Killing Ground

Chapter One

'Do we have to have that damn thing on?'

'God, you found a voice. Hey, that's excitement.'

' All I'm saying – do we have to have the damn heater thing on?'

'Just when I was going to get wondering whether the Good Lord had done something violent with your tongue, knotted it – yes, I like to have the heater on.'

It was the last day of March. They'd left the three-lane highway lar behind. They'd turned off the two-lane highway long ago, and a hit after they'd cut through the town of Kingsbridge. When the y, uy driving had dumped the road map on his lap and told him to tai l the navigation bit, they'd left the last bit of decent track. The guy driving used the word 'lane' for what they were on now, and the map called it 'minor road'. The lane, the minor road, seemed in him to coil round the fields that were behind the high hedges that had been brutalized the past autumn by cutting equipment and had not yet taken on the spring's foliage. The high hedges and the fields beyond seemed dead to him. They bent round the angles of the fields, they dropped with the flow of the lane into dips and . limbed small summits, and when they reached the small summits he could see in the distance the grey-blue of the sea and the white caps where the wind caught it. It was not raining now. It had rained most of the drive out of London, then started to ease when they were just short of Bristol, then stopped when they were east of Exeter. It was four hours since they had left London, and he was quiet because he was already fretting that the guy driving had made a mess of the equation of distance and speed and time. There was a certain time when he wanted to get there, to the end of this goddam track, and he didn't care to be early and he didn't care to be late.

He asked, sour, 'What sort of place is this going to be?'

The man driving looked ahead. 'How the hell should I know?'

'I was just asking.'

'Listen, man, because I work out of London doesn't mean that I know every corner of the country – and the heater stays on.'

There was no rain, and the narrow tarmacadam surface of the lane was dry, but there was wind. The wind that made white caps on the grey-blue sea ahead, tossed at the few trees that had survived the winter gales that came hard at the Devon coastline and blustered the flight of the gulls above. If they hadn't had the heater on, if they'd had the window of the Cherokee Jeep down, then he didn't reckon he'd have been cold. His way of sulking, making his protest, was to wipe with his shirt sleeve the condensation on the inside of the door window beside him and on the inside of the windscreen in front of him. He wiped hard, a small release for his stress, but as a way of clearing the condensation it was lousy work and the window beside him and the windscreen ahead of him were left smeared. He heard the guy who was driving hiss annoyance beside him. He bent his head and studied the map and won no help from it. His finger followed the thin red line of the lane across empty space towards the blue-printed mass of the sea and on the map there were names over the sea like Stoke Point and Bigbury Bay and Bolt Tail. He looked down at his watch. Shit. He looked back at the map, and the page spread across his knee was harder to see because the evening was closing down, and the width of the Cherokee Jeep filled the lane and the cut dark hedges were high above the windows. Shit. Goddam it…

The brakes went on hard. He was jolted in his belt. It was his way, whenever he was riding as passenger in a vehicle that went to emergency stop, to drop his right hand to his belt, it was the instinct from long ago, but riding as passenger in a lane in the south of Devon in the west of England meant that his belt was empty, carried no holster. And his way also, and his instinct, at the moment of an emergency stop to swivel his head fast, the pony-tail of his hair flying, to check the scope behind for fast reverse and the J-procedure turn. He grinned, the first time anything of a smile had creased his mouth since they had left London, a rueful twitch of his lips, because he reckoned the guy driving would have seen his right hand drop to his belt and seen the swift glance of his eyes behind. They had come over the summit of a hill, then there had been a hard right turn, then there had been the cattle herd in the lane. The big lights of the Cherokee Jeep speared into the eyes of the lumbering and advancing cows. A small dog, seeming to run on its lstomach, came out from under the cattle's hooves and it was leaping, barking, growling at the radiator grille of the Cherokee Jeep. Behind the dog, behind the cattle, down below them, were the lights of the community that was their destination and beyond the lights and stretching away, limitless, was the sea. The breath hissed in his throat. He wondered what time the letter post came round to a place like this, reached the community down at the end at the lane beside the sea – some time that day, but not early, was the best answer he'd been able to get before they'd left London. And he wondered what time a young woman finished teaching the second year – some time in the middle of the afternoon, but she might stay on to check that day's work and to prepare for the next day's classes, and he had to add on to 'sometime in the middle of the afternoon' how long it would take a young woman to ride a low-power scooter back home along the lanes from the town behind them. It was important, when the letter was delivered, when the young woman came home. He wanted to hit her, meet her, after the letter had been delivered, after she had reached home and read it, but not more than a few minutes after she had read it. It was Important, the timing, and it was down to him, the plan… He was stressed. He reckoned he could have killed for a cigarette, and in front of him on the glove box was the 'No Smoking' sticker which was standard these goddam days in any Drug Enforcement

Administration vehicle, back in the States or overseas. The time to hit her was critically important.

The cattle split in front of the Cherokee Jeep. Either side of the radiator and bonnet, and then the side windows, the cattle, a mixed Friesian and Holstein herd, scrambled on the bank below the scalped hedges, slipped, blundered against the vehicle. The driver's-side wing mirror was pressured back. A wet and slobbering tongue squelched against the glass of the window. The Cherokee Jeep shook from the weight of an animal against the body of the vehicle behind him. The lights shone on the face of the man who drove the cattle, unshaven, pinched in the wind, weathered. He could see the agitation of the man as his mouth with the gaps in his teeth flapped in silence, silence because of the noise of the goddam heater. Beside him, the hand was reaching for the gear stick.

