The two men received VIP treatment at the Reggio di Calabria Airport, clearing customs on board, then deplaning the Gulfstream G550 straight into a Mercedes idling for them on the tarmac. Their time of arrival was approximately twelve hours after Armando Cutrì placed his first call to the United States.
“Ever been here before?” Mikkel Andreason asked Marcus Handler.
“You mean this part? Toe of the boot? No.”
Until an hour before touchdown, Marcus hadn’t been aware they were going directly to the house. No hotel, no shower, no sobering up from the ad libitum Scotch on board. In the aft lavatory, the best he could do was run a comb through his wire-bristle hair, splash water on his haggard face, pop breath mints, and cinch up his necktie. At the best of times, he avoided mirrors. He preferred the delusion that he was his thirty-year-old self, not fifty, although women told him he was still a remarkable specimen. Tonight, was not the best of times. Mickey had caught him in the middle of the night at a casino in East Chicago ahead of a planned day off. Now, everything about Marcus was tinged gray—his skin, his stubble—even the blue in his irises seemed to have drained away.
His boss, however, had the appearance of someone who had just emerged, fresh and crisp, from a walk-in refrigerator. Mickey was the youngest-looking seventy-two Marcus had ever met. His skin was tight and shiny and his eyes were a proper, vivid blue. His full head of silky hair was only a shade or two lighter than his son Jesper’s yellow locks. And he moved with the loose-jointed fluidity of a youngster.
“I never liked it here,” Mickey said. “Especially now.”
“I imagine,” Marcus said, innocently enough.
“Do you? Imagine?” His voice rose in anger. Mickey had been bottling it up, Marcus thought, and now he was going to be on the receiving end. “I didn’t want them to have a house here. The area is crawling with the Mafia.”
“In Calabria, it’s the ’Ndrangheta mostly.” As soon as Marcus issued his correction, he regretted it, because it gave Mickey an excuse to get even angrier.
The louder he got, the stronger his Danish accent. Even when he swore, he sounded refined. “I don’t care what the fuck they’re called! For God’s sake! Jesper put his family and my company at risk. And why? Because he’s pussy-whipped by my daughter-in-law! If her parents need to see my granddaughters, they could damn well spend their summers in Chicago.”
The sea was to their left, invisible in the darkness. Marcus didn’t have a chance to light a cigarette on the tarmac and he was feeling the chemical void.
“What was the name of the policeman we spoke to?” Mickey demanded.
“Lumaga. Major Roberto Lumaga.”
“Lumaga said the house had a security system, but it wasn’t engaged. Did you talk to Jesper about arming his system every night?”
“I don’t believe we had that specific conversation.”
“Lumaga said there were no cameras inside the house or on the grounds. Why not? Lumaga said there was no panic room built into the remodel. Why not?”
“I offered to review his construction plans, but Jesper didn’t take me up on it.”
“You offered. Why didn’t you insist? He’s the company CEO for fuck’s sake!”
“I believe I offered on more than one occasion. He’s my boss. I couldn’t force him.”
“I’m your fucking boss!”
The driver glanced hard into his rearview mirror.
Mickey had hired Marcus, but when he relinquished the CEO title to his son, all of Mickey’s direct reports transferred over. Apparently, to Mickey’s state of mind, this was merely on paper.
“I smell booze on your breath.”
Marcus wheezed a sigh and went for his breath mints. “I assumed we’d be going to our hotel first.”
“You assumed.”
They drove in silence the rest of the way until Marcus asked the driver to let him know when they were about five kilometers from the house.
“About here,” the driver said at a certain point.
Marcus was already working, scanning the dark road for CCTV cameras. A few minutes later, the driver announced that they had arrived. Through the open gates of Villa Shibui, the headlights bounced off white gravel. Apart from the lights of the villa, the grounds were pitch dark.
The house is isolated as hell, Marcus thought. A lot of shit could’ve gone down and neighbors wouldn’t have been any the wiser. Outside the house, he counted eight vehicles, including two marked Carabinieri cars.
