They got the stockings off without further injury. When Marco returned to the living room, Signora Altonelli was arranging the ice around the left ankle.
“She says it’s not broken,” Francesca said to him. “She worked in a hospital for many years.”
“Does she live in Bologna?”
“Imola, a few miles away.”
He knew exactly where it was, on the map anyway. “I guess I should be going now,” he said, not really wanting to go but suddenly feeling like a trespasser.
“I think you need some coffee,” Francesca said. Her mother darted away, back into the kitchen.
“I feel like I’m intruding,” he said.
“No, please, after all you’ve done today, it’s the least I can do.”
Her mother was back, with a glass of water and two pills. Francesca gulped it all down and propped her head
up on some pillows. She exchanged short sentences with her mother, then looked at him and said, “She has a chocolate torta in the refrigerator. Would you like some?”
“Yes, thank you.”
And her mother was off again, humming now and quite pleased that she had someone to care for and someone to feed. Marco resumed his place on the stool. “Does it hurt?”
“Yes, it does,” she said, smiling. “I cannot lie. It hurts.”
He could think of no appropriate response, so he ventured back to common ground. “It all happened so fast,” he said. They spent a few minutes rehashing the fall. Then they were silent. She closed her eyes and appeared to be napping. Marco crossed his arms over his chest and stared at a huge, very odd painting that covered almost an entire wall.
The building was ancient, but from the inside Francesca and her husband had fought back as determined modernists. The furniture was low, sleek black leather with bright steel frames, very minimalist. The walls were covered with baffling contemporary art.
“We can’t tell Luigi about this,” she whispered.
“Why not?”
She hesitated, then let it go. “He is paying me two hundred euros a week to tutor you, Marco, and he’s complaining about the price. We’ve argued. He has threatened to find someone else. Frankly, I need the money. I’m getting one or two jobs a week now; it’s still the slow season. Things will pick up in a month when the tourists come south, but right now I’m not earning much.”
The stoic façade was long gone. He couldn’t believe
that she was allowing herself to be so vulnerable. The lady was frightened, and he would break his neck to help her.
She continued: “I’m sure he will terminate my services if I skip a few days.”
“Well, you’re about to skip a few days.” He glanced at the ice wrapped around her ankle.
“Can we keep it quiet? I should be able to move around soon, don’t you think?”
“We can try to keep it quiet, but Luigi has a way of knowing things. He follows me closely. I’ll call in sick tomorrow, then we’ll figure out something the next day. Maybe we could study here.”
“No. My husband is here.”
Marco couldn’t help but glance over his shoulder. “Here?”
“He’s in the bedroom, very ill.”
“What’s—”
“Cancer. The last stages. My mother sits with him when I’m working. A hospice nurse comes in each afternoon to medicate him.”
“I’m sorry.”
“So am I.”
“Don’t worry about Luigi. I’ll tell him I’m thrilled with your teaching style, and that I will refuse to work with anyone else.”
“That would be a lie, wouldn’t it?”
“Sort of.”
Signora Altonelli was back with a tray of torta and espresso. She placed it on a bright red coffee table in the middle of the room and began slicing. Francesca took the coffee but didn’t feel like eating. Marco ate as slowly as humanly possible and sipped from his small cup as if it
might be his last. When Signora Altonelli insisted on another slice, and a refill, he grudgingly accepted.
Marco stayed about an hour. Riding down in the elevator, he realized that Giovanni Ferro had not made a sound.
23
RED CHINA’S PRINCIPAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY, THE
Ministry of State Security, or MSS, used small, highly trained units to carry out assassinations around the world, in much the same manner as the Russians, Israelis, British, and Americans.
