The Wolf: A Novel Read online

  I picked up on the second ring.

  “Package gift-wrapped and paid for,” Burke said.

  “Good,” I said. “Everyone get out before the store closed?”

  “With time to spare,” Burke said.

  “All good then,” I said, and was about to end the call.

  “Not all,” Burke said.

  I paused and sat back in my chair. “I’m still here,” I said.

  “There is one problem.”

  “What kind of problem?” I asked.

  “It’s an internal,” Burke said.

  “How close?”

  “Not sure yet,” Burke said. “But close is bad enough.”

  I put the phone down and rested it on a coffee table to my left. I leaned my head against a thick pillow, my left arm bandaged and sore from the bullet wound. I stared out into the garden of Angela’s villa, alone in her guest room, and knew I had more to deal with than Raza and his cell or Vladimir and his Russian crew.

  I knew now the traitor was in my camp.

  Chapter 38

  Rome, Italy

  Raza watched as two of his men duct-taped Santos to a steam pipe against the far wall of the cramped basement.

  “My people get wind of this shit, you are going to get a taste of serious trouble,” Santos said to Raza. “There’s no need for this. You want something from me, you ask. You don’t tape me to no damn pipe.”

  “You have no people,” Raza said. “You’re just a gunrunner and I can find one on any corner, in any city.”

  “Maybe, maybe not,” Santos said, still not certain what Raza wanted and what information he had on him.

  “I trusted you,” Raza said.

  “I never burned you, Raza,” Santos said. “The deliveries were always on time and merchandise was top of the line as promised. If this is about your team getting wiped out the other night, that’s not on me. That’s bad luck on your part.”

  “You weren’t there,” Raza said. “But that doesn’t mean you didn’t have anything to do with what happened.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Let me refresh you, then,” Raza said, “and see if I can help you remember.”

  Raza walked over to a small wooden table, picked up a shearing knife and held it in his right hand, blade first, running his fingers along the serrated edges. “You know the man who killed my men and stole the weapons I bought from you,” he said to Santos, speaking without looking at him, his eyes focused on the knife in his hand. “You might even know some of the people who work for him.”

  “I know who he is,” Santos said. “I wouldn’t be any good in my line of work if I didn’t. But I know who all the bosses of the syndicates are. It’s a part of my business to know my business.”

  “You would do anything for money,” Raza said. “I knew that when I started to work with you. I didn’t think you would betray someone for a payoff. But then that mistake is on me.”

  Santos didn’t respond. He stared at Raza, still with the shearing knife in his hand, and knew he had been outed as a snitch. He also knew there was nothing he could offer Raza—no weapons, no information, no amount of money—that would allow him to walk free and clear from that stifling hot basement.

  Santos knew he was going to die today.

  “I took a gamble,” Santos said. “The Wolf had me in a corner, like you do now. When you’re stuck in the middle, you got no choice but play both ends, and that’s what I did. I fed you guns and I fed them info about the guns and I got money in both hands. It was the best deal I could make for myself and I took it. So would you.”

  “I doubt it,” Raza said.

  “You say that because you never been there,” Santos said. “If you got any luck at all, you won’t ever be. Now I may have told them when your shipments were due and what was in your buy, but I never told them about any safe house and there’s a good reason for that.”

  “Which is?”

  “I don’t know about your safe houses,” Santos said. “You never told me and I never asked. It was never a part of our deal. So you can find fault for me tipping off the Wolf about our deals. But that wipeout the other night? That’s not on me. That’s on one of your people.”

  Raza stepped up closer to Santos and slapped him across the face with the back of his free hand. “There are no traitors in my group,” he said.

  Santos smiled, a tear running down a side of his face, his cheek red from the blow. “Baby, everybody’s a traitor.”

  Raza glared at Santos. “A traitor dies a horrible death,” he said. “It’s deserved and it sends a signal. I might even send whatever’s left of your body to the Wolf. Show what happens when he sends a turncoat into my camp.”

