Cry Wolf Read online

  At that moment, the special operations coordinator walked in.

  ‘Shut those phones!’ he snapped.

  ‘The situation is simple,’ the coordinator was saying.

  They were in the conference room, the eight officers who had worked the day shift and the four who would have been on-duty that night. Everyone was sitting down, except for him. He laid his hands flat on the table, leaned forward, then fixed his eyes on each of them in turn.

  ‘You call me Coordinator,’ he said. ‘You don’t need to know my name or rank, which is, I assure you, superior to the rank of any man or woman in this room. You are all on duty until I say that you are free to go home. Is that clear?’

  Pulenti pressed his lips together, but still the words came out.

  ‘Have we been kidnapped?’

  A thin smile appeared on the coordinator’s lips. ‘You might call it that,’ he said. ‘Just be glad that you’ll be released quite soon.’

  Everyone knew who he was. Everyone had seen him on the television or read about him in the newspapers. No one had ever thought they would meet him face-to-face.

  Tonino Sustrico would have preferred to keep his mouth shut, but he was the senior officer in the room – after General Corsini, obviously. Everyone turned to him, expecting him to speak up for them.

  ‘Excuse me, sir. You said that something important is going to happen. Will we be told what this is all about? And will we be taking an active role in the operation?’

  ‘You will all be a part of what is about to happen. From a logistical point of view, only at the beginning. First, I want everyone to understand that this is a matter of national importance.’ General Corsini stopped short. ‘Any questions?’

  Sustrico turned down the corners of his mouth, raised his chin in the air and looked around the table. His gesture expressed more clearly than words what he wanted to say: What the hell is going on?

  General Corsini’s glasses flashed beneath the neon lights overhead. His fist fell gently on the papers spread out before him. ‘Let’s make the most of the time that remains before my men and the magistrate arrive, and this operation kicks off in earnest.’

  Pulenti was sitting next to Sustrico. ‘His men? What’s he talking about?’

  Fortunately, only Sustrico heard him.

  22.35

  Generale Corsini was shut up in the communications room. No one had seen him since nine o’clock.

  Sustrico and the others remained in the conference room. They’d talked the situation over for a bit, then Sustrico had laid his head on his arms and fallen asleep. The last thing he remembered saying was that it reminded him of the night his youngest had been born. ‘Fourteen hours of passion. On my feet all bloody night.’

  The next thing, he was woken up by an argument that was going on.

  Eugenio Falsetti was the youngest officer in the station. ‘Just ’cause I’m the lowest in rank, why should I have to do the cooking?’

  It was getting late, and everyone was hungry. No one had been at home for dinner. There were three packets of spaghetti, half a bottle of olive oil, a can of tomatoes and a jar of dried red peppers left over in the larder. As a rule, whoever was on the night shift kept the cupboard stocked up for an early morning spaghettata. No one had come prepared that night, and there were more of them than usual.

  Sustrico looked at Falsetti. ‘Do it!’ he said.

  Falsetti’s pasta was overcooked, they all agreed, but everyone tucked in and made the most of it. The spaghetti alla diavola was served on plastic plates left over from the time a lorry had been stopped on its way from Serbia to Rome packed with illegally imported cats and dogs that were nearly dead of thirst.

  Falsetti had knocked on General Corsini’s door, asking if he was hungry.

  The Legend didn’t even look up at him.

  ‘Bring me a large black coffee,’ he said. ‘Make it strong.’

  02.30

  Everyone was sleeping, more or less.

  Michele Carosio was alone at the reception desk when a sharp rap woke him up. General Corsini was standing in front of him.

  ‘My men will be here at any moment,’ he warned. ‘Let them in without delay.’

  Five minutes later, the buzzer sounded from the door down in the street.

