My father chose to end his life.
He had lived with the burden of my mother’s illness for many years and now the weight of her death was more than he could bear and he brought it all to a close on a stretch of highway he had driven for over a decade.
And then I was alone in a large room, my father’s sealed coffin resting a few feet away, surrounded by flowers and a prayer book. I wore the same dark jacket and slacks I wore for my mother’s wake, sitting there in an uncomfortable chair in a foul-smelling room, having lost, in less than a month’s time, the only two people in my life who mattered. At one point the door behind me swung open and I heard footsteps. I looked up and saw a man who resembled my father in feature and stature, though he was far better dressed and gave off an air of authority. He seemed to be the kind of man used to having his way.
He walked over to my father’s coffin, rested a hand on the top and bowed his head. He stayed still for several minutes, then made the sign of the cross, turned, walked to a corner of the room and grabbed a folding chair. He stopped a few inches from me, popped open the chair and sat down.
“I’m Carlo Marelli,” he said in a commanding voice. “Your father’s brother and your uncle.”
“He never mentioned you,” I said. “Never told me he had a brother.”
“We weren’t close,” he said.
“Why?”
“There’s time for that later,” he said, his dark eyes never moving from mine. “Right now, we need to talk about you and me.”
“I don’t know anything about you.”
“And I know all I need to know about you,” he said.
“Like what?” I asked.
“You’re a smart kid with a bright head,” he said. “You keep to yourself and don’t let people you don’t know get close.”
“People like you?”
He smiled and nodded. “Especially people like me,” he said. “At least for now. Until we get to a place where we know and trust one another, and that’s going to take time. But if you agree, then you and me will have more than enough time to get to that point.”
“How?” I asked.
“I want you to come live with me,” he said. “I’ll tell you up-front it will be a different life than what you had with your mother and father. And I’ll also tell you right here and now, you won’t be raised as a guest or a nephew I got stuck with. You’ll be raised as if you were my son. On that you have my word. And that’s usually good enough for anybody.”
“Was it good enough for my father?” I asked.
Carlo stood, folded the chair and rested it against his side. “Okay, then,” he said. “Most anybody. I know this came on you sudden so take time to think it over. But don’t take too long. I won’t hang around for the funeral; your father didn’t want much to do with me when he was alive, find it hard to imagine he would want me to watch him get buried. I have a few meetings in the city the next day or so. Once those are wrapped up, I’ll come find you and you can give me your answer.”
“What if I decide no?” I asked.
“Then that’s what you decide,” he said. “I get out of your life as fast as I came into it.”
With that, Carlo Marelli handed me the folding chair, patted me on the shoulder, slid his hands into the pockets of his tailored slacks and walked out of the room.
In so many ways, my life was a straight shot from that funeral parlor to this boardroom.
Chapter 4
The first explosion rocked the Rome train station. It was 8:58 Monday morning. The blast came from a backpack left against the side of a water fountain by a chunky teenager in a Grateful Dead T-shirt, jeans, and a green windbreaker. He was out of the station when the bomb went off, timed to hit at the height of passenger traffic, a summer’s blend of tourists beginning their vacation and Italians starting a week of work.
Fifteen minutes later a car bomb ignited in a quiet London middle-class neighborhood, a long street of row houses facing quaint shops, shuttered pubs and a middle school playground jammed with children. The explosion sent the car—a late model Fiat 124—hurtling into the air, landing inside the second floor den of a newlywed couple eating breakfast and planning a shopping excursion. They died instantly, the wife thrown against a wall, the husband left holding the remains of a teacup in a burnt and rigid hand. Six of the row houses were destroyed by fire, two of the shops and pubs suffered significant damage, and the schoolyard was now quiet.
Two minutes later, 117 passengers boarded Lufthansa Flight 8142 from Frankfurt to Paris. They were mostly business commuters mixed in with a few scattered Parisians eager to return home. They were joined by an overweight man in a disheveled suit, a boarding pass in one hand, a copy of the King James Bible in the other. His manner was calm and he smiled often, as if being told a humorous story he alone could hear. He handed the woman at the gate his boarding pass, nodded his thanks as she slipped it through the readout and handed a portion back. He then followed an elderly couple into the walkway, gripping the Bible tighter, glancing at his watch and shutting his eyes for a moment.
