‘There’s a bunker, but no power in it. The entrance is an electric-controlled door, but it’s dead. Back here, the wire’s broken. Who did that?’
‘Are you asking or telling?’
‘He’s quite a lad, your young man . . .’
He thought again of what the woman had said, in the kitchen of a small home in Canning Town, about her son – who had a brother working in the street market and a shop-assistant sister in the West End. He’d thought her strangely rude, and reckoned her opinion inappropriate. Nothing she had said would indicate why the boy, who should have been her pride and joy and had no link to the region, had decided on waging warfare on a criminal clan he didn’t know and with whom he had little argument. Two flash-bangs had been rolled the length of the tunnel. Anyone lingering inside would have been deafened and temporarily blinded.
‘Do you understand?’ Fred jabbed the question.
‘I don’t.’
They waited and watched. The tunnel was filled with searchers.
One came back. A head shaken, a gesture with a hand. He thought young Luca, beside him, drooped, like a guy who thinks he’s won the lottery and has spent the money twice, then finds he forgot to buy the coupon. A savage moment.
Carlo asked, ‘Do you think we might have overstayed . . .?’
‘Maybe the only useful thing we did was scratch our names on that tree.’
‘Let’s get the fuck out – after our comprehensive exercise in learning the perils of shoving a snout where it has no right to be.’
They turned their backs. Another day, another dollar. Carlo sniffed. He thought it looked, again, like rain – and, again, like he hadn’t changed the world.
He’d known where to go.
They had led him.
It was a low entrance. He had to duck and his knees brushed the dried leaves that had accumulated at the mouth. Jago had the torch in one hand and in the other he gripped the penknife. The helicopter was still up but over the approach to the house, where the olives were grown, and towards the village. He thought it would come back, do more sweeps, but doubted that the thermal-imagery kit could penetrate the deep granite roof. There had been a little moonlight to help him find the hole, but instinct had told him where to look. They had gone quiet, off his radar, but the entrance was easy to find. He had relied on his memory – his lecturers at Lancaster had noted it, as had his line manager in the City and the FrauBoss. They had all remarked on it and his ability to retain what he had seen or been told once. The floor of the cave was compacted earth. He had a hand in front of him so that he did not snag an obstruction – there had been none when he had seen the cave’s interior. He could hear them.
The old man was breathing harshly. Jago sensed his ordeal. Alone, in pitch blackness, unable to communicate because no one had come for him. Maybe on the floor and hurt – a new experience for him. He assumed Bernardo, the padrino, had once been as young, as arrogant, as Marcantonio. As he had aged, he would have become more cunning, wary, determined to cling to power. Those hard hours, because of Jago Browne, were the price of his having sent his grandson to Berlin. The old man’s chest would be heaving, his heart pounding. She was quieter, but she must have shifted because he heard movement.
And he heard the firearm being cocked. The scrape of metal on metal.
A powerful torch was switched on and shone straight into Jago’s face. He could see nothing and it hurt his eyes, which watered. He mustn’t show fear. Fear was a killer in the alleys around Freemasons Road, behind the Beckton Arms or in any part of Kreuzberg. Consolata had shown no fear. If he showed fear, he was dead. They would read fear. He thought they didn’t know who he was but were aware of what he had done. He had time.
Lower down the hill there were still occasional shouts from the troops, and the helicopter stayed overhead. He didn’t think he would be shot, with the noise reverberating in the small space, before the search had finished.
He kept his face devoid of expression. He thought the family, for its survival, had snuffed out many lives. He neither smiled nor cringed. He thought they would be at the end of the cave, where the ring for the chain was. Jago waited to see the face of the old man. He would wait as long as he had to. The light never left his face, and he didn’t turn away.
20