Mickey got out first and barged in without knocking. Marcus lagged for a few moments, shining a penlight onto the gravel behind the Mercedes. Coming inside, he saw a veritable cast of thousands—well, not quite. He counted four uniformed officers and six civilians. Mickey was holding himself stiffly as an elegant woman cried and hugged him and said with an Italian accent, “Oh, Mickey, what shall we do?” He assumed this was Elena’s mother and that the man who then solemnly and wordlessly shook Mickey’s hand was her father. They asked Mickey how his wife, Freja, was holding up, and he replied that she was not doing well, not well at all.
Marcus noticed that family photos had been removed from frames and scattered on the coffee table, presumably rephotographed by the police for missing-persons purposes. They were certainly a handsome family. He knew Elena and the kids from company social events and from the times he went to their suburban Chicago Lake Forest estate for the occasional meeting with Jesper. He always found Elena to be personable and charming, not to mention stunning. The little girls were bold and sassy, not the least bit shy, and Marcus thought that they lacked the unpleasant traits that so often afflicted the offspring of the privileged. He was less fond of Jesper. He found him too excitable for a good leader and prone to treat his employees with a lack of respect, a trait learned at his old man’s knee.
A florid young man with peach fuzz, whom Marcus doubted had ever shaved, rushed forward to be next in line to kiss the ring. Before he opened his mouth, Marcus had him pegged as an American.
“Dr. Andreason,” the fellow said. “I’m Mitch O’Connor from the American Embassy in Rome. The ambassador wanted me to personally let you know that any resources you require will be forthcoming.”
One of Mickey’s first calls in the middle of the night had been to the American ambassador to make sure that the best people in Italian law enforcement were going to be working on the case. Mickey had considerable pull. Andreason Engineering Corp was the largest private defense contractor in America, supplying mission-critical electronic systems to companies like Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and Raytheon. Mickey, a Danish national born in Copenhagen, had designed an innovative gyroscope as a PhD student at MIT. After graduation, he licensed the patents from the university and started Andreason Engineering in his garage.
To say that it became a success would be a mammoth understatement. In the last fiscal year, the company had thirteen billion dollars in revenue and customers in seventy countries. Jesper, an only child, followed in his father’s footsteps, got his degree at MIT in electrical engineering, and joined the company in the R&D department. From there, he began his inevitable rise to the C-suite.
“You came all the way from Rome to tell me that?” Mickey asked O’Connor, ladling irritation over the young man like gravy. Marcus had seen this behavior in spades during his six years with the company. Mickey Andreason did not suffer fools.
“And to monitor the investigation—yes, sir.”
“Good, monitor away,” Mickey said, turning his back.
The next in line was a short, balding Italian who had rushed to find his suit jacket when Mickey entered. He was a representative of the Italian Ministry of Defense. Andreason Engineering was a major supplier of missile guidance systems to the Italian Navy.
Mickey said, “You’re here to monitor the investigation too, I assume.”
“Precisely,” was the reply.
“Well, who the hell is doing the investigating?” Mickey bellowed.
“That would be me.”
The reply came in English from a tall Carabinieri officer in his forties who had been watching the proceedings with a square-jawed, poker face. From the moment he laid eyes on him, Marcus figured he was the big dog on the porch.
“And you are?” Mickey asked.
“Major Roberto Lumaga, the commanding officer of the Carabinieri station at Reggio Calabria.” His English was polished and refined.
“Yes, we spoke on the phone,” Mickey said.
“Indeed, we did. And this is your security chief, Mr. Handler?”
Marcus nodded and offered a clipped wave.
The room was warm and everyone who had been waiting seemed to be wilting except for Lumaga. He appeared completely comfortable in a black jacket trimmed with silver braid and scarlet piping and perfectly creased black trousers. He was the only one in the room who was deeply tanned. Marcus figured he was just coming off a vacation or liked his tanning beds.
Before Mickey could demand an update, Lumaga provided one.
“First of all, you will want to hear that we have not yet received a ransom demand or indeed any communication from kidnappers. We have officers monitoring the fixed telephone lines at the Cutrìs’ residence and Dottore Cutrì’s law office, as well as the telephone line here at the villa. I am assuming that if a call came into your company offices in America or your Italian affiliate in Rome, that the information would have reached you.”
“We checked before we landed,” Marcus said. “It’s radio silence on our end.”
