Clean Break (24 page)

He took it from me and swigged a generous mouthful. He savored it, swilling it round his mouth before swallowing it. “You're right. Bitter and sweet. Like love, huh?” The leer was back.

“Not too bitter, I hope,” I giggled, moving behind him and hugging him from behind.

“Not with me, baby. With me, it'll be sweeter than sugar,” he said arrogantly.

“I can hardly wait,” I murmured. I wasn't exactly lying. I moved away and perched on a high stool, watching him cook. The onions went into a deep pan with olive oil and garlic. Next, he chopped a fennel bulb into thin slices and added them to the stewing onions. He took a punnet of wild mushrooms from the fridge, washed them under running water, patted them dry lovingly with paper towels and chopped them coarsely. Into the pan they went along with a torn handful of coriander leaves.

“It smells wonderful,” I said.

“Wait till you taste it,” he said. “There's only one thing tastes better.” Time for another leer. The temperature was rising in more ways than one. The only good thing about that was the speed at which he was drinking his cocktail.

“No contest,” I said, watching him measure out round grains of risotto rice. He tipped the rice into the pan, stirred it into the mixture for a couple of minutes, then took a carton out of the freezer.

“Chicken stock,” he said, tossing the solid lump into the pan amidst much hissing and clouds of steam. He kept stirring till the stock had defrosted and the pan was bubbling gently. Then he put a lid on, set the timer for twelve minutes and drained his glass.

“How about a salad to go with it?” I asked hastily as he started to move towards me. “And I'll mix you another drink, OK?”

His eyes seemed to lose focus momentarily and he shook his head like a bull bothered by flies. He rubbed his hands over his face and mumbled, “OK.” I'd reckoned about twenty minutes for the drugs to take effect, but maybe the amount he'd had to drink on an empty stomach was accelerating things.

I'd barely got the cap off the gin bottle when there was a sound like a tree falling in the kitchen. I tiptoed back to the doorway to see Gianni spread-eagled on the marble floor. For one terrible moment, I thought I'd killed him. Then he started to snore like a sawmill on overtime. I ran across to the butcher's block and picked up the knife. It took seconds to saw off the electric cable from a couple of the kitchen appliances. Tying him up took quite a bit
longer, but the snoring didn't even change in note while I was doing it. I took the black box out of his pocket and tucked it in my bag.

I found the cellar door on the second try. A wide flight of stairs led down into the depths. One thing about marble floors is that they make shifting heavy loads a lot easier. I got down on my knees behind Gianni and shoved with all my strength. Foot by foot, we slid across the gleaming tiles to the doorway. One last push sent him skidding over the first step, feet first. He bounced down the stairs like a sack of potatoes, still snoring. I staggered to my feet. For the first time, I was grateful that Gianni's boss was security conscious. The cellar door had bolts top and bottom as well as a lock on the door. I slid the bolts home and leaned against the door to get my breath back.

When the timer went off, I nearly jumped out of my skin. Automatically, I turned off the gas under the pan. Now the adrenaline surge was slipping away, I realized that I was in fact ravenous. I shrugged. The food was there, I might as well eat. I didn't think Gianni was going to be knocking at the door demanding his share in a hurry.

He might have been the world's worst lecher, but he was a fabulous cook. I shoveled the risotto down, savoring every delicious mouthful. Now I needed coffee. It was going to be a long night. I wished I hadn't chopped the lead off the Gaggia. A search of the cupboards eventually turned up a jar of instant and a Thermos jug. I brewed up and, armed with jug, mug and shoulder bag, I set off to explore.

Whatever Gianni's boss was, he wasn't short of a bob. The public rooms on the ground floor were all marble floored, with expensive Oriental rugs scattered around. The furniture was upmarket repro, all polished to a mirror finish. There was nothing in the dining room, drawing room, morning room or the TV lounge to indicate that this was anything other than the home of a successful businessman. Even the videos lined up in the cabinet by the oversized TV were completely innocuous.

