Havoc (5 page)

CHAPTER 13

Feng Wu walked as quickly as possible through the dimly-lit streets of Rome, fighting every impulse screaming at him to run. He knew running would draw attention to himself; that was the last thing he needed. He had to move unseen, unnoticed. In a city full of tourists, such anonymity was guaranteed unless he acted out of the norm. So he continued to walk, albeit at a brisk pace.

For the twentieth time, Wu checked his pocket, ensuring the precious cargo remained safely hidden. This whole trip would be for naught if anything happened to Duncan Wells’ phone.

Wu glanced at his watch. How far had he traveled? Two kilometers? Three? He had to put more distance between himself and the Colosseum before hailing a cab. Surely, the police would contact the taxi companies to identify all passengers picked up in the vicinity of the Colosseum shootout. He had to move outside the radius of their inquiry.

After an hour of walking through the streets, Feng Wu purchased a bottle of Beba, an Italian brew, from a convenience store. After taking a swig of the disgusting liquid and swabbing some of it on his face, he hailed a cab.

“Where to?” asked the driver.

“I ferrrgeh the name of my hotel,” slurred Wu. “I think I have it…on a card. Jus’ a minute. Okay, here it is. How you say this? Hotel Villa Graziolini.” He slumped over against the door and closed his eyes.

“Okay, sir,” said the cabby. “First, I need you to put on your seatbelt.”

“Wha’?” asked Wu. “Okay. I put it on.” He snapped the buckle and resumed his position on the door.

After twenty minutes of driving, the taxi pulled to a stop. Wu paid the fare and staggered towards the hotel. Once the taxi pulled out of sight, he discontinued the act and chucked the beer into a trashcan outside the hotel’s main entrance. If the police did track down his cabby, what are the odds they would become suspicious of a drunken tourist picked up five kilometers from the Colosseum?

Making a beeline for the elevator, Wu crept back to his hotel room. As he entered the bathroom to wash the smell of alcohol off his face, he looked in the mirror. His disheveled clothes matched the rattled state of his nerves. He had known the mission carried risk, but the reality of the experience had been more than he had bargained for.

Was Duncan Wells dead? Wu had no way of knowing. He only knew that he had to contact Xing Z
hǔ
xí as soon as possible to discuss the next steps.

With trembling fingers, Wu established a secure network connection and sent a terse e-mail message back home: “First half of files acquired. Urgently request secure call to discuss acquisition of second half.”

CHAPTER 14

While a police sergeant met with Anna Wells to exchange contact information with her, Alton and Mallory remained in the conference room with Inspector Rossi.

“Can you wait here a minute?” asked Rossi. As the policeman left, Alton glanced through the conference room’s window into the hallway. He observed the inspector speak with a uniformed officer and gesture back to their room, presumably telling the officer to keep an eye on them.

Rossi returned in a quarter of an hour. “This is my boss, Captain Salvatore Moretti. This is Mallory Wilson and Alton Blackwell.”

Alton extended a hand, which Moretti examined but made no effort to grasp.

“You have identification?” asked Moretti.

“Yes,” said Alton, handing over his passport.

“So, you FBI Agent?” asked Moretti, turning to Mallory.

“That’s right,” she replied.

“You have any FBI identification, Officer Wilson?”

“It’s
Agent
Wilson. And yes, I do.” As Mallory extracted her badge from her purse, she glanced at Alton. “I didn’t think I was gonna need this here, especially just to prove my identity.”

“Anyone can make one of these,” said Moretti, tossing the ID in the air. “Rossi, put them in the jail until they start to tell the truth.”

“Wait a minute,” said Alton. “What are we being charged with? We
have
told you the truth.”

“The truth, really?” snorted Moretti. “You
happen
to see these people at the airport and you just
happen
to have dinner in the same restaurant as them the same night this man is murdered. You think we are stupid? We just gonna believe you?”

“As I told Inspector Rossi, it is a weird coincidence, but maybe not as weird as it would seem at first,” said Alton. “Duncan Wells recommended Naumachia to us while we were in the taxi. That’s the only reason we were there. Anna Wells can verify that. We all arrived in Rome two days ago, and we’re all here for a short time on vacation, so there really aren’t that many nights to choose from. We all happened to pick our third night as the one to visit Naumachia.”