'Where the hell are you going?'

'I'm going to back up.'

'How many miles are you going to back up? Stay put.'

'He's telling me to back up.'

'Then tell him to go eat his own shit.'

'You're kind of edgy, aren't you?'

The face of the man driving the cattle was close to the windscreen. The mouth still flapped. There were three teeth missing, he reckoned, and he reckoned that there was a denture set back home at the farm for inserting when the day was done and the evening meal was on the kitchen table. He spited himself, turned the Cherokee Jeep's heater higher so that the blast of dry warm air and the roar of the motor drowned the man's protest. The perspiration ran on his forehead and in his groin and down the small of his back but he could not hear the protest of the man driving the cattle. The man was peering at them through the windscreen, squinting through narrow eyes at them.

'Like we're out of the zoo,' Axel said.

And he should not have said that, no. Should not have said that because Dwight, the driver, was Afro-American. At Quantico, in an Ethics class, they would have gone ape.

A remark such as his last might just have been enough to get a guy busted out of the Training Academy. Axel did not apologize, he seldom made apologies.

The man driving the cattle stared hard at them, at two guys in an American Cherokee Jeep, wrong-side drive, peculiar number- plate, one white with a goddam pony-tail of hair, one black as a dark night.

'I get the feeling we're noticed/ Axel said in bitterness.

Daniel Bent, farmer, sixty-nine years of age, working the land of his father and his grandfather and his great-grandfather, who had maintained the development of the twin Friesian and Holstein herds

10 to championship status, cursed Axel Moen and Dwight Smythe. He cursed them richly, obscenities and blasphemies, because he saw the risk of one of his cows falling from the bank between the road and the hedge, plunging under the body of the four-wheel-drive and breaking a leg. He noticed, too fucking right, the bastards and recognised them for Americans, and wondered what was their business late in the day on the lane to the coast.

When the big vehicle, too big for these roads for sure, going at speed and ignoring the 30 mph limit, came past her, Fanny Carthew saw them.. Mrs Carthew, artist of sea views in oils, eighty-one years old, muttered the protest that in the moment afterwards gave her a tremor of shame and would have shocked her fellow worshippers 11 at the Baptist Hall in Kingsbridge if they had heard her utter such words. The cause of her protest – she had to heave at the leash on which she walked her venerable Pekinese dog right off the lane and into the nettles of the verge. She knew them to be Americans, the scowling white one with his hair ridiculously pulled back

… and the coloured one who drove. She noticed them and wondered

… I the business that brought them down the lane that led no wh e r e.

Because the Jeep was slowing, moving as if with hesitation past the houses, Zachary Jones saw them. Zachary Jones, disabled building worker, fifty-three years old, short of a leg, amputated below the knee from a construction-site fall, sat at the window of his cottage. He saw everything that moved in the collection of homes at the end of the lane that was too small to be called a village. With his binoculars he noted every coming and going, every visitor,. every stranger. The binoculars' magnification flitted from the face of the white one to the face of the black one, and he thought they were arguing and thought they disputed their directions, and then down to the tail-end registration plate.

Zachary Jones had worked the building game in London, knew diplomatic plates, before coming home as an amputee to live with his spinster sister. He wondered what brought Americans from their embassy down to this God-forgotten corner of nowhere.

Mrs Daphne Farson saw them from behind her lace curtains, then lost them when her view was obscured by the sign in her front garden that advertised bed-and-breakfast accommodation. She knew Americans.

The retired clergyman, the occasional gardener, the crab fisherman, the retired librarian, the District Nurse, everyone who lived in that community at the end of the lane beside the sea shore saw the big Cherokee Jeep edge down over the last of the tarmacadam, pause in the car park for summer visitors, reverse, turn, come back up the lane and stop just short of David and Flora Parsons' bungalow. All of them heard the engine stilled, saw the lights doused.

All eyes on the Cherokee Jeep and all eyes on the front door of David and Flora Parsons' bungalow. The waiting time… A small collective shiver of excitement held the community.

'You sure it's right?'

'It's what I was told, a white singled storey in a crap place,' Axel said.

'We got here, so when you going to shift yourself?'

'She's not here.'

'You know that? How do you know that?'

'Because her scooter's not parked in the driveway.'

'Maybe she put it in the garage.'

'Her father's car is in the garage, she leaves the scooter in the driveway, if it matters to you…'

'You haven't been within a thousand miles of here before, you've never met this woman before… How come you know that sort of detail, or am I getting bullshit?'

'I had it checked.'

'You had it checked, down to whether she put a scooter into the garage or left it out in the driveway?'

'Checked.' Axel said it sharply, dismissive, like it was obvious that such a detail would be checked. The headquarters in Exeter of the Devon and Cornwall police, through their liaison officer, had provided information on the progress of an airmail letter through the city's sorting service, information on the hours worked by a young woman teacher, information on the nighttime parking of a scooter. He believed in detail. He thought that with detail people more easily stayed alive.

