Killing Pace Page 2

  Not once did he ask Lisa for her input.

  As they rounded the end of an aisle near the single working cashier, the front doors slid open and a man in his late thirties entered. He was accompanied by a girl of about ten. Roland pulled Lisa closer. “Here, you push the cart,” he whispered. He led her down the next aisle.

  After a few more minutes of hurried shopping, he told her to take the cart to the checkout. “Start unloading. I’ll be right there.” He headed for the beer cooler.

  This is your chance! Run! Out the door!

  A small television was playing on the wall behind the cashier. It was tuned to CNN.

  No! Tell the cashier to call the police!

  As Lisa wrestled with competing impulses, the news anchor was reporting on a plane crash in the French Alps. A sudden chill washed over her. For some reason beyond morbid curiosity, the story seized her attention.

  “We’re learning chilling new details about the last moments of Germanwings Flight 9525, as well as about the copilot who intentionally crashed the jet, carrying 150 passengers and crew, into the French Alps. CNN’s senior international correspondent Frederik Pleitgen is in Cologne, Germany. Frederik, a German newspaper has just…”

  A vision of twisted wreckage suddenly assaulted her mind. A huge chunk of fuselage lying in a field … a foreign policeman wearing high-visibility gear … painted words that read CLIPPER MAID OF THE SEAS …

  “103,” she muttered. She turned to the cashier. “It was 103! It was 103 that killed him!”

  “Killed who, dear?”

  “103 … 103…”

  She stood there, almost in a trance, repeating the number.

  Roland arrived with a brace of six-packs.

  The cashier said, “Mister, I think there’s something wrong with your wife!”

  Roland set down the beer.

  “103!” Lisa’s eyes were wide and faraway. “103, Roland!”

  “Shit!” Roland grabbed Lisa by the arm and pulled her toward the door.

  “103!” Lisa cried. “It’s something important, Roland!”

  He ignored her. As the doors slid open, he half-pulled, half-dragged her across the sidewalk and into the space between his pickup and a late-model car parked next to it.

  In that instant, Lisa’s last vestiges of restraint gave way to boiling anger.

  “LET ME GO!” she shouted. “I need to find out!” With a strength that took her captor by surprise, she yanked her arm free and ran back to the store. Impatient with the timed delay of the sliding doors, she forced them open with her fingers. She rushed over to the alarmed cashier and stood, transfixed, staring at the television.

  Almost instantly she was struck by a blinding flash of memory …

  * * *

  It was late at night and a woman was moaning. The sound had woken her. She left her bed and ran crying to the woman.

  Crying because she was afraid.

  The woman wrapped her in her arms, but it took many long seconds before she could speak. Finally, the woman wiped her eyes.

  “I want you to be strong,” she said, looking deep into the child’s eyes.

  “I am strong!” the child sobbed. “You teached me! I want to grow up like you! I want to be just like you!”

  “And you will, my little angel. It’s just you and me now.” The woman clenched her teeth, suppressing a sob. “Just you and me.”

  It had taken two more days for her to understand.

  Two more days to understand that her father, her wonderful, beautiful, loving Papa, would never be coming home.

  He had died on Pan Am 103—blown out of the sky over Lockerbie, Scotland.

  * * *

  As the horror of that memory crystalized in Lisa’s shocked consciousness, other memories began rushing in. But even through this flood of distractions, another part of her brain had switched onto high alert.

  That other part of her brain registered a sudden change in the cashier’s facial expression.

  And it simultaneously registered movement coming from her right.

  She spun in time to see Roland closing fast. He reached for her, his face contorted with rage. Guided by some inexplicable instinct, Lisa’s body swung into action. Her assailant’s fingers came up empty as she neatly sidestepped his lumbering form, and in the same movement lashed out with a lightning kick.

  There was an audible crack as the blow shattered his left knee. He crashed into a newspaper stand, toppled a greeting card display, and landed in a writhing heap. As he struggled to rise, Lisa knocked him cold with a single, well-timed punch.

