Sohlberg and the White Death (15 page)

What if I instead shoot her in the head by accident with my crossbow?

Anything could happen out here in the wilderness. Anything.

Chapter 11/Elleve

LYON, FRANCE: MORNING OF TUESDAY

JULY 19, OR THREE MONTHS AND 7 DAYS

AFTER THE DAY

Chief Inspector Harald Sohlberg glanced at the clock by his bed.

4:01 AM

He had barely started to fall asleep when his thoughts about the upcoming meeting with Ishmael took off at full speed. Insomnia scattered his thoughts—they ran off like wild horses. His wife’s palpable absence worsened his mental turmoil.

4:32 AM

Ishmael was the perfect name for the informant at the center of Operation Locust. Old Testament Ishmael caused major if not perpetual upheaval when he split off the Muslims from the Jews and Christians. Sohlberg had picked his latter-day Ishmael to rip up the tribes of the underworld.

4:33 AM

He kept thinking about Ishmael and what would be said and not said and what would be learned and not learned. He went over the rules for informants to make sure that he didn’t get played for a fool.

Rule # 1: the informant must never be trusted.

Rule # 2: the informant must never be believed wholeheartedly (see Rule # 1).

Rule # 3: the informant will never tell you all of the truth all of the time (see Rule # 1).

 Rule # 4: the informant will only tell you some of the truth some of the time (see Rule # 1).

Rule # 5: the informant will always use you for his or her own benefit or profit or both.

Sohlberg reluctantly looked at the clock again.

4:34 AM

~ ~ ~

Domenico Pelle woke up at 5:00 AM. He had a lot to do that day. Pressing obligations waited for him in Milan. He hated traveling to Lyon. Too much of his valuable time would be consumed. But he enjoyed staying at
Le Royal
—his favorite luxury hotel in downtown Lyon.

The Italian got out of bed. He pulled the curtains and peeked out the window. A glimmer of sunlight tinged the sky. The giant public square of Place Bellecour was as empty as his growling stomach. Pelle called room service for breakfast and was told to call back when the restaurant opened at 6:30 AM.

He began planning what he was going to do as soon as he arrived back home in Italy. But first he had to take care of an urgent problem: a simple case of thievery over the weekend. The theft was absolutely intolerable and likely to cause a lot of headaches for him and his family and the business. People and profits would be hurt unless he took extreme action.

~ ~ ~

Laprade and the widow Theillaud took their breakfast on the terrace. The cloudless sky promised another scorching day. The couple enjoyed the cool mountain air which invigorated them as well as the vibrant carnations and roses in Laprade’s garden.

“Are you going to see your dying friend at the hospital?”

“Yes.”

“Doesn’t he have any family?”

“I don’t think so . . . none that I know about.”

“No woman in his life?”

“None as far as I know.”

“Maybe he has a man?”

“None that I know about.”

“You know very little about him,” said the widow Theillaud.

Laprade wondered if his friend Gerard was a homosexual. Perhaps. But it really didn’t matter. The important
fact
was that the man had risked his own life to rescue Laprade from certain death when the two men had been on a secret mission in Serbia for the French Foreign Legion. They had shared so many hardships during their time in the Legion. And yet Laprade knew so little of the man. The detective said:

“How well can you ever know anyone?”

Madame Theillaud shrugged and drank her coffee.

~ ~ ~

The expected call finally came in at 7:00 AM.

Sohlberg looked at the caller’s number. He stood up to leave the dining room where he had been reading local newspapers and enjoying a simple breakfast of croissants from one of the many bakeries in the Sixth
Arrondissement
. The open windows admitted a sultry breeze that promised another hot day.

Juliette Bonnaire had just started vacuuming. The 60-year-old housekeeper liked to start cleaning the house before it got too hot. The Sohlbergs paid her handsomely to do minimal housework because they liked how she wanted a job to supplement her flimsy pension.

“Madame Bonnaire,” he shouted while the cell phone rang. “You don’t have to turn off the machine. I’ll take the call in another room.”

Juliette Bonnaire opened her mouth and was about to say something but then she just smiled.

The detective took the main hallway to the little guest bedroom near the dining room. He was amazed at how the difficult case always intruded on his off-hours. Operation Locust was well named because it ate up all of his free time. The phone stopped ringing after the third ring.

Sohlberg closed the door. He wondered what would be the latest twist in Operation Locust—an Interpol and multi-agency investigation across twelve countries in Europe and the Americas. Locust was all about tracking down the identity of the higher-ups who imported and distributed high-grade cocaine and heroin into Europe.

The phone started ringing again.

For Sohlberg the genesis of Operation Locust felt like some distant memory from antiquity.

Almost three years ago his friend Jesse Hernandez—a Boston Police detective—had alerted him about a routine arrest at Boston’s Logan International Airport. Two passengers in a taxi cab had refused to pay the full fare. The male and female passenger punched the driver. A search of the pregnant female’s luggage revealed a tiny packet of crack cocaine. The male passenger turned out to be a wanted Italian who ran an international ring of drug mules. The insolent trafficker was Federico “Rico” Gerardi and he got law enforcement’s undivided attention when he said:

“Give me and my woman a break and I’ll give you guys a big fat break. I’ll tell you everything I know about the biggest players in the business.”

Rico Gerardi received a suspended sentence for himself and a drastically reduced sentence for his careless girlfriend. The informant was released back into the underworld to gather information. His woman remained in state prison for two years to serve her sentence, deliver her baby, and insure her boyfriend’s cooperation. The baby was placed in temporary foster care. Lilianne Timmermans then had one more year to go in a supervised work-release program.

