The Wolf (24 page)

“What am I looking at?” he asked.

“You tell me,” Malasson said.

Burke surveyed the list of phone numbers and stopped at the one he recognized, the one he had burned into his memory and called only four times since he was given access to it. “Take this with you,” he said, handing the cell phone back to Malasson. “When we get back, we need to find out all the calls that number generated and all the ones it received. Get the Greek to help you.”

“Do I tell him why?”

“You won’t need to tell him,” Burke said.

Burke turned from Malasson and shouted to the rest of the group, “Load up and let’s get out of here. We have less than four minutes to get to the truck.”

The Silent Six zipped the heavy duffel bags stuffed with weapons, ammo, scrawled notes, and ledger folders, tossed them across their shoulders and walked quietly and quickly out of a palazzo built to withstand the test of time but not the blast of a dozen high-end explosives.

They were in the van, Kinder behind the wheel switching gears, careening down a narrow side street, when the explosion lit up the night sky, shattering windows a mile in each direction, setting off car alarms and smoke detectors. The blast was so intense it forced the van to tilt to one side. Kinder held tight to the wheel and veered the car north, toward the highway that would lead them out of the center of Florence.

They left behind sixteen dead followers of Raza and a ruined palazzo. Sitting in the front seat across from Kinder, Burke was lost in thought, content with the success of the mission, conflicted over the troubling information found at the scene. He gazed at the scenery whizzing past and a morning sun that still lay hidden, not yet ready to greet a new day. He pulled a cell phone from the front flap of his flak jacket, held it for a moment and then pressed down on a number.

I picked up on the second ring.

“Package gift-wrapped and paid for,” Burke said.

“Good,” I said. “Everyone get out before the store closed?”

“With time to spare,” Burke said.

“All good then,” I said, and was about to end the call.

“Not all,” Burke said.

I paused and sat back in my chair. “I’m still here,” I said.

“There is one problem.”

“What kind of problem?” I asked.

“It’s an internal,” Burke said.

“How close?”

“Not sure yet,” Burke said. “But close is bad enough.”

I put the phone down and rested it on a coffee table to my left. I leaned my head against a thick pillow, my left arm bandaged and sore from the bullet wound. I stared out into the garden of Angela’s villa, alone in her guest room, and knew I had more to deal with than Raza and his cell or Vladimir and his Russian crew.

I knew now the traitor was in my camp.

Chapter 38

Rome, Italy

Raza watched as two of his men duct-taped Santos to a steam pipe against the far wall of the cramped basement.

“My people get wind of this shit, you are going to get a taste of serious trouble,” Santos said to Raza. “There’s no need for this. You want something from me, you ask. You don’t tape me to no damn pipe.”

“You have no people,” Raza said. “You’re just a gunrunner and I can find one on any corner, in any city.”

“Maybe, maybe not,” Santos said, still not certain what Raza wanted and what information he had on him.

“I trusted you,” Raza said.

“I never burned you, Raza,” Santos said. “The deliveries were always on time and merchandise was top of the line as promised. If this is about your team getting wiped out the other night, that’s not on me. That’s bad luck on your part.”

“You weren’t there,” Raza said. “But that doesn’t mean you didn’t have anything to do with what happened.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Let me refresh you, then,” Raza said, “and see if I can help you remember.”

Raza walked over to a small wooden table, picked up a shearing knife and held it in his right hand, blade first, running his fingers along the serrated edges. “You know the man who killed my men and stole the weapons I bought from you,” he said to Santos, speaking without looking at him, his eyes focused on the knife in his hand. “You might even know some of the people who work for him.”

“I know who he is,” Santos said. “I wouldn’t be any good in my line of work if I didn’t. But I know who all the bosses of the syndicates are. It’s a part of my business to know my business.”

“You would do anything for money,” Raza said. “I knew that when I started to work with you. I didn’t think you would betray someone for a payoff. But then that mistake is on me.”

Santos didn’t respond. He stared at Raza, still with the shearing knife in his hand, and knew he had been outed as a snitch. He also knew there was nothing he could offer Raza—no weapons, no information, no amount of money—that would allow him to walk free and clear from that stifling hot basement.

Santos knew he was going to die today.

