Chapter Three
Rome
There were procedures to be followed, and Yusef Ali—still charged with the security of the establishment on via Angelo Masina—followed them, reporting in regularly to the cramped communications room situated at a rear corner of the villa’s second floor. A series of messages were relayed to him, in various idioms, and with various degrees of urgency. Yet the gist was plain: The late master himself had masters, masters until now unseen. The establishment was now theirs. The security breach had to be repaired, the weak links replaced. Failure—and there had been failure—was to be punished.
The administration of it would be Yusef Ali’s task. Their expectations of him were high; he would need to take care that he did not disappoint them. He assured them that he would not. His life had not been that of someone averse to risk, but neither was he one for taking foolish chances.
Yusef Ali had been reared in a Tunisian village that was only a hundred miles from the coastline of Sicily. Fishing vessels could make the passage across the Cap Bon from Tunisia to Agrigento or Trapani in a morning, depending on the currents. Italian lire were as common as dinars in the coastal settlements near Tunis. From an early age, Yusef spoke Italian as well as Arabic, negotiating prices for his father’s catch with the Sicilian fishmongers. He was in his mid-teens when he learned that there were even more lucrative forms of import and export for someone whose discretion could be counted upon. Italy had a small-arms industry, was one of the largest exporters of pistols, rifles, and ammunition in the world; in Tunisia, there were eager and adept middlemen who transshipped such weaponry to areas where the demand was surging—perhaps Sierra Leone one year, Congo or Mauritania another. The smuggling obviated end-use certificates and the other feckless bureaucratic attempts to limit the arms trade. The movement of arms could no more be halted by such regulations than the ocean’s currents could be arrested by drawing lines on a map. It was a matter of linking supply and demand—and North African merchants had for centuries taken advantage of Tunisia’s ports to make a specialty of it, whether the valuable in question was salt, silk, or gunpowder.
Yusef Ali himself was something of an exported valuable. He had first distinguished himself when he repelled a half-dozen brigands who had sought to hijack a shipment of Beretta handguns he was helping shepherd to an inland depot near Béja. Yusef was part of a team of four young men entrusted with the cargo, and he swiftly realized that at least two of his fellows were complicit in the attack—had provided information to the brigands, doubtless for cash, and were only pantomiming resistance when they arrived with guns drawn. Yusef, for his part, pantomimed acquiescence, opening the trailer for the brigands, opening a crate as if to demonstrate that the goods were what they had come for, before abruptly turning his own automatic pistol on them. They fell like those small brown birds, the pipits and shrikes, on which Yusef had practiced his marksmanship during long afternoons in the dusty countryside.
After Yusef gunned down the brigands, he leveled his pistol at the turncoats, and could read their treachery on their panicked faces. Then he gunned each of them down as well.
The delivery was made without further incident. And Yusef Ali found that he had made a name for himself. When he was in his early twenties, he found himself with new employers: Like so many small-scale arms merchants around the world, they were incorporated into a larger and well-organized network. To join the network was to prosper; to resist it was to be destroyed. Pragmatists to the core, these merchants found the choice was not a difficult one to make. Their higher-ups would exert their privileged status by commandeering from them persons whose particular talents they required. Yusef Ali came from a tribal community in which such feudal devotion was commonplace; he accepted the training he received with gratitude; he accepted the greater responsibilities with which he was entrusted with grave sobriety. Besides, his employer’s sense of discipline came ridged with an outsized degree of cruelty. Having taken a position in Ansari’s own household, Yusef had seen what punishments had befallen others who stumbled in the course of their responsibilities. At times he had helped carry them out.
Indeed, he was doing so again. The young guard who had been drugged and stowed in a cupboard—his own demonstrable lack of vigilance could be described as nothing other than failure. Yusef had asked him to recount precisely how he had been overpowered, again and again. The guard, though humbled, had denied that he had done wrong. He had to be made an example of.
Now Yusef watched as the young man dangled with his feet just a few feet from the ground, the hawser around his neck securely attached to a beam in the interrogation chamber, his hands corded tightly together. Better you than me, the Tunisian thought mordantly. The young guard was strangling very slowly, his face a deep scarlet, a faint burble coming from his mouth, a feeble flow of air forced through compressed flesh and accumulating drool. With distaste, Yusef noticed the dark patch of wetness at the man’s groin. Though the man’s neck was broken, death would not come soon. He had at least another two hours of conscious life remaining to him. Time to contemplate his deeds and misdeeds. Time to contemplate his dereliction of duty.
Others would come for the body in the morning, Yusef knew. And they would see. They would see that Yusef did not countenance failure. They would see that Yusef would maintain the highest standards. Examples would be made. Weak links would be replaced.
Yusef Ali would make sure of it.
