“You came to work with us,” the Palestinian said. “You’re still here. So either you stayed to try to kill me or because you believe in jihad. Which is it?”
“Mos zibbi,” Mourad said, using the Arabic vulgarity to tell the Palestinian what part of him to suck. “What do you think?”
“I think you are a martyr. One of Allah’s chosen. But there can be only one capo. Adil did not accept this. I had to kill him.”
“He was of much pride,” Mourad muttered. “I told him his mouth would get him killed.”
Past Savona, they headed north on the A6 toward Torino. He told Mourad to idle the truck by the side of the road till the second armored truck caught up. When it lumbered into view and stopped behind them, they started up again through the pass in the mountains. Just before Priero they had to slow for a police roadblock.
“What’s this?” the Palestinian asked.
“I don’t know. It wasn’t here when we came through this morning,” Mourad said nervously.
“Call the other truck. Tell them if the polizia stop us and try to look inside either truck, we kill them and get out of here. Understood?”
Mourad nodded, pulled out his cell phone and told the other truck. The Palestinian took the safety off the gun, but kept it below the window level, so it could not be seen. Mourad pulled a gun from beneath the dashboard. A policeman stood beside the barrier, looking at each car as it stopped and then waited until he waved them toward the barrier. Behind the policeman were two police cars.
“Is he carabiniere?”
“No, guardia, Polizia di Stato,” Mourad said.
The Palestinian felt a slight lessening of tension. The Carabinieri were the best of the Italian forces, and a roadblock here might have meant a security alert. It was why he purchased the armored trucks and had them painted with the BANCA POPOLARE DI MILANO logo. In theory, that should get them through. Police didn’t like to stop armored trucks, which were presumably carrying a lot of money; nobody wanted the responsibility of something being splashed all over the evening news. Still, he could feel the sweat breaking all over his body as they approached the barrier. A handgun wasn’t sufficient, he told himself. He needed something that would take out the policemen from both cars, plus any bystanders who got in the way. From now on, anywhere they went, they would be better armed, he decided.
They stopped next to the barrier. The policemen looked at the Palestinian through the window’s bulletproof glass, and for a moment their eyes met and the Palestinian was glad he was wearing an armored truck guard’s uniform. Neither of them smiled. The policeman looked at Mourad, and his eyes ran over both armored trucks, engines idling at the barrier. After a long moment he waved them on.
As the truck rumbled past the barrier, the Palestinian saw a car, smashed at an angle and overturned in the ditch beside the road. It was just an accident, he told himself, but he didn’t relax or speak till they drove into Turin and to the warehouse they had taken him to the previous week. He was glad to see they had followed his orders and put up a sign over the door, COMPAGNIA BOLOGNA PARTES DI CAMIONS ALL’INGROSSO, a truck parts company, to help explain the comings and goings of people and trucks at the warehouse. Although he couldn’t see it, he knew there was a security camera hidden behind the sign and other cameras at the corners of the roof. Mourad honked the horn twice and then twice again, and the loading door opened and they drove inside, followed by the second truck.
By evening the Palestinian had organized the teams and set up the workshops, labs, and dormitory spaces. He set up a separate closed-off space to work on the uranium. They unloaded and stored the steel drums, sheathing, explosives, and other materials from the armored trucks and then he called a meeting in the lunch area, two rows of metal tables set next to a small kitchen that smelled of lamb fat and cumin. He counted ten of them, eight young men and two women wearing black hijabs. There were supposed to be fourteen.
“Where are the missing four?” he asked Mourad in Fusha Arabic.
“I will find out,” Mourad said.
“This is unacceptable. Our biggest danger is security,” he told them, putting a Beretta 9mm handgun on the table in front of him. “All of you are shaheedin volunteers for martyrdom, but none of you knows what the operation is. You will not be told your assignment until the last moment. Keep any thoughts, any guesses, to yourself.
“If you have any suspicion about someone, anything at all, you must tell me at once,” he said, picking up the Beretta. “If I believe there is any danger, that person dies. From this moment none of you will leave here alone. You will always be with another, and each time, who that person is will change so there can be no plotting among you. You may plot, but as the Sura says, ‘waAllahu khayru almakireena.’ Allah is the best of plotters. As for the four who are missing, bring them here and keep them under guard. I’ll deal with them later tonight.”
T hat evening, after working on the uranium, he met Francesca Bartolo at her restaurant in Milan. She ordered Negronis and an antipasto for both of them.
“So there was no trouble with the dogana?” she said. The Customs.
“It was good,” he said. “The Camorra should run Italy.”
“Bene,” she laughed. “We would do a better job than this coglione government we have now.” She leaned forward, beckoning him closer. She was wearing a low-cut grape-colored designer dress that enabled her to show off her designer cleavage. “Listen, caro, where is the second sixty thousand?”
“Where’s the remaining item I requested?”
“There’s been a problem,” she said, biting off the tip of a strip of nervetti meat like a guillotine. “It’s not so simple.”
“Meaning you want more money.”
She smiled. “I like you, caro. You are understanding me very good. A real man understands what a woman wants without her even having to say a word.”
“A real man doesn’t let a woman take advantage of him,” he said, crumpling his napkin and putting it on the table as if ready to leave. She put her hand on his.
“Don’t leave,” she said. She was smiling, but her eyes checked behind him to see that her bodyguards were in place near the door. “I want to go back with you to your hotel. But primo, business is, how we say, business.”
“What would Carmine ‘il brutto’ do if someone was trying to shake him down for more money?”
She frowned. “He does not like that name.”
“What would he do?”
“His first impulse would be to kill them. Per fortuna, most of the time he talks with me first or half of Italy would be dead. This matter is difficult. That’s why you came to us.”
“How much?”
“You see! I knew I liked you,” she said, putting her hand under the table and running it as far up his thigh as she could reach. “Double, caro. One hundred and twenty thousand more and you tell me what it’s for.”
“I don’t have that kind of cash.”
“But you can get it.”
“A bank. That’s the job,” he said.
“Which one?” she asked, giving his thigh a squeeze before withdrawing her hand.
“Does it matter?”
She thought for a moment. “Not really. Do you have sixty thousand now?”
He nodded and pushed a messenger bag toward her under the table with his foot. She bent down, opened the bag, glanced in and closed it. She patted her mouth with her napkin and put it down.
“Let’s go to the hotel now,” she said.
“When do I get my item?”
“A few days. I’ll let you know.”
“When I get it, we’ll celebrate,” he said, getting up and heading for the door.
An hour later he parked the car near the warehouse in Torino and went inside. Mourad, his friend Jamal, and two other Moroccans were holding guns on four young men, one of them still a teenager, sitting on the floor in the warehouse office. The Palestinian came in and sat on the desk, facing them.
“Where were you?” he said in Arabic to the first, a thin bearded Moroccan in a Windbreaker.
“My wife. She doesn’t know what I’m doing, just that it’s something to do with the mosque, but she doesn’t want me to be here. She says I need to be at home. We argued, the baby was crying, she said she would call the
