After quite a bit of tapping and frowning he said he could find no trace of Minerva being booked into Brindisi during the next two months. I handed him another twenty and asked if he could check the timetable for Bari and the other Italian ports as well, and he gave me the same answer.

Checking out the coastline to the north was next on my agenda. Frank’s villa was only a minor detour. Dijani would have to assume it was high on my list of known locations, so I didn’t expect him to have set up shop there and be waiting for me to come and give him the Hesco treatment. But I needed to check the place out, if only to cross it off my list.

I slowed before the turning, hung a right on the opposite side of the road, and parked outside a sleepy-looking garden centre.

There were fresh tyre marks on the track through the trees that led up to the entrance to the villa, but no wagons parked in the driveway. A big In Vendita sign had been hammered into the grass beside the locked gates.

The villa wasn’t as grand as the Courchevel chalet, but who cared? It was right in the middle of an olive grove, with a view up to the hill town of Ostuni behind it, and down to the Adriatic in front. I wasn’t surprised that Frank had been happy there. Until that last visit.

Every shutter that I could see was closed. The garden swing creaked as it moved in the breeze. I didn’t feel the need to hang around. This must have been where we were heading when Frank was killed, but there was no reason it would be bursting with clues about the location of the boat I was looking for.

As soon as I was a safe distance away I stopped again and pulled out the blueprint, willing it to give up its secret, willing Frank to tell me all over again what he must have told me in the green room.

If he’d known where and when Minerva was going to park, if he’d known what cargo it was carrying, I was sure he’d have said.

Maybe he did.

Maybe he had.

But all I could hear was his frustration. ‘Look again …’

And all I knew was what the pantomime at Brindisi told me: that if Minerva hadn’t already arrived, it would do so inside the next twelve to eighteen hours, while the GIS were so busy fucking about with Vesta and Diana and the exploding container that they wouldn’t be paying any attention to what might be happening elsewhere.

I was about to fold the blueprint and put it back in the day sack when Frank finally lost his cool with me. ‘Look again. Look at the hold. Then look below …’

I knew fuck-all about boats, but I’d had to gain access to one or two of them, and knew how they worked. The basic objective was to keep load space to a maximum. I traced the outline of the engine room. Then the cabins. Then the hold.

This time, I did look below the hold. And I noticed something. A row of boxes sitting just above the keel. I’d previously thought they must be containers. Now they looked like compartments.

I glanced at the Suunto and sparked up another choggy Nokia.

Luca sounded even worse than he had that morning.

‘Mate, I think I’ve spotted something. On the blueprint. There’s a bunch of compartments under the hold. So whatever they’ve got in there is something they want to keep well hidden.’

‘My source in the carabinieri says you were right about Brindisi. They did get a tip-off. Two of them got hit by the explosion. One dead, one critical. And they won’t finish unloading Vesta and Diana until tomorrow night.’

He went quiet on me for a moment.

‘Nico …’

I suddenly realized it was tension in his voice, not tiredness. And it wasn’t about the Brindisi gangfuck.

‘Mate, what’s up?’

‘The laptop …’ I heard him gulp, then the chink of glass. Another espresso had just bitten the dust. ‘Bad news. Very bad news. My man has been able to access three files so far. Nothing about Minerva. But one of them contains a detailed breakdown of Frank Timis’s property portfolio …’

I was still shit at remembering the twenty-four hours that had led up to me being thrown off the French mountain road, but I knew exactly what Luca was going to say next.

‘Oh, fuck. Fuck. The safe houses …’

‘It wasn’t one of our big priorities so, to begin with, I only looked through the list with half an eye. Frank owned a lot of places, all over the world. Mostly for business or investment purposes.

‘Then we found a more personal file. A dacha in Peredelkino. A chalet in Courchevel. A villa outside Ostuni. Apartments in New York and London. And two others, in Ukraine. Not luxurious. Not expensive. At the end of a chain of shell companies, camouflaging ownership, I saw Anna’s name.’

‘Those fuckers are supposed to be so secure even I don’t know where they are.’

‘I called Pasha immediately. He phoned her, got no answer. Then he sent one of his local guys to check both places as quickly as possible …’

He hesitated.

‘She and the boy have gone.’

11

My pulse rate barely altered during a contact, or even when I was tabbing across high ground in hostile territory. But my heart was doing its best to fight its way out of my ribcage right now. I opened my mouth, slowed my breathing and gripped myself.

‘OK. He say anything else? He have any idea where they might be?’

‘He will leave no stone unturned, you know that.’ Luca was trying to sound as upbeat as possible, but I could tell he was in pieces. ‘He’ll be asking everyone in the surrounding area for …’

He kept talking, but I stopped listening.

I needed to focus.

Dijani would have had Frank’s laptop within hours of his death. If they’d cracked the password and taken her and the baby before I picked up Hesco, that fucker would have told me. He’d have used them to save his own skin.

Maybe Luca’s geek was a magician, and Dijani’s guys were still scratching their heads and failing to gain access to Frank’s files.

Maybe they hadn’t taken them.

Maybe Mr Lover Man hadn’t given them her name, or told them Anna and Nicholai were my weak point.

Maybe Anna had found a different bolthole.

But ‘maybe’ wasn’t good enough.

I had to work on the assumption that whichever safe house Anna had chosen had stopped being safe at least seventy-two hours ago.

‘Where were they? The safe houses.’

‘One east of Ternopil. One south of Vinnitsa.’

That made sense. It was Frank’s home turf.

‘Will you go there, Nico?’

‘No.’ I felt my head shake, as if that was helping. ‘Dijani will know where they are. And Minerva is still my best chance of finding him.’

My mission had changed. My target hadn’t.

‘We heard she left Patras four hours ago.’

It was 17:42 now. I got my brain in gear on some numbers. They would frame my actions between now and first light tomorrow. And doing the sums was a good way to avoid thinking about the shit Anna and our son might be in.

Patras was 330 nautical miles from Brindisi, give or take.

Minerva was fresh off the slipway, so should be able to do at least twenty-two knots fully loaded, more if not.

Which meant I had between eight and fourteen hours to locate the fucker.

‘OK, listen in. They won’t drop anchor offshore at the height of the trafficking season. The coastguards would be all over it. And it’s not booked into any of the main Italian terminals. I’ve covered every fucking centimetre of the coast between Brindisi and Taranto, and there’s nowhere it could get into without drawing attention to itself. So I’m going north. I’m starting with Monopoli. You know it?’

‘I’ve never been there.’