“Well, that doesn’t mean that we won’t hear demands tomorrow or in the coming days,” Lumaga said, “but that is where we presently stand. Next, I can tell you that our forensics squad was at the house until only a few hours ago and they have fully processed the crime scene. There were no signs of struggle, no blood, no broken objects. According to the housekeepers, the Pennestrìs, nothing seems to have been stolen. Isn’t that correct?”
Giuseppe and Noemi were sitting apart from everyone else. They nodded sadly.
“The Cutrìs were good enough to scrutinize the wardrobes and bureaus of the children and the parents to try to decide what clothes they might have been wearing when they left the house, but they were unable to make a determination.”
Leonora raised her hands in exasperation. “They all have so many clothes and shoes. It’s impossible to say.”
Lumaga continued, “As I told you on the telephone, Mr. Andreason and Mr. Handler, we found Jesper’s and Elena’s wallets and purses with their credit cards and driving licenses, family passports, and their mobile phones. Elena’s phone was unlocked and we examined it for any evidence of unusual communications. There were none. Jesper’s phone was locked and we have not been able to access its contents.”
“I should hope not,” Mickey said. “It’s going to contain all sorts of sensitive corporate data.”
From Lumaga’s expression, Marcus thought that the policeman was about to say something like: Excuse me, but your son’s been kidnapped, and your first concern is your corporate secrets? Marcus preempted him and said, “All our executives use encrypted phones. I can get into it tonight and give you a read-out of relevant information.”
Lumaga smiled and said, “That would be excellent. Now, I must say, our forensics technicians encountered some challenges. The housekeepers cooked and cleaned for approximately one hour before becoming alarmed and calling the Cutrìs. The house had been thoroughly dusted and vacuumed.”
Giuseppe shrugged. Guilty as charged.
“Of course, we found many, many fingerprints around the house, and we have taken the prints of the Pennestrìs and the Cutrìs for exclusion, but we do not have prints of the Andreason family.”
“I figured this would be an issue,” Marcus said. “I have Jesper’s fingerprints on file from his federal security clearances and I took the liberty of sending someone over to their house in Chicago to dust all the rooms. I’ll forward you the files. Except for Jesper, I won’t be able to tell you who belongs to which prints, but they’ll be useful for exclusionary purposes.”
“That will be most helpful,” Lumaga said. “There was no sign of forced entry and, as you know, the alarm system had not been armed. We checked the log and it seems they only activated the system when they were away from the villa for extended times.”
“But they always locked the doors,” Noemi said, by way of defense for her employers. “They were good about that.”
Lumaga said, “We can only assume that the intruders rang the bell and were permitted to enter sometime between 10 p.m. when Elena telephoned her mother for a call of routine pleasantries, and 8 a.m. when the housekeepers arrived. We had hoped that for a magnificent house such as this, we might find security cameras, but unfortunately, that is not the case.”
“Don’t even get me started,” Mickey fumed.
“We arrived from the south,” Marcus said. “It’s nighttime, but I didn’t see any CCTV cameras within five kilometers of here.”
“We are making checks,” Lumaga said, “but it seems that is the case. From the north, as well. This is a rural area. We don’t have the kind of camera coverage here that you see on highways and cities.”
“And you’re not going to get any tire tracks from the gravel driveway.”
“You are also correct about that, Mr. Handler.”
“So that’s it?” Mickey said. “You’re saying you’ve got nothing? A family of four vanishes and you’ve got nothing?”
“Frankly, Mr. Andreason,” Lumaga said, “that is precisely what I am saying, but please, do not lose faith. This investigation is only getting started.”
“Right now, from where I’m sitting, I can’t say I’ve got any faith whatsoever in your operation, Major. Go ahead and surprise me. I like some surprises, not others.” He rose, looking disgusted, and said, “Armando, do you know where Jesper keeps his liquor? I’ll need a drink before I call Freja.”
“Come with me,” Armando said, looking pleased to be of help. “I’ll take care of you.”
Lumaga went straight for Marcus and said, “Let me get you Jesper’s phone.”
He spoke to one of his men in Italian and a plastic evidence bag was produced.
“I’ll take care of it,” Marcus said.
“Good, but perhaps you could come outside with me for a moment while I have a cigarette.’
“Thank God,” Marcus said.
“You also have the filthy habit? Fine, let’s go.”