  At that time of night it seemed lower in tone and more sinister than usual. Then again, everything seemed strange and menacing that night. Not just the pale, drawn face of Magistrate Catapanni – Carosio had seen him occasionally when he escorted a prisoner to the local court in the centre of town – but also the three tall men who walked in through the swing doors at the magistrate’s back. Each one wore a black assault uniform, a black bulletproof jacket, a black balaclava, and carried a Beretta PM 12 machine gun.

  They didn’t even look at Carosio.

  General Corsini was standing outside the fax room.

  ‘Magistrate Catapanni, gentlemen,’ he called. ‘I’ve been expecting you. In here, please. We need to run through the final details.’

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  19 September, 03.01

  It was dark on D wing.

  Even darker than he had expected. The night lights glimmered like pale mushrooms growing on the ceiling. Moonlight, coming in through the windows on the right, cut pale diamonds on the rubber-tiled floor, the slanting bars like shallow incisions in pure crystalline carbon. Along the left-hand side of the corridor the isolation cells were marked off by steel doors at intervals of twenty feet.

  He counted them until he came to the sixth door. There, he stopped and listened.

  A maximum-security prison is never silent. Even so, there was an uneasy sort of peace. He could hear the sound of muffled snores, the stifled voices of prisoners talking in their sleep, living out their dreams, the pounding of a steel door closing somewhere far off. He had passed through two barred gates already, and no one had tried to stop him. Nobody was supposed to stop him. No one was supposed to see him. Some poor bastard of an underpaid prison guard had been there with the pass-key minutes before, opening the gates and doors, preparing the way.

  Still, it paid to be careful.

  It wouldn’t be the first time a man in his position had been betrayed by the people he was supposed to be working for. Before he did the job, he needed to be sure that he wasn’t being set up. Life was life, but two consecutive life sentences would be pushing it. There’d be no remission for another killing. Once he was in the cell it would be child’s play to lock him inside with the victim. No amount of explaining would get you out of a fix like that. Not when you were supposed to be locked up in your own cell fast asleep.

  Further ahead, through three more sets of closed barred gates, he could see the dim lights in the palisade area at the far end of the corridor. That was where the prisoners were brought each morning for security checks and handcuffing before being taken off to court or transferred to another prison. Returning prisoners and new inmates were forced to wait there until the cuffs and the restraining belts had been removed and they were escorted to their cells. He felt an incredible sense of freedom in being able to move through the prison unchained and unguarded. The neon light of a snacks-and-drinks machine flashed on and off in the palisade like an irregular stroboscope. The bulb was fading but no one would change it until it popped.

  He looked back over his shoulder. Darkness, silence, unrestricted space.

  He had left the barricade gates wide open in case he had to run. He could say that he’d been trying to escape if they caught him in the corridor. Trying to get out of jail was legitimate. Six months in solitary and that would be the end of it.

  But what he was doing now …

  He laid his hand on the door of cell number eighteen, then pushed it open.

  The heavy steel door swung back, resisting slightly, and he stepped quickly into the narrow room. It might have been his own home from home. There was a narrow window-slit in the far wall, a metal toilet bowl beneath it, a metal washbasin in the corner and a narrow bed p
ressed up against the right-hand wall. On the left, a slim-line plasma TV had been secured high up on the wall near the ceiling, a single bookshelf suspended below it, a metal desk and a metal chair that served as a table where you ate your meals and read your mail. His own cell was identical, except for two things: the mess on the table and the man on the bed.

  Moonlight shone in through the slit and fell on the table.

  There was a plastic plate, a plastic knife, a plastic fork, a plastic mug and a half-empty plastic bottle of mineral water. The prisoner hadn’t had the time to wash up after the special dinner he’d been served that night. He’d scoffed the lot then gone straight to bed. The ketamine and diamorphine had knocked him out, as it was meant to do.

  The fish had been pumped full of it.

  He glanced at the dirty plate, the scaly skin, the big bones of the sea bream.

  The prisoner was lying on his back, snoring loudly, his mouth wide open. He didn’t seem to be dreaming, his eyelids heavy, motionless, like those of a corpse that a mortician had finished making up for a funeral; a stocky, dark-skinned man in his mid-fifties, whose curly black hair had a light grey frosting. A man he had never seen before, and hoped he would never see again.

