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“It’s the old one.”
“That’s how they knew where you were,” Jim said. “They waited until you stopped at Hadrian’s Villa, then sent somebody to intercept you. By the time they got there, you had already moved to the restaurant, and they picked you up when you left there, right?”
“Right,” Stone agreed. “I guess I’d better start using the new SIM card in the new phone.”
“Don’t throw the old one away,” Jim said. “It might come in useful later.”
38
Hedy swam up through a fog into something like sunlight, coming from the glass-brick window. They had been feeding her well, she thought, but they had also been drugging her. They had taken away her bonds, too. She was free within the room’s space of about eight by eight feet. She figured it was a maid’s room, but it showed no signs of having been occupied; the paint was fresh, the furniture new. She heard the door open. The woman came into the room and set a tray down on the table next to the bed. “Mange,” she said.
Hedy got her feet over the side of the bed and looked at the tray. Two fried eggs, pancetta, orange juice, coffee. Which one had they been using to drug her? The eggs weren’t scrambled, and they looked untampered with. She stuck a finger in the orange juice and tasted it: a slight bitterness. That one. She took it into the bathroom and flushed it down the toilet, then she went back, ate the eggs, bacon, and bread and drank the coffee. The caffeine made a difference.
How long did they take to come back for the tray? Sometimes until they brought lunch. Maybe she had some time. She retrieved the phone from under the mattress and switched it on: three percent left on the battery; it was going to go any minute. She tried calling Stone, but the call wouldn’t go through. She hit the text icon: Ru
The phone made a weak little noise. She picked it up and looked at it: the battery on-screen turned red, then the screen went dark. It was done.
From outside she began hearing clanging and banging noises. They went on all day, and she finally figured out that they were dismantling the construction elevator. She had been hearing banging and power tools inside the house for what seemed like days. Now all that was silent; all she heard was a vacuum cleaner, maybe two.
At lunch she feigned sleep when they left a ham sandwich and a glass of milk. She ate the sandwich and poured the milk into the toilet and flushed. She put the dead phone back under the mattress; it was useless, but she didn’t want them to know she had it.
As daylight waned, the noises from outside stopped. Was the elevator gone, or were they just quitting for the day? The cleaners in the house were quitting, too, and she heard a new, very faint mechanical noise. Had they replaced the construction elevator with a permanent one? She had no way of knowing.
She took her daily shower and rinsed out her thong and bra, then put them back on to dry on her body, under her jeans and sweater.
It was dark when they brought di
Stone tried calling Hedy’s phone and texting her, but nothing went through. He checked for texts from her but got nothing.
Jim Lugano turned up and took a sheet of paper from his briefcase. It was a map of Italy, and little red dots had been placed on it around Naples and as far south as Salerno. “These are the buildings with Casselli’s company’s name on the building permits. Two of them have permits for construction elevators: the one you raided in Naples and one at Ravello, a village on top of the mountain above the Amalfi Coast.”
“Then it must be the building at Ravello,” Stone said. “Let’s get down there.”
“Hang on,” Jim said, raising a hand. “I’ve already got people on the way, but darkness will hamper them. They’ll find the building early tomorrow, and we’ll have it photographed.”
“Why don’t we just raid it, the way we raided the Naples building?”
“First of all, as I’ve just explained, we don’t know exactly where it is, and we won’t know until daylight, when the elevator will be visible. Secondly, your raid in Naples was successful because there was nobody there. If they’re holding her at the Ravello site, she’ll be guarded, and we’ll need all the recon we can get before we go in there. Be patient, Stone.”
“I’m ru
Lugano laughed. “Nothing on the chocolate. It’s in a truck somewhere, and we have no idea where to look.”
“And still no trace of Casselli?”
“He knows we’re looking for him. He’s hiding, and doing a good job of it. Have you had any messages from Hedy?”
“No, I just checked.”
“On the new phone or the old phone?”
“Shit!” Stone yelled, and went to get the old phone. He turned it on, hit the messages icon and read, then he handed the phone to Lugano. “She’s all out of battery. Did your guys get a location? She turned on the phone, at least long enough to send that text.”
Lugano made a call. “Nothing,” he said. “Could be the weak battery or a weak signal, or both.” He closed his briefcase. “I’ll see you this time tomorrow.”
39
Leo Casselli sat back in his reclining chair and watched CNN. His lap was full of work papers, and the sound was turned down fairly low, but then he heard his name mentioned. He turned up the volume.
“Let’s go to our Rome correspondent, Jeff Palmer, for more on this very interesting story,” the young female anchor said. The scene cut to a shot of a middle-aged man standing outside the Colosseum.
“Kalie, Leo Casselli, or Leonardo, as he prefers to be called, made headlines in the United States nearly twenty years ago, when a member of the Mafia family he ran in New York ratted him out to a congressional committee. Before the Justice Department could indict him, Casselli vanished and has not been seen in the United States since that time. He has, however, been seen in fashionable hot spots around Italy and France, schmoozing with the glitterati and having his picture taken with scantily clad young women, usually in restaurants. Casselli maintains that he is a retired businessman, but he is rumored to have a finger in the pies of a dozen Italian industries, and his name appears on many building sites around the country.” They cut to a shot of a Casselli Costruzione sign outside some under-construction condos.
“But now, the Italian police department that concentrates on the Mafia—the DIA—has taken a sudden, overt interest in speaking to Signor Casselli, and two multimillionaire businessmen, one an American, the other French, have posted flyers around Rome and Naples, offering a cash reward of five million euros, a new passport, and resettlement to anyone who can produce evidence that will put Casselli in prison, preferably forever.”