  Santos let out a loud laugh. “You think he gives a shit what happens to me?” he asked. “And what do you think he’s going to do when they show him chunks of my body? Run and hide? Men like him? Like me? We come into this life knowing what the end of the road looks like and that don’t scare us. And guys like you scare us even less. The Wolf’s a gangster. You’re a punk. A whole world of difference.”

  Raza held the wooden end of the shearing knife and plunged the blade deep into the center of Santos’s stomach. He held it there, looking into the older man’s eyes, waiting for the first signs of the death tremble, feeling the warm blood flowing over his hand and wrist. Raza moved the knife up, cutting through tissue and veins, seeing Santos’s eyes roll back and blood form at the corners of his mouth. He released his grip on the knife, stepped away from the pool of blood forming around his feet and nodded toward the two young men hovering in a corner of the basement. “Have him bleed out,” Raza said, “and then torch the body. It will be as if he never even existed.”

  Chapter 39

  New York City

  “How long have you known?” I asked.

  “About a week, give or take,” Big Mike said.

  We were sitting at the bar of a restaurant in downtown Manhattan. We had the place to ourselves, the lunch staff not due in for work for at least another hour.

  “But you waited until now to tell me,” I said.

  “I needed to be certain, Vincent,” Big Mike said. “I needed to be one hundred percent nailed down sure on this before I brought it in.”

  “How did you track the calls to him?”

  “It wasn’t easy,” Big Mike said. “He’s good; always has been. Almost as good as I am. Bad for him that almost doesn’t cut it. His biggest mistake was thinking no one would be looking in his direction.”

  “There any way this could be a setup?” I asked. “Have us look inside our house while it’s someone else doing the dirty work?”

  “I was hoping it would fall that way as well,” Big Mike said. “Had it double- and triple-checked. There is no one else. Jimmy is Vladimir’s inside man.”

  The news had devastated me. I had difficulty coming to terms with it on so many levels, from the personal to the professional. At first glance it was a senseless and foolish move, even a cruel one, knowing what had recently happened to my family. Acts of betrayal are common in my line of work and expected. I was never so naive as to think it could not happen to me and was always on the lookout for any sign someone had his eye on more than just my back.

  But I never thought it would come from Jimmy.

  He was my closest confidant, the one I went to with my doubts, concerns, fears, and he was always ready to give me sage, sound, and comforting advice. If there was anyone who knew my secrets, who could discern my motives and anticipate my actions, it was the brilliant young man confined to life in a wheelchair.

  And then there was Jack, who Jimmy had been watching. Jimmy’s betrayal endangered my son’s life.

  “What are you going to do?” Big Mike asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “For the first time since I’ve been doing this, I don’t know.”

  “You can’t let this sit,” Big Mike said. “And you can’t let the fact the traitor is family stand
in the way.”

  “There’s more to it than that,” I said.

  “Only if you let there be,” Big Mike said. “Tell me something. If it were me instead of Jimmy that had betrayed you, would you be this unsure of what to do?”

  I shook my head. “No,” I said. “You would be taken care of, no doubt. I wouldn’t like it, but that wouldn’t stop me from doing it.”

  “And Jimmy’s different why?” Big Mike asked. “Because of his condition? Because you like to think the two of you are brothers? All that’s out the window now, Vincent. You got a traitor, and that traitor is on the inside as close as close is. He is a risk to the entire operation. And to you, to the Strega, to me, and most important of all, to Jack.”

  “You think Jimmy would let harm come to Jack?” I said.

  “To my way of thinking, he already has,” Big Mike said. “Your enemies have access now, the kind they could never get without an inside connection.”

  “What about what happened on the plane?” I asked, barely able to get the words out. “Was he part of that plan?”

