Black Wolf: A Dreamland Thriller Page 6

  “Wow.”

  “The paramedics were here right away. Still, you don’t know at his age.”

  “That’s terrible.”

  Both men frowned. Even though Dirks and Osten were from different parties, as senators they were fellow members of the most exclusive club in the world.

  “I was hoping we could grab lunch at some point,” said Dirks. “I wanted to talk about the Air Force appropriations for their new jets. Maybe sometime this week?”

  “Sure. Have your staff set it up with Clarissa,” said Zen. “Better yet—the Nationals are in town. What do you say about a game?”

  “Now we’re talking,” said Dirks. “I’ll check the calendar.”

  “Don’t check too hard,” said Zen. “Thanks for your vote today, by the way.”

  “It’s a good bill. Now all you need is House support. And your President.”

  “I’m working on it,” said Zen. The President was anything but his President. Even though they were from the same party, Christine Mary Todd and Zen often found themselves at loggerheads.

  Which made him a little suspicious an hour later, when she seemed overly profuse as he entered the Oval Office with Jason Black in tow.

  “Here is Senator Stockard,” she said, without a trace of sarcasm. “Fresh from his victory on the floor.”

  “Congratulations, Zen,” said Secretary of Defense Charles Lovel. “It’s a good bill.”

  “Thank you,” said Zen. “Thank you, Ms. President.”

  Zen nodded at Secretary of State Alistair Newhaven and National Security Advisor Michael Blitz, who were seated in a semicircle in front of the President’s desk. Zen wheeled himself next to Newhaven, while Black joined the aides near the side of the room.

  “Have you heard anything about Senator Osten?” asked the President. “His staff told us he was taken to the hospital as a precaution.”

  “That’s more information than I have,” said Zen. “I only just heard that he had a heart attack.”

  Todd nodded grimly. Before she could say anything else, her phone buzzed.

  “That should be General Danker,” said the President. “I’ll put him on speaker.”

  Danker was the American representative to NATO. He was currently in Germany, touring facilities there. Zen had met the Army general when he was an aide to the Joint Chiefs of Staff a decade and a half before. Danker was more a politician than a tactician, which made him perfect for the NATO post.

  Zen watched the others as they exchanged small talk with the general. Each had a different style and personality. Blitz leaned forward in his chair, eyes squinting slightly, a very serious look on his face even as he asked the general how his wife was. Newhaven fidgeted—he always fidgeted. Lovel was his usual easygoing self, making a joke about German beer.

  President Todd, meanwhile, seemed impatient—also completely in character.

  “So—the NATO meeting in Kiev,” she said, bringing the brief how-are-ya session to an end. “Can we have an update on it?”

  “The Russians oppose it, of course,” said Newhaven, launching into a brief recap of the political situation.

  Russia had long opposed Ukraine’s addition to NATO. They were not politically in a position to do much about it—with the drop in energy prices, the Russian economy had slumped to its lowest state since the collapse of the Soviet Union. But they certainly weren’t happy about it.

  “There’s intelligence that they might attempt to disrupt the sessions,” said Newhaven. “Very good intelligence.”

  “I would say that physical threats to the participants cannot be ruled out,” said Blitz. “They should be expected.”

  “I concur,” said General Danker over the speakerphone.

  They discussed the threats briefly. Such intelligence reports and warnings were much more common than people thought, but the fact that this had been connected to a legitimate government made it unusual. Still, there was no chance that NATO would call off the meeting, or that any of the members, including the U.S., would decline to attend. Terrorist-type threats had become an unfortunate fact of life in the post–9/11 era.

  President Todd moved the discussion back to the importance of having Ukraine join NATO. She saw Russia’s objections as a sign that the policy was a good one, though not everyone in Congress agreed. That was an important issue, since the new NATO membership would be part of a revision to the NATO charter and subject to Senate ratification.

