"The American."
"I've never met him. No one at my level meets him. He uses local operators, different ones each time. Cuts them loose after a single job. The only constants are the compound and the cycle."
"If a woman was taken from a private estate outside Palermo four weeks ago. American. Auburn hair. Where would she be."
His good eye finds mine, and in it I see a flicker of something that might be pity, which is an odd thing to see in a man whose face I've just rearranged.
"Four weeks?" He shakes his head, just barely, the motion limited by my grip in his hair. "The cycle is three weeks. If she went through the compound, she's been moved on. They train them there. Break them. Then they go to buyers, auction houses, private sales. If your woman was taken four weeks ago, she is most likely no longer there."
Fuck. I suspected that she could be gone. Sold. Shipped somewhere I can't reach in time, packaged and delivered like Lombardi's cargo.
My hand tightens in his hair. My jaw locks. The knife in my pocket burns as I reach for it.
She is not gone. She is somewhere, and I will find that somewhere, and I will take it apart stone by stone. And if she's not there, I will follow the trail until it ends or I do.
I pull the knife out. The same knife that has Cicero's blood on it, Lombardi's blood on it, and now Bianchi looks at the blade, his bravado dissolving into the primal understanding that he is about to die.
"The exact location."
He gives it. Coordinates spilling out of him alongside blood and broken teeth, a road name, a landmark, the turn off the provincial highway where an unmarked track leads up into the hills. I commit every word to memory because this is the last thing this man will ever be useful for, and when he's finished and his mouth stops moving and his one good eye searches my face for the mercy I don't have, I draw the blade across his throat in a single line and step back from the spray.
Valente is in the doorway, arms folded, his face doing that thing it does when he disagrees with me.
"That wasn't sensible."
"No."
"He could have had more. Contacts. Names. The American's identity."
"I know."
"If she's at that compound, we could have used him to get in clean. Fewer casualties. Better odds."
"I know, Valente."
He looks at the body, then back at me, and what I see in his face isn't judgment. It's the expression he wore in Catania when he put his hand on my shoulder and pulled me back from a scream that wasn't there. Concern worn down to its bare essentials, stripped of comfort, offering only the fact of its presence.
"You're losing it, Elio."
I wipe the blade on Bianchi's shirt. Fold the knife. Return it to my pocket.
"Find the compound," I tell him. "Confirm the location, the guard rotation, the access points. Get Gio on the case. Pull in Alessandro's contacts in Palermo if you need additional men. I want satellite imagery, I want ground reconnaissance, and I want it in forty-eight hours."
"And then?"
"Then we go in."
Valente nods once, pushes off the doorframe, and pulls his phone from his jacket. Behind me, Bianchi's blood runs into the seams of the concrete floor, following the path of least resistance toward the drain in the center of the room, and I stand watching it pool and spread while Valente's voice carries from the hallway, already making calls, already putting the pieces in motion.
She's been gone for almost a month, and now the distance between us has collapsed to forty-eight hours and a compound in the hills outside Palermo.
She was so close all this time.
Valente reappears in the doorway, phone still pressed to his ear.
"Alessandro can have eight men in Palermo by tomorrow night. I need to verify the road Bianchi described, cross-reference with the provincial maps. If the compound is where he says it is, there's only one approach that gives us cover, and it's a three-kilometer hike through agricultural terrain in the dark."
"Then we hike."