It had been the idea of Axel Moen. It was the operational plan of Axel Moen. What he wanted most, right now, was to smoke a cigarette. He opened the door beside him, felt the cool of the air, the grip of the sharp wind coming up off the pebble beach, heard the rustle of waves on stones. He reached back and grabbed for a windcheater. He stepped down onto the grass beside the road. Ahead of him, behind a low fence and a trimmed hedge, was the bungalow and the light was on over the door. He lit the cigarette, Lucky Strike, dragged on it, coughed and spat. He saw the shadowed bungalows and cottages, with their lights in the windows, stretching as a haphazard ribbon away up the lane to the bend round which the young woman would come on her scooter.

II It was the sort of place he knew. He wondered where the letter would be-in her room and on her bed or on her dressing table, on a stand in the hall, in the kitchen. He wondered whether she would tear the envelope open before she discarded her coat or her anorak, whether she would let it lie while she took herself to the bathroom for a wash or a pee. He heard Dwight Smythe open his door behind him, then slam it shut.

This young woman, does she know you're coming?'

Axel shook his head.

'You just walking in there, no invite?'

Axel nodded his head, did not turn.

'You feel OK about that?'

Axel shrugged.

He watched the top of the lane, where it emerged from the bend. The woman with the dog stared down the lane at him, and he could make out the man in the window with the small binoculars aimed at him, and he saw the flicker of movement behind the curtains of the house that advertised bed-and-breakfast. It was as it would have been for a stranger driving on a lane on the Door Peninsula, the scrutiny and suspicion. Where the finger of the Door Peninsula cut out into Michigan Bay. And, going north from Egg Harbour and Fish Creek, from Jacksonport and Ephraim, they would have stared at a stranger coming in the dusk and followed him with binoculars and peered from behind curtains. Far in the distance, back beyond the bend in the lane, he heard the engine. It sounded to Axel Moen like the two-stroke power of a brush cutter or a small chainsaw. He dragged a last time on the cigarette and dropped what was left of it down onto the tarmacadam and tramped it with his boot and then kicked the mess of it towards the weeds. He saw the narrow wash of light from up the lane, back beyond the bend.

'You're a mafia man, right? Have to be a specialist in mafia if you're based down in Rome. What's-?

'Mafia's generic. Don't you work "organized crime"?'

'You going to play smart-ass? Actually, if you want to know, I am personnel, I am accounts, I am administration. Because of people like me, arrogant shits get to run around and play their games. What's this young woman-?'

'Lima Charlie November, that's LCN, that's La Cosa Nostra. I work La Cosa Nostra, we don't call it "mafia".'

'Forgive me for breathing – I apologize. Best of my knowledge, La Cosa Nostra, mafia, is Sicily, is Italy, is not quite adjacent to here.'

'Why don't you just go wrap yourself round the heater?'

The scooter's light was a small beam, dully illuminating the bank and hedge at the top of the lane, then sweeping lower and catching the woman with the dog, then swerving and reflecting in the lenses of the binoculars in the window, then finding the moving curtain at the bungalow that advertised bed-and-breakfast. He saw the arm of the rider wave twice. The scooter came down the hill and was slowing. The brakes had a squeal to them, like a cat's howl when its tail is trapped. The scooter came to a stop in front of the bungalow where the light shone 'welcome' above the porch. The engine was killed, the light was doused. He had not seen a photograph of her. He knew only the barest of her personal details from the file. No way that he could have had a decent picture of her in his mind, but when she was off the scooter and tugging the shape of the helmet from her head, when she shook her hair free, when she started to push the weight of the scooter into the driveway in front of the garage, when she walked under the light above the porch, she seemed to be smaller, slighter, than he had imagined.

He turned a key in the latch, pushed the door open. The hall light Hooded over an ordinary young woman, and he heard her call that she was back, an ordinary young woman's voice. The door closed behind her.

Dwight Smythe, above the sound of the heater, called from behind him, 'So, when are you going to bust in, no invite?' Axel walked back towards the Cherokee Jeep. So, when are you going to start to shake the ground under her feet?'

Axel swung himself into the passenger seat. 'So, do I go short of answers?'

Axel said quietly, 'About a quarter of an hour for her to read a letter. Don't ask me.'

Dwight Smythe arched his eyebrows, spread the palms of his hands wide over the wheel. 'Would I dream of asking, would I, what a young woman from down here has to do with DEA business, with organized crime, with La Cosa Nostra in Sicily…?'

The professor had said, 'If you take the hip and pelvis of Italy and think about it, and look at the map up there, well, that's the piece that's joined to Europe, and that's the bit that's high-class tourism and finance…'

When the rookies were not on Crime Simulation or Firearms Procedures or Physical Education or Legal classes or Defensive tactics, when they were not crowded into the Casino School or the Engineering Research Facility or the Forensic Laboratory, then they sat in on Public Affairs. It was nine years since Dwight Smythe had listened to the professor at the Public Affairs lecture.

'Come on down and you've the thigh of Italy, which is agriculture 'and industry. Move on lower, and you have the knee joint, Rome administration, bureaucracy, high life, the corruption of govern- ment You following me? We go south, we have the shin -

Naples,

…. and it's going sour. There is a heel – Lecce. There is a foot – Cosenza. There is a toe – Reggio Calabria. The way I like to think of it, maybe that toe is bare inside sandals, or at most the protection is the canvas of a pair of sneakers. Sandals or sneakers, whichever, they're not the best gear for kicking a rock.. .'

At Quantico, out in the Virginia forest off Interstate Route 95, FBI and Marine Corps territory, where the Drug Enforcement Administration recruit programme is tolerated, as are relations from the wrong side of the tracks, the professor was a legend. Any heat, any cold, the professor lectured Public Affairs in a three-piece suit of Scottish tweed.

