The Informant

14

SCHAEFFER WAS ON the plane to Phoenix, and it was before noon. He'd had the advantage of knowing that one of the passengers booked on the flight from Syracuse wasn't going to make it to the airport. So he had bought a standby ticket early in the morning, sat down with his computer, and waited until he had been called to the gate and assigned a seat. He spent the two hours in the waiting area across the concourse from his gate watching. If Cavalli had chosen this flight, it was possible there were others—friends of his, Castiglione soldiers, even Tosca—on the same flight. When he had determined that there weren't any passengers he had to worry about, he saw the air marshal arrive. She was about thirty-five years old, blond, wearing a business suit and carrying a leather shoulder bag. The flight attendants at the gate were not nearly ready for boarding, but they saw her enter the waiting area at a brisk pace, nodded to her as she walked into the boarding tunnel and disappeared. It all took about four seconds, and he had the feeling that if someone asked the flight attendants about the woman, they would have said, "What woman?" When he boarded the plane, he found her standing by an aisle seat about two thirds of the way back, staring at each passenger who came in the door. He had spotted marshals on his two flights into Washington, D.C., but he hadn't expected to have one on a flight to Phoenix. He just noted where she was, took his seat, and waited.

When the flight attendant had finally closed the forward hatch and brought the bar down to lock it, he was relieved. It meant that there wouldn't be four big men appearing in front of the cockpit door in a moment to drag him off the plane. Travel was always full of small obstacles and checkpoints that had to be passed through.

As soon as the plane taxied to the end of the runway and then hurtled over the pavement into the sky, he settled into the back of his seat and prepared to sleep. Sleeping whenever and wherever he could was something he had learned from Eddie when he was about twelve. "Never work when you're tired, kid. If you don't win by strength in the first couple of seconds, you have to win by stamina. You have to learn to keep resetting the clock so it's always morning for you. The other guy is so exhausted he's beginning to see things out of the corner of his eye, but you just got up."

Sleep was a trick. Just find a comfortable place, close both eyes, and mentally repeat some short, meaningless mantra a couple of times to clear the mind of distractions. Eddie had used the Lord's Prayer, but the boy had preferred writing the alphabet. He would write each letter by directing an imaginary pen in longhand until he was asleep.

After a disconnected and meaningless series of dreams, he awoke feeling rested and alert. He looked at his watch, saw that he had slept four hours, and adjusted it to Phoenix time.

While he was waiting in the airport in the morning, he had Googled the Silver Saguaro Ranch and found its website. He had taken the virtual tour and studied the maps and layouts. The place was a resort in a mountainous area with pine trees. There was a big building called the Lodge, which appeared to have two restaurants, a couple of meeting rooms, a huge open room with gigantic stone fireplaces on either end, and a wall that appeared to be all glass. There were stables and horse trails and hiking routes, and a lake with some canoes and a dock. The suites consisted of dozens of separate cabins, each with a bedroom, a living room with a bar, and a bathroom.

At the bottom of the home page of the website was small print saying the Saguaro was a Pure Gold Seam resort. He ran a Google search on the name and found that the president of the company was Sylvia Fibbiano. Of course. He was sure that she was the daughter of Jimmy Fibbiano, who had always had a construction company in New Jersey that kept changing its name every time it got to be well known. He had been fairly sure the Silver Saguaro Ranch must be owned by a Mafioso, or the others would never consent to meet there. He supposed any potential guests for the next couple of days would be told the whole place was rented out for a large wedding party or something, so there would be no outsiders around. The help would all be relatives and protégés of the Fibbianos, even if they had to be flown in from other Fibbiano enterprises. Fibbiano would have guards stationed around the perimeter of the place to prevent a breach or warn of a raid.

He could only hope that the men out there would be the usual big guys with the expensive suits and Italian shoes who ran the football betting sheets, and not a few lean and silent types who spent every fall in the woods stalking deer.

When the plane landed in Phoenix, he moved quickly. He went to the curb and got on a shuttle bus to the car-rental depot. While he was inside behind the tinted windows, he studied the crowd coming out of the baggage claim for familiar faces but he saw none. When he got to the depot, he rented a Nissan Altima in an unobtrusive gray and drove.

He stopped in a sporting-goods store and made some purchases. He bought a small backpack, a .308 Remington rifle with a ten-power Weaver scope, and three boxes of ammunition. On the way out he picked up a folding hunting knife with a flat handle that was easy to conceal and came open with a flick of his thumb.

His next stop was at a military-surplus store. He bought a pair of tropical-style combat boots, a light camouflage poncho with a hood, a camouflage tarp, a backpack-style water pack with a tube for drinking on the move, a set of water purification tablets, some salt pills, and a camouflage ventilated hat with a flap to protect the back of his neck from the sun. There was a high-tech section where he found a night-vision scope and a GPS unit. He picked out a set of U.S. Geological Survey maps of southern Arizona with altitude lines and landmarks. He needed to drive out Route 87, called the Beeline Highway, past Saguaro Lake in the Tonto National Forest. That seemed to be about forty miles. From there he had to take a turnoff and go farther out into the desert toward the pine woods and hills.

