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  But irritating the padrino was still a priceless exercise.

  Dangerous, certainly, but satisfying all the same.

  When it came to dealing with the ’Ndrangheta, Basile was cautious but not terrified. That might come later, but he reckoned it was worth the risk. In the meantime, he would watch his back and keep his weapons close, prepared to go down fighting if it came to that.

  “It seems you have the situation well in hand,” he said, nearly gagging on the quasi-compliment. “I’ll go now and give Magolino your regards.”

  As he retreated to his car and drove away, Basile was pleased to imagine Albanesi glaring after him.

  Robert F. Kennedy Department of Justice Building,

  Washington, D.C.

  HAL BROGNOLA’S MOBILE satellite phone was the smallest and lightest available, tipping the scale at a mere seven ounces. Its long, angular antenna contributed half of that weight and sometimes made Hal feel as if he were talking into the bowl of a meerschaum pipe.

  With the sat phone, Hal could reach out to Stony Man or his operatives nearly anywhere on Earth. In fact, he refrained from calling agents in the field, except in dire emergencies where some bit of intelligence he possessed might help avert disaster. Otherwise, he thought it best to spare them needless interruptions when their focus meant the difference between survival and a grisly death.

  And when the sat phone rang, Hal always felt a little chill that lifted the short hairs on his nape. Experience had taught him that calls rarely brought good news. More often, by a ratio of ninety-odd to one, the callers had some problem they were hoping Brognola could resolve by pulling strings in Washington, dispatching fresh supplies or reaching out to trusted contacts overseas. Hal didn’t mind—that was his function, after all—but some days he sat dreading the phone’s customized ringtone.

  Days like today—and damn, there it was.

  Hal snared it midway through the second ring, scrambler engaged. Wrong numbers could not reach his phone, in theory, but if they did, the caller would hear nothing but a shrill tone reminiscent of a fax line.

  “Go,” he said.

  “It’s me.” Bolan, calling from Italy.

  “How’s it going?” Brognola asked.

  “There’s a wrinkle,” Bolan said. “Make that two wrinkles.”

  “Oh?”

  “First up, the witness from Shelter Island has a sister. I just met her. Magolino’s boys were taking her for seafood.”

  “I suppose she’s off the menu.”

  “Reservation canceled. Now, the thing is, she needs somewhere safe to go.”

  Brognola thought it through in seconds. “I won’t get any traction here,” he said, “unless she’s got something to share.”

  “Like, say, an inside view from Magolino’s headquarters?”

  “Depends. If it connects to the indictment in Manhattan, she’d be useful. If it’s all Calabrian, I doubt the prosecution will import her.”

  “I don’t have any details for you yet,” Bolan replied. “But while we’re sorting that, I’d like to see if we can keep her breathing.”

  “And your thought is...”

  “Are there any cops you trust in the neighborhood of Catanzaro? Someone who can stash her out of sight while I take care of business?”

  That was tough. Hal knew a captain of the GDF who might be sympathetic to the lady’s plight, but if he tied it to Bolan’s blitz against the ’Ndrangheta, that could blow the deal sky-high, along with any hopes of collaboration down the road.

  “It could be...sensitive,” Brognola said.

  “The story of my life,” Bolan replied.

  “This guy I know, he’s arrow-straight. We’ve checked him seven ways from Sunday, and he’s clean. Despite that, he’s advanced on merit, through his record of arrests and solid cases. Mafiosi, terrorists, a couple psychos, take your pick.”

  “I’m waiting for the other shoe,” Bolan said.

  “Just this—he’s by the book. I can’t swear that he never cuts a corner, but he won’t run off on any tangents helping you take Magolino down.”

  “Nobody’s asking that,” Bolan replied. “Just help a lady stay alive and maybe file some of those solid cases in the process.”

  “If there’s anybody left to prosecute.”

  “There always is.”

  “Okay,” Brognola said. “His name’s Basile. Nicola Basile. Hang on for a second while I get his number for you.”

  Before he set the phone down, Hal’s mind clicked and he asked Bolan, “What’s the second wrinkle?”

  “The police will have my rental car by now.”

  “Meaning your name and paperwork.”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay. Phone number first, and then I’ll see what Stony Man can do about the rest.”

  Viale Alvaro Corrado, Catanzaro

  “YOU HAVE DISAPPOINTED me severely,” Gianni Magolino said.

  Standing before his master’s desk, Aldo Adamo realized there was no defense he could offer. He couldn’t shift the blame onto his slaughtered soldiers. As the second in command, he’d been given an assignment and had failed to see it through. Whatever consequences might flow from that failure, they would fall on him.

  “I understand,” Aldo said. “The fault is mine, of course.”

  “Spare me self-righteous martyrdom,” his godfather replied. “What do we know of this American who has interfered with our business?”

  “Only his name and his address in the United States, if they are accurate.”

  “You doubt it?” Magolino asked.

  “He is obviously a professional,” Adamo answered. “Commonly, they travel with false papers, often multiple identities.”

  “You’ve started searching the hotels, of course.”

  “Yes. If he took a room, we’ll find out where it was.”

