Havoc (17 page)

CHAPTER 44

Feng Wu waited until 1:00 a.m. local time to place the secure call, knowing the time to be first thing Sunday morning in Beijing.

“Hello?”

“Xing Z
hǔ
xí, this is Wu.”

“Hello, Wu. Are you making progress?”

“Yes, sir. That is why I am contacting you. I have made contact with a man representing another Vidulum employee, a man who calls himself Mr. Brookings. I offered him terms similar to Duncan Wells’, and Mr. Brookings has agreed.”

“Excellent.”

“As expected, Mr. Brookings insisted on negotiating his own terms for the transaction.”

“How much does he want?” asked Cúnchú’s CEO.

“Fifty million.”

“Fifty? Didn’t we offer Wells more for the second set of files?”

“Yes, sir. The bargain was that after we verified the authenticity of the first set of files, he would give us the second half in exchange for seventy-five million.”

“So we are saving twenty-five million? Superb.”

This was the reaction Wu had hoped for. “Yes, sir. I am not only striving to procure the files. I also hope to pay the smallest price.”

“Admirable work, Wu, but your first priority is securing the remaining Silverstar files at any price. There is more riding on this transaction than Cúnchú’s profitability—much more.”

“I will procure the files,” said Wu. “And if I may ask…”

“Yes?”

“Are the funds available in our account? I am scheduled to meet with Mr. Brookings in thirty-two hours to make the final exchange.”

“They will be. I will verify myself.”

“Thank you. I will notify you when the transaction is complete.”

“Very good, Wu. I wish you success.”

“Thank you, Xing Z
hǔ
xí.”

Wu ended the call. Now to get some rest, shower, and kill time until the final exchange. If all went well, he would be headed back to China in forty-eight hours.

CHAPTER 45

In the morning, Crowe placed a call to Gino Piazza, his Sicilian Mafia associate. “Hello, Gino. This is Zane Crowe.”

“Zane. How are you,
mi amico
?”

“I’ve been better, I can bloody well tell you. I got into a bit of a shootout with those chaps who gave it to your men in Pompeii.”

“They got the better of you, too?”

“A little,” admitted Crowe, “but at least I’m not sitting in jail—or the morgue.”

“I am glad to hear it. But I am wondering…why are you calling me?”

“I need your help. I’m not giving up on snuffing the Americans, not by a long shot. I need your help figuring out where they’ll be.”

“How do you know they will leave Florence?”

“It’s what I’d do if I was them. That bloke’s not stupid. He has to know I might have figured out where they’re staying.”

“Have you?” asked Piazza.

“No, but he don’t know that, now does he? If I figured out what tour they’d be on, I could figure out what hotel they’re at, right? I say they’ll leave Florence. And when they do, I need your help tracking their next move. Do you think you can get the word out to your mole in the Roman
Polizia di Stato
? See if he can figure out where they’re going next?”

“I will try. I let you know if I hear anything.”

“That’s the ticket,” said Crowe. “Don’t forget: these are the guys who whacked two of your men and put another in the hospital. They injured me, too. We both have a reason to return the favor.”

“I know. I will send out a message to my contacts. If the Americans are leaving Florence, I will find out soon. And then I will let you know.”

“Thanks, Gino. I knew I could count on you.”

CHAPTER 46

That same morning, Alton awoke first. He gazed at his companion, whose hair spilled across her pillow. He sat up and examined her face. A slight bruise had formed underneath the abrasion on her jawbone. It seemed more likely that this impact, more than the concussion, had caused Mallory to remain unconscious so long yesterday.

Alton checked his phone and read a text message, then sat on the bed next to Mallory. She awoke and stretched her arms overhead.

“Morning, Honey,” said Alton. “How do you feel?”

“Fine. Well…actually, I am a little sore,” she added, wiggling her chin from side to side as she sat up.

“I’m not surprised. You have a bruise—not bad, just a little discoloration.”

“Dang, really?” She rose and hurried to the bathroom. “Ugh, look at this. I look like a mess.”

Alton walked in behind her. “You look like the kind of person I love waking up next to.”

Mallory looked down, but Alton could see her smiling. Looking in the mirror again, she asked, “It’s pretty noticeable, isn’t it?”

“Not really. When I woke up, I wondered how you were doing and made a point to examine the scrape you got yesterday. I only noticed it then.”

“Yeah, right. Thanks for trying to make me feel better.”

“It’s really not that bad, and it’ll be gone in a few days,” said Alton. “Hey, Inspector Rossi texted me a few minutes ago. He said he has information on our assailant. He wants us to call him when we have a chance. Want to grab some breakfast first?”

“Yeah—and take a shower,” said Mallory, still dressed in yesterday’s now-rumpled clothes.

“Okay. I’ll tell Rossi we’ll call in an hour or so.”

Thirty minutes later, Alton and Mallory picked up cannoli pastries and coffee from a food cart just down the street from their hotel. They sat on a bench in the Piazza della Signoria and enjoyed their breakfast. Beams of bright morning sunshine streamed in at an angle, warming the paver stones, and the chirping of nearby skylarks provided a relaxing soundtrack to their meal.