“And it’s easy enough to verify my FBI credentials, isn’t it?” added Mallory. “I can give you my supervising agent’s number, if you like.”

“I call my own number, not one you give me,” replied Moretti. He pondered for a moment. After speaking to Rossi in Italian, he stormed out of the room and slammed the door behind him.

“What did he say?” asked Alton.

“He say I am to stay with you. And if you give me any trouble, I put you in the jail.”

Alton rolled his eyes but didn’t reply. The truth would be revealed soon enough.

Within minutes, a detective entered the room and spoke in quiet tones to Rossi while handing him a set of papers. The detective departed, and Rossi leafed through the documents in silence for another three minutes. He glanced up and smiled. “Is good for you. Everything you say is here in these papers. You are FBI agent, and you are guy who works for Kruptos, right? And you both were in the US Army for a few years. And I see your record shows you were medically discharged from the Army, right, Mr. Blackwell?”

“That’s right,” replied Alton, impressed at the level of intel at the Italians’ fingertips. “That’s when I sustained the combat injury I mentioned to you at the Colosseum.”

“I remember. And which leg was the one injured?”

“The left one.”

“Okay. Now we know you are telling the truth,” said Rossi.

Mallory released a long breath. “Would Moretti really have put us in jail? Or was he just rattling our cage?”

“My boss—he don’t fool around. If he says he put you in jail, he probably will.”

“Don’t get me wrong,” said Mallory. “I understand the need to verify our identities, but I don’t get the whole ‘guilty until proven innocent’ approach.”

Rossi shrugged. “That’s my Captain.” He returned Alton’s passport and Mallory’s FBI badge.

“Inspector,” said Alton. “After the gunshots, it was havoc in the Colosseum tonight. In addition to Duncan Wells, we saw three men running around in there. Do you think they were working together?”

“I think they have to be,” replied Rossi. “What is the chance three guys are walking around in the dark Colosseum, all at the same time?”

“I agree it’s not a coincidence,” said Alton, “but it seems strange to me that after shooting Duncan, they ran in different directions rather than sticking together.”

“Maybe tonight’s crime was supposed to be a robbery, not a murder,” said Mallory. “When the gunman shot Duncan, his buddies might have been spooked and ran.”

“Or come to think of it, maybe splitting up was the plan all along,” said Alton. “After all, it worked. We divided our forces trying to find each one and weren’t able to track down any of them.”

“This is true,” admitted Rossi. “I see you think like a policeman. I will keep these ideas with me. In the meantime, can you give me the name of your hotel? Maybe I have more questions for you later.”

“Sure,” replied Alton. “We’re staying at the Pantheon Royal Suite for now, but we’re scheduled to visit Naples and Florence during this trip. Can we give you our cellphone numbers? That might be better in case we’ve already left Rome.”

“Here,” said Mallory, removing another FBI card. “My cell number is on it.”

“Thank you,” said Rossi. “I don’t think we will need more information from you, but you never know, right?”

Alton and Mallory remained silent during the taxi ride back to their hotel, the joy of their dream vacation tempered with the cold reality of the evening’s tragic events. Alton supposed Anna Wells must have felt a similar joy at the beginning of her vacation with Duncan, a sentiment undone in a single, horrific moment. He held Mallory close and prayed no similar fate would ever befall them.

CHAPTER 15

Ernesto Vega walked in a haphazard route through the streets of Rome, periodically altering his course to avoid the more brightly illuminated sections. Back at the Colosseum, he had waited in the dark for hours before the Italian police had finally left the scene. He probably could have made it over the Colosseum’s security fence, but why take a chance? In this business, where a mistake could be lethal, one learned to tip the odds in one’s favor whenever possible.

Vega thought he had caught a glimpse of Raven, his European contact, in the melee, but he couldn’t be sure. The man’s appearance had surprised Vega. He hadn’t been able to reestablish contact with Raven since arriving in Rome, but that was why Vega had reached out to the man in the first place. He surprised you with his ability to get things done.

After putting several miles between himself and the Colosseum, Vega caught a cab and returned to the nondescript hotel in which a low-budget traveler like his alias, Chris Jackson, would be staying.

Early the following morning, Vega placed a call to Control. “Gantt?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m on my cellphone. Hook up your VoiceKeeper, and I’ll call you back.”

