Chapter 17 #2
A van. White panel. The plate did not match the registration. It went south on Cottage Grove and then it went east on 79th and then it dropped off the grid for nine minutes and then it picked up again on a service road on the southwest side of the city, and the service road went exactly one place.
“Lansing,” Marco said.
I did not know what was at Lansing.
“Private airfield,” Dante said.
Santo’s voice came back on the speaker at 11:48.
“Pietro.”
I did not answer.
“Pietro.”
“Yes.”
“I’m at Lansing. The apron’s warm. There’s deicing fluid on the tarmac that hasn’t frozen yet.
The tower says a Gulfstream left here at 11:24 wheels-up.
The flight plan they filed is for Gander, Newfoundland, refueling stop, onward routing not yet disclosed.
The plan is falsified—the tail number doesn’t match the registration the tower logged. I’m sorry, cugino. She is in the air.”
The line stayed open.
Nobody said anything.
I do not remember standing up from the chair.
I remember being on the floor. I remember the cabinets at my back, the lower kitchen cabinets, the painted wood with the brass handles Tonio had complained about for six months, and I remember sliding down them until I was sitting with my knees up and my hands hanging loose between them.
She was in the air.
She was over Lake Michigan. She was over Ontario. She was over the black water of the Atlantic, somewhere, by herself, in the dark of an aircraft cabin, with men I did not know.
Catania came up through me.
It came up the way a wound came up—old, buried, never properly closed.
The warehouse. The dark. The crates of chickens.
The girl who had looked at me with the still flat attention of a person who had already decided she was going to die, and had been waiting only to find out whether I was the one who would do it.
I had not done it.
I had not done anything.
I had stood still.
I had failed like that again.
Olimpo came over. He pushed his head into my chest. I put my arm around his neck.
I did not move.
Ido not know how long I sat on the floor.
Long enough that Olimpo had settled across my lap. Long enough that Tonio had come and gone and come back. Long enough that the snow outside had stopped and the light through the kitchen window had shifted from morning to the flat blue-white of Chicago noon.
Marco was at the workstation.
He had not left it. While Dante had been on the phone and Santo had been at the airfield and Sal had been in and out of the courtyard with one phone at each ear, Marco had sat in the chair Angela had sat in and worked the screens she had been working.
He had not spoken to me. He had not spoken to anyone.
He had been doing what Marco did, which was the thing he was best at and never advertised: he was reading her work.
“Pietro.”
I did not lift my head.
“Pietro. Come here.”
There was a new register in his voice. Not soft. Not pitying. It was the register of a man who had found a thread.
I lifted my head.
He was half-turned in the chair, looking at me over his shoulder. He had Angela’s black notebook open on the desk beside the keyboard. His finger was on the page.
“Come here, cugino.”
I got Olimpo off my lap. I got up.
“Look.”
It was the Northbridge trace. Her file, the one she had been building since seven that morning.
The screen showed the routing diagram she had been constructing — Toronto to Zurich to the Isle of Man to Marseilles for the contract, that was the visible end she had told us about in the meeting yesterday.
But she had not stopped there. She had gone backward.
While we had been sleeping she had been going backward, through the structures that funded Northbridge, through the trust in the Channel Islands, through the correspondent banks that fed the trust.
“Here,” Marco said.
He tapped the page in the notebook. Krol — still signing. Same hand.
“Anastasia Krol. Maltese registry signature on Northbridge. Same hand on three other Valenti shells eighteen months ago — she documented this at the firm. The signature lives in Malta. The lawyer who placeholdered the second director’s seat — Liechtenstein, but his practice is in Valletta.
The correspondent bank Northbridge feeds through is the Bank of Valletta.
The trust that funds Northbridge is administered out of Sliema. ”
He turned to the third monitor.
“And this.”
A property record. A villa on the coast outside Mellieha. Title held by a Maltese holding company. The holding company’s beneficial owner, when Marco peeled it three layers down, was the same signature woman, Krol, on behalf of an unnamed principal.
“This is where he is, Pietro.”
I did not speak.
“He has been in Malta since November. Santo’s people lost his trail in Geneva and we assumed he was somewhere in southern France.
He isn’t. He’s in Malta. He has been in Malta for two months.
She found him this morning. She did not know she had found him.
The Maltese correspondent file was the last thing she opened before the phone rang. ”
He looked at me.
“The plane is going to Malta.”
I sat in the chair.
“A Gulfstream can’t fly Chicago to Malta direct,” Marco said.
He was talking faster now, the way he talked when he had found the seam of a problem.
“It doesn’t have the range. They’ll stage.
Gander, more likely Shannon for the customs cover, possibly Rome.
The flight plan they filed is falsified—Santo said so—but a falsified plan still has to be in somebody’s system, because they have to land somewhere, and the moment they land they go on a tower’s log.
We have eyes in Shannon. The family has eyes in Rome.
The Scordato has eyes in every airfield from Palermo to Catania.
The moment that plane comes down to refuel, we have it. ”
He paused.
“And the moment we have it, we have her.”
I put my hand flat on the desk.