Rules of Vengeance (36 page)

“You must have a copy on your computer,” said Kate. “If you’d like, we can check from here.” She stared into his eyes, letting him know in no uncertain terms that she knew all about him.

“Civitavecchia,” said Luca Lazio. “That is where the ambulance picked her up. That’s all I know.”

   Ten minutes later, Kate Ford was seated in the front seat of an Alfa Romeo belonging to the carabinieri, speeding up the highway. The ambulance company had provided the address where Emma Ransom, or Lara, had been picked up. Via Porto 89. It also listed the nearest establishment. A place called the Hotel Rondo.

“The drive will take thirty minutes,” said the lieutenant colonel, a handsome olive-skinned man of thirty-five. “Maybe an hour, depending on traffic. Summer. You never know.”

“Get your men there ahead of us,” said Kate. “Block off all streets leading to the hotel. Make sure they have a description of Ransom.”

“He is dangerous, this man? He has a gun, no?”
Dangerous
. Shorthand for asking whether the order be given to shoot Ransom on sight.

“We’d prefer him alive,” said Kate. “He may have information that could save lives.”

The lieutenant colonel placed a call to his counterpart in Civitavecchia and advised him that the man responsible for the car bombing in London two days earlier might at that moment be in or near the Hotel Rondo. “We are mobilizing our local brigade,” he announced confidently upon hanging up. “We will have one hundred men on the streets within thirty minutes. We will shut down the area. If Ransom is there, we will get him.”

Kate said nothing. She stared out the window at the whitecaps and the sailboats cutting through the blue water. Soon the road narrowed to two lanes. The Alfa Romeo slowed and came to a halt. Traffic was backed up in both directions. Drumming her fingers, she looked out the window. Across the street was a gated enclave with a sign reading “Regional Barracks Ladispoli; XX Artillery Battalion. Italian Department of Defense.” Kate recognized the name with a start. It was from this barracks that Emma Ransom had hijacked the shipment of Semtex three months earlier.

Just then the car accelerated, and soon they were moving at high speed again.

Kate lowered her hand to her side and crossed her fingers for luck.

Ransom was close.

She could feel it.

   The Hotel Rondo was closed for business.

Jonathan stood at the front door, gazing into the lobby where he had seen Emma those eight years before. The red English phone booth was gone, as well as the furniture and the potted plants. Even the reception desk had been ripped out. The hotel was a husk.

He tried the door anyway. Locked.

Disappointed, he turned and walked back down the street. A café around the corner was just opening its doors. He took a table near the window, and when the manager came, he showed him a picture of him and Emma together and asked if he might have seen her a few months back. The manager studied the picture long enough to be polite, then apologized and said that he hadn’t.

“A coffee and some rolls,” said Jonathan.

“Súbito.”

A busboy delivered the breakfast a few minutes later. Jonathan set the picture on the table and stared at it as he drank his coffee. The photograph had been taken five months earlier, in Arosa, Switzerland, the day before the climb that had ended in such disaster. He and Emma stood close to each other on the ski slopes. She was smiling sunnily, her head resting on his shoulder. No matter how long he looked at her, he could not spot the artifice. He ran a finger over the image of his wife. Here was a woman who at that moment had taken upon herself the responsibility of preventing the destruction of a passenger airliner, and because of that, the outbreak of war, and she appeared as footloose and fancy free as a teenager on ski holiday.

He knew then that he was beaten. He was no match for her cunning. He’d been foolish to even try to find her. Worse, Emma knew it, too.
She’d known it all along
.

His fingers curled around the photograph and crumpled it inside his fist. The search was over. He had nowhere else to go. No more clues to follow. No trail, however faded, to trace. Emma had gotten her wish. She had disappeared.

Jonathan paid the bill and ambled outside. He looked up into the sky, considering what to do. Going back to work with Doctors Without Borders was out; so was returning to the camp in Kenya. The thought struck him that he might never be able to practice medicine again. He would need to reinvent himself. But as what? And where? He shrugged and began walking.

“Signore, per favore.”

Reflexively, Jonathan quickened his pace.

“Yes,
you
, signore!”