Cautiously, I made my way up the stairs. It was always possible that Turner was a prisoner somewhere inside the villa rather than
the victim of my worst imaginings. Six doors opened off the long landing. The first two were lavish guest bedrooms, complete with
en suite
bathrooms. If Gianni's boss ever set up in competition with Casa Nico, the
pensione
down the valley would go out of business within hours. The third door opened on what was clearly the master bedroom. The wardrobes were filled with designer suits and shirts, the drawers with silk underwear and the kind of leisure wear that has the labels on the outside. No trace of a woman in residence. No trace of any papers, either.

The fourth door opened on to a library. It was obviously a reader's library rather than one where the books had been bought by the yard. Modern hardbacks lined the shelves. I noticed a sizeable chunk of crime fiction, but most of the books were by authors I'd never heard of. There was also a whole section of legal textbooks, mostly covering commercial and international law. But again, there were no papers anywhere, unless some of the books were dummies. If they were, they'd be hanging on to their secrets. There was no way I had time to go through that lot book by book.

The fifth door was locked. I left it for a moment and tried the sixth. Another guest bedroom. That told me that either Turner was behind the locked door, or something significant was. Unfortunately, I didn't have my set of picklocks with me. I don't carry them routinely, and when I'd set off on my pursuit of Turner, I hadn't expected to be doing any burglaries. I could of course simply smash the lock with one of the dozens of marble statuettes that hung around in niches all over the place. But I didn't want the villa's owner to know the extent to which he'd been turned over unless I could possibly help it.

I looked up at the door lintel. Gianni's boss was not much bigger than me, so the chances were that the key wasn't sitting up there. I went back to the master bedroom and began a proper search. I got lucky in the bathroom. I'd taken the contents of the bathroom cupboard off the shelves one by one, just to make sure there was nothing behind them. There were two aerosol cans of Polo shaving foam, and one was a lot lighter than the other. I looked more closely at the heavier of the two. Gripping it tightly, I twisted the bottom of the can. It unscrewed smoothly, revealing a
compartment lined with bubble wrap. Inside was what looked like a handkerchief. I pulled it out and a bunch of keys tumbled to the floor. “Gotcha!” I murmured.

The longest of the keys opened the locked door. Inside was a starkly functional office, a sharp contrast to the luxurious appointments of the rest of the villa. I switched the light on, closed the shutters and took a good look around. A basic desk stood against one wall with a computer, a modem, and a fax machine on it. To one side there was a photocopier and a laser printer. Automatically, I switched them on. I noticed a shredder under the desk as I sat down and hit the computer's power button. The machine booted up and I called up the directories. Ten minutes later, my jubilation had given way to depression. Every single data file I'd tried to access was password protected. I couldn't get in to read them. All it would let me do was print out a list of all files, which I duly did.

Muttering dark imprecations, I returned to the main directory. Time for some lateral thinking. In the years since I first started working at Mortensen and Brannigan and discovered the wonderful world of electronic mail, the Internet had grown from the home of academics and a handful of computer loonies like me to the world's bulletin board. The communications software that was running on this machine was a standard business package that I'd used dozens of times before. Even if the files were password protected, I reckoned that the communications program would still be able to transmit them intact to somewhere I could retrieve them later and pass them on to someone who could crack the passwording. All I needed was a local number for the Internet. If I was lucky, there would be one already loaded in the comms program. I started it running and called up the telephone directory screen.

It was my lucky night. Right at the top of the list was the number for the local Internet node—the E-mail equivalent of a postal sorting office. The way the Net works is simple. It's analogous to sending a letter rather than making a phone call. The network is connected by phone lines, and works on what they call a parcel switching system. What happens is you dial a local number and send your data to it. The computer there reads the address and
shunts your data down the network, section by section, till it arrives at its destination. But unlike a letter, which takes days if you're lucky, this takes less time than it takes to describe the process.

I used the edit mode to discover Gianni's boss's login and password, then I instructed the computer to connect me to the Internet. Less than a minute later, we were in. I typed in the electronic mail address of the office, then I started sending the files one by one. An hour and a mug of coffee later, I'd sent a copy of every data file in the machine back to Manchester.