  Adamo, for his part, had doubts about this Scott Parker checking into a hotel under the same name he’d used to hire a car.

  “And at the airport?”

  “We are still seeking the data on his reservation. The commercial carriers take time.”

  “And charter services?”

  “None recognized his name or photograph.”

  “The name may change. But if we have his face...”

  “Indeed, sir.” But Adamo’s tone betrayed him.

  “Where’s your confidence?” Magolino asked.

  “What we have, padrino, is a photocopy of his driver’s license from America. It’s not the best, but one of my santisti—the computer man, whom you’ve met—tells me photographs on passports and the like may be manipulated.”

  “Explain.”

  “I do not understand it all myself,” Adamo said. “He tells me you can take digital photos of a person, then ‘adjust’ them until they are similar but not the same. Distort the features slightly, or graft others from a different person’s face. The new ones come out close enough to satisfy a passport check, for instance, but on close examination, they may just as easily be someone else entirely.”

  Magolino waved the scientific talk away. “I don’t care what was done to any photograph. You have a name and a description. Find this bastard who made a mockery of us and bring him to me, alive, if possible. If not, bring me his head.”

  Adamo smiled at that.

  “You won’t forget our Mariana, eh?”

  “Of course not, padrino.”

  “She can seriously damage each and every one of us. The taint of an informant is upon her. Do not let her speak to the authorities.”

  “No, sir.”

  But Magolino was not finished yet. “Your life is forfeit for today’s disaster,” he said. “This you know. Whether I choose to take it from you shall depend on how you deal with this unhappy situation.
Solve it soon, my brother, and you’ll find that much may be forgiven. If you fail...”

  He said no more, but drew the index finger of his right hand slowly across his throat. Adamo got the message loud and clear.

  Lamezia Terme International Airport

  SWITCHING CARS WASN’T a problem. Bolan took a long-term parking ticket for the Lancia Delta and parked it between a panel van and a Fiat Sedici. He replaced it with a Fiat Panda, navy blue, whose cautious owner had left a spare key in a small magnetic box inside the right-rear wheel well. The parking ticket on the Panda’s dash was one day old, suggesting Bolan would have a few more days, at least, before its rightful owner came to look for it. Leaving the lot, Bolan paid the tab and started back to Catanzaro, Mariana Natale slumped in the seat beside him, his weapons riding in back.

  Bolan had heard her story—or at least the parts of it she felt like sharing with him. She’d been born into an ’Ndrangheta family, four generations of santisti and vangeli on her father’s side. Her brother naturally went into the family business, leaving Mariana to consider whether she’d marry someone from the cosche and adopt a life of ease or possibly become a nun. The route she chose instead, playing the field with influential mobsters, nearly led her father to disown her, but he’d relented when Gianni Magolino took her as his mistress. Any further criticism was forbidden, and her father’s death—an ambush by a gang of Camorra mobsters on a trip to Rome—had silenced him for good. The rest of Mariana’s family still regarded her with thinly veiled distain, but they never managed to reject the gifts she bought for them with Magolino’s money.

  Her brother changed all that when he was busted by the DEA and chose to violate the code of silence rather than accept a prison term that would have put him back in circulation sometime in the next millennium. From that point on, the rest of the Natale family was forced to make a choice: deny the traitor and do everything within their power to destroy him, or prepare to share his fate. Now, with Rinaldo dead, it seemed Gianni Magolino had decided the rest of them should go, too.

  “I got a name and number,” he told Mariana on the short drive back to Catanzaro. “Someone who’s supposed to be trustworthy.”

  “Ah. Supposed to be.”

  “I trust my source,” he said. “Of course, we don’t know till we try.”

  “And then what?”

  “That depends on you. They’ll probably want something in return for guaranteeing your security.”

  “Security!” she scoffed. “Rinaldo had security.”

  “Or I can drop you off somewhere in town, and you can take your chances. Your call.”

  “You don’t care if I live or die?”

  Emotional blackmail didn’t work on Bolan. “If I didn’t care,” he said, “you’d still be back with Magolino’s men. It doesn’t mean I’m adopting you.”

  “You have a job to do,” she said. “I understand, believe me.” She turned to him, staring. “They’ll kill you. Do you understand that?”

  “They’ve been trying for a while,” Bolan replied. “It isn’t working out for them so far.”

  “You don’t know Catanzaro. Anyone who does not serve the family is either ostracized or liquidated. You’re a foreigner, a stranger. Just because you speak the language, more or less, does not mean you’ll survive.”

  “Thanks for the vote of confidence,” he said.

  “I’m simply telling you the truth.”

  Bolan changed the subject. “I’ll reach out to this new contact once we’re back in town. You can speak to him yourself. If you decide to try it on your own instead, I’ll take you anywhere you want to go, within a reasonable distance.”

  “So you wash your hands of me.”

  “I told you—”

  “No adoption, right. But what about the rest of my family?”

  She clearly meant her blood relations now, and not the ’Ndrangheta cosche whose godfather had decided she must die.

  “Maybe they’ll make a deal.”

  Her laugh was bitter, jagged. When it passed, she told him, “You know nothing of our ways.”