The material of his suit had the same roughness as the wild beard splaying from his chin and cheeks. In the lecture room, with his maps and his pointer, he taught the recruits the rudimentaries of the countries that would fill their files, the societies they would interact with, the criminal conspiracies they would confront. And he did it well, which was why he was remembered.

'The Government of Italy, for a hundred years, has been stupid enough to kick with an unprotected toe against the rock that is Sicily. My advice, if you've set your mind on kicking rocks with a bare toe, is go and find one that's not granite or flint. Sicily is hard mineral, and the toe gets to be bloodied, bruised. That rock is a meeting point, where Africa comes to Europe, different cultures, different values. The rock, granite or flint, has been shaped by history. Sicily is where the conquerors liked to come. You name him, he's been there – Moors and Normans and Bourbons, and before them the Greeks and the Romans and the Carthaginians and the Vandals. Government in Rome is just seen as another freebooter, the latest, come to cream off more than his share.'

The professor used a big lectern that took his weight as he leaned forward on it, and the voice came from deep in the whiskered beard, pebbles churning in a mixer.

'If you've toned your muscles, if you can swing a pickaxe, if you've journeyed to Sicily, then take a hack at a piece of ground. You may have to go looking a while first to find ground that's not rock. Find it and hack – chance is you'll dig up an arrowhead or a sword blade or the iron of a spear tip, or maybe a bayonet or a mortar round or a rifle's cartridge case – the weapons of repression and torture. Imagine you live there, when you hold whatever you've dug in your hand. When your history is one of dispossession, expropriation, incarceration, execution, then that sort of colours your personality, sort of shapes an attitude: each new conqueror moulded the Sicilian view of life. The lesson dinned by history into the modern generations tells them trust is a luxury to be kept tight round the family, that the greatest virtue is silence, that you wait as long as it takes for the opportunity of revenge, then, by God, you dish it out. While Europe was civilizing itself a hundred years ago, down there on the rock, close to Africa, they were brigands and bandits. Not our problem, an Italian problem, until…'

Dwight Smythe remembered him now, like it was yesterday, and the recruits hadn't coughed, or sniggered, or fidgeted, but had sat rapt as if the old academic was telling them the reality of DEA work.

'For protection, the brigands and bandits formed a secret society. Rules, hierarchy, organization, discipline, but relevant only to Italy, running contraband cigarettes, fleecing an extortion racket dry, until – strange, I think, the way the little moments in our existence, the two-cent moments have their day – until a Turkish gentleman named Musullulu got to share a prison cell in Italy with the Sicilian gangster Pietro Vernengo.

They talked for two years. Those two years, in that cell, '78 and '79, they changed the face of society, they put you men in work. The drugs trade, the misery trade began in that cell, two men and their talk…'

So clear to Dwight Smythe, the professor's words. Beside him Axel Moen sat quiet and still, eyes closed. Dwight knew the current statistics – a Federal Anti-Narcotics budget of $13.2 billion, of which the DEA took $757 million and said it was inadequate.

'The Turk talked heroin. The Turk could bring unprocessed morphine base into Sicily, via the Balkans. Good morphine base to make good heroin. In 1979, the Italians opened the cell door and Mr Musullulu went his way, never been seen by a law enforcement agent since, and Signor Vernengo went back to Sicily and told the guys what was on offer. Don't ever think that because they didn't get grades at school the Sicilian peasants are dumb. For killing and conspiracy they are the best and the brightest, for moving money and for spreading the cloy of corruption they are the best and the brightest. They saw the window, they jumped through it. They had more heroin, more morphine base, coming onto that heap of rock than they knew what to do with, and they had the market. The market was the USA, they went international. The money flowed. They had dollar bills up their ears, mouths, nostrils, every orifice they owned.

So you've heard of the Colombians and the Yakuza out of Japan and the Chinese Triads, but first on the scene was La Cosa Nostra of Sicily. The people I've just mentioned, the cartels and the Yakuza and the Triads, they're hard people but they've never been fool enough to mix it with the Sicilians. It's difficult to believe, but off that piece of rock stuck out between Europe and Africa come the big boys of organized crime, and what everyone's thrown at them just seems to bounce back. You see, gentlemen, ladies, down there it's a war of survival, as it has been through history, a bad place to be on the losing side, it's a war to the death…'

It's what the professor had said at a cold, early morning session in the lecture hall at Quantico, with snow flaking against the windows, what Dwight Smythe recalled. He felt a sense of raw anger. The next week, nine years back, the professor had lectured on the marijuana crop out of Mexico, and the week after he had given over the hour session to the coca-leaf production of Bolivia and Peru, and the final week of the course had been concerned with opium production in the triangle of Burma and Laos and Thailand. Dwight Smythe felt the sense of raw anger because the professor had seemed only a diversion from the main matter of the induction course. Sitting in the car beside the younger man with the blond pony-tail of hair shafted down under the collar of his windcheater, Dwight Smythe knew reality. He was far from the office accounts that he managed on the fifth floor of the embassy, far from the duty rosters and leave charts he so meticulously prepared, far from the filing system he was proud of and the maintenance of the computer systems… He was with reality. The anger spat in him as he turned towards Axel Moen.

'What right do you have, what God-given right do you have to play Christ with that kid, to involve her?'

