When the Dead Awaken (28 page)

The huge man nodded.

‘It does mean something, Sabrina, and I will start listening to you,' he said calmly as if they were discussing some arcane aspects of nanotechnology.

The physicist seemed to have been fitted with some sort of on/off switch.

‘Thank you.'

‘It was Paolo Iacovelli who betrayed us,' he said in a loud and clear voice.

It would seem she had indeed damaged his eardrums after all because a thin trickle of blood was running from one of his ears and under the collar of his jacket.

He pressed a finger against his right ear and studied the bloodstained fingertip mournfully.

‘It'll get better soon,' she assured him. ‘The computer whizz-kid? But he was just a boy.'

‘What? Yes, he was. And he would have been a very rich
and evil boy, if they hadn't killed him as well. It was he who made me drive to the General Electric importer in Assago so they would know exactly where I was. Stupid boy! Max found a hacker, a guy who called himself Columbus. He discovered that large amounts of money had been deposited in Paolo Iacovelli's name in various bank accounts in Liechtenstein and the Channel Islands before the attack. He was able to trace the money back to various companies controlled by the Camorra. By then the transactions had already been reversed, of course.'

Sabrina returned the pistol to the holster and began to breathe more normally.

What was wrong with the men in her life? Forlani was the second man she had almost had to kill in the last forty-eight hours. And they were supposed to be on her side. What would happen once she got to Savelli or L'Artista?

It was like sitting in a cage with a huge Bengal tiger, who might start to lick its lips in anticipation of its next meal at any moment. Perhaps the tiger was your friend. Perhaps you had misunderstood everything … such as thinking that it might be love.

‘Can I have a cigarette?' he asked.

‘What? Yes, of course,' she said. Still feeling nauseous from the adrenaline.

She lit it for him.

Forlani smoked like someone trying their first cigarette, smiled apologetically and coughed.

‘I've never smoked before,' he explained. ‘But suddenly I really wanted a cigarette.'

‘That's all right,' she said. ‘I have that effect on people.'

Castellarano

‘Signor Savelli?'

‘Mmm?'

Urs Savelli's driver had opened a wardrobe in one of Enzo Canavaro's three small rooms and was showing the captain the bundles of euro notes on the top shelf.

‘Leave them,' the Albanian said.

The young man nodded and switched on his metal detector.

Savelli watched him with quiet satisfaction. One of the few things he respected was people with real skills and Claudio possessed a quiver full of talents: he was an excellent driver, he was pleasant, polite and reserved in company, he was a first-class picklock and electronics expert, and he could perform miracles with a computer.

Claudio had been duly impressed at Enzo Canavaro's locks and alarms systems, but far from deterred.

He started moving the metal detector across the floor
boards methodically while Urs Savelli continued to sit on Enzo Canavaro's bed. He studied the photographic collage on the walls, Enzo Canavaro's, or Giulio Forlani's, past life. The twin brother, Bruno, his parents, his wife, his son. The wedding. The town.

The Albanian felt uneasy without his makila, which he had left in the stolen red and white Telecom Italia engineering van which was currently parked in Antonia Moretti's yard, out of sight from the road. And he felt ridiculous in the telecommunications company's white and red uniform.

It had proved surprisingly easy to identify the woman from the park who had shared blue grapes with Sabrina D'Avalos. And they had been phenomenally lucky: the woman had led them directly to the resurrected Giulio Forlani.

A freelance reporter had been the key to locating him. Don Francesco Terrasino's firm of solicitors in Rome had used her before. The firm's senior partner, Don Francesco's closest ally, told her a story about possible heirs to a minor fortune from an eccentric old woman who had just died in Rome. The family had been clients of the firm for generations. A distant great-grandchild possibly living in Castellarano in Reggio Emilia. Nothing sensational, signora, but still a respectable amount. They had a couple of photographs belonging to the deceased to go by. Could she help? Discreetly. Very discreetly? An unexpected
inheritance always brought out the worst in people, didn't she agree? It should be a straightforward job.