The summer had started hot and had remained unseasonably warm. The air was heavy. The moon was somewhere up there, but a thick layer of clouds kept the night black as India ink. Although the villa was isolated and well off the road, it was far from quiet outdoors. Waves were pulsing against the cliffs and there was a much louder racket, a high-pitched, rhythmic clicking.
Marcus offered Lumaga one of his cigarettes and lit it for him.
“One always knows that summer has come to the south of Italy when the cicadas start banging their drums,” Lumaga said. “The females make their presence known at well over a hundred decibels. That’s a fact.”
“I prefer it when a lady whispers,” Marcus said in Italian.
“Me too. Where did you learn your Italian?”
As they walked, the gravel crunched under their shoes.
“I was stationed in Rome years ago.”
“The military?”
“Me? No. I was with the CIA.”
“Is that so? How fascinating.”
“There were some fascinating moments, but they were few and far between.”
“You were based in America?”
“Some of the time. Mostly Europe.”
“May I ask what kind of work you did?”
Marcus chuckled. “You can ask, but don’t expect much of an answer.”
“Ah. If you told me, you’d have to kill me.”
“Tired old joke. I was in counterintelligence.”
“And this is a background that is desirable for a company like Andreason?”
Marcus flipped back to English. It was easier. “Mickey—Mikkel Andreason—thought so. We do defense contracting. A number of state actors, some unfriendly, and even some so-called friendly ones, are always interested in getting their hands on our technology. If your systems aren’t hardened, your lifespan won’t be much longer than these cicadas.”
“I assume you are the person I’ll need to communicate with about the investigation?”
“That’s right.”
“You see, Mr. Handler—”
“How about Marcus?”
“Certainly, and please, call me Roberto—what I must say is that there has already been considerable political pressure put upon me and my department from the highest levels in the Italian government. Wealthy American couple. High-profile company that deals in military technology. Two beautiful, young girls whose faces will sell many newspapers, presumably kidnapped, vanishing without a trace into our infamous Calabrian countryside. Once the media finds out about the story—which should happen in a matter of hours—you won’t be able to get a hotel room within thirty kilometers of here. They will descend on us like the proverbial locusts. This will be a difficult, and possibly unpleasant case.”
“I’m sure you’re right, Roberto. So, what about the elephant in the room?”
Lumaga stubbed out his cigarette, picked the cool stub off the gravel, and put it in his pocket lest someone from forensics pick it up for testing. Marcus did the same, and this time, they lit Lumaga’s cigarettes.
“I assume you mean the ’Ndrangheta,” Lumaga said. “Look, this has to be the most likely theory, even before we get a ransom demand. This family could be thought of as a fat goose to be plucked. The ’Ndrangheta have spread all over the world—Europe, North America, South America, even Australia—but this region is their home. It’s true that their roots are in kidnapping and protection, but this is relatively minor these days. It’s drugs, drugs, drugs. This is their main business.”
“But it’s not like there’s a central command and control, right? They have lots of autonomous cells, some of them small.”
“Yes, for sure. These cells, as you call them, are based on family units. Some of the smaller ones still might find this kidnapping to be a tasty piece of trade. There are other possibilities, including the unfriendly state actors you spoke of, but for me, the ’Ndrangheta must be high on the list. I also have to say that Armando Cutrì is someone to think about. To be sure, not him as the perpetrator, but he is a prominent lawyer in this area, and he may have represented some members of the ’Ndrangheta. Who knows if there could be a—what’s the word—a disgruntled client?”
“Tell you what. You work on your angles. I’ll work on the corporate angle. We’ll share everything. Okay?”
“It’s a deal, Marcus. We’ll help each other. Now, we’d better go inside before your boss gets me demoted several ranks.”
“There’s one more thing,” Marcus said. “Andreason wants to make a statement to the media.”
“And what would this statement be?” Lumaga asked.
“That he wants his family back and is willing to pay to make sure it happens.”
Lumaga erupted. “That’s crazy! We haven’t even gotten a ransom demand yet. If he does this, we’ll be buried in fake demands.”
“I know. I told him.”
“How much does he wish to offer?”
“A million euros.”
“A fortune, but if he offers a million, the kidnappers will demand twenty. Don’t you see?”
“I do see. Here’s the problem. Mickey Andreason’s a billionaire. He owns a big company. He plays golf with presidents and kings. Nobody tells him what to do.”