The Broker

After an hour of scouring the Modena bus station and the two streets next to it, Krater called Luigi with the news that was not all good, and not all bad. He’d lost his man, but the mad dash for freedom confirmed that it was indeed Marco.

Luigi’s reaction was mixed. He was frustrated that Krater had been outfoxed by an amateur. He was impressed that Marco could effectively change his appearance and elude a small army of assassins. And he was angry at Whitaker and the fools in Washington who kept changing the plans and had now created an impending disaster for which he, Luigi, would no doubt get the blame.

He called Whitaker, yelled and cursed some more, then headed for the train station with Zellman and the two others. They’d meet up with Krater in Milano, where Whitaker was promising a full-court press with all the muscle he could pull in.

Leaving Bologna on the direct Eurostar, Luigi had a wonderful idea, one he could never mention. Why not just simply call the Israelis and the Chinese and tell them that Backman was last seen in Modena, headed west to Parma and probably Milano? They wanted him much more than Langley did. And they could certainly do a better job of finding him.

But orders were orders, even though they kept changing.

All roads led to Milano.

The cab stopped a block away from the Milano central train station. Marco paid the driver, thanked him more than once, wished him well back home in Modena, then walked past a dozen more taxis that were waiting for arriving passengers. Inside the mammoth station, he drifted with the crowd, up the escalators, into the controlled frenzy of the platform area where a dozen tracks brought the trains. He found the departure board and studied his options. A train left for Stuttgart four times a day, and its seventh stop was Zurich. He picked up a schedule, bought a cheap city guide with a map, then found a table at a cafe among a row of shops. Time could not be wasted, but he needed to figure out where he was. He had two espressos and a pastry while his eyes watched the crowd. He loved the mob, the throng of people coming and going. There was safety in those numbers.

His first plan was to take a walk, about thirty minutes, to the center of the city. Somewhere along the way he would find an inexpensive clothing store and change everything-jacket, shirt, pants, shoes. They had spotted him in Bologna. He couldn’t risk it again.

Surely, somewhere in the center of the city, near the Piazza del Duomo, there was an Internet cafe where he could rent a computer for fifteen minutes. He had little confidence in his ability to sit in front of a strange machine, turn the damn thing on, and not only survive the jungle of the Internet but get a message to Neal. It was 10:15 a.m. in Milan, 4:15 a.m. in Culpeper, Virginia. Neal would be checking in live at 7:50.

Somehow he’d make the e-mail work. He had no choice.

The second plan, the one that was looking better and better as he watched a thousand people casually hop on trains that would have them scattered throughout Europe in a matter of hours, was to run. Buy a ticket right now and get out of Milano and Italy as soon as possible. His new hair color and Giovanni his eyeglasses and old professor his jacket had not fooled them in Bologna. If they were that good, they would surely find him anywhere.

He compromised with a walk around the block. The fresh air always helped, and after four blocks his blood was pumping again. As in Bologna, the streets of Milano fanned out in all directions like a spiderweb. The traffic was heavy and at times hardly moved. He loved the traffic, and he especially loved the crowded sidewalks that gave him cover.

The shop was called Roberto’s, a small haberdashery wedged between a jewelry store and a bakery. The two front windows were packed with clothing that would hold up for about a week, which fit Marco’s time frame perfectly. A clerk from the Middle East spoke worse Italian than Marco, but he was fluent in pointing and grunting and he was determined to transform his customer. The blue jacket was replaced with a dark brown one. The new shirt was a white pullover with short sleeves. The slacks were low-grade wool, very dark navy. Alterations would take a week, so Marco asked the clerk for a pair of scissors. In the mildewy dressing room, he measured as best he could, then cut the pants off himself. When he walked out in his new ensemble, the clerk looked at the ragged edges where the cuffs should have been and almost cried.

The shoes Marco tried on would have crippled him before he made it back to the train station, so he stayed with his hiking boots for the moment. The best purchase was a tan straw hat that Marco bought because he’d seen one just before entering the store.

What did he care about fashion at this point?

The new getup cost him almost four hundred euros, money he hated to part with, but he had no choice. He tried to swap Giovanni’s briefcase, which was certainly worth more than everything he was wearing, but the clerk was too depressed over the butchered slacks. He was barely able to offer a weak thanks and goodbye. Marco left with the blue jacket, faded jeans, and the old shirt folded up in a red shopping bag; again, something different to carry around.

He walked a few minutes and saw a shoe store. He bought a pair of what appeared to be slightly modified bowling shoes, without a doubt the ugliest items in what turned out to be a very nice store. They were black with some manner of burgundy striping, hopefully built for comfort and not attractiveness. He paid 150 euros for them, only because they were already broken in. It took two blocks before he could muster the courage to look down at them.

Luigi got himself followed out of Bologna. The kid on the scooter saw him leave the apartment next to Backmans, and it was the manner in which he left that caught his attention. He was jogging, and gaining speed with each step. No one runs under the porticoes on Via Fondazza. The scooter hung back until Luigi stopped and quickly crawled into a red Fiat. He drove a few blocks, then slowed long enough for another man to jump into the car. They took off at breakneck speed, but in city traffic the scooter had no trouble keeping up. When they wheeled into the train station and parked illegally, the kid on the scooter saw it all and radioed Efraim again.

Within fifteen minutes, two Mossad agents dressed as traffic policemen entered Luigi’s apartment, setting off alarms-some silent, some barely audible. While three agents waited on the street, providing cover, the three inside kicked open the kitchen door and found the astounding collection of electronic surveillance equipment.

When Luigi, Zellman, and a third agent stepped onto the Eurostar to Milano, the kid on the scooter had a ticket too. His name was Paul, the youngest member of the kidon and the most fluent speaker of Italian. Behind the bangs and baby face was a twenty-sbc-year-old veteran of half a dozen killings. When he radioed that he was on the train and it was moving, two more agents entered Luigi’s apartment to help dissect the equipment. One alarm, though, could not be silenced. Its steady ring penetrated the walls just enough to attract attention from a few neighbors along the street.

After ten minutes, Efraim called a halt to the break-in. The agents scattered, then regrouped in one of their safe houses. They had not been able to determine who Luigi was or who he worked for, but it was obvious he’d been spying on Backman around the clock.

As the hours passed with no sign of Backman, they began to believe that he had fled. Could Luigi lead them to him?

In central Milano, at the Piazza del Duomo, Marco gawked at the mammoth Gothic cathedral that took only three hundred years to complete. He strolled along the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele, the magnificent glass-domed gallery that Milano is famous for. Lined with cafes and bookshops, the gallery is the center of the city’s life, its most popular meeting place. With the temperature approaching sixty degrees, Marco had a sandwich and a cola outdoors where the pigeons swarmed every wayward crumb. He watched elderly Milanesi stroll through the gallery, women arm in arm, men stopping to chat as if time was irrelevant. To be so lucky, he thought.