“Listen, Signor de Grazia…”
Vincenzo waved him off. “I know what you’re going to say.”
“Do you? I was going to say that Achille could already be dead.”
“The tape…”
“The tape could have been made days ago, right after they got him. My advice-”
“Your advice,” Vincenzo said through narrowed lips, “was to offer them a million euros, and we see how that worked out, don’t we? Will you stand in my way if I try to pay the ransom?”
“No, it’s up to you. But you’re operating in the dark. You’re liable to be out five million euros and still not get your son back.”
“Let me be frank, Colonel. I will be out nothing but the deductible and the interest on the loan. That I can afford. It’s my insurer that will be out the five million euros. Am I willing to risk Argos’s money on the chance of getting my son back alive? What do you think?”
“I think-”
“What would you think if it was your son, not mine?”
“I would-” Caravale stopped and dipped his chin. He knew what he’d think, all right.
“Good,” said Vincenzo, taking charge now. “May we go back to your office? With your permission, I’d like to use your telephone to tell my man to open the shutters.”
The call was made to Isola de Grazia at 10:22 A.M. At 10:24, Clemente opened the shutters. At 10:55, “Signor Pinzolo,” the name that Caravale had chosen for his role as negotiator, received his first, last, and only telephone call. The police technician who recorded it quickly ran the tape up to Colonel Caravale. “I think the call was made on one of those throwaway phones, Colonel. That’s not good.”
Vincenzo, in the act of leaving, sat down again and both men listened to the message, heads bent, ears pricked.
“Bank of Rezekne, Latvia,” the weird, gibbering voice said. “R, E, Z, E, K, N, E.”
“Damn,” Caravale muttered. Whoever it was had used an electronic voice distorter, one of the new generation that processed the sounds through an encoded chip and put them back out in a digital format. Next to impossible to trace. Voice prints wouldn’t work. Voice stress analyzers wouldn’t work. Chances were, they wouldn’t even be able to tell if it was a man or a woman.
“Account number. One. Eight. Eight. Zero. Five. Two. Nine. Six. Two. Seven. By tomorrow.”
When it was clear that there was nothing else, Caravale turned off the machine.
Vincenzo was shaking his head, laughing again, this time in perplexity. “For God’s sake-Latvia?”
Major Massimiliano d’Este, deputy chief of the carabinieri ’s financial crimes unit, also laughed when Caravale called him after Vincenzo had left.
“Latvia?” he said over the telephone from Rome. “A numbered account? Well, they know their business, I have to give them that.”
“It’s going to be hard to trace?”
“It’s going to be impossible, Tullio. Compared to Rezekne, those banks in Liechtenstein or in the Cayman lslands-they’re open books.”
Latvia, he explained, was a recent entry in the anonymous banking field. In its all-out effort to attract business from persons interested in what it euphemistically referred to as “asset protection” or “tax optimization,” it had installed the strictest confidentiality laws in the world. The banks themselves often didn’t know their clients’ real identities. And unauthorized disclosure of information about accounts or account holders was a felony. Only on proof of a criminal act by the client could the records be opened up. The Latvian-”
“Well, what the hell do you call kidnapping and murder?” Caravale demanded.
“I said ‘proof.’”
“I have two men dead. I have a boy kidnapped and held for ransom. That’s not enough proof for you?”
“For me, yes. For the Latvian Court of Justice… mm, no. You’re out of luck, Tullio. Maybe two years from now you’ll squeeze a little information from them. Even then, I doubt if they’ll be able to tell you who the account holder is. Or was; I expect he’ll close the account and disappear the minute he gets the money. Wouldn’t you?”
Caravale shook his head. Where did he go from here? There were no leads, no voices to try to trace (except for that indistinct “Louder, kid.”), no evidence that could be physically linked to them, no vehicle to put a tracking device on…
He sighed. “Well, thanks for your help, Massimiliano.”
“Next time you envy my assignment in Rome,” d’Este said, “just remember that I have to deal with this kind of frustration every day.”
“Who said I envied your assignment in Rome?” Caravale said.
After four days spent with the travel group, Gideon was getting a little desperate. It wasn’t that the Pedal and Paddle Adventure itself had been unpleasant-the leisurely days of kayaking and sightseeing from Arona at the south end of the lake up past Stresa and through the Borromean Islands had been relaxing and fun, at least until the rains had hit that morning, and the food had been decent. The bicycling was still to come, a two-day trip to and around little Lake Orta that would conclude the tour, and Gideon would probably give that a skip, especially if the rain kept up. Even the camping accommodations, truth be told, hadn’t looked too bad, although the well-equipped, two-and four-person platform tents were usually set up in the midst of smelly, lumbering RVs packed with French- or German-speaking families loaded with noisy kids. And while Phil had asked Gideon to help out once or twice, the duties had hardly been onerous.
He’d been able to stick to his clean-bed, private-bath stipulations by driving out in the rented Fiat to meet the group every morning, spending the day with them, then getting a taxi back to the morning’s starting point-they covered only five or six miles a day, so it was easy enough-getting back into the car, and returning to the Hotel Primavera in Stresa for a solitary, enjoyable glass of wine, usually at a sidewalk cafe, and a good meal in one of the town’s many restaurants. Everything seemed to be working out just fine.
Well, almost. By day four he was feeling a bit like a fifth wheel-unneeded and maybe a little in the way. Or it could have been that he was simply getting restless. Gideon was one of that unfortunate breed who could take only a few days of pure vacation at a time before he began to get twitchy. He needed something to do. Classes had been out for almost two weeks, and it had been two months since he’d finished his last forensic case. He wished now that he’d brought a paper or a course curriculum to work on, although he knew that there would have been no way to do that without hauling a great load of research materials to Italy with him. And regardless of how much he brought, the items he would turn out to need wouldn’t be among them; he’d learned that through experience. Still, that didn’t prevent him from feeling vaguely guilty and at loose ends.
The tour members, by and large, were pleasant enough-mostly middle-aged, travel-experienced couples from around the United States, appreciative and undemanding. However, as he soon learned, the Prime Law of the Classroom-in every group of students, no matter how delightful otherwise, there must be one whose mere presence makes you cringe-also applied to tour groups. (This law, as all professors knew, was so immutable that even if you were lucky enough to somehow get rid of the offending member, another would invariably come forward in his or her place.)
In the case of the Italian Lakes Pedal and Paddle Adventure, the inevitable fly in the ointment, or maybe it was the straw that broke the camel’s back, was Paula Ardlee-Arbogast, one of the few singles and the quietest and most retiring of the group-a stick-thin, flat-muscled woman of forty-five who kept pretty much to herself. But on the fourth day, after Gideon had helped the group stow their kayaks in the racks at the Campeggio Paradiso “camping village”-jammed, as they all seemed to be, even on a wet, gloomy day like this-and after he’d taken his now-customary “quality time” walk alone in the rain with Julie along the lake, Paula approached him respectfully just after he’d called for a taxi from the public telephone. He was seated, soaked to the skin despite his windbreaker, at a covered picnic table, waiting for it to arrive.