He caught Borgia’s air of concern. “What is it?”
“I don’t want them getting their hands on the materiel.”
“No question of it. The plastique cannot be detonated without the proper equipment. We will defuse the grenades and remove the firing pins from the pistols.”
“No mistakes,” said Borgia.
Sabbatini placed a hand on his upper arm. One soldier’s word to another.
It was a clear, pleasant afternoon. The air base, on the Lazio plain, looked east toward Cassino and south toward Pompeii. Borgia fancied himself a student of history. At such a place Pompey had fought Caesar and lost, signaling the end of the First Triumvirate. Borgia had no illusion. He was not the next Caesar. But like Caesar, he viewed himself as an expression of the people’s will, the vox populi. Through him, their voices would be heard. He was not the only one who had had enough.
Turin. Milan. Lampedusa. Ingolstadt. Dijon. Copenhagen. Madrid.
Equal shares of explosives and armaments purchased from Libya had been sent to each city. In each city, members of Prato Bornum would see that they were properly used. Police. Military. Intelligence agencies of one stripe or another. Bloodshed was necessary, but Borgia had instructed his colleagues to keep it to a minimum. Enough blood would be spilled come tomorrow night to spark his plan into action. The other cities were meant to be symbolic, to let the public know that no one was safe. Not in Italy. Not in Germany. Not in Denmark. Not in Spain. And not in France.
Poor France, thought Borgia. Yet again she would suffer the most, but if it was any consolation, many of the victims would not be French.
There had been one last shipment, and this was the most important. It had left his possession an hour after he had acquired the materiel from the gangsters Toto and Peppe, on the Naples docks, and had been placed aboard a private jet and flown to, of all places, Switzerland. Fifty kilos of plastic explosives packed in a lead-lined stainless-steel case, ensuring the plastique’s chemical signature remained invisible to even the most sophisticated scanner.
From the airport outside the Swiss capital of Bern, a courier had ferried the case south along Lake Thun before turning due west and heading into the Simmental Valley. His destination was the resort town of Gstaad, elevation 3,445 feet, in the canton Bern. It was a ninety-minute drive. Once there, he navigated toward the famed Palace hotel, and past the hotel to a chalet not much smaller.
The chalet belonged to Arabs, the Al-Obeidi family, originally from Dhahran. Tarek Al-Obeidi had served as managing partner of PetroSaud and, more recently, headed up the newly formed International Rare Earth Consortium. His older brother, Abdul Al-Obeidi, age sixty-one, had chosen a different profession. For the past twenty years he had served as the deputy chief of the Mabahith, the Saudi secret police.
It was Abdul Al-Obeidi who the day before had made sure the doors to the chalet’s subterranean garage stood open so the courier could enter and off-load his sensitive cargo undetected. Abdul Al-Obeidi had phoned Borgia soon afterward to give him a firsthand description of the work being done.
Swiss law demanded that every home have a secure, airtight room on the ground floor or, preferably, the cellar to serve as protection against a nuclear attack. The luftschutzbunker was large and high ceilinged, its concrete floor and walls painted a glossy battleship gray, a reinforced steel door one meter thick guarding entry and exit, anti-gas filters built into the ceiling. A worktable had been erected in the center of the room, no more than a thick plywood sheet set atop sawhorses. It was a temporary construct, to be disposed of after use. Four military-style vests rested on the table’s surface. The vests were made from molecular-weight polyethylene, black, with pockets on the left and right and a larger one across the back, all designed to house Kevlar plating to protect the wearer against bullets and shrapnel. These vests, however, would be used for quite the opposite purpose.
On the floor beside the worktable was a tall plastic garbage bin filled with an assortment of nails, nuts, bolts, washers, screws, hinges, steel balls of various diameters, and razor wire, the last designed to slice off appendages and cause death by exsanguination to those not in the blast’s immediate vicinity.
A gray, elfin man dressed in baggy trousers and a shabby cardigan stood by the table, hands in his pockets, as the explosives were brought in. He moved quietly