Ghost Soldiers (3 page)

He flicked it away with a frown of disgust. “The vampire wasn't alone. Someone or something attacked it after it fed. Does the Thorn have other people in the area?” He saw no spent shell casings, but maybe they'd relied on edged weapons and spells.

“Just our infiltrator, but he learned of this secondhand. Sorin Cojocaru did this—him or his people. Did they kill the vampire?”

“I don't think so. Not here, at least.” Karl started to walk back toward the distant truck where Bailey waited. He could do nothing more for the woman, but leaving her dead at the side of the road felt shameful all the same. The Thorn usually covered up these kinds of deaths, but here in Eastern Europe they seemed to have far less power. “If they destroyed the vampire, I'd be able to sense the stain of dark energy.”

“Damn it. That means Cojocaru's added another slave to his army.”

“Cojocaru isn't a vampire. Only a master can enslave vampire sirelings.”

“He has his ways,” she replied, and the com clicked off.

Chapter Three: Consolidation

Maria waited at the railing beneath the streetlight, staring out beyond the high pillars of the Tobin Memorial Bridge to where the Channel dumped into the Bay. From underneath, the bridge looked like a huge green insect from a Godzilla movie—row after row of steel girders for spindly legs marching along where Mystic River met Chelsea River. A few docked boats bumped gently against their stays and water slapped against their sides. A steady stream of traffic rushed overhead on the section of Tobin Bridge that curved above her, from rumbling semis to a car desperately in need of a new muffler.

John Passerini's car cruised past her, following the curve around to Terminal Street, and disappeared from view behind a bunch of trees. A few minutes later he appeared again, walking toward her alone. He crossed the street and stopped next to her, looking out on Little Mystic Channel as he buttoned his suit coat and slipped his hands into his trouser pockets. She couldn't smell guns or any other metal—steel or a wire—just a faint trace of aftershave and cigarette smoke.

“We have problems.” John always spoke calmly, regardless of the situation. She'd never seen him lose his equilibrium.

He'd served as underboss for her father and had always been one of his highest earners, ruthless and loyal. Maria's relationship with him had been rocky at best. Back before the Ricardi-Lucatti war, he'd opposed her involvement in the business—sometimes actively, sometimes passively. If anything, she'd expected him to grab for the wheel after her father's murder. And he
had
held the family together, but he'd also deferred to her after she'd shown back up on the scene. She'd been prepared to kill him at the time, if he wouldn't swear his loyalty and support her, but he'd never been one to miss the way the wind shifted. He'd joined her, and she'd given him back his position of
sotto capo
, second-in-command. If he resented not running the family, he never let it show.

She leaned her elbows on the rail and joined him in looking out at the water. “I expected better news. Maybe a congratulations or two.”

A long pause. “It's not common for a boss to do wet work. It's…unseemly.” He glanced at her, the slightest flash of reproval in his eyes. “You've got people to do that.”

“I haven't been made, remember? Don't you recall our little conversation about proving myself?” That conversation felt like an age ago, when she'd still been human and challenging expectations had seemed to matter.

His lips twitched up in a quick smile, there and then gone. “Things were different then.”

From this close she could smell his blood, rich in his veins. She glanced at his throat and away again. She'd fed recently, thank God, and that made it easier to fight back the thirst. Karl had said her control would get better with time, but so far her struggle continued against the urge to gorge herself on the warm and the red.

“Everything's different
now
,” she finally said. Boston was hers, her father was dead and Karl was gone.

He nodded. A sharp dip of his chin, nothing more. “As for being made, I told you once it would never happen. But now? Like I said, things are different. It might make things smoother if we did the ceremony, had you take the oath, get you on the books. Everything's fucked up enough with you being a woman. You not being made just shoves the knife in deeper, turns it a couple times.”

She laughed. She'd trade a thousand yes men for one who bluntly told it like it was, no matter how much she might hate what she heard. Bringing John in had been the best thing she'd ever done. “Tell you what. I'll take it easy for awhile. Behave myself like a good boss and keep a low profile.”

