Detonator (34 page)

After quite a bit of tapping and frowning he said he could find no trace of
Minerva
being booked into Brindisi during the next two months. I handed him another twenty and asked if he could check the timetable for Bari and the other Italian ports as well, and he gave me the same answer.

Checking out the coastline to the north was next on my agenda. Frank’s villa was only a minor detour. Dijani would have to assume it was high on my list of known locations, so I didn’t expect him to have set up shop there and be waiting for me to come and give him the Hesco treatment. But I needed to check the place out, if only to cross it off my list.

I slowed before the turning, hung a right on the opposite side of the road, and parked outside a sleepy-looking garden centre.

There were fresh tyre marks on the track through the trees that led up to the entrance to the villa, but no wagons parked in the driveway. A big
In Vendita
sign had been hammered into the grass beside the locked gates.

The villa wasn’t as grand as the Courchevel chalet, but who cared? It was right in the middle of an olive grove, with a view up to the hill town of Ostuni behind it, and down to the Adriatic in front. I wasn’t surprised that Frank had been happy there. Until that last visit.

Every shutter that I could see was closed. The garden swing creaked as it moved in the breeze. I didn’t feel the need to hang around. This must have been where we were heading when Frank was killed, but there was no reason it would be bursting with clues about the location of the boat I was looking for.

As soon as I was a safe distance away I stopped again and pulled out the blueprint, willing it to give up its secret, willing Frank to tell me all over again what he must have told me in the green room.

If he’d known where and when
Minerva
was going to park, if he’d known what cargo it was carrying, I was sure he’d have said.

Maybe he did.

Maybe he had.

But all I could hear was his frustration. ‘
Look again
…’

And all I knew was what the pantomime at Brindisi told me: that if
Minerva
hadn’t already arrived, it would do so inside the next twelve to eighteen hours, while the GIS were so busy fucking about with
Vesta
and
Diana
and the exploding container that they wouldn’t be paying any attention to what might be happening elsewhere.

I was about to fold the blueprint and put it back in the day sack when Frank finally lost his cool with me. ‘
Look again. Look at the hold. Then look below
…’

I knew fuck-all about boats, but I’d had to gain access to one or two of them, and knew how they worked. The basic objective was to keep load space to a maximum. I traced the outline of the engine room. Then the cabins. Then the hold.

This time, I
did
look below the hold. And I noticed something. A row of boxes sitting just above the keel. I’d previously thought they must be containers. Now they looked like compartments.

I glanced at the Suunto and sparked up another choggy Nokia.

Luca sounded even worse than he had that morning.

‘Mate, I think I’ve spotted something. On the blueprint. There’s a bunch of compartments under the hold. So whatever they’ve got in there is something they want to keep well hidden.’

‘My source in the
carabinieri
says you were right about Brindisi. They did get a tip-off. Two of them got hit by the explosion. One dead, one critical. And they won’t finish unloading
Vesta
and
Diana
until tomorrow night.’

He went quiet on me for a moment.

‘Nico …’

I suddenly realized it was tension in his voice, not tiredness. And it wasn’t about the Brindisi gangfuck.

‘Mate, what’s up?’

‘The laptop …’ I heard him gulp, then the chink of glass. Another espresso had just bitten the dust. ‘Bad news. Very bad news. My man has been able to access three files so far. Nothing about
Minerva
. But one of them contains a detailed breakdown of Frank Timis’s property portfolio …’

I was still shit at remembering the twenty-four hours that had led up to me being thrown off the French mountain road, but I knew exactly what Luca was going to say next.

‘Oh, fuck.
Fuck.
The safe houses …’

‘It wasn’t one of our big priorities so, to begin with, I only looked through the list with half an eye. Frank owned a lot of places, all over the world. Mostly for business or investment purposes.

‘Then we found a more personal file. A
dacha
in Peredelkino. A chalet in Courchevel. A villa outside Ostuni. Apartments in New York and London. And two others, in Ukraine. Not luxurious. Not expensive. At the end of a chain of shell companies, camouflaging ownership, I saw Anna’s name.’