  He could have argued with her, told her he’d been dealing with oath-bound secret societies since one of them had killed most of his family, but what would be the point? The lady had escaped death, for the moment, and was feeling sorry for herself. Bolan had a war to fight in Catanzaro.

  Starting any minute now.

  Chapter 5

  Catanzaro

  “This is a waste of time,” Niccolo Gatti said. “We should be doing something.”

  Raf Dondini half turned toward him from the Maserati Quattroporte’s shotgun seat and answered. “We’re doing just what Aldo told us to. If that’s a problem for you, take it up with him.”

  “Goddamn hotels,” Gatti groused. “We’ve checked a dozen of them—”

  “Five,” Arturo Pino said.

  “Whatever,” Gatti told their driver. “No one has seen this damned American.”

  “We can say that when we’ve checked them all,” Pino replied.

  “How many more?”

  “We got the shortest list,” Pino informed him. “Twenty-eight to go.”

  “That will take all night!”

  “Can’t wait to see his little stripper,” Mimmo Renni said, smiling.

  “She’s a dancer,” Gatti muttered.

  “A naked dancer.”

  “Shut it, eh?”

  “Enough!” Dondini snapped. “You want to fight, wait till we’re finished working.”

  His backseat soldiers lapsed into uneasy silence, Gatti glowered while Renni smiled, self-satisfied. They were like children sometimes, quarreling over trifles. It could be amusing under certain circumstances, but tonight their bickering was getting on Dondini’s nerves. They had a job to do.

  Two enemies. And not a sign of them, so far.

  Dondini’s orders had been simple—find the two of them, presumably together, and retrieve them, one way or another. His team was assigned to scour hotels on the southwest side of Catanzaro, and Dondini would complete that task without complaint, although he secretly agreed with Gatti that it was a waste of time.

  Aldo had told them the American was some kind of professional. It stood to reason, then, that he wouldn’t leave paper trails all over town. The rental car was one thing, maybe unavoidable if he was operating solo, but hotels were something else. Too many witnesses, particularly if he brought the woman back with him after he’d killed four men to free her.

  The best thing Dondini could do right now was find the American and the woman. Although Don Magolino wanted them alive, Aldo had acknowledged that might not be possible. Accordingly, Dondini’s team was armed to deal with any threat they might encounter: two Heckler & Koch MP5K submachine guns fitted with suppressors, a Franchi SPAS-15 semiautomatic shotgun and a Steyr AUG assault rifle, also with a suppressor. If they couldn’t do the job with that hardware, each member of the team also carried at least one pistol and a knife for backup. Nothing was left to chance.

  Dondini had known Cortale and the others who’d been killed that afternoon. They’d been his friends and his brothers in the Magolino family. Avenging them would be an honor, and the sooner it was done, the better, for the sake of all concerned.

  “Where next?” Gatti asked.

  Dondini checked his list, then said, “The Paradiso.”

  “That’s five stars,” Gatti said.

  “So what?”

  “This bastard’s hiding out. Assuming he hasn’t left the city, would he risk a five-star hotel?”

  “He might think it’s the last place anyone would look,” Dondini said.

  “Foolish,” Gatti muttered.

  “What was that?”

  “Never mind.”

  “I’d like to be with Ro
cco’s team when they find Mariana’s mother,” Renni said. “That should be fun.”

  “Not for the mother,” Pino replied.

  “Don Magolino should have killed them all the day Rinaldo sold us out,” Gatti said.

  “He had a soft spot for the girl,” Pino suggested.

  “Or a hard spot,” Renni sniggered.

  Dondini let them babble on. He found their disrespect for il padrino disconcerting, but their task was tiresome, and as Gatti said, they would be at it all night long—unless they caught a break. If they did, they would all be instant heroes to the family.

  A little luck, he thought. That’s all I need.

  * * *

  THE TELEPHONE RANG twice before a deep voice said, “Basile.”

  “You don’t know me, Captain,” Bolan said, “but a good friend tells me you’re trustworthy.”

  “Who is this?”

  “The one who stopped four of Gianni Magolino’s boys from killing Mariana Natale.”

  After a momentary silence on the line, Basile said, “If that is true, we may have much to talk about.”

  “Maybe another time,” Bolan replied. “Right now, the lady needs someplace where she can feel secure.”

  “Is she applying for immunity? Making an offer to cooperate with prosecutors?”

  “None of that’s for me to say,” Bolan advised. “I need someone to take her off my hands and keep her safe while I go on about my business.”

  “Ah. And what, exactly, would that business be?” Basile asked.

  “For your sake,” Bolan said, “we’d better not get into that.”

  “Are you afraid of shocking me?”

  “I’d hate to see you charged as an accomplice.”

  “So you have illegal plans.”

  Bolan ignored that. “Can you help the lady or not?”

  “Facilities are available, but it requires a certain measure of discretion.”

  “As the marshals found out in New York,” Bolan replied.

  “Indeed. You’re the American,” Basile said. “May I call you Scott?”

  “If it helps. That’s not my name.”

  “I thought as much. You’re a professional. May I inquire who sent you to Calabria?”