The Negotiator

Prologue

The dream came again, just before the rain. He did not hear the rain. In his sleep the dream possessed him.

There was the clearing again, in the forest in Sicily, high above Taormina. He emerged from the forest and walked slowly toward the center of the space, as agreed. The attaché case was in his right hand. In the middle of the clearing he stopped, placed the case on the ground, went back six paces, and dropped to his knees. As agreed. The case contained a billion lire.

It had taken six weeks to negotiate the child’s release, quick by most precedents. Sometimes these cases went on for months. For six weeks he had sat beside the expert from the carabinieri’s Rome office-another Sicilian but on the side of the angels-and had advised on tactics. The carabinieri officer did all the talking. Finally the release of the daughter of the Milan jeweler, snatched from the family’s summer home near Cefalù beach, had been arranged. A ransom of close to a million U.S. dollars, after a start-off demand for five times that sum, but finally the Mafia had agreed.

From the other side of the clearing a man emerged, unshaven, rough-looking, masked, with a Lupara shotgun slung over his shoulder. He held the ten-year-old girl by one hand. She was barefoot, frightened, pale, but she looked unharmed. Physically, at least. The pair walked toward him; he could see the bandit’s eyes staring at him through the mask, then flickering across the forest behind him.

The Mafioso stopped at the case, growled at the girl to stand still. She obeyed. But she stared across at her rescuer with huge dark eyes. Not long now, kid. Hang in there, baby.

The bandit flicked through the rolls of bills in the case until satisfied he had not been cheated. The tall man and the girl looked at each other. He winked; she gave a small flicker of a smile. The bandit closed the case and began to retreat, facing forward, to his side of the clearing. He had reached the trees when it happened.

It was not the carabinieri man from Rome; it was the local fool. There was a clatter of rifle fire; the bandit with the case stumbled and fell. Of course his friends were strung out through the pine trees behind him, in cover. They fired back. In a second the clearing was torn by chains of flying bullets. He screamed, “Down!” in Italian but she did not hear, or panicked and tried to run toward him. He came off his knees and hurled himself across the twenty feet between them.

He almost made it. He could see her there, just beyond his fingertips, inches beyond the hard right hand that would drag her down to safety in the long grass. He could see the fright in her huge eyes, the little white teeth in her screaming mouth… and then the bright crimson rose that bloomed on the front of her thin cotton dress. She went down then as if punched in the back and he recalled lying over her, covering her with his body until the firing stopped and the Mafiosi escaped through the forest. He remembered sitting there holding her, cradling the tiny limp body in his arms, weeping and shouting at the uncomprehending and too-late-apologetic local police: “No, no, sweet Jesus, not again…”