The laptop boasted of visits to Beirut and Dhahran and Hanoi and Belfast and Grozny and Sarajevo and Kabul. He started, two fingers, to type, and he was going well and his mind was diverted from t he warm air turbulence until the passenger beside him spoke.
'I see you are a journalist, a journalist from Germany, and you have been in Sicily to write about the malvagita of our society – did you find that wickedness? It is a strange time for you to be leaving, it is peculiar that you should choose this day to leave.
Myself, I am a physician, I work with children, I do not see any foreign journalists, they do not come to my surgery. I presume you have been meeting with our illustrious politicians and with our social workers and with magistrates. Are you confused? I met once with a British engineer working on a sewerage project here. The engineer said that he believed the evil in our society to be a product of imagination, a subject of discussion in the same way that the British are obsessed with discussion of the future of the weather. He told me also that in his part of Britain there was a great inland sea in which there was said to live a huge monster, a creature from pre- history, which was elusive whenever scientific examination was made of the inland sea. But the engineer said that many people desired to believe in the existence of the monster even if there was no proof that it lived. I remember, it was the monster of Loch Ness. The engineer said it did not exist in reality, and he said, his opinion, that La Cosa Nostra was similar, something that is in our imagination. If you are leaving Sicily today, then you must surely follow the belief of the British engineer. I said to him, but of course he did not have the time, that he should come with me to the rotten apartment towers of Brancaccio in Palermo, where I work. He should see the children without hope who live under the heel of La Cosa Nostra, who eat when La Cosa Nostra says they should eat, whose parents work when La Cosa Nostra says they should work. And I said that he should go to Rome and Milan and taste the corruption in government and commerce that is brought by La Cosa Nostra. And he should go, I told him, to Frankfurt and London and New York and walk among the addicts of Grade A drugs and think further about La Cosa Nostra. But he said that I made a fantasy, that I saw a monster like the one in the inland sea. You leave now? It was on the car radio just before I reached the airport, a killing in Catania, a bomb. I am surprised that you are leaving at a time when there is proof of wickedness. I am sorry that I interrupt you from your important thoughts. Excuse me, forgive me…'
The pulse tone travelled from the antennae on Monte Gallo to the antennae on Monte Castellacio to the antennae on Monte Cuccio and on to the antennae that waited for the UHF signal. It travelled clear, sharp.
His mind was a wreckage of scrambled thoughts because, Christ, it was actually happening…
He had come out of the cloister and gone to a stall and bought a carton of juice and taken it to one of the solid seats on the wide and shaded balcony garden at the back of the duomo, where the wisteria hung in flower from high walls, where the vista reached down the valley to Palermo and the sea.
The pulse tone, carried from the CSS 900 crystal-controlled two-channel receiver and into the cordless induction earpiece, beat in Axel's skull. His hand shook, tightened on the carton, spilled the juice from the plastic straw onto his shirt and his trousers. The pulse tone hammered its coded rhythm in the confines of the bone of his skull.
It was what they taught at the camp in Laurel, Maryland. 'Christ, it is actually happening.' They taught the guys of the Secret Service, the bullet-catcher guys, that they'd freeze, that they'd lose the power of action because, Christ, it was actually happening. When the headcase had gotten himself up close to the President, gotten his shots off, there was the photograph of one of the Secret Service guys with his arms splayed out and holding his hardware up to the skies, useless and rooted. The guy would have gone through every training simulation that could be thrown up by the Secret Service firearms instructors at the camp in Laurel, and the refreshers, and what he'd done, when the moment came, was shout, 'Christ, it's actually happening.'
For a moment Axel was useless and rooted.
It was the Immediate Alert code, played a second and then a third time. Shit. He was scuffling with his hands down in the bag at his feet, and the carton was on the ground and spreading juice on his trainers. He had the mobile telephone and he was belting through the numbers. He switched the goddam thing off, couldn't concentrate on the numbers. Axel needed 'Vanni Crespo. Axel needed 'Vanni Crespo because he could receive a pulse tone on the CSS 900 receiver, but didn't carry with him the electronics for location of the signal. Shit. The goddam number was engaged, was whining engaged.
