*
“Look at them,” Armando whispered, standing at the foot of the girls’ beds. “Two angels.”
His wife agreed and said, “As much as I’ve been with them, I still can’t wrap my head around it. Gone for four years and here they are—the same as they were.”
“Think about it, my dear,” her husband said. “It’s like a gift. We haven’t missed watching them grow up.”
“I suppose,” she said.
“Come, let’s have a little drink on the patio.”
Downstairs, Armando prepared the Negronis and through the kitchen window watched Tim Wheelock walk across the back lawn to have a word with one of his security men.
“Do you think there’s a chance?” Leonora asked.
“A chance that Elena and Jesper will come back tonight? Is that what you’re asking?” Armando said.
She wiped her eyes with a tissue.
“If I tell you what I think, you’ll accuse me of robbing your hope, so I won’t say a thing.”
“But Mickey believes her. They’ll be at the mountain now, won’t they?”
Armando glanced at the clock on the microwave and grunted. “Mickey is an optimist. He always has been and it gets the better of him sometimes. How else can you explain a sober engineer casting his lot with a psychic? Marcus doesn’t believe her as far as he can toss her.”
“But he went along with them?”
“He’s paid to do Mickey’s bidding. There’s no mystery to it.”
“Well, I choose to believe that Elena’s going to appear on top of the mountain tonight with Jesper and I’m not going to bed until we get Mickey’s call.”
He handed her a cocktail. “You know something? Neither will I.”
*
The trail became quite steep in the final half hour of the ascent, although it presented no technical challenges. The mule path was fairly smooth without many rocks or roots to trip them up. Still, Colonel Carter was loudly huffing and puffing, and Marcus found himself too winded to light a cigarette along the way. The path narrowed to a single file and cut across the western slope of the mountain in the midst of a lovely beech wood. Soon, the trees gave way to a dramatic vista and in the twilight, they could see the dark waters of Brugneto Lake.
“It’s very beautiful,” Celeste said, turning to Marcus.
“Another ten minutes and we’ll be there,” the guide called out. “The last grove we pass through will be a little dark, so you might wish to use your torches.”
Finally, they emerged from the wood and the trail disappeared, replaced by an expanse of bald rock stretching the last hundred meters to the flat summit. It was nine o’clock and just past sunset. Out in the open and unprotected, the chilly wind had them all zipping up their new jackets. Zanardi had been gathering kindling along the way, and he set about starting a fire while everyone else found a comfortable enough place to sit. While Carter loosened his shoelaces and moaned, Marcus lit a cigarette and Mickey checked his mobile signal and grunted at the no-service icon.
“Come, sit by the nice fire,” the guide said cheerfully, “and we will have our mountain meal. We can eat and watch the stars come out and before you know it, midnight will come. Personally, I can’t wait to see why you wanted to be here tonight. Also, I have a little brandy. Who would like some?”
Marcus raised his hand.
*
At 11:30 p.m. the two Carabinieri guarding the gate of Villa Shibui saw a van approaching from the north. It slowed as it got closer.
The non-commissioned officer named Vaglio, a vice brigadiere, said to his underling, a young carabiniere, “What the hell does this jackass want?”
The van had no commercial markings. It stopped in the road opposite the gate and the driver’s side window lowered. A large man with long, blond hair said, “Hey, you. English? You speak English?”
“Go, go,” the vice brigadiere answered in English, making a backhanded shooing gesture. “Move away.”
The carabiniere lifted his hand to unbutton his white holster and edged forward.
A pistol appeared in the blond man’s hand. The suppressor tube on its barrel made it look freakishly long. The shooter eliminated the threat from the younger man first.
Thwack, thwack.
The older carabinieri heard the muted percussions and saw his colleague clutching his chest and falling, but he didn’t see him hit the ground before he took a bullet to the forehead.
The driver pulled on a black balaclava and turned the wheel, rolling over the body of the vice brigadiere, rocking the vehicle.
In Slovakian, the blond man said to the others in the van, “You know what they call the speed bumps in England? Sleeping policemen! Pretty funny, eh?”
He gently accelerated until the front bumper was against the gate, then gave it a little more gas until the gate cracked open, scraping the sides of the van as it pushed through.
*
Tim Wheelock was at the rear of the villa, smoking a cigar and chatting with one of his men when he heard over his earpiece, “Breach, breach, breach. White van. Unknown—”
“Jimmy!” Wheelock said, beginning his sprint and unshouldering his bullpup assault rifle. “Jimmy! Report!”
Including Wheelock, there were four CSS guards on duty, two in the rear, two in the front of the house. As he ran, Wheelock ordered Graham, the other rear guard, to circle around the opposite side.
Halfway down the driveway, the van stood empty. Three men in black clothing and black balaclavas lay on the grass underneath olive trees, two on one side of the drive, one on the other. All of them used identical gear—barrel-suppressed, .308 caliber rifles with bipods and night-vision scopes. The guard named Jimmy went down in the initial volley. The second CSS guard patrolling the front of the villa acquired the dark form of one of the shooters in his sights just as a round fired by another exploded his skull.
Wheelock came around his side of the house and saw a muzzle flash from the olive grove and heard the soft thwack of a suppressed round and a buzzing noise
