Michael Dibdin - End games

The official coughed lightly.

‘Very good, sir.’

He sounded doubtful.

‘Is there a manning problem?’ Zen demanded. ‘Pull everyone off other jobs, cancel all — ’

‘It’s not that.’

‘Then what the hell is it?’

‘Well, sir, I don’t want to be critical or anything, only I know you’re new to the area and I have to say that operations like this haven’t proven very productive in the past. In fact, you might almost say that they’ve been counter-productive. People around here, the more you squeeze them, the harder they get.’

‘Admirable attempt to save your colleagues from hours of irksome overtime,’ Zen commented. ‘Admirable, but doomed. I don’t remotely expect any of the inhabitants of the place to talk. That isn’t the object of the exercise. Execute the orders you have been given.’

Martin Nguyen held that one of the ways you distinguished winners from losers was by how many times they had to change planes to get to their destination. He had therefore been appalled to discover that to reach the godforsaken hole in the ground down which Rapture Works was pouring its millions, he needed to transfer not just in Los Angeles but also in Rome. On the up side, the transatlantic flight lasted almost ten hours and the time difference was in Martin’s favour. He worked the twenty-dollar-a-minute credit-card phone in the armrest of his first-class seat to good effect, arranging to hire a European mobile — when was the rest of the world going to get over its hissy fit and switch to the US standard? — as well as a limo and driver, all to be delivered to him on arrival at Fiumicino airport.

The driver spoke extremely limited English, but he was there on time and proved to possess the skills, nerve and coolness of a Formula One professional. A little jaded after the long flight, Martin sat back in the rear of the Mercedes S-Class saloon and admired the Italian’s amazing ability to overtake and undertake, using the hard shoulder or a notional third lane which he conjured into being for precisely the duration of opportunity required, as well as the shamelessly thuggish tactics he employed on slower vehicles, which in effect meant everything else on the road, accelerating towards them at well over a hundred m.p. h., braking at the very last moment to fetch up less than a metre from the victim’s rear bumper and then repeatedly flashing his halogen high beams and sounding a series of aggressive and discordant horn blasts. The long section of single-lane working resulting from the reconstruction of the Salerno- Reggio autostrada proved almost excessively interesting, with plastic cones flying in all directions and at least one moment when Martin knew without a shadow of doubt that he was going to die.

In the end, they covered the five hundred kilometres from Rome to Cosenza in just under three hours, including a pit stop south of Naples. With the layover for the connection, flying would have taken four. Once the initial thrills of this crash course in extreme driving had worn off, Martin got busy with his rental phone. Okay, so this place was abroad. He knew what you did with broads. Someone fucks and someone gets fucked was the rule everywhere. Martin was sporting his Bluetooth, he was eager and armed. First up was the US consulate. They were as helpful as they had been during his earlier contacts with them, but apparently had nothing new to report on the Newman case.

‘The officer in charge is called Aurelio Zen,’ the consular official informed Martin. ‘Let me spell that. Well, yeah, “aw-reelly-oh” is how it might look to you, but “ow-raily-oh” is how they pronounce it here. Anyway, I suggest that you get in contact with him tomorrow, if only for form’s sake. It would just make everything go more smoothly. Do you have an interpreter? I can fix one up for you if you want.’

‘An American?’

The official hesitated.

‘I do know someone, but she’s vacationing right now. But I have a whole list of Italians who speak English better than most Americans. Hey, only kidding! They’re students, so they’d be glad to make some money.’

I’ll bet, thought Martin. Students could be bought cheap, but there was no knowing who else might offer them a cut above the agreed rate to pass on details of the conversations they had been party to. You could trust Italians to drive cars, but much of what Martin would need to discuss came under the heading of highly sensitive and strictly confidential information. If any word of what Rapture Works was really up to in Calabria leaked out, the whole project would be blown sky high in no time, and Martin’s job with it.

‘Thanks, I’ll think it over.’

‘The other thing is Newman’s son, Thomas. You’ll probably want to meet with him too. He’s at a hotel in the centre. Let me give you the number.’

Martin dialled it next. The desk clerk put him through to the room, where the phone rang and rang. Martin was about to hang up when a bleary voice answered.

‘ Pronto.’

Martin wondered what the hell the Lone Ranger had to do with it.

‘Give me Tom Newman,’ he stated crisply.

‘That’s me.’

‘Oh, hi, Tom. My name is Martin. I’m a business associate of your father. All of us at the company are just shocked at what’s happened, so I’ve been sent out from the States to see if we might be able to provide any help on the ground. I’ll be arriving in Cosenza momentarily. I don’t know how you’re fixed for this evening, but I’d sure appreciate it if we could touch base at some point.’

Martin manufactured an embarrassed chuckle.

‘I’m kind of like the new kid on the block here, so it would be real helpful to have someone who can bring me up to speed on the background and the current state of play. If you’re free, that is.’

‘Free as the wind,’ the voice replied tonelessly.

‘Well, how about dinner? I’m staying at a different hotel, but what say I swing by your place about six? Do you know somewhere that does good food?’

‘Sure, but they don’t really get going till eight.’

‘They don’t?’

‘Nowhere does.’

‘That late? Wow, this is seriously foreign. Still, when in Rome, I guess! Okay, how does a quarter of eight sound? Good speaking with you, Tom.’

Martin’s next call, to Phil Larson, was pitched in a rather different register.

‘Nguyen. I’ll be there in a couple of hours. Anything new?’

‘Not yet.’

‘Any fresh ideas about narrowing the search area?’

‘Not till someone firms up the variables in the equation for me, Mr Nguyen.’

‘I’ve got a team doing that right now. They’ll email me their conclusions by midnight tonight local time. When do you start work?’

‘We get to the site at five-thirty and airborne around six.’

‘Be there no later than five tomorrow. I need to brief you.’

The next call was the one that Martin had been dreading, but it had to be made. After ploughing through a security cordon of call-catchers, he finally got Luciano Aldobrandini on the line. At least the great director spoke excellent English.

‘Good of you to take my call, maestro,’ Martin gushed.

‘I’d told Pippo that I was at home to nobody, but money doesn’t speak, it shouts, as your famous cantautore put it. What can I do for you, Signor Nguyen?’

Martin gave out the warm guffaw of a door-to-door salesman working up to his pitch.

‘Well, maestro, I just flew into Rome so I thought I’d give you a call.’

‘You are in Rome now?’

Aldobrandini’s tone was not welcoming.

‘No, no, I’m on my way to Cosenza. As you know, our representative there has gone missing and I’ve been sent over to sort out the loose ends and get everything back on track. So I was kind of wondering if we might get together at some stage and hash out any outstanding issues.’