Andrea poured herself a glass of wine and went upstairs to change. She just wanted to feel normal. But “normal” was proving elusive. She felt…like Alice in Wonderland, having swallowed a potion and grown enormous, because the Cape Cod now seemed like a dollhouse, the rooms shrinking around her. In the hall outside her bedroom she stumbled on a sneaker, one of a pair of unlaced men’s running shoes. Goddamn Brent Farley, she thought, seething for a few seconds. Well, good goddamn riddance. The thought would have been more satisfying if she had been the one to call it quits, but that was not how the relationship played out.
Brent was a few years older than she was, another finance guy out of Greenwich, a vice president for sales development at a specialty reinsurance firm. He was silver-tongued, deep-voiced, ambitious—a man who dressed well, played squash as if his life depended on the outcome, checked his personal portfolios several times a day, and would browse his BlackBerry during what was meant to be a romantic date. They had a blow-out fight about that about a week before. “I think I’d have a better chance of getting your attention if I were texting you right now,” she’d complained at a restaurant. All she wanted was an apology. She never got it. Instead, the argument escalated, with Brent making references to her “small-time” mentality; she was, he said, a “downer.” Methodically, he gathered up his things from her house, loaded them into his black Audi sports car, and drove off. No door slamming, nothing flung, no squealing tires in the driveway. He wasn’t even angry, not really—that was the hardest thing to take. He was dismissive and contemptuous, yes, but he wasn’t really angry. She wasn’t worthy of anger, it seemed. Too small-time, obviously.
She opened her closet. Had Brent left anything here? Not that she could see. Her gaze settled on her own clothes, and she felt something small and wistful well up. Hanging neatly from padded hangers were her business suits, evening dresses, weekend wear, every hue of blue and peach and beige.
Her wardrobe—not extensive but well-chosen—was always a point of pride with her. She was an aficionado of discount outlets like Filenes Basement, could spot under-priced item of upscale apparel like a heron spotting a fish. And there were often bargains to be had, as she’d counseled friends, if you weren’t a snob about labels. A lot of those bridge-collection brands, like Evan Picone and Bandolino, could bring out something truly handsome, almost indistinguishable from the outfits they were copying. Guess what I paid for this—it was a game she and her girlfriends used to play when they weren’t complaining about work or men, and Andrea was a champ of it. The cream silk blouse that she got for thirty bucks? Suzanne Muldower had yelped; she’d seen something identical at Talbot’s for a hundred and ten. Andrea now fingered the fabrics wistfully, the way she used to page through her high-school yearbook, amused and embarrassed by who she used to be: the pretension, the innocence, the freckles.
Suzanne Muldower—a friend since the age of eleven, the one who had known her longest—was the first to arrive. The invitation was last-minute, but Muldower didn’t have much to cancel: just a double date with her microwave and DVD player, she admitted. Melissa Pratt—a willowy blonde with what Andrea privately thought of as a downtown attitude, and slowly ebbing hopes for an acting career—arrived a few minutes later, with her boyfriend of the past eight months, Jeremy Lemuelson, a chunky little guy who worked as a civil engineer in Hartford, owned two vintage Stratocasters, and, because he painted in his spare time, considered himself something of an artist.
Dinner was nothing fancy, as she warned: a pot of fettuccine with some store-bought pesto, a few side dishes she got at the prepared foods counter at the Carlyle Market—and a big bottle of Vouvray.
“So what’s the four-one-one?” Suzanne asked, after tasting the pasta and making the obligatory noises of admiration. “You said we were celebrating tonight.” She turned to Melissa. “And I told her, ‘Let me be the judge of that.’”
“Brent bought you a ring, didn’t he?” Melissa put in. She shot Suzanne an I-told-you-so look, premature in victory.
“Brent? Please.” Andrea clucked, smiling beneath slitted eyes. Melissa and she had shared an apartment when Andrea was in grad school, and even then she took a sisterly interest in Andrea’s romantic successes and failures.
“You got a promotion?” Suzanne’s turn.
“A bun in the oven?” Melissa looked concerned.
“Garlic bread, actually,” Andrea said. “Smells good, doesn’t it?” She trotted out to the kitchen and brought it to the table, a little crisper than ideal.
“I already know. You won the lottery.” Jeremy’s sardonic contribution. His cheek was swollen with half-chewed food, like a squirrel’s.
“Close,” Andrea told him.
“Okay, girlfriend, out with it!” Suzanne reached across the table and gave her hand a squeeze. “Don’t make us suffer.”
“I’m dying here,” Melissa chimed in. “Now give!”
“Well, the thing is…” Andrea looked at the three expectant faces around her and suddenly the lines she’d rehearsed in her head seemed awkward and boastful. “The thing is that the Bancroft Foundation has decided to…reach out to me. They want me to be on the board. A trustee.”
“That’s amazing,” Suzanne shrilled.
“Any money in it for you?” Jeremy asked, massaging a callus on his right forefinger.
“Actually, there is,” Andrea said. Twelve million dollars.
“Yeah?” A gentle prod.
