Killing Pace Read online

  “And with the marketing?”

  “That too.”

  “What’s in Geneva?”

  “Hmm?”

  “You said Trieste is handy to Geneva. Are the Swiss involved in this business?”

  “No. I just like going there. Ever been?”

  “No.”

  “Worth a visit. The streets are spotless, hardly any crime, the food’s great, and the desserts are unbelievable. There’s this one place that brews the most amazing white chocolate coffee. It’s called ‘Precision.’ Perfect name.”

  “So, you’re a man with a sweet tooth.”

  “I’m having lunch with you, aren’t I?”

  Sarah couldn’t help smiling. “Nice comeback. Did you tell me all that just so you could use that line?”

  He grinned.

  Their meals arrived.

  “Why Customs?”

  “Sorry?”

  “You’re obviously an intelligent woman. I’m guessing you’ve probably been to university and picked up a degree.”

  Sarah nodded.

  “In what?”

  “Criminal justice.”

  “They give degrees in that?”

  “Some colleges do.”

  “So … why Customs? Why not the FBI?”

  * * *

  “They said they were from the Lockerbie investigation,” Nonna had told her, years after the disaster that had taken her father’s life. “Somehow they found out I’d been a member of the Resistance. And that my brigata was called Stella Rossa. ‘Red Star.’ They came to our house. They asked me to come with them. I told them I was alone, and I needed to pick you up from school. I told them I wouldn’t go anywhere with them unless they were there to arrest me, which I doubted. They were angry. They questioned me about my year in the Resistance. They said I must have had communist sympathies. They said that they suspected that I had poisoned your father against America. I couldn’t believe what they were saying. They were saying I might be some kind of communist infiltrator, and my Angelo, your dear father, might have been the one who blew up that plane. They sounded just like those Fascisti bullies who destroyed our lives.”

  Scorched by her personal history, her grandmother had managed to control her rage long enough to ask one question of her own:

  “Did I not read somewhere that all FBI agents are required to have a college education?”

  “Most of us have law degrees,” came the supercilious reply.

  “Then you should have spent more time studying history.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Any fool who took the time to study history would know that our band was nonpolitical. Our leader, Lupo, adopted the name Stella Rossa because it sounded good. He copied it from another group operating against the Germans in the Balkans. He didn’t even know that the other group were Stalinists. Our job was to help the Allies—your government!—by killing Germans and Italian fascists, and that’s what we did. We also saved many escaped American prisoners of war. And if you are so well-educated, why don’t you know that communist fanatics have never been in the business of blowing themselves up along with their victims?” She stood up and shouted at them. “Leave my house! Instead of harassing an old woman for saving American lives, get out there and find the people who killed my son!”

  * * *

  Sarah wasn’t about to explain to a virtual stranger why she hadn’t joined the FBI, so she replied, “I preferred the job offer I got from Homeland.” After maneuvering past a few more questions that were plainly aimed at establishing a warmer bond between them, she decided she’d had enough.

  It was time to find out what this man really wanted.

  “This has been nice, Conrad. But you haven’t told me the reason you asked for this meeting.”

  Nelthorp set down his fork. “It’s simple. I want to be in a position for you and I to work together if either of us turns up anything that can help shut these bastards down.”

  “By ‘these bastards,’ I assume you mean the people shipping fake Durasteel parts.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Okay. I have your card. If I come across any fake Durasteel parts, you’ll be the first to know.”

  “That’s it?”

  “You had something more in mind?”

  “I have sources. I come across information. It’s not always directly related to my client’s business, but it could be useful to you.”

  “You mean, useful to U.S. Customs.”

  “Yes.”

  “So now we come to it … you’re looking for a deal.”

  “You’re Homeland, Sarah! You get intelligence reports. Updates. Briefings.”

  “I wouldn’t be able to share those with you.”

  “Not even intel on counterfeit auto parts? Even stuff that doesn’t relate to Durasteel might lead back … might help identify plants, warehouses, locations.”

  “You mean … help identify possible new corporate clients for you.”

  “Okay, yeah. That too.”

  “This is the best I can do: If I come across something that bears directly on your work—and on your client, Durasteel—I’ll give you a summary. If it bears on some other aspect of the fake auto parts trade, but I think it might help you, I’ll ask for clearance to share it. If I get that clearance, I’ll call you.”

  “So, I’m relying on your judgment.”

  “Yes, you are.”

  He thought about that. “Guess I can’t ask for more. Deal.”

  A few more minutes passed as they ate in silence.

  “You aren’t here just to screen containers, are you?”

  It was Sarah’s turn to set down her fork. “What are you after?”

  “Just guessing. You’re not ICE, but you are Homeland. This island is getting a lot of migrants. Syrians looking for asylum. Africans looking for a better life. Some of them might have another agenda.”

  “Your point being?”

  “I hear things.”

  “Does terrorism concern you?”

  “Of course it does.”

  “Then if you hear something, you’ll call me.”

  “You have my word.” A pause. “What are you doing tonight?”

  Sarah studied his face. More gleaming teeth. Behind the surface expression of expectation, was that … complacency? Entitlement?