As he drove farther out of the city in the afternoon, he studied the country. His plans had become specific and certain. If the Justice Department managed to figure out where the meeting was, they'd block all the roads for miles before they moved in. There was no way that most of the old men would try to take off across country in a place like this. Chi-chi Tasso or Big Al Costananza would run about a hundred yards and die.

He found the turnoff past the lake, drove another fifteen miles on the road to the Silver Saguaro Ranch, and looked for a place to hide his car. He turned off the road onto a rocky, dry streambed that curved away into an area where the rocks were as big as small houses. He parked between two of them, stretched his tarp from one to the other over the car, and anchored it on both ends with rows of stones. He tossed some loose brush over the tarp to help disguise it from the air.

He put on his camouflage hat and boots, broke down his rifle, rolled the barrel and stock in his poncho to hide them, put the rest of his gear into his backpack, and set off on foot.

It had been at least ten years since he had engaged in the level of physical activity he was about to attempt. But in England he had kept himself in reasonably good condition as a precaution, and he routinely walked nearly everywhere he went.

He began the hike tentatively, and as his muscles warmed up and loosened in the late summer heat, he worked harder. It was midafternoon when he started, and he wanted to get as far as he could while he had light. He would be virtually invisible from the air during daylight, but at night his body heat would show up on infrared sensors, and his outline would be clear in the amplified green glow of a night-vision viewer. He ran a hundred yards, then walked a hundred yards, then repeated it. The ground was gravel with a few spiky plants and rocks of every size from a pea to a car.

The desert heat made his body seem heavier, as though gravity had been augmented somehow, but he pushed on. When he was walking, he drank, checked his position with the map and GPS, and judged his progress toward the dark silhouettes of the distant hills. He could easily tell he was gradually climbing into higher country. By the end of three hours he had noticed that the vegetation was thicker, with a few woody plants with leaves, and soon there were stands of pine. He moved to the inside of the groves for shade and cover.

Before the fifth hour the sun was low in the sky and he judged he was getting close to the ranch. He found a copse in the middle of a pine woods, half covered by a rock shelf and sheltered by trees that had grown close to it. He crawled under the shelf, opened his pack, and sorted his gear. He assembled his rifle, loaded it, then put another five rounds in the spare magazine and put it into his pocket. He rechecked the adjustments of the scope and mounts to be sure they were in the midrange—essentially the factory setting. He would have liked to zero in the rifle before he tried to do anything risky with it, but that had been impossible. He would have to move in as close as he dared, fire his first round, and adjust to improve the precision of his aim. He plotted his route to the ranch and identified a mountain as the landmark he would still be able to see later in dim moonlight.

He drank more water, lay down, and slept for a time, then awoke in the dark. He looked at his watch. It was ten o'clock in the evening. He took with him his night-vision scope, his rifle and ammunition, and his camouflage poncho. He left everything else in his pack and pushed it far back under the rock shelf.

The night was quiet in the dry, rocky hills. The birds that had sung at twilight were all quiet now. His own footsteps seemed to be the loudest sounds. Now and then some small animal skittered away into the brush ahead of him. After another quarter mile he would stop occasionally in cover, take out his night scope, and study the next stretch of visible ground before he stepped into it. He searched for the shapes of men waiting for an intruder, and then for electronic devices that might have been installed around the perimeter of Silver Saguaro Ranch.

He saw nothing and heard nothing that indicated men had been here. Probably anyone on the path he was blazing would have traveled on horseback, but he could see no signs that horses had been up here. As he approached what his map indicated was the last ridge before the ranch, he became more wary. There could easily be men posted up on the high ground watching the approaches to the resort.

He knelt in some fragrant brush, put on his camouflage poncho, concealed his rifle under it, and looked through his night scope. He saw pale green rocks and trees, black sky, pale green clouds. He looked, he waited, then moved ahead to a higher plateau with a few jagged rock outcroppings on it. He sat in front of an outcropping, spread his poncho so he wasn't shaped like a human being, and stared through the night scope, looking down the slope toward the ranch.

A hundred yards ahead there was a fallen log on the ground, a big pine that had once stood at the edge of the nearby stand. After a few seconds he saw part of it move. It moved again and he made out the shape of a head, a shoulder, and then the whole shape separated itself from the background. It was a man lying down, leaning on the log, and staring up the mountainside in his general direction.

He had to find a way past this sentry. If he passed far enough to the left or the right, he might avoid this man's notice, but there would be others stationed at intervals. One sentry was like one ant—an impossibility. He studied the area with his night-vision scope, but he couldn't see a good way around. He also knew that it would be foolish to leave an armed enemy behind him. Getting past him on the way out, after things had happened, might be impossible. But if the man was dead, this spot would be clear.