One notable difference, though, was that the Chinese had come to rely upon one unit in particular. Instead of spreading the dirty work around like other countries, the MSS turned first to a young man the CIA and Mossad had been watching with great admiration for several years. His name was Sammy Tin, the product of two Red Chinese diplomats who were rumored to have been selected by the MSS to marry and reproduce. If ever an agent were perfectly cloned, it was Sammy Tin. Born in New York City and raised in the suburbs around D.C., he’d been educated by private tutors who bombarded him with foreign languages from the time he left diapers. He entered the University of Maryland at the age of sixteen, left it with two degrees at the age of twenty-one, then studied engineering in Hamburg, Germany. Somewhere along the
way he picked up bomb-making as a hobby. Explosives became his passion, with an emphasis on controlled explosions from odd packages—envelopes, paper cups, ballpoint pens, cigarette packages. He was an expert marksman, but guns were simple and bored him. The Tin Man loved his bombs.
He then studied chemistry under an assumed name in Tokyo, and there he mastered the art and science of killing with poisons. By the time he was twenty-four he had a dozen different names, about that many languages, and crossed borders with a vast array of passports and disguises. He could convince any customs agent anywhere that he was Japanese, Korean, or Taiwanese.
To round out his education, he spent a grueling year in training with an elite Chinese army unit. He learned to camp, cook over a fire, cross raging rivers, survive in the ocean, and live in the wilderness for days. When he was twenty-six, the MSS decided the boy had studied enough. It was time to start killing.
As far as Langley could tell, he began notching his astounding body count with the murders of three Red Chinese scientists who’d gotten too cozy with the Russians. He got them over dinner at a restaurant in Moscow. While their bodyguards waited outside, one got his throat slit in the men’s room while he finished up at the urinal. It took an hour to find his body, crammed in a rather small garbage can. The second made the mistake of worrying about the first. He went to the men’s room, where the Tin Man was waiting, dressed as a janitor. They found him with his head stuffed down the toilet, which had been clogged and was backing up. The third died seconds later at the table, where he was sitting alone and
becoming very worried about his two missing colleagues. A man in a waiter’s jacket hurried by, and without slowing thrust a poison dart into the back of his neck.
As killings go, it was all quite sloppy. Too much blood, too many witnesses. Escape was dicey, but the Tin Man got a break and managed to dash through the busy kitchen unnoticed. He was on the loose and sprinting through a back alley by the time the bodyguards were summoned. He ducked into the dark city, caught a cab, and twenty minutes later entered the Chinese embassy. The next day he was in Beijing, quietly celebrating his first success.
The audacity of the attack shocked the intelligence world. Rival agencies scrambled to find out who did it. It ran so contrary to how the Chinese normally eliminated their enemies. They were famous for their patience, the discipline to wait and wait until the timing was perfect. They would chase until their prey simply gave up. Or they would ditch one plan and go to the next, carefully waiting for their opportunity.
When it happened again a few months later in Berlin, the Tin Man’s legend was born. A French executive had handed over some bogus high-tech secrets dealing with mobile radar. He got flung from the balcony of a fourteenth-floor hotel room, and when he landed beside the pool it upset quite a few sunbathers. Again, the killing was much too visible.
In London, the Tin Man blew a man’s head off with a cell phone. A defector in New York’s Chinatown lost most of his face when a cigarette exploded. Sammy Tin was soon getting credit for most of the more dramatic intelligence killings in that underworld. The legend grew
rapidly. Though he kept four or five trusted members in his unit, he often worked alone. He lost a man in Singapore when their target suddenly emerged with some friends, all with guns. It was a rare failure, and the lesson from it was to stay lean, strike fast, and don’t keep too many people on the payroll.
As he matured, the hits became less dramatic, less violent, and much easier to conceal. He was now thirty-three, and without a doubt the most feared agent in the world. The CIA spent a fortune trying to track his movements. They knew he was in Beijing, hanging around his luxurious apartment. When he left, they tracked him to Hong Kong. Interpol was alerted when he boarded a nonstop flight to London, where he changed passports and at the last moment boarded an Alitalia flight to Milan.
Interpol could only watch. Sammy Tin often traveled with diplomatic cover. He was no criminal; he was an agent, a diplomat, a businessman, a professor, anything he needed to be.
A car was waiting for him at Milan’s Malpensa airport, and he vanished into the city. As far as the CIA could tell, it had been four and a half years since the Tin Man had set foot in Italy.
______
MR.
