“Vieni qui!” Chris yells at Zabrina. “Now!”
Slowly Zabrina hooks her hair behind her ears with a dreamy gaze, as if it were a summer night and she was standing at a fountain with her friends.
“Now, you stupid bitch!”
“I will be okay,” she says with a soft wave of the hand. “I am family.”
One quiver of hesitation and Chris would have gone back, but she emphatically turns from the route of escape. She makes her choice. He disappears over the edge. One jerk from below and the rope is unloosed and drops to the street.
The helicopter is gone, and with it, the wind, the whole episode. Heat rises off the tarred rooftop. The sky is bleached white, empty. Fat Pasquale keeps coming, weapon sighted. Zabrina fingers the plastic bags of powder she snatched off the kitchen table, safe inside her pockets. She gives an innocent shrug, as if she, too, is a victim in this, but he keeps on coming, up to point-blank range, until he is close enough for her to see the ripples in his sweat-soaked forehead, and look into the cold eyes of her cousin.
Zabrina smiles and says, “It’s me.”
THIRTY-NINE
When I arrive at the airport in Reggio di Calabria, the last stop on the mainland of Italy, I am met by a barrel-chested, forty-year-old Englishman wearing sailor’s whites. He has a wind-burned face and sun-bleached red hair going up his arms. We drive urgently, almost wordlessly, to the harbor. Once we had identified ourselves as Oryx, there was little interest on either side in getting-to-know-you. The only thing that matters is the clock.
There is plenty of action at the terminal where hydrofoils and ferries make the twenty-minute crossing to the island of Sicily. It being the high season, the ferries run 24/7. This is good, as the plan is to blend in with the boat traffic. At a private marina farther up the seaside promenade, we board the Miramare, a seventy-foot megayacht chosen by Atlas for its speed and large rear deck — a good target for a helicopter put-down. There are two other Oryx people as crew, a full-scale operating room with an Italian surgeon and a nurse, a one-hundred-horsepower tender in case of the need for evasive action, and a cache of arms. It takes forty minutes to clear the harbor and another hour to reach cruising distance from the coast. Once the navigation system confirms that we are at the coordinates, the skipper cuts the engines and we put out fishing lines, like any well-heeled party on holiday. Moments later, we receive the radio message from Sterling that the helicopter is on its way.
Later, from the vantage point of a weathered redwood deck on the California coast, it will strike me that these events could never have taken place on our side of the world, not in the easygoing Pacific Ocean — lazy, and flat as a sheet. Not in America, where everything is known. I was something of a baffled passenger on that mystery cruise, just as I had often been mystified by the secrets of Siena. Now, standing on the rear deck of the Miramare, feeling the vibration of the motors and staring at the foamy wake as it fans out and is lost, I try to make the pieces of this voyage fit, but ultimately, there is no rational explanation for why, at any minute, a woman who was a stranger, and is now my sister, will come out of the sky at the end of a rope.
But rational things are not what make you cry, and I begin to cry even before the helicopter appears; in fact, as soon as Sterling radios that Cecilia is on the way. Not from the release of emotion even hardened agents feel when a victim is returned to safety — the abducted child back in the arms of the mom — but a calm, almost imperceptible letting go.
When I left my grandfather Poppy’s house to go to college, I had been conditioned to expect that being cared for would always come with a side dish of punishment. One day a pair of new sneakers would appear under the bed, and the next day he would open the door and hit me across the face because I had kissed a boy. Forever after, I wrapped myself in isolation to avoid being smacked. I didn’t know the sentence was of my own making, and that it could be absolved as quietly as a bird flying off a branch.
On the yacht there is nothing but action and noise — slicing rotors, whipping water, angling for position, and radio squawks — but inside me a tranquil space has opened. The side doors of the chopper slide apart and human faces peer out: Cecilia and the other operative, whose body protects hers as they are lowered to the deck. She is hanging limp, and for a gut-squeezing second I think she is dead, but when the crew unbuckles the harness she stands on her own. The operative is winched back up, the helicopter angles away, and Cecilia and I are safe in each other’s arms. The wind mixes our tears and tangles up our hair. I allow my sister into my heart.
The engines catch and the huge vessel kicks up speed, rock-solid and comforting. The nurse and doctor help Cecilia slowly down a flight of polished teakwood steps to a living room suite with enormous windows looking out at the bright green ocean, and a white sectional couch thirty feet long.
Stripped of the helmet and rescue gear, she is almost unrecognizable, as if she’s been in a horrendous car accident. Her face is swollen in uneven contusions. She is filthy, emaciated, with an ugly gap in her front teeth, her lips caked and peeling. The muscles in her arms have atrophied, and everywhere her skin is splotched and bruised. They take her vital signs and say her blood pressure is high and she is dehydrated.
“We’ve got her! She’s here!” I tell Nicosa, and put Cecilia on the phone.
“Sto bène. Ti amo. Com’è Giovanni?”
She speaks in hushed Italian. Nicosa is confined to the abbey under house arrest, but Giovanni is waiting in the small coastal town of Agropoli, where a launch will take him out to the yacht. Cecilia is only able to speak to her husband in two-word sentences. She has no tears, maybe none left.
I sit beside her on the couch while the nurse administers an IV.
Cecilia puts a hand on mine. It sits there, light as a sparrow.
“They left the girl behind.”
“Zabrina?”
“Is that her name?” she murmurs tiredly.
The doctor prepares a syringe and injects it into the IV line. Clear liquid moves through the tube into her bloodstream.
“She’s my patient, and she’s very ill,” Cecilia says, before the dark.
Chris repeated the code words to Atlas in London: “It’s been sorted. We’ve given them the good news.” After setting off the diversionary explosion on the gas line, Ripper, in cleanup position, moving in the opposite direction of the confused crowds, gained entry to the rearmost courtyard of the Little City, where the crack house was situated, and climbed the steps to the roof. There he saw the body of Zabrina Tursi, shot in the chest at close range. Fat Pasquale, balancing heavily on one knee, was attempting to recover the bags of cocaine from her pockets when Ripper took him out with an easy head shot. He lined the pack of boy-criminals who were loyal to Fat Pasquale up against a wall, and made them wait there in the sun while he disappeared down the steps and locked the door to the roof, abandoning them to the buzzing corpses.
FORTY
At first the families come respectfully to the questura. In the cool of the morning, the olive farmer Aleandro, whose uncle had also vanished, meets with thirty others on the steps of the shambling building. Middle-aged, dressed in casual summer clothes, they might have been mistaken for a neighborhood coalition lobbying for more streetlights, except there is something profoundly cohesive about that group — solemn determination on their faces, as opposed to the mixed bag of international tourists mindlessly wandering the sunlit passage between the modern world and the commanding black-and-white medieval cathedral looming in the Piazza del Duomo ahead. The tourists are expecting to be entertained by whatever tale history wants to tell. The families of the “disappeared,” who have come to see the Commissario, have abandoned their illusions.