Jeffery Deaver - The Burial Hour

Fatima — Sachs could see her face clearly now as she looked back nervously — was wheeling toward this archway. The dull-toned blond wig clashed with her olive skin. The backpack was over her shoulder still. It wouldn’t contain the bomb any longer. No, she would have planted it in a more populated part of the island.

Sachs drew her weapon but kept it hidden under her arm and jogged forward. She was thirty feet away when, eyes wide, the woman saw her and froze.

Speaking softly, Sachs said slowly and in a low, clear voice, ‘You have been tricked, Fatima! Ibrahim is not who you think. He is using you. He’s lied to you.’

Fatima frowned, shook her head. ‘No. No trick!’ Her eyes were wide — and damp with tears.

Sachs walked a few feet closer. Fatima moved back, turning the carriage and keeping it between her and Sachs.

‘I don’t want to hurt you. You’ll be safe. Just put your hands up. Let me come talk to you. You don’t want to do this. You’ll be hurting people without any reason. Please!’

Fatima stiffened.

Sachs said, ‘I saved your husband. I saved his life. Remember?’

Then Fatima lowered her head. A moment later she looked up with a smile. ‘Yes. Yes, miss. Yes. Thank you for that. Shukran! ’ The smile twisted into a look of profound sorrow and Sachs saw tears. Then Fatima shoved the baby carriage toward the water. There was no barrier, or even a low lip, on the pier and it tumbled, as if in slow motion, twenty feet into the water.

Sachs caught a glimpse of blankets and black hair rising inside as it landed with a loud splash. The carriage settled and sank fast.

Sachs, however, didn’t do what Fatima hoped. She ignored the buggy and went into a combat shooting stance as the woman dug for her phone to call the mobile wired to the detonator.

‘No, Fatima, no!’

Above them, screams pealed from the top of the castle, fifty feet above her, where tourists had seen the carriage go into the water.

Fatima yanked the phone free. It was a flip phone. She opened it, looking down at the keypad, reaching a finger out.

Amelia Sachs inhaled, held her breath and squeezed the trigger. Three times.

‘ Non siamo riusciti a trovare nulla ,’ the scuba diver said.

Ercole Benelli translated. The man was sorry but he and his colleagues in the Italian navy had found nothing in the water below the looming castle.

‘Keep searching,’ Lincoln Rhyme said. He, Ercole, Sachs, Spiro and Rossi were near the spot where Fatima had shoved the carriage into the water, in the shadow of the blunt, ruddy castle. Curiously much of the entrance route to the edifice, centuries old, was disabled-accessible.

The diver nodded and walked backward along the pier — he wore flippers — then turned and, stiff-legged, strode into the water. Rhyme glanced at the half-dozen eruptions of bubbles on the surface of Naples Bay from the aquatic search party below.

A wail sounded to their left, a woman’s keen of despair. The sixtyish-year-old matron pointed at Sachs and fired off a vicious fusillade of words.

Ercole started to translate but Rhyme interrupted. ‘She’s upset that my Sachs here was so devoted to stopping a terror attack that she ignored a drowning baby. Am I in the ballpark?’

‘Ballpark?’ A questioning frown.

‘Am. I. Correct?’

‘You are close, Captain Rhyme. But she didn’t raise any question of devotion to stopping the villain. In essence she accuses your partner of being a child killer.’

Rhyme chuckled. ‘Tell her what really happened. If it’ll shut her up.’

Ercole gave the woman the story — a very abbreviated version of the full tale, which was that it wasn’t a baby in the carriage but a doll.

Sachs had known all along that Fatima’s and Khaled’s little girl, Muna, was not in the carriage. When she’d been to the Capodichino Reception Center earlier that day, after Fatima had vanished, Sachs had seen Muna in the care of a neighbor, in the vacant lot beside their tent. And among the boxes inside their tent was an empty carton that had once held — from the picture on the side — a dark-haired doll, the size of a large baby. Sachs had caught a glimpse of the toy in the carriage.

A clever diversion. Rhyme had to give Fatima credit.

He glared at the agitated tourist until she fell silent, turned and left.

Prosecutor Spiro approached. ‘Have they found the phone yet?’

‘No,’ Rossi told him. ‘Five divers in the bay. But nothing.’

This was the object of the navy divers’ search. They hoped to recover the sim card from Fatima’s new phone and track Gianni’s or other numbers that might lead to him, to Ibrahim, or to whoever within the Italian anti-immigrant movement had hired them to derail the pro-immigrant legislative proposal in Rome.

But the currents in the bay were not, it seemed, cooperating.

The Carabinieri’s bomb team, directed by Fatima Jabril, had found and removed the explosive device, which had been placed deep in a stone recess of the castle, not far from the fashion show reception. It was a bad placement, from a terrorist’s point of view. The solid walls would have protected almost everyone from the blast. Dogs had searched and found no other explosives and a team had cleared Fatima’s backpack, too, which contained no weapons, but only medical supplies — bandages and antiseptics and the like. An ID badge from the refugee camp indicated that Fatima was a nurse/aide.

The woman herself was nearby — in the castle, being treated by a medical team. The injuries were minor — two broken carpals, finger bones, and one hell of a bruise. But the 9mm slugs, which had destroyed the phone, had not broken any skin.

Sachs had not shot to kill.

After the phone had been so dramatically removed from her hand, Fatima had grown hysterical. She said that — because she’d failed — Ibrahim would now kill her family in Libya.

But Sachs explained that that was unlikely, given that the plot was not what it seemed. Ibrahim and Gianni weren’t terrorists; they were mercenaries being paid to stage phony attacks. Still, to reassure Fatima — and snag her cooperation — Spiro told her that Italian agents in Libya would keep an eye on her family.

She readily agreed and gave a statement about everything she knew about him: It wasn’t much, true, but she confirmed he was a tanned, unsmiling man who smoked foul-smelling cigarettes, was clean-shaven and had thick curly hair, an athletic build. She described him as a man who traveled much, whose hours were not his own. When they spoke he was often out of town and usually on the road.

Rossi’s phone hummed and he answered. ‘ Sì, pronto? ’

Rhyme couldn’t deduce from the conversation whether the inspector was receiving good news or bad. At one point he lifted a pen from his breast pocket, pulled the cap off with his teeth and jotted something in a notebook.

After he disconnected he turned to the others and said, ‘Beatrice. She found one print on the detonator phone. It came back positive. An Albanian — in the country legally.’

‘Legally?’ Rhyme asked. ‘Then why was he in the system?’

‘He was required to have a security check because he works at Malpensa airport. In Milan. He is a mechanic for fuel trucks and those big vehicles that tow and push airplanes. All airport workers are fingerprinted. He would have, I think, some connection with the Albanian gangs. He could run arms and smuggle drugs without having to pass through Customs. Explosives too, it seems.’

Sachs was looking out to sea, squinting. It was her intense look. Her huntress look. Rhyme enjoyed watching her at moments like that.

Rhyme repeated, ‘Sachs? Enjoying the view?’