“Hungry?” the CIA officer asked as they arrived at a vending machine filled with plastic-wrapped sandwiches.
“No thanks,” he replied.
Lovett bought a Diet Coke from the machine next to it and they continued walking.
Arriving at a door simply marked A7, she pressed a button and they were buzzed in.
He followed her into a small office where four Navy personnel sat working at gray metal desks. None of them looked up.
“Phone,” she said as they approached the heavy metal door of the SCIF. Mounted on the wall next to it was an old wooden hotel mail sorter.
Harvath wasn’t excited about leaving his cell phone in an office with four strangers, even if they were U.S. military personnel, but he understood the rules and slid his into the cubby next to Lovett’s.
“Coffee?” she asked, nodding at the Keurig machine to their left.
“Actually, yes,” he replied. “You good?”
“I’m fine, thank you,” she replied, holding up her drink.
After walking over to the coffee station, Harvath brewed a cup of black coffee and added a shot of espresso.
Rejoining Lovett at the door to the SCIF, he smiled and said, “Good to go.”
The CIA officer nodded, punched a code into the keypad, and then opened the door.
CHAPTER 49
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SCIFs were designed to be immune to electronic eavesdropping and surveillance. The moment you entered, the first thing that struck most people was the silence. It was like walking into a tomb.
It was lit from overhead with strips of white LED lighting and smelled like compressed air. In the center was a chipped blue Formica conference table surrounded by gray faux leather chairs.
At the front of the room were three flat-panel monitors, as well as two workstations. Harvath and Lovett were the only people there.
Removing a laptop from her briefcase, she plugged it into a port beneath the conference table and motioned for Harvath to sit.
“What do you know about ISIS and its ties to the Italian Mafia?” she asked.
“Not much,” Harvath replied. “Though I’d imagine there are some areas where their interests overlap.”
“More than just some.”
Once she had her computer powered up, she opened PowerPoint and an image of Roman ruins appeared on all the monitors.
Harvath recognized them immediately. “Palmyra,” he said. “Syria.”
She was impressed. “You know it.”
“All too well.”
On a recent assignment, Harvath had barely escaped from that part of Syria with his life. He had passed right through Palmyra.
What ISIS had done to that ancient city was as bad as what the Taliban and their RPGs had done to the Bamiyan statues of Buddha in Afghanistan.
“Across Syria, Iraq, and Libya, ISIS has overrun UNESCO world heritage sites, slaughtering archeologists and plundering everything they can get their hands on.”
As she spoke, she backed her points up with slide after slide.
“They load the looted artifacts onto cargo ships headed for southern Italian ports. There, the Mafia usually purchases them with cash. Increasingly, though, we’re seeing payment made in weapons.
“The Mafia then help smuggle the weapons farther north into Europe, where ISIS and other terror groups can carry out attacks.”
Immediately, Harvath’s mind was drawn to what had happened at the cathedral in Spain. “What about explosives?” he asked.
Lovett nodded. “The Italian organized crime groups are all interconnected. The Cosa Nostra, the Camorra, the N’drangheta—what one doesn’t have, the other can get. They’re supplied by an array of arms dealers from Ukraine, Russia, and other places across the Balkans and Eastern Europe.”
“What about the name I gave you? The guy our Libyan smuggler, Halim, gave up?”
She took a sip of her Diet Coke and pulled up a new series of images, surveillance photos taken by Italian police. “Sicily is home to a highly organized, ruthless Nigerian criminal network known as the Black Axe. They operate with the permission of the Sicilian Mafia.
“The name you gave me, Festus Aghaku, he was a tassista for the Black Axe. It’s Italian for taxi driver. His job was to meet the smuggling boats from Libya out at sea and sneak in high-paying customers before Italian authorities could get to them.”
Harvath held up his hand and interrupted. “You said his job was to meet the smuggling boats from Libya. What’s he doing now?”
Lovett advanced to her next slide. “He’s dead.”
The image showed a corpse inside an unzipped body bag. “What happened to him?”
“He drowned. The same night, the same storm, as your chemistry student, Mustapha Marzouk.
“The Italians have a handful of informants in the Black Axe. From what I’ve been able to gather,” Lovett continued, “Festus Aghaku didn’t want to go out that night, but he was forced to.”
“Forced by whom?”
“The Sicilian Mafia. Allegedly, there was a VIP who needed to be picked up off the coast of Lampedusa. The Cosa Nostra didn’t care about the storm. Festus Aghaku was a dead man if he didn’t go.”
“So what happened?”
“He went. The storm was much worse than predicted. The boat sank. He and two Nigerian crew members drowned.”
“Do we know who the VIP was?” Harvath asked. “Did they mention Mustapha Marzouk by name?”
“No.”
“What about where he was going once he reached Italy?”
Lovett shook her head. “They didn’t mention that either. But they wouldn’t have known his final destination. That’s not how it’s set up. The Black Axe runs the water taxi portion. That’s it. Once the customer gets to dry land, the Cosa Nostra takes over. They then run the smuggling routes up through Italy and into the rest of Europe.”
Harvath hated the Mafia. They thrived on human suffering. He didn’t care if they were Italian, Nigerian, or Libyan. Profiting off other people’s misery, they were nothing more than animals in his book.
The Sicilians were some of the most violent. They paid lip service to honor and respect while they trafficked in drugs, money laundering, blackmail, weapons, and terrorism. There was nothing honorable or respectable about how they made their livings.
“So who would have been in charge of getting Mustapha Marzouk to his final destination?” he asked.
The CIA officer advanced to her next slide. On it was a sixty-something-year-old man with dark, olive-colored skin, a prominent Roman nose, and a pair of green eyes saddled with heavy bags. His receding hairline had gone gray and boasted two prominent widow’s peaks.
“Meet Carlo Ragusa. Anything and everything the Black Axe does in Sicily, it does because Ragusa allows them to. He’s the one who sent Festus Aghaku and his crew into the storm that night. He’s also the one who can tell you where Mustapha Marzouk was headed.”
It was some of the best news Harvath had gotten yet. “Where do I find him?”
Lovett winced and clicked to her next slide.
CHAPTER 50
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PARIS