Schaeffer moved to his right, away from the sentry, and slipped into the pine woods. He felt extremely lucky that the trees up here were pines. The ground had a thick, soft carpet of fallen needles, and he could walk without making a sound. As he circled back to the left, he considered the proper method. Shooting the man would bring the rest of the watchdogs. Cutting his throat would be difficult to do without some sort of a struggle and the chance of being soaked with the man's blood. The best way would be a ligature. He pulled the cord from the neck of his poncho, tested its strength, and then looked for the right sort of branch as he moved in the woods. When he found it, he used his knife to carve it into two pieces, each about an inch thick and four inches long. In the center of each he carved a groove, then put the knife away. He tied the ends of the cord to the handles, keeping the cord in the groove. Now the cord was about two feet long with a sturdy handle on each end.

He moved on through the woods, looking in his scope until he could see the sentry again. The sentry was staring up at the slope of the hill, watching for intruders. Schaeffer began to advance toward the sentry. He stayed low, but moved steadily, and soon he was directly behind him, on the other side of the log. He gripped the handles, crossed his wrists, and dropped the loop around the man's neck. He tightened it and kept it tight. The man struggled to get the cord off his neck, then to reach for the hand that held it. But Schaeffer pulled backward hard and set both feet against the fallen tree trunk.

As he tightened the strangling cord and the man lost consciousness, Schaeffer thought about strangulation. As he had thrown the loop over the man's head, the man had done the wrong thing instinctively. He had dropped the objects in his hands and used both hands to try to pull the cord away from his throat, then to wrench his attacker's hands off the cord. Before he could change his tactic and reach down for the gun in his jacket, his brain had been denied oxygen for a couple of minutes so he was already weak and dizzy. A few seconds later he was unconscious. What amateur killers didn't realize was that strangling took patience. The amateur might consider the job done right about now. But to be sure the man wouldn't start breathing again and regain consciousness after he was gone, it was necessary to deny him oxygen for much longer. Eddie Mastrewski had always insisted on seven minutes.

While he held the cord tight and waited, he watched and listened. There was no sound up here except the whisper of wind in the tall trees. He studied the view up the hill from here so he would be sure to come back past the dead sentry instead of some live one. He looked down at the sentry. He was about thirty years old, wearing new blue jeans and a black shirt cut like a cowboy's, with snaps instead of buttons. He was beginning to lose his hair prematurely, with a receding hairline and a bare spot at the back of his head about the size of a silver dollar. On his feet were a pair of clean, new hiking boots.

Schaeffer held both handles in his left hand, touched the man's wrist, and felt for a pulse: nothing. He unwrapped the rope, found the man's wallet, and looked inside. His driver's license was from New York and said he was Raymond Agnetti. There was a thick layer of hundred-dollar bills, so Schaeffer took them. Agnetti's jacket was lying on the log beside him. When he lifted it, he felt the weight of a gun. He took it out and looked at it in the moonlight. The etching on the slide said it was a Springfield Armory XD. He'd never seen this model before, and so he knew it must be new. He released the magazine and saw it held about sixteen nine-millimeter rounds in a double stack. He pushed it back in and put the pistol in his belt and its spare magazine in his pocket.

He found Agnetti's cell phone in the coat, but he had no radio for talking to all the other guards at once. Schaeffer turned the phone off, put it back in the coat, dragged the body into the low brush at the edge of the pine woods, and covered it with branches from a broken sapling. He retrieved his gear and went on.

Moving slowly and carefully, he made his way down the hill toward the ranch. There were clearly marked hiking trails now, and he stayed in the woods that bordered them. After a quarter mile he saw the complex and realized why the families had posted guards up the hill. The hill offered a good view of the whole re-sort. He kept moving downward looking below for ways to accomplish what he wanted to do.

When he was only a few hundred feet from the populated area, he stopped and surveyed it. From the website he recognized the Lodge, a big, barnlike building with a high roof and big windows. He could see there were many men inside it right now. Parked beside it on the side away from the main entrance were three big white Fibbiani trucks marked GOLD SEAM CATERING, with white-coated hotel staff walking back and forth unloading supplies.

There were cabins along a network of paved roads surrounding the lodge. Many cabins had cars parked in front of them, and quite a few had lights glowing in their windows. There were small knots of men who had gathered to talk at various places along the paths to the lodge or on the wooden porches of the cabins. The thing that struck him as he looked down on the scene was that every human being he saw was male. This was not the sort of conference where they brought wives and girlfriends. It looked like a military encampment.

He found a small level space on the hillside that served as a foothold for some spiky plants, sat down, and spread his poncho on the plants so his body was under it, and its shape merged into the brush. He trained the rifle scope on a group of men standing near the lodge and studied them, then moved the rifle to other groups, searching for familiar faces. It took him several more minutes before he found one he knew. It was Gino Castelletti, an old caporegima from Brooklyn. He was fat and stooped now, and Schaeffer judged he must be around seventy. His hair was so thin that it looked like lines drawn on his bald head.

The five men standing around him listening to him talk were all about twenty-five to thirty-five years old, and Schaeffer didn't know any of them. At one time he had known a great many made men across the country and a fair proportion of the bosses. But nearly all the faces he saw tonight were new. It had been twenty years ago when he had last been around people in the families. Even the oldest of these soldiers had been children then, ten or fifteen years old. None of them had ever seen him.