Jonathan glanced over his shoulder and saw that it was the busboy from the café, the kid who had brought him his breakfast. He stopped and turned to face him.

“The woman you asked about. The lady with the beautiful hair. I see her.”

Jonathan dug out the photograph. “Her?” he asked, flattening out the wrinkles. “You’re sure?”

“She was here in April. She ate at the café every morning. She was German, I think, but her Italian was very good.”

“Do you remember how long she was here?”

“Three or four days.”

“Was she with anyone?”

“No, she always ate alone. Are you her husband or something?”

“Or something,” said Jonathan. “It’s important that I find her.”

“Did you talk to her hotel? She was at the De La Ville. It is a few blocks up the road.” The busboy smiled sheepishly. “I followed her one day when she left. I wanted to ask if I could buy her a drink.” He lowered his eyes, signaling defeat. “I didn’t have the courage to ask her name.”

Jonathan patted the young man on the shoulder. “No apology necessary. Thanks for helping me out.”

“She was a kind person. You know, decent. You could see it in her eyes. The first genuine girl I met in a long time. Before you go, can you tell me something?”

“If I can,” said Jonathan. “Sure.”

“What is her name?”

“Lara.”

   “Of course I remember Mrs. Bach,” said the manager of the Hotel De La Ville, studying the picture of Emma and Jonathan on the ski slope. He was a short, fastidious man, dressed in an immaculate gray suit that contrasted with the lobby’s seedy decor. “But who are you?”

“Her husband.”

“Her husband?” came the skeptical response. “You are Mr. Bach?”

Bach. Another name to go with another identity. “Yes, I’m Mr. Bach.”

“From France?”

“No,” said Jonathan, taken aback. “I’m American, but my wife and I lived all over. Our last residence was in Geneva.”

The manager looked at him a moment longer, then walked behind the reception desk and punched a blizzard of commands into the computer. “Your wife checked in on April fifteenth. She was here four days, then she disappeared. Not a word. Not a call. I phoned the police, but no one has heard of her. Is she all right?”

“She’s fine. She had an accident while she was here and had to spend some time in the hospital. Do you still have her belongings?”

“I’m sorry, but I gave them to the other man who was here asking about her.”

Other man? No doubt the same person who’d checked her out of the hospital. “Tall guy,” tried Jonathan, fishing. “Dark hair.”

“No, in fact he was short like me. And older, with gray hair. He said he was her husband, too, but I did not believe him. Mrs. Bach is far too pretty for such a rough man.”

“What do you mean, rough?”

“He was not polite. A foreigner, but not like you. He paid the bill. Cash.” The manager crossed his arms, his brows raised in some Mediterranean mixture of apology, sympathy, and camaraderie. Women, he seemed to be saying. They could never be trusted.

“Do you know where he was from?”

“He spoke no Italian, only English, but with an accent. Maybe British. Maybe German. I really couldn’t say.”

Jonathan sighed, bitterly disappointed. “Well, thank you anyway,” he said, shaking the manager’s hand, then feeling stupid for doing it. For some reason he needed that contact. Putting on his sunglasses, he headed for the door.

“I do, however, have an address,” said the manager.

Jonathan spun and returned to the reception desk. “You do?”

“The man was very worried about your wife. He thought there might be other people inquiring about her. I got the feeling he did not trust her so much. Perhaps ‘suspicious’ is the better word. He asked me to contact him if anyone came to the hotel and asked about her.”

“And you said you would?”

“For five hundred euros, wouldn’t you?” The manager grew serious. “Do not worry. I will not tell him about you.”

“Thanks,” said Jonathan, not believing him for a second.

The manager went to his monitor and printed up a page with a phone number and the address Route de La Turbie 4, Èze, France.

Èze. A tiny medieval village carved into the mountainside overlooking the Mediterranean on the Côte d’Azur, a few kilometers from Monaco. Jonathan had driven through it, but never visited. It hardly seemed like a headquarters for a clandestine service that had employed Emma. Then again, he knew better than to be surprised.

Above the address was printed a company name: VOR S.A.

It was the same name given on the hospital bill.

   “We tracked down the phone.”

