Tarantula (2 page)

“Could you put your tray table up, please,” the steward asked.

“Of course,” Milton said.

He did as he was asked. The plane banked steeply to port and Milton looked out as the port filled the window. He wondered what Owen Grieves had found down there that had led to his disappearance.

MILTON had no checked luggage and so he skirted the carousels that spewed out the battered possessions of his fellow travellers and made his way through immigration. He stopped at the British Airways desk and collected the envelope that had been left for him there. He found the long stay car park and skirted it until he found the covered bay that was reserved for motorcycles. He found the big, retro styled Ducati PS1000LE sport bike that he had asked for, opened the envelope and let the keys drop out. He straddled the bike and turned the engine over, feeling the purr of the big 992cc air-cooled two-cylinder as it throbbed beneath him.

It was a bright, warm day, and the sun glared down, a myriad of shafts that lanced into his eyes. He took his sunglasses from his pocket, put them on and then settled the helmet over his head. He gunned the engine, pulled out into the access road and then fed in the revs, racing out of the exit and onto the slip road.

He pulled into the traffic on the road into the city, revved the engine and headed out.

MILTON HAD booked the Presidential Suite at the Hotel Excelsior. It cost two thousand Euros a night, but he had an image that he wanted to maintain. He knew that had been spotted at the airport and he had seen the trail car that had followed him into the city. He didn’t mind that. He welcomed it. He knew the Camorra would keep a watchful eye over foreign arrivals and, with that in mind, Group Fifteen’s staff had seen to it that there was plenty of information on him that their illicit sources would be able to collect. They would report that Mr. John Smith, Esq., had excited the interest of the Metropolitan Police’s organised crime unit on more than one occasion. There were rumours, all unproven, that he was involved in the capital’s pre-eminent drug distribution network, the same network that had latterly employed Owen Grieve. There were rumours, again unproven, that he had personally eliminated rivals in his quick rise up the ranks of the organisation. He was also known as something of a playboy with extravagant tastes and a predilection for expensive women and fast motorbikes. It was important that he live up to that reputation, and a luxury hotel like this one was perfect.

The bellboy opened the door and ushered him inside. It was certainly opulent: a shimmering mirror marked with a royal coat of arms had been hung over an ornate grand piano; there were glistening Murano crystal chandeliers; a large mahogany table could accommodate eight guests for dinner or private meetings.

“Is it to your satisfaction, Signor Smith?” the man asked him in heavily accented Italian.

“Yes. It will do very well, thank you.”

He tipped him with a twenty and closed the door as soon as he had left.

He went to his rucksack, took out the small aluminium case inside and removed his bug detection equipment from the foam inserts. His kit comprised several expensive units that included a wide band radio frequency detection device, an external probe that operated between 0.1 MHz and 25GHz and a hidden camera detector. He went through his routine, stage by stage, eliminating the possibility of hidden cameras, but finding several possible bugs. The probe was set on silent, and located the bugs by way of a series of escalating bars on its display. It looked like there were bugs inside the bedside lamp, the television and two plug sockets. Milton didn’t disturb them, but he was pleased to know that they were there.

He wasn’t surprised. The Camorra were so entrenched here, it was to be expected that they had surveillance ready in the local accommodation most favoured by the high-end businessmen they would deal with.

He packed the kit away and took his case into the semi-circular bedroom. There was a luxury king-size bed, silk-draped walls, and a private terrace. He opened the French doors and stepped out onto the terrace. The view was impressive: the Bay of Naples spread out below him and the vista extended all the way to Mount Vesuvius, the island of Capri and the Sorrento coastline.

MILTON AWOKE at six feeling fresh and ready to get started. He showered and, with a towel wrapped around his waist, he opened the French doors and stepped out onto the balcony. It was early but it was still warm and there was a humid closeness in the air that promised to become sweltering as the morning drew on. He left the doors open to ventilate the room and made his first coffee of the day with the machine on the bureau. He took the espresso, thick and bitter, and flicked on the television. It defaulted to an Italian news channel. Milton dropped to the floor and began his usual morning routine of five hundred sit-ups.