  “Spending it alone.”

  “Sarah, I was only thinking of dinner.”

  Sure you were …

  “How often do you come to Sicily?”

  “Once a month. Sometimes twice.”

  “Call me next time you’re in town.”

  “I will. But I’m here now. So what is it? Need more time to background me?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Thought you’d done that already.”

  “Never hurts to recheck your work.”

  “You’re a very careful woman.”

  “Blame my grandmother.”

  She didn’t bother to explain.

  5

  A week after her lunch with Nelthorp, Sarah drove to Porto Empedocle, just west of Agrigento on Sicily’s south coast. A group of refugees had managed to make it from North Africa, but not before their two boats had sunk in the Mediterranean. The sixty-odd survivors were about to be landed at the port by the Guardia Costiera, the Italian Coast Guard.

  Accompanying the survivors were over a hundred recovered bodies.

  Sarah’s route cut across the southeastern interior of the island. Despite the grim realities awaiting her at Porto Empedocle, the trip offered a genuine chance to spend a day playing tourist. She stopped at Caltagirone and spent a few hours wandering through its famous ceramics shops. After lunch, she continued on through the rolling vastness of the Sicilian interior, deliberately choosing secondary roads, winding through orchards and vineyards and fertile hillocks rippled by the wind. Reaching the Mediterranean at Gela, she swung west. Towns sparkled in the lowering sunlight as she worked her way along the coastal plain.
She had an ominous feeling about the task that awaited her in Porto Empedocle, so it was a relief just to empty her mind, enjoy each new vista, and bathe her senses in the ethereal clarity of Sicilian sunlight.

  It was nearly dark when she reached her hotel. She had booked a room at the Carlo V, a small hostelry located directly across the street from the port facility. She grabbed a quick supper and turned in early.

  * * *

  “Nothing will prepare you for the misery you will see, Sarah.”

  Marco’s earlier warning, and Sarah’s lurking misgivings, had been fully justified.

  The first day was the worst. A coast guard officer escorted her to the makeshift morgue the police had established in a collection of empty shipping containers on the docks.

  “There were two wooden fishing boats—leaky old derelicts, both of them,” the officer told her. “One had no engine, and it was being towed by the other one. The survivors say the second boat started leaking right from the start. Everyone kept bailing—men, women, even the older children, but as time passed, and more and more of the passengers became exhausted, the incoming sea got ahead of them. When it finally began to sink, the smuggler in charge of the first boat cut the towline. It didn’t help. His own boat sank a little while later.”

  The sheer numbers of the corpses were horrific. When Sarah stepped into the first makeshift morgue, the faint odor of putrescence had just begun to taint the thick, still air. She felt her stomach react, but not because of the smell. What churned her insides was the sight of a long row of drowned children. Sarah Lockhart had witnessed her share of mayhem during her short life, but the sight of all those dead children, their little faces still shining as if they would awaken at any moment, was almost more than she could bear.

  That gut-churning tour was followed by three and a half days of intense interviews, listening to stories of deaths at sea and pitiless smugglers, many of whom had imprisoned, starved, and raped the migrants who fell into their hands before cramming them into leaking boats. There were even rumors, unproven but certainly credible, that some migrants who couldn’t pay for their passage had been sold to Egyptians who murdered them and harvested their organs for corrupt transplant surgeons in Cairo. In addition, there were scores of unaccompanied and orphaned children, many of whom had been cruelly abused. Although most adult migrants were quickly transferred to more comfortable camps farther north, Italian Immigration officials constantly struggled to find spaces for minors. Marco had told her that many ended up stranded for weeks in crowded holding centers along Sicily’s southern coast, where they were vulnerable to continuing abuse by other migrants.

  In keeping with one of her primary assignments, Sarah assisted in the interrogations of four young Syrian men who had been singled out by Major Sander Dirksen, a NATO intelligence officer. Dirksen was a Dutch national seconded to the Italian Navy. The vast majority of both the rescued and the deceased migrants were sub-Saharan Africans fleeing conflict or poverty in their homelands, so the presence of these four Arabic men, all in their twenties, had attracted the officer’s immediate interest.

  The secondary screening interviews were conducted carefully and professionally, and Sarah’s ready access to Homeland’s resources contributed to their swift resolutions. Only one of the men spoke English. He had lost his wife to a phosphorus barrel bomb. Before her horrifying death, the couple had sworn to each other that, if one were killed, the other would carry their baby daughter far away from the conflict zone so she would have a chance to grow up in a peaceful society. Rather than spend months rotting away in a refugee camp, he had worked his way along the North African littoral, baby in arms, until he’d finally made contact with a Libyan smuggling group.

  Now after weeks of hardship, he had failed. When their boat sank in heavy seas, his baby girl had been washed from his arms and lost in the Mediterranean. His frantic search among the survivors and the laid-out dead had confirmed that the infant’s body had not been recovered. The man was inconsolable, barely able to speak. Under Sarah’s gentle questioning, he explained that, before the war, he had been living in Homs, studying computer engineering.