Christ, it was actually happening, and he was behaving like a goddam fool, like he'd freaked. He sat still. He cleared the failed call from his telephone. 'Vanni had the back-up. They would be calling 'Vanni from the communications area, why the goddam number was engaged, they would be identifying the origin location of the pulse tone, and 'Vanni would call him and he must wait to be called. Shit. He had panicked and he felt sour with himself. He waited. He wondered where she was, how she was, and it was goddam hard to wait to be called.
He snatched the paper with the co-ordinates from the technician. The technician said that he'd not heard the initial signal first hand, been out of the operations area and refilling the coffee machine, but the light on the equipment had alerted him. The technician apologized for the time it had taken him to replay the tape- recording of the pulse tone and then to check with the code system, but the code system was in the floor safe, and the technician had had to recall the correct combination for the lock… 'Vanni snatched the paper from the technician and was running for the door and the corridor.
The technician shouted after him, 'But it's confusing – please, listen to me. Three Immediate Alert signals, then a pause, two minutes, then Stand Down, then two Immediate Alert-'
'Vanni ran. 'Vanni didn't stop to listen.
The technician stood in the door to the operations area. He shouted a last time, 'Pause one minute, then Stand-by code, and again Immediate Alert. I don't understand.'
'Vanni had run faster, fourteen years younger, the length of the Via Carini towards the knot of sightseers and firemen and policemen, towards the bullet-spattered cars of the general and the general's wife, of the single ragazzo who had guarded him. Of course, then, as he had run the dark, sun-less length of the Via Carini, he had known he was too late to intervene, to do anything, to be other than helpless. It was a scar on the soul of 'Vanni Crespo that he had stood, panting and helpless, beside the cars and the blood pools, too late to intervene. He did not even know what she looked like, the Codename Helen, tall, thin, fair, short, fat, dark, did not know. As he ran the length of the corridor, slower than he had run the length of the Via Carini, he prayed to his God, soundless, that he would not again be too late to intervene.
He burst, a fool stammering, into the rest room. The men of the Response Squad stared at him through the smoke haze, looked up at him from their magazines and their card games.
'Now, hurry, you bastards. Immediate Alert. We have – God, I hope we have -
Ruggerio. We have a location for Mario Ruggerio. Mondello. Please move. It's Ruggerio.'
There was the gathering of the weapons. There was the stampede out of the ready room. There was the thunder of boots in the corridor. There was the roar of the cars' engines.
'Vanni, in the back seat of the second car, three more behind him, yelled into his telephone, 'Don't tell me what I should have done,
I have priorities. I have to respond to the signal. The priority is to move. You are at the duomo? The piazza in front of the duomo, by the camera shop. Two minutes and I am there, a green Alfetta. If you are not there, I don't wait.'
The convoy of cars swerved through the gates of the Monreale barracks. Two boys up the road, astride motorcycles, were held back by a uniformed carabiniere soldier.
They were not interested, there was no builder's van in the convoy. The scream of the tyres hung in the afternoon air.
Not necessary, but the excitement raced in 'Vanni, forty-two years old and like a child with the anticipation of a favoured present. 'It's an open line, Dr Tardelli, not secure. Our mutual interest, we have a location… You should clear your desk for the rest of the afternoon because I hope to bring our friend as a guest to you. Please make yourself available.'
The American was running, reaching the camera shop. The second car slowed, and behind it the rest of the convoy hit their brakes. 'Vanni had the door open and he caught at Axel's arm and pulled him inside, and Axel's jerked body tangled with the cable lead that linked 'Vanni's headset to the communications console beside the driver's knee.
'Still transmitting, confused but transmitting from Mondello. I have these hooligans, and I also have a helicopter coming…'