  “Senator Osten’s illness could be a major problem for us,” she said. “He was scheduled to be at the conference. If he’s had a heart attack, I’m afraid that will complicate matters.”

  “Someone from the committee will go,” said Zen. “It may even be me.”

  Todd pressed her lips together. “Senator?”

  “I’m next in line. And I’m the only other one who supports the measure on the committee. In our party, anyway.”

  “It would be helpful if you attended, and then were able to persuade your colleagues upon your return,” said the President.

  “I don’t think I’ve ever been to Kiev,” said Zen.

  “There will be impeccable security,” said Danker over the phone.

  “I’m not worried,” said Zen.

  8

  Rome, Italy

  Nuri felt the weight of Frau Gerste’s sigh all the way to Rome.

  He also felt the weight of Gregor’s shoulder, as they sat next to each other on a Euro C Flight direct from Berlin.

  The C, Nuri was sure, stood for “cheap.” The seats were so narrow a mouse would have felt crowded.

  Gregor had insisted on coming, following a call from her supervisor. Apparently the Bureau was now worried that the CIA would crack the case and they wouldn’t get any credit. On the bright side, she managed to get an appointment with a member of the Office of Special Magistrate, the antimafia police, that afternoon. Hence the flight.

  She was uncharacteristically quiet for much of the flight, and Nuri tolerated her presence, if not her bad breath, until just before they were landing, when she began talking about Frau Gerste.

  Why, she wondered, had Nuri found her attractive?

  “Who says I found her attractive?” he asked.

  “You were practically leering. ‘Frau’ means she’s married, you know.”

  “I’m sure.”

  “She had a wedding ring.”

  “Really? I hadn’t noticed.”

  “Because you were too busy staring at her boobs. I hate it when men do that. Treating women like sex objects. It’s disgusting.”

  You have nothing to worry about, Nuri thought to himself, but he kept his mouth shut, concentrating instead on the dossier MY-PID had provided on the man who apparently ordered the murder in Berlin.

  The Italian newspapers had played up the tobacco shop owner’s death, calling Giuseppe DeFrancisco one of the “grand old men of Rome,” an appellation that not even his most faithful customers could ever remember hearing during his lifetime. Established in 1956, his small shop had been a dusty holdover from an era that had passed as surely as the Caesars and chariot races. But his untimely death transformed it into a symbol of all Italy, which was being overtaken by the rapacious thieves of international finance, who cared not a wit for the ability of an Italian to buy a good cigar and catch up on the latest gossip of the neighborhood, be that neighborhood in an obscure Abruzzi town or Rome itself.

  Giuseppe’s connection to his mafia grandson was not mentioned in any of these feature stories. The obituary contained only the broadest hint: Giuseppe had only two surviving grandchildren, one in the U.S. and the other in Naples. Neither was named.

  The grandson was Alfredo Moreno, a mafia chief well-known enough in Interpol circles to have a nickname—the Car Thief. He had not lived in Naples for more than a decade, preferring to spend most of his time at his hilltop estate thirty miles away in a town named Fuggire. So small it didn’t show up on most maps, the town consisted of three buildings at an intersection of two rugged ro
ads, an abandoned monastery building, and Moreno’s hilltop property.

  The estate had once belonged to a religious order, willed to them by a wealthy cardinal who had established the monastery. It had passed back into private hands somewhere in the sixteenth or eighteenth century. Sometime after that it had become the family home for the Morenos, and was passed down on Alfredo’s father’s side of the family for at least eight generations.

  Its connections with the mafia were well-known and documented in the media. Alfredo had, of course, made all of the pretenses of going “straight,” supposedly denouncing his mobster roots and becoming in the Italian phrase, uno mano moderno—a modern hand.

  Alfredo was indeed modern, but then so was crime. Where his forebears had depended on handshakes and backroom conversations, he preferred encrypted BlackBerries and pay-as-you go cell phones.

