They were sitting in one of the interrogation rooms. A small tape recorder lay on the table. Caravale reached out and pressed a button. Vincenzo leaned in over it, shoulders hunched, head cocked. He had rushed over without slipping on a jacket, and with his shirtsleeves folded up over hairless, smooth forearms, he seemed to be vibrating with nervous energy.
“Papa?” The voice was tentative and frightened.
“Huh!” came from Vincenzo.
In the background they heard someone mutter, “Louder, kid.” There was a scraping sound; the recorder being moved closer.
“Papa?” Louder, much more intense.
Vincenzo nodded. “It’s him.”
“I’m all right...they gave me a Game Boy....”
They could tell Achille’s throat was clogging up, and a moment later he was bawling. “Papa, they’re going to kill me if you don’t pay them! I know they really mean it. I don’t want to d—”
That was all. Vincenzo listened for a few seconds longer to see if there was anything more, then threw himself angrily back against his chair. “You call that ‘all right’? I don’t.”
“What are you going to do?”
An uneven laugh. “I’m going to pay them, what else?”
“The entire five million? You have it?”
“I’ve made arrangements for it. A telephone call to Milan is all that’s needed.”
“Listen, Signor de Grazia...”
Vincenzo waved him off. “I know what you’re going to say.”
“Do you? I was going to say that Achille could already be dead.”
“The tape...”
“The tape could have been made days ago, right after they got him. My advice—”
“Your advice,” Vincenzo said through narrowed lips, “was to offer them a million euros, and we see how that worked out, don’t we? Will you stand in my way if I try to pay the ransom?”
“No, it’s up to you. But you’re operating in the dark. You’re liable to be out five million euros and still not get your son back.”
“Let me be frank, Colonel. I will be out nothing but the deductible and the interest on the loan. That I can afford. It’s my insurer that will be out the five million euros. Am I willing to risk Argos’s money on the chance of getting my son back alive? What do you think?”
“I think—”
“What would you think if it was your son, not mine?”
“I would—” Caravale stopped and dipped his chin. He knew what he’d think, all right.
“Good,” said Vincenzo, taking charge now. “May we go back to your office? With your permission, I’d like to use your telephone to tell my man to open the shutters.”
The call was made to Isola de Grazia at 10:22 a.m. At 10:24, Clemente opened the shutters. At 10:55, “Signor Pinzolo,” the name that Caravale had chosen for his role as negotiator, received his first, last, and only telephone call. The police technician who recorded it quickly ran the tape up to Colonel Caravale. “I think the call was made on one of those throwaway phones, Colonel. That’s not good.”
Vincenzo, in the act of leaving, sat down again and both men listened to the message, heads bent, ears pricked.
“Bank of Rezekne, Latvia,” the weird, gibbering voice said. “R, E, Z, E, K, N, E.”
“Damn,” Caravale muttered. Whoever it was had used an electronic voice distorter, one of the new generation that processed the sounds through an encoded chip and put them back out in a digital format. Next to impossible to trace. Voice prints wouldn’t work. Voice stress analyzers wouldn’t work. Chances were, they wouldn’t even be able to tell if it was a man or a woman.
“Account number. One. Eight. Eight. Zero. Five. Two. Nine. Six. Two. Seven. By tomorrow.”
When it was clear that there was nothing else, Caravale turned off the machine.
Vincenzo was shaking his head, laughing again, this time in perplexity. “For God’s sake—Latvia?”
MAJOR Massimiliano d’Este, deputy chief of the
“Latvia?” he said over the telephone from Rome. “A numbered account? Well, they know their business, I have to give them that.”
“It’s going to be hard to trace?”
“It’s going to be impossible, Tullio. Compared to Rezekne, those banks in Liechtenstein or in the Cayman lslands—they’re open books.”
Latvia, he explained, was a recent entry in the anonymous banking field. In its all-out effort to attract business from persons interested in what it euphemistically referred to as “asset protection” or “tax optimization,” it had installed the strictest confidentiality laws in the world. The banks themselves often didn’t know their clients’ real identities. And unauthorized disclosure of information about accounts or account holders was a felony. Only on proof of a criminal act by the client could the records be opened up. The Latvian—”