There were few of the older men in evidence outside the lodge. A lot of the men who had known him were probably dead by now, and others had been convicted of something and been given those comical sentences of four or five hundred years, as Carl Bala had. There were probably two hundred men gathered at the resort tonight for the conference where one of the topics was his death, but he guessed there were fewer than forty present who had ever seen him.

He carefully made his way down the hill after stowing the rifle, the scope, and the poncho underneath a ledge. He picked his way between thick bushes and rocks, trying to stay as invisible as possible. At the edge of the resort and up a short drive by itself was a cabin with a dim light glowing in a window and a rental car parked beside it. He went to the back of the building and looked in the window. There was a bedroom, and he could see a suitcase open on a folding stand and some clothes hanging in an open closet. He went to the woodpile, picked up a piece of firewood, wrapped his hat around the end to muffle the sound, broke the upper pane of glass, reached in, and unlocked the latch, then climbed in.

He went to the closet and picked out the sort of outfit that the men outside were wearing—a pair of blue jeans and a shirt, with a nylon windbreaker intended to keep off the night chill of the mountains and conceal a weapon.

He changed into the clothes, searched the suitcase, and found a brand-new Springfield Armory .45 pistol, still in the box, and a full box of .45 ACP ammunition. These people must have flown into southwestern cities, then driven straight to gun stores operated by friendly owners to pick something out so they wouldn't feel powerless. Probably when they went back to catch their flights home, they would drop the guns off where they had picked them up. He already had the sentry's gun, and it was more concealable than the .45, so he left this one alone.

Through the front window he watched a group of younger men coming along the lighted drive toward the lodge. He had never seen any of them before. He waited until they were just past him, then opened the door and hurried to the road to follow them. If someone looked at him from a distance, he would seem to be a straggler from the main group.

He was very watchful, trying to avoid coming face-to-face with any older men because they were the ones who might have seen his face years ago. When he was young, not long after Eddie Mastrewski had died, he had worked for the Albanese family in Detroit for a time. By then he had a reputation, and so a few times the Albanese capo, Johnny Sotto, had used Schaeffer's face. He had gone along with an Albanese soldier to collect debts. People might stall the soldier, but as soon as he walked in the door, the money would appear very efficiently and without any discussion. After a few months he left and never did that kind of work again because he didn't like having so many people see his face.

He had also resisted the camaraderie that some of the capos who had hired him tried to foster. He had kept his distance, done his job, collected his pay, and left town before buyer's remorse set in. He made it clear that he was a free agent and that he was nobody's friend.

The group of men kept moving down the drive leading to the lodge. There were already many men gathering there. He knew that he couldn't take the chance of going inside, where the men who had seen him would be. He preferred to stay outside with the young men who had no idea who he was. The young ones would find out what was going on inside as soon as it happened anyway. They absorbed every word the old men said, analyzed it, and repeated it.

A couple of them had turned their heads and noticed him, and now they slowed to walk with him. The bigger one held out his hand. "Vic Malatesta, from Buffalo." Then he tapped his companion's shoulder. "This is my brother-in-law, Joe Bollo."

He shook their hands. "Mike Agnelli, Calgary."

"Calgary? Holy shit," said Malatesta. "Nice of you to come."

Bollo said, "You're showing your ignorance. Of course we got crews in Calgary. You think we'd leave Canada to the f*cking Eskimos?"

Schaeffer smiled, and said to Malatesta, "The Castiglione family has been in Canada since Prohibition."

Malatesta seemed to wilt a little. The Castiglione family was a major power, holding the biggest piece of Chicago since Al Capone went to jail, and had colonies in lots of distant places sending tribute to the home base.

The group kept walking. Schaeffer said, "What do you think of this sit-down so far?"

"I don't know," said Bollo. "Maybe when I hear what Frank Tosca has to say, I'll have an opinion. Or more likely, when I hear what Mr. Visconti's opinion is."

"That sounds safe."

"How about you?" Malatesta said.

"I don't have an opinion yet either. I'm waiting to hear what any of us has to gain by helping Frank Tosca kill somebody and take over the Balacontano family. What's he give the rest of the families? Do they get to taste some of the profits?"

"That would be more like it," said Malatesta.

"Well," said Bollo. "Maybe even without that, making him strong might do the rest of us some good."

"Some guys are saying he's the one to run the whole country."

"Do you know him?" asked Schaeffer.

"No," said Malatesta, "but I've been hearing about him for a long time. He's supposed to be a good earner, and a little bit of a wild man too. And that doesn't hurt when something is up. People used to hear the Italians wanted a piece of their action, and they'd get maybe a little chill in their spines. It wouldn't hurt to have some of that again."

"No question," Schaeffer said. "But maybe the way to do that isn't to send the whole organization out after one small guy that nobody's seen in ten, twenty years. It doesn't feel right to me. Not in proportion, you know? Not dignified."

"It's not going up against him that's the problem. It's finding him. That's what takes a lot of people."

Schaeffer chuckled. "If he's that hard to find, maybe he's not that big a problem. Maybe he's an anaconda."

"An anaconda?"

