Jeffery Deaver - The Burial Hour

His initial response was a gasp of horror. But then he was nodding. ‘Yes, yes, she has not been herself. She has not been acting in a normal manner. Someone forced her to do this!’

‘Yes, probably.’ Sachs crouched across from him and said in a firm tone, ‘Still she’s going to hurt people, Khaled. Help us. We need to find her. Is she in the camp?’

‘No. She left an hour ago. She was going to be buying some things for Muna. At the shop here in the camp or maybe at one of the vendors outside. I don’t know if she said more. She might have. After my incident, after what happened to me, my mind is very, you would say, uncertain. Confused.’

‘Does she have her phone?’

‘I suppose she does.’

‘Give me the number.’

He did and Charlotte McKenzie, listening over speaker, said, ‘Got it. I’ll send it to Fort Meade, see if they can track it.’

Sachs asked the refugee, ‘Do you remember if she’d met with anyone recently? Did anyone give her anything?’

He frowned. ‘Perhaps... Let me think.’ He actually tapped his forehead. ‘Yes. She got a package. It was tea from her family.’

Rania’s stern but pretty face tightened in a grimace. ‘Yes, I remember.’

He pointed to a locker. ‘I think she put it in there.’

Ercole opened the lid and handed Sachs a brown cardboard carton.

Sachs held the box to her nose.

A sigh.

‘This too,’ Ercole said. He’d found plastic wrapping for a cheap mobile phone, but not the label that gave the phone’s number or details of the sim card; Fatima had taken that with her.

Pulling on her headset, Sachs speed-dialed a number.

‘What?’ came the abrupt response. ‘We’ve been waiting.’

‘She’s not here, Rhyme. And she got a delivery: C4, maybe Semtex. Like the others, looks like a half kilo. And another phone. For the detonator.’

Mobile phones had supplanted timers and radios as the most popular way to set off explosive devices.

‘A bomb? Are we the target here?’ Rania asked Sachs in a grim voice.

Those in the Questura had heard and, after a brief discussion, Rhyme answered, ‘No, very unlikely. The whole point of the plot is to sabotage the immigration legislation in Parliament. That means Italian citizens have to be hurt, not refugees.’

Khaled found his own mobile and asked, ‘Should I call her? Try to talk her out of this madness?’

Rhyme and Spiro, she could hear, were debating this.

But McKenzie came on the line. ‘Never mind. Meade says it’s dead. They’ll keep monitoring but I’ll bet she tossed it.’ Then the woman said, ‘Wait. They’ve got something.’ There was a pause and Sachs could hear computer keyboard clatter. ‘This could be good. The NSA bot just logged a call to the coffeehouse in Tripoli from a burner mobile in Naples that was just activated this morning. It’s still live.’

‘Gianni?’ Sachs asked.

Rossi said, ‘If we are lucky. Where is it?’

McKenzie called out longitude and latitude, and a moment later, after some keyboarding, the police inspector said, ‘At the Royal Palace. Downtown Naples. I’m sending a team there now.’

Luigi Procopio, for this job known also as ‘Gianni,’ was presently leaning against his car parked on the edge of the plaza in front of the Royal Palace of Naples, the massive and impressive structure that had once been home to the Bourbon kings, when they were rulers of the Two Kingdoms of Sicily, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Procopio loved his Italian history.

Procopio came from the Catanzaro district of Calabria, a region south of Campania.

Calabria is the very tip of the boot of Italy. This region is known for its fiery pork paste, stoccafisso dried cod and many types of preserved foods, owing to the hot climate, which traditionally meant that meats and seafood should be cured to avoid spoiling.

Calabria is known too for the ’Ndràngheta, the famed organized crime outfit. The name ‘’Ndràngheta’ means ‘loyalty,’ and it was a well-known fact that the six thousand members of the organization were true to their comrades, who made up the 150 or so small cells within Italy. But that didn’t mean that members might not strike out on their own — they could, and did, as long as no conflicts of interest existed.

This was especially the case when the member was affiliated not with a crew in Calabria itself but with one of the satellite operations, such as those in the UK or the United States. The ’Ndràngheta had, in fact, been active in East Coast criminal activity for more than a hundred years. A gang in Pennsylvania mining country had extortion and protection rackets in the early 1900s, and the organization had been involved for years in US drug and money-laundering operations, often working with transplanted members of the Mafia and Camorra, as well as local Anglo and Caribbean gangs. (Senior ’Ndràngheta officials in America were reportedly angered by The Godfather , as they felt the Mafia was far less glamorous and clever and ruthless than they were.)

Big, dark, hairy and intimidating, Luigi Procopio was one such freelance operator. His good language skills, military and trade union contacts, and willingness to do whatever he needed to had let him carve out a specialty as a middleman, putting together deals among interests in southern Italy, North Africa, Europe and the United States.

His instinct let him walk the delicate high-wire between self-interest and the ’Ndràngheta’s, and he’d become successful.

Anywhere there was money to be made, Procopio had a presence: the old standbys, of course, arms, drugs and human trafficking, as well as newer twenty-first-century markets.

Say, terrorism, for instance.

He had just called Ibrahim at the Happy Day coffeehouse in Tripoli to update him on the developments here in Naples, and was now smoking and looking over the massive square.

Glancing up the street he happened to see black vans and marked police cars speeding his way. Lights were flashing but the vehicles’ sirens were silent.

Close, closer...

Then the entourage zipped past him, not a single driver or passenger looking his way.

Instead, the law enforcers sped across the square and skidded to a stop in a semicircle around a trash container. They jumped out, highly armed men and women, and scanned about them for their target.

Which was, of course, him.

Or, to be more accurate, the mobile phone on which he’d just called Ibrahim. Procopio had left the phone live in a paper bag at the foot of the trash bin. A young Police of State officer carefully examined the container — a bomb was a possibility under the circumstances — and then found the phone. He held it up. One officer, apparently the commander, shook his head, undoubtedly in disappointment, if not disgust. Other officers looked at nearby buildings, surely for CCTV cameras. But there were none. Procopio had made sure of that before leaving the bait phone.

He now stubbed out his cigarette. He had learned all he needed to. This, in fact, was the entire point of the call to Tripoli. He needed to see just how far along the police had come in their investigation.

So. They knew about Ibrahim’s existence, if not his name, and that there was an operative here. And they were scanning the landline and mobiles.

It would be total phone silence for the time being.

He settled into the car’s comfortable seat and started the engine. He wanted to find a café and enjoy another cigarette, along with an aperitivo of a nice Cirò red wine, and some hard, dried Calabrian salami and bread.

But that would have to wait.

Until after the bloodshed.

The street was colorful.