Gathering Storm by Don Pendleton

Author:Don Pendleton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Worldwide Library
Published: 2013-01-25T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SEVEN

San Remo, Italy

Calvin James walked outside and stood beside the pool, turning to look at the villa.

The deserted villa.

Razan Khariza and his group were long gone. The spacious villa was empty, and nothing had been left behind. Khariza had been extremely thorough.

James glanced up as he heard footsteps to see Rafael Encizo coming around the side of the villa. The Cuban shook his head before James even asked the question.

“Nothing in the garage except tire marks on the floor.”

“Talk about batting zero,” James said.

“Khariza is pretty good at covering his tracks, Cal. It’s why he’s stayed on the loose for so long.”

“Hey, you two, I think we might have something.”

James and Encizo saw Gary Manning standing in the open doorway, holding something in his hand.

“You remember the Hitchcock movie Psycho?”

“Don’t tell me you found Khariza’s mother preserved in the cellar,” James said.

Manning smiled. “When Marion Crane’s boyfriend and her sister are looking for her in the Bates’s Motel, what did they find in the bathroom?”

“Beats me,” Encizo said.

“He finds a scrap of paper in the toilet bowl with figures on it.”

“Uh-huh. And the answer is?”

Manning showed the torn section of a piece of notepaper in his hand.

“It’s blank,” Encizo said.

“It has the impression of writing on it. I had a look around. There’s a writing pad on the nightstand beside one of the beds. This matches the sheet torn off it.”

“Are you saying someone wrote something on the pad, took it, then tore off the next sheet because of the impression?”

“Trying to be thorough. Maybe because they were in a hurry they tossed this in the toilet and flushed it away. Thought they had flushed it away.”

“Can you make out what the impression says?” James asked.

“It’s a number,” Manning said. He held up the paper and angled it until the light picked out the numbers. He read them out as James jotted them down. “What do you think?”

“Looks like a phone number to me,” James said. He held up the written number so Encizo could see it. “Rafe?”

“I’d go for that.”

Manning took out his Tri-Band cell phone and hit the button for Stony Man.

Computer Room, Annex, Stony Man Farm

AARON KURTZMAN READ the number back to Manning.

“Okay. I’ll run it through the system. I’ll call you back soon as I have anything.”

“Anything come up on those other searches you were making?”

“Khariza has a longtime buddy called Radic Zehlivic, an Albanian Muslim. They went to school in the U.K. Zehlivic has made himself a fortune playing the stock markets. He’s quite a wheeler-dealer. Dark horse kind of character who doesn’t form attachments easily. But the friends he does have he keeps. Has a reputation as a ladies’ man. Played the field until he recently got married to a much younger woman. French girl called Monique Cadot. Zehlivic seems happy to let her play around and spend money. New York. Paris. Rome. The usual circuit.”

“Was Zehlivic involved in Khariza’s disappearance from Iraq?”

“Let me get back to my searches and I might be able to answer that.

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