  “Very unlikely,” Big Mike said. “It was the first thing I had checked, and so far he comes up clean in that regard. In all likelihood, Jimmy made the flip sometime this summer, a week, maybe two after we had the council meeting.”

  “Is there any way we can make use of Jimmy?” I asked. “At least until I get a handle on how to deal with the situation.”

  “Give me a for instance.”

  “What if we tell Jimmy we know where Raza is planning to hit, that he may even be thinking of a double attack?” I said. “That we’re on to him and we’re going to make a move.”

  “And he relays that info to Vladimir’s crew, who then pass it on to Raza,” Big Mike said. “That happens, what does it do for us?”

  “One of two things, if it works,” I said. “We may pick up chatter about their actual plans, which will point us in the right direction.”

  “Or?”

  “Or they rush the plan,” I said. “Move up the date and put their pieces in motion at a faster clip. And from their movements we can pinpoint the attack sites.”

  “Could work,” Big Mike said. “I’ll rig it so Jimmy will never get wise he’s being tapped incoming and out. But like I said, he’s good at this and a lot smarter than any of the guys on the other end of his relay. We’ve been on him for about a week, light touches mostly, not enough for him to pick up a trace. But with a full 24/7 it won’t be long before a guy like Jimmy figures he’s being monitored.”

  “Will he be able to tell who’s doing it?”

  “He won’t need to,” Big Mike said. “We’ll be his only suspects.”

  I sat quietly for a few minutes and then walked from the front of the bar toward a large coffee machine. I looked over at Big Mike, who seemed as crushed as I was by the news. He caught the look and shook his head. “I’ll buy as much time as I can,” he said. “But I don’t think I can run it for more than another week before he catches on.”

  “That’s enough time,” I said.

  “This is really going to shake your uncle,” Big Mike said. “Old school mob like him do not take this kind of news well. My father was cut the same way. They don’t care who it is or why they did it or how sorry they are. You betray the family, you’re no longer part of the family. You’re gone.”

  “Have you been monitoring the old man’s phones?”

  “Never had reason to,” Big Mike said. He seemed taken aback by the hard shift in my tone. “We weren’t looking Jimmy’s way, either. He just fell into our laps.”

  “Who initiated contact with the Russians?” I asked.

  “I have to go deeper into Jimmy’s phone logs to answer that and it might not even be there,” Big Mike said. “There’s really no way to tell. I had to guess, I would put it on Vladimir. I doubt very much Jimmy, no matter his intent, would reach out to the Russian mob.”

  “How does he communicate with them?” I asked. “They can talk to him, but how does he respond?”

  “The calls are always from the Russian end,” Big Mike said. “Jimmy answers either by coded text or through an audio relay patched in through his laptop. Perfect inside man if you think about it—guy who can’t speak. Who would ever suspect?”

  “I should have,” I said.

  “You want to give a heads-up to the Strega?” Big Mike asked. “She’s been on the money with us. And not only is she close to Jimmy, she trusts him. Up to today we all did.”

  “Let’s leave everything the way it is,” I said. “I’ll deal with Jimmy when I have to. Maybe there’s more to this than a clear betrayal. Or maybe I just would like to think there is.”

  “You mean he’s working Vladimir?”

  “Something like that,” I said. “You said it yourself—Jimmy is very smart and I don’t give him much to do, other than look after my son and run the computer end of the business. Maybe this is his way of showing us he can be a bigger help. He sees us focused on Raza and his cell. He also knows that other than the Strega, none of the syndicates are stepping into this in a big way. They’re letting it play out, see who’s still standing once the smoke clears.”

  “So he pretends to do a flip?” Big Mike said.

  “I’m not saying that’s what it is,” I said. “All I’m saying is that is what it could be.”

  “Which is why we wait,” Big Mike said.

  “Exactly,” I said. “If I’m going to have to dust Jimmy, I have to be sure that he’s a traitor instead of somebody who’s looking out for me and the family.”

  “Which of those two you really think it is?” Big Mike asked.