  “I wanted that degree. I thought it would help us to emigrate one day … to use the proper channels. To live in peace. In England. Or maybe even America! And now my Jada and our beautiful baby are gone! What do I work for? Where is my reason to live? Can you tell me that, American lady? What do I do? What do I do?” He wept without shame, and without hope.

  One thing was pretty clear to Sarah: the young man was no jihadist.

  The other three men were interviewed with the assistance of an Arabic-speaking interpreter supplied by the commander of the Carabinieri detachment in Agrigento. Their stories were similar, their gaunt faces a portrait of composite agony. Two of them were cousins traveling together—one had lost his parents in a bombardment, the other his entire family in the same attack. The last interviewee had two fingers missing from his right hand. He told of refusing military service, of being imprisoned and tortured, and of escaping only because a government helicopter had accidentally released a barrel bomb while taking off and the blast had destroyed most of the building where he was being held. He had escaped the government-controlled area and joined the White Helmets, a group of unarmed volunteers who spent every waking hour rescuing people from the smoking rubble in the aftermath of government air attacks. But when the warplanes began circling back to attack the rescuers, and government snipers started deliberately picking them off, he decided he’d had enough and fled the country. Now, weeks later, he sat across a table from Sarah, haggard with shame, hating that this self-possessed woman from America might think him a coward.

  Not knowing that Sarah thought nothing of the sort.

  Not knowing that she had never felt less self-possessed in her life.

  After endless calls and database searches on the encrypted cell phone and laptop system Homeland had provided to Sarah, and after Washington had made direct contact with CIA sources on the ground in Syria, everyone was satisfied that the men’s stories checked out. By the end of the fourth day, all of them were cleared to file their EU asylum applications.

  That procedure would not be difficult for the Syrians because they could genuinely claim to be fleeing war or persecution, but, as Sarah learned, it would be almost insurmountable for many of the African migrants. Those deemed to be “economic migrants” would be summarily classified as illegal immigrants, served with refusal-of-entry documents, and told they had seven days to leave the country. Most of them, of course, were penniless and had no means of returning to their home countries. Some would end up being held in detention camps for weeks or months before being expelled at EU taxpayers’ expense. Others would escape, go on the run, and end up working illegally in northern Europe, where jobs were more readily available.

  Or living on the streets.

  Or turning to crime.

  The whole process was unedifying, chaotic, and immensely depressing.

  Sarah’s time at Porto Empedocle had left her feeling heartsick. She was more than ready to head directly back to Catania and bury herself in the more mundane aspects of her assignment.

  But that was not to be.

  At least … not exactly as she’d planned.

  On the morning of the fifth day, she checked out of her hotel and returned to her car. After loading her luggage in the trunk, she noticed an envelope tucked under her driver’s-side windshield wiper. It was addressed, in neat handwriting, to “Signorina Lockhart.” Inside, she found a printed card, in Italian, inviting her to attend a special Mass being held in the church at the Italkali salt mine.

  She was vaguely aware of this church. Over dinner with a pair of coast guard officers one night, between stories of capsized boats and rescues at sea, she’d been told that the Pope had once held a Mass in a nearby underground church—a house of worship that had been carved entirely out of salt, deep in a mine under the village of Realmonte.

  Inscribed on the back of th
e invitation was a handwritten note: “Ho informazioni.”

  “I have information.”

  6

  Half a kilometer inland from the shore of the Sicilian Channel, the dark, gaping entrance to the Italkali Corporation’s Realmonte salt mine gave access to a broad tunnel that sloped deep underground, connecting the surface to twenty-five kilometers of chambers, drifts, and crosscuts stretching in every direction. The mine produced over a million tons of rock salt a year, most of which was shipped to northern Europe for winter road de-icing.

  But the walls of the mine also offered an astonishing natural wonder—alternating dark and light layers of sedimentary rock salt laid down five million years ago, resulting in a vivid presentation of stripes, spirals, and concentric circles. At many of the interlacing tunnels’ collars and junctions, the vast, mural-like phenomena dramatically called to mind the abstractions of optical-school artists from the 1960s.

  In an immense gallery off the main tunnel, a kilometer from the surface, lay another attraction: a cathedral formed entirely of salt. Painstakingly carved out of those eons-old deposits were an altar, a bishop’s seat, and finely executed frescoes—most prominent among them an elaborate relief of Saint Barbara, the protector of mine workers. The church was large enough to accommodate eight hundred people.

  There were not that many worshipers at today’s Mass. By Sarah’s count, there were no more than two dozen souls—all that could be accommodated in the three Fiat Ducato passenger vans that had conveyed the congregation down the long, arrow-straight tunnel from the surface.

  Sarah’s grandmother had been Catholic by heritage only. She had been deeply embittered by her experiences in the Resistance, by her encounters with compromised priests who blindly supported Mussolini, hypocrites in cassocks who turned a blind eye to violence and persecution, some of whom even gave a raised-arm Fascisti salute at the conclusion of every Mass. After the war, Nonna had been determinedly nonobservant. Apart from an occasional wedding or funeral, as far as Sarah could recall the woman never voluntarily set foot in a church of any denomination in all the years she lived with her.