  He paused, and listened again. This was the moment of greatest danger.

  If the prisoner woke up now, if the guard with the key had second thoughts, if one of the other guards came wandering through D wing and saw the open gates and the unlocked door, then he was in the shit. Not that any of guards would want to get involved. ‘Do it any way you like,’ Raniero had told him. ‘Just make it look like an accident.’

  He looked around the cell. There was a lot of stuff he could have used. Pillow, shoelaces, towel – you could throttle a drugged man with any of those. But he’d seen something better the instant he entered the cell. He went over to the table, picked up the fish skeleton by its tail, moved close to the bed then sat down heavily on the man’s chest.

  The sleeper’s mouth gaped open. He was too far gone to react or make a sound. Out cold, even with fourteen stones of criminal malice sitting on top of him.

  He slid the fish into the prisoner’s open mouth, then he stood up.

  There was a swoosh as the man on the bed gasped for breath. A gurgle as he tried to swallow, and the bones slid deeper into his throat. His eyelids fluttered, but he didn’t wake up. He choked and gagged, tried to retch, his throat muscles fighting instinctively to eject the bones, trying to cough them up and out.

  He pinched the man’s nose between his thumb and forefinger, pressed his left hand over the man’s mouth and held it there, crushing the fish bones further into the gaping hole. He felt warm vomit hit the palm of his hand, a smell of fish and lemons in the air.

  He pressed down harder.

  It was over in less than a minute.

  The body bucked a couple of times, then the head sank back lifeless on the pillow.

  A cardiac arrest, maybe, or pseudo-anaphylaxis. That was the medical term for it. A bad reaction to fish, or the fish bones wedged in his gullet. That was what the coroner would be told to say. The official announcement wouldn’t change a thing. The prisoner in cell eighteen was dead, whoever he was.

  He caught hold of the fish by the tail fin, pulled hard and the skeleton came sliding easily out of the dead man’s mouth. The muscles in his throat were limp now, offering no resistance. He rinsed the vomit off beneath the tap, then dropped the fish skeleton back on the plastic plate where he had found it.

  He stood by the door for a moment, then peered out into the corridor.

  All was silent. The coast was clear.

  Two minutes later he was back in his own cell, stretched out on the cot.

  He heard the sound of footsteps coming slowly down the corridor. They stopped outside his door. Nothing happened for some moments, then a key turned in the lock. The footsteps moved away, and he heard a clang as the steel gate closed. Some moments later, further off, the second gate closed.

  The guard was going to lock the dead man in his cell.

  The killer didn’t hear the sound of the key in the lock. He was fast asleep by then.

  Someone said next morning that Corrado Formisano was dead.

  THIRTY-NINE

  19 September, 05.15

  It started as a rumble far away to the south.

  Distant thunder, you might have thought, though there wasn’t a cloud in the sky.

  Then four black dots appeared above the hills, four helicopters flying north in a tight formation. People who were awake that early wondered what was going on as the rotor blades began to pulse and beat like a single throbbing heart, changing rhythm as the aircraft broke away in different directions, covering the four points of the compass, hovering over the four gates that led in and out of the old town centre.

  People getting ready for a hard day’s work in factories, quarries and building sites cursed and swore, imagining that some bigwig from the government had decided to stop off in town for breakfast before flying on to wherever he or she was going for lunch at the taxpayers’ expense.

  Other people wondered whether some sort of military exercise was taking place. It was odd, they thought, because helicopters had never been seen around the town before.

  And did they need to make such a god-awful noise?

  Many people turned over and went back to sleep despite the racket. Others just put the coffee-pot on the stove and turned the radio up a bit.

  05.25

  A man was working in his allotment close to the southern gate.

