situations in the real world, she wouldn't be completely on her own, sneaking around like a spy in the building where she had worked for twenty years. His rigid absolutism had transformed a lucky turn of events into nothing. It was worse than nothing, really. Tosca would get the Butcher's Boy killed, exactly as he wanted. The more families involved in the hunt the better. They would be cooperating on a project that he had initiated and directed. He would not only get to be head of the Balacontano family, but a national figure, a symbol of new unity. And he was a vicious thug, a man who could make the Mafia into a terrifying force of a sort it had never been in the old days.
She couldn't help feeling sorry for the Butcher's Boy. He was as alone as a human being could be, put in the position of attacking an international enemy a hundred and fifty years old, that had unlimited people and resources. He could never hope to accomplish anything but to get away and live the rest of his life in some form of hiding. And he had been retired. He hadn't worked-killed anyone for money-in about twenty years. It was hard not to make comparisons, hard not to hope that if any criminal got through this, he did.
14
Schaeffer was on the plane to Phoenix, and it was before noon. He'd had the advantage of knowing that one of the passengers booked on the flight from Syracuse wasn't going to make it to the airport. So he had bought a standby ticket early in the morning, sat down with his computer, and waited until he had been called to the gate and assigned a seat. He spent the two hours in the waiting area across the concourse from his gate watching. If Cavalli had chosen this flight, it was possible there were others-friends of his, Castiglione soldiers, even Tosca-on the same flight. When he had determined that there weren't any passengers he had to worry about, he saw the air marshal arrive. She was about thirty-five years old, blond, wearing a business suit and carrying a leather shoulder bag. The flight attendants at the gate were not nearly ready for boarding, but they saw her enter the waiting area at a brisk pace, nodded to her as she walked into the boarding tunnel and disappeared. It all took about four seconds, and he had the feeling that if someone asked the flight attendants about the woman, they would have said, 'What woman?' When he boarded the plane, he found her standing by an aisle seat about two thirds of the way back, staring at each passenger who came in the door. He had spotted marshals on his two flights into Washington, D.C., but he hadn't expected to have one on a flight to Phoenix. He just noted where she was, took his seat, and waited.
When the flight attendant had finally closed the forward hatch and brought the bar down to lock it, he was relieved. It meant that there wouldn't be four big men appearing in front of the cockpit door in a moment to drag him off the plane. Travel was always full of small obstacles and checkpoints that had to be passed through.
As soon as the plane taxied to the end of the runway and then hurtled over the pavement into the sky, he settled into the back of his seat and prepared to sleep. Sleeping whenever and wherever he could was something he had learned from Eddie when he was about twelve. 'Never work when you're tired, kid. If you don't win by strength in the first couple of seconds, you have to win by stamina. You have to learn to keep resetting the clock so it's always morning for you. The other guy is so exhausted he's beginning to see things out of the corner of his eye, but you just got up.'
Sleep was a trick. Just find a comfortable place, close both eyes, and mentally repeat some short, meaningless mantra a couple of times to clear the mind of distractions. Eddie had used the Lord's Prayer, but the boy had preferred writing the alphabet. He would write each letter by directing an imaginary pen in longhand until he was asleep.
After a disconnected and meaningless series of dreams, he awoke feeling rested and alert. He looked at his watch, saw that he had slept four hours, and adjusted it to Phoenix time.
While he was waiting in the airport in the morning, he had Googled the Silver Saguaro Ranch and found its website. He had taken the virtual tour and studied the maps and layouts. The place was a resort in a mountainous area with pine trees. There was a big building called the Lodge, which appeared to have two restaurants, a couple of meeting rooms, a huge open room with gigantic stone fireplaces on either end, and a wall that appeared to be all glass. There were stables and horse trails and hiking routes, and a lake with some canoes and a dock. The suites consisted of dozens of separate cabins, each with a bedroom, a living room with a bar, and a bathroom.
At the bottom of the home page of the website was small print saying the Saguaro was a Pure Gold Seam resort. He ran a Google search on the name and found that the president of the company was Sylvia Fibbiano. Of course. He was sure that she was the daughter of Jimmy Fibbiano, who had always had a construction company in New Jersey that kept changing its name every time it got to be well known. He had been fairly sure the Silver Saguaro Ranch must be owned by a Mafioso, or the others would never consent to meet there. He supposed any potential guests for the next couple of days would be told the whole place was rented out for a large wedding party or something, so there would be no outsiders around. The help would all be relatives and proteges of the Fibbianos, even if they had to be flown in from other Fibbiano enterprises. Fibbiano would have guards stationed around the perimeter of the place to prevent a breach or warn of a raid.
He could only hope that the men out there would be the usual big guys with the expensive suits and Italian shoes who ran the football betting sheets, and not a few lean and silent types who spent every fall in the woods stalking deer.
When the plane landed in Phoenix, he moved quickly. He went to the curb and got on a shuttle bus to the car-rental depot. While he was inside behind the tinted windows, he studied the crowd coming out of the baggage claim for familiar faces but he saw none. When he got to the depot, he rented a Nissan Altima in an unobtrusive gray and drove.
He stopped in a sporting-goods store and made some purchases. He bought a small backpack, a. 308 Remington rifle with a ten-power Weaver scope, and three boxes of ammunition. On the way out he picked up a folding hunting knife with a flat handle that was easy to conceal and came open with a flick of his thumb.
His next stop was at a military-surplus store. He bought a pair of tropical-style combat boots, a light camouflage poncho with a hood, a camouflage tarp, a backpack-style water pack with a tube for drinking on the move, a set of water purification tablets, some salt pills, and a camouflage ventilated hat with a flap to protect the back of his neck from the sun. There was a high-tech section where he found a night-vision scope and a GPS unit. He picked out a set of U.S. Geological Survey maps of southern Arizona with altitude lines and landmarks. He needed to drive out Route 87, called the Beeline Highway, past Saguaro Lake in the Tonto National Forest. That seemed to be about forty miles. From there he had to take a turnoff and go farther out into the desert toward the pine woods and hills.
As he drove farther out of the city in the afternoon, he studied the country. His plans had become specific and certain. If the Justice Department managed to figure out where the meeting was, they'd block all the roads for miles before they moved in. There was no way that most of the old men would try to take off across country in a place like this. Chi-chi Tasso or Big Al Costananza would run about a hundred yards and die.
He found the turnoff past the lake, drove another fifteen miles on the road to the Silver Saguaro Ranch, and looked for a place to hide his car. He turned off the road onto a rocky, dry streambed that curved away into an area where the rocks were as big as small houses. He parked between two of them, stretched his tarp from one to the other over the car, and anchored it on both ends with rows of stones. He tossed some loose brush over the tarp to help disguise it from the air.
He put on his camouflage hat and boots, broke down his rifle, rolled the barrel and stock in his poncho to hide them, put the rest of his gear into his backpack, and set off on foot.
It had been at least ten years since he had engaged in the level of physical activity he was about to attempt. But in England he had kept himself in reasonably good condition as a precaution, and he routinely walked nearly everywhere he went.
He began the hike tentatively, and as his muscles warmed up and loosened in the late summer heat, he worked harder. It was midafternoon when he started, and he wanted to get as far as he could while he had light. He would be virtually invisible from the air during daylight, but at night his body heat would show up on infrared sensors, and his outline would be clear in the amplified green glow of a night-vision viewer. He ran a hundred yards, then walked a hundred yards, then repeated it. The ground was gravel with a few spiky plants and rocks of every size from a pea to a car.
The desert heat made his body seem heavier, as though gravity had been augmented somehow, but he