  He made a great deal of money importing and exporting—he brought in olive oil and other goods from Turkey, Syria, and Libya, and exported cars to northern Africa and occasionally the Middle East. The cars were stolen; the oil and food were generally mislabeled and occasionally transported in defiance of various international sanctions, such as those requiring inspections and others forbidding trade with places like Iran, which Libya was particularly good in circumventing.

  Alfredo also supplemented his income by importing heroin from Afghanistan; it was a small amount of his overall business, but it did pay for the annual Christmas and Easter parties he threw in the town at the foot of his hilltop. It went without saying that he did not pay much in the way of taxes, though in Italy this was merely a sign of his smart business sense.

  Nuri realized that while many Italian magistrates would have loved the headlines that would come from arresting a mafioso, they could not stomach the obituaries that would inevitably follow. But he wasn’t counting on an arrest. He was hoping he could interest the Italian antimafia police in a visit to Alfredo’s estate, at which time he might talk to Alfredo about the Wolves—a conversation he assumed would go nowhere—but also borrow whatever home computers he had in his house. For the intercepts that had yielded the conversations led to other conversations indicating he was making financial transfers via the Internet; one of them was surely going to the Wolves’ account. With the murder so recent, there were likely to be traces of the payoff somewhere in the computer.

  With Western countries under pressure from the U.S. and the UN to do something about the Afghan heroin trade, which had thrived despite the apparent demise of the Taliban, Nuri decided to use that as his opening. He focused on the evidence connecting Alfredo to the trade and skipping any mention of the murder in Berlin, which he guessed the Italians weren’t too likely to care about.

  A tall, thin man in his mid-thirties met them at the ministry. He introduced himself as Pascal La Rota, the magistrate who specialized in the Naples-area mafia. He had a military air—close-cropped hair, wide chest, and a nose that seemed to have been broken when he was a young man. He offered the two Americans caffè—in Italy, this meant espresso—then began looking at the evidence Nuri had brought along.

  In the Italian justice system, a magistrate was closer to an American district attorney than a judge. They had a wide range of investigative powers and could be extremely unpleasant when crossed. Those who worked in the antimafia commission were reputed to be among the toughest in the nation—or the craziest.

  La Rota impressed Nuri as neither. His manner was mild, almost studious. He put on a pair of glasses and began reading the information Nuri had brought, while Gregor spooned sugar into her coffee.

  MY-PID had collected ships’ manifests and various information on different shipments connected to Alfredo’s empire. It showed that a middle-level heroin dealer in Florence who supplied a British network received yearly deposits into an Austrian bank account from one of Alfredo’s companies. It connected a truck stopped at the French border with a hundred kilos of heroin to another of Alfredo’s firms. And best of all, it included the transcripts of three phone calls between Alfredo and two contacts in Iran referring to shipments of flowers, which circumstantial evidence indicated was a code word for heroin.

  The transcripts were clearly the smoking gun, a direct link between the mobster and the drugs. They had been recorded nearly eighteen months before, as part of an NSA program collecting raw intelligence from Iran. But they weren’t of sufficient priority for even a computer transcription, let alone to trigger a human review. MY-PID had found them listed along with three thousand other files that it judged might have a connection to the heroin trade and Italy, and had done the brute translation work itself.

  As valuable as they were, they proved a sticking point for La Rota.

  “Interesting,” he said, leafing through the papers. His English was good enough that he could read the summary sheet in the original without referring to the translation that had been prepared for him. “But, as far as this is concerned for evidence—I must tell you, Italian laws are very strict about wiretaps.”

  “When they want to be,” said Gregor.

  Nuri shot her a glare he hoped would laser a hole through the side of her head. He’d told her to say absolutely nothing.

  A smile flickered in La Rota’s long, pale face, and the hairs in his thin goatee rustled. But his tone was almost scolding.

  “Whatever you and I may think of the law,” he said, focusing on Nuri, “we must observe it.”

  “True,” said Nuri. “Which is why the Libyan government filed its own indictments. The conversations were recorded in its jurisdiction.”

