Gerald Seymour - The Collaborator

Time drifted – and he created word games, arithmetic games that were more complicated, taxing, and the dust of the smoothed concrete was thicker in his nostrils, caking the outer skin of his lips. He had to do it for himself. No other bastard would.

‘How will he be?’

‘Scared,’ Lukas said. ‘Scared and alone, feeling that the world, already, has given up on him. Probably in darkness, probably trussed up, likely to be hooded.’

Castrolami drove. ‘We have kidnapping in the south, in the toecap of the boot. It is an industry, and when payment is slow there is the possibility of a knife taking off an ear or a finger and the item consigned to the postal services. But not here. I do not have the experience of it.’

Lukas thought Castrolami drove well. They went fast, had come off the autostrada and were now on a dual-carriage way. Ahead, there was a wide panoramic vista of lights, different intensity but constant, then a short, curved horizon and beyond it almost total darkness. But the Gulf of Naples was broken up by oases of lights and Lukas thought one would be the island of Capri, but didn’t know which. He could keep most layers of excitement well suppressed, but always a faint buzz-glow grew in him when he saw, the first time, his place of operations. Might have been from the hatch window of a Cessna light aircraft coming in to a jungle strip up in the mountains and far from Bogota, or from the porthole of a C-130 as it corkscrewed down towards the Bagram runway outside Kabul, or from a Black Hawk’s open hatch and over the shoulder of the machine-gunner anywhere in Shia or Sunni Iraq. If he didn’t have the buzz-glow, if he’d gotten too cynical for it, it would probably be past time for him to call it a day, go quit. It was all, sort of, routine and he had played this game so many times, and he didn’t expect to be surprised. He still had, and was grateful, the focus. They hadn’t talked much on the journey. Lukas reckoned that Castrolami was poor with chatter: they had done a little – Castrolami had a wife and children up in Milan, and they’d gone there because the job was shit and they never saw him; and he had a friend who painted, and most times he took her out he was asleep at the table by the time the meat was served; and he was forty-six, and bullets had come through the post in little padded bags… Lukas had given some: had done the FBI’s unit for Hostage Rescue, had been on the sidelines at the ‘big’ events, Ruby Ridge and Waco, did coordination now, and was a year older at forty-seven. His mother had brought him up in a trailer camp and had cleaned offices to get him through college; she was American-Italian and his father was pretty much a shit and long gone. There was a wife, Martha, and a boy, Dougie – had only mentioned his son’s name, but Lukas had said nothing else of him. They all lived together now, mother and wife and son, in the trailer park, adjacent to each other, and the cut-off didn’t seem to bother him… They had talked a bit about things that didn’t matter and didn’t affect why they rode in a car down a hill and into the city of Naples… Seemed they’d each talked enough about themselves.

Lukas said, ‘Very few hostages taken have an expectation of the risk. They come to the situation with an experience bank equal to that of a newborn child.’

‘We talk the language of “leverage”?’

‘That would be an appropriate word. “Leverage” is where we’re at.’

‘And negotiation is not an appropriate word?’

‘When we have an open line of communication, we talk a fair amount about negotiation. But it’s talk. I accept that. Talk buys time… The time is used for assets of intelligence, surveillance, informers, for just plain old-fashioned luck to chip in – I don’t come from a world where hostage-takers get rewarded. Maybe, up front, I’ve been party to them being paid for a freedom exchange, but then they get hunted down, shot or hanged, or they disappear off the face of the earth. I understand the reality.’

‘In this case, Immacolata Borelli, if we paid we would destroy an anti-kidnap strategy applicable in domestic Italy for more than thirty years.’

‘I said I understood,’ Lukas murmured.

‘And if we permitted Immacolata Borelli to withdraw her evidence in return for the boy keeping his ears, fingers, eyes – whatever else of his body that can be cut off – the programme we have of collaborators with justice is finished. The postal service would be filled with the stink of decaying flesh.’

‘Again, I understand.’

Castrolami said, ‘Close to the autostrada, where we left it, was the territory of the Nuvoletta clan. We have bypassed the zone of Scampia, which is the base of di Lauro. Now we cross the suburb of the city called Secondigliano and it is under the control of the Licciardi clan and the Contini clan. As we drive towards the old city we pass the territory of Mallardo, Misso and Mazzarella. They are the principal families of the Camorra. Then there is another level – Lo Russo, Sarno, de Luca, Caldarelli, Picirillo – and the clan of Borelli, then another level of perhaps as many as eighty clans. The first level we cannot destroy. We can make arrests – occasionally, when we find a principal – and we can disrupt, but little more. The second level is where we find the Borelli clan. With a collaborator it is possible – I used it with care, but possible – to take the conspiracy apart to the extent that it ceases to exist. The opportunity does not come every week or month, it might come once in a year, but I would believe that is optimistic. Every two years or three…’

Lukas asked, ‘She has that capability, Immacolata Borelli?’

‘We believe so. We remove a clan’s leadership. It is a ship that has no crew. More important it has no rudder. It sinks. Warfare breaks out as the void is filled, but many opportunities then come our way. In the scramble for the empty territory, other clans – ruthless in what they will do, the risks they will take, the numbers they will kill – make mistakes. Mistakes are fertile ground for us.’

‘She has that importance?’ A gently posed question. The tower blocks of great housing estates, lights climbing into the darkened skies, were gone. The streets were filled now with cars and they had slowed. Off the route, Lukas could see narrow little openings. Noise – engines, horns, music, shouting – came through the windows.

‘Immacolata Borelli can deliver us the clan – her mother, her brothers, the hitman and the enforcers, the buyers and the bankers. It is a chance for us to win. Do you know what it is, Lukas, not to win?’

‘Keep it for another day – winning and losing,’ Lukas said.

‘Some days, in life, it is necessary to win.’

‘Another day we talk about winning – and we decide if we can win twice… with the girl, with the boy.’

‘I don’t bargain with you – it is not for discussion. We have to win with the evidence of Immacolata Borelli. It is primary. If, afterwards, we save the boy – Eddie Deacon, the idiot and the imbecile, now forgotten – then we may drink some spumante. It is made at vineyards near the town of Asti, in the region of Piedmont. They use the moscato bianco grape. It is very popular in Italy. It is drunk on a celebratory occasion. I like…’

Lukas said, drily, ‘I think you don’t often get to taste spumante, my friend.’

‘It is my regret that, true, I drink it rarely.’

Lukas gave him the winter smile – no love, no life, no humour. The car was stopped against the kerb. Lukas was given directions – how far he needed to walk, how long it would take him, and was told to watch his back and put his watch in his pocket, out of sight. Castrolami told him he was going to his office, his workplace in the barracks, and would set up, discreetly, a crisis-control desk. He took from his wallet a card that bore just his name on one side, no logo, wrote his mobile number on it and gave it to Castrolami. Then he reached to the back seat and pulled the laptop out of his rucksack – needed a contortion but he achieved it – and asked that the computer be lodged at the desk overnight. They shook hands perfunctorily, like an afterthought.