He hit the four hundredth rep when the picture on the television switched to an outside broadcast. A female reporter was standing on the edge of a road. The sea was to the left and the terrain climbed steeply to the right. The woman was delivering a piece to camera. The road had been blocked by two cars from the
carabinieri
, slotted back to back so that there was no way to get past. A large mobile crane had been parked at the edge of the road, its long arm extended out over the water. As Milton watched, a waterlogged car was hoisted up into view. Plumes of seawater poured out of the cabin, the water sparkling in the light.

The reporter turned to watch the operation and the camera zoomed in. Milton’s Italian wasn’t good enough to understand what the woman was saying but as the car gently revolved on the cable that had been fastened to the roof with a grapple, the numberplate became visible.

NA 301GE.

The number snagged Milton’s attention. He knelt by the desk, taking the hotel’s headed notepaper and a pencil and writing it down. He went over to his phone and scrolled through his notes until he had the page that he wanted.

It was a summary of the information that Control had provided.

Owen Grieve had hired a car from Naples airport.

The registration was NA 301GE.

MILTON SPREAD talcum powder over the carpet next to the door. It would be disturbed if anyone came into the room while he was away. He hooked the DO NOT DISTURB sign over the handle, closed the door and then took a hair, licked it, and pressed it across the tiny gap between the door and the jamb. If the door was opened, the hair would be disturbed.

He went outside to the street, away from the bugs, and walked. He called back to London and asked to speak to the Group Fifteen intelligence officer who had been assigned as his liaison for this case. The woman was already aware of the discovery of the car and had been assembling information ready for it to be provided to him.

She explained that the car had ended its plunge on a narrow ridge that meant that it was only submerged beneath a couple of feet of water. The bottom fell away steeply to the left and right of the ridge and if the car had not landed there, or had the tide nudged it off its perch, then it might never have been found.

Instead, it had been spotted by the skipper of a pleasure craft cruising between Diamante and Salerno. The tide was breaking across the upturned chassis, a frothing spume that revealed the two rear tyres when it drew back. The skipper had moved in close enough to confirm that it was a car and had called the police.

The analyst said that she would send the dossier immediately.

Milton ended the call and stopped in a shop to purchase a new set of clothes and the other things he knew that he would need and, when he returned, he took out his laptop and powered it up. There was an email waiting for him. He opened it, waiting patiently as the decryption algorithms stripped away the protection, and then he read.

The initial thesis was that a driver had taken the bend too fast and lost control, leaving the road through the gap in the guard rail. A frogman had dived down to investigate. The body was still strapped into the driver’s seat, bloated and starting to decompose, the soft tissue already nibbled away by the fish and the crabs. The body had been cut free and recovered and then the car had been hauled out. Both had been taken to a forensic laboratory in Naples.

The initial thesis had been quickly debunked.

The windshield of the car was still intact save for the single circular hole two feet left of centre, so precise that it might have been drilled. The hole matched up perfectly with the hole that the pathologist observed just below the right shoulder of the driver.

He had been shot.

The victim had been identified from dental records as a Mr Owen Grieves, a businessman from London who was in Naples to close a deal with a supplier of artisanal olive oil.

MILTON RODE the Ducati out of Naples and headed south, following the A3 until he reached the Via Belvedere. He carried on, through the picturesque villages with the stone buildings, the undulating hills that climbed into the Vallo di Diano National Park and then, on the right, the endless blue of the Mediterranean. The bike throbbed powerfully between his legs and Milton opened the throttle all the way and gave it its head. He followed the switchbacks and the hairpins, climbing and falling with the camber of the road as it negotiated the cliffs.

