White Shotgun

“A friend from the university.”

“You vouch for her?”

“I vouch for her.”

Without getting up, a wedge of cantaloupe stuck in his mouth like an obscene grin, he sticks a foot out and pries the door open with dirty toes.

“Bullrider, we’re at yellow,” Delilah murmurs into the transmitter under the cap, meaning they’re at the last position of cover and concealment. The last point at which they could still turn around and nobody would know they were here.

The kitchen may be exactly as Zabrina described it — the tulip tiles, the sink where the woman chopped tomatoes — but the Puppet is not at the table. Instead there is another joker fooling with the white powder and syringes, and a terrified porcino who gets up and runs. The dealer reaches for a shotgun propped against a chair. Delilah assassinates him with a single shot from a silencer-equipped Beretta. She draws a weapon from a hidden compartment in the rucksack, pulling on infrared goggles, moving down the hall, trusting that Chris, thirty seconds behind them, has taken out the guy with the cantaloupe.

Just like in the shoot house, the first one in is always right. Delilah, in the lead, saves the porcino’s life by shoving him into the bathroom and shouting for him to get down and shut up. Then she is at the locked bedroom door, behind which the infrared image shows a human figure.

“Bullrider, I see the hostage!” Delilah says. “What is the order?”

“Move to green and execute,” Sterling answers from the command unit in the van.

Chris sets a charge and they blow the door to Cecilia’s room.

Sterling, parked a block from Little City, copies Delilah’s report that they have breeched, and conveys the order to execute to two other operatives who are stationed in a warehouse several miles away, where a light helicopter has been standing off — the team having agreed at the training run in England that airlifting the victim to safety was the best way to get her out. The warehouse doors open, and the little bird rolls out on skids, rotors already turning. Within fifteen seconds it is airborne.

At the same time, Ripper, who has been enjoying a panino in a cafe across from the van, leaves the table and ambles toward an alley, where he punches a number on a cell phone. As he passes, a small box clamped to a gas line fizzles and explodes with an unremarkable pop.

Delilah and Chris rush the bedroom, finding Cecilia curled up in a corner, shivering like a dog, her arms covering her head. They pull her to her feet and say the prearranged words:

“Nicoli Nicosa sent us. We’re going to get you out.”

Cecilia’s face screws up and she makes sounds. She is trying to cooperate but can hardly walk. Chris lifts her onto his shoulder.

“We’re in control of the hostage and coming out,” Delilah reports as they exit the front door of the apartment.

Here there was always a problem. We could figure no way out of the apartment except the way they came in—but there would be no time to check whether the planned escape route was clear. Despite our misgivings, that job had to be done by Zabrina. As soon as Chris defeated the lookouts, she was to exit the apartment, turn right, enter a dead-end hallway, and open the door to the roof.

Chris and Delilah get through the front door of the apartment with twenty seconds to make it to the point of contact with the helicopter — past tenants and junkies potentially clogging the second-floor walkway. But these people have witnessed too many mafia shootings to hang around and gawk. When they see the man with the bloody melon rind smile slumped in the chair, and hear sirens from the gas explosion, they scatter.

Farther down, Zabrina is faithfully at her post, holding the door to the roof. Chris lopes up the steps with Cecilia draped around his neck in a fireman’s carry. All three break out of the stairwell to the roof and open sky as the helicopter appears and stabilizes.

Chris lowers Cecilia to her feet. In the whirlwind of debris she sees the figure of Zabrina in the midst of the pandemonium — a hopeless drug addict, who somehow, impossibly, miraculously, came back to this hellhole to save her.

An operative is lowered on a rope. There is a harness at the end. Cecilia sags against Delilah as they force her legs into the straps.

“Her too!” she murmurs.

Zabrina, stunned by the noise and impact, tries to hold her long hair back from whipping painfully across her eyes. Voiceless in the earsplitting drone, Cecilia struggles and reaches toward the girl.

“Take her! She’s coming, too!”

Chris shouts, “Don’t worry, we’ll take care of her.”

They muscle Cecilia into the harness and buckle it. The operative places his body over hers.

“No! Wait!”

“You’re safe! I’ve got you!” he shouts as the chopper lifts and banks away with the two of them still dangling.

Zabrina watches as they’re dragged across the sky. Delilah remembers her wide-eyed stare of awe, met by Cecilia’s downward look of anguish. Without hesitating, the two Oryx operatives were already securing a rope to an iron stanchion they’d identified on Google Earth, and tossed it over the side of the roof. It will be easy to rappel down and become lost in the confusion created by the gas line explosion. Delilah is already over the top. Chris is calling to Zabrina to get her ass over there, when the roof door bangs open and Fat Pasquale lumbers out, followed by a dozen half-grown boys who spring ahead like wolves.

“Vieni qui!” Chris yells at Zabrina. “Now!”

Slowly Zabrina hooks her hair behind her ears with a dreamy gaze, as if it were a summer night and she was standing at a fountain with her friends.

“Now, you stupid bitch!”

“I will be okay,” she says with a soft wave of the hand. “I am family.”

One quiver of hesitation and Chris would have gone back, but she emphatically turns from the route of escape. She makes her choice. He disappears over the edge. One jerk from below and the rope is unloosed and drops to the street.

The helicopter is gone, and with it, the wind, the whole episode. Heat rises off the tarred rooftop. The sky is bleached white, empty. Fat Pasquale keeps coming, weapon sighted. Zabrina fingers the plastic bags of powder she snatched off the kitchen table, safe inside her pockets. She gives an innocent shrug, as if she, too, is a victim in this, but he keeps on coming, up to point-blank range, until he is close enough for her to see the ripples in his sweat-soaked forehead, and look into the cold eyes of her cousin.

Zabrina smiles and says, “It’s me.”

THIRTY-NINE

When I arrive at the airport in Reggio di Calabria, the last stop on the mainland of Italy, I am met by a barrel-chested, forty-year-old Englishman wearing sailor’s whites. He has a wind-burned face and sun-bleached red hair going up his arms. We drive urgently, almost wordlessly, to the harbor. Once we had identified ourselves as Oryx, there was little interest on either side in getting-to-know-you. The only thing that matters is the clock.

There is plenty of action at the terminal where hydrofoils and ferries make the twenty-minute crossing to the island of Sicily. It being the high season, the ferries run 24/7. This is good, as the plan is to blend in with the boat traffic. At a private marina farther up the seaside promenade, we board the Miramare, a seventy-foot megayacht chosen by Atlas for its speed and large rear deck — a good target for a helicopter put- down. There are two other Oryx people as crew, a full-scale operating room with an Italian surgeon and a nurse, a one-hundred-horsepower tender in case of the need for evasive action, and a cache of arms. It takes forty minutes to clear the harbor and another hour to reach cruising distance from the coast. Once the navigation system confirms