The building was ancient, but from the inside Francesca and her husband had fought back as determined modernists. The furniture was low, sleek black leather with bright steel frames, very minimalist. The walls were covered with baffling contemporary art.
“We can’t tell Luigi about this,” she whispered.
“Why not?”
She hesitated, then let it go. “He is paying me two hundred euros a week to tutor you, Marco, and he’s complaining about the price. We’ve argued. He has threatened to find someone else. Frankly, I need the money. I’m getting one or two jobs a week now; it’s still the slow season. Things will pick up in a month when the tourists come south, but right now I’m not earning much.”
The stoic façade was long gone. He couldn’t believe that she was allowing herself to be so vulnerable. The lady was frightened, and he would break his neck to help her.
She continued: “I’m sure he will terminate my services if I skip a few days.”
“Well, you’re about to skip a few days.” He glanced at the ice wrapped around her ankle.
“Can we keep it quiet? I should be able to move around soon, don’t you think?”
“We can try to keep it quiet, but Luigi has a way of knowing things. He follows me closely. I’ll call in sick tomorrow, then we’ll figure out something the next day. Maybe we could study here.”
“No. My husband is here.”
Marco couldn’t help but glance over his shoulder. “Here?”
“He’s in the bedroom, very ill.”
“What’s—”
“Cancer. The last stages. My mother sits with him when I’m working. A hospice nurse comes in each afternoon to medicate him.”
“I’m sorry.”
“So am I.”
“Don’t worry about Luigi. I’ll tell him I’m thrilled with your teaching style, and that I will refuse to work with anyone else.”
“That would be a lie, wouldn’t it?”
“Sort of.”
Signora Altonelli was back with a tray of torta and espresso. She placed it on a bright red coffee table in the middle of the room and began slicing. Francesca took the coffee but didn’t feel like eating. Marco ate as slowly as humanly possible and sipped from his small cup as if it might be his last. When Signora Altonelli insisted on another slice, and a refill, he grudgingly accepted.
Marco stayed about an hour. Riding down in the elevator, he realized that Giovanni Ferro had not made a sound.
23
Red China’s principal intelligence agency, the Ministry of State Security, or MSS, used small, highly trained units to carry out assassinations around the world, in much the same manner as the Russians, Israelis, British, and Americans.
One notable difference, though, was that the Chinese had come to rely upon one unit in particular. Instead of spreading the dirty work around like other countries, the MSS turned first to a young man the CIA and Mossad had been watching with great admiration for several years. His name was Sammy Tin, the product of two Red Chinese diplomats who were rumored to have been selected by the MSS to marry and reproduce. If ever an agent were perfectly cloned, it was Sammy Tin. Born in New York City and raised in the suburbs around D.C., he’d been educated by private tutors who bombarded him with foreign languages from the time he left diapers. He entered the University of Maryland at the age of sixteen, left it with two degrees at the age of twenty-one, then studied engineering in Hamburg, Germany. Somewhere along the way he picked up bomb-making as a hobby. Explosives became his passion, with an emphasis on controlled explosions from odd packages — envelopes, paper cups, ballpoint pens, cigarette packages. He was an expert marksman, but guns were simple and bored him. The Tin Man loved his bombs.
He then studied chemistry under an assumed name in Tokyo, and there he mastered the art and science of killing with poisons. By the time he was twenty-four he had a dozen different names, about that many languages, and crossed borders with a vast array of passports and disguises. He could convince any customs agent anywhere that he was Japanese, Korean, or Taiwanese.
To round out his education, he spent a grueling year in training with an elite Chinese army unit. He learned to camp, cook over a fire, cross raging rivers, survive in the ocean, and live in the wilderness for days. When he was twenty-six, the MSS decided the boy had studied enough. It was time to start killing.
As far as Langley could tell, he began notching his astounding body count with the murders of three Red Chinese scientists who’d gotten too cozy with the Russians. He got them over dinner at a restaurant in Moscow. While their bodyguards waited outside, one got his throat slit in the men’s room while he finished up at the urinal. It took an hour to find his body, crammed in a rather small garbage can. The second made the mistake of worrying about the first. He went to the men’s room, where the Tin Man was waiting, dressed as a janitor. They found him with his head stuffed down the toilet, which had been clogged and was backing up. The third died seconds later at the table, where he was sitting alone and becoming very worried about his two missing colleagues. A man in a waiter’s jacket hurried by, and without slowing thrust a poison dart into the back of his neck.
As killings go, it was all quite sloppy. Too much blood, too many witnesses. Escape was dicey, but the Tin Man got a break and managed to dash through the busy kitchen unnoticed. He was on the loose and sprinting through a back alley by the time the bodyguards were summoned. He ducked into the dark city, caught a cab, and twenty minutes later entered the Chinese embassy. The next day he was in Beijing, quietly celebrating his first success.
The audacity of the attack shocked the intelligence world. Rival agencies scrambled to find out who did it. It ran so contrary to how the Chinese normally eliminated their enemies. They were famous for their patience, the discipline to wait and wait until the timing was perfect. They would chase until their prey simply gave up. Or they would ditch one plan and go to the next, carefully waiting for their opportunity.
When it happened again a few months later in Berlin, the Tin Man’s legend was born. A French executive had handed over some bogus high-tech secrets dealing with mobile radar. He got flung from the balcony of a fourteenth-floor hotel room, and when he landed beside the pool it upset quite a few sunbathers. Again, the killing was much too visible.
In London, the Tin Man blew a man’s head off with a cell phone. A defector in New York’s Chinatown lost most of his face when a cigarette exploded. Sammy Tin was soon getting credit for most of the more dramatic intelligence killings in that underworld. The legend grew rapidly. Though he kept four or five trusted members in his unit, he often worked alone. He lost a man in Singapore when their target suddenly emerged with some friends, all with guns. It was a rare failure, and the lesson from it was to stay lean, strike fast, and don’t keep too many people on the payroll.
As he matured, the hits became less dramatic, less violent, and much easier to conceal. He was now thirty-three, and without a doubt the most feared agent in the world. The CIA spent a fortune trying to track his movements. They knew he was in Beijing, hanging around his luxurious apartment. When he left, they tracked him to Hong Kong. Interpol was alerted when he boarded a nonstop flight to London, where he changed passports and at the last moment boarded an Alitalia flight to Milan.
Interpol could only watch. Sammy Tin often traveled with diplomatic cover. He was no criminal; he was an agent, a diplomat, a businessman, a professor, anything he needed to be.