship with her was over, and he had never imagined she would ever consider marrying him. He was ten years older and of an incalculably lower social class. While he had enough money to remain idle and keep the old house he had remodeled, he didn't have enough to make him a plausible husband to the last direct descendant of a bloodline that people seemed to consider a part of the national patrimony. But when he found himself once again in the presence of the only woman who had ever fascinated him, and she seemed to be determined to marry him, he couldn't think of a reason to resist.
When people asked him what he did for a living, he had always replied that he'd retired from a business that was so spectacularly boring that he couldn't bear to ruin a pleasant evening by talking about it. After he returned from the United States, he resumed that policy, and it continued to work.
He and Meg had married as quietly as possible, with the Anglican priest who often figured in Meg's most ribald slanders presiding, and the pretty, plump Hartleby sisters, who were also prominent in the stories, playing their harps.
Since their wedding ten years ago, they had lived a quiet, unobtrusive life in Bath. He kept up a few precautions. He could never allow himself to be photographed, so they had always stayed as far as possible from anyone who appeared to be a celebrity. They gave money to charities through a trust, but never attended any of the receptions, balls, or dinners that were intended to prime the donors for the next year. On the rare occasions when pictures needed to be taken, Meg would be in them alone. Photographers didn't seem to mind because, although she was approaching forty, she was still perfect.
Tonight he drove the fast, crowded highway toward Toronto, feeling the traffic mounting every second. As he went from Hamilton to Mississauga, he thought about Meg. He had no more business being married to her than to the Queen. She had simply been so willful and contrary that she had fallen in love with the worst man she had ever met and stuck with him without delving any further into the truth about him than to tell him his lies weren't fooling her. He could see her without closing his eyes. In the silence of the closed car, he could hear her voice.
He could tell already that the way home to her was not going to be as easy or direct as it had been the last time. The ones who had come for him this time had not just stumbled on him. They had been searching. They had found him in Brighton, where Tony Talarese's nephew had found him the first time. That felt like a bad bit of luck; he and Meg seldom went down to Brighton because of the bad memory.
He knew exactly what he had to do to make his way home. It wasn't hoping they'd forget. He had to make them think about him every day and every night until they hated Frank Tosca for bringing him into their lives again.
11
It was getting to be evening, and Elizabeth was in the Justice Department basement staring at a computer screen. In the old days they had used a single big computer down here with a lot of terminals. In that era each morning's suspicious-death lists-her specialty-were printed on wide sheets of lined paper that were attached with perforated edges so they could be separated or left folded like an accordion. They'd been unwieldy, but much easier on the eyes than the bright, pretty screens of these desktops.
The array of screens at this workstation constantly updated the status of each of the men the Organized Crime and Racketeering Division kept track of. If she had signed into these files from the computer in her office, there would be a record of it, but here the array was always on, and all she had to do was sit at this desk and wait. She watched, and the screen in front of her updated: Castiglione, Salvatore; Castiglione, Paul; Castiglione, Joseph, all checked in on a flight from Chicago to Phoenix, departing 8:14 P.M. All three of the brothers, the next generation leaders of the family, were leaving for Phoenix on the same plane.
Ten lines down, she noticed another sudden change: a private jet operated by Aviation Interests, Inc., and leased to Garden State Engineering and Construction, had taken off from Newark with a flight plan for St. Louis. Garden State was a Fibbiano operation. Everybody was heading west.
Three lines up, an agent reported that Angelo LoCicero was just seen arriving at the airport in Detroit. Stand by for ticketing information.
Everywhere on the display, the status entries for the heads of the families were being updated by the people assigned to watch them. It was evening, but still early even here in the Eastern time zone. She knew there was more to come because the Butcher's Boy had told her what was going to happen before it had begun. The old men were on the move, and they were on the way to a meeting, but she couldn't do anything to respond yet because she couldn't reveal to anyone how she knew. She would have to wait and let the movement go on long enough to be clear to anyone who looked at the data.
The Butcher's Boy had told her the truth. She had been given a chance to watch the upper echelon of the Mafia gathering for a meeting, something that hadn't happened even once during her career. And it was happening quickly. Alphonse Costananza was in JFK waiting at the gate for a JetBlue flight to Las Vegas. He was the head of the family that ran Cleveland.
Phil Langusto was already touching down at the airport in Flagstaff, Arizona. Salvatore Molinari was en route to Santa Fe, New Mexico. Giovanni "Chi-chi" Tasso had left New Orleans in the morning, but the surveillance team had not noticed his car leaving the city and had not yet seen him at an airport. Danny Spoleto had been seen in Albuquerque, and he was an underling for Mike Catania of Boston. It looked as though he was preparing to meet Catania on a later flight and drive him to wherever the meeting was going to be.
Evening was shading off into an early, rainy night in Washington. She began to check the communication channels, the e-mails and faxes and the data updates, for some sign that any of the people who monitored organized crime activity had already put together the fact that this wasn't just one big player doing some unusual travel. They all seemed to be converging on a single point somewhere in the Southwest.
She waited until she had fifteen big names on her summary screen, copied it, and attached it to an e-mail to be sent from her personal e-mail address. She typed in the address of Special Agent Holman at the FBI. He was the one who had been in charge of the night surveillance on Tosca, and when it was ordered stopped he had given her a chance to get it authorized by midnight. To Elizabeth that meant he was on duty at night. And he not only had behaved sensibly on that operation, but he would now be aware that the person at the Justice Department who had been right that time was Elizabeth Waring, and not her boss, the deputy assistant, who had made an unforgivable mistake in overruling her-a career-ending mistake for most people.
She hesitated for a second and reviewed her decision. She had been privileged to have secret information of a sort that she would probably never have again. If the configuration of power had only been slightly different, acting on this information would have made her career. Law enforcement people had been waiting for fifty years for this kind of meeting to happen again, and now it was happening, but only she knew it. Somebody had to do something now, and it wasn't going to be the Justice Department.