He had not aroused an alert. The door was open and he could hear a radio playing sentimental music in the kitchen.
He looked closely at the next stage of his descent: he should track to his right. Below him he had seen a small cliff face, a drop of more than twenty feet. He searched to his right for places where his fingers could grip and others that would give a foothold.
A fly came. He hadn’t seen one like it before. It was very near to him. There was a stone outcrop almost level with his eyes and nose and above it a cobweb, its mesh designed to trap. He couldn’t see the spider that had made it, but he used a finger to dismantle the web so that it was no longer a threat to the fly. It seemed important. The fly had long antennae stretching from its head, six fine legs, and its wings, camouflaged with dark brown blotches, stretched beyond the length of its body, which was thin, as if it had been shaped on a potter’s wheel. The tail had an orange tip that was like a scorpion’s sting. He thought he had made it safe. That was where it had begun: a fly in a web. He had watched the fly’s death, and the car had come. If he had been later, if the FrauBoss had not been delayed, if he had looked the other way and minded his own business, the fly would still have been killed and eaten, but Jago would not have joined a fight in which he had no stake.
The fly flew away. His mind cleared.
Jago looked for the route he would need to take, to his right, for the next leg of his descent, which would bring him to the line of sheets and a buried cable.
They packed their gear carefully into the bags. The camera’s lenses and the image intensifier for the binoculars were worth thousands of euros, and their arses would be well kicked if the kit was not securely stowed and they dropped it, damaging the optics. They had had glimpses of the boy going forward. To Ciccio, he was now a part of the scenery. The suit, tie and shaven cheeks in the photo that had seen sent to their communications hub were long gone. They had seen Jago Browne twice, maybe three times, moving down the hill towards the house. What to do?
Fabio had said, ‘I didn’t see or hear anything. What did you think you saw or heard?’
‘I don’t know.’
Better to be incompetent than devious. They had had no sight or sound of him. At their pay-grade, they would be thanked only for hard, clear information. He was ‘a can of worms’, and their intent was to get off the slope before darkness with everything they had brought in. Problem solved.
Ciccio swore.
She was no more than five metres from them.
She moved as he had taught her to.
Ciccio tilted his head and saw Fabio’s face: incredulity. She went past them. They had the scrim net in front of them. It hid their hands and faces. She might, actually, have tripped over them and stayed ignorant of their presence. Ciccio’s assessment of her: a good kid, a fair shag but intense. Her mind had been at war with the criminal classes of Calabria. Her conversations all ran along the same tracks and finished with the demand for detail of the families: that was all that concerned her. His own interest was based on her performance beneath him, and the matchless fun of tracking her hiding places and hunting her down, or reversing their roles, when he hid and she came after him. Always, when she’d got her breath back, she would ask questions. How many weeks? A few. How had it finished? It had run its course. Had he been fond of her? He’d sort of felt responsible – he’d thought her confidence was fake, that she was vulnerable.
‘Did you see that?’
‘A woman.’
‘What in fuck’s name is . . .’ Ciccio’s mouth was an inch from Fabio’s head. She was gone. She didn’t move badly but was still a novice. She had been a quick learner, but eventually he’d had enough, ignoring her texts and not returning calls. He added, ‘She’s called Consolata. She’s an activist; anti—pizzo shit. I knew her.’
‘For Christ’s sake, you didn’t— Ciccio, were you screwing her? What about Neomi?’
‘It was before Neomi.’
They couldn’t see her now, but heard her once when she must have kicked loose stones and a few had fallen. Ciccio had had a view of her face: she had looked close to breaking point. She had glanced around her, as if searching for something, then gone on.
‘If you were cheating on Neomi, I’d—’
‘I told you the truth.’
Silence clung between them. Repeat: hear, see and know nothing. They could justify it. They had a ‘mission objective’. They were there to identify the hiding place used by Bernardo Cancello, padrino of a clan, locate it and report it. They liked the jokes: Q. Why do elephants paint their toenails red? A. So they can hide in cherry trees. Q. Have you ever seen an elephant in a cherry tree? A. No, so it works . . . There was no humour now. They hadn’t found him.
The thought of having to offer explanations, have his career examined, his liaisons subject to scrutiny, was unattractive. They made no call. It was sufficient for him to register that they had not seen the high-value target.