Double pursuit, p.1
Double Pursuit, page 1
Contents
About Double Pursuit
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
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Some kind words about Double Identity
About the Author
Also by Alison Morton
Published in 2021 by Pulcheria Press
Copyright © 2021 by Alison Morton
All rights reserved Tous droits réservés
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The right of Alison Morton to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Acts 1988 Sections 77 and 78.
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No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission of the copyright holder, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
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Propriété littéraire d’Alison Morton
Tous droits de reproduction, d’adaptation et de traduction, intégrale ou partielle réservés pour tous pays. L’auteur ou l’éditeur est seul propriétaire des droits et responsable du contenu de ce livre.
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Le Code de la propriété intellectuelle interdit les copies ou reproductions destinées à une utilisation collective. Toute représentation ou reproduction intégrale ou partielle faite par quelque procédé que ce soit, sans le consentement de l’auteur ou de ses ayant droit ou ayant cause, est illicite et constitue une contrefaçon, aux termes des articles L.335-2 et suivants du Code de la propriété intellectuelle
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locations or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.
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ISBN 9791097310301 (ebook)
ISBN 9791097310318 (paperback)
About Double Pursuit
She’s hunting arms smugglers. But who is hunting her?
* * *
One dead body, two badly injured operatives and five crates of hijacked rifles.
* * *
In Rome, former French special forces intelligence analyst Mélisende des Pittones is frustrated by obnoxious local cops and ruthless thugs. Despite the backing of the powerful European Investigation and Regulation Service, her case is going nowhere. Then an unknown woman tries to blow her head off.
* * *
As Mel and fellow investigator Jeff McCracken attempt to discover the heart of the criminal network as well as their own unpredictable relationship, all roads point to the place she dreads – the arid and remote African Sahel – where she was once betrayed and nearly died. Can Mel conquer her fear as she races to smash the network and save her colleague’s life?
1
Mel turned over in the bed trying to find a cool spot. Even the thin cotton sheet felt hot and heavy. Her skin was damp with light sweat; everywhere, especially in her groin and under her breasts. Rome in a heatwave was purgatory. Not so much the temperature – she’d experienced over 40°C every day when on operation with her regiment in the African Sahel – but the humidity. She leant over and drank tepid water from the glass on the bedside table.
Andreas was still asleep beside her; his blond curls reminded Mel of a Renaissance angel. Even though separated by several centimetres, just the extra heat from his body made the room so much warmer. The fan was no substitute for broken air conditioning, but it wasn’t the heat that was keeping Mel awake. It was frustration.
Their investigation had stalled. Their one contact was dead. Mel had knelt by the body in the street last night and touched the dark hair on the back of his head to find it matted and wet with blood and tissue. When they’d turned him over, she’d shivered at the small round hole in his forehead stark black under the dim streetlights. However distressing brutal death was, she had to focus. The reaction would come later. Today would be the first of several of long interviews and endless paperwork with the police.
She pulled herself out of bed and opened the louvred shutters. They’d opened the windows wide at two this morning but closed the shutters when the carabinieri had at last let them go back to their pensione. The small side-street hotel covered in ochre stucco and festooned in flags and geraniums was more discreet than a big hotel, but at this precise minute Mel yearned for the efficient if sterile, air-conditioned box of a four-star international.
In the bathroom, she yanked off the nightshirt she’d been wearing for decency’s sake. Andreas Holzmann was the perfect gentleman, but she didn’t want to embarrass him or herself. That was the problem working undercover as a married couple with a colleague who was a friend who’d rather be more than a friend. She could have told Director Stevenson ‘no’ when he’d outlined their assignment, but that would have been cowardly and Mélisende des Pittones was no coward. Besides, she’d always worked in mixed groups since she’d joined the French Army, often sleeping in a stuffy tent with the rest of her detail, mostly male. At least Andreas didn’t belch or fart in bed.
But Jeff McCracken, whom she was dating, had been furious.
‘Why does Holzmann have to go with you? He just wants to get into your knickers.’
‘God, Jeff, it’s just an assignment. A professional one. It’s because both of us speak some Italian. I’m perfectly aware Andreas has feelings for me, but he knows how to behave.’
‘As long as you do your ice maiden act, I suppose that’ll have to do.’
