The Arab nodded, now in fear for his life. He was bleeding from the corner of his eye and a massive welt had already emerged over his cheekbone.
“Tell him to apologize!” Federov said to his translator. “Now!” Ramiz relayed the request.
“Yuri. It’s all right,” Alex said.
But the Russian was blind with rage.
Cowering, Ahmet said his only word of English for the evening, looking at Alex. “Sorry,” he said. There was blood in his mouth. He sputtered. Part of a tooth came out.
Peter reached in his pocket, found a handkerchief, and tossed it to Ahmet. Ahmet gave him a trembling nod of thanks.
They all settled in at the table. Alex sat between Peter and Rizzo. The hostage had Ramiz to his right and Federov to his left, in case he needed to be encouraged to talk again. There were several empty chairs.
In a surreal touch, Dmitri-all seventy-four inches tall of him-appeared again with a tray. He spread bottles of water around the table, a bowl of fruit, and some chips.
Federov lit one of his cigarettes, waved the match to extinguish it, and threw the match to the floor. He turned back to Ramiz.
“Tell him to speak Italian,” Federov said. “I understand it some. Two of my guests,” he added, meaning Alex and Rizzo, “are fluent.”
Ramiz brought the prisoner up to speed.
Peter leaned to Alex and whispered, “You’re my lifeline on this one. I don’t understand any Italian.”
“I’ll fill you in afterward,” she said. Rizzo gave a slight nod to the two of them also, underscoring that he was working the same side of the street. Federov stared at Ahmet, barely appeased. The trip had been long and the prisoner finally began to talk.
FIFTY-SEVEN
VILLA MALAFORTUNATA, ITALY, SEPTEMBER 16, 10:18 P.M.
His name was Ahmet Lazzari, he said, switching into Italian. He was a Turk by way of Sicily. His parents had been laborers, his father a bricklayer, his mother a picker in a vineyard. More recently, he and his brother had moved to Genoa, where they had found occasional work on the docks. Eventually, they had worked for one of Federov’s shipping companies.
His accent was thick and guttural.
All of Federov’s business had come out of Odessa, Alex knew, but his bases of operation had expanded heavily into the Middle East and the Mediterranean. He thought of himself as a poor man’s Aristotle Onassis, with the ships but without the ex-first-lady wife who could give him the big time social and political clout and solve problems for him.
As Ahmet began, Alex quietly brought a notepad and pen out of her purse. Peter sat with his arms folded, elbows on the table. Rizzo sat next to her on the other side, his arms folded across his chest, his facial expression a tight scowl.
Ahmet Lazzari had a stricken look as he launched into his story. He had a prison pallor about him and behaved at times like a stray dog, not knowing whether he was going to be fed or whipped. But he had worked for Federov’s companies since 2001, he said, as a warehouseman first, then as a deck hand, and eventually as a member of a crew on the outbound freighters. He’d been clear of trouble for the entire time of his employment, up until about two months ago.
“That’s when hell broke loose,” he said. “That’s when we made some mistakes, my brother, Hassan, and me. Bad mistakes. I regret them.”
His eyes darted to Federov and then around the table. Hell breaking loose, he explained next, was when he, his brother, the shipping company, and a ship known as
Ahmet and Hassan had worked together for several years, each one watching the other’s back, working intermittently as merchant seamen for various companies. They were in Genoa two months earlier when the Fuguero was signing on crew. They signed on together. The bursar and much of the staff were Arabs, many Libyan, a few Saudis. The brothers had Sicilian names and Italian passports but were Arabs. So they got special treatment and were hired.
Two nights before sailing, the purser, a man named Abdul, approached them in a cafe near the docks. He wanted to put an offer to them, Ahmet recalled, something that would earn them some extra money. Ahmet had drawn his attention because he was an Arab and because he had experience working in shipyards and knew how to weld the inner structure of a ship. So would they be interested in listening? And would they be able to keep their mouths shut if they said no.
The brothers looked at each other and didn’t think too much about it. Extra money was important, whatever the job, so they said yes. It had to do with taking some panels off the wall and sealing some material back in. The brothers looked at each other and laughed.
“Half the boats in the Mediterranean are running drugs,” Ahmet said to the table full of his visitors. “The other half are running guns. People in suits in offices are getting rich. Men who have yachts and seven mistresses. So why shouldn’t we get some crumbs from the rich guys’ table?”
So they agreed.
Two nights later they were aboard the ship. It had been cleared of local crew. The brothers were asked to go into the bursar’s office with an array of tools and take out one of the panels on the wall. They did so. Behind it was a hollow area, about a meter wide and half a meter deep. It was perfect for storage. They left the new hole in the wall open and reported back to Abdul.
Abdul came in and inspected their work. He was pleased. The panel lay on the floor with the bolts that had held it. There wasn’t much of a mess and nothing had been damaged. The brothers had done good work.
“Next, we were told to go below decks until summoned back,” Ahmet said. “When we came back down below, the atmosphere on the ship had changed. The crew was gone, almost all of it. In their place, there were some Middle Eastern guys. They had the scarves. Dark glasses. They looked like Egyptians, and they looked like they wanted trouble. They all had Uzi’s. They didn’t bother us, but they knew we were welders.”
“We understood that this was when a delivery was made,” Ahmet said. “They didn’t want us seeing whoever got on and off.”
“We sat in the ship’s kitchen, my brother, Hassan, and me,” Ahmet said. “We opened a bottle of wine and smoked cigarettes. It must have been less than an hour. One of the gunman came for us. He spoke to us in Arabic and told us we could go back upstairs and finish our work. He asked us if we had more cigarettes, so we gave him a pack. We wanted him to be our friend, you know?”
He searched the table nervously and looked for some interaction from his audience. None was forthcoming.
“We went back upstairs and Abdul was standing there. He was looking into our secret compartment. There was a bag in it. A sack. Rough material, like burlap. The type of thing tools are kept in. He motioned with his head at the hiding place. ‘Close it up now!’ he said to us. So we did. We put the steel plating back in place and used an automatic drill to put the bolts back. He didn’t let us look in the bag. We had no idea.”
He drew a breath. Alex interrupted him.
“Ahmet,” she said. “What was the exact date that we’re talking about?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said.
“Try harder than that, if you will.”
After some consultation he claimed it was June the twenty-first of this year. Or thereabouts. He wasn’t certain.
“Why is the exact date important?” Federov asked.
“Dates are always important,” Alex said.