“It’s really generous. An honorarium just for serving and…” She faltered, berating herself silently: What a phony she was becoming! “Oh, shit, listen to me. They’re giving me…”
The words would not come out. She could not say them. Nothing would be the same among them once she did. She hadn’t thought this through. And yet not saying it—especially if and when they found out later—would be the corrosive thing. Not for the first time that evening, she found herself choking on the number. “Look, let’s just say it’s crazy money, okay?”
“Crazy money,” Suzanne repeated acidly. “Would that be bigger than a breadbox?”
“Is this one of those I-could-tell-you-but-then-I’d-have-to-kill-you situations?” Melissa put in. She once had a guest, i.e., nonrecurring, role in a soap opera episode with a plot element like that.
“You know, I’m hazy on my arithmetic. Is ‘crazy’ greater or less than ‘mad phat’?” Jeremy asked, exasperated.
“Hey, you’re a private person,” Suzanne said, in a voice that could curdle milk. “We need to respect that.”
“Twelve,” Andrea said quietly. “Million.”
The others looked on in stunned silence until Jeremy half-choked on a nastily swallowed mouthful of pasta. He knocked back a glass of the Vouvray. “You’re shitting me,” he said at last.
“This is a joke, right?” Melissa asked. “Or, like, an improv thing?” Melissa turned to Suzanne. “When I was taking acting classes, at the studio? Andrea used to help me with my improv exercises, and I always thought she was better at them than I was.”
Andrea shook her head. “I can hardly believe it myself,” she said.
“And so the caterpillar turns into the butterfly,” Suzanne said, a spot of red appearing on each cheek.
“Twelve million dollars,” Melissa said softly, almost singing the syllables the way she did when she was trying to memorize a part. “Congratulations! I couldn’t be happier for you! This is un-buh-lievable.” The last word turned into three.
“A toast!” Jeremy called out, refilling his wineglass.
The mood was jubilant and joshing, but by the time the meal turned into coffee and cordials, their excitement for her had—or was she imagining it?—somehow edged into envy. Her friends were spending her money for her in their imaginations, coming up with Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous scenarios that were both outlandish and banal. Jeremy talked, with a faint air of defiance, about a rich man he knew—he did yardwork for him when was a teenager—who “was just like the guy next door, never put on any airs” and there was a hint of reproach in his story, as if Andrea wasn’t going to measure up to the Pepsi bottling-plant mogul of Doylestown, Pennsylvania.
Finally, after the tenth reference to Donald Trump and eighty-foot yachts, Andrea said, “Can we talk about something else?”
Suzanne gave her a who-are-you-trying-to-kid look. “What else is there to talk about?” she asked.
“I’m serious,” Andrea said. “How are you doing?”
“Don’t patronize me, sweetheart,” Suzanne returned, pretending to be insulted. Except that wasn’t quite it, Andrea realized. Her friend was pretending to be pretending to be insulted.
So this is what it was going to be like.
“Anyone for some herbal tea?” Andrea asked, brightly. She could feel a headache coming on.
Suzanne stared at her, unblinking. “You know how you always said you weren’t one of those Bancrofts?” she asked, not unkindly. “Well, guess what. You just became one.”
In a darkened room illuminated only by the bluish glow of a flat-panel monitor, agile fingers caressed gently concave keycaps; the LCD screen filled and emptied. Words, numerals. Requests for information. Requests for action. Payments assured. Payments revoked. Reward conferred and reward withheld; sanctions and incentives systematically applied. Information came in. Information went out. It was a computer networked to countless others around the world, receiving and generating a pulse of binary digits, a cascade of ones and zeros, of logic gates in closed or open position, each as insubstantial as the atoms from which mighty edifices are built. Instructions were digitally issued, modified. Data was collected, collated, and assessed. Sizable sums flashed around the world, digitally transferred from one financial institution to another, and another, ending up in numbered accounts nested within other numbered accounts. More instructions were issued; more agents were enlisted through a multiplex of cutaways.
Within the room, a face was illuminated only by the moon-glow of the screen. Yet the recipients of the communications were denied even that glimpse. The guiding intelligence remained hidden to them, as vaporous as the morning mist, as distant as the sun that burns it away. A snatch of an old spiritual drifted into the person’s mind. He’s got the whole world in his hands.
The tapping of the keys was almost lost among the ambient noises, but these were the sounds of knowledge and action, of the resources to translate the first into the second. These were the sounds of power. In the lower left corner of the keyboard were the key caps marked COMMAND and CONTROL. It was not an irony so much as an aptness, and not one lost upon the person seated before the computer. That soft crackling was, indeed, the sound of command and control.
A final, encoded transmission was made. It concluded with one sentence: Time is of the essence.
Time, the one entity that could be neither commanded nor controlled, would have to be honored and respected.
Agile fingers, a soft crackling of keys, and the sign-off was typed. GENESIS.
For hundreds of people around the planet, it was a name to conjure with. For many, it meant opportunity and quickened their sense of avarice. For others, it meant something very different, and made their blood run cold, haunted their nightmares. Genesis. The beginning. But of what?