Alton turned to Mallory. “It’s amazing what rest, a shower, a good breakfast, and a tranquil environment can do for a person’s frame of mind, huh?”

“Yeah. Yesterday—the bad parts of yesterday, at least—almost feel like they didn’t really happen.” Mallory swung her feet under the bench and munched on her cannoli.

“I agree. I think today will be better. It’s too nice a day for anything bad to happen.” Alton hoped Mallory found more assurance in the words than he did.

They returned to their hotel room and settled down at the room’s desk to place a call to Inspector Rossi. After dialing the number, Alton put his cell on speaker and placed the phone down on the desk between them.

“Good morning, Inspector,” said Alton.

“Good morning to you,” came the reply. “I am here with Captain Moretti.”

“Do you have news for us?”

“Yes. Lieutenant Donati’s men were able to obtain the fingerprints of the man who attacked you yesterday from the baton he left behind. Donati sent me the prints, and we were able to match them to Interpol records.”

“So you had his prints on file. That’s good,” said Mallory. “Does that mean he’s been arrested before?”

“No,” said Rossi. “He was a soldier in the British Army, first in UK Special Forces, then in the more specialized SRR—Special Reconnaissance Regiment.”

“SRR,” said Alton. “They specialize in covert surveillance. That explains how he was able to track us down.”

“Yes,” said Rossi. “This man has been suspected in a number of assassinations over the past five years but never charged due to lack of evidence. He is a professional.”

“So he’s an assassin, not a high-tech intellectual-property thief,” said Alton. “That means he was hired by someone else, just like the Mafia thugs in Pompeii.”

“That is what we are thinking,” said Rossi.

“I’m guessing his name isn’t really Arnold Smith,” said Alton.

“No. He is called Zane Crowe.”

“What else do you know about Mr. Crowe?” asked Mallory.

“Not much,” admitted Rossi. “He lives in Bracknell, England. Customs records show he’s in and out of the country constantly, probably on ‘assignments.’ He was infantry-trained in the British Army before he joined Special Forces. Twice awarded the British Military Cross for gallantry in Afghanistan.”

Afghanistan—Alton shot a glance at Mallory but said nothing. He hadn’t expected their former theater of deployment to come up during this call.

“So what led him to turn from hero to hired gun, do you think?” asked Mallory.

“Who knows?” said Alton. “We both know firsthand how combat can change a person. What’s important is that he
has
changed, and is after us.”

“We think he was after Duncan Wells, too,” said Rossi, “but we need to confirm that.”

“How are you going to go about that?” asked Alton.

“My forensic team found two transfer hairs on Wells’ body on the night of his murder. Lieutenant Donati’s men recovered several hairs from Zane Crowe’s hospital bed. We are going to compare the hair under a microscope today to see if they’re a preliminary match. If they are, we’ll run a DNA test to confirm. If the hairs match, then we will know who killed Duncan Wells.”

“My guess is that the hairs will match,” said Mallory. “In the meantime, have you contacted the FBI to see if they know anything about Crowe?”

“No. I will do that in a few hours, when people will be in their Washington office to begin the workday.”

A knock rang out on the hotel room’s door. “Housekeeping.”

Alton shot a look at Mallory. He leaned low over his phone. “Inspector, stand by.”

Grabbing the Beretta off the nightstand, Alton motioned for Mallory to move to the far wall, out of the line of fire from the room’s entrance. Limping to the door, he cocked the handgun’s hammer and peered through the peephole.

An elderly woman in a floral dress and white apron stood in the hall with a cleaning cart by her side.

Alton breathed a sigh of relief. Nonetheless, as he cracked the door, he examined both sides of the hallway before speaking. “I’m sorry. We’ll be in here for a few more minutes. Can you come back in a little while?”

The woman smiled and nodded, but Alton wasn’t sure if she had truly understood him. The maid began to push her cart down the hallway, so apparently she had comprehended enough.

Exhaling another breath, Alton closed and locked the door. He returned to Mallory, who remained ensconced in the room’s interior. “False alarm. It was just the cleaning lady.”

They both returned to their seats at the room’s desk.

“Sorry for the interruption, Inspector,” said Alton. “I guess we’re a little jumpy around here.”

“I don’t blame you,” said Rossi. “I would be jumpy too, after all the adventures you’ve had these past days.”

Alton took of sip of the coffee he had carried back from his breakfast in the Piazza della Signoria. “Since we’re up to speed on Zane Crowe, can we turn our discussion to the bigger picture of this crime?”

“Sure,” said Rossi. “What in particular did you want to discuss?”

“First, I’m wondering if you have any updates on the buyer of Duncan Wells’ cellphone. Then I’d like to chat about the relationship between the three men Mallory and I spotted in the Colosseum the night of Wells’ murder.”

“Okay,” said Rossi. “We talk about the buyer first. I am pretty sure it is Feng Wu. Our financial agents checked into Cúnchú, the company Wu works for. It is one of the biggest multinational electronic companies in China, or even the world.”

