“That should be General Danker,” said the President. “I’ll put him on speaker.”
Danker was the American representative to NATO. He was currently in Germany, touring facilities there. Zen had met the Army general when he was an aide to the Joint Chiefs of Staff a decade and a half before. Danker was more a politician than a tactician, which made him perfect for the NATO post.
Zen watched the others as they exchanged small talk with the general. Each had a different style and personality. Blitz leaned forward in his chair, eyes squinting slightly, a very serious look on his face even as he asked the general how his wife was. Newhaven fidgeted — he always fidgeted. Lovel was his usual easygoing self, making a joke about German beer.
President Todd, meanwhile, seemed impatient — also completely in character.
“So — the NATO meeting in Kiev,” she said, bringing the brief how-are-ya session to an end. “Can we have an update on it?”
“The Russians oppose it, of course,” said Newhaven, launching into a brief recap of the political situation.
Russia had long opposed Ukraine’s addition to NATO. They were not politically in a position to do much about it — with the drop in energy prices, the Russian economy had slumped to its lowest state since the collapse of the Soviet Union. But they certainly weren’t happy about it.
“There’s intelligence that they might attempt to disrupt the sessions,” said Newhaven. “Very good intelligence.”
“I would say that physical threats to the participants cannot be ruled out,” said Blitz. “They should be expected.”
“I concur,” said General Danker over the speakerphone.
They discussed the threats briefly. Such intelligence reports and warnings were much more common than people thought, but the fact that this had been connected to a legitimate government made it unusual. Still, there was no chance that NATO would call off the meeting, or that any of the members, including the U.S., would decline to attend. Terrorist-type threats had become an unfortunate fact of life in the post–9/11 era.
President Todd moved the discussion back to the importance of having Ukraine join NATO. She saw Russia’s objections as a sign that the policy was a good one, though not everyone in Congress agreed. That was an important issue, since the new NATO membership would be part of a revision to the NATO charter and subject to Senate ratification.
“Senator Osten’s illness could be a major problem for us,” she said. “He was scheduled to be at the conference. If he’s had a heart attack, I’m afraid that will complicate matters.”
“Someone from the committee will go,” said Zen. “It may even be me.”
Todd pressed her lips together. “Senator?”
“I’m next in line. And I’m the only other one who supports the measure on the committee. In our party, anyway.”
“It would be helpful if you attended, and then were able to persuade your colleagues upon your return,” said the President.
“I don’t think I’ve ever been to Kiev,” said Zen.
“There will be impeccable security,” said Danker over the phone.
“I’m not worried,” said Zen.
8
Nuri felt the weight of Frau Gerste’s sigh all the way to Rome.
He also felt the weight of Gregor’s shoulder, as they sat next to each other on a Euro C Flight direct from Berlin.
The C, Nuri was sure, stood for “cheap.” The seats were so narrow a mouse would have felt crowded.
Gregor had insisted on coming, following a call from her supervisor. Apparently the Bureau was now worried that the CIA would crack the case and they wouldn’t get any credit. On the bright side, she managed to get an appointment with a member of the Office of Special Magistrate, the antimafia police, that afternoon. Hence the flight.
She was uncharacteristically quiet for much of the flight, and Nuri tolerated her presence, if not her bad breath, until just before they were landing, when she began talking about Frau Gerste.
Why, she wondered, had Nuri found her attractive?
“Who says I found her attractive?” he asked.
“You were practically leering. ‘Frau’ means she’s married, you know.”
“I’m sure.”
“She had a wedding ring.”
“Really? I hadn’t noticed.”
“Because you were too busy staring at her boobs. I hate it when men do that. Treating women like sex objects. It’s disgusting.”
You have nothing to worry about, Nuri thought to himself, but he kept his mouth shut, concentrating instead on the dossier MY-PID had provided on the man who apparently ordered the murder in Berlin.
The Italian newspapers had played up the tobacco shop owner’s death, calling Giuseppe DeFrancisco one of the “grand old men of Rome,” an appellation that not even his most faithful customers could ever remember hearing during his lifetime. Established in 1956, his small shop had been a dusty holdover from an era that had passed as surely as the Caesars and chariot races. But his untimely death transformed it into a symbol of all Italy, which was being overtaken by the rapacious thieves of international finance, who cared not a wit for the ability of an Italian to buy a good cigar and catch up on the latest gossip of the neighborhood, be that neighborhood in an obscure Abruzzi town or Rome itself.
Giuseppe’s connection to his mafia grandson was not mentioned in any of these feature stories. The obituary contained only the broadest hint: Giuseppe had only two surviving grandchildren, one in the U.S. and the other in Naples. Neither was named.
The grandson was Alfredo Moreno, a mafia chief well-known enough in Interpol circles to have a nickname — the Car Thief. He had not lived in Naples for more than a decade, preferring to spend most of his time at his hilltop estate thirty miles away in a town named Fuggire. So small it didn’t show up on most maps, the town consisted of three buildings at an intersection of two rugged roads, an abandoned monastery building, and Moreno’s hilltop property.
The estate had once belonged to a religious order, willed to them by a wealthy cardinal who had established the monastery. It had passed back into private hands somewhere in the sixteenth or eighteenth century. Sometime after that it had become the family home for the Morenos, and was passed down on Alfredo’s father’s side of the family for at least eight generations.
Its connections with the mafia were well-known and documented in the media. Alfredo had, of course, made all of the pretenses of going “straight,” supposedly denouncing his mobster roots and becoming in the Italian phrase,
Alfredo was indeed modern, but then so was crime. Where his forebears had depended on handshakes and backroom conversations, he preferred encrypted BlackBerries and pay-as-you go cell phones.
He made a great deal of money importing and exporting — he brought in olive oil and other goods from Turkey, Syria, and Libya, and exported cars to northern Africa and occasionally the Middle East. The cars were stolen; the oil and food were generally mislabeled and occasionally transported in defiance of various international sanctions, such as those requiring inspections and others forbidding trade with places like Iran, which Libya was particularly good in circumventing.
Alfredo also supplemented his income by importing heroin from Afghanistan; it was a small amount of his overall business, but it did pay for the annual Christmas and Easter parties he threw in the town at the foot of his hilltop. It went without saying that he did not pay much in the way of taxes, though in Italy this was merely a sign of his smart business sense.