“You’re sure?” asked Den Baxter of the Evidence Recovery Team.

“Oh, yeah. We’ve got it, all right. And there’s more, boss. You’d best get over here as soon as you can manage.”

Baxter checked his wristwatch as he ran up the stairs leading to the London Metropolitan Police’s forensics laboratory. It was just shy of nine. It had taken the Met’s team of technicians less than a day to piece together the fragments of the circuit board recovered at 1 Victoria Street and identify the make and model of the mobile phone used to detonate the car bomb aimed at Russian Interior Minister Igor Ivanov.

Twenty-one hours and forty-one minutes, to be exact
.

Baxter kept track of such things.

Alastair McKenzie was waiting at the door to the lab. Baxter noted with pride that the man was wearing the same clothing as the day before. He smelled like last week’s garbage, but so what? Cleanliness might be next to godliness, but it didn’t do a thing to solve an investigation.

“Nearly killed myself getting over here,” said Baxter, taking McKenzie’s hand in his own and nearly crushing it. “Better be worth it.”

McKenzie’s answer was a tight smile and a direction to follow him.

Baxter entered a conference room and found a team of white-coated techs waiting. “Right, then,” he said. “Let’s hear it.”

“Keep in mind that we had bugger all to start with,” said Evans, the chief of the forensics squad. “Two grotty little remnants of the circuit board that Mr. McKenzie was kind enough to bring us, and that was it. We used a bit of epoxy to piece the board back together, cured it in the autoclave, and here’s what we came up with.” Evans handed Baxter a warped chunk of sky-blue plastic shaped like a wee pistol. “You can see the place for the screen, and here’s where the microphone goes. What gave it away was the placement of the antenna feed pad. Only Nokia puts it there. We had a look at their manuals and straightaway saw that it was a model 9500S.”

“Entry-level model,” piped up one of Evans’s assistants.

“Give ’em away free with a two-year subscription plan,” said another.

“But what’s most important,” continued Evans, “is that the 9500S is brand spanking new.” He took back the reconstructed piece of circuit board and held it up to the light for examination. “Problem was that we didn’t have the entire serial number. Now, every circuit board gets its own number. Costs the manufacturer a penny more, but it keeps out the counterfeiters and helps law enforcement in the bargain. This particular board showed a 4-5-7-1 and a 3. We checked it against the prototype and saw that it was missing the first two numbers. Here’s where we got lucky. I called my counterpart over in Helsinki and we conferenced the boys at Nokia. Turns out that very few of the phones using these new circuit boards have been sold as yet. In fact, the only buyer is Vodafone. The lads at the company were only too glad to be of service, provided we kept quiet about its being one of their customers who planted the bomb.”

Baxter said he would do his best to keep the company’s name out of the news, but if it came to trial, the circuit board would have to be admitted as evidence.

“Fair enough,” responded Evans. “Here’s where the story gets interesting. Vodafone’s been selling the phone exclusively in the UK for the past two weeks. According to their records, phones manufactured with a circuit board ending in 4571 were sold in three metropolitan areas: Manchester, Liverpool, and London. My boys spent half of yesterday and all of last night calling every sales outlet and checking to see who did or didn’t have phones with the serial numbers in question. Turns out that neither Manchester nor Liverpool has placed their wares on the shelves yet. That left London, where batches beginning with 12 through 42 were delivered. Because it’s a new phone, the people at Vodafone were conducting what they called ‘a soft rollout,’ meaning they put a few on the shelves here and there to see if anyone liked the ruddy things. The warehouse manager looked round and confirmed that of batches beginning with the numbers 12 through 42, he still had 28 through 42. That means only batches 12 through 27 were gone. To make it short, we kept calling and narrowed down the place of sale of the phone used to detonate that bomb to three locations: Terminal Five, London Heath row; the Vodafone store on Oxford Circus; and an independent sales agent in Waterloo Station.”

“They still have them?” asked Baxter, who by now was perched on the edge of his seat, nearly driven mad by the wait.

“The store at Oxford Circus has all its phones with the serial numbers in question, and so does the sales agent in Waterloo Station.”