“Will do.”

Vega attached the device, which scrambled the call while in transit. Only with the device’s decryption algorithm on the receiving end would the encrypted transmissions from the sending end become intelligible.

After reestablishing contact, Vega asked, “Did you hear the news?”

“Somewhat,” replied Gantt. “It sounds like there was a shoot-out at the Colosseum. What happened?”

“When I arrived here in Rome, Wells and his wife hadn’t left their hotel yet—thank God, or I probably never would have found them. Anyway, I tailed them all day. They walked about four hundred miles looking at every spot in this part of the city. In the evening, they went to a restaurant for dinner. I couldn’t go into the same restaurant or I’d fall within their line of sight, so I hung out at the Arch of Constantine.”

“Arch of what?”

“You know, that big stone thing next to the Colosseum…looks like the Arc de Triomphe in Paris.”

“Okay,” replied Gantt in a tone suggesting he still wasn’t quite clear on the structure in question.

“In any case,” continued Vega, “it was a good spot for keeping an eye on Wells—only a hundred yards or so from the restaurant, and with enough tourists around to keep me from standing out.

“Wells left his table and headed in the direction of the restaurant’s interior, probably for the bathrooms, I figured. His wife was still sitting there, so I knew he’d be back soon. But I kept thinking the Colosseum would be a good location to make contact with someone you’d never met before, since everyone knows where it is. So I kept my eyes peeled. It was so dark, I only spotted Wells doubling back into the Colosseum at the last second.”

“I would have thought it’d be locked down,” said Gantt.

“I think normally it is—at least there’s a fence encircling it. But there’s some construction underway on a section of the fence near the restaurant. There’s only yellow tape blocking the section where the fence used to be, which didn’t stop Wells or me.

“I followed him into the Colosseum, but once you get inside there, it’s as black as tar after a dozen yards or so. I looked for a light, figuring it would be Wells’, but there’s so many hallways, it’s a bit like looking for a needle in a haystack.

“I headed to the right, making my way around a perimeter corridor and looking into each hallway as I passed. Turns out I went the wrong direction. I heard shots fired behind me and ran toward the noise. As I neared the location, a skinny guy wearing a suit bolted out of a hall not too far in front of me, right into my corridor. I figured this guy might already have the files, so I pursued him. Unfortunately, he ducked into another hallway and disappeared.”

“You let him get away?” asked Gantt.

“I didn’t ‘let’ anything happen,” retorted Vega. “If you’d had better intel, I could have been waiting at the meeting spot instead of wandering around in the dark trying to find it.”

“Bickering won’t get us anywhere,” said Gantt. “Is that all?”

“Pretty much. After all the cops showed up, I had to wait for a few hours to leave. I wanted to avoid meeting them.”

“So you didn’t hear what happened to Wells?”

“No—what?”

“He’s dead. And there was no trace of any files on him—at least not in the police’s list of personal effects.”

“Dammit! What the devil do we do now?”

“I’m thinking about the guy you chased,” said Gantt.

“What about him?”

“It’s a safe bet he has the files. He must be the courier sent to Rome to buy them, don’t you think?”

“Yeah, probably. Only it looks like he decided to take the goods
and
keep the money, like the seller ripping off the buyer in a drug deal, only with higher stakes.”

“That’s putting it mildly,” said Gantt. “What about your contact there? What have you learned from him?”

“Nothing yet. Before I flew out here, I got ahold of him long enough to share the intel on Wells, but since then, I’ve had problems reestablishing contact. He’s not returning my calls or texts, which isn’t like him. Maybe he’s having phone issues. Or maybe he was spotted and taken out.”

“If that’s true, it means he may have underestimated the people we’re tracking down. Don’t make that same mistake yourself.”

“Yeah—I’ll try not to,” replied Vega.

“Your mission now is to track down the courier and recover the files. If the courier makes it back home, wherever that is, we’re screwed. We’ll never see the files again until they’re put to use against us.”

“Don’t worry. I may have been too late to intercept the files this time, but I’m not letting them slip through my grasp again.”

“You have your kit reassembled, right?”

Vega patted the Ruger holstered underneath his left arm. “Yep, I’ve got it.”

“Don’t be afraid to use it.”

“Believe me, I’m not. That bastard’s not getting away again.”