SIXTY.

The formal way for the US government to persuade a foreign government to do something is through a demarche, which can be made either in Washington to the foreign emba.s.sy or in its capital or in both places at once.

It can be done at any level, up to and including "calling in" the foreign country's amba.s.sador for a senior state official to deliver the request or having the US amba.s.sador approach the host country foreign minister or even prime minister.

In the case of the American couple who had been shot to death on a cold evening in January, the American government needed to be coy in its handling of the case. The Italians were already fuming over American handling of several intelligence issues, and there were still warrants out for several CIA agents concerning "renditions" carried out in Italy. Worse, the Italians knew that the CIA had embedded some excellent contacts in Rome right under their noses within the various Italian police agencies.

Hence, a p.r.i.c.kly problem it was. The CIA station chief in Rome informally approached his contacts in Italian intelligence and began to exert whatever informal influence could be brought to bear upon the Roman police. The scandals about CIA flights with disappeared persons transiting Italian airs.p.a.ce did not make this any easier. Similar contacts were made in Washington through the Italian amba.s.sador.

An additional complication was that the Italian government was, as always, a delicate coalition. Such requests reaching the public, or at least certain members of parliament, could actually blow apart the ruling coalition.

Nonetheless, the matter of Lt. Rizzo's investigation went through the usual back channels. Rizzo felt he had made highly praiseworthy progress on the case. So when he found himself summoned to the office of the minister of the interior, he should have beamed with pride, expecting to be congratulated upon his fine work. But one never knew which way these meetings with bosses would go. Nor, in any way, could he expect to know where his investigation would be headed next.

SIXTY-ONE.

Monday morning. Alex stood in the security line at JFK in New York, waiting to check in for her flight.

Time for everyone to be searched. She read all the signs. Every bag to be X-rayed. Take off your jacket. Take off your socks and shoes. High risk of terrorist attack. Drop your slightly used undergarments in a one-pint ziplock and turn them over to the baggage handlers.

Hey, got a steel pin in your hip? Take it out so we can check it.

What nonsense. Okay, okay. She knew she was anxious over this new trip, and she tried to cool it. But what was her country coming to? Give me your tired, your poor, your teeming ma.s.ses, your fingerprints.

Signs, signs. Everywhere there were signs, as the old pop song went. Messing up the view. Messing up everyone's mind. No cigarette lighters on the aircraft. No scissors. No knives. No booze. How about a numchuck or a Tai Chi sword?

Yeah. Long-haired freaky people didn't need to apply, but they were actually going though the security line just fine. A woman who looked like someone's great grandmother was being searched, however. A security person was examining her roll of lipstick. Alex sipped from a fresh bottle of cold water that she knew she was going to have to relinquish.

The fear had taken root all over America by now, planted by excessively reckless people in the government. Having been in Ukraine on the day of the RPG attacks, having had to fire lethal weapons at other human beings and shoot her way out, she knew what real fear was. She knew what it was like to be scared, to understand what a true threat feels like, to be a moment away from a painful death or perhaps permanent disfigurement if she acted wrong or was just plain unlucky. She knew what it was like to lose someone she loved in an attack that made no sense.

But on American soil, she didn't want to live in constant fear. She resented the signs. Who the heck was going to make a bomb out of Scope and Pepsodent, anyway?

Alex took off her shoes, belt, and jacket and put them in one bin. Her computer came out of her backpack and went into another while the backpack itself went into a third. Then she dumped her wallet, change, keys, pa.s.sport, and boarding pa.s.s into a fourth. Then she graduated to the hallowed grounds of a "five binner" as she dropped the black duffel bag stuffed with a week's worth of clothes in the fifth.

A security person watched her uneasily, and she was ready for him to say something. She preempted him. "Why don't we all just wear transparent plastic raincoats when we travel," she said. "It would speed things up and make things much easier, wouldn't it?"

He looked at her and muttered something about regulations. He was about to wave her through when a TSA agent stopped the screening counter.

"We'll need to search this backpack," he said to Alex. "Is this yours?

"What's the problem?" she asked.

Whatever it was, it drew a second TSA person, a supervisor. They opened the bag and pulled the rest of her things off the carrier. How she longed right then to have a Federal ID, her old Treasury Department or FBI identification. But she was as naked and vulnerable as any other American.

The first agent reached in and pulled out a half-finished bottle of Diet 7-Up. He smiled, shrugged, and tossed it into a bin that was already overflowing with other half-dead plastics of liquid.

