Mario nodded, took the paper from his pocket again, presumably to check that he had covered everything he needed to do, then replaced it and nodded again.
‘Now I don’t think we need to detain you any longer, Mr Taverner.’
A wave of relief washed over the terrified archaeologist.
‘I would hate you to be late for your next appointment,’ Mario added, with a wintry smile.
‘Appointment? I don’t have any appointments.’
‘Oh, I think you do, Mr Taverner. In this case, you have a very important and final meeting. With your maker.’
Stephen’s eyes widened in horror as he realized what the man was saying, but before he could move, or even say anything, Mario made a single gesture and his companion took a half step forward, aimed his pistol at Stephen’s chest and pulled the trigger. A simple execution.
The weapon coughed once, the noise sounding like a heavy, wet slap, and the archaeologist slumped backwards as the bullet tore through his heart. For good measure, the gunman fired twice more, once into his chest and the third bullet through his forehead.
Then he calmly unscrewed the suppressor from the end of the barrel and slipped it into his jacket pocket and replaced the pistol in his underarm holster.
‘An easy morning’s work,’ Mario said in Italian. ‘Pack up his laptop and charger, then find his camera and check for anything else that could contain images.’
Before the two men left the room they took half a dozen photographs of the dead man, including close-ups of the bullet wounds. The contract that had been accepted by them had been quite specific in a number of details, but the two most important conditions were that any piece of electronic equipment capable of storing images was to be recovered and then sent by courier to an address in Baghdad, and unambiguous photographic evidence of the termination of the principals was to be supplied before the agreed payment would be released.
The problem was that because the targets had split up, he had only been able to fulfil a part of the contract, and the probability was that the Lewis woman and her ex-husband were now beyond the reach of his criminal organization. But at least he hoped he would be able to start following the trail and establish how the two people had left Milan.
It would be fairly easy to find out if they had hired a car, if Taverner had been right in his belief, and his contacts in the carabinieri would be able to provide both a description of the vehicle and the registration number. In that case it could possibly be traced as it made its way through France. Of course, tracing it and stopping it were two entirely different matters, but that would not be his problem.
He had already instructed his man to begin checking with the car hire companies, and it shouldn’t take too long for the results to come in. With his influence, things tended to happen immediately. He’d told his man to initiate checks on all rentals for the two hours after the Sharm flight had touched down, to allow time for them to have passed through customs and immigration. Only if that produced no results would he start asking questions at the railway stations in the city.
Less than ten minutes after Stephen had been shot, the two dark-suited men walked out of the hotel and across the street to where two other men waited in a black Alfa Romeo saloon, the smoked-glass windows making it impossible to see who was inside it.
‘Give me a phone,’ Mario said, as the Alfa nosed its way out into the traffic, another Alfa following a few yards behind it.
The man sitting in the front seat beside the driver opened the glove box and took out a pair of latex gloves, which he pulled on, and a mobile phone. He unclipped the back, checked that a SIM card was already inserted, slid a battery into position and replaced the back panel. Then he switched on the mobile and passed it back.
The small man consulted the piece of paper again and pressed the buttons on the keypad to dial a mobile number in Iraq. All the phones used in this kind of third-party operation were burners — cheap mobiles purchased in bulk from a wholesaler — and the SIM card inserted in each of them would be used to make exactly one call before being disposed of, and no numbers were ever programmed into their memories. Each mobile would only be used half a dozen times before being dumped as well. Members of the Mafia who needed to make telephone calls memorized the appropriate numbers, and if additional numbers had to be used, as in this case when the organization was carrying out a contract on behalf of another group, then those numbers would be written down on small slips of paper. Paper could be burned or swallowed in an emergency, but data stored electronically on almost anything could always be retrieved, and that was a potential problem.
‘We have had partial success,’ Mario said when his call was answered. ‘We have located and spoken to the man in question and obtained what we needed from him.’
Calls from one mobile to another were essentially encrypted, but like all people involved in criminal activities, the small man was always circumspect in what he said. You never knew when information might get into the wrong hands.
‘But the lady and her husband had already left. We believe they decided to continue their journey by car, and I should be able to confirm that this morning. Do you still wish to speak to her?’
The man in Baghdad paused for a moment while he digested this unpleasant piece of news.
‘Did you get an answer to my other question?’ he asked.
‘I did,’ Mario replied, ‘and he said the answer was yes. In fact, he said everybody had done so.’
Khaled cursed briefly and fluently in Arabic, then switched back to English, their only common language.
‘Very well,’ he said. ‘In that case I will certainly need to reach her. Do you know anybody who could talk to them on my behalf?’
‘Possibly, but finding them will not be easy, and it might be better to wait until they get home. I definitely have friends there who could contact them.’
That was about as clear a statement of intent as Mario was prepared to say on an open line: he knew that trying to find the targets in France would be difficult, perhaps impossible, but once the Lewis woman reached Britain, she would probably think she was safe and certainly wouldn’t feel the need to hide. So eliminating her there would be comparatively easy, a simple matter of locating her house or apartment and then subcontracting the killing to an organized crime group based in Britain.
‘I’ll have to think about it,’ Khaled said, after another pause. ‘If I decide that that is the best option would you be able to organize it?’
‘Of course. There will be some additional expenses for my friends, but I presume that would not be a problem.’
‘No.’
Moments later Mario passed the phone back to the man in the passenger seat. He snapped the back off the mobile, removed the battery and took out the SIM card. He produced a small pair of scissors, snipped the card into four pieces and dropped them out of the side window one at a time as the vehicle sped through the streets. Then he took a small plastic packet containing a new and unused SIM card, opened it, slid it into the slot in the phone, and replaced the plastic back before putting the phone back into the glove box, along with the battery. Simply having the battery in place offered at least the possibility that the mobile could be tracked, even if it wasn’t switched on, which was why the phone was only powered up for the time it took for the call to be made. Finally, he peeled off the latex gloves and put them and the remains of the SIM card packet into a small plastic bag that he would dump later.
Before long the small convoy reached its destination, a large and palatial villa set in extensive grounds surrounded by a high wall topped with razor wire a few miles to the north of Milan.
In an air-conditioned room built into the basement of the property and protected by solid concrete walls and a steel door that would resist anything short of a rocket-propelled grenade, a trusted and experienced computer specialist oversaw the IT facilities of the Milan family of the Cosa Nostra.