He didn't laugh and only stood there watching her with those disturbingly intelligent eyes. A shark with the mind of a tactician.

“So what's our trouble then?” she asked when the silence grew too long. “I mean beside the fact that I have two X chromosomes? This should be nonstop, good-times-are-here-to-stay. Cavallo's dead, and I took down two of his crew with him. Speaking of which, I want Paul Ruggeri and Little Joe Marco gone. They won't come back to me and we both know it. The rest of Cavallo's people…give them an opportunity to come to the table. Easy street from here on out.”

He still didn't answer, and that annoyed her.

She stood straighter and turned to face him. “Any remnants of the Lucattis going to give us grief?” After Boss Stefano Lucatti had been killed, one of his
caporegimes
, Little Jack Cirelli, had moved to take up the flag. Ricardi wiseguys had shot him down in a Cheesecake Factory parking lot. The backbone of the Lucatti family had been killed either in the war or in the fire at Stefano's mansion. Memories of that chaotic night flashed through her mind—all the gunfire and flames and grim desperation—until she pushed the images away again. If her face betrayed her, John didn't seem to notice.

“No,” John said. “The ones that wouldn't turn have hightailed it. Some of them to Providence. Some to New York.”

“So what's the fucking problem, John? This isn't high school drama class. Don't draw the goddamn suspense out until I scream.”

“New York's making noise.”

Shit.

A tingle started at the tips of her fingers, her claws wanting to push all the way out as if she had something to fight in front of her. She clenched her hands into fists until the urge went away. She'd ascended without the blessing of the Commission, the ruling panel of bosses from every mafia family in America that made policy and settled disputes. She had no idea who the Commission wanted to head the Ricardis after her father's death, and she didn't care. It wouldn't have been her anyhow. Communication with New York had been dicey at best during the war and following the chaos after the Lucatti mansion fire. That chaos had given her time to snatch up the pieces.

“How much noise they making?” she asked.

“They disapprove. Same reasons some of our people aren't happy. You aren't made. You're a woman. You got the top slot without Commission approval. You're riding the coattails of your father.”

“So I make some promises, smother them with money. This is business.”

He shrugged. “This is business—but it's not a woman's business.”

“Goddamn fucking pigheaded Neanderthals.” She clenched her fists harder. Her claws started to cut into her palms, so she crossed her arms and trapped her fists beneath her armpits. “So…you think they'll make a move against us?”

“Yes.”

“How soon?”

“Word is they're going to send a guy, arrange a sit down with you and make their concerns known. After that…” He shrugged again.

At least that gave her a little more breathing room to consolidate things. If she could firmly establish herself, it'd be harder to unseat her. She needed allies, and quickly. She also needed all of her people one hundred percent on her side. Hell, if Elizabeth could run England while surrounded by hostile, scheming men, then Maria could certainly run a Boston
borgata
.

“Call the capos together. We do a ceremony. Make me legit.”

He stared off at a boat cutting across the dark water. “And then?”

“Put off New York as long as we can. The Five Families have their own problems. We'll be deferential and stall. Get all our rackets up and running. Get good money rolling in and people will be happy.” Happ
ier
at least.

“There's more.”

She grunted. “It just keeps raining shit today, doesn't it?”

“The FBI. They're all over the place. Watching our clubs. Photographing license plates. Same old shit. We think our little Brink's Social Club is being monitored—Sam says the Feds are crawling all over the North End lately. They're heavy in the market for stool pigeons. Some of our people have been approached. They're trying to flip them.”

“Is it working?”

“Neil Mangano's up on gun charges. They got Deuce Santoro on possession—he's going down. We caught word through an insider that Fratianno's gonna get an indictment on RICO charges. You know Sam's a stand-up guy—I got a good feeling about him. Not so sure about Santoro.” He frowned. “Some talk about slapping me with the same RICO bit.”

