Brute Force

52

1250 hrs

Cristoforo Colombo International Airport is quite small, despite the grand name and the fact Genoa is a big industrial city of close to a million inhabitants. Built on a reclaimed peninsula about fifteen Ks outside the city, it's only got the one terminal. But it's always busy if you're Irish or a Brit. The 1995 Schengen Agreement allows EU countries to remove their internal borders and let citizens travel freely from country to country. For security reasons, the UK and Ireland were the only two countries to remain outside the agreement. It pissed Lynn off big-time.

'The upshot is, you have to join the bloody United Nations queue for just two booths to have our passports checked. By the time you've got to the front and they've had a quick flickthrough, all the taxis have gone and there's a long wait between buses.'

'Just as well we won't be using them then, eh?'

I was feeling confident. I knew my passport chip was going to say exactly what was written on the page.

To my right I could hear Lynn being very cool and casual, giving it plenty of 'Buongiorno' and 'Grazie'.

If his passport didn't pass the test and the carabinieri jumped him, I'd carry on alone. From here, fuck it, I could drive to Russia, or get a train and be there within sixteen hours. Or I could even drive to Serbia or Kosovo. No heavy surveillance there: just ask Radovan Karadzic. It'd only take a few hours. It'd actually be quicker than driving from London to Dundee.

We both sailed through. Brendan had earned his fifteen hundred. Well, sixteen if you counted the hundred I gave him on top for his next three months' worth of Hob Nobs and a bunch of something nice for Leena.

Rather than getting any of the transport I could see outside, the buses that took you down to the train station, Genoa Principale, or a cab from the rank, I headed for the Hertz office. I thought I'd give Avis a miss. I wasn't worried they'd tie me in to the missing Merc because I was using my cover docs – but their cars didn't seem to be doing me any favours.

Lynn had said the forty-K drive to Santa Margherita Ligure took about fifty minutes. We could have taken a taxi, but Lynn had a theory that every cab driver in Italy worked either for the Mafia or the government. Besides, we might need to make a quick getaway from his safe house if it turned out not to be so safe after all, and I wanted instant wheels.

I left Lynn outside and went to the Hertz desk alone. The less time we were seen together the better. The girl processed my card, licence and passport with a big smile, and minutes later I had the key fob to a blue Fiat Punto in my hand and was heading for the car park. It was possible they had cameras at entrance and exit as an anti-theft measure, so I'd told Lynn I'd pick him up just outside.

He was waiting where I'd told him to. I'd taken the piss out of his Don Corleone overcoat, but now he looked like every other smartly dressed Italian in sight.

Lynn directed me onto the tollbooths for the A12. The Italians did two things well, I'd always thought: dictators and motorways. The one thing they didn't seem to go in for, I said, was CCTV cameras.

Lynn laughed. 'You worry about surveillance in the UK, but the Italians are among the most spied-upon people in the world. Seventy-six telephone intercepts per hundred thousand people each year.

'It's hilarious. The Italian constitution guarantees privacy of information, and they even set up a national data-protection authority in 2003, but wiretapping and electronic eavesdropping are a national sport – not only by the secret services, but also by the judiciary. Prosecutors routinely order wiretaps, citing the fight against the Mafia as their justification. The cost to the Italian taxpayer is enormous.'

'I always thought "Italian taxpayer" was a contradiction in terms. Who carries out the wiretaps?'

'The newly privatized Italian Telecom – which the press has been having a go at for years for working hand in glove with the secret services.'

The two-lane autostrada cut straight through the mountains on its way to the sea. Everyone was driving at 160km an hour and about a metre apart. A mother with a cigarette in her mouth still managed to bollock her kids and her husband as she pulled into the fast lane to overtake us. A motorbike somehow cut her up, and she went berserk. Italians really do talk with their hands.

Lynn didn't bat an eyelid. He was now in full university lecturer mode. 'A former director of security at Telecom, who had close links with the secret services, was sent to prison not so long ago, together with a former anti-terrorism chief, as a result of a wiretapping scandal.

'Private conversations of politicians and public figures are taped wholesale. Prosecutors and judges routinely leak details to journalists.'

We went into a tunnel that seemed to go on forever. Not long after we emerged, Lynn pointed ahead at a small service station cut into the mountainside on the right. 'Groceries are cheaper here than down in the town.'

Typical officer.

Alad with a bumbag was filling petrol tanks and taking payment. He was chatting away with the driver in front of us but it looked like they were about to come to blows. There was a small car park to one side for the Autogrill.

We weren't back on the road for long before the Rapallo turn-off, which was actually past Santa Margherita Ligure. Paying our two and a bit euros at the toll, we drove into a neat little coastal town, and then stayed by the sea for the next five or six Ks. As we drove over the last hill and Santa Margherita spread out below us it was like a scene from a French Riviera movie of the fifties or sixties. I was half expecting David Niven to come over the crest in an open-top Austin Healey.