"Yeah. You don't ever want to tangle with one of those bastards. They're twenty, twenty-five feet long. They wrap themselves around you and squeeze you to death. Only thing is, there aren't any around here, so they aren't a problem unless you go where they are and look for them."

"I see what you mean."

The group moved closer and closer to the lodge, and he slouched a little to change his walk and keep his face down to avoid the light from the lamps along the eaves of the lodge and from the tall windows of the big banquet room.

He had not yet decided what he was going to do. He was outnumbered by hundreds to one, and his only way out would be overland, down from the mountain and across the desert to his car. He couldn't predict how the old men were going to react to Frank Tosca's request for their help and support, and that would make all the difference.

He said, "I got a feeling that we need to know a lot more about this before it happens. My bosses ask me what I think, and I have to say I don't know. Either of you guys know which cabin Tosca is staying in?"

"You're just going to pop in and ask him to explain it to you?"

"Not to just me. Maybe I'll ask one of the Castigliones to come too. But I go back a ways with Tosca. I knew him a little bit in New York when we were twenty. He'll probably remember me."

"Cabin nine," Malatesta said. "Or ten, maybe. They're both together over that way. One is his, and the other is a couple of guys he brought with him."

"Thanks. I'll see who I can get to go with me." He stepped aside and headed across the road toward the lodge. He knew it was dangerous to get too close to the building where all the attention was focused, but he needed to know more. He devoted a portion of his attention to each face that turned his way. So far they were all the faces he had hoped for, the men in their twenties and thirties who had been brought along to carry the luggage and look tough. The older men, the ones who knew him or had at least seen him, were either inside the big room in the lodge or back in their home cities running the businesses that kept the supply of money coming in.

Through the huge panes of glass he could see the old men standing around with drinks in their hands. One of the Castigliones, no, all three of the Castiglione brothers, were standing around in blue jeans and hiking boots. And there was Vince Pugliese, who was their underboss now. It must be a good night for law-abiding citizens in Chicago. There was Mike Catania from Boston, and Dean Amalfi, and one of the Sottos whose first name he couldn't bring back. He was definitely a son or nephew of the Sotto who had run the Albanese empire in Detroit years ago. Mike Tragonatta was perched on a step of the big staircase with his shoulders hunched up so he looked like a vulture.

Tosca. There he was. He looked like a cheap politician threading his way through the crowd, insinuating himself and making it impossible for the others to have a conversation that wasn't with him and about him. As he passed, he punched the shoulder of Rich Martinoli and hugged the ancient, skinny frame of Paolo Canaletti. Schaeffer cringed at the stupid presumption of it. Tosca was claiming a false equality with men older than his own father.

Schaeffer couldn't spend too much time in the glow coming from the lodge windows so he moved away. He took this opportunity to go to cabins nine and ten and look in the windows. He found that nine had twin beds and two suitcases, but ten had a king and only one suitcase so he chose that one. He went to the door, pushed the blade of his knife into the space between the handle and the strike plate, and opened it. He went in and closed the door, and then searched Tosca's luggage, but found nothing useful or revealing except a nine-millimeter Beretta pistol. He decided that the rules of the conference must require the participants to come unarmed. He ejected the magazine, removed all of the bullets, and pulled back the slide to open the chamber. He took a sheet of paper from the small pad by the phone, tore off a corner, and crumpled it. He crammed it into the chamber and barrel so even if Tosca reloaded, the first round would fail to feed. He searched for other guns, but there were none in the cabin. He went out through the back window, closed it, but left it unlocked. He walked out of the small clearing on the back side so nobody would see him coming from Tosca's cabin. He passed a few men on the paved drive, but didn't recognize any of them.

He felt slightly better now because he had at least taken some steps to prepare for killing Tosca in his cabin. Any plausible plan was better than no plan. And earlier he had created a gap in the cordon of sentries so there would be at least one way out. Now he needed to learn how the old men reacted to Tosca's proposal. If they turned him down and told him to solve his own problems, Schaeffer's best move would be to get out quietly and then kill Tosca somewhere else on another day.

He got onto the lighted drive and moved toward the lodge again. As he came nearer, he could see into the big conference room and tell that the meeting had begun. The light from inside poured out onto the pavement around the building from the glass wall so he stayed back. He could see there were four large tables pushed together into a huge square. All around it sat the old men.

It occurred to him that the square was a sign of resistance to Tosca. With a rectangular table, somebody was always at the head, and somebody was at the foot. These men were all chieftains, the heads of semitribal groups composed of extended family and close friends, as well as loose collections of hangers-on, allies, and associates who were willing to follow orders because there had always been money and protection if they did. The dons from the smaller, older eastern cities were often as rich and powerful as the leaders of the families in New York or Chicago or Boston because they could control virtually all illegal activity in those places and take a percentage. They were protective of their independence and dignity, and didn't acknowledge the superiority of anyone. They also knew that while a New York family might have more made men, there was no way to project that power to do much in a tightly held city a thousand miles away.

His best hope was that these men would be too suspicious and guarded to help Tosca come to power in the Balacontano family. Why set loose a force greater than their own? Agreeing to hunt for the Butcher's Boy was a small enough thing to do, but its very smallness meant it would be worth little gratitude in the future. Once Carl Bala was satisfied and put Tosca in power, Tosca wouldn't need their help anymore.