As if he hadn't heard, as if the accusation were not important, Axel Moen, beside him, glanced down at his watch, like it was time to go to work.

'You're a mafia specialist – sorry, forgive me, I apologize, a La Cosa Nostra specialist – and you're not making, what I hear, a good job of winning.

Aren't you ever fed to the teeth that you don't ever get to win?'

The chill air with the salt tang came into the cab of the Cherokee Jeep, then the door slammed shut on Dwight Smythe. He watched the hunched shoulders of Axel Moen glide away, no sound against the throb of the heater, towards the little wrought-iron gate and the path leading to the door of the bungalow over which the porch light shone. He watched the shoulders and the resolute stride through the gate and up the path and past the scooter parked in the driveway, and he thought of the preacher of his childhood talking of the Death Angel who came on the unsuspecting with destruction and darkness, and he thought it was wrong to involve an ordinary young woman, just wrong.

Wrong to break, without warning, into a life.

'So sorry to trouble you, I hope it's not inconvenient…'

He could smile. When it was necessary, Axel Moen had a fine, wide smile that cut his face. He smiled at the older man who stood In the lit doorway.

'My name's Axel Moen, I've come down from our embassy in London, it's to see Miss Charlotte Parsons. I surely hope it's not inconvenient…'

He could charm. When it was asked of him, he could charm sufficient to bring down a barrier. He kept walking. There had been no gesture for him to enter the bungalow, no invitation, but he kept walking and David Parsons stepped aside. The frown was on the man's forehead, confusion.

'You're wondering, Mr Parsons, at my name. It's Norwegian. I here's a fair few of Norwegian stock where I come from, that'sthe north-eastern corner of Wisconsin. They were farmers, they came over around a hundred years ago. I'd like to see your daughter, please, it's a private matter.'

He could deflect. When it was important to him, Axel Moen knew how to batter aside the doubts and queries and seem to give an answer where a different question had been asked. The question would have been, what was his business? But the question was not put. It was a small hall, recently decorated but not by a professional, and he noted that the paper pattern did not match where the strips were joined, and the paint had run on the woodwork. He had a cold eye. It was a detached observer's eye. The eye of a man who gave nothing. He saw the small hall table with the telephone on it, and above the table was a framed photograph of the young woman in academic gown and with a mortarboard worn rakishly. The angle of the mortarboard and the cheekiness of the grin in the college graduation photograph rather pleased him, he had hoped to find an independent spirit. He towered over the man, he dominated him in the narrow width of the hallway. It was what he had to do and what he was good at, flashing a smile, breathing charm, and dominating. He was good, also, at making the fast judgement on the spine of a man, and he judged this one, pullover with the buttons undone and wearing yesterday's clean shirt and frayed carpet slippers, as a coward.

'She's having her tea.'

'It won't take too many minutes,' Axel said. He was good, as well, at playing the bully. The man backed away from him and shuffled towards the opened door at the end of the hall. There was a television on and a local news bulletin dealing with the day of a small place and a small town and small people. The man had no fight to stand his ground and ask the questions and demand the answers. The man went in through the door, into the kitchen area. Axel had broken into the sanctum of a family, fractured a mealtime, and he felt no guilt. The man muttered to his wife, at the stove, moving pans, that it was an American who had come to see Charley, and the wife had boldness and challenge in her gaze. Axel ignored the man and the man's wife. He stood at the entrance to the kitchen. The young woman was sitting at the table. She had a half slice of bread, margarine smeared on it, in her hand and halfway to her mouth. She quizzed him, a strong, firm glance. She wore a full- length denim skirt and a shapeless sweater with the sleeves stretched down over her wrists and no cosmetics and her hair was held up with a band so that it came from the back of her head as a pig's tail. She neither cowered like her father nor challenged like her mother, she met Axel's eye. In front of her, beside the plate with the bread slices and the mug of tea, was a torn-open envelope and beside it were the two sheets of a handwritten letter.

'Miss Charlotte Parsons?'

'Yes.'

'I'd be grateful if I could speak to you, a private matter.'

'These are my parents.'

'It would be easier in private, if you wouldn't mind…'

'Who are you?'

'I am Axel Moen, from the American embassy.'

'I've no business with your embassy, private or not.'

'It would be better, private.'

She could have backed off then, but she did not. He pulled his shoulders back, consciously, to fill the kitchen doorway. He held her with his eyes. They talked on the courses about body language and eye-to-eye contact. The body language was domination and the eye contact was authority. She could have said that it was in front of her parents or not at all… She pushed her chair back, scraped it over the vinyl floor of mock terracotta tiles. She stood her full height, then as an afterthought she stuffed the half slice of bread and margarine into her mouth, then she swigged at her mug of tea, then she wiped the sleeve of her sweater across her lips. She was moving from the table.

Axel said, 'You received a letter, Miss Parsons, please bring it with you.'

She rocked, quick, fast. Her eyes blinked. She swayed, but she did as he asked her because he had the domination and authority. She picked up the letter and the torn-open envelope and she walked past her mother and father, her own person. She went past him as if he did not exist, and her face was set. She led into the living room and snapped on the light in the standard lamp and cleared the morning paper off the sofa, waved for him to sit. She took the chair beside the fire. She held the letter and the envelope tight in her hands. He tried to judge her, to measure whether it was bravado, whether it was an inner toughness.

'Well?'

'You are Charlotte Eunice Parsons, teacher?'