Eventually, he reached the spot where Number Three’s car had come off the road. It was marked by a long double skid, burnt rubber markings that swung towards the wall. There was a further tracing from where the car must have bounced against the rock face, markings that pointed straight for the unguarded drop to the water below.

The sun was bright and strong as he stepped off the bike and removed the helmet, the fresh air washing across his hot skin. He pushed his glasses onto his head, walked back to the start of the skid, crouched down, and turned to the south. The sun was overhead and he held his hand up to block out the glare. The terrain climbed sharply, a sheer face of rock with the sharp edges of boulders that must have been exposed when the cliff was dynamited so that the road could be cut through. There was scrub and vegetation above that, then a line of cypress trees and then, behind them, a climb up to a ridge that was seventy or eight feet above. Milton looked at the ridge line. There was a clear line of sight from a point just a little less than one hundred and eighty degrees ahead of him, a channel that passed through the trees and the scrub and terminated right where he was crouching.

He looked from the ridge line back to the skid on the road. A single shot fired from there into Number Three as he came around the corner, following the road as it bent around to the left. The car loses control, strikes against the cliff face and then bounces off, heading straight off the road and over the edge.

You’d need a decent shooter but, if you had one, it stacked up.

MILTON WENT back to the bike and rode on. He saw a single-lane track branching off to the left and he slowed as he approached it, turning off and then climbing steeply up the cliff. There was a passing space. Milton slid into it and stopped the bike. He stepped out and examined the loose dirt. There were tyre tracks imprinted there. It was impossible to say when they would have been left but it was a useful sign.

He set off, hiking up into the hills and heading back towards the north. He walked for five minutes. It was rough and difficult terrain. There were vines on the floor and strung out between the branches of the trees. There were shrubs and low trees and then the tall cypresses, a canopy of green that filtered the light into slanting columns. He walked carefully, his eyes focussed on the ground and the vegetation ahead and, reasonably quickly, he found signs that someone had negotiated the climb up to the ridge ahead of him. A clump of nettles had been flattened down, low twigs had been snapped, there was the muddy imprint of a hiking boot. He tracked the signs for ten minutes until he broke out of the green cover and clambered up to the flat escarpment he had seen from the road below.

He was sweating a little.

He paused.

He assessed.

He could see all the way down to the surface of the road. The black skid marks were clear against the grey asphalt. He could see all the way to the unguarded section of the road, the drop itself obscured by the lip of rock that preceded the fall.

He lowered himself to his belly and sighted the spot just before the skid had begun. He worked out an approximate firing solution in his head: distance and angle were simple enough, wind was unlikely to be much of a problem, either.

It wasn’t a difficult shot to make. A sniper even half as good as him should hit the target nine times out of every ten shots fired. A good sniper wouldn’t miss at all. It was a good spot for the purpose. The fall from the cliff edge was dead ahead and it would be impossible to avoid it if the driver was even momentarily disabled.

An easy shot.

An excellent way to make the body and the evidence disappear.

Milton stood. He was smeared with moss and green pollen dust and he swept the worst of it away with brisk downward strokes with both hands.

Milton was impressed. A method like this was something he would have used himself.

Whoever had killed Number Three was like him.

Very dangerous indeed.

MILTON RETURNED to the hotel, found a table in the bar and, over a gin and tonic, reviewed, once again, the files of information that had been provided for him.

The intelligence provided by MI6, the Metropolitan Police and their counterparts in the Italian judicial system suggested that the port of Naples was run by the Camorra. It was an offshoot of the mafia with an estimated membership of ten thousand men. Their activities ran the gamut of criminal enterprise: racketeering, drug trafficking, gambling, loan-sharking, prostitution, insurance fraud, waste management, pornography, murder.

It was not as famous abroad as the Sicilian Cosa Nostra, but it was estimated to be the most powerful Italian syndicate. A US study estimated that it was responsible for three per cent of Italy’s gross domestic product, with a revenue of fifty billion Euros a year, and that the money was drenched in the blood of their rivals.