  She kneeled beside his unconscious form. She pushed back an eyelid and then checked his throat for a pulse. Satisfied, she was about to rise when she noticed the front page of one of the newspapers that had been scattered by his fall. It carried the story of the air crash in the French Alps. She scooped up the paper, rose to her feet, and faced the ashen-faced cashier. By now, the woman had a cell phone pressed to her ear.

  “Sorry about the mess,” Lisa said, with eerie calmness.

  She started for the door.

  The male customer who had entered after them had witnessed the commotion from a few dozen feet away. In contrast to his own shocked expression, the preteen girl at his side wore a look of unreserved awe.

  “Lady!” the man called, hurrying to block her exit. “Wait for the police.”

  Lisa fixed him with a stare that stopped him in his tracks.

  She stepped out into the sunlight and slowly walked away.

  Crossing the street, her step faltered. Fragmented memories flashed through her mind. She couldn’t remember exactly who she was, but she was now positive she’d had another life. Another past. Not the past Roland’s fabric of lies had woven for her.

  Not that life. Not that life at all.

  Disturbing mental images welled up from nowhere. Heedless of her surroundings, she wandered into an empty lot, almost tripping over a faded realty sign that leaned at a crazy angle. She found herself standing beside a dilapidated boat trailer that was parked among tall weeds near the back of the property. She sat down hard on the trailer’s corroded yoke.

  As she stared at the front page of the newspaper, a torrent of revelations flooded through her consciousness.

  First came tears of joy at a life miraculously rediscovered.

  Followed by sobs of horror at what those memories revealed.

  They kept coming … and coming … and coming … threatening to overwhelm her.

  When the sheriff’s deputy found her, she was retching up her breakfast.

  He stood back respectfully, waiting until she’d finished.

  “Miss, my name is Deputy Newman. We had a call from the market. Do you need a doctor?”

  Lisa looked up, taking in the uniform, the young male face, the look of concern. She wiped her mouth on her sleeve and stood up. Instead of the embarrassment or nervousness the deputy had expected, he found himself looking into a pair of dark eyes that were cold with unyielding intent.

  “I want to report a missing person,” Lisa said.

  “Who’s that, ma’am?”

  “Me.”

  SARAH

  3

  OCTOBER 2014

  The offices of the Consolato Stati Uniti D’America in Sicily were located in an eight-story building in Palermo, at 1 Via Giovan Battista Vaccarini. The consulate shared space in the building with the local offices of Istat, the Italian National Institute of Statistics. To the east, the shabbier, graffiti-covered neighboring buildings housed the offices of Agenzia del Territoria, the territorial tax agency, and the Sicilian Regional Council.

  Customs and Border Protection Officer Sarah Lockhart was sitting in front of a gigantic desk. The desk was so offensively ultramodern, so surgically clean-lined, so spotlessly melamine, that it told her all she needed to know about the man sitting behind it.

  United States consul Anthony Nicosia examined the contents of a thin file that lay before him. He was a short, thickset man
with bushy eyebrows and the drooping features of a bloodhound. He looked unhappy, and Sarah—who’d had her share of encounters with prickly low-level bureaucrats—was pretty sure she knew why. Until twenty-four hours ago, Consul Nicosia had been completely unaware of her presence in Sicily, mainly because the powers in Washington had pointedly not bothered to advise him of her posting. Encouraged by her bosses’ attitude, Sarah had spent the last two weeks setting herself up in a loft apartment on Via Reitano, near the port in Catania, before bothering to make contact. During that period, she’d liaised with her counterparts in the Guardia di Finanza, Italy’s police responsible for financial crime and smuggling. Then, with the Guardia’s assistance, she’d established her credentials with Agenzia delle Dogane, the Italian Customs Agency. Only when everything was in place had she set off on the three-hour drive to Palermo to belatedly introduce herself to the consul.