  He leant on his spade, shading his eyes against the first bright rays of the sun. A hundred yards away a helicopter was hovering thirty feet above the houses. Black lines suddenly uncoiled from the helicopter, then men came sliding down the ropes, landing on one of the roofs or maybe sliding further down into the street.

  He didn’t know what to make of it.

  He had seen such things on television.

  But that was television …

  05.27

  Lorenzo Micheli was aware of a flitting shadow through his half-closed eyes.

  Then something cold and metallic dug hard into his right temple. A hand crushed down against the side of his face and pushed his head into the pillow, a voice exploding in his ear.

  ‘Where are the bullets?’

  Lorenzo opened his eyes and tried to move his head.

  He saw himself reflected in the wardrobe mirror. A man in a black assault outfit and ski mask was pointing a pistol at his head, bending low, shouting in his ear: ‘Where the fuck have you hidden the guns?’

  It was hard to answer, his mouth pushed into the pillow. ‘What guns?’

  ‘Where are they?’

  The man in the mask was not alone. Lorenzo heard other people moving around inside his bedroom. A table, chairs and other furniture screeched as they were pushed aside. Books hit the floor, then a stack of CDs crashed on to the tiles in their plastic covers. A cup or a plate was smashed to bits.

  The voice next to Lorenzo’s ear cancelled out the other sounds. ‘Get up slowly. I want to see your hands at all times. This pistol’s loaded.’

  Three minutes later, dressed but unwashed, hands cuffed behind his back, Lorenzo Micheli was hustled down the steep staircase. On the way out he counted eight masked men with machine guns guarding all the doors and the windows.

  Outside, it was chaos. More masked men, more guns, a helicopter hovering low in the sky, a big black van with Carabinieri written on the flank in large white letters, the pale faces of people who were peering out of all the windows.

  The narrow street was full of armed men.

  Twenty? Thirty?

  As they pushed him into the back of the van, Lorenzo wondered whether the police had come to arrest him alone, or were they rounding up every single person who lived in the neighbourhood?

  The double doors slammed shut and the wailing siren drowned out the noise of the helicopter.

  05.28

  His mother burst
into his bedroom and switched on the light.

  ‘Wake up, Davide! Something’s going on outside.’

  A heavy sleeper, it took him a few moments to pull himself together. His mother was standing by the window, pulling back the curtain, looking down into the back garden.

  The danger was out there, it seemed.

  He jumped up, moved to her side, terrified by what he saw outside. Seven or eight masked men in black uniforms were encircling the house. Each man held a machine gun at the ready. Wide awake, he turned towards the door but his mother held him back, a sob breaking from her lips.

  ‘Who are they? What do they want?’

  He grabbed his phone from the bedside table and dialled a number that everyone knew: 112.

  A deep bass voice answered at once: ‘Carabinieri. Who’s speaking?’

  ‘Davide … Castrianni. A gang of men. In my back garden. With guns,’ he managed to say.

  At the other end of the line, the voice said calmly: ‘That’s us, Davide. Just open the door and come out with your hands up!’

  05.32

  Signora Donati wasn’t alarmed when she heard the doorbell ring.

  She was waiting for Sauro, the male nurse, who gave her husband his injections. Sauro had told her that was on the first shift at the hospital that day, so he would be coming early. She had got up on purpose.

  She opened the door and a man pointed a pistol in her face.

  A man?

  The face was covered in black, except for two round eyeholes and a larger hole which showed his mouth.

  ‘Carabinieri!’ the mouth hissed. ‘Where’s Federico?’

  Signora Donati fainted, but it couldn’t have been for long. She opened her eyes, struggled to her feet and pushed her way towards Federico’s bedroom through the crush of men in black who were blocking the narrow hallway. A figure was standing over her son, holding a pistol next to Federico’s cheek. The boy was crushed against the wall, his face pushed out of shape by the gun. Two men were tapping the walls like doctors tapping her husband’s chest and back, while others were pulling out drawers and opening cupboards, throwing everything into a heap on the floor.