He stood in the crowd and studied what he could see of the big room through the glass. If Tosca had wanted to preside, he had been thwarted. The participants were sitting in equal seats at the table, the old men taking turns as each of them made his own statement. Now and then a speaker would stop, raise his eyebrows inquiringly, and gesture toward one or more of the others. Most of the time, the men indicated would nod sagely or make a reply that seemed to indicate an affirmative answer. There was no telling what the topics were, but he guessed that they were using the conference as a way to settle the eternal boundary disputes and make requests for help, a share in some racket, or exclusive rights to some method of stealing in some particular place. He knew that for most of them, there was a wide range of issues that were more important than the succession of leaders in the Balacontano family or the fate of a hit man nobody had seen in years.

Agreements made openly in this company would be difficult to disavow later, and at the same time, could not be understood by third parties to be conspiracies. He stood outside among the young men, the retainers and bodyguards and soldiers, who had no more idea of the outcome than he had. But then, four men came out of the door and lit cigarettes. As they talked to friends and acquaintances, he edged closer. Within a few seconds, the four were surrounded by a growing ring of the curious.

In the center was a man about forty years old. He said, "The local stuff—gambling, street dealers, fencing operations, crews that rip off trucks and trains and cargo containers, percentages of local businesses—all that stays local. You won't have a crew from a Chicago family come in and start asking a contractor in your town to pay them for protection. Trying to pull a scam on a national company or make a deal in a foreign country is open to everybody. But if you have to go to the national headquarters, and it's in St. Louis, you do the St. Louis people the courtesy of letting them know you're there and giving them a small piece of the game." He shrugged. "It's all pretty much the way it was before we were born."

Schaeffer said quietly to the man beside him, "I wonder what happened with Frank Tosca."

One of the men who had come out heard him. "They're still talking about some of it, but he'll get what he wants. They all like the idea of a mutual defense agreement. If some outsider attacks one of the families, the don asks for help, and the other families all send soldiers."

One of the listeners said, "Sounds like overkill."

"That's the point. Things used to work because everybody knew if they wanted to go head-to-head with the Mafia, they were taking on a lot more than what was in front of their eyes that day. There was no way they could win. We need that again. Say some Mexican gang starts shaking down a neighborhood in Houston. The next thing that happens is that the city fills up with goombahs. Fifteen or twenty of the Mexicans disappear one night and the problem is solved for the next ten years."

One of the listeners said, "I'd be ready for that."

"Right. It's the only way. We should have been doing that already."

"Damned straight."

Schaeffer said, "What's that stuff about him wanting some guy killed? Why can't he handle that himself?"

"I think it's a test, to see which of the old men are on board."

"What do the old men think?"

"They all agreed to that first thing. It's common courtesy. You'll hear everything in a few minutes. They're going to take a half-hour break after the last couple of capos finish talking."

Schaeffer drifted backward, allowing other men to slip in to listen, so he didn't appear to be moving, but was soon ten feet from the center of the conversation. Then he was in dimmer light, farther from the lodge. He turned away and began to walk. When he was near the cabins, he left the pavement and walked between two of them as though he were taking a shortcut to his own.

He went to the back of cabin ten, entered through the window, and sat down in the dark to wait for Frank Tosca. He had heard what he needed to know so there was no reason to take the risk of standing outside the lodge in the crowd, waiting for someone to recognize him. He sat in the dark and planned and rested. It was over an hour later before he heard men's voices as they passed on the paved drive outside. Maybe the formal part of the conference was over, or maybe it was just the break. But he had to be ready.

He stood and went to the doorway, stepped into the space at the hinge side of the door, took out the lock-blade knife he had brought, and opened it. He concentrated on regulating his breathing and his heartbeat, readying himself for the struggle. This was no different from the old days. There was no longer any room for negotiation or for last-minute bartering. He heard a man coming up the gravel walk. He listened for other footsteps, but there was only one set. The man climbed up the wooden steps. His leather-soled shoes clopped on the wooden porch. His key was in the lock. The door opened and he stepped inside. Tosca. He began to close it, but before it was fully closed, Schaeffer was behind him, his forearm snaking around Tosca's neck, the knife edge tilted inward. He brought the knife across Tosca's throat with as much force as he could, and then leaned into the door so it closed and locked. He released his hold on Tosca.

Tosca collapsed to the floor on his back, his blood pumping out of him rapidly. His eyes were wide with the panicky realization that he was dying, and would be dead in seconds. His shirt, the upper part of his sport coat, and the carpet beneath him were soaked already, and the blood was pooling beside him.

Schaeffer looked down and said, "I told you to leave me out of it."

A few seconds later, Tosca lost consciousness and his body relaxed. On his way to the window Schaeffer wiped the knife on the bed sheet, closed it, and put it in his pocket. He moved the pistol he had taken from the dead sentry from his belt to his jacket pocket and climbed out the window. He closed the window, took a few steps, and slipped in among the surrounding pine trees.