  “I wish to hell I knew,” I said.

  Chapter 40

  Vatican City, Italy

  “This is the room where the cardinals gather when they need to choose a new Pope,” Raza said, gazing up at Michelangelo’s massive and stunning work, The Last Judgment. “The smoke they show on television? It goes through a tube in the rear of the room. If it’s brown, they have yet to decide. If it’s white, there’s a new man in charge.”

  “The guidebook says they sit in these wooden chairs along the walls and discuss the possible choices,” Avrim said. “Hard for me to believe it’s all done in such a civil way.”

  “That’s because it isn’t,” Raza said. “It’s all corruption and deal-making and back door agreements. Religion plays no role in the selection of a Pope. It’s a business like any other.”

  “It is an impressive room,” Avrim said, staring now at the massive ceiling filled with the beauty of Michelangelo’s Creation. “I’ve been here on five, maybe six occasions and it never fails to move me.”

  “The artist has little to do with the religion,” Raza said. “In his own way, Michelangelo was a rebel. They all were—Raphael, Da Vinci, Caravaggio.”

  “Yet, look at the work,” Avrim said. “It’s as spiritual as any I’ve seen. They must have had some degree of faith to agree to such undertakings.”

  “They had faith in their talents,” Raza said. “Their true beliefs rested in their skills. They ignored all who dared question the work and had contempt for the mildest of criticism. They wanted nothing from their patrons other than the funds needed to complete their work. In many ways, they were no different than the two of us in league with the Russian. I don’t value his opinion. I don’t seek his counsel. All that concerns me is that the money keeps flowing in and he helps keep as many of our men safe as possible until our mission is complete.”

  The enormous Sistine Chapel was packed wall-to-wall with tourists, as it is most days of the year. Vatican guards walked among the crowd asking for silence and looking to prevent photos being taken with flash lighting. The art in the chapel, originally commissioned by Pope Julius II in the late thirteenth century and rebuilt under the orders of Sixtus IV, took up every inch of the three levels of the room.

  Avrim stared at each of the frescoes that lined the walls along the second tier, overcome by the sheer majesty of the work.
“I know you don’t want to hear this, but I feel I must say it,” he said to Raza.

  Raza looked away from The Last Judgment and gazed over at him. “I’m listening,” he said.

  “I wish you had chosen other targets,” Avrim said, hesitant even to speak the words. “A government building, perhaps, or a bridge, a tunnel, a harbor. It seems wrong to destroy something that comes this close to perfection.”

  “I know,” Raza said, “and that’s why they are perfect choices. Their destruction will be an emotional blow of epic proportions. Look at these people, lost in wonder and useless prayer, gazing at the work as if the figures on the walls were real and could walk among them. To have such an effect on so many speaks to the power of a great artist. And that’s exactly what I will be doing, only in reverse. I will strip them of this perfection, tear away their dream, rip apart their beliefs. After this mission is completed and the sites are brought to ruin, people will be left with nothing but memories. And when they think of Michelangelo or even mention his name, they will have to think of me and mention mine. For I will be forever linked with the Divine One.”

  “You once thought yourself an artist,” Avrim said, uncertain if he should push the conversation further. “You had the talent to be one.”

  “I am an artist, Avrim,” Raza said.

  “We are on a path of destruction,” Avrim said, speaking freely now, no longer concerned with the consequences that could result from such an act of defiance. “We do not create anything other than bombs fools like me strap on because of their belief in people like you. We go out and destroy and are hated for it.”

  “You do not yet understand the importance of our task,” Raza said. “And perhaps you will die never knowing. That would be a shame, since what we do is not for glory or gold. We ask only to be allowed to live our lives on our own soil and worship in our own fashion. We have never declared war on anyone. But war is always declared on us. And you are correct when you say we are hated because of the destruction we caused. But we are also feared, and I would much rather people tremble in my presence than find comfort in it.”