'Yes.'

'You are twenty-three years old?'

'How's that of interest to the American embassy?'

'I'm asking the questions, Miss Parsons. Please answer them.' 'I am twenty-three years old. Do you need to know that I have a mole on my backside, and an appendix scar?'

'In the summer of 1992 you worked for eleven weeks as a home help and child-minder in Rome for the family of Giuseppe Ruggerio?'

'I don't see the importance-'

'Yes or no?'

'Yes.'

'This afternoon you have received a letter from that family inviting you to return?'

'Who the hell are you?'

Out of the hip pocket of his trousers, he took the squashed wallet. He flipped it open, exposed the identification badge in gold-veneer metal of the Drug Enforcement Administration, thumb half covering the title of Special Agent, fingers masking the rampant eagle.

'My name is Axel Moen, DEA. I work out of Rome.'

'You've come from Rome?'

'Don't interrupt me, Miss Parsons. I'm sorry, where can I smoke?'

'Sort your answer out. What on earth are you doing here, prying and poking. Come on.'

But a small grin was on her face. She marched him back out into the hall, and grabbed a heavy coat off a hook, and then through a darkened dining room. She unlocked the doors, and let him into the garden. The kitchen lights washed half of the patio, but she led him beyond the light and onto the paving slabs outside a garden shed. She turned to face him, looked up at him, and the flash of the match caught her face.

'Prying and poking, so what the hell's your answer?'

'I work out of Rome – you should listen to what I say. I work in liaison with the Italian agencies. I work against the Sicilian-based organization La Cosa Nostra. You were employed by Giuseppe and Angela Ruggerio to look after their son at the time their daughter was born. They have written you to say that two months ago they were

"blessed" with the birth of a second son, Mauro – just listen – and they have asked you to return to them to do the same work as four years ago. They live now in Palermo.'

He threw down the cigarette, half smoked. His foot was moving to stamp on it, but she crouched and picked it up and handed it back to him. He stubbed out the cigarette on the ribbed sole of his shoe, then placed the dead end in the matchbox.

'They live now in Palermo. How do I know? Giuseppe Ruggerio is sporadically under surveillance. There are not the resources, such is the scale of criminality in Sicily, for the surveillance to be full time. From time to time he is targeted. Tailed, wire-tapped, mail watch, electronic stuff, it's routine. It's a trawl. The letter showed up.

Angela Ruggerio posted it. The letter was intercepted, copied, resealed and went back into the postal service. In Rome I was shown the copy. The letter was tracked from Palermo to Milan, international sorting, Milan to London, London down here. We took that trouble to ensure the timing of my journey, so that I should get here after you received the letter, before you responded. This is my idea, Miss Parsons, I have initiated this. I want you to go to Palermo and take up that offer.'

She laughed in his face. He didn't think the laugh was affectation.

'Ridiculous…'

'Go back to Palermo and work for Giuseppe and Angela Ruggerio.'

'I've a job, I'm in full-time work. Before, that was just a fill-in between school and college. It's just, well, it's idiotic. It's a joke.'

'1 want you to accept the invitation and travel to Palermo.'

Axel lit a second cigarette. The wind was on his face and cutting into the thin material of his windcheater. She was small now, huddled inside the shape of her coat and her arms were clamped across her chest as if to hold in the warmth.

'What do they call you, people who know you?'

' I get called Charley.'

'Don't think, Charley, that I would have bothered to haul myself over here if this were not an important investigation, don't think I take kindly to wasted time. We get opportunities, maybe they come convenient, maybe they don't. Maybe we can handle the opportunities ourselves, maybe we need to pull in help from outside. We want you in the home of Giuseppe and Angela Ruggerio.'

The bitterness hissed in her voice, and the contempt. 'As a spy?'

'The opportunity we have, through you, is one of access.'

'They treated me as one of their family.'

'Giuseppe Ruggerio is a careful, clever bastard. You should take up that offer and work for Giuseppe and Angela Ruggerio/

'Go to hell. Bugger off and bloody get out of here.'

He flicked the cigarette into the middle of the dark grass. He started to turn away.

'Please yourself, I don't beg. You care to live here, you care to spend the rest of your life living here, you care to cross over to the other side of the street when there's something you could do, please yourself. I thought that maybe you had some balls. Pity is that I was wrong.'

'You are, Mr Axel bloody Moen, a total shit.'

'Big words, but you're short of big action. You want to rot here, then that's your problem. Don't talk about this conversation. If you talk about it, you might be responsible for hurting people.'

A small voice. She wouldn't be able to see his face, see the flicker of satisfaction.

She asked, 'Why do you need access to Giuseppe's and Angela's home?'

No sarcasm, and no laugh, and no bullshit, Axel said, 'You get on board and you get told, so think on it. And think also on whether, for the rest of your life, you want to remember crossing over the road to avoid responsibility. Good night, Miss Parsons.

When you've had a chance to think on it, I'll make the contact again. Don't worry, I can see myself out.'

He walked away, back through the darkened dining room, and past the open door to the kitchen, and through the hall. He looked a last time at the photograph of Charley Parsons on the wall above the table with the telephone. He liked the cockiness and cheekiness in her graduation photograph. He let himself out through the front door.

