Ross remained looking at his agent, as if he were going to continue the criticism. Instead, to Danilov, he said: ‘This crooked cop a friend of yours?’
‘He succeeded me, on promotion,’ said Danilov guardedly. He’d expected some sort of conference, but not to be in the presence of the FBI Director and Secretary of State: he wasn’t overawed, but frighteningly aware of being out of his depth. If it was ever discovered in Moscow what he was doing, nothing could save him: he hardly deserved to be saved.
‘Why target him? You know he was dirty?’
‘He made an obvious approach to me.’
Hartz waved generally around the office and the city beyond. ‘You think he’ll go for all this?’
‘There was another meeting, not on tape. He hasn’t named a Family but it’s obvious who he’s talking about. He wants to introduce me. Just before I left Moscow we spoke on the telephone. I said I might like to take up his offer when I get back. He said his friends would be very pleased, and that they would help me any way I wanted.’
‘You record that, with a prior explanation to protect yourself?’ demanded the former judge.
‘No,’ admitted Danilov.
‘Let’s hope he didn’t: if he did, you’re dead.’
After today – this encounter – he could be anyway, Danilov thought.
Cowley and Danilov left the FBI building by freight elevator and flew to Italy from the totally secure Andrews Air Force base on a loaned CIA plane equipped like no other Danilov had ever seen or imagined possible. The entire fuselage was divided between a lounge, actually fitted with satellite-transmitted in-flight television as well as the predictable movies, and a minuscule but functional bar which adjoined a dining area with full-sized chairs set at a full-sized, white clothed table at which they were served steak and California chardonnay from a closed-off galley. Beyond that were three divided sleeping sections, each with a full length bed, bordering closets and bathroom annexes. They both got six hours’ sleep.
Their arrival at the closed-off military section of Rome’s Fiumicino airport was frenzied, swarming with uniformed and plainclothes police. It was not until they were halfway towards the city, wedged in the middle of a horn-blaring cavalcade, that they became properly aware with whom they were travelling. The FBI station chief re-introduced himself as Barclay Smith: it was Smith, who was a thin, immaculately dressed man given to languid hand and arm movements, who introduced the plainclothed Italian in the front seat as Guiseppe Melega, the investigating colonel of the Interior Ministry’s anti-Mafia division. As he did so Smith said: ‘Don’t imagine all these outriders are for you: Colonel Melega is currently number one on the Mafia hit list.’
‘Maybe we should have taken the airport train,’ said Cowley. Why the fuck were they bothering with all the non-leak security in Moscow and Washington to become part of a circus like this, in the very place where they needed the most discreet security of all!
‘Much safer,’ agreed the DEA agent. ‘But no-one’s life is complete until they’ve had a ride in an Italian police car at a hundred miles an hour in traffic’ David Patton was a plump man cutting himself in half with a belt fastened too tightly around a lightweight suit that had long ago been defeated by pasta and Italian heat. That heat was troubling the man now, making him glow pink.
Everyone was at the early-curiosity stage Danilov had come to expect, looking at him as if they expected him to have one eye in the middle of his forehead or six fingers on each hand. He wished he could have satisfied them with some physical oddity.
Melega twisted to smile confidently from the front seat. ‘Everything is in place: it will be a perfect trap.’ He talked directly to Danilov, enunciating good English with elaborate slowness, as if talking to someone of limited intelligence.
Cowley’s concern at the security of the operation only partially lifted when the Italian planning was outlined in detail in Melega’s screened, bomb-proofed and electronically guarded headquarters. The man insisted only five people in total in both his controlling ministry and his anti-Mafia division knew a meeting of the Moscow Mafia and the Sicilian Cosa Nostra was anticipated. The two names from Kosov’s car telephone – Zimin and Zavorin – were on watch lists at all Italian air and sea ports. The reason had been disguised from Customs authorities by the order being issued through a ministry totally unconnected with Melega’s division. Five helicopters, each capable of carrying a fifteen-strong Carabinieri assault force, were on two-hour standby: so, too, were three naval patrol boats, which could transport a total of seventy-five men. To prevent any suspicion of a specific operation on a Mafia-dominated island, no additional officers had been drafted to Sicily itself, but there were fifty mainland Carabinieri who could be mobilised and helicoptered there in under four hours. None had yet been warned of their selection. Detectives and undercover operatives already on the island were listening to informers and sources, but not asking any questions to hint prior knowledge. Obviously there was no watch list for Zimin or Zavorin at either of Sicily’s Palermo or Catania airports: all incoming arrivals, apart from holiday charters, had to be routed through Rome.
Danilov pointed out that everything hinged on the two Chechen Family men travelling under their identified names in the first place, and flying direct to Rome in the second. From Moscow, even if they did keep their own names, they could arrive at any airport in Europe, travel on to Italy by train, bus or car and cross to Sicily by sea with practically no risk of detection. Although it meant dangerously spreading still more widely the two names, it was agreed Drug Enforcement Administration officers at American embassies in the relevant capitals create a watch list at the most likely transfer airports.
And they waited.
There were daily conferences, away from Melega’s possibly monitored office, in restaurants and hotels and ‘safe’ houses. At each, Cowley passed on what they received through the American embassy on the via Veneto, close to where he and Danilov were living, at the Bernini Bristol. Kosov’s car-phone interception continued to provide incontrovertible evidence of the man’s corruption, but nothing more about a visit to Sicily of two Moscow gangsters. Quantico established the voice on the first day of the interception was the same as that on the only tape discussing Sicily. The Sicilian tape had been enhanced to the point of destruction: none of the additional words, six in all, had added any useful material. The American technicians had been unable to decipher a trace-back number from the dialling tone without an identical Russian telephone: Snow had sent from Moscow a duplicate of every car telephone openly available in the city, which included two French and one German, but it was going to take time. If Kosov’s equipment was adapted from a European import of which they did not have a copy, a comparison was virtually impossible. Swiss police had not come up with any further information about the Russian named Ilya Nishin; neither had the FBI.
Each evening Patton and Smith tried to entertain them, which was an experience for Danilov and a comparison for Cowley, from his earlier tour of duty as the FBI resident in Rome. The first week Cowley said nothing seemed to have changed in six years, to which Patton replied laconically that nothing had changed in Rome for two thousand years, which was why it was called the Eternal City. Most nights they finished at bars along the via Veneto, which was hardly typically Italian but a place where they all felt comfortable, despite the prices. Never once did Cowley get drunk: several nights he did not drink at all. In the middle of the second week Barclay Smith, who did get drunk most nights, insisted he’d waited a long time to say it but it looked to him like either a bum steer or the bastards had been and gone without them knowing about it. Patton mumbled that he thought so too. Neither Cowley nor Danilov felt like arguing. At the end of that week there was the first suggestion of impatience from Washington, in a personal message from Leonard Ross to Cowley asking how much longer he felt the stake-out justified. There was no indication in the cable of political pressure, but Cowley guessed there was some when Melega raised virtually the same query at that day’s conference. The question created the first worthwhile discussion between them for more than a week, opinion ending almost equally divided between the called-off theory and the been-and-gone suggestion.