“Yes,” said Mallory. “I did a little checking too, on our first night in Naples. Chinese Financial reporting isn’t as transparent as in the US, but I was eventually able to track down Cúnchú’s balance sheet using online financial records on the Shanghai Stock Exchange. Cúnchú has over four billion dollars in cash and other highly-liquid investments. They’d have plenty of money to pay for the stolen technology and construct a plant to manufacture it.”

“So we’ll operate under the assumption that Feng Wu is our guy, unless we uncover some new evidence to the contrary?” asked Alton.

“Yes,” replied Rossi. “Our next step is to track him down. We finally got the records from Duncan Wells’ phone company yesterday. The GPS tracking on his phone is disabled, but if Wu uses it to make a call, we’ll still be able to identify his location.”

“Right,” said Alton, “using the cell network towers to triangulate in on his position.” Such triangulation by enemy forces had been one of Alton’s greatest fears as the commander of a mobile communications van in the desert regions of Afghanistan’s Gazib District. Once an enemy knew your location, he could call in an air or ground strike. Alton felt thankful this location technique would work to his advantage for once. “So I take it Wu hasn’t used the phone yet?”

“No, not since we started monitoring it yesterday,” said Rossi. “We will continue monitoring. I am a little worried, though. Our efforts assume the phone hasn’t left the country. What are the chances it is still here after so long?” The man sounded discouraged.

“You know,” said Mallory. “I share your concern, Inspector Rossi. Maybe the cellphone is already long gone. On the other hand, Zane Crowe seems to be coming after me and Alton pretty persistently. Why would he do that if the phone had been safely returned to China? In that case, he would’ve already accomplished his primary mission, so there’d be no reason for him to keep seeking us out.”

“Plus, even if the odds of finding Well’s cellphone are slim, I think we still have to assume it’s still here in Italy,” said Alton. “If we stop monitoring for it, the chances of us finding it fall from small to zero.

“But Mallory’s question about Zane Crowe actually segues nicely into the other topic I wanted to discuss: the relationship between the three men running around the Colosseum on the night of Well’s murder.”

“Okay,” said Rossi. “What questions do you have?”

“Ever since that night, we’ve assumed that the three men were working together. Now I’m not so sure.”

“Why do you say that?” asked Mallory.

“Well, as I think back to that evening,” replied Alton, “I realize that Feng Wu had traveled much too far down the Colosseum’s hallway to have started running away from Wells only after the gunshots were fired. Wu must have already been walking away when Crowe—or whoever it was—killed Wells.”

Captain Moretti spoke for the first time. “Maybe Wu told Crowe to shoot Wells after they finished the deal.”

“Yes, I considered that possibility,” said Alton, “but it seems to me that a guy as intelligent as Duncan Wells would have insisted on being paid before turning over the Silverstar files. If that’s the case, why would Wu have Crowe shoot him? It would presumably be too late to get the money back.”

“Maybe Wu was trying to cover his tracks,” said Mallory. “You know, remove the only witness to the crime.”

“That’s certainly a possibility, too,” said Alton, “but it carries enormous risk to Wu and Cúnchú. What if the entire phone or certain key files are password protected, and Wu doesn’t have the password? What if a file is missing or corrupted? We know Wu represents a tech company, and I can’t imagine a tech person with half a brain wanting to kill his only source of follow-up information. Once you’ve killed the goose, you can’t get any more golden eggs from it. Your only source of information is gone. Speaking as an employee of a tech firm myself, I’d say that kind of data risk is far greater than the risk of letting Wells live, which is really almost no risk at all.”

“Really?” scoffed Captain Moretti. “Why wouldn’t it be risky to let Wells live?”

“Wells would have been as highly motivated as Wu to keep the transaction a secret. Why would he want to expose his own theft? Plus, if Wells did come forward, so what? It’s just his word against Cúnchú’s. Wells would have to admit he stole the files in the first place. If he did so, would people even believe him, or would they question the credibility of such a person?”

“I see what you’re saying,” said Mallory. “So what’s your conclusion?”

“I can’t be absolutely certain,” replied Alton, “but since we’ve established Wu would have no compelling reason to hire a professional killer, I don’t think he and Crowe were working together,.”

“So who
was
Crowe working for, if not Wu?” asked Rossi.

“I don’t know,” said Alton. “And here’s another question. What about that third guy Mallory and I saw in the Colosseum that night? Was he working with Crowe or Wu?”

“Or was he completely on his own?” said Mallory.

“What are the chances of that?” said Rossi. “Surely he was working with one or the other. He wouldn’t just be walking around there at random.”

“But we really don’t know,” said Mallory. “Do you have any leads on the third man’s identity?”

“No,” admitted Rossi.

“Okay, so that’s another question we still need to answer,” said Alton. “What are the next steps, Inspector Rossi?”

“We keep looking for Feng Wu and Zane Crowe.”

“I might be able to help with that,” said Alton.