‘Pronto …’

One word was enough to tell me I wasn’t the only fucker who’d been up all night. He sounded like shit.

I filled him in on the Brindisi experience. ‘You mentioned your police contacts. The GIS were there in force, minutes after Vesta and Diana began to unload. No way was it just a lucky break. Someone wanted an audience. It smells to me like a tip-off. Could you do some digging?’

‘Sure.’

He hadn’t yet had any luck tracking Minerva. Maritime law demanded that the Automatic Identification System had to be fitted to every vessel in international waters that weighed in at a gross tonnage of three hundred or more. If the AIS was switched on, pretty much anyone with access to the Internet could pinpoint its location in real time. If it wasn’t, the tracking process became a lot more complicated.

And it wasn’t.

But Luca had put the word out to his sources in Çanakkale and Patras and asked them to get straight on to him if Minerva or any other inbound Nettuno vessels were sighted.

The body who jumped on me in Naples had been found at the bottom of the apartment block and taken to the local mortuary. He was a small-time Sicilian enforcer and nobody gave a fuck. The other members of the pizza takeaway team hadn’t come forward to help the carabinieri with their enquiries, but a couple of shiny heads had threatened the Diavolo staff when they’d arrived at the office that morning, so it sounded like last night’s shit had been about trying to close Luca down, not me.

‘Anything on Dijani?’

‘We haven’t located him yet, but I have people checking the best hotels near where you are now, and some of the not so good ones too. We looked closely at his past, and couldn’t find anything to get excited about. Then we followed your advice …’

‘Funny.’ Even with a dodgy signal and a voice like gravel in a concrete mixer, I could tell he was taking the piss.

‘We checked out his father. Some questionable business deals, but that’s all. Then his uncle. An imam, but not radical—’

‘I don’t have all fucking day, Luca. How many uncles has he got?’

‘Three only. The second owns racehorses. At first glance, the youngest, Asif, seemed to have disappeared without trace. Then we discovered that he had changed his name to Abdul Azeem, Servant of the Mighty. And Abdul Azeem was very close to Imad Mughniyah. He was also assassinated by Mossad. Also in Syria. Also in 2008.’

Imad Mughniyah had been Hezbollah’s international psychopath-in-chief, and made Osama bin Laden look like a very cuddly bunny. He was blown to bits in Damascus after a party to celebrate the anniversary of the Iranian Revolution. The CIA designed an explosive device in one of their facilities in North Carolina. The Mossad hid the thing in the spare tyre of a wagon parked near his Pajero and detonated it as he walked by. It couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.

‘So, Nico, you are a genius. We would never have discovered this connection without your help.’

‘Mate, stick around. We’ll make an investigator of you yet. How’s your computer geek shaping up?’

‘Nothing so far. But he’s only had the laptop and the iPhone for three hours. Call me later. This afternoon.’

We swapped ciaos and I dismantled and binned the Nokia.

I got back into the Seat and took some nice deep breaths. Then I realized I’d hammered the steering-wheel a couple of times with my fist.

Imad Mughniyah.

Fuck.

He’d masterminded the bombing of the US Embassy in Beirut in ’83 and the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires in ’92. Total body count: more than a hundred. I’d been in Dhahran when his people blew off the front of the Khobar Towers apartment block in ’96, killing nineteen USAF pilots and staff. They’d sifted through the debris on plastic sheets laid out across the forecourt.

We reckoned Mughniyah was also responsible for the torture and death of the CIA’s Lebanon station chief in ’84, and the training and supply of the Shiite militias who fucked up Allied troops in Iraq seven or eight years ago.

And those were just the highlights.

So, I no longer felt like I was wandering around in the dark. But if the George Michael lookalike was even a part-time member of the Mughniyah fan club, this was not going to be a good day out.

I had about ninety Ks of ground to recce, so it took me nearly three hours to confirm that you couldn’t hide anything larger than an eighteen-metre gin palace at any point along the way. A cargo vessel would stick out like a dog’s bollocks. It would also be impossible to unload a single container.

Otranto itself had a big fuck-off marina, filled with boats and masts and rigging and all that shit, but no way could a merchant ship fit in. The castle and loads of the buildings beside it looked like they’d been there since the Ottomans had had the place under siege. The seafront was heaving with locals and tourists.

I only stayed long enough to get a sense of the place, and where I’d launch an attack on it if I was in that kind of mood. August 14 was a few weeks away, but I couldn’t bin the idea that Dijani, nephew of Abdul Azeem, Servant of the Mighty, was about to open up another can of martyrs. And if he had the same liking for iconic targets as Al Qaeda, maybe this was the place to do it.

10

I spent the next few hours combing the coastline around the tip of the peninsula – the heel of the Italian boot – and the west side of it, taking in Leuca, Gallipoli and Porto Cesareo en route. Yesterday’s clouds had done a runner, so I could see further in the bright sunlight, and my progress was quicker. But Taranto was the only place large enough to do the job, and Minerva wasn’t there either.

I got back to the port of Brindisi by mid-afternoon. The road that ran alongside the fence at the top of the bank had been sealed off with barriers and stripy tape, and the GIS were still out in force. Another couple of Iveco VM 90s loomed in my rear-view and sped past me as I hung a left into the parking area.

The football-gear traders in the MPV had packed up and gone. Everybody in the immediate vicinity of the terminal building was doing their best to behave like nothing much was happening, but you could feel the tension in the air.

I joined a small crowd that had gathered by the rail overlooking the main entrance to the docks. The Nettuno quay was a fair distance away, but we were high enough here to have a grandstand view of the continuing drama around it.

Coastguard patrol boats were tied up at each end of Diana and Vesta, and the dock crew were busy hoisting containers off their decks. As we watched, another group of refugees was extracted from one that had recently been unbolted, and shepherded to a waiting coach. I reckoned at least seventy per cent of their cargo was still aboard. At this rate, the process was going to take all night and most of tomorrow.

A mobile crane and a low-loader were being moved into position beside the overturned chassis of the artic. What was left of its metal coffin lay where I’d last seen it that morning, skin peeled back like a sardine tin, at the centre of a tight cordon, with the bomb squad sifting through the wreckage. A lot of uniforms were bouncing around nearby, so they must have completed scanning the thing for secondary devices.

A row of Iveco VM 90s stood in the shadow of the gantry, and I spotted the UNHCR and Médecins Sans Frontières logos on a couple of other vehicles parked nearby.

The terminal ticket office only dealt with passenger ferries, but I managed to find an admin guy with nothing much to do who thought that a couple of twenty-euro notes – even slightly damp ones – might well give me access to the cargo schedules.