Mel had put her hand out and caught his. McCracken’s mouth had been a tight line, his grey eyes flint hard and his whole body tense. She’d known it was anxiety. Bit by bit, Mel had gleaned from him that he’d come up the tough way. His family, really his mother, had strained every nerve and bone in the body in a daily struggle to ensure they survived until the next pay day. With his father’s drinking habit and her low-wage jobs it had been a gamble, he’d said, given she had to clothe and feed four children on fresh air and handouts. There hadn’t been much space or energy for anything like emotional nurturing, although his mum always came to school open evenings with them all. Joining the London police had saved him from the life of a petty criminal that had crushed his father, but he found it hard to throw off the cynicism that had protected him all his life.
Mel’s upbringing had been more than comfortable, in a rural château in France her family had owned for centuries. Although grounding their children in the realities of life – they’d all had to learn how to milk cows and goats and muck in with harvesting – her father and mother had given them all the best education possible along with unconditional love.
But somehow, a spark of recognition and working together in the European Investigation and Regulation Service had made them friends, then lovers. For Mel, in Jeff McCracken she had found safety, a straightforward and honest man and a strong and considerate lover. Was it love? After two relationships when she’d thought she’d found her life partner had ended disastrously, she’d shut those thoughts away in a locked cupboard in the back of her mind.
* * *
After a breakfast of cappuccino and over-sweet cornetti served by a smiling but silent mamma hovering round them in the shaded courtyard behind the pensione, Mel and Andreas set off in the glaring sunshine.
‘I don’t know how you can bear to wear longs in this,’ Mel said and waved her hand towards the brilliant blue sky.
‘Well, I don’t want to look like a tourist when we meet our Italian colleagues this time,’ Andreas said.
Mel smoothed her hand down the skirt of her linen sleeveless sundress and prodded the bridge of her sunglasses. She’d piled her fair hair up into a pleat to keep her neck and shoulders cool.
‘Well, I’m certainly not putting a suit on for a day like this.’
‘Do you ever?’ Andreas smiled at her.
‘Ha!’ True, she was a jeans and shirt type or until recently, combats. But this morning her practical side had led her to choose thick-soled canvas shoes for Rome’s hard pavements.
The police building on the Quirinal Hill stretched up in front of them from a ground floor of grey masonry blocks to the upper three floors covered in red stucco. No window boxes of scarlet geraniums. Inside, the carabiniere radioed through their names and a few minutes later a man in a light grey suit entered the lobby.
‘Buongiorno,’ he said, his face solemn. His black, slicked-back hair and slender frame gave him a youthful look, and he radiated fitness in his stride. But Mel saw wrinkles at the outside edges of his eyes and some grey hai
‘I am Captain Giordano,’ the man said. ‘Your ID, please.’
He took their EIRS warrant cards, studied them, turned them over then handed them back without a comment. He gestured them to follow him and set off down a corridor, obviously confident they would follow him. At a security arch, he flashed a plastic card across a reader pad.
‘Please use your EIRS cards to pass through.’ Two peeps and a green light for both Mel and Andreas. Giordano opened the next door and they entered a meeting room complete with polished table and uncomfortable-looking chairs.
‘Now,’ he said, fixing them with a hard stare, ‘Investigator des Pittones and Kriminalkommissar Holzmann, please tell me why two officers from the European Investigation and Regulation Service are sneaking around Rome under false names and without the courtesy of at least informing us.’
‘I think you could start by telling us exactly who you are,’ Mel replied. ‘You’re not a standard carabiniere processing a murder, are you? Serious though that is,’ she added.
Giordano looked at Andreas and raised an eyebrow, but Andreas’s face was impassive. Normally, he smiled at the least excuse – a warm smile that made his eyes sparkle. Now, he was returning Giordano’s look with a cold light in his that Mel rarely saw. She sat back and waited. She would give Giordano another couple of minutes, then they’d leave.
‘Bene,’ he said after one. ‘I belong to the Guardia di Finanza, GICO.’
Andreas raised his eyebrows this time.
‘Organised crime?’ he said. ‘You think the death is connected to the mafia?’
‘You know what we do?’ Giordano looked surprised.
‘I’m seconded from the financial crime section at the Bundeskriminalamt in Wiesbaden, so yes. I’ve met some of your colleagues when they visited – Lieutenant-Colonel Vanni and Captain Torelli.’
‘You know Torelli? He was in my year at the officers’ school.’ Giordano relaxed his shoulders and almost smiled.
‘He was serious, which my boss liked,’ Andreas added. ‘And your colonel had an excellent strategic approach but was unhappy about some of his administrative backup at home.’
‘Always a hazard in complex government systems,’ Giordano said, then added a conspiratorial smile which Andreas returned.
