White Hot Silence Read online

  Also by Henry Porter

  Remembrance Day

  A Spy’s Life

  Empire State

  Brandenburg

  The Dying Light

  Firefly

  WHITE HOT SILENCE

  HENRY PORTER

  Copyright © 2019 Henry Porter

  Cover design by Cindy Hernandez

  Cover photograph © Woman:

  plainpicture/Mark Owen; Train: Bigstock

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove Atlantic, 154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011 or [email protected].

  First published in Great Britain in 2019 by Quercus Editions, an imprint of Hachette UK

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Printed in the United States of America

  First Grove Atlantic eBook edition: September 2019

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available for this title.

  ISBN 978-0-8021-4753-0

  eISBN 978-0-8021-4754-7

  The Mysterious Press

  an imprint of Grove Atlantic

  154 West 14th Street

  New York, NY 10011

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  groveatlantic.com

  For Miranda and Benji

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Also by Henry Porter

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  Back Cover

  CHAPTER 1

  Two figures were moving up the hill in the hot afternoon of the Calabrian autumn, silhouetted against the dusty white track that led to one of the abandoned mountain villages that now housed refugees. She recognised the effortless stride of men who had walked across deserts and guessed they were African migrants on the way to the refugee village of Spiadino. There was no other reason for them to be out in these barren hills, yet it was odd they hadn’t taken the coast road then headed up to the village. Maybe they encountered less trouble using this route.

  She had been holding a phone while trying to get through to Denis Hisami, and she placed it on the dash as she rounded the first of several small bends that lay between her and the two men – on these roads the gravelly surface was as treacherous as ice. The phone began to vibrate then slide towards her. She caught it before it dropped into the footwell and answered Hisami in Palo Alto. It was 6.30 a.m. in California, but her husband was already at a meeting which she knew from his rather abrupt manner the day before to be a critical.

  ‘Hi there! Sleep well?’ she said with a smile in her voice.

  ‘Where are you?’ She heard him move. ‘We thought you’d have taken off by now.’

  ‘They needed someone to deliver a vehicle to Spiadino. Seemed like a good opportunity to see what they’re doing in the new centre. Our new centre, Denis.’

  ‘Yes, but I’d really prefer you to be here with me,’ he said.

  ‘I’ll be on the next flight from Naples – promise.’

  This was unlike Hisami. In the year of their marriage – they were just two weeks past their first anniversary – she had never known him to be demanding, or to complain about anything. But there was a plaintive note in his voice, which she chose to put down to disappointment.

  ‘I’m sorry. Should’ve checked with you. Just thought you’d be pleased to hear what good work the Foundation is already doing. We’re making a real difference to these people’s lives.’

  ‘I know, and I want to hear about it, but right now I would like you to be here with me. I need to talk something over and I’d appreciate your advice.’

  This, too, was out of character. Denis never showed any doubt about the course he was taking and seldom consulted her about business. He would occasionally walk her through his dealings, but this was more like a briefing after all his calculations and dispositions had been made. He was the most self-sufficient and purposeful man she had ever encountered. Just then, briefly, and irritatingly, Paul Samson flashed into her mind, but she dismissed the image of him reading in their bedroom on a biting cold morning in Venice and, using the nickname for Denis that had appeared out of nowhere a few months before, she said with some passion. ‘Oh, Hash, I’ll be with you before you know it. I can’t wait.’

  Hisami began to say something but she could hear voices in the background and realised he felt constrained. At that moment she reached the two men and slowed down. As she passed them, one turned and raised his hand and grinned at her. She recognised Louis, a wraith-thin Senegalese who bore the mental and physical scars of the journey across the Sahara to Libya, where he had been confined, tortured and eventually kicked out of detention with the same mysterious fury with which he had been arrested and beaten a few months before. Somehow, he’d found his way on to a boat which then capsized just outside Italian territorial waters and he had been pulled from the sea half dead by a ship operated by a German NGO. Louis’s first language was Wolof but he spoke good English, though with a hiss caused by a missing upper front tooth that had been knocked out in Tripoli.

  ‘Hold on,’ she said to Hisami, ‘there are some men on the road out here – I recognise them.’

  She brought the car to a halt in a cloud of dust and turned round to see Louis and his companion running towards her, smiling and waving their arms. One had a phone in his hand.

  ‘What’s going on, Anastasia?’ Hisami demanded.

  ‘These men I know are obviously going to the village. I’ll give them a ride. They’re perfectly fine. Don’t worry.’