She smiled back. "Oops. Sorry," Alex said.

"It happens all day," the guy said. A job well done, that capture of a 7-Up bottle.

She repacked and pulled her backpack onto her shoulder.

What was the last thought of that song? Thank you, Lord, for thinking of me, but I think I'm doing fine.

Trouble was, Alex wasn't so sure how her country was doing. Billions spent to inconvenience travelers, and where was the real fight against the real enemies of modern civilization? Just one woman's opinion as she grabbed her duffel and hooked her backpack onto her left shoulder. She turned toward her gate.

At a newsstand on the way, she bought another drink and a paperback novel in Spanish, one of those n.o.bel Prize-winning South American works where the women turn into b.u.t.terflies. Might as well get into the mood.

SIXTY-TWO.

A few hours into the flight to Caracas, as the aircraft pa.s.sed above the Caribbean, the pilot announced that pa.s.sengers on the right of the plane could see Cuba. Alex glanced out her window, and sure enough, there it was, nestled in the blue water about a hundred miles to the east.

She had never been there, wished she'd be able to visit sometime, and took a long look as her plane pa.s.sed. It was hard to believe the political issues at play. She felt sorry for the Cuban people, who had been under one oppressive regime or another for more than a century. When would the world again be able to celebrate the cla.s.sic poetry of Jose Mart or the music of the modern-day Cuban trovador Silvio Rodrguez?

Christian missionaries were not allowed to visit the island, for example, even to bring clothing or medical a.s.sistance. The Cuban people deserved better, as did all the people of Central and South America. Having had a mother from Mexico, Alex felt very close to these people. She made a note to include them in her prayers.

The island pa.s.sed. The jet continued its path southward over the Caribbean. Alex slipped into headphones and dozed. She missed Robert horribly. A wave of sadness remained, but at least she felt she was moving forward, starting to get a grip again on her life. She wondered how Ben was doing as well as her pals at the gym.

Note to self. Work my way back into basketball when and if I get back to Washington. She slipped off into a light nap.

She drifted. She opened her eyes. It had seemed like only a few minutes, but she had fallen asleep for the better part of an hour.

The plane was descending now into Maiqueta, Caracas's airport. The airport was called that after the village that once stood there, rather than "Simn Bolvar International Airport," its real name.

The aircraft went into a sharp bank as it angled in from the sea, with mountains on one side. The aisle-seat pa.s.senger in Alex's row was an older woman who gave a nervous glance at her seatmate. She shook her head. "Scary, no?" she asked. She looked to Alex for comfort as well.

Alex smiled.

"And you haven't flown into La Carlota," the man in the middle seat said. He spoke with a Spanish accent.

"Where's La Carlota?" Alex asked.

"The old downtown airport in Caracas. It's mostly used for general aviation now. Coming in you're almost kissing the vila, the mountain range that forms the southern border of Caracas. As a young man I remember coming in there in fog. You felt the pilots were just sensing where the vila was."

Alex nodded and shook her head. The aircraft eased into a further descent.

"President Chvez often still flies out of there," the other pa.s.senger said. "Hopefully one day his pilot will get it wrong."

Moments later, they were on the ground, taxiing to the terminal.

Maiqueta airport was astonishingly modern. Alex retrieved her bags and cleared customs easily. Outside the gates, the steamy Venezuelan heat was waiting for her. She was struck by the contrast with Kiev, where everything had been frozen. The clothing she had worn from New York was already uncomfortably heavy.

She scanned a crowd waiting for arriving pa.s.sengers. There was a well-dressed man with a sign that had her name on it.

Alex approached him in Spanish. "Buenas tardes. Soy Seorita LaDuca."

"Mucho gusto," he answered.

They continued in Spanish. Alex slipped into the flow of it with ease.

"I'm Jose Mardariaga of the Mardariaga limousine service," he said. "I've been sent by Seor Collins to pick you up. Let me take your bags."

The man took her to a new Lexus with air conditioning that worked. A blessing.

"Is it always this hot this time of year?" she asked, making conversation.

"Down here on the coast, s, claro!" Seor Mardariaga said. "But not in Caracas, which is up high. The Spaniards usually built their colonial capitals in the mountains away from the coast for this reason. For instance in Chile, I'm a Chilean myself, the port is El Paraso, but the capital of Santiago de Chile is inland, in the mountains."

"Nice airport."

"There's even a TGI Friday's," the driver said, as if that was the height of current civilization. Perhaps it was, Alex reflected.

