Michael Dibdin - End games

After a brief glance inside, Benedetto took up position outside the bar, in the informal car park that the original piazzetta, a mere widening of the main road, had become. The bar was empty except for Mantega and three elderly men who looked as if they had been there since it opened. When Benedetto next looked — turning casually in the manner of a shiftless youth intent on his phone conversation — the target had emerged from the cafe and was now weaving his way rapidly through the ranks of parked cars, across the highway and into the station yard just as a diesel railcar emerged from the right and slowed to a halt. This was awkward. By the rule book, one of the others should have taken over at this point, but there was no time for that. Benedetto sprinted after him, narrowly avoiding an oncoming truck on the highway, and reached the platform just as the doors of the railcar were closing. He levered the rear one open and climbed aboard.

There were about a dozen other passengers. Benedetto slid on to a seat at the rear. Fortunately, Nicola Mantega had chosen to sit facing forward and gave no sign of having noticed Benedetto’s presence. When the guard came round, both men bought tickets. In Mantega’s case, this involved quite a lengthy discussion, but the roar of the engine as they climbed the steep gradient out of the valley made it impossible for Benedetto to hear what was said. He himself bought a single ticket all the way, then went to the lavatory and made a number of phone calls.

The back-up team at the Questura did their best, but it was an impossible task. There were twenty-six scheduled stops on the three and a half hour trip across the rugged interior of Calabria, twelve of which lay in the neighbouring province of Catanzaro and hence would require the co-operation of the authorities in that city, which was unlikely to be rapidly forthcoming at a time when most of their senior personnel would either be on the way home for lunch or at a restaurant. The metre-gauge railcar trundled along at no more than forty kilometres an hour, but on the winding, unimproved roads of that area even the MotoGuzzi would be hard pressed to maintain a better average speed. All Benedetto’s instincts told him that Nicola Mantega was headed for a covert meeting with the kidnappers, the vital link in the chain of evidence that would bring the dormant investigation to life, and eventually to court. But there would be further feints, dodges and cut-outs at the other end, and he himself, alone and on foot, could do nothing.

In the end, it wouldn’t have mattered anyway. In addition to the scheduled stations, the train also passed a number of fermate facoltative, unmanned halts where it could be stopped by request to the guard. It was at one of these, located at the head of a remote valley which the line looped languidly around, that Nicola Mantega descended. There was an abandoned station, its windows and doorways bricked up, and a disused siding and goods shed. Behind this, a heavily overgrown dirt track rose up the bare hillside, presumably leading to the village that had given the station its name, but there was no sign of it or of any other human presence in the scrubby landscape. The railcar revved up its engine in a cloud of diesel fumes and then sidled off. Benedetto headed for the solitude of the lavatory and switched on his mobile and radio, but he couldn’t get a signal on the phone, the radio was out of range and anyway it was too late.

Nicola Mantega stood motionless until the railcar was out of sight, then started to walk slowly up the dirt track. After about a minute, a distant sound attracted his attention. A black Jeep was making its way down the hillside towards him, disdaining the levelled track. When it was about five metres away it swung around to face uphill and an electric window peeled down.

‘ Salve,’ said Giorgio.

The rotor blades were whirling slowly to a halt as the three men stepped down from the Bell 412. To the west, just above the line of mountains that cradled the city, the sun was also powering down for the night, but on the ground the temperature was still over a hundred. Flanked by the pilot and technician, Phil Larson headed towards the metal box that Aeroscan had hired as a temporary office facility. It stood on the cracked concrete paving that also served as a landing pad, right alongside a skeletal concrete structure that had obviously been abandoned for years. It looked as though someone had set out to build a factory or a supermarket and then changed his mind or run out of money half-way through.

None of the men talked. They were all stupid from the heat, filthy from the dust kicked up by the backdraught, jittery from the continual noise and vibration of the helicopter and looking forward to stripping off their work clothes and getting back to the hotel as soon as possible. So Phil wasn’t real happy when his phone started to ring. Even worse, the screen displayed Anonimo in place of the caller’s name. He had learnt that this meant an out-of-area call, almost certainly international and probably from head office. The damnedest thing about operating in Europe was the time difference. Just as you crawled out of the galley after a hard day at the oars, the eager beavers back in the States were arriving at the office all caffeined up and keen to show their mettle.

‘Phil Larson.’

‘Phil? It’s Martin Nguyen.’

‘Hi, Mr Nguyen.’

‘Phil? Phil? Are you there?’

‘Sure I’m here.’

‘I can’t hear you, Phil! Can you hear me?’

‘I can hear you fine, Mr Nguyen. Maybe there’s a problem with the connection.’

‘Phil? There must be a problem with the connection. I’ll call you right back.’

Oh no you won’t, thought Phil, speed-dialling another number.

‘Hi, Phil.’

‘Hi, Jason,’ replied Phil, pushing open the door. Jason looked up at him in surprise and made to clam his cell.

‘Leave it on!’ Phil told him. ‘I need to block an incoming while I unwind.’

After a quick rinse in what they called the sewer shower, Phil emerged wearing his street clothes. The others were all set to go. Phil told them that he’d be along later, retired to his office and scrolled down on the mobile till he hit ‘Rapture Works’.

‘Martin.’

‘This is Phil, Mr Nguyen.’

‘Finally! I’ve been trying to get you for almost half an hour. Where the fuck were you?’

Phil was not a serious student of human nature — too many variables — but Martin Nguyen had always struck him as being the nearest thing to the electrical circuitry that he loved and understood. Now he sounded like some goddamn chick. What was up?

‘I had to take another call, Mr Nguyen. Our aviation fuel distributor didn’t deliver on schedule and we’ve only got fifteen hours’ supply left. Anyway, I’ve sorted it all out. The gasoline’s going to arrive tomorrow, trucked in from…’

‘I don’t want to hear your goddamn life story, Larson. Report progress.’

‘Well, we’ve been working twelve-hour shifts and getting through around a hundred kilometres each day.’

‘But you haven’t found anything.’

‘You’d have heard if we had.’

‘So how long is this going to take?’

‘No way to tell, Mr Nguyen. We might find it first thing tomorrow, or it might be at the far end of our last beat.’

‘How can we speed up the search?’

‘We can’t. The ultrasound waves require a given amount of time to penetrate down into the ground and reflect back up to the receiver. The duration of each wave bounce represents a physical constant. If the forward motion of the monitoring vehicle exceeds the envelope created by that constant, the information returned is worthless.’

Martin Nguyen’s hiss echoed down the line.

‘Then we need to grow our resources. Hire another helicopter.’