Sohlberg was based in New York City at the time. He was called in to interview Gerardi because the Norwegian was in charge of Interpol’s investigation of worldwide drug smuggling by organized crime based in Europe. Sohlberg still remembered the informant’s last words before leaving Boston:

“I’m gonna do you guys a lot of good. Yeah . . . Rico is gonna put you in with the big time players . . . the whales . . . it’s time that you go fish the big boys and not little fish like me.”

The Boston Police and the Suffolk County Sheriff's Department and the DEA and the FBI and all of the other federal alphabet bureaucrats agreed that the trafficker was worth releasing because the informant-to-be was a cousin of Elio and Bruno Gerardi. The two Italian bothers were well-known for their drug trafficking
bona fides
as members of Sicily’s
Cosa Nostra
.

The phone rang again.

~ ~ ~

Sohlberg looked forward to meeting the Sicilian. Sohlberg had grown tired of traveling to dead letter drops all over Europe where the Sicilian left handwritten notes. The information had led to spectacular drug busts.

The always-suspicious detective wondered how the informant managed to get such good information. But it really didn’t matter because drugs off the street equals lives saved. It also didn’t matter because it was just a matter of time before the Sicilian Snitch would meet a horrible death at the hands of his employers or their competitors. The informant’s employers had zero tolerance for snitches and they would inevitably put two and two together and reduce the mule’s existence to less than zero. Sohlberg’s bosses would miss Rico Gerardi if the informant was downsized into an early grave. The bosses had fallen in love with the colossal drug busts that made Interpol look very very good.

The mind-boggling numbers broke records. The word on the street was that a reward of $ 3 million U.S. dollars had been offered by the America and Sicilian mafia—along with the Camorra in Naples—for the identity of the snitch or snitches whose betrayals were beyond the pale.

Case in point: the Genovese Family and their partners in the Huang Chinese triad gang lost $ 97 million (street value) of high-grade Afghan heroin that was seized from a Chinese cargo ship unloading Nike tennis shoes from Pakistan at the Port of Tacoma in Washington State.

The second drug bust almost destroyed the Brancaccio family in Sicily when they lost $ 103 million (street value) of high-grade cocaine that was seized from a Panamanian vessel loading sulfur at the Port of Houston in the State of Texas.

The third drug bust enraged the Licciardi family and other Camorra capos in Naples when $ 132 million worth of meth precursor chemicals were seized from a Malaysian boat picking up scrap metal at the Newark docks of the Port Authority of New York.

The phone stopped its incessant ringing for a few seconds before it started up again. The fifth call irritated Sohlberg. But he did not answer—as pre-arranged with the caller.

Rico Gerardi also fingered mobsters who imported cocaine and heroin from distributors based in Eastern Europe, Syria, Turkey, and Russia. The informant’s solid tips led to the arrest and conviction of dozens of soldiers and underbosses from the Cosa Nostra in Sicily and the Camorra in Naples. Soon enough the snitch provided Sohlberg with plenty of Albanian, Corsican, Russian, and Bulgarian names. A couple of the names came attached with police and military titles. One- and two-star generals were also in the action.

After two minutes the phone rang again. This time the call ended abruptly midway through the first ring as previously agreed upon. The final call came in exactly one minute later. Sohlberg picked it up on the pre-agreed second ring.

“Can you talk?”

Sohlberg barely recognized the caller’s voice. But it had been more than two years since he had last spoken to the promising informant from Italy.

“Yes. We can talk.”

“I need to meet with you,” said the man in heavily accented English with a voice as pleasant and melodic as gravel tumbling around in a galvanized pail. “Are we meeting at your office?”

“No,” said Sohlberg.

“But I need to see you and your friend
today
. And I mean now! . . . Stuff’s happening. Serious stuff. . . .”

“That may be the case. But I want you to live.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Interpol headquarters are always under surveillance by the criminal element. It’s no secret that the Sicilian mafia keeps their eye on Interpol headquarters to see who comes and goes. They sell that information to interested buyers all over the world.”

“Wait a minute . . . are you telling me I’m in danger?”

“Not unless you show up at headquarters or any of our offices.”

“What if I need protection?”

“You’ll get it. But don’t ever drop by any Interpol office if you want to live to retirement age or die from natural causes.”

“That’s crazy.”

“Call it whatever you want . . . but the Sicilians’ local people take pictures of every license plate of every vehicle that comes in and out of headquarters . . . the same goes for the face of every person who enters and leaves headquarters. . . . They have telephoto lenses that can pick up a pimple from 500 yards. You never know who will connect the dots.”

~ ~ ~

The informant lapsed into a long silence as well he should have. “Alright . . . where do we meet?”

“It’s a discrete location in Vieux Lyon . . . Old Lyon . . . it’s a bookstore . . . Flaubert and Company . . . they buy and sell old and rare books in a four-hundred-year-old building.”

“Who do I ask for?”

“No one. Just ask the cashier if they have any books written by French crusaders. She will send you to the back.”

“I’d like to meet somewhere else. Vieux Lyon is too confusing. . . .”

“No. This is the only place.”

The caller remained silent as if testing Sohlberg’s resolve. But the Norwegian would not change his mind. The detective had not picked the lovely old city center for its beauty. He chose the old part of town because it was a maze. Even an amateur could shake off an experienced surveillance team in the endless labyrinth of narrow twisting lanes lined with shops and cafés.