"Chvez's doing?" she asked.

"Not a bit of it! The project of replacing the old airport terminal predates him."

Hearing him, Alex thought back to her phone conversation with her friend Don Toms, just before leaving. He had discussed att.i.tudes toward Hugo Chvez based on social cla.s.s.

Venezuelan sociologists traditionally divided society into five cla.s.ses. A, B, C, D, and E. A were the rich, B were those who could have an American middle-cla.s.s lifestyle, C were people what the Venezuelans called "middle cla.s.s" but had an American lower-middle-cla.s.s lifestyle at best. D's were working cla.s.s people with very modest income but steady work, and E's were the people on the bottom.

Seventy percent of Venezuelans were D's and E's. They were Chvez's unconditional supporters. The C's were torn, but many were anti-Chvez, if for no other reason than the cla.s.sic desire of their cla.s.s to seek to distinguish itself from the cla.s.ses below. The A's and B's loathed Chvez. The B's were in the toughest position, because this was the country they were stuck with. The A's, the truly wealthy, already had their bolt-holes in Miami and their a.s.sets stashed in American and Swiss banks.

Clearly, Alex thought, her driver with his own limousine service was an anti-Chvez C.

The ride to the city went quickly. Alex came out of her daydream as they went through a tunnel, and then on the other side they were on the expressway that ran the length of the long, narrow city. Before her, Alex saw high-rise office buildings and, on some of the hills, obvious condos. But on other hills there were cinderblock shacks piled one on top of the other.

"Estoy curiosa. Donde est Petrare?" Alex asked, remembering Don Toms's description of the city. Where's Petrare?

"That hill right in front, in the distance. You won't want to go there," the driver said.

"I know," she said. "A friend warned me."

The car turned off the elevated freeway onto the parallel street running under it. The driver executed a hair-raising U-turn in the middle of traffic, then turned right up a well-manicured driveway with palms in the center strip.

The Lexus came to a plaza with a white, low-lying building and stopped at the door. "El Tamanaco." the driver announced. "Su hotel, Seorita."

Alex checked in. She found a suitcase waiting for her in her room, courtesy of Sam and his operatives. Jungle clothing and a weapon. Shirts, hiking boots, shorts, a rain slicker, and a Beretta. She tried things on. She checked the weapon. She also found a small digital camera and three extra memory cards. A thoughtful addition.

She showered, ordered a light meal from room service, and realized she was exhausted. Toward ten in the evening, she collapsed into bed and slept.

SIXTY-THREE.

The meeting at the Justice Ministry in Rome had not gone exactly the way Rizzo had planned. He had excluded his a.s.sistant DiPetri, the worthless one, because why should the worthless one be allowed to show up when the laurels were being awarded? The worthless one hadn't done anything helpful, for example, except possibly just keeping his foolish hands out of the way. So why should he get any credit?

But twenty minutes into the meeting with the minister, Rizzo wished he had brought DiPetri along to take some of the heat. In response to the minister's questions, Rizzo found himself giving a step-by-step recapitulation of his two investigations, from the commission of the crime, through their linkage, through trips to the obitorio, through the official meddling by the Americans in the custody of the bodies, through his Sailor Moon linkage of the crimes to Ukrainian Mafia.

Unimpressed, the minister sat at a wide desk with his eyes downcast, a secretary recording Rizzo's explanation.

After several minutes, despite his years of professionalism, Rizzo got as jittery as a dozen scared cats. There had been much in the press recently about CIA agents embedded within the Roman police. The minister had no reason to suspect Rizzo of such collusion, of serving two masters like that, but Rizzo didn't know whether he might come under accusation, anyway. Things like that happened sometimes.

Rizzo finally came to his conclusion. "And that is where we are today," he finally said.

The minister looked up.

"Do you feel that any arrests are imminent?"

"Arrests, Signore?"

"Arrests," the minister said in a tired voice. "Surely you know what arrests are because I'm certain you've made a few in your long career."

"Arrests in Rome are unlikely," Rizzo said, "as I strongly suspect that the gunmen have fled the country by now. As to identifying them and asking one of the other police agencies in Europe to effect the arrests, well, that-"

"Let's save the wishful thinking for later, shall we?" the minister said, cutting him off. "Are there any Ukrainian or Russian gangsters in Rome now whom you feel that we could pin this upon?"

Rizzo's eyes widened, clearly ill at ease with the notion.

"Pin?" he asked. "As in 'frame'?"