get more specific than that, and before I could press, he’d hung up on me.” Henna paused. “I dug a little deeper and things got real interesting. I cross-referenced her name through the CIA database, and within minutes I got an angry call.”
“Eritrea’s ambassador again?”
“No. Are you ready for this? Paul Barnes.”
“What?”
“You heard me. The director of the CIA. Typing her name into the computer sent up all sorts of red flags. Part of our system is indexed with the Mossad’s, and when her name came up, alarms must have screamed all over Tel Aviv. Barnes’s opposite number in Israel called and read him the riot act about interagency cooperation and a bunch of other shit. The upshot is, Israel did not like me poking into the background of Miss Nagast.”
“Why in the hell would the Israelis care if you’re researching an Eritrean national?” This was one turn Mercer hadn’t expected.
“Because she’s not,” Henna said. “Selome Nagast holds duel citizenship, Eritrea and Israel, and she has an officer’s commission in the Israeli Defense Force as well as a position in their government.”
“I don’t get it.” If Selome was Israeli, that could mean Harry was being held by one of the Jewish state’s legions of enemies.
“Neither do I. But ten minutes after getting off the phone with Barnes, Lloyd Easton called.”
“The Secretary of State?” This was going far outside Mercer’s realm, and the implications were beginning to scare him.
“No other. He told me that he’d just received a call too, this one from Israel’s foreign minister. We are to back off Selome Nagast or face serious consequences. She’s one of theirs, operating in the United States on a mission — get this—‘not detrimental to America and therefore none of our concern.’ The guy told us to piss off in our own back-yard. He said by investigating her mission, we are jeopardizing our close alliance with his nation.”
“What the hell is going on here, Dick?”
“You tell me,” Henna shot back. “I thought this would be a routine inquiry, and the next thing I know, I’ve got shit coming down on me faster than I can shovel. What do you think?”
Mercer thought for a moment, paying little attention to the ambulances and police vehicles around them. “I didn’t trust her from the beginning. I thought there was something dirty about her — Prescott Hyde, too, for that matter — but this is unbelievable.”
“Why can’t you be like the rest of my friends?” Henna wasn’t upset, but he was serious. “When they call up for a favor, it’s usually to help paint their garage or put together a gas grill. With you, it always has to be something else, doesn’t it? And it gets worse every time. Harry’s kidnapping has turned into a bloodbath. What is it about you?”
“Lucky, I guess. What’d you find at Harry’s?”
“Too early to tell. The team went to his place just as I was heading for the airport. What can you tell me about the night Harry was grabbed? It’ll help sift through the evidence the forensic team picks up.”
“There’s nothing I can tell you that would help. It was a night like any other. We were drinking at Tiny’s until Selome arrived. We had a couple more after she left, then Harry took off and I headed home too.”
“I guess there’s nothing we can do unless we can track that plane.” Henna rested an arm on the Jag’s open door as Mercer finally swung into his car. “Except wait for the forensics reports.”
“When do you think you’ll have something from Harry’s apartment?”
“A couple hours for a preliminary, I’d think,” Henna replied, watching his friend critically. “After this mess, I won’t be going to California, so why don’t you come over to my place tonight and we’ll go over it? We’ll have a couple of drinks.”
“I know what you’re trying to do and I appreciate the gesture, but don’t bother. I’ve got too much work. I know my limitations better than anyone.” Mercer fired up the Jag’s throaty V-12. “When I reach the end of my rope, I’ll stop.”
“I just hope the end of your rope isn’t a noose, you crazy son of a bitch,” Henna muttered at the receding car.
Venice, Italy
Giancarlo Gianelli brooded with his back to the windows in the spacious drawing room of his ancestral home located on the Grand Canal. The windows — huge floor-to-ceiling affairs of leaded glass and wrought iron — were over three hundred years old, made at a time when the glassmaker’s art was still being perfected. There was a blister in each of the eight hundred individual panes where the blower’s pipe had once been inserted into the molten glass. The sunlight streaming through them cast a grid shadow on the floor that matched its checker pattern of beige and rose carrera marble.
The room’s furniture were all antiques, each piece exceptional in its own right but coming alive when blended with the rest of the surroundings. It was a room of extraordinary wealth and was only one of forty-three in the home. Gianelli, too, looked as if he were a furnishing for the house, an elegant addition placed just so. His sports coat had been custom made in Milan, his shirt of Egyptian cotton, and his tie had been given to him personally by the late Gianni Versace. He was the epitome of an Italian merchant prince, comparable with the Renaissance Medicis.
Today, the planet was a small place. Anyone had global accessibility in just a few hours with jet aircraft or instantly with the telephone and the Internet. Thus the days when men with vision could generate wealth in direct accordance to the risk were all but gone. Only a few still retained the kind of independence to function without the constraints of obfuscating lawyers and miserly bankers. Giancarlo Gianelli was just such a person.
As the last male heir in a dynasty that stretched back more than six centuries, Gianelli stood at the apex of all his clan had struggled to achieve. In two months the last of his six daughters would be married, and all that would remain to give him succor as he eased into the second half of his fifties was the fabled history of his family. While he had two sons by two separate mistresses, neither of them could ever assume the Gianelli mantle. It was possible that this lack of an heir gave him the recklessness to draw himself away from the legitimate portions of his businesses and delve deeper into the shadows of what his family had created.
The twentieth century had been good to his family. His grandfather had added not one, but two new fortunes, first at the turn of the century when the manufacturing revolution reached the Italian peninsula and again during the fascist reign of Benito Mussolini, when he switched the Gianelli companies to wartime production under the direct patronage of Il Duce. During the 1930s and early 40s the Gianellis rivaled the Fiat Corporation in size and scope, manufacturing everything from submarines to infantrymen’s mess kits.
Giancarlo’s father had taken the reins in 1955 and shepherded Gianelli SpA, the principle holding company, through the turbulent but profitable 1960s, the downturn of the 70s, and into the meteoric 1980s. He turned over stewardship to his son, Giancarlo, just weeks before the American stock market crash of October 1987. Though Giancarlo’s first years as CEO were trying, the company remained one of Italy’s largest and most profitable.
Looking out the windows, Giancarlo could see a few gondolas on the Grand Canal, mostly empty, for the boats were used mainly by the tourists and it was still too early for them. There were several
It was April in Venice, a magic time of year. The sun’s rays were warm enough to make strolls along the narrow streets comfortable yet the heat wasn’t enough to turn fetid the sewage that tended to choke the canals later in the summer. The shop owners were happy and expectant, eagerly awaiting the tourists’ imminent arrival. By July, their smiles would be forced, their bonhomie worn a little thin, and by August they would be downright surly because they had made a year’s income and were ready to be rid of the droves.
The phone chimed.
“He’s leaving in two days’ time, Mr. Gianelli,” the caller said without preamble.
