Hardly more than a foot away, a body lay on the crushed roof of the Mercedes taxicab. A man in a dark suit. He’d landed on his back. His head lolled to one side, eyes open, staring at Simon. But for a trail of blood running from his mouth, Hadrian Lester looked remarkably peaceful.
Simon helped London to her feet. A moment to come to their senses, to fully realize what was before their eyes. London circled the ruined car, hurrying to help the driver pinned inside. With Simon’s help, and that of several bellmen and porters, they pulled the man free. By some miracle, he was unhurt except for some cuts on his forehead. He saw his car, the dead man on it, and collapsed.
Simon approached London. “Come here.”
“What is it?”
“Just come here.”
She approached warily. With a handkerchief, he wiped away several flecks of blood on her cheek. She lifted her chin, eyes on his. “You sure you want to go?” he asked.
London nodded, but a moment later, backed away, as if she’d gotten a shock. She walked to the next taxi. “My apartment is on the way to the airport. Am I allowed to get my passport?”
Chapter 53
Latina Air Base, Italy
Caesar led his legions to victory at the Battle of Vosges.
Mark Antony at the head of his cavalry routed the Gauls and their king, Vercingetorix, at Alesia.
And Luca Borgia, no less a champion of his people, would expel the barbarian hordes from the shores of Europe.
Borgia sat in the passenger seat of the van as it cleared security at Latina Air Base, an hour south of Rome, and drove onto the tarmac. A Piaggio turboprop sat on the runway, engines spooling, loading ramp lowered. Near it was parked a jeep. General Massimo Sabbatini, clad in his navy-blue utilities, beret cocked on his head, jumped down and started toward them. A squad of his men waited close by.
Borgia left the van. The two men shook hands. It was not a day for pleasantries. They were preparing for war.
Sabbatini ordered his soldiers to unload the van. In minutes, a stack of crates man-high stood next to the loading ramp. The paratrooper read from a clipboard. “Four crates Semtex at ten kilos per crate. Two crates hand grenades at twenty grenades per. Two crates Beretta nine-millimeter pistols at ten pistols per. Two crates ammunition. All here.” He caught Borgia’s air of concern. “What is it?”
“I don’t want them getting their hands on the materiel.”
“No question of it. The plastique cannot be detonated without the proper equipment. We will defuse the grenades and remove the firing pins from the pistols.”
“No mistakes,” said Borgia.
Sabbatini placed a hand on his upper arm. One soldier’s word to another.
It was a clear, pleasant afternoon. The air base, on the Lazio plain, looked east toward Cassino and south toward Pompeii. Borgia fancied himself a student of history. At such a place Pompey had fought Caesar and lost, signaling the end of the First Triumvirate. Borgia had no illusion. He was not the next Caesar. But like Caesar, he viewed himself as an expression of the people’s will, the vox populi. Through him, their voices would be heard. He was not the only one who had had enough.
Turin. Milan. Lampedusa. Ingolstadt. Dijon. Copenhagen. Madrid.
Equal shares of explosives and armaments purchased from Libya had been sent to each city. In each city, members of Prato Bornum would see that they were properly used. Police. Military. Intelligence agencies of one stripe or another. Bloodshed was necessary, but Borgia had instructed his colleagues to keep it to a minimum. Enough blood would be spilled come tomorrow night to spark his plan into action. The other cities were meant to be symbolic, to let the public know that no one was safe. Not in Italy. Not in Germany. Not in Denmark. Not in Spain. And not in France.
Poor France, thought Borgia. Yet again she would suffer the most, but if it was any consolation, many of the victims would not be French.
There had been one last shipment, and this was the most important. It had left his possession an hour after he had acquired the materiel from the gangsters Toto and Peppe, on the Naples docks, and had been placed aboard a private jet and flown to, of all places, Switzerland. Fifty kilos of plastic explosives packed in a lead-lined stainless-steel case, ensuring the plastique’s chemical signature remained invisible to even the most sophisticated scanner.
From the airport outside the Swiss capital of Bern, a courier had ferried the case south along Lake Thun before turning due west and heading into the Simmental Valley. His destination was the resort town of Gstaad, elevation 3,445 feet, in the canton Bern. It was a ninety-minute drive. Once there, he navigated toward the famed Palace hotel, and past the hotel to a chalet not much smaller.
The chalet belonged to Arabs, the Al-Obeidi family, originally from Dhahran. Tarek Al-Obeidi had served as managing partner of PetroSaud and, more recently, headed up the newly formed International Rare Earth Consortium. His older brother, Abdul Al-Obeidi, age sixty-one, had chosen a different profession. For the past twenty years he had served as the deputy chief of the Mabahith, the Saudi secret police.
It was Abdul Al-Obeidi who the day before had made sure the doors to the chalet’s subterranean garage stood open so the courier could enter and off-load his sensitive cargo undetected. Abdul Al-Obeidi had phoned Borgia soon afterward to give him a firsthand description of the work being done.
Swiss law demanded that every home have a secure, airtight room on the ground floor or, preferably, the cellar to serve as protection against a nuclear attack. Theluftschutzbunkerwas large and high ceilinged, its concrete floor and walls painted a glossy battleship gray, a reinforced steel door one meter thick guarding entry and exit, anti-gas filters built into the ceiling. A worktable had been erected in the center of the room, no more than a thick plywood sheet set atop sawhorses. It was a temporary construct, to be disposed of after use. Four military-style vests rested on the table’s surface. The vests were made from molecular-weight polyethylene, black, with pockets on the left and right and a larger one across the back, all designed to house Kevlar plating to protect the wearer against bullets and shrapnel. These vests, however, would be used for quite the opposite purpose.
On the floor beside the worktable was a tall plastic garbage bin filled with an assortment of nails, nuts, bolts, washers, screws, hinges, steel balls of various diameters, and razor wire, the last designed to slice off appendages and cause death by exsanguination to those not in the blast’s immediate vicinity.
A gray, elfin man dressed in baggy trousers and a shabby cardigan stood by the table, hands in his pockets, as the explosives were brought in. He moved quietly and carefully, and with his trim mustache and scholarly glasses could have been mistaken for a shy-mannered country physician. In fact, in his earlier days he had practiced medicine as the chief of cardiology at Baghdad General Hospital. His career ended the day the Americans invaded Iraq. For the past sixteen years, he had specialized in the building of suicide vests and explosive belts for the Sunni insurgency. He was known by all as “the Doctor.”