  She heard Hisami protest, but by now Louis was speaking to her through the open window and saying it was a miracle that Signora Anastasia had come along at just the moment they felt they could go no further – they had been walking for twelve hours straight and were out of water. And, yes, they were going to Spiadino, so that his companion, Akachi, could take up a job as a baker and Louis could maybe help out as a soccer coach and seek work as a carver of wood. There was a promise of a roof over their heads in Spiadino, now known as the Village of a Hundred Nations, and they felt blessed and hopeful about the future.

  As this all spilled out, she put her hand u
p to stop him. ‘Hold on, I’m on the phone. Get in and I’ll finish up with this call.’ Speaking to Hisami, she said, ‘Did you hear all that? It’s nothing to worry about. I’ll be at the village in half an hour, and then I’ve got a car later to take me to the local airport for the Naples flight.’

  ‘Let me know when you get to the village,’ said Hisami.

  She hung up and turned to Louis, who’d got in beside her. His smile had suddenly faded into a look of angry regret, as though she were about to compel him to act against his will. He put out a hand.

  ‘Sorry, Signora Anastasia, but you must give phone to me.’

  Jerking her hand away from his, she shouted, ‘Are you crazy! I don’t expect you to steal my things when I offer you a ride. Get the hell out now!’

  Louis looked hurt and, shaking his head, snatched at the phone again, while Akachi leaned forward and attempted to pin her arms from behind. She swapped the phone to her left hand and let the car jump forward, causing them both to be thrown back. Akachi struck the side of her head wildly and Louis tried to wrestle the key from the ignition but then took hold of the wheel as they charged towards the bank on their right and collided with it, causing rock and clods of dry earth to cascade on to the front of the car. He was cursing in his own language and his eyes bulged with fear and aggression. He lashed out at her with a backward blow aimed at her face, but she ducked and he missed. Releasing her seat belt, she tumbled out of the door and ran up the track towards a black Mercedes van that had rounded the bend above her. She stopped and waved frantically at the van, but the driver seemed in no hurry to help her, even though it must have been obvious that she was in trouble. Her two assailants had climbed out with their backpacks, yet they weren’t bothering to pursue her, nor, she noted in a flash, were they themselves making any attempt to escape from the Mercedes.

  About fifty metres up the road from her car, she stopped in her tracks. The Mercedes rolled to a halt and two men got out and began to walk towards her. Both were armed, which for one brief moment reassured her, but then she threw a look at Louis and his friend and saw they were simply waiting by her Toyota, which had come to rest with its front mounted on a boulder. She glanced up the track again and saw the men had now raised their guns and were beckoning her towards the Mercedes. One spoke to her in Italian, using her name, but by the time she registered this she had vaulted over a short length of crash barrier and was plunging down a slope towards dense scrub and a stand of stunted oaks some fifty metres away. Pursued by a small landslide of rocks and dirt, she dived into the scrub and dug into the pocket of her jeans for her phone.

  Desperately trying to regain her breath, she dialled Denis and ordered in her mind the details he would need to know immediately – her position, roughly twenty kilometres north of a town called Prianzano, descriptions of the migrants and of the two men in the Mercedes.

  The call went straight to voicemail. She swore and waited for Denis to say, ‘Leave a message and I’ll return your call as soon as I am able.’ She spoke calmly but urgently, saying she’d been targeted for kidnap and one of the Italians knew her name. She was still free and was going to try her luck along a gully that went due west from her position, but that might mean she would have to break cover for a few seconds and so give her position away.

  She hung up and peered through the bushes. On the road above her, the four men were standing together, looking down the steep bank. She wondered why neither of the two Italians had come down after her. She moved to her right, snaking across the dead leaves and twigs, painfully aware that each slight sound might tell them exactly where she was. Her sweat dripped on the leaves beneath her and her palms were covered in pinpoints of blood from the thorns on the ground. She stopped and decided to make another call, this time to her contact in Spiadino, an Italian-American psychologist named George Ciccone who had set up the Aysel Hisami Therapy Foundation in the village to treat the many migrants suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. She got through and told George to write down the same details she’d given Hisami, including descriptions of the men and Hisami’s number. ‘Have you got all that, George?’ she hissed. ‘Okay – now call the Carabinieri. Tell them a kidnap is in progress. Get a photograph of me to them and talk to Denis. Now!’

  She hung up and called her husband again. It went straight to voicemail so she began describing, in a rapid telegraphese, what was happening on the road and everything around her – the lone white building across the valley, the line of transmission towers that crossed the hill above the road, the cluster of mobile-phone masts on a peak in the distance, the orange streak in the rock above the Mercedes where the road had been carved from the hillside. If she managed to escape, they would need to know exactly where the attempted abduction had taken place to find her. She stopped with her face in the leaves because one of the Italians was calling down to her and using her name again. He spoke a brutal, coarse English. ‘Signora Anastasia, you come here or I kill your black friends.’