“I took a gamble,” Santos said. “The Wolf had me in a corner, like you do now. When you’re stuck in the middle, you got no choice but play both ends, and that’s what I did. I fed you guns and I fed them info about the guns and I got money in both hands. It was the best deal I could make for myself and I took it. So would you.”

“I doubt it,” Raza said.

“You say that because you never been there,” Santos said. “If you got any luck at all, you won’t ever be. Now I may have told them when your shipments were due and what was in your buy, but I never told them about any safe house and there’s a good reason for that.”

“Which is?”

“I don’t know about your safe houses,” Santos said. “You never told me and I never asked. It was never a part of our deal. So you can find fault for me tipping off the Wolf about our deals. But that wipeout the other night? That’s not on me. That’s on one of your people.”

Raza stepped up closer to Santos and slapped him across the face with the back of his free hand. “There are no traitors in my group,” he said.

Santos smiled, a tear running down a side of his face, his cheek red from the blow. “Baby, everybody’s a traitor.”

Raza glared at Santos. “A traitor dies a horrible death,” he said. “It’s deserved and it sends a signal. I might even send whatever’s left of your body to the Wolf. Show what happens when he sends a turncoat into my camp.”

Santos let out a loud laugh. “You think he gives a shit what happens to me?” he asked. “And what do you think he’s going to do when they show him chunks of my body? Run and hide? Men like him? Like me? We come into this life knowing what the end of the road looks like and that don’t scare us. And guys like you scare us even less. The Wolf’s a gangster. You’re a punk. A whole world of difference.”

Raza held the wooden end of the shearing knife and plunged the blade deep into the center of Santos’s stomach. He held it there, looking into the older man’s eyes, waiting for the first signs of the death tremble, feeling the warm blood flowing over his hand and wrist. Raza moved the knife up, cutting through tissue and veins, seeing Santos’s eyes roll back and blood form at the corners of his mouth. He released his grip on the knife, stepped away from the pool of blood forming around his feet and nodded toward the two young men hovering in a corner of the basement. “Have him bleed out,” Raza said, “and then torch the body. It will be as if he never even existed.”

Chapter 39

New York City

“How long have you known?” I asked.

“About a week, give or take,” Big Mike said.

We were sitting at the bar of a restaurant in downtown Manhattan. We had the place to ourselves, the lunch staff not due in for work for at least another hour.

“But you waited until now to tell me,” I said.

“I needed to be certain, Vincent,” Big Mike said. “I needed to be one hundred percent nailed down sure on this before I brought it in.”

“How did you track the calls to him?”

“It wasn’t easy,” Big Mike said. “He’s good; always has been. Almost as good as I am. Bad for him that almost doesn’t cut it. His biggest mistake was thinking no one would be looking in his direction.”

“There any way this could be a setup?” I asked. “Have us look inside our house while it’s someone else doing the dirty work?”

“I was hoping it would fall that way as well,” Big Mike said. “Had it double- and triple-checked. There is no one else. Jimmy is Vladimir’s inside man.”

The news had devastated me. I had difficulty coming to terms with it on so many levels, from the personal to the professional. At first glance it was a senseless and foolish move, even a cruel one, knowing what had recently happened to my family. Acts of betrayal are common in my line of work and expected. I was never so naive as to think it could not happen to me and was always on the lookout for any sign someone had his eye on more than just my back.

But I never thought it would come from Jimmy.

He was my closest confidant, the one I went to with my doubts, concerns, fears, and he was always ready to give me sage, sound, and comforting advice. If there was anyone who knew my secrets, who could discern my motives and anticipate my actions, it was the brilliant young man confined to life in a wheelchair.

And then there was Jack, who Jimmy had been watching. Jimmy’s betrayal endangered my son’s life.

“What are you going to do?” Big Mike asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “For the first time since I’ve been doing this, I don’t know.”

“You can’t let this sit,” Big Mike said. “And you can’t let the fact the traitor is family stand in the way.”

“There’s more to it than that,” I said.

“Only if you let there be,” Big Mike said. “Tell me something. If it were me instead of Jimmy that had betrayed you, would you be this unsure of what to do?”