  He unfolded a letter from the Libyan justice ministry indicating not only interest in the case, but promising that an arrest warrant would be issued by the appropriate authorities by the end of the day.

  In Libyan time, “end of the day” meant within the next three months, a fact La Rota was clearly aware of.

  “I have dealt with the Libyans before,” he told Nuri. “On several occasions.”

  La Rota took off his glasses and began cleaning them.

  “Still, this is very persuasive,” he told Nuri. “I believe I will be able to get my superiors to consider action on its basis.”

  “I thought you were in charge,” said Nuri.

  “Oh I am, of course.”

  “Then can’t you authorize a raid?”

  The magistrate blanched. “A raid?”

  “A visit, I mean,” said Nuri. “An interview. To speak to Mr. Moreno?”

  “You don’t understand the situation, I’m afraid. One does not simply speak to Mr. Moreno.”

  “Arrest him, then.”

  “Perhaps we will be able to do that,” said La Rota. “Once the commission reviews the evidence.”

  “How long will this review last?” asked Gregor.

  Nuri glared at Gregor again, even though he would have asked the question himself had she not interrupted.

  “A while,” said La Rota indulgently.

  “That’s how long?”

  “It is very difficult to predict.”

  “By the end of the day?” said Nuri, as suggestively as he could.

  “A day? For something like this?” La Rota laughed.

  “Not next week,” said Nuri hopefully.

  “Oh no, not next week. Something like this—a case has to be made. The way must be prepared.”

  “You’re talking months,” said Gregor.

  La Rota held out his hands in a gesture that meant if that.

  “Is there any way to speed up the process?” Nuri asked.

  “Usually not.”

  “What if he murdered someone?” asked Gregor.

  “Oh, I’m sure a man like Alfredo Moreno has been responsible for murdering many people,” answered La Rota. “You would be surprised. These men are animals. They murder for pleasure, for business, for many reasons.”

  “If it was an important murder, in a prominent case?” said Nuri, grasping at straws.

  “In that case, perhaps by July.”

>   “I told you the Italians were impossible to deal with,” said Gregor as they walked out of the building. “It’s a complete waste of time.”

  The FBI agent had said no such thing—just the opposite in fact: she’d expressed optimism that they would be inside Moreno’s compound by nightfall. But Nuri was in no mood to argue.

  “We can interview him ourselves,” she continued. “I can get someone from the local office to act as a translator—”

  “We’re not interviewing him,” said Nuri sharply.

  “You’re just going to drop it?”

  “It’s not my call,” said Nuri noncommittally.

  He nodded at the Italian policeman at the foot of the steps of the justice building, then walked in the direction of their car. One thing he had to say for the Italians—they didn’t skimp when it came to police stations. The ministry was a veritable palace, with an exterior as grand as anything Nuri had ever seen in the States.

  “We can arrest him on an American warrant,” said Gregor. “I can arrange—”

  “You and what army?” said Nuri.

  Gregor had made quite a lot of progress in less than eight hours—first she was a wet blanket, now she was Wyatt Earp.

  Nuri had rented a small Fiat, which put him uncomfortably close to the FBI agent once they got inside the car. She smelled as if she’d had salami for lunch.

  “I’ll drop you off at the airport,” he said, programming the GPS. “You want Euro C, right?”

  “Let’s drive there,” said Gregor. “It will only take us a few hours. We can scout it out.”

  “No, I have to get back to Berlin,” said Nuri. “There are a few more things to check out up there.”

  “Drop me off at a rental place, then,” said Gregor.

  Had she guessed what he was up to and called his bluff? Or was she really intending on going there herself?

  Either way, he couldn’t take the chance of her interfering.

  “I don’t think it’s a good idea to just drive around the estate,” said Nuri. “Don’t you have to clear your activities with your Rome office?”

  “Not on this. My boss gave me carte blanche.”