  As the file she had brought with her was now revealing to the testy diplomat, Sarah had been posted to Sicily as an overseas CBP officer. Although there were already a half dozen CBP-staffed ports on the Italian mainland, and one in Sardinia, Sarah was the first officer to be posted full-time to Sicily. Based in Catania, a port on the island’s eastern shore, her remit was to institute CBP Container Security Initiative protocols at that city’s container facility, and also to keep tabs on the influx of migrants and refugees at the several smaller ports on the island’s western and southern coasts and, when required, at Palermo.

  In recent decades, the economies of scale had revolutionized international maritime trade, leading to the construction of ever larger container ships. Only major seaports could handle these Panamax and Triple E class vessels. The Port of Catania’s modest size and shallow depth restricted entry to small and midsize general cargo vessels, but in the past two years several ships owned by Ikaria Marine Group, a Greek shipping company, had been making regular direct sailings from Catania to Miami, Florida. Although Ikaria’s fleet contributed only a tiny fraction to the transatlantic tonnage arriving annually at the Port of Miami, the security of those shipments, together with the worrisome influx of undocumented refugees reaching Sicily from North Africa and Syria, had led Sarah’s supervisors to authorize a permanent Homeland Security presence on the island.

  Sarah had been chosen for the posting because she had proven herself to be a shrewd and resourceful officer during an earlier high-profile investigation … and because she spoke Italian.

  And she’d been happy to come. Relieved, in fact. In the wake of her earlier experiences, much of it in undercover operations, her recent stint in uniform at Miami had felt far too predictable. Too scripted. Too boring. This new posting suited her much better.

  Especially because she was not in Sicily solely for the reasons outlined in the file.

  She was also there on a separate mission—one that she had no intention of sharing with this junior State Department functionary. Customs had come under severe pressure from U.S. multinationals to interdict traffic in counterfeit commercial goods. Fake brand-name merchandise—electronics, drugs, watches, designer handbags, and all the rest—had become a trillion-dollar business worldwide, and U.S. companies were losing billions. Customs had received credible intelligence that a counterfeit goods ring with stateside Mafia connections was operating in Catania.

  “Sar-ah Lock-hart…” The consul’s tone was faintly supercilious as he rolled the syllables off his tongue. “How’s your Italian?” he asked in English.

  “È passabile,” she responded.

  In fact, Sarah’s Italian was more than passable. She had learned the language at the knee of her grandmother, and she spoke it fluently.

  But she wasn’t about to tell Nicosia that. Nor was she going to tell him that Sarah Jane Lockhart was not her name. There was always a chance that one or more U.S. Customs officers might be complicit in the fake goods racket—and Sarah’s real name was notorious in the service. For that reason, she had dyed her hair—naturally cocoa brown, now copper blond—and assumed the identity of a nonexistent CBP officer. Should anyone decide to check, they would find a carefully assembled personnel file for the fictitious Sarah Lockhart in the Homeland Security database. But if that person decided to look deeper, he or she would have a hard time identifying anyone in the department who had actually met and worked with her. Not that the hypothetical snoop would get a chance to expand those inquiries. Within minutes of anyone searching her name, an alarm would go off in a remote computer, a telephone would ring, and the inquisitor would receive an unwelcome visit from cold-eyed men in suits.

  The consul grunted. “Why Catania? Palermo is twice the size, and it’s the busiest port in Sicily.”

  “Since last year, there have been regular sailings directly from Catania to the U.S. Here in Palermo, you have a lot of regional ferry traffic, but not a single container leaves this port that doesn’t pass through one of our other stations on the mainland before leaving for the States.”

  “That can’t be right.”

  “It is right, and it concerns us. Certain cargo vessels are regularly clearing CBP-staffed ports on the Italian mainland and then stopping at Catania to take on wine and agri products. These are shipments that could easily be consolidated through the Medcenter container terminal over in Calabria. Instead, they’re being picked up here and taken straight to the States.”

  “You’re talking about ships coming here after inspection on the mainland, picking up a few more containers to top off, and then leaving for the Atlantic?”

  “That’s right.”

  “How often?”

  “One or two a month.”