He walked purposefully toward the outer edge of the complex, heading upward on the hillside with his hand in his pocket on the gun. He passed within sight of two more cabins, and he could see there were lights on in their windows. He kept climbing steadily up the hill, away from the cabins. From the vantage of the higher ground, he could see that about half the soldiers were still milling around outside the lodge, and a few of the old capos seemed to have stayed in the big meeting room, standing in small groups talking, but there were many more men walking up the paved paths to cabins. He could see nobody running or making big gestures so he knew Tosca still had not been discovered. He climbed as rapidly as he could, staying in the cover of the pine groves.

He began to feel winded, to gasp for breath as he forced himself to trot up the hillside. The lack of breath was a nightmarish feeling. He was back in the world he had left twenty years ago, forced to stay alive with his wits and the weapons he could find, but he wasn't the same man anymore. He was twenty years older, far beyond the age when this prolonged physical exertion was routine. What he was doing tonight was something that would have challenged him in his prime. He didn't allow himself to think about how much of the ordeal was ahead of him; he just kept running, putting one foot in front of the other, taking himself up the side of the mountain.

When he reached the level ledge where he'd left his gear, he retrieved the rifle, the rolled poncho, and the night-vision scope, and climbed some more. It was after a few steps higher that he became aware of a faint, almost imperceptible hum. For a second he wondered if it was some kind of vehicle straining its transmission as it drove up a parallel road to intercept him. But as it grew louder, it didn't sound like that. It was some kind of aircraft. It occurred to him that he had not heard any aircraft before. And it must be too late at night for airliners to be landing at Phoenix Sky Harbor.

He moved faster. He took off the jacket he had stolen from the sentry and ran on. He concentrated on making his way up to the crest of the mountain, where the pine forest flourished and the cover was thick. When he reached the big grove he moved off the trail to the thick carpet of pine needles to quiet his footsteps and tried to catch his breath while he walked.

The hum of engines grew into a loud, rhythmic throbbing, and the sound of rotors became a thwack-thwack-thwack in the general roar. Helicopters came in overhead, and he could see their running lights as they cleared the top of the mountain and followed the terrain down into the compound below.

He kept moving, listening to the sounds of more and more helicopters coming in and landing at the foot of the mountain. He knew there would already be federal or police vehicles blocking the private road that led away from the resort, and undoubtedly the highway beyond it. The first thing they did in a raid was take control of the roads so nobody could drive out.

There was no question in his mind that these invaders were the result of his conversation with Elizabeth Waring. He had tipped her off to the existence of a meeting and asked her to use the Justice Department's net of wiretaps and surveillance operations to find out whether a lot of capos were on their way to one place. She had refused to tell him, but of course she had found out and sent an army of federal cops to round up everybody at the meeting. Now the feds would have a wonderful couple of days photographing, fingerprinting, and identifying all the men at the meeting and trying to find out what they were up to.

But things had not worked out well for him. If he had been able to get to her more quickly, or had more specific information for her, maybe the federal cops would have arrived in time to keep Frank Tosca from making his pitch. Tosca had called powerful men here from all over the country, and if they'd all been arrested right away, they would have been angry. Maybe they wouldn't have killed Tosca, but they might have. They certainly wouldn't have agreed to make him head of the Balacontano family. For Schaeffer the timing was wrong. They had already agreed before the first helicopter had swooped in. Now Schaeffer was about as likely to get scooped up in the police sweep as the rest of them. And if the police didn't get startled in the woods and open fire on him, then he would be locked up in a big holding cell with about fifty men who would consider it a pleasure and a privilege to beat him to death.

When he reached the rock shelf where he'd left his pack, he slipped the poncho over his head. He hid the rifle under a pile of rocks, pushed pine needles over it so no part was visible, and stood. Getting out was going to depend on stealth and speed, and not on trying to win a shoot-out with the FBI.

The trail through the pines was deserted, but as he loped along, the sound of helicopters was always in his ears. Suddenly the sound grew deafening, and he threw himself down and skittered under a big rock outcropping. When the helicopter was overhead, he was blinded by the outcropping above him, but then he could see the white belly slide over and then down into the valley. It looked so near that it seemed to him he could almost reach up and touch it.

They must be still ferrying policemen into the center of the resort so they could keep swarming into the compound, detaining everybody they saw. In a few minutes that would be accomplished, and they would be free to start fanning out, searching for stray gangsters from the air.

Before he dared to slow down, he needed to get outside the perimeter the cops were establishing. He kept moving through the pine woods, fighting the stitch in his side and the difficulty he felt gasping in enough air. He reached the spot where he had left the dead sentry, and knowing he had gotten that far gave him a second wind. If all the sentries were in a long line at this altitude, that line would be the spot where the police would start. He ran harder, promising himself he would get as far as the downslope and then stop to catch his breath. Do it now, he thought. Whatever you do now is worth a hundred times as much as anything you can do later.

He found that he remembered the ground he was crossing. He knew the spots where he could risk breaking into a full run, and where he would have to trot, watching for half-buried rocks and raised roots that could injure him in the dark. Tonight a broken ankle would be fatal.