He didn’t wait for the flight to takeoff, nor did he walk to his seat. Instead, he stopped just short of the entrance to the plane, held the Bible with both hands and smiled at those around him. “You are a blessed few,” he said to them, “for the Lord’s might shines upon you on this day.”
He then opened the Bible and set free the wired explosives.
Vladimir Kostolov pressed a button on his cell phone and rested it on a coffee table, staring at the wide expanse of the northern Alps that bordered his mountain estate. He had orchestrated the first in a planned series of terror plots, three attacks in all. He took satisfaction knowing a certain degree of panic would set in among the Western nations’ security networks, their primary focus on what all antiterrorist organizations fear most—the unknown. No group would call in to take credit for the attacks, and if one rogue group was bold enough to step forward, the full force of a number of national security agencies would be sent in search of the wrong enemy. Either way, Vladimir was at the controls.
Vladimir held the belief, one that permeated the higher echelons of the Red Mafiya, that where there was chaos there was profit, millions waiting to be made from massive unrest. International law enforcement would have no choice but to divert time and energy to capture the terrorist groups responsible for the acts of violence. That would leave his organization able to focus on their illegal activities free of concern from legal interlopers. With fewer eyes prying on his criminal network, Vladimir would be able to conclude a three-nation, multi-billion-dollar arms shipment to the Middle East, hundreds of cases of AK-47s and rocket launchers primed to make their way to the Yemen underground. He also had a seven-hundred-kilo shipment of heroin to move out of Pakistan, bound for European and American shores. His take from the completion of these two transactions would be several hundred million dollars.
Vladimir picked up the cell phone and punched in a four-digit code followed by a fourteen-digit international number. He gazed at the morning sun shining against the side of the mountains, making them gleam as if polished.
He said into the phone, “Begin the second phase.”
Chapter 5
“You’re asking us to take a risk that could cause us to lose what it took decades to build.” The man across from me looked straight into my eyes. “Go all-in against crews would rather die than cut a deal. And to what end? As it stands, they steer clear of us, we steer clear of them. Why stir the pot?”
The man was Anthony Zambelli, head of the Sicilian branch of organized crime, the Mafia. He had inherited the title and a temper from his father, Don Francisco Zambelli, the man credited with the invention of the double-decker coffin, the most convenient means of disposing of a body the mob ever devised. Anthony was, in many ways, smarter and savvier than his father, expanding their hold on the world’s harbors to include cruise ships and luxury liners, allowing the organization to take in two dollars for every five spent on board. He helped expand our restaurant and casino holdings and turned the enforced sale of twigs of parsley into a $15 million a year operation.
Zambelli’s initial comments surprised me. I came into the meeting thinking he would be the one in the group most willing to go along with my plan. Then again, maybe I would still turn out to be right about that. Anthony could be acting as my front-runner, asking questions he figured I came prepared to answer. I knew he had no love for the Russians or the Mexicans, and on the turf he ruled in Sicily anyone connected to terrorism was eliminated before the rumor could be confirmed.
I took note of his demeanor as he spoke. He was calm, not hostile, and if he had an inclination to push aside my plan, he would not have been able to keep a rein on his anger. He put up an aggressive defense, but while he questioned my plan he didn’t discount it. He merely pointed out the inherent dangers.
“There is no later in this,” I said, looking at the men sitting around the table. “Not for me. Not for us. If we’re going to act, the time is now. We might have waited too long as it is. We gave them space to grow. Maybe that made sense once. Not anymore. We might lose everything getting into an all-out war against them. That’s a risk. But we lose everything if we don’t fight them. That’s a fact.”