Early that morning Urs Savelli had received an e-mail from the woman, with a brief report attached. A few enquiries around Castellarano was all it had taken. Signora Antonia Moretti, aged forty-three, a widow, living in the old grocery shop opposite the La Stazione restaurant. She worked as a beautician – mostly for the undertaker Ugo Conti, and ran a small B&B with one permanent lodger, an invalid who called himself Enzo Canavaro. He had been living there for two years. Perhaps they were a couple, who knew? If they were, it would be a blessing for them, people said. They had both suffered misfortunes. The widow had a son, Gianni, age fifteen. A boy like all other teenage boys.

Later that morning Savelli and Claudio had parked the stolen telecommunications van under shady trees on a side road with a full view of the grocery shop. They had watched as the boy cycled to school and the tall woman laden with boxes and bags got into a dark blue BMW, which she drove in the direction of the convent school.

Her son's school and the convent were both being watched by other members of Savelli's small but carefully selected unit. The best of the Terrasino clan.

The metal detector buzzed when Claudio reached a small kilim rug in the next room. The young man moved the rug and knelt down.

Savelli rose and watched while Claudio removed a couple of shortened and skilfully camouflaged floorboards with a small crowbar. Where the boards had been was a hatch with a combination lock.

Claudio placed a revolving magnetic device on top of the combination lock, hooked it up to the shop's own power supply and a computer, entered a few commands into the computer and then began reading a book about safecracking. Opening the box would take time. The electronic code breaker could spin through combinations with 10,000 permutations a minute. Even so, in theory it could take up to eleven hours before the correct combination of four digits were identified and the box opened.

Savelli went downstairs and into Antonia Moretti's clean but plain bedroom. He opened her wardrobe and noted that the widow's basic wardrobe consisted of two pairs of jeans, a couple of dresses, and a number of cheap T-shirts and shirts. The television was an old black-and-white apparatus. Above the widow's bed there was a photograph of the sublime Ferrari Testarossa in the garage. A dark-haired boy was behind the wheel. Moretti, smiling and beautiful, was sitting next to the boy and on the rear wing sat an unrecognizable, bearded, dark-haired giant. One massive hand rested on the boy's shoulder, the other on the widow's. The man looked straight into the camera with an anxious smile and narrowed, dark eyes.

Evidence of real devotion there, he noted.

He turned around at the sound of Claudio's footsteps.

‘All done?' he asked.

‘The safe is open, signore.'

‘That was quick.'

‘We were lucky, signore.'

Anyone working with Claudio should regard themselves as lucky, Savelli thought.

The recessed fireproof box was empty apart from a stack of identical grey envelopes. Urs Savelli sat down on the bed with a pile of them on his lap and opened the first one.

It would appear that someone wanted Enzo Canavaro, also known as Giulio Forlani, to be provided for. Well provided for. The contents of the envelopes explained the banknotes in the wardrobe – and the Ferrari in the garage. Since 1 August 2008 an unknown benefactor had transferred €30,000 every month to Credit Suisse in Rome. The contents of the envelopes were always the same: a bank statement. Apart from the Ferrari, this new version of Giulio Forlani would appear to be remarkably frugal, and the car had presumably been a wreck when he bought it.

He estimated that Forlani's wardrobe contained about €50,000 and was in no doubt that the cash was a runaway fund in case the Camorra were about to close in on him.

He passed a bank statement to Claudio who entered the details into his laptop.

‘Let's go,' the Albanian said.

The young man nodded, put the envelopes back in the box, closed the lid and set the combination lock to the default position. Using an ultraviolet lamp and specialist goggles, he checked that Giulio Forlani hadn't used saliva to stick a hair or some other tell-tale sign on the fold of the lid, replaced the floorboards and put back the rug.

Urs Savelli himself drove the Audi to Naples while Claudio sat in the back, hunched over his computer, muttering when something failed to go the way he had hoped, but never giving in – there were no problems as far as Claudio was concerned, only challenges of varying degrees of difficulty.

They were outside Barberino di Mugello on the E35 when the young man cleared his throat.

‘Signore?'

‘Yes.'

‘The Credit Suisse benefactor. I have a name.'

Savelli looked at the young man in the rear-view mirror.

