The Family Hightower by Brian Francis Slattery

from Lisbon to New York after having gone by train from Spain to Portugal. At least one man has died. Well, a lot more than that—men, women, and children—and a lot more death is coming. But we’re not ready for that.
    The police in five countries all have just a small piece of what’s going on. In Granada, they’re examining the break-in at Peter’s apartment, wondering where the tenant has gone, wondering what kind of man lives like he does. In Ukraine, local, state, and international authorities have noted the appearance of the two Americans, and their disappearance, too. But Curly and Petey don’t seem important enough to distract them from much bigger problems, or to find out where they went. In Cleveland, the police know the most. Just like Kosookyy hoped, the FBI’s got files on him and all his buddies; they have a pretty good sense of what they’re all up to. It’s been that way at least since the Organized Crime Control Act got passed in 19 70 , when the feds started being able to prosecute RICO cases—after the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, for the people out there taking score at home. See, for the FBI to bust a bunch of guys at once, it’s not enough that those guys are just doing bad things. The FBI needs to show that those guys are, you know, organized. That they know each other, work together. That there’s a hierarchy, a system, people giving orders, people taking orders. So they’ve been collecting that kind of information for years, for at least a generation. Then they wait until the smoking gun appears, or until something big’s about to happen, something big and bad enough that they can bring everyone in and put them away for a long time. They work, these RICO cases, and the Cleveland FBI office has done some good busts. They’ve gotten Angelo Lonardo, who started off in 1929 by killing the people who killed his father, just a year after the big Mafia convention at the Hotel Statler, and risen to run the Mafia rackets in all northeast Ohio by 1980 . They got Joseph Gallo, Frederick Graewe, and Kevin McTaggart, too. Drug running, murder, a bunch of other charges. Twenty-five federal convictions and twenty state ones. Just a couple years ago, they started going international. They’re investigating a Taiwanese company for stealing trade secrets from an Ohio glue factory; they’ll gather enough to convict the company’s president, along with his daughter, in 1999 . They’re doing a lot of drug cases; they’ll do a lot of cyber crime. And by 1995 they’ve learned a couple things that don’t make them very happy.
    Agents George Guarino and Anne Easton have been put onto the Cleveland office’s organized crime investigations, Easton because she’s smart, Guarino because he’s almost as smart and knows a thing or two about Cleveland; he grew up around here. We’re in the days before September 11 , before organized crime takes a backseat to terrorism in the FBI’s priorities. So Guarino and Easton have some bureau money to spend. They’ve set up a nice little network of informants, they’ve been doing surveillance. They know the restaurant Petey and Curly visited, though they didn’t see them go in there. They know the man who owns the place and have been tracing the connections—of money, for the most part, because it’s all about money, right?—back to Russia and Eastern Europe, to someone, or something, called the Wolf. They know about a rival international group, whose Cleveland contact appears to be a man named Feodor. They know about someone called the White Lady, who they’re pretty sure lives in town, appears to have connections to a few different organizations, including Feodor’s and the Wolf’s—as if she’s playing a few sides at once. But they’re not sure why she’d do that, or even who she is. They’re just