The sound of the helicopters changed again. This time the sound was coming from the north, along the spine of the mountain. He dashed to a sparse stand of pines nearby and then searched for a better place to hide. He found a deep depression on the edge of the grove. It looked as though sometime in the past a big tree had fallen, and the roots had left a hole. He sat in the depression, spread his poncho around him, pulled armloads of pine needles and twigs over on top of it, and lay down on his back.

A helicopter passed over him, bright spotlights shone down from its belly, and then it began to descend. It hovered and set down on the open meadow that lay between him and the downslope. The engine remained loud and the rotors still turned, the false wind kicking up dust and bits of bark.

The door on the side opened and two men in olive jumpsuits ran a few feet, dropped to their bellies, and lay there sighting M-16 rifles on theoretical foes lurking in the forest. Then the rest of the team jumped out, spread, and ran for cover. A second helicopter landed farther up in the meadow, and its crew performed the same landing drill.

The two helicopters churned up even more dust and debris as they rose unsteadily to a height of about a hundred feet and then swung away along the spine of the mountain. The men on their bellies got up and ran to join their comrades, who were already setting off along the path that led to the ranch complex.

He lay still and waited. He was fairly certain that the outer edge of the sweep had been established, and this was it. The men coming along the path passed within fifty feet of him, the butts of their assault rifles resting atop their shoulders instead of against them, turning their heads one way and the other to spot a target. None of them discerned anything human about him in the hole under the poncho and the pine needles and scraps.

Moving slowly, he fed the tube from his backpack canteen up through the neck of the poncho and drank. He rested and regained his strength while he waited for the contingent of federal officers to move far enough off. After a few more minutes he didn't hear them anymore so he got up and began to walk.

Before long he reached the beginning of the downslope. It was a gradual, steady descent, but now there were no paths. Probably few, if any, of the resort's guests had ever hiked down the mountain. In the daytime, the level land at the foot was a hot, harsh, demanding place.

As he descended out of the zone of pine trees and into the levels with patches of cactus and yucca, he could feel the rocky ground radiating stored heat into the cooler night air, like a memory of scorching sunlight. He came downward at a walk. When he reached the level ground and could see ahead far enough to spot the variations that were rocks and desert plants, he worked his way up to a trot. He could just catch the faint sound of helicopters on the moving air now and then from the far side of the mountain.

By now they were probably ferrying passengers to some police facility in the area. A lot of the men at the conference would draw some charges. Nearly every cabin would have a gun or two in it. A lot of the men were violating their paroles just by being in the same place as a hundred other convicted felons. There would undoubtedly be lots of other minor charges he couldn't anticipate—possession of this or that drug, carrying false identification, and so on. If the police found Frank Tosca, his body alone was adequate justification for holding all of the men for questioning.

Now that he was off the mountain there was little cover. He was tired, but he forced himself to stretch and take longer strides. His fast walk turned into a trot, and his trot accelerated into a jog. He kept up the pace for a mile or more before he slowed to a walk. When he caught his breath again, he worked up to a jog. He felt his age more than before. It wasn't that he couldn't perform quick, strong movements. It was his stamina that was diminished. He felt tired, used up now, and keeping up the pace was difficult.

The desert was black and silent and empty, but he knew that was an illusion. He was probably running past lots of desert creatures. He hoped he wasn't coming close to any rattlesnakes. They tended to slither into holes and crevices at night, but if he stepped in the wrong place, he was likely to draw a bite.

The only sounds now were his breathing, his footsteps, and the quiet rush of air past his ears. He kept on until he wondered if it was possible that he had missed the road in the dark and was going into an endless stretch of desert. But then he saw the dim, pale line of gravel a shade lighter than the surrounding desert. He stepped onto it, turned, and followed it. After a few minutes more he spotted the tall rocks with the tarp stretched between them where he had left his rental car. His navigation had been a bit off, but he must have diverged from his trail only a degree or two. He felt relieved. He had made it all the way into the mountain resort on foot, done what he had planned to do, and made it all the way back.

He took off his poncho and his hat and rolled them into a compact bundle, then drank the last of his water. When he reached his car, he put the bundle into the trunk with his small suitcase. He opened the suitcase and took out a set of street clothes and changed into them. He stuck the small pistol he had taken off the sentry in the back of his waistband and covered it with his shirt.

He remembered a 1950s-era hotel in Scottsdale that he used to like so he drove there and found that it didn't look as though it had changed much. He asked if they had a vacant room at this hour, checked in, and went to his room for a shower. After standing under the heavy stream of hot water for a few minutes getting the dust off and soothing his aching muscles, he ran a bath and soaked for a long time. He lay there with the water to his chin, and then his head jerked in a reflex and he realized he'd dozed off. The water had already begun to cool. He stood, dried off, went to the door to be sure he'd put out the DO NOT DISTURB sign, and locked everything that would lock. He propped a chair under the knob to buy himself a few extra seconds if someone battered in the door. Then he made sure the nine-millimeter pistol was fully loaded and ready. He put it under the spare pillow on the side of the bed nearest the door, got under the covers on the other side, and let himself fall into a deep sleep.