‘Well, now you’ve had a little interservice chit-chat to establish who you are, would either of you care to fill me in?’ Mel said.
‘I apologise, Mélisende,’ Andreas looked contrite. ‘The Guardia di Finanza is a militarised police force like the carabinieri, but they specialise in financial and economic crime and smuggling. They’re also the primary agency for suppressing immigrant trafficking and the illegal drug trade.’ He glanced at Giordano. ‘Am I correct, Captain?’
‘Sì. We also protect our country’s territorial waters. Torelli is currently commanding one of the aeronaval units in the south.’
‘I see,’ Mel said, not seeing at all. Why on earth did Italy have three police forces? Two in her native France were bad enough. ‘So what is this GICO you mentioned?’
‘Gruppo d'investigazione sulla criminalità organizzata, as your colleague Holzmann mentioned.’ He looked at her as if she was simple-minded.
‘Very well,’ Mel replied ignoring his tone. ‘But I’m puzzled by your interest in a dead lawyer.’
Giordano looked up.
‘You know him?’
‘He’s Gavril Dalca, a Romanian financial lawyer living and practising in London,’ Mel replied. ‘I met him several months ago at a French Embassy reception for the security industry where one of his colleagues was teasing him about being punctilious by acting by the book.’
What Mel couldn’t say was that Gavril Dalca’s colleague Niccolò Mestre had been an intermediary in gun smuggling. That was outside Giordano’s need-to-know. All she wanted from him was a proper investigation of Dalca’s murder.
‘Why were you in the street where he was discovered?’ he asked.
‘We were on our way to a bar round the corner where we’d arranged to meet him.’
‘What about?’
‘Sorry. That’s confidential.’
‘Oh, really?’
‘Yes, really. I am not authorised to discuss the circumstances.’
Giordano’s face clouded over and he gripped his silver pen.
‘Would you prefer to be put in a cell for obstruction?’ he said. ‘It could be months before your case comes before a magistrate.’
Dieu, what was his problem?
‘Is that a threat?’ she said. ‘I’m sure you didn’t mean it like that, Captain. Or are you ignorant of EIRS jurisdiction?’ She stood. ‘I’m disappointed in your lack of cooperation. Unless you have anything helpful to contribute, we’ll leave now. And, of course, I will be making a full report to our director who will forward a copy to the minister of economy and finance responsible for the Guardia. Let’s go, Andreas.’
Holzmann got to his feet, nodded at Giordano and followed Mel to the door.
‘Wait,’ Giordano said.
‘What?’ Mel half turned.
He opened his hands and gave the smallest indication of a shrug.
‘Perhaps I was over-hasty.’
‘Yes, you were,’ Mel replied.
‘What my colleague means—’ Andreas began.
‘What your colleague means, Andreas,’ Mel said, ‘is that we expect some professional respect.’ She turned to Giordano. ‘You know that EIRS has special status. We’re trying to catch lawbreakers. I presume that is the case with you?’
‘If you want the Guardia di Finanza’s assistance, then you must work with us.’
‘We value cooperation with all European forces as a matter of course, but understand this, Captain, we do not expect petty threats that hamper that cooperation.’ Mel slid back into her seat and dug out one of her best smiles. ‘Now, do you have the preliminary incident report, please?’
* * *
‘You were a little harsh with him, Mélisende,’ Andreas remarked as they walked away. They turned off the wide grandeur of the Via Ventiquattro Maggio where the carabinieri station was located into a side street lined with tall apartment blocks that provided welcome shade.
‘He was trying to bully me. We aren’t suspects but fellow officers. And he was snotty.’
‘Snotty?’
‘Sorry, it’s a bit slangy.’ Andreas’s English was very, very good, but perhaps this word didn’t belong in his vocabulary. He was far too nice. It was one of her English mum’s favourite insults. ‘Superior, no, conceited attitude. And he kept looking at you for confirmation of everything I said.’
‘Ah.’
Andreas was sympa, as they said in France, and a very effective co-worker, but like most men he didn’t always catch the subtle undercurrents of another man uncomfortable with seeing women as equal let alone leading. She looked around, checking nobody was near enough to overhear her.
‘Well, his personality may lack charm, but his preliminary report and commentary are a useful addition to the subject’s profile,’ she conceded. They wove through a series of narrower cobbled streets with multiple-storey blocks covered in yellow and dull peach stucco interspersed with ornate travertine doorways and tall windows.
