I had a bad gut reaction when he took off the bandanna. He looked less like a warrior than a hardened killer. Security operatives are hired to protect, not fight — although it doesn’t always work that way. Some of my best friends at the Bureau are snipers, but lord knows, they don’t do it for the money. How well do I know Sterling McCord and what kind of assignments he will accept? How long and hard will I stand by? It is troubling to realize these are the same irksome questions I’ve been asking myself about Cecilia. She made a deal with the devil when she married Nicosa, and a deal with the mafias (same thing) to keep her clinics alive. Maybe she’s escaped to a safe and happy place in the arms of ’Ndrangheta. How well do I know her? What makes me qualified to save her from her own life?
When I get back to the room with the food, Sterling is clean and showered and dead to the world, lying across the bed in the bathrobe as if he’d literally just dropped. Wedging into a valley at the edge of the mattress, I try to roll him over, but he kicks out, slashing my leg with a jagged toenail. I debark to the chaise. It isn’t much of a sleep, awakening with the roosters and the light and filled with a million questions.
All of which will have to wait, because Sterling sleeps for the next sixteen hours. I dash to get his stuff out of the dryer before anyone else wakes up, and I keep the bedroom door locked. Finally, sometime around sunset, I return to find him fully dressed — and from the lavender vapor in the room, having showered again — wearing clean jeans that fit too loosely, a T-shirt, and a baseball cap, and buckling on his watch. The sandwich has evaporated. My laptop is open on the desk.
“Don’t you get Internet in this hooch?”
“Depends on the time of day.”
“It just cut out on me,” he says sullenly. “We’ve gotta go.”
“Where?”
“Meeting a buddy.”
He slips on a pair of blue Oakleys the color of the Florida gulf. We exit the room into the billowing evening.
“Are you okay? Are you done with the mission?”
“Yes to both.”
“I won’t ask a lot of questions, but I’m curious to know how you found me,” I say, as we hurry down the marble stairs.
“Word got through.”
Instead of crossing the courtyard he grabs my arm, and we go the other way, ducking underneath the staircase and around the back of the family quarters where the pine forest comes down to the stone wall. Following in his careful footsteps over the scrub, it occurs to me that maybe Sterling believes we are on reconnaissance, that he has truly lost his mind. We pick up a deer trail that comes out into an olive grove on the neighboring farm. From here it is fifty meters to the road. This must be the way he gained entry in the middle of the night.
A well-used black Fiat is waiting on the shoulder. Sterling opens the door, and we climb in.
“You’re late, you cunt,” says the driver.
“Ana, this is Chris.”
Seeing Chris is a shocker.
“I know Chris!”
Chris is the English bartender from the Walkabout Pub.
“And I know Ana!” he echoes mockingly as we take off.
“How do you know Sterling?”
“Never saw the lad before in me life,” says Chris. “He was out there on the road, trying to pick me up.”
“Fuck off.”
Chris pulls a serious face and seeks me out in the rearview mirror.
“Everything green?” he asks Sterling.
“Good to go.”
“Well then, no worries.”
“Chris is former SAS,” Sterling explains. “Now he’s also an operative for Oryx.”
I see it. The buff body. The detached observer who stays out of the limelight, placed in a job that positions him to know every English-speaker in town.
“Chris told you I was here?”
“I saw you were having troubles,” the bartender says. “The missing sister and all.”
“Thank you, sir. You could have also told me that you work with Sterling.”
“Normally we’re mum around the girlfriend — but now I discover you’re not the girlfriend, you’re FBI.”
“You’re the girlfriend,” Sterling intones, folding his arms and hunkering down under the Oakleys.
This gets a tiny smile out of Chris.
“Just think,” he says. “If an RPG hit this car right now with the three of us in it, what a total bummer for covert ops.”
“Not for Oryx. We are a hundred percent deniable.”
“The girlfriend isn’t.”
“According to the FBI,” I say, “officially, I’m on vacation.”
“Enough of that kind of talk,” Sterling mutters. “Bad juju.” We are down off the mountain and turning onto the main road to Siena.
“Anyone care to say where we’re headed?” I wonder.
“I’m going to my day job,” Chris says. “Pouring drinks for alcoholics.”
“We’re going to the pub,” Sterling interrupts. “To try to get on the damn Internet.”
“What for?”
“There’s an e-mail from Glasgow, which I couldn’t open.”
“About a job?”
“About you.”
In the back room of the Walkabout, under the crude map of Australia, Sterling’s gaunt face is lit by the glow of Chris’s laptop. He is accessing a secure site referred to as the Circuit, available only to private military contractors — a cyber version of the old soldier-for-hire magazines — where buddies are located and private military companies are rated by operatives as places to work, the way consumers rank can openers on Amazon.
No worries, as Chris would say, since nobody posts under their real name. They use handles, just like in the field. Sterling’s handle is Bullrider, but he’d kill me if I ever called him that, like the old superstition about never letting a woman board a sailing ship. Talk about bad juju.
While Sterling works the Internet, I am banished to the bar, to stare at another motorcar race on the flat-screen, interrupted by a news update describing the disappearance and suspected kidnapping of medical doctor and socialite Cecilia Nicosa, wife of the well-known coffee king. I stare with fascination at the inner and outer confluence of events: at the moment her image appeared I was making a list of people who could tell me about Cecilia’s associates and routines. This is how we do it in the big leagues: interview everyone who might have been in contact with the subject twenty-four hours before the abduction. The hospital staff. Giovanni’s teachers. The parents of Giovanni’s friends. The ladies I met at the party. The ladies she cooks with at contrada headquarters. Donnato’s advice makes sense: skirting the authorities may be the most direct route to finding her.
Sterling calls me over. I take my limonata. He is eating a chocolate bar and drinking water.
“This is something you need to know,” he says, very serious. “It comes from a solid source, a Scotsman I knew in Fallujah. He quit the private contracting business and he’s back home, on an antiterrorist unit with the Glasgow police. He gave me a heads-up through the Circuit on the investigation into the attack in South Kensington. Being an honest cop, he first asked what in hell I was doing at a multiple homicide in London. When Oryx confirmed that I had been leaving on a mission, he e-mailed this photo. It was taken just before the shooters opened fire.”
Sterling flips the computer around to display a blurry-but-discernable picture of me in front of the London restaurant, Baciare, staring at the camera and looking plenty annoyed for having been catcalled by a jerk in a Ford. You can see Sterling in the background, heading off, wearing the rucksack.