Breathing a deep sigh of relief, I switched off the machine. Now it was time for the desk drawers. I unlocked each drawer with the remaining keys on the bunch. The first drawer held stationery. The second held junk—rubber bands, spare computer disks, a couple of computer cables, a half-eaten chocolate bar and a box of Post-it notes. The bottom drawer looked more promising, with its collection of suspension files. No such luck. All the files held was the paperwork for the house: utility bills, receipts for furniture, building work, landscaping, pool maintenance. The only interesting thing was that everything was in the name of a company—Gruppo Leopardi. There was no clue as to who was behind Gruppo Leopardi. And I didn't have the time for the kind of thorough search that might reveal that. I'd already been there too long, and I was getting too tired to concentrate. It was time to make tracks.

I went back over to the window, to open the shutters again. I wanted to leave everything exactly as I'd found it. As I turned back, clumsy with exhaustion, I caught the Thermos jug with my elbow. It sailed off the desk and bounced off the paneled wall under the window. It landed on its side on the floor, apparently undamaged. Not so the wall. The wood paneling where the jug had hit had slowly swung away from the wall, revealing a safe. Eat your heart out, Enid Blyton. If preposterous coincidence is good enough for the Secret Seven, it's good enough for me.

If the Brannigans were posh enough to have a family motto, it would go something like, “What do you mean, I
can't
?” Just because I've never learned how to crack a safe didn't mean I was going to close the panel and walk away. I sat on the floor opposite the safe and studied it. There was a six-digit electronic display above a keypad with the letters of the alphabet and the numbers zero to nine. Beside the keypad were buttons that I translated as “enter code,” “open,” “random reset,” “master.” That didn't take me a whole lot further forward.

I checked my watch. Ten o'clock. Not too late to make a call. I took the mobile out of my bag and rang Dennis. It would have been cheaper to use the fax phone, but I'd already noticed that Gruppo Leopardi had itemized billing on their phone account and I didn't want to leave a trail straight back to Dennis, especially given that he already had connections with these people via Turner. Dennis answered his phone on the second ring. “Hi, Dennis,” I said. “I'm looking at the outside of a safe and I want to be looking at the inside. Any ideas?”

“Kate, you're more of a villain than I am. You know I haven't touched a safe since Billy the Whip dropped one on my foot in 1983.”

“This isn't the time for reminiscing. This call's costing me a week's wages.”

He chuckled. “Then somebody else must be paying for it. What does this safe look like?”

I described it to him. “You're wasting your time, Kate. Beast like that, you've got no chance unless you know the combo,” he said sorrowfully.

“You sure?”

“I'm sure. He might be a sloppy git though, this guy you're having over. He might have gone for something really stupid like the last six digits of the phone number. Or the first six. Or his date of birth. Or his girlfriend's name. Or some set of letters and numbers he sees in his office every day.”

I groaned. “Enough, already. You sure there's no other way?”

“That's why they call them safes,” Dennis said. “Where are you, anyway?”

“You don't want to know. Believe me, you don't want to know. I'll be in touch. Thanks for your help.”

I went back to the domestic files and tried various combinations of the phone number and any other number I could find, including the vehicle registrations. No joy. I sat in the boss's chair and looked around me. What would he see from here that would be a constant
aide-mémoire
? I got up and tried the model numbers of the fax machine, the modem and the photocopier. Nothing. I didn't know the boss's birthday, but I had a feeling that a man as security conscious as him wouldn't have gone for anything that obvious.

It was last resort time. What would
I
do if I wanted a code that was random enough for no one to guess, but accessible to me whenever I forgot it? Acting on pure instinct, I hit the power button on the computer again and watched the screen, looking for any six digit combinations that came up during the boot process. I ended up with two, MB 4D33 was part of the operating system ident. And the CD-ROM drive's device model number was CR-563-X. The first string did nothing. But when I entered the second set of digits, the display changed from red to green. I couldn't believe it.