Sometimes he used a driver, most times Mario Ruggerio drove himself. Whether he drove himself, or whether he rode with the driver, he used a mass-produced, factory-production-line saloon car. There was nothing flamboyant, nothing ostentatious, in the life of Mario Ruggerio, nothing to draw attention to him. That evening, if a car of the carabineri or the squadra mobile or the polizia stradale or the polizia municipale or the Guardia di Finanze or the Direzione Investigativa Anti-Mafia had passed the Citroen BX that carried him as passenger, nothing would have seemed remarkable to the police officers of those agencies. He had been released from Ucciardione Prison, down by the city's docks, on 15 June 1960, and he had not been arrested since. He was now aged sixty-two. He was governed by twin obsessions and they were the seeking of power and the avoidance of capture. Without freedom there was no power. To maintain that precious freedom he travelled the city in a series of commonplace vehicles. To any of the police officers of those agencies, the sight of him at the traffic lights or at a pedestrian crossing would have been of an old man, tired by long life, being driven by a son or a nephew… but he was, and he knew it so well, to all of the police officers of all of those agencies, the most wanted man in the city, the most hunted man on the island, I he most tracked man in the country, the most sought-after man on the continent of Europe. He believed himself to have achieved the primary position on what the Ministry of the Interior called the Special Programme of the Thirty Most Dangerous Criminals at l arge. The police officers of those agencies would have seen, at I he traffic lights or a pedestrian crossing, an old man who sat low In the passenger seat, a height of 5 feet 3 inches and a weight ol a couple of pounds less than 13 stones, unstyled and shorti-ropped and grey-flecked hair, a low peasant's forehead, roving and cautious eyes, jowls at his throat and nicotine-stained teeth, broad but bowed shoulders. They would not have known… Nor would they have seen the powerful, thickset fingers, with the nails cut back to the quick, because the hands were held down between his knees. They might have seen his eyes, and if the police officers of the agencies had met those eyes, then Mario Ruggerio's head would have ducked in respect to their uniforms and their position, but they would not have seen his hands, clasping and unclasping, stretching and clenching. He moved his fingers and thumbs, worked the joints, because his hands were still bruised and aching from the effort of strangulation, and the rheu- matism in his hands was always worse at the end of the wet months iof the Sicilian winter.

There was a calmness in his expression as the driver brought him from their rendezvous point on the south side of Via Generale di Maria, along the Via Malaspina and across the Piazza Virgilio, but the expression of calmness was false. With the obsessions for power and freedom came neurosis. The neurosis was based on the fear of loss of power and loss of freedom, and the fear that was always with him was of betrayal. It was hard for Mario Ruggerio to trust any man, even the driver who had been with him seven years. The fear of loss of power and freedom governed the precautions that he took every day and every night of his life. He had the keys to sixteen apartments in the city, loaned to him indefinitely by 'affiliates' who owed loyalty to him and him alone. The driver who had been with him for seven years was never given the address of an apartment block from which to pick him up, merely a street junction, and never given an address at which to drop him. When they came, that evening, past the decayed facade of the Villa Filippina and onto Via Balsamo, he coughed hard as if to signal for his driver to pull in to the kerb.

He climbed awkwardly, heavily, out of the Citroen, and the driver passed him a small bag in which a kid might have kept sports clothes or stored school books, and then his cap of grey-check pattern. He stood among the debris on the pavement, among the filth and the paper wrappings, put on his cap, and he watched the car drive away.

Always he satisfied himself that the car was gone before he moved from the drop point.

The old eyes, bright and alert and clear blue, raked the road and searched the faces of drivers and checked the pedestrians. He knew the signs of surveillance… When he was satisfied, only when he was sure, he walked off down the Via Balsamo and across the wide Via Volturno, where the street market was packing up for the evening, and he disappeared into the labyrinthine alleys of the Capo district of Palermo.

The most wanted man on the continent, in the country, on the island, in the city, walked alone and carried his own bag in the near darkness, and around him radios played and women screamed and men shouted and children cried. He was worth – his own estimate and tapped out each week on his Casio calculator – something in excess of $245,000,000, and his calculator could tell him in the time that it took tired eyes to blink that the value of his worth was in excess of 637,000,000,000 Italian lire. The wealth of Mario Ruggerio, walking in the slum district of Capo, was held in government bonds, foreign currencies, blue-chip gilts on the European and New York stock markets, investment in multinational companies and in real estate.

He pushed open a battered door.

He climbed an ill-lit stairway. He found the key. He let himself into the room.

Only when he had drawn the thick curtains of the room did he switch on the light.

The pain in his hands, bruised from strangulation, pitched at his mouth and he winced.

He unpacked t he small bag, his nightclothes, his shaving bag, his clean shirt and underwear and socks, and the framed photograph of the two children that he loved and the baby.

Carrying the suitcase, Giuseppe Ruggerio, known always to his family as Peppino, was first through the outer door and behind him was piccolo Mario, heaving the children's bag, and then Francesca with her soft toys, and further behind him was Angela, who tried to soothe baby Mauro's crying… the end of a four-day break in the San Domenico Palace hotel of Taormina, five-star. Back home in Palermo, and the baby was hungry.

But the hunger of the baby was not high in the thoughts of Giuseppe Ruggerio. He had almost run, in spite of the weight of the suitcase, the last few steps from the elevator to the outer door of the apartment, and he had pulled hard on piccolo Mario's collar to propel the child backwards as he had opened the door.