Elya certainly looked the part of a wealthy Saudi businessman, though his heavy wool suit was almost black, a little too dark for Bologna, and its pinstripes were much too thick for anything designed in Italy. And his shirt was pink, with a glistening white collar, not a bad combo, but, well, it was still pink. Through the collar was a gold bar, also too thick, that pushed the knot of the tie
up tightly for the choking look, and at each end of the bar was a diamond. Mr. Elya was into diamonds—a large one on each hand, dozens of smaller ones clustered in his Rolex, a couple more in the gold cuffs of his shirt. The shoes appeared to Stefano to be Italian, brand new, brown, but much too light to go with the suit.
As a whole, the package simply wasn’t working. It was trying mightily, though. Stefano had time to analyze his client while they rode in virtual silence from the airport, where Mr. Elya and his assistant had arrived by private jet, to the center of Bologna. They were in the rear of a black Mercedes, one of Mr. Elya’s conditions, with a driver who was silent in the front seat along with the assistant, who evidently spoke only Arabic. Mr. Elya’s English was passable, quick bursts of it, usually followed with something in Arabic to the assistant, who felt compelled to write down everything his master said.
After ten minutes in the car with them, Stefano was already hoping they would finish well before lunch.
The first apartment he showed them was near the university, where Mr. Elya’s son would soon arrive to study medicine. Four rooms on the second floor, no elevator, solid old building, nicely furnished, certainly luxurious for any student—1,800 euros a month, one year’s lease, utilities extra. Mr. Elya did nothing but frown, as if his spoiled son would require something much nicer. The assistant frowned too. They frowned all the way down the stairs, into the car, and said nothing as the driver hurried to the second stop.
It was on Via Remorsella, one block west of Via Fondazza. The flat was slightly larger than the first, had a kitchen the size of a broom closet, was badly furnished,
had no view whatsoever, was twenty minutes away from the university, cost 2,600 euros a month, and even had a strange odor to it. The frowning stopped, they liked the place. “This will be fine,” Mr. Elya said, and Stefano breathed a sigh of relief. With a bit of luck, he wouldn’t have to entertain them over lunch. And he’d just earned a nice commission.
They hurried over to the office of Stefano’s company, where paperwork was produced at a record pace. Mr. Elya was a busy man with an urgent meeting in Rome, and if the rental couldn’t be completed right then, on the spot, then forget everything!
The black Mercedes sped them back to the airport, where a rattled and exhausted Stefano said thanks and farewell and hurried away as quickly as possible. Mr. Elya and his assistant walked across the tarmac to his jet and disappeared inside. The door closed.
The jet didn’t move. Inside, Mr. Elya and his assistant had ditched their business garb and were dressed casually. They huddled with three other members of their team. After waiting for about an hour, they finally left the jet, hauled their substantial baggage to the private terminal, then into waiting vans.
______
LUIGI
had become suspicious of the navy blue Silvio bag. Marco never left it in his apartment. It was never out of his sight. He carried it everywhere, strapped over his shoulder and tucked tightly under his right arm as if it contained gold.
What could he possibly possess now that required such protection? He rarely carried his study materials
anywhere. If he and Ermanno studied inside, they did so in Marco’s apartment. If they studied outside, it was all conversation and no books were used.
Whitaker in Milano was suspicious too, especially since Marco had been spotted in an Internet café near the university. He sent an agent named Krater to Bologna to help Zellman and Luigi keep a closer eye on Marco and his troublesome bag. With the noose tightening and fireworks expected, Whitaker was asking Langley for even more muscle on the streets.
But Langley was in chaos. Teddy’s departure, though certainly not unexpected, had turned the place upside down. The shock waves from Lucat’s sacking were still being felt. The President was threatening a major overhaul, and the deputy directors and high-level administrators were spending more time protecting their butts than watching their operations.
It was Krater who got the radio message from Luigi that Marco was drifting toward Piazza Maggiore, probably in search of his late-afternoon coffee. Krater spotted him as he strode across the square, dark blue bag under his right arm, looking very much like a local. After studying a rather thick file on Joel Backman, it was nice to finally lay eyes on him. If the poor guy only knew.