he has truly lost his mind. We pick up a deer trail that comes out into an olive grove on the neighboring farm. From here it is fifty meters to the road. This must be the way he gained entry in the middle of the night.
A well-used black Fiat is waiting on the shoulder. Sterling opens the door, and we climb in.
“You’re late, you cunt,” says the driver.
“Ana, this is Chris.”
Seeing Chris is a shocker.
“I know Chris!”
Chris is the English bartender from the Walkabout Pub.
“And I know Ana!” he echoes mockingly as we take off.
“How do you know Sterling?”
“Never saw the lad before in me life,” says Chris. “He was out there on the road, trying to pick me up.”
“Fuck off.”
Chris pulls a serious face and seeks me out in the rearview mirror.
“Everything green?” he asks Sterling.
“Good to go.”
“Well then, no worries.”
“Chris is former SAS,” Sterling explains. “Now he’s also an operative for Oryx.”
I see it. The buff body. The detached observer who stays out of the limelight, placed in a job that positions him to know every English-speaker in town.
“Chris told you I was here?”
“I saw you were having troubles,” the bartender says. “The missing sister and all.”
“Thank you, sir. You could have also told me that you work with Sterling.”
“Normally we’re mum around the girlfriend — but now I discover you’re not the girlfriend, you’re FBI.”
“
This gets a tiny smile out of Chris.
“Just think,” he says. “If an RPG hit this car right now with the three of us in it, what a total bummer for covert ops.”
“Not for Oryx. We are a hundred percent deniable.”
“The girlfriend isn’t.”
“According to the FBI,” I say, “officially, I’m on vacation.”
“Enough of that kind of talk,” Sterling mutters. “Bad juju.” We are down off the mountain and turning onto the main road to Siena.
“Anyone care to say where we’re headed?” I wonder.
“I’m going to my day job,” Chris says. “Pouring drinks for alcoholics.”
“We’re going to the pub,” Sterling interrupts. “To try to get on the damn Internet.”
“What for?”
“There’s an e-mail from Glasgow, which I couldn’t open.”
“About a job?”
“About you.”
In the back room of the Walkabout, under the crude map of Australia, Sterling’s gaunt face is lit by the glow of Chris’s laptop. He is accessing a secure site referred to as the Circuit, available only to private military contractors — a cyber version of the old soldier-for-hire magazines — where buddies are located and private military companies are rated by operatives as places to work, the way consumers rank can openers on Amazon.
No worries, as Chris would say, since nobody posts under their real name. They use handles, just like in the field. Sterling’s handle is Bullrider, but he’d kill me if I ever called him that, like the old superstition about never letting a woman board a sailing ship. Talk about bad juju.
While Sterling works the Internet, I am banished to the bar, to stare at another motorcar race on the flat- screen, interrupted by a news update describing the disappearance and suspected kidnapping of medical doctor and socialite Cecilia Nicosa, wife of the well-known coffee king. I stare with fascination at the inner and outer confluence of events: at the moment her image appeared I was making a list of people who could tell me about Cecilia’s associates and routines. This is how we do it in the big leagues: interview everyone who might have been in contact with the subject twenty-four hours before the abduction. The hospital staff. Giovanni’s teachers. The parents of Giovanni’s friends. The ladies I met at the party. The ladies she cooks with at
Sterling calls me over. I take my
“This is something you need to know,” he says, very serious. “It comes from a solid source, a Scotsman I knew in Fallujah. He quit the private contracting business and he’s back home, on an antiterrorist unit with the Glasgow police. He gave me a heads-up through the Circuit on the investigation into the attack in South Kensington. Being an honest cop, he first asked what in hell I was doing at a multiple homicide in London. When Oryx confirmed that I had been leaving on a mission, he e-mailed this photo. It was taken just before the shooters opened fire.”
Sterling flips the computer around to display a blurry-but-discernable picture of me in front of the London restaurant, Baciare, staring at the camera and looking plenty annoyed for having been catcalled by a jerk in a Ford. You can see Sterling in the background, heading off, wearing the rucksack.
“Where did this come from?”
“The investigators got it off a cell phone belonging to one of the three men who were detained at the Glasgow airport, off an Interpol no-fly alert originating from the Met. Three Italian nationals, trying to get to Rome through Cairo.”
“I’m aware of them. The FBI legat was here yesterday. He told me they had three suspects in custody.”
“Did he say anything about the bad guys being in possession of a picture of you?”
“No. Maybe he didn’t know,” I say. The failure of different agencies to talk to each other is a given these days.
“Oh, honey. He knew.”
To prove it, Sterling highlights the list of forwards on the screen. The Glasgow police had sent the photo to Inspector Reilly at the Metropolitan Police, who forwarded it to Dennis Rizzio. Sterling peers disconsolately over the bar of light rimming the laptop.
“That honcho in Rome is holdin’ out on you. He’s playin’ you for something.”
I do not reply.
“Why do you suppose that is?”
“It’s SOP at the Bureau,” I say bitterly. “Keep the field agent in the dark. Withhold information, so the Bureau maintains total control over everybody’s actions.”
I can barely speak. Why didn’t Rizzio tell me about the photo? Or, earlier, that Cecilia was paying bribes?
“Meanwhile,” Sterling says, “here’s the puke that shot up those kids.”
Mug shots appear on the screen. Three awfully young and stupid-looking men in their twenties. The names mean nothing, but I do recognize a face: the scowling eyes, long face, heavy and ruler-straight eyebrows. He looks remarkably like the drawing made by the sketch artist in Scotland Yard. Amazing how they can do that.
“That’s one of them,” I say. “The one I saw in the Ford.”
Sterling leans back and pushes up his baseball cap.
“We’re fucked.”
“How so?”
“What you just did.” He nods toward the screen. “Identified the bad guy.”
“Why’s that?”
