Page 101 of Ruthless Daddy
I did not move.
Idonotknowhowlong I sat on the floor.
Long enough that Olimpo had settled across my lap. Long enough that Tonio had come and gone and come back. Long enough that the snow outside had stopped and the light through the kitchen window had shifted from morning to the flat blue-white of Chicago noon.
Marco was at the workstation.
He had not left it. While Dante had been on the phone and Santo had been at the airfield and Sal had been in and out of the courtyard with one phone at each ear, Marco had sat in the chair Angela had sat in and worked the screens she had been working. He had not spoken to me. He had not spoken to anyone. He had been doing what Marco did, which was the thing he was best at and never advertised: he was reading her work.
“Pietro.”
I did not lift my head.
“Pietro. Come here.”
There was a new register in his voice. Not soft. Not pitying. It was the register of a man who had found a thread.
I lifted my head.
He was half-turned in the chair, looking at me over his shoulder. He had Angela’s black notebook open on the desk beside the keyboard. His finger was on the page.
“Come here,cugino.”
I got Olimpo off my lap. I got up.
“Look.”
It was the Northbridge trace. Her file, the one she had been building since seven that morning. The screen showed the routing diagram she had been constructing — Toronto to Zurich to the Isle of Man to Marseilles for the contract, that was the visible end she had told us about in the meeting yesterday. But she had not stopped there. She had gone backward. While we had been sleeping she had been going backward, through the structures that funded Northbridge, through the trust in the Channel Islands, through the correspondent banks that fed the trust.
“Here,” Marco said.
He tapped the page in the notebook.Krol — still signing. Same hand.
“Anastasia Krol. Maltese registry signature on Northbridge. Same hand on three other Valenti shells eighteen months ago — she documented this at the firm. The signature lives in Malta. The lawyer who placeholdered the second director’s seat — Liechtenstein, but his practice is in Valletta. The correspondent bank Northbridge feeds through is the Bank of Valletta. The trust that funds Northbridge is administered out of Sliema.”
He turned to the third monitor.
“And this.”
A property record. A villa on the coast outside Mellieha. Title held by a Maltese holding company. The holding company’sbeneficial owner, when Marco peeled it three layers down, was the same signature woman, Krol, on behalf of an unnamed principal.
“This is where he is, Pietro.”
I did not speak.
“He has been in Malta since November. Santo’s people lost his trail in Geneva and we assumed he was somewhere in southern France. He isn’t. He’s in Malta. He has been in Malta for two months. She found him this morning. She did not know she had found him. The Maltese correspondent file was the last thing she opened before the phone rang.”
He looked at me.
“The plane is going to Malta.”
I sat in the chair.
“A Gulfstream can’t fly Chicago to Malta direct,” Marco said. He was talking faster now, the way he talked when he had found the seam of a problem. “It doesn’t have the range. They’ll stage. Gander, more likely Shannon for the customs cover, possibly Rome. The flight plan they filed is falsified—Santo said so—but a falsified plan still has to be in somebody’s system, because they have to land somewhere, and the moment they land they go on a tower’s log. We have eyes in Shannon. The family has eyes in Rome. TheScordatohas eyes in every airfield from Palermo to Catania. The moment that plane comes down to refuel, we have it.”
He paused.
“And the moment we have it, we have her.”