‘Those fuckers are supposed to be so secure even I don’t know where they are.’

‘I called Pasha immediately. He phoned her, got no answer. Then he sent one of his local guys to check both places as quickly as possible …’

He hesitated.

‘She and the boy have gone.’

My pulse rate barely altered during a contact, or even when I was tabbing across high ground in hostile territory. But my heart was doing its best to fight its way out of my ribcage right now. I opened my mouth, slowed my breathing and gripped myself.

‘OK. He say anything else? He have any idea where they might be?’

‘He will leave no stone unturned, you know that.’ Luca was trying to sound as upbeat as possible, but I could tell he was in pieces. ‘He’ll be asking everyone in the surrounding area for …’

He kept talking, but I stopped listening.

I needed to focus.

Dijani would have had Frank’s laptop within hours of his death. If they’d cracked the password and taken her and the baby before I picked up Hesco, that fucker would have told me. He’d have used them to save his own skin.

Maybe Luca’s geek was a magician, and Dijani’s guys were still scratching their heads and failing to gain access to Frank’s files.

Maybe they hadn’t taken them.

Maybe Mr Lover Man hadn’t given them her name, or told them Anna and Nicholai were my weak point.

Maybe Anna had found a different bolthole.

But ‘maybe’ wasn’t good enough.

I had to work on the assumption that whichever safe house Anna had chosen had stopped being safe at least seventy-two hours ago.

‘Where were they? The safe houses.’

‘One east of Ternopil. One south of Vinnitsa.’

That made sense. It was Frank’s home turf.

‘Will you go there, Nico?’

‘No.’ I felt my head shake, as if that was helping. ‘Dijani will know where they are. And
Minerva
is still my best chance of finding
him
.’

My mission had changed. My target hadn’t.

‘We heard she left Patras four hours ago.’

It was 17:42 now. I got my brain in gear on some numbers. They would frame my actions between now and first light tomorrow. And doing the sums was a good way to avoid thinking about the shit Anna and our son might be in.

Patras was 330 nautical miles from Brindisi, give or take.

Minerva
was fresh off the slipway, so should be able to do at least twenty-two knots fully loaded, more if not.

Which meant I had between eight and fourteen hours to locate the fucker.

‘OK, listen in. They won’t drop anchor offshore at the height of the trafficking season. The coastguards would be all over it. And it’s not booked into any of the main Italian terminals. I’ve covered every fucking centimetre of the coast between Brindisi and Taranto, and there’s nowhere it could get into without drawing attention to itself. So I’m going north. I’m starting with Monopoli. You know it?’

‘I’ve never been there.’

‘Can you Google it?’

I could hear him tapping at his keyboard. He gave me a running commentary as he scrolled down the imagery. ‘Old town … beach … swimmers … more swimmers … ancient wall … parasols … swimming-pool … map …
trulli
… No, that must be a shot of Alberobello …’

I didn’t know what the fuck he was talking about.

‘… church … more parasols … fish … Pippa Middleton at a wedding … fishing boats … no cargo ships yet … more Pippa—’

I was about to tell him to shut the fuck up about Pippa Middleton when he got excited about a big ship – a tanker or a container vessel – and a crane.

‘But only one photograph.’

I told him I didn’t give a shit: one was good enough for me.

‘Nico … I … Anna …’

‘Luca, no need, mate. Really.’

At times like this, you have to cut people away. I needed him switched on. I didn’t want him to take up time or get emotional.

‘But I still need your help. I’m not going to bin this mobile. Call or text if you get any updates about Anna, Dijani, the Urans,
Minerva
, or any other shit I need to know. And if I find the fucking thing, I’ll call you.’

I powered down and shoved the mobile into my jeans. If I got tracked down, so what? At least I would be one step closer to Dijani.

I just needed it to be on my terms, not his. I had to be in control of what happened next.

This wasn’t just about me any more.

A short avenue of cypresses led up to the Monopoli graveyard. Its whitewashed outer walls and the two sets of columns on either side of a heavily barred entrance made it look like a barracks built to withstand a full-scale infantry attack. I passed it on my way to the headland immediately to the south-east of the old town.