‘The benefactor,' Claudio repeated patiently. ‘It's Emporia Massimiliano Di Luca s.a., Milano–Rome–London …'

‘Are you sure?'

The question baffled Claudio, and Savelli elaborated: ‘Have you hacked into Credit Suisse, Claudio?' He looked at his watch. ‘In one and a half hours? That's … that's …'

The young man laughed.

‘No one can hack into a Swiss bank, signore. Certainly no one I've heard of. An American bank might be possible. There was this Russian, Levin, who stole ten million dollars from Citibank, but he had someone on the inside. But a Swiss one, no. The Americans or the Israelis might be able to, I don't know. Possibly. But it would require enormous resources.' Claudio looked dreamily at the flat landscape outside. ‘Possibly the brains who put the STUXNET worm inside the Iranian uranium enrichment plant could …'

Savelli wondered how much longer he could expect to keep Claudio. Sooner or later he would be headhunted by some intelligence agency. It was bound to happen.

‘So what did you do?' Savelli interrupted him. ‘And pretend you're explaining this to your mother.'

‘I can't, signore,' Claudio said apologetically. ‘It's very difficult to explain. It either happens or it doesn't. But if you know that someone has an account with a specific bank, you might be lucky enough to find a ghost trail on a server that person has used from their personal computer when logging on to the bank. If they don't, you're out of luck. I simply found a temporary Internet file on a server that collects data transfers from Castellarano. The file contained Signor Canavaro's passwords and access codes.'

‘Excellent.'

‘Thank you, signore.'

Savelli shook his head in despair.

‘Max, Max, Massimiliano Di Luca …' he muttered.

Cold shivers ran up Savelli's spine and he shuddered. He looked out across the landscape along the autostrada. Far away on the other side of this deserted no-man's-land of market gardens, petrol stations, workshops, supermarkets, car parks, abandoned farms, fallow fields and forgotten, half-dreamt and half-finished building sites, cumulous clouds were stacking up. They were white where they met the blue, vaulted sky, and grey and dark blue where they touched the horizon.

He was in a dangerous mood and he knew it. The most dangerous of all. A state where something deep inside him had decided that he wanted to – ought to – fail.

Behind him Claudio was still absorbed by the computer. Claudio undoubtedly had grandiose dreams of being hired by Shin Bet or the NSA. To have the chance to use all his skills. And who could blame him, Urs Savelli thought: ultimately was there anything more fulfilling for a human being than to discover their true vocation?

Ticino, Milan

‘You can open your eyes now,' Giulio Forlani said.

‘Pardon?'

‘We've arrived,' he said.

‘What?'

He pulled the motorbike on its prop stand and turned off the engine.

Carefully and for the first time in an hour Sabrina opened her eyes and looked around. Forlani had been a gentleman and offered her his crash helmet while he himself made do with only sunglasses during the entire, terrible ride.

The helmet was far too big and kept slipping over her eyes.

At one point she had been foolish enough to push it up, lean forwards and look at the instrument panel in front of Giulio. The speedometer showed 230 km/h; at this speed the six-lane Milan–Brescia autostrada was the width of a
rail track and the other traffic looked stationary. It had been like sitting on a motorbike falling from an aeroplane.

Fearing the worst, she looked down between her legs. She would be mortified if she had wet herself. She was numb from the waist down from the cold.

‘If you want to dismount, you'll have to let go of that strap,' Forlani said.

‘What? Yes, sorry.'

She had to prise her frozen fingers from the passenger seat strap.

He helped her unbuckle the helmet and supported her when she reached the ground.

‘Thank you.'

Again Forlani did the same big, wide and involuntary flapping with his arms as he had at the top of the basilica. She ducked to avoid a gloved fist that would otherwise have sent her flying across the yard. Forlani was standing with his back to her, looking at the house.

She had no recollection of agreeing to this insane ride. They had walked down the endless steps inside the basilica's bell tower. Her hangover had returned with full, murderous vengeance and her brain had almost turned to mush when they reached the bottom and looked out across the nearly deserted and drowsy Piazza Vecchia.