These were the most powerful mob leaders in the world—Jannetti from the Camorra sitting next to Kodoma of the Yakuza, and Qing, the Triad Dragon Head. The Israeli assassin squad sent Weiner, a former Mossad agent, and the French flew over old man Carbone, who seemed more dangerous now that he was battling prostrate cancer. The Albanians sent Orto, the last link to the original Gypsy Kings, and the Greeks gave their slot to Big Mike Paleokrassas, as true with a knife as he was with his word.
They all had doubts about waging a war that in their minds was more about my thirst for vengeance than the need to protect their profit base.
In some ways we were run no differently than any multinational corporation. There really isn’t much that separates an international organized crime council from oil conglomerates, hedge funds, and financial institutions. We’re in the profit business, and all of us, on occasion, utilize methods frowned upon by those who live honest lives. Each of us has had days that end with blood on our hands, and not a single one of us—not gangsters, not legitimate businessmen—ever feel truly guilty about it.
“What is the cost of such an endeavor?” Qing asked, his manner smooth as ever.
“Financial or physical?” I asked.
“I would be interested in an answer to both,” Qing said.
“Off the charts,” I said, “on both. The Russians have enough cash to sustain a decade-long war, and the Mexicans aren’t far behind. And we all know how they feel about leaving bodies in the sand.”
“And these terrorists,” Jannetti added, “live to die. And there’s not one of us in this room can put a number to how many of them are out there waiting to pull a pin and take a trip to heaven.”
“That’s right,” I said. “We would be on equal footing financially, able to match the Russians, Mexicans, and terrorists dollar for dollar. We have an edge on secondary sources—our street information, for example, is deeper and stronger than anything they have. Plus, we all have law enforcement contacts that work with us, especially when they know who we are going up against. But where we come up short—and there’s no point in even guessing how short—is manpower.”
“And you think there’s no talking to them?” Kodoma asked. “Come to an agreement where their activities don’t impact our businesses?”
“I don’t think,” I said. “I
know.
”
“Vincent is correct,” Weiner said, voice and manner relaxed. “You
can
talk to them, just don’t expect it to get you anywhere.”
“Look, everybody here is sorry about what happened to your wife and daughters,” Carbone said, never one to shy from awkward moments. “And if it were my family instead of yours, I would do anything,
anything,
to get the bastards behind the job. If that’s the reason, the only reason, you’re asking us to go down into the pit, I think it fair we hear that from you right now, before we go further.”
I had figured Qing and Kodoma would be up for my plan. The Triads and the Yakuza were organizations built on discipline, loyalty, and respect. They had disdain for any organization not designed in a similar fashion, which made them natural enemies of the Russians, Mexicans, South Americans, and terrorists. They were men of tradition and would expect one reason for my plan to be personal, since family members are held sacred in their cultures.
Carbone was a money whore. I could tell from the moment he sat down he would be opposed to a plan that brought with it risk to the bottom line of his outfit. I was also aware, as were others in the room, that his crew had a wink and nod deal with terrorists on his turf. He allowed them to use his areas as a base in return for monthly payments so long as there were no attacks perpetrated on sections he controlled. But I also knew Carbone was at the mercy of the Camorra and the Mafia, dependent on them for supplies and a pipeline into keeping his drug operations running. If they were in, he had to be, if only for the sake of appearances.
“It’s part of it,” I said. “To sit here and say otherwise would be insulting to each of you. But if it were only that, I wouldn’t need any of you to do what needs to be done. I would take care of it myself. I don’t lack the money, the manpower, or the stomach. So, if you think I called you in just for that, then there’s a car waiting downstairs to take you back to your hotel or airport or wherever the hell it is you want to go. I don’t need you to fight my battle. But this is a much bigger issue. This is about
our
war with them. A war that must be fought. You all know that. You knew it as soon as you were aware of the Russians brokering a deal with the terrorists. That is a line we cannot allow to be crossed. You wouldn’t be who you are, wouldn’t hold the positions you do, if you didn’t believe that.”
“Let’s say, for sake of argument, we leave this alone, let them go about their business,” Jannetti said. “How does that hurt us more than getting into an all-out war where numbers favor the other side?”