Yakob
The bright warmth of Catania hits me as soon as I step off the plane.
“Eight days,” the pilot says to me as he lights up a cigarette.
“Eight days,” I say with a nod. It’s how long he is to remain available to me, to get Iris back home. Anything longer than that and I may end up needing to wait for him, which only adds another layer of risk. All being well I’ll have her out of the compound and at the airstrip in half that time.
My contact came through, and there’s a nondescript car waiting for me on the tarmac.
A dark blue sedan that blends into every other dark blue sedan on the road.
I drive it north out of the city with both hands loose on the wheel.
Nobody follows. Nobody cares about one more tired businessman driving toward the foothills.
By the time I've been in Sicily for six hours, I've confirmed what the Orlovs already told me, because trust is a luxury I don't extend to intelligence I haven't verified myself.
Salvatore Ramunno owns three properties within twenty kilometers of Catania.
Two are decoys, businesses with legitimate paperwork and legitimate foot traffic, the kind of places a man keeps clean on purpose so no one looks too hard at the third.
The third is on the coastal hills outside Ringata. Old stone, a working vineyard as cover, and a security detail that thinks it's subtle because it wears polo shirts instead of tactical vests.
I've watched compounds like this a hundred times. They’re all the same, but I still confirm that, just in case Ramunno had a rush of blood and wanted to spice things up.
I find a position on a ridge two kilometers out, tucked into scrub brush where the ground drops away toward a dry riverbed.
I scouted the approach on satellite imagery during the flight, but satellite imagery lies by omission.
It shows you the roof and the driveway and the tree line.
It doesn't show you which dog barks at strangers and which one is too old to bother.
It doesn't show you that the guard on the east wall smokes every forty minutes like clockwork, or that the kitchen door gets propped open around noon when someone starts cooking and the heat becomes unbearable.
I need three days to know a place well enough to walk into it and out of it without anyone noticing I was there. I've worked with less. I've never liked it.
I set up the scope and start watching.
The rotation becomes clear within the first two hours.
Two men on the main gate, changing shift at six and eighteen hundred.
A patrol that walks the perimeter every forty minutes, more or less, human beings being incapable of true consistency even when their lives depend on it.
Cameras at the corners of the main building, angled to cover the driveway and the front entrance, with a gap along the east wall where the vineyard rows block the sightline. That gap is my way in.
I log the guard count. Fourteen visible over the first two hours, which tracks with the Orlovs' estimate.
I note weapons, mostly handguns, a few carrying rifles slung low, the posture of men who've never actually had to use them in a real fight.
Confidence built on reputation instead of experience.
That's useful. Overconfident men are easier to dispatch.
I don't know which building or which room she's in yet.
That's the piece I need most and the piece that will take the longest, because a stone villa with thick walls doesn't give up its interior easily from two kilometers away.
I'll need to get closer eventually. Tonight, maybe, or tomorrow, once I understand the night patrol as well as I understand the day patrol.
For now I watch and wait, and I do the thing I've trained myself to do for twenty years, which is think about nothing at all but the job at hand.
Except I don't, not entirely, and that's new enough to notice.
I keep seeing her. The photograph surfaces on its own, uninvited, the way a smell can pull you backward through time. Her head thrown back, her mouth wide open around a laugh so complete it looks like it might have hurt. Green eyes nearly closed, and still somehow the brightest thing in the frame.
I close my eyes for a second, right there on the ridge, scope still in my hand, and I make myself see the compound instead. The gate. The guard rotation. The gap in the camera coverage. Facts. Angles. The things that matter.
It doesn't work as well as it should.
I've done this job for two decades. I've watched a hundred targets through a hundred scopes, men and women I've never met, whose faces meant nothing to me beyond threat or rescue.
I don't remember most of them. I couldn't pick their faces out of a crowd a week later.
That's the point. That's what makes me good at this.
I tell myself it's the mother. Standing in that study with her hands gripping my shoulders, her voice cracking under the weight of what she was asking me to promise.
That kind of desperation leaves a mark even on someone who's spent his whole adult life training himself not to leave room for distractions.
I tell myself it's the brothers, five men built out of violence and restraint, watching me like I’m the only thing standing between them and losing everything.
I tell myself it's professional. An unusually high-stakes contract. Nothing more.
I don't believe myself, which is also new.
I push it down anyway. That's the skill that matters more than any weapon I own.
Not the absence of feeling, because I've learned over the years that the absence isn't real, it's just something you get better at hiding from yourself.
The skill is the pushing. The discipline of taking whatever rises up uninvited and setting it aside, gently, the way you'd set down something breakable, so it doesn't shatter in your hands while you're trying to work.
I watch the compound until the light starts to change, bright daylight sliding toward soft pinks and deep blues the way it does here, fast and without warning, the sun dropping behind the hills like it has somewhere else to be.
The guard shift changes at eighteen hundred, exactly on schedule, and I note the new faces, the new postures, the slight differences in how the night crew carries their weapons.
More alert. Less bored. Night shifts always are, until the boredom sets back in around three in the morning when nothing has happened for hours and the body starts believing nothing ever will.
That's when I'll move. Not tonight. Tonight is for watching, for building the map in my head that I'll use to walk through this place blind if I have to. But soon I'll know this villa better than the men who live in it.
I think about her sleeping somewhere inside those stone walls, if she's sleeping at all, and find myself wondering what the tightening in my chest is.
I press the heel of my hand against my ribs, once, hard, the way you'd reset something that's slipped out of alignment, and I go back to counting guards. Maybe I’m due for a medical.
By dawn I have the rhythm of the place memorized. The kitchen light that stays on past midnight. The guard on the east wall who smokes at the same intervals like his lungs are keeping time for the whole operation. The guard who is having an affair with Ramunno’s wife.
I pack up as the sun clears the ridge line, moving without sound down the slope to where I left the car a kilometer back, tucked behind a stand of olive trees where no one will find it.
I drive back toward Gioiosa Marea where I intend to find an abandoned building to set up in. Something small and insignificant where I can close my eyes for a couple of hours and let the plan solidify in my head.
I park the car just outside of town and walk the rest of the way, letting the heat of the rising sun penetrate me.
It doesn’t take long to find an abandoned building.
A concrete box that time forgot. Graffiti sprawls along the only side that hasn’t been taken back by nature.
The shutters are easy enough to pull from their housing, either age or rot has made them brittle, and I climb in to find exactly what I was expecting. Emptiness.
I drop my pack onto the floor along the north wall and scratch away the leaves and debris with my foot before lying down.
Two hours. I close my eyes and see the photo of her, the way she transforms in my mind’s eye into a moving picture of beauty.
Later I’ll go back to the ridge. I’ll find the room she's being held in. I’ll learn the last pieces I need to know before I walk into that villa and take her out of it, whatever it costs me.
That's the job, I remind myself for the hundredth time, expecting the words to start to sound true again.
It's just a job.
I almost believe it.