any group of foreign friends on holiday. A middle-aged Italian with a ready smile, hair that—after some time in the bathroom the previous evening—was now cropped short and dyed a deep shade of brown. A tall, black African, in his twenties, athletic, who couldn’t stop listening to music on his headphones whenever he had the chance, dancing along to whatever he heard. A quiet, introspective dark-skinned man, foreign, perhaps, from the Middle East, with the distanced, almost arrogant air of a businessman.
And a woman. Anna Ybarra. Spanish, though she would doubtless regard herself as Basque. She had the muscular, full body of a peasant, long dark hair, and a guileless, compelling face, that of the Madonna in some medieval painting—plain, not beautiful, or pretty, yet impossible not to admire. A woman who would always attract attention, turn heads as she passed.
With her round, guileless eyes, which seemed to engage with the world and find only amazement, Anna Ybarra had an air of intriguinginnocence. She was twenty-seven but, at times, looked no more than a teenager. For all these reasons, he chose her above the other individuals trawled from the covert links they possessed around the world. Many had more talents, few more motivation. None looked less like a terrorist, and this, above all else, made her invaluable. The police and the secret services worked the way they knew, with precision and practice based on past experience. They would be looking for what their shared understanding told them to seek: a group of men hiding in the network of safe houses that the organization had acquired the length of Europe. The online news services were already talking of raids on suspected Muslim extremists in the grim immigrant suburbs of Rome, Milan, Turin, and beyond. This was what he hoped for, knowing that not one of those whom the police would arrest could breathe a word about what was happening, for the simplest of reasons: None knew. This was an operation that came from on high, like 9/11, Madrid, and the London bombs. No one could have expected it, because no one, outside the closest circle of those moving to and fro each evening on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, was aware that the plot existed.
He could imagine the men the Italians had rounded up, locked in some grim cell, being screamed at by interrogators, wondering if the Americans might intercede at any moment, whisk them away to a private jet and a short trip to a friendly foreign country where torture was an everyday occurrence. Rendition was supposed to be banned in Italy; the politicians had demanded that after one case had resulted in criminal prosecutions against some of those involved. But in reality …?
Petrakis had no idea whether it would happen or not, and he didn’t care. The pain and outrage would make the detention all the more galling, and there would be mistakes, as there always were, which the media would seize upon and scream from the rooftops as evidence of the new, draconian state.
Terror was about more than the visible act. It concerned the temperament of a nation, the breaking of its spirit, the destruction of anything it could use to cling to the certainties of the past.
By the side of the pool, he found his attention drifting to the woman once more. He had checked her story himself, every last detail. She hadgrown up in the Basque country, daughter of a simple country farmer. Married at nineteen. A mother at twenty-one. Five years later, in the midst of a police crackdown after ETA exploded a bomb at Madrid airport, killing three people, a covert anti-terror squad had stormed into the farmhouse she shared with her husband. It was a nighttime raid, badly handled. In the ensuing firefight he had died, and so had their little boy, who was just a week away from his fifth birthday. When the sun rose on their humble home outside the village of Hernani, near San Sebastián, it shed light on a terrible mistake. The police had entered the wrong
And a woman. Anna Ybarra. Spanish, though she would doubtless regard herself as Basque. She had the muscular, full body of a peasant, long dark hair, and a guileless, compelling face, that of the Madonna in some medieval painting—plain, not beautiful, or pretty, yet impossible not to admire. A woman who would always attract attention, turn heads as she passed.
With her round, guileless eyes, which seemed to engage with the world and find only amazement, Anna Ybarra had an air of intriguinginnocence. She was twenty-seven but, at times, looked no more than a teenager. For all these reasons, he chose her above the other individuals trawled from the covert links they possessed around the world. Many had more talents, few more motivation. None looked less like a terrorist, and this, above all else, made her invaluable. The police and the secret services worked the way they knew, with precision and practice based on past experience. They would be looking for what their shared understanding told them to seek: a group of men hiding in the network of safe houses that the organization had acquired the length of Europe. The online news services were already talking of raids on suspected Muslim extremists in the grim immigrant suburbs of Rome, Milan, Turin, and beyond. This was what he hoped for, knowing that not one of those whom the police would arrest could breathe a word about what was happening, for the simplest of reasons: None knew. This was an operation that came from on high, like 9/11, Madrid, and the London bombs. No one could have expected it, because no one, outside the closest circle of those moving to and fro each evening on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, was aware that the plot existed.
He could imagine the men the Italians had rounded up, locked in some grim cell, being screamed at by interrogators, wondering if the Americans might intercede at any moment, whisk them away to a private jet and a short trip to a friendly foreign country where torture was an everyday occurrence. Rendition was supposed to be banned in Italy; the politicians had demanded that after one case had resulted in criminal prosecutions against some of those involved. But in reality …?
Petrakis had no idea whether it would happen or not, and he didn’t care. The pain and outrage would make the detention all the more galling, and there would be mistakes, as there always were, which the media would seize upon and scream from the rooftops as evidence of the new, draconian state.
Terror was about more than the visible act. It concerned the temperament of a nation, the breaking of its spirit, the destruction of anything it could use to cling to the certainties of the past.
By the side of the pool, he found his attention drifting to the woman once more. He had checked her story himself, every last detail. She hadgrown up in the Basque country, daughter of a simple country farmer. Married at nineteen. A mother at twenty-one. Five years later, in the midst of a police crackdown after ETA exploded a bomb at Madrid airport, killing three people, a covert anti-terror squad had stormed into the farmhouse she shared with her husband. It was a nighttime raid, badly handled. In the ensuing firefight he had died, and so had their little boy, who was just a week away from his fifth birthday. When the sun rose on their humble home outside the village of Hernani, near San Sebastián, it shed light on a terrible mistake. The police had entered the wrong
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