  “And you’re in Catania because of that? Sounds to me like a complete waste of manpower. Your department could have arranged for Italian Customs to check those extra containers.”

  “I’m not here just for that. There are ports in Sicily that are currently receiving refugees from North Africa and the Middle East. Since we don’t have any ICE officers posted to Sicily right now, I’ll be helping the Guardia and local Immigration with their screening.”

  Nicosia remained skeptical. “Still…”

  Sarah wasn’t interested in debating with this man. It wasn’t as if he had any say in the matter. She stood up. “I reported to you as a courtesy, Mr. Nicosia. If you have other questions, call the CBP officer at the embassy in Rome.”

  “I already did, when you called to make your appointment. He claimed he didn’t know you.”

  “I’m glad to hear that. It means we’re in agreement.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He and I both agree that this operation is above your pay grade.”

  She left the man narrow-eyed and glaring. As the automatic door swung shut behind her, he muttered “Fuckin’ bitch!” and picked up his phone. He didn’t know she’d heard him. Sarah Lockhart had inherited a number of her grandmother’s skills—one of which was to listen carefully at the shrinking gap of a closing door after retiring from any tension-fraught encounter.

  She had heard exactly what Nicosia said, and she’d heard him pick up his phone.

  She allowed herself a tight smile as she ambled to the elevator.

  * * *

  “The worst part of the job is the migrants.”

  Her companion’s pronunciation of the word—“mee-grunts”—though correct in Italian, sounded faintly like some repugnant form of insect life when he included it in an English sentence. But Sarah already knew that Major Marco Sinatra, the fifteen-year Guardia veteran who had been assigned as her on-site liaison and guide at the Porta di Catania, was as good-hearted as he was astute. She sensed from his tone that the plight of the migrants caused him deep pain.

  Major Sinatra was a great bear of a man who stood six inches taller than Sarah and outweighed her, she judged, by a good sixty pounds. In full uniform, shoulder boards and all, he cut an imposing figure—except when he strode quickly, because he tended to swing his arms across his body rather than at his sides, a gait that was odd to see. De
spite that, his face had a pleasing openness, and he’d revealed his genial nature from the moment they were first introduced. As Sarah’s eyes widened and she opened her mouth to ask the obvious question, he’d cut her off with, “No relation, signorina, and I can’t sing worth a damn.”

  “A lot of people say he couldn’t either,” she’d replied with a laugh.

  A grin. “Bene allora!”

  Today, the mood wasn’t quite as insouciant as they threaded their way between two rows of containers on Sporgente Centrale, one of the port’s main piers.

  “You’ve been involved? I thought the refugees were being landed at Porto Empedocle and Trapani.”

  “È vero. But three times this year, the navy has brought survivors of sinkings to us. Little children screaming for their drowned parents; fathers and mothers wailing for lost bambini. In la Repubblica and all the other papers, these people are just numbers—one hundred drowned here, two hundred there. But in person, walking among them, the living and the dead, it is terrible to see.”

  “I suppose I need to prepare myself.”

  “Nothing will prepare you for the misery you will see, Sarah. Compared to that, the rest of our work is as nothing.”

  Contrary to Marco’s comment, the rest of their work was decidedly not “as nothing.”

  But it was definitely tedious.

  Sarah spent much of her time isolating and inspecting shipments that arrived by road from all over Sicily—olive oil, organic farm products of every description, wine in specially designed climate-controlled containers—all consigned to U.S. importers. Her days on the docks, inhaling exotic dusts and smells, followed by desk-bound nights in her cubicle at the back of the customs office, might have kept her focused on the job, but they were hardly invigorating.

  That lack of stimulation, however, stood in marked contrast to life away from work. The open-air fish market was a visual delight—stall after stall of tuna and swordfish and squid and sardines, some so fresh they were still twitching and flapping. The vegetable and fruit and cheese stalls that lined many alleyways were a hubbub of activity and color. And unlike the cloak of sharp indifference she was accustomed to on American sidewalks, in Catania, approaching strangers often met her gaze with a simple smile or nod.