The Wolf: A Novel Page 6

  The footwear was what first caught Frantoni’s eye. It told him Rome was not her final destination. She was on the move to another city, a place where the terrain would be more hospitable to the boots she had chosen. They also would give her more traction in the event she needed to move quickly, to evade authorities or run clear from the heat and debris of an explosion. Frantoni was also aware that Timberland boots are a desired commodity among young terrorists, often given to them as gifts on the day of a crucial mission.

  He pulled a BlackBerry from the rear pocket of his jeans, hit a button and waited through two rings. “If she reaches for her luggage,” he said, “have them set off the fire alarm. Make sure they make enough noise to scare the hell out of the passengers. The more confusion, the better my chance to grab her before she can do damage. If it looks like I can’t get to her in time or if she’s holding a secondary device, take her out. Head shot only. If she goes down, she stays down.”

  Frantoni slipped the phone back into his jeans and walked toward the redhead. She had her back to him, eyes on a brown leather satchel snaking its way down the baggage wheel, inching within reach, her right hand poised to grab it. Frantoni brushed against her and smiled. “This is always the longest part of the trip,” he said.

  The redhead gave him the slightest of nods, attention focused on the satchel now less than a dozen feet away. He followed her eyes, turned his head, spotted the satchel and then looked back to the young woman. “Is that yours?” he asked.

  The woman nodded.

  “Allow me,” he said, sliding toward the approaching satchel.

  “I can manage,” she responded in a firm voice.

  Frantoni turned toward the woman, inches from her face. He grabbed her right arm with his left hand and held it. “I insist,” he said, his voice taking on a harsher tone.

  He held onto her, turned his body slightly, pulled the satchel off the carousel and dropped it by his left leg. “I also insist you not make any sudden moves. As fast as you think you can run, I run a lot faster. And I would prefer to walk you out of here than leave you dead on a filthy floor.”

  “Who the hell are you?” she asked. She was frightened but shielded it with an air of defiance. “What do you want?”

  Frantoni moved close enough to kiss her and said in a low voice, “I need to know how you planned to set off the device. I need to know if there’s a timer on it and if there’s a backup, in the event something happened to you. Give me that in the next thirty seconds and there’s a chance we’ll walk out of here alive, along with everyone else in the terminal.”

  “What if I don’t know anything about a device?” she said. “What if I don’t know what you’re talking about?”

  “I’ll kill you,” Frantoni said. “And if I’m right about a secondary set-off and somebody else waiting to hit a switch, I’ll die with you. Now, you may want that to happen. In which case consider it a victory for you and a loss for me.”

  The woman took a deep breath, her hazel eyes on Frantoni, still composed, with a trace of uncertainty crossing her brow. “What if I tell you what you want to hear?”

  “We take the device and walk out of here,” he said. “We go to my car and drive to my office. A bomb crew will take the device and you and I will sit. Have coffee. Talk.”

  The woman swung a few strands of hair from her forehead and smiled. “You might have the right device,” she said, her confidence back, matched with a swagger he had not yet seen, “but you picked the wrong girl.” She rested her head on Frantoni’s shoulder and whispered into his ear, “I’m not the one supposed to set it off.”

  Frantoni released his grip on her arm and pushed her away. He scanned the faces in the baggage area, estimating the starter would need to be within fifty feet of the satchel.

  “You have less than a minute,” the redhead said, standing behind him, hands and arms folded across her chest. “That’s not enough time to find the face you’re looking to find.”

  “Unless I bring the face to me,” Frantoni said.

  “There’s only one way to make that happen,” she said, “and that’s not in the good guy rule book.”

  He turned and faced the redhead, nine millimeter held low in his right hand. “I’m not a good guy,” he said.

  He raised the weapon and fired two bullets into her chest. The force lifted her off her feet, arms and legs spread wide. She landed with a thud against the hard floor, her head and back taking the brunt of the blow, lines of blood flowing out of both corners of her mouth, her eyes staring at a gray ceiling, red hair matted to one side.

  She was dead before she hit the ground.

  Frantoni wheeled around, surveyed the screaming crowd. Passengers were scurrying for cover, children shielded by the bodies of their mothers, the elderly collapsing to the floor, hands covering the backs of their heads. Frantoni grabbed the satchel in his left hand and ran, heading for the terminal exit, airport security in pursuit, screams and shots coming at him from all sides.

  He was holding a satchel packed with heavy explosives in his left hand. Police snipers were stationed in the areas above the terminals, frozen in place, unsure of their next move.

  And somewhere in the middle of the madness, a terrorist waited to press a red button and slaughter hundreds.

  Chapter 9

  New York City

  I sat behind a desk, a hand-carved chessboard composed of characters from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories spread before me. I moved a pawn made to resemble a London bobby, sat back and gazed up at the still photo that filled the length of a fifty-two-inch flat screen. I was in the den of a four-bedroom apartment I kept in a Manhattan high-rise, staring at a face that belonged to a young man with short cropped hair, dark, penetrating eyes, and well-groomed brown beard. I had read through a thick file folder, now resting next to the board, filled with details both monotonous and monstrous. The young man was twenty-nine, born in Chicago, raised by relatives in Egypt and educated at Washington University in St. Louis and at Yale. He was the older of two sons, his father a respected chemist, his mother a social worker, both now living in a town house north of Michigan Avenue.