I shook my head. “No,” I said. “You would be taken care of, no doubt. I wouldn’t like it, but that wouldn’t stop me from doing it.”

“And Jimmy’s different why?” Big Mike asked. “Because of his condition? Because you like to think the two of you are brothers? All that’s out the window now, Vincent. You got a traitor, and that traitor is on the inside as close as close is. He is a risk to the entire operation. And to you, to the Strega, to me, and most important of all, to Jack.”

“You think Jimmy would let harm come to Jack?” I said.

“To my way of thinking, he already has,” Big Mike said. “Your enemies have access now, the kind they could never get without an inside connection.”

“What about what happened on the plane?” I asked, barely able to get the words out. “Was he part of that plan?”

“Very unlikely,” Big Mike said. “It was the first thing I had checked, and so far he comes up clean in that regard. In all likelihood, Jimmy made the flip sometime this summer, a week, maybe two after we had the council meeting.”

“Is there any way we can make use of Jimmy?” I asked. “At least until I get a handle on how to deal with the situation.”

“Give me a for instance.”

“What if we tell Jimmy we know where Raza is planning to hit, that he may even be thinking of a double attack?” I said. “That we’re on to him and we’re going to make a move.”

“And he relays that info to Vladimir’s crew, who then pass it on to Raza,” Big Mike said. “That happens, what does it do for us?”

“One of two things, if it works,” I said. “We may pick up chatter about their actual plans, which will point us in the right direction.”

“Or?”

“Or they rush the plan,” I said. “Move up the date and put their pieces in motion at a faster clip. And from their movements we can pinpoint the attack sites.”

“Could work,” Big Mike said. “I’ll rig it so Jimmy will never get wise he’s being tapped incoming and out. But like I said, he’s good at this and a lot smarter than any of the guys on the other end of his relay. We’ve been on him for about a week, light touches mostly, not enough for him to pick up a trace. But with a full 24/7 it won’t be long before a guy like Jimmy figures he’s being monitored.”

“Will he be able to tell who’s doing it?”

“He won’t need to,” Big Mike said. “We’ll be his only suspects.”

I sat quietly for a few minutes and then walked from the front of the bar toward a large coffee machine. I looked over at Big Mike, who seemed as crushed as I was by the news. He caught the look and shook his head. “I’ll buy as much time as I can,” he said. “But I don’t think I can run it for more than another week before he catches on.”

“That’s enough time,” I said.

“This is really going to shake your uncle,” Big Mike said. “Old school mob like him do not take this kind of news well. My father was cut the same way. They don’t care who it is or why they did it or how sorry they are. You betray the family, you’re no longer part of the family. You’re gone.”

“Have you been monitoring the old man’s phones?”

“Never had reason to,” Big Mike said. He seemed taken aback by the hard shift in my tone. “We weren’t looking Jimmy’s way, either. He just fell into our laps.”

“Who initiated contact with the Russians?” I asked.

“I have to go deeper into Jimmy’s phone logs to answer that and it might not even be there,” Big Mike said. “There’s really no way to tell. I had to guess, I would put it on Vladimir. I doubt very much Jimmy, no matter his intent, would reach out to the Russian mob.”

“How does he communicate with them?” I asked. “They can talk to him, but how does he respond?”

“The calls are always from the Russian end,” Big Mike said. “Jimmy answers either by coded text or through an audio relay patched in through his laptop. Perfect inside man if you think about it—guy who can’t speak. Who would ever suspect?”

“I should have,” I said.

“You want to give a heads-up to the Strega?” Big Mike asked. “She’s been on the money with us. And not only is she close to Jimmy, she trusts him. Up to today we all did.”

“Let’s leave everything the way it is,” I said. “I’ll deal with Jimmy when I have to. Maybe there’s more to this than a clear betrayal. Or maybe I just would like to think there is.”

“You mean he’s working Vladimir?”

“Something like that,” I said. “You said it yourself—Jimmy is very smart and I don’t give him much to do, other than look after my son and run the computer end of the business. Maybe this is his way of showing us he can be a bigger help. He sees us focused on Raza and his cell. He also knows that other than the Strega, none of the syndicates are stepping into this in a big way. They’re letting it play out, see who’s still standing once the smoke clears.”