“Shit.”

“It's our own fault. We've been too noisy, attracted a lot of attention. War's bad for business.”

She didn't answer.

“Louie Rastelli flipped. Turned state's evidence. Could bring down the whole Antonelli crew. We can't get to him.”

“Goddamn rats.”

He gave her the same noncommittal shrug. “The cost of doing business.”

Damn it. The war might be over, but the flood of troubles never stopped. She closed her eyes and gathered her determination. Her father had done it; she could do it. She was a fucking Ricardi to the bone.

But first things first. FBI or no, they had to get the revenue streams open again and the money flowing. The constant fighting had disrupted everything. “All right. Here's what I want. Get everybody on the street again. Let it be known we're going to throw the books open, replace some of the people we lost. That should motivate some of our better-earning associates. Get the rackets up and running. Davey Abello has that thing with the online porn. I want that up and going strong. I want Antonelli back on his Fast Toll racket. Nobody's in the wind anymore—I want the soldiers kicking up to the capos, and I want them all fat and happy. I'm going to cut my take down by a couple of points. Make things easier.”

“And the Feds?”

“Nothing we can do except stay as slippery as possible. Tell the guys I'm doubling my contribution to our lawyer pool. He'll be available to anybody facing time. Maybe that'll keep them from feeling desperate enough to flip.”

“You want us to start tidying up loose ends?”

She hesitated. He wanted to know whether or not to order the execution of made men who posed a risk of flipping. Santoro would be first, most likely. Rastelli's death sentence was already set in stone for betraying the family—if they could get at him, that was.

“No, that's last resort stuff. Play too hard and we'll drive people right to the Feds.”

He nodded, but she couldn't tell from his face whether or not he approved. “I'll keep in touch.”

He walked away, back across the street, and left her alone with a thousand worries.

Chapter Four: Message

The sun dropped beneath the horizon. Karl opened his eyes to darkness and the cloying ghost-stink of mildew on rubber and old ice.

The chest freezer lid swung open before he could lift it, and Bailey's face appeared above him. Dark circles smudged under her eyes, and her skin looked even paler than usual. He could almost smell the worry seeping out of her pores like sweat.

“What's wrong?” He pushed himself to his feet, and Bailey drew back to give him room to climb out. He shut the lid, trying to ignore the smells from the freezer that had bled into his black fatigues.

“We lost contact with the infiltrator.” She paced back and forth in the narrow aisle between the freezer and the computer station, then stopped and looked at him. “The Watchers picked up something, some kind of disturbance on the road. Even bigger than the last one. They tagged his last known position a few kilometers behind us. Command just gave orders to check it out.”

“How close did the infiltrator get to Cojocaru?”

She hesitated, chewing at her lip, seeming to debate how much she could tell him.

“It's time to cut the secrecy,” he said. “I need information if you want the mission to succeed.”

“The infiltrator was a mage. He'd become an acolyte to Cojocaru, but only recently—within the last week—did he meet up with Cojocaru's main group here in Romania.”

“If the Watchers knew his position, couldn't they track him at any time?”

She shook her head. “Cojocaru kept them shielded. Our guy contacted me all panicked, all juiced up…and then he went dark.”

“What did he say?”

A longer hesitation. “You don't have clearance to know.”

The Order of the Thorn and their damned secrets. Nothing ever changed. “I'm just the hired gun, right?”

“Yeah… No. Maybe…” She paced back and forth again, head down, before drawing up short. A slow smile spread across her face, and the worry faded a bit. “We're partners, you and me, right? Hell, I've been your handler since they hauled you out here, kicked you off the train.”

He said nothing, only watched her.

She began to pace again, aggravated, pulling at the edge of the fingerless glove on her left hand. “So screw Command and fuck all of Lord Sokoll's secrets. It's my ass out here in the wind, not his. I mean, you're with the Thorn. You killed that vampire back in the States. I heard the story. You killed some crazy werewolf too. I can trust you.”