Slaton spent the night in small hotel on the east side of Milan, an address that was chic and restful, and likely tested the limits of his CIA credit card. He enjoyed a leisurely breakfast under a patio awning, and later spent thirty minutes on the phone with Christine. Ten more he spent watching a video stream of Davy doing somersaults in the embassy’s grassy courtyard. It was the longest he’d been away from either of them for months.
At half past eleven he set out for the modest shop in the Brera District where Vittorio both lived and worked. Slaton began with an excursion along Via Montenapoleone. There he saw the designs of Versace and Gucci displayed in windows along the street, and those of Ferrari and Lamborghini cruising between them. It was haughty and ostentatious, and no different from a dozen other streets in a dozen other cities where the beautiful people ran. Not so long ago Slaton had himself been a billionaire, the accidental consequence of a Mossad mission that had imploded to his benefit. At the time that wealth had seemed as empty as it was unearned, and he’d had neither the time nor inclination for spontaneous consumption. That being the case, when the money evaporated as easily as it had come, he felt not a trace of remorse.
On arriving in Brera he diverted into the municipal park and performed a rudimentary countersurveillance scheme, made easy by rows of hedges and intricate walking paths. He still had no specific cause to be on edge, but old habits were old habits for a reason.
Having been to Vittorio’s shop twice before, he was familiar with the address, and he made one loop around the building upon arriving. Slaton knocked on the door two seconds before noon. No one appreciated precision like a gunsmith.
Vittorio opened the door promptly, probably having had the reverse thought. The two shook hands, and the armorer led Slaton down from the first floor living quarters into the basement where he ran his shop. Nothing had changed. It was a small and cramped workspace, a makeshift office in front and a machine shop behind, the two divided by a cheap bamboo partition. The smell of machine oil weighed on the air.
“It pains me to remind you,” said Vittorio, taking a seat behind his desk, “but I must ask for your complete discretion in anything we discuss. I have recently been reissued a limited license to modify arms, but the carabinieri have been dogging me lately. I show them antique weapons I’ve brought gloriously back to life, and they accuse me of using hacksaws to saw off shotguns for the underworld down south.”
“Do you?”
“Certainly not. A die grinder with a diamond cut-off disc gives a far superior product.”
Slaton grinned as he took a seat across the desk.
Vittorio began by reaching into a drawer and removing the round in question. It was wrapped in a fresh piece of oilcloth. He set it on the table between them, exposed the bullet, and adjusted a trainable work light. “First I should thank you—you have tested me. It’s good to find a challenge now and again.”
“And did you come up with an answer?”
“I will let you be the judge.” Vittorio pointed to the bullet. “The jacket is unlike anything I’ve seen. I could not specifically identify the material—it shows signatures of an advanced alloy, but also retains characteristics of a composite. It appears perfectly machined, but keeps an unusual degree of pliability. I also noted three slightly altered belts that circle the round’s midsection.”
Slaton looked more closely, and he did see three barely discernible rings. “What would those be for?”
Vittorio raised a pointed finger to tell Slaton his question had to wait. “Also,” he picked up, “we must consider the damaged tip. Beneath this crushed composite is a reflective wafer which could have few possible utilities. And as I mentioned yesterday, I thought it might be useful to have a look inside.”
The armorer opened the same drawer and removed a printout of an X-ray image. From a dentist’s office, Slaton mused. Vittorio placed the evidence between them.
In the ghosted picture Slaton saw electrical circuitry, and, at perfect intervals along the longitudinal axis, what looked like dense ribs of metal. A bright circle near the shank of the round got his attention. “What’s that?” he asked.
Looking pleased, Vittorio leaned back in his chair. “That, if I am not mistaken, is a battery.”
Slaton stared at the armorer. Vittorio only stared back in silence, allowing him to work it all out.
“Are you saying what I think you’re saying?” Slaton asked.
“Don’t tell me you haven’t had your own suspicions. The battery, optics of some kind, the dense masses around the waist. This is something that I fear might put you out of business, my friend. What you have here is a steerable bullet.”
* * *
CIA director Thomas Coltrane sat in his office wearing gym attire. Even so clothed, he cut an undeniably dapper figure. He worked out nearly every morning in the headquarters gym, and the regulars there knew better than to interrupt him as he went through his paces—thirty minutes of free weights, followed by cardio. It kept him trim and fit. What few in the building realized, however, was that it was less a matter of self-improvement than an outlet for the stress of his position. Proving the point this morning, and as typically happened at least once a week, events had cut his workout short.
He used his fingers to comb back damp and mussed silver hair as he stared at two messages on his desk. Both were marked urgent, were highly classified, and had been delivered in tandem as he was loading a squat rack. Now in private, he looked at them in disbelief, not so much for what either contained, but simply because they had arrived in such serendipitous unison. One was an internal flash message, sourced from a recently promoted department head whom he knew quite well—Anna Sorensen. She was in Rome, delving into the matter of a recently assassinated Russian oligarch. That very fact—that she’d gone to Rome to pursue a lead he’d already told her wasn’t worth chasing—struck Coltrane on two fronts. He was pissed she hadn’t taken his advice. He was also impressed by her initiative.
As it turned out, the second message implied she’d been right. An urgent dispatch from the Israeli ambassador to the United States had been forwarded through the State Department. In spite of that circuitous routing, the Israeli version was nearly identical in content to Sorensen’s report.
Coltrane picked up the messages, one in each hand, and read them carefully a second time, trying to discern any differences. There were few. Last night, the two intelligence services had independently, and nearly simultaneously, detected an offload from a freighter in the northern Red Sea. Three small boats had taken on crates and run fast ashore to ports along the Saudi coast. Sorensen’s version suggested that two other freighters, one in the Gulf of Aden and another in the Persian Gulf, were undertaking parallel operations.
Having seen Sorensen in action, Coltrane knew she was competent. More to the point, he had to admit that her instincts, which he’d discounted only days ago, had proved dead on. Right then the director made his first decision. Anna Sorensen would take the lead on this. His second choice proved more problematic. Israel was already involved, with an apparent threat on their regional doorstep—something they never took lightly. Against that, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Jordan, or even the Gulf Arab states could also be facing some degree of risk. From such a combustible cast of characters, who should he share the information with?
His problem was mitigated by a quick analysis of the evidence. Odds were, the cargo was nothing more than small arms, or possibly explosives. Of course, other possibilities had to be considered. The worst case was always some manner of WMD. Could the crates contain the precursors of chemical weapons, a makeshift laboratory for biological agents? Even nuclear material? Coltrane thought it unlikely. The sheer quantity of material involved, along with the fact that it was being dispersed to different geographic points, shouted that they were looking at conventional weapons. Even so, it was quite an arsenal.
“Enough to start a small war,” Coltrane thought aloud in the confines of his office.
He touched a button to call his deputy into the office, thinking a strategy session was in order. As he did, Coltrane had no idea how prescient his mumblings would prove.