Cortona, Italy. Sunday, July 12, 5:10 a.m., 11:10 a.m. in Beijing.
'Thank you, my friend,' Thomas Kind said in English. Then, clicking off the cellular, he put it on the seat beside him. Chen Yin's call had been within the allocated time window, and the news was as he had expected. Li Wen had the documents and was on his way home. There had been no face-to-face contact. Chen Yin was good. Dependable. And he had found Li Wen, not an easy thing to do – uncover the perfect all-too-accommodating pawn who had all the skills and reasons to do as asked, yet who, if circumstance required, could be disavowed or simply liquidated at any time.
Chen Yin had been paid beforehand, as a deposit in good faith, and once Li Wen had done his job, he would be paid the remainder of what he was owed. Then both would vanish: Li Wen because his usefulness would be over and they dared leave no trace back to themselves; Chen Yin, because it would be wise for him to leave the country for a time and because his money was out of China anyway, deposited in the Union Square branch of a Wells Fargo bank in downtown San Francisco.
Somewhere a rooster crowed, the sound bringing Thomas Kind immediately back to the task at hand. Ahead, in the predawn light, he could just see the house. It sat back from the road and behind a stone wall, a layer of mist hanging over the ploughed fields across from it.
He could have gone in just after he'd arrived, at a little past midnight. He would have cut the power, and the night-vision goggles would have given him the advantage. But still the killing would have had to be done in the dark. And against three men in a house he did not know.
So he'd waited, parking the rented Mercedes on an out-of-the-way cul-de-sac a mile away. There he'd field-stripped and checked his weapons in the darkness – twin 9mm Walther MPKs, mascinen pistole kurz, machine pistols with thirty-round magazines – then rested, his mind flashing back to the unfortunate happening in Pescara when Ettore Caputo, owner of Servizio Ambulanza Pescara, and his wife had refused to talk to him about the Iveco ambulance that left Hospital St Cecilia Thursday night for a destination unknown.
Stubbornness was an unfortunate trait in all of them. The husband and wife would not talk, and Thomas Kind was determined to have answers and would not leave without them. His questions were simple: who were the people in the ambulance? and where had they gone?
It had only been when Kind pressed a two-shot.44 magnum derringer against Signora Caputo's forehead that Ettore suddenly had had the urge to talk. Who the patient or passengers were he had no idea. The driver was a man named Luca Fanari, a former carabiniere and licensed ambulance driver who worked for him from time to time.
Luca had rented the ambulance from him earlier that week and for an unspecified period of time. Where he had gone with it, he did not know.
Thomas Kind pressed the derringer a little more firmly against Signora Caputo's head and asked again.
'Call Fanari's wife, for God's sake!' the signora shouted.
Ninety seconds later Caputo hung up the phone. Luca Fanari's wife had given him a telephone number and an address where to reach her husband, warning him that neither was to be given out under any circumstance whatsoever.
Luca Fanari, Caputo said, had driven his patient north. To a private home. Just outside the town of Cortona.
Streaks of daylight crossed the sky as Thomas Kind slipped over the wall and approached the house from behind. He wore tight gloves, steel-colored jeans, a dark sweater, and black running shoes. One of the Walther MPKs was in his hand, the other hung from a strap over his shoulder. Both were mounted with silencers. He looked like a commando; which, at this moment, he was.
In front of him he could see the beige Iveco ambulance parked near the side door. Five minutes later he had searched the entire house. It was empty.