  With the line to Hisami still open, she parted the foliage in front of her to see that Akachi was now held by the straps of his backpack at the edge of the road with a gun to his temple. The stocky individual with the gun forced him to his knees by kicking his legs from under him then pushed his head down and placed the gun at the nape of his neck. Akachi held out his hands in prayer, begging for his life.

  ‘Wait! They’re threatening to kill the two migrants,’ she said into the phone. ‘It has to be a bluff. The migrants who stopped me are in on the act. They have to be.’

  Then a shot rang out and she jerked up to see Akachi’s body slump and the short Italian who had executed him start casually kicking the body over the edge, as if it were a roll of old carpet. Akachi’s body fell with a thud on to the ground and began to tumble down the slope, in the process leaving a pathetic trail of possessions that spewed from his backpack. It came to rest at a thorn bush a dozen metres away from Anastasia, with the man’s shocked, lifeless eyes staring in her direction. ‘My God, they killed him,’ she whispered into the phone. ‘They just shot him dead. Jesus, what is this? What do they want?’

  Louis was brought to the edge of the road and, wailing about his friend, he, too, was forced to his knees. ‘You want to see this man killed also?’ shouted the Italian. ‘Then I will kill him. One less Africano in our country is not a problem for us.’ By the direction he faced, she could tell that he didn’t know where she was, so it was still possible for her to escape – the vegetation below her in the gully was dense and difficult for two men to search alone. She crouched and peered through the bushes, biting her lip. ‘If I run, they’ll kill him,’ she said to the phone. ‘God, I wish you would tell me what to do.’

  Then one of the men started counting down in Italian, calling the numbers out above Louis’s wail. Without thinking, Anastasia shouted, ‘I’ll come if you let him go! I want to see him walking away from you.’

  ‘Mostrati!’ shouted the Italian – show yourself!

  ‘Let him go, or I’ll run and you’ll never find me.’

  They knew where she was, and one of the Italians began to climb down the slope. If she were going to make a dash for it, she’d have to run now. She knew she was in good shape and could easily outpace the stocky little Italian, whom she noticed flung away a cigarette before lowering himself on to the rubble below the road.

  Louis was hauled to his feet, now calling out to Anastasia to save his life and screaming that he didn’t mean for her to be harmed.

  ‘You come – this guy walks away!’ shouted the man who held Louis.

  She looked down to the screen of her phone and turned on the video to ‘record’, keeping the call open.

  ‘I have to go,’ she said simply to the phone. ‘I must – I love you, Denis. Know that.’ She kept talking, telling him that she was going to find a place to leave the phone on the way up.

  She stood and, holding the phone by her side she made her way up the incline, taking care to choose a route that would
not require her to use her hands, because she needed to record as much as she could before reaching the men. This necessitated moving to a spot a few metres down the road from where the Toyota had come to rest, but it didn’t seem to bother the two men, who now waited calmly with Louis, who she saw had wet himself.

  ‘Let him go now,’ she said as she neared the top of the bank. ‘Tell him to walk towards me.’

  The Italian holding him made a shooing movement to Louis, who picked up his bag and stumbled towards her. The short man followed him, holding his gun with two hands in front of him.

  She climbed on to the road and began walking towards Louis, holding the phone beside her so that it would capture the men and the registration plate of the Mercedes. She saw Louis was going to try to pass her without looking at her, but just as she reached him she darted to the right and took hold of him and searched his tear-streaked face. He was utterly distraught. All the hardship and anguish in the young man’s life was written in his eyes. She put her hand on his shoulder and slipped the phone into the pocket of his trousers with the other hand. ‘Look after this,’ she murmured. ‘Take it to the police.’ She spoke with her head down so the short man approaching them could not hear her or see her lips move. She let go of him, not even sure if he was aware of what she’d said. ‘Run!’ she said, and he staggered off.

  She turned to the man with the gun. ‘What do you want with me?’ she said, trying to block his way. He grabbed her around the neck with his left arm and held her tight to his chest then fired three times, bringing Louis down with the last bullet. She saw the momentum of Louis’s chaotic dash for freedom carry him over the edge of the road with his arms spread out, as though he were about to fly.

  CHAPTER 2

  There were six in the conference room of Gilly & Co., a law firm on Verona Street, a block away from Alma Street in the heart of Palo Alto. Denis Hisami sat looking out of the window at the firm’s exotic grass and cactus garden, pondering the motorcycle that had tracked his car from the gates of his estate on the ocean near Santa Cruz, causing his driver to speed up and take several evasive detours and his bodyguards to place their hands on their weapons. Hisami was sure he was never in any danger because the biker plainly wanted to be seen – he was just another part of the low-level campaign of harassment that had been going on for a few weeks.