Inside, snapping on the lights, dumping the suitcase, his eyes roved over floors and walls – he saw the faint smear where the marble in the hallway had been wiped. On into the living area, more lights crashing on, checking the sofa and chairs where they would have sat, and on into the dining area and over the polished block floor and gazing at the smooth sheen of the mahogany table where they would have eaten. Pictures where they should have been, the statue where it should have been. Turning fast, into the kitchen, the fluorescent ceiling light hesitating and then shining, and the kitchen was as it had been left. Everything was as it should have been. A fast gasp of relief. He refused nothing that his brother asked of him, nothing… It had said on the radio that morning, on Radio Uno, in the hotel in Taormina, that the wife of a man from Agrigento had reported to the carabineri that her husband was missing from home and her grandson and her husband's driver. The man from Agrigento, with his grandson and his driver, would have come to a meeting point in Palermo, and a picciotto of his brother would have met them there, then travelled in their car to the apartment in the complex of the Giardino Inglese, they would not have been able by cellular phone or digital phone or personal radio to communicate the ultimate destination. His brother was always careful.

'Peppino.'

There was the shrill whine of her voice behind him. He turned. Angela stood in the living room. Angela held the baby, Mauro, and the face of the baby was red from crying. Angela, his wife of nine years, pointed down at the thick woven carpet from Iran.

'What is that?' The whine in her voice was from her accent, that was Roman. 'That was not here when we left.'

Nothing to be seen where the carpet fabric was of magenta wool, but beyond the magenta was pure white, and the white was stained.

She accused, 'Who has been here? Who has dirtied our carpet? The carpet cost you seventeen million lire. It is destroyed. Who has been here, Peppino?'

He smiled, sweetness and love. 'I do not see anything.'

She jabbed her finger. 'Look, there… Did you give the key of our home to someone? Did you let someone use our home? Who? Did you?'

And her voice died. It was as if she had forgotten herself, forgotten her life and her place. As if she had forgotten that she no longer lived in Rome, forgotten she lived now in Palermo. The anger was gone from her face, and her shoulders crumpled. He had hoped so much that the short break, sandwiched between his journeys to Frankfurt and London, would revive her after the difficult birth of baby Mauro. Peppino never cursed his brother, never. She was gone to the kitchen to warm food for baby Mauro. He bent over the carpet, over the stain, and from deep in the weave he lifted clear the dried seed of a tomato.

He went into the kitchen. She would not meet his eyes. Peppino had his hand on her shoulder and he stroked the soft hair on baby Mauro's head.

'When I am in London I will telephone to Charlotte. She will have received it. I will persuade her to come, I promise.'

Hee tapped the numbers on the telephone in the Cherokee Jeep. He waited. He hadn't asked Dwight Smythe for permission to use the telephone, but then he hadn't spoken since he had come out of the bungalow, flopped back into the passenger seat and indicated they could move off. They were out of the lanes, had the speed going. Axel hadn't spoken because there was no requirement for him to talk through an operation with a guy who did accounts and personnel and office management, and if there was no requirement for him to talk, then he seldom did. He heard the phone lifted, the connection made.

'Bill, hi, Axel here. How's Rome? Raining, Jesus. This is not a secure line. I did the contact. She's OK, nothing special. First reaction was to chuck me out, second reaction was to think on it. She's predictable. She wanted to know more, but she's going to have to wait until she's thought harder. I'm going to call in at the local police HQ and work something out that'll help her thinking. I'll call you tomorrow… Sorry, come again…

Hold on, Bill.'

He reached forward. He snapped off the heater switch, quietened the cab.

'What were you saying, Bill? Maybe, maybe she could do it, maybe she couldn't, but she's all that's on offer. I'll see you, Bill.'

He put the telephone back on the rest. He slouched his legs forward and worked his shoulders lower down on the seat back and closed his eyes.

Dwight said, staring ahead and following the road, 'If I'd been her, I'd have thrown you out. You are a cold bastard.'

'She called me a total shit. Your problem, her problem, I don't care too much what people call me.'

'And you hooked her? Trampled in on her life?'

'Where I come from, north-west Wisconsin, there's good muskie fishing. You know the muskie?'

'We didn't fish round Albuquerque. There would have been trout up in the hills, but it wasn't for black kids in Albuquerque.'

'Wear your chip with honour… The muskie is a big fine fish, but it's a killer and ugly as sin, it's hard and vicious on its fellows, it terrorizes a reed bank. Most anglers go out after muskie with lures, spoons and plugs. They get muskie, right, but not the daddies. The way for the big killers, the big uglies, is live bait. You get a little wall-eye, could be a small-mouth bass, latch it to a treble hook and sling it out under a float.

When the little fish goes ape, when the float starts charging, that tells you that the big killer's close, the big ugly's on the scene. Put simply, the little fish gives you access to a specimen muskie.'

Dwight Smythe said hoarsely, 'That's rough on the little fish.'

'If she goes, then we'd try and wind her in when we get the shout, like when the float starts to charge we'd reel in the tackle,' Axel said softly.

'You can live with that?'

'I just do a job.'

There was a heavy lorry coming towards them, big, high lights, and Axel saw the driver's face and saw the gleam of sweat on Dwight Smythe's forehead, as if it were him that was being asked to travel to Palermo, live the lie, have the treble hook in his backbone.

'She'll go?'

'I should reckon so. Didn't seem to be much to keep her here. Yes, I reckon she'll go.

She'll jump when she's pushed. If you don't mind, I'm kind of tired.'