  His name was Alshair Al-Madel and he was a chemical engineer by profession and one of the world’s most feared terrorists by choice. A long list of biographical information ran down the left side of his photograph, but I didn’t need to read it. I knew all I needed to know about him, the cause he believed in, the religion he embraced. Al-Madel had a small but loyal following of roughly two hundred men, all as educated as he was and equally as fanatical. He was well-funded, holding private bank accounts in Switzerland, Japan, and Saudi Arabia, three countries where banks are known to ask few questions. He traveled often and seldom slept in the same bed more than three nights in a row. He had a wife and two sons living in the suburbs of Cairo and a teenage mistress who occupied the top floor of a modest hotel on an island in southern Italy. But he spent the bulk of his time with a third woman, an American from Northern California, whose biographical information remained sketchy. All I knew about her at this point was that she had graduated from Northwestern with a degree in economics, worked for two years at a small accounting firm in New York, and met Al-Madel there. She became smitten with his charm, then his cause.

  I sat back in the leather chair and looked at the chessboard. The crime bosses were right to question my desire to declare open war on the terrorists and their sponsors. It was difficult enough to go head-to-head with an enemy you knew.

  Here, we would be up against thousands of young men who fit Al-Madel’s profile, eager to die and take as many innocents with them as possible. They weren’t after control of an operation or looking to come out of their gamble with a profit. Their victory rested in death, their spoils were the remains they left behind—in a schoolyard, a church, a crowded airport, crashing a plane through a building, or dropping vials of poison in the middle of a packed train. How do you take down somebody whose goal is to be taken down? Carbone, the F
rench crime boss, had asked as we made our way out of the meeting. If you come up with an answer, maybe we have a chance. If not, we’re going to be knee deep in blood for many years.

  Carbone wasn’t wrong.

  I had designed a road map I believed would lead to victory. But I felt there was still something missing. I leaned forward and moved my pawn in front of a Victorian-era version of a knight and looked up at Al-Madel’s photo. There were too many of them. Too many Al-Madels spread throughout the world, each more eager to die than the next. I needed to figure a way to lessen the impact of such a numerical disadvantage. I would need to be three steps ahead of them at every play—detect their objective, break their plan, reach them before they could do damage.

  And the only way for me to do this was to know who was calling the shots. Who was directing the Al-Madels of the world? If I knew for certain who that person was—or who those people were—and was able to anticipate the moves, then we had a chance.

  The terrorist landscape was changing. It was no longer solely the realm of Middle Eastern fundamentalists, though they got all the attention. Each country had its own growing contingent, either disenchanted with the direction of their government or fueled by drugs and ready to right perceived wrongs. These free floaters would be the most difficult targets to pinpoint, because their faces could be any face, anywhere—from a neglected teenager in Ohio to an abused housewife in Budapest to a middle-age drifter in Norway. I would need to solve the riddle of a thousand nondescript faces.

  I held the queen, debating whether to move her in direct line of a rook and a knight, anticipating the consequences of such an action to the second move, never the first. I knew Vladimir would utilize terrorists who did not fit the profile, promise them great wealth or financial security for their families.

  His first move was obvious—keep the Colombian cartels in the loop, make them think they were more than shadows of the Mexican gangs who had grown so large that they now eclipsed their once more powerful adversaries. Together, the Mexicans, Colombians, Russians—and the terrorists they were exploiting—had enough manpower and financial resources to enter the profitable world of organized crime and disrupt the efficient operations that had long been in place.

  We are at our best when we work in the shadows, Kodoma had told me. From there we make millions, and few eyes look our way. If we are lucky, no one notices—and those who do are not upset we exist. To some people we are a threat and a scourge, to others a necessity. These Russians and their terrorist friends are not like us. They do not think of what we do as business. They do not believe in the shadow world. They choose to work under the light of day. To travel down that path is madness. But that is who we will be fighting—madmen. And if we are to fight them, it must be to the death. There can be no other way. If I bring my group in and join in battle with you, I will never accept a peace proposal from our opponents. Never. We fight until there is no one left to fight.

  I moved the queen into position. She was surrounded and looked to be facing defeat. The first move would give her clearance. The second move would give her the upper hand. The third would lead to victory.

  It was now time to play for real.

  The first battle of our war would begin on this very day.

  Chapter 10

  Rome, Italy

  Remi Frantoni ran out of the international arrivals terminal and into the sharp sunlight. He was followed by dozens of passengers and airport employees seeking refuge from the turmoil.