I skirted a couple of small sandy bays filled with locals and tourists enjoying the late-afternoon sun, and parked up on the far side of a pizza restaurant that looked like it had seen better days. I bought a litre of mineral water and a slice of something that had been pattern-bombed with cheese, tomato and
peperoni
, and started on it as I walked out to the nearest spit.

I found a place among the rocks that gave me cover, swallowed the last bit of crust and got some liquid down my neck before bringing out the binos. The map had delivered on its promise of a good, uninterrupted view of my target.

This wasn’t the playground of the super-rich, so the water wasn’t stuffed with jet skis and luxury yachts and perma-tans. Two or three teams of rowers were working up a sweat close to the opposite shore and there was the odd swimmer and marker buoy, but that was it.

From this angle, Monopoli looked like a fantasy travel poster – a combo of blindingly white and light brown buildings, framed by the deep blue-green of the sea and the paler blue of the sky. As I scanned the place left to right, my view was dominated by the cathedral, a pair of massive old factory chimneys, another huge church and a neat little fortress that guarded the harbour mouth.

Then the thing I was really here for: the stone dock that Luca had Googled. It doubled as a breakwater and had two cargo vessels parked up alongside it. Neither of them had ‘
NETTUNO
’ painted across their flank, but there was room for a third, and maybe even a fourth.

There was no sign of a gantry or any kind of storage facility, but two smart yellow tower cranes and a third hoist, half their size, mounted on caterpillar tracks, stood against the back wall, ready to swing into action.

I lowered the binos and ran them along the surviving segment of the ancient fortifications. Part of it had been converted into what looked like a boutique hotel, with white parasols lining the battlements. I checked out the balconies in case Dijani and the Uran brothers were using it as their operating base. They were both deserted. A couple of lads with bellies overhanging their shorts gutted octopi in a rock pool beneath them.

A circular cannon emplacement jutted out between the hotel and the fortress. A red-and-white-striped mini-lighthouse and what looked like a Second World War bunker stood at the end of the quay a hundred to its right.

I moved across to the other side of the spit. A lone fishing boat was chugging out to sea. A couple of passenger ferries steamed along the horizon, heading for Bari, I guessed, or maybe further north. There wasn’t a single container in sight.

I wandered back to the Seat, wrapped the passports, IDs and money in a plastic bag, pocketed the torch and left the day sack in the boot. The bag went under a rock at the edge of a patch of scrub twenty paces from where I’d parked. Then I took the boardwalk around the edge of the first bay.

I was crossing the outcrop that separated it from the second when the Nokia vibrated in my pocket.

‘Nico, we have traced Dijani’s hotel bookings for last night, tonight and tomorrow. All five star. All paid in advance. In six different locations: Otranto, Brindisi, Bari, Ancona, Ravenna and Venezia.’

‘Pretty much every major port on the Adriatic.’

‘Correct.’

‘Not Monopoli?’

‘Not Monopoli.’

‘Has he checked into any of them?’

‘Not so far.’

‘So he’s fucking about.’

‘Looks like it.’

‘I’m sticking with Plan A. Unless you get a firm sighting of either Dijani or the boat somewhere else.’ I didn’t have a choice. There was no way I could keep rocketing up and down the coast in the hope that I might get lucky. And this place ticked all the boxes.

I slipped off my jacket and hooked it over my shoulder as I joined a random group of punters coming off the beach. I nodded and smiled at a succession of complete strangers whenever I needed to look like someone whose top priority was to find a nice place for a beer.

The walkway beneath the hotel balconies was completely in shadow now. Even the octopus fishermen had pissed off. I stayed with the crowd and turned right, down a paved street that ran along the town side of the old wall.

Every so often cars and slow-moving delivery vehicles crept up behind us, but mostly they were too polite to tell us to get the fuck out of their way.

I ducked into a shop that advertised everything from holiday rentals to Internet access on the door and grabbed a couple of maps – a large-scale street plan of the old town and one of the whole city.