  Remi crossed the walkway, dodging a bus and two taxis, feverishly looking for the one face he needed to find. He ran toward the parking garage, heading for the off-ramp, still holding the satchel, his police shield clipped to a chain and dangling around his neck, desperate to find a place to unload the bag where its explosion would do the least damage. As he ran, sweat streaming down his cheeks and across his back and chest, he wondered why it hadn’t been set off yet, why the person with the device hadn’t hit the button. An experienced hand would have detonated it in the airport, the second he saw the woman hit the ground. The device hidden in the satchel also eliminated any concern about a suicide bomber. That led Remi to conclude he was dealing with a trained recruit on his first mission; while it’s not much of a task to set off a bomb in a terrorist camp under the eyes of seasoned killers, it is quite another to press the button in a crowded airport and watch hundreds of people be killed and wounded. The first murder is always the most perilous, even for a terrorist.

  Remi stopped running, turned and walked back toward the scattering crowds. He was working on instinct now, a risk he was willing to take, one he really had no choice but to take. He could run with the satchel until the bomb squad arrived, but with traffic congestion and clogged roads leading out of the city, that could be ten, fifteen minutes away. And dropping it in a safer area, as far from the airport as he could find, helped only so much. There were roadways, garages, traffic, and hundreds of people walking in all directions.

  Regardless of where he left the thing, innocent people would die.

  He was close, Remi could sense it, feel it, willing to ride his hunch to the finish line. He inched forward, taking deliberate steps, glancing at the people running past, each one desperate to get as far from the airport as possible. In the distance, he heard the sirens, knew the bomb squad was close, knew his window to nab the terrorist was narrowing.

  Remi smiled when he saw the young man standing next to a taxi stand, one hand in the pocket of a soiled blue windbreaker. He was rail thin with long brown hair and a cropped beard that did little to hide his youth. The boy was pasty white and seemed to shiver even under the glare of a warm sun. Remi crossed the walkway, sidestepping a Fiat 124 speeding toward him. The sirens grew louder, increasing the crowd’s distress to a feverish level.

  Remi stepped in next to the young man, one hand grabbing his free arm and holding it tight. “You can come out of this alive,” he said to the boy. “We all can. All you need is to stay calm and hand me the device in your pocket. But do it slowly. Fast moves make me nervous.”

  “I’m not a fool,” the young man said, struggling to regain his composure. “You’ll kill me the second I hand it to you. And if you don’t, the others who will be here will for certain.”

  “You were a fool,” Remi said, catching the young man’s British accent, reading him as well-bred and well-educated, another misguided missionary recruited into a battle whose motives he would never live long enough to understand, “when you agreed to step into this mess. Now you have a chance at smart. You can come out of this without blood on your hands. Take a look around. You see all these people? They can die because of what you do. Or they can live because of what you don’t.”

  The young man took a deep breath. “I’m not afraid,” he said.

  “I know you’re not,” Remi said.

  “I just didn’t think it would be like this,” the young man said. “I didn’t think it would feel the way it does.”

  “You’re not a fanatic,” Remi said. He caught sight of a police van screeching to a halt in front of the terminal. “But you’re down to seconds. Hand me the device and live, or set it off and die.”

  “You’ll die, too,” the young man said. “The other police officers. Hundreds of others.”

  “That’s right,” Remi said. “You are the one, the only one, who makes that decision.”

  The young man eased the device out of his pocket, gripping it in his right hand. He was sweating. Remi saw the control was crudely made, the kind he hated the most because something always went wrong with them. There were wires wrapped around a square box large enough to hold a wristwatch. Brown tape covered the detonator and there was a switch in the center of the box. The young man’s thumb rested on the edge of the switch.

  Remi took two steps back, placed the satchel next to his left leg and held his gun by his side. “What’s your name?” he asked.

  “John,” the young man said.

  “Well, John,” Remi said, “se
ems you and I are in position, as are the snipers above us. But truth is, we’re the only players here. Whatever happens will be because of what one of us does.”

  “What about me?” John asked.

  “If you give me the device?”

  John nodded.

  “You’ll be arrested,” Remi said. “You’ll be asked about the people who sent you here—names, locations, along those lines.”

  “Will I go to prison?”

  “I don’t know, John,” Remi said. “But I know right now the only person dead in this is a terrorist, and that works in your favor.”

  Remi stared at the young man for several seconds and then holstered his gun, his hands inches from the device. “I’m going to help you, John,” he said. “The ones who sent you? They were wrong about you.”

  “In what way?”

  “You’re not a murderer,” Remi said. “If you were, you would have set off the bomb the minute I put her down in the terminal. But you didn’t. You waited. You came out into the open air and waited, hoping someone like me would let you off the hook.”

  Remi put his hand on the box and eased it out of John’s grip. He held it cupped in both hands and backed away, signaling with his head for the bomb squad members to advance. He waited as a unit rushed toward him from across the walkway, his eyes on John, who seemed relieved his ordeal was nearly over.

  “You did well,” Remi said to him.

  “I know,” John said, a smile spreading across his face. “Better than you, I would say.”

  Remi stared at John, followed the young man’s eyes over toward an overweight man in a blue smock standing on the other end of the taxi stand. John looked at Remi and said, “I’m sorry I wasted your time.”

  Remi knew he had no chance to take down the overweight man, knew that his hunch had set him off course. He had gone for the obvious, the worst mistake a cop could make. He had narrowed his scope, and now it would not only cost him his life, but the lives of many innocent people, those he had been sent there to save.