Free Killing Ground by Gerald Seymour

it was not necessary for ,a married woman to know the detail of her husband's work.
    She slumped down into the depth of the wide sofa. She flicked the pages of a magazine and read nothing . . . The boy shouted.Picolo Mario yelled from the balcony that he had seen his uncle, really, and she must come. She pushed herself up from the sofa, She held the baby tight against her. She went onto the balcony. She looked down, across the car park, past the security gates, onto the pavement. She saw nobody, but piccolo Mario shouted that he had seen his uncle, yelled that his uncle had walked past the gates and looked for them and had waved, and she saw nobody that she knew. How many times did he come, the little old man with the bowed shoulders and the jowl at his throat and the grey jacket and the checked cap, and walk past the apartment in the Giardino Inglese and look up towards the flowers on their balcony, how often? She knew, of course, all that was said of ipiccolo Mario's uncle on the television, all that was written of Peppino's brother in the Giorale di Sicilia . . . She took the boy from the balcony. It was not right that the boy should talk of his uncle.
    In four days they would be at the villa, they would be by the sea, where, if it were possible, she would be more lonely than in the city. She prayed, almost with fervour, that Charlotte would come.
    When she rang the bell for the end of mid-afternoon break she saw him sitting with a magazine in his car. She thought of the old woman, in fear, going back to her one bedroom with the hidden tin of savings that made her vulnerable.
    There were only two pictures on the walls of the room in the barracks at Monreale.
    There was the picture of his daughter and there was the photograph of Generale Carlos Alberto dalla Chiesa. The smiling ten-year-old girl and the militaristic portrait served to heighten Giovanni Crespo's sense of total isolation.
    He dialled the number, he threw the switch that activated the scrambler.
    Isolato, isolated, was a cruel word for the captain of carabineri. His daughter was growing up in Bologna. He was isolated from her, saw her twice a year at best, three days at a time, and spoke briefly on the telephone each Sunday evening. That was isolation. But it was the general who had taught him the true meaning of the word isolato. The general, hero of the counter-terrorist campaign against the Brigate Rosse, prefect of Palermo, had been ridiculed, sneered at, whispered of, isolated and shot to death thirty-eight days after Giovanni Crespo had joined his staff as liaison officer.
    They were all isolated, all the condemned men, before the gunfire or the bomb. To stay alive, living and breathing and fucking and drinking, he thought it most necessary to recognize isolation.
    His call was to an unlisted number in Rome, a quiet side-street office on the Via Sardegna, to the desk of the DEA's Country Chief.
    "Vanni here. Go secure, Bill.'
    He was asked to wait out. He heard the clicked interruption on the line. The voice was fainter, with metallic distortion. He was told he could speak.
    'Just wanted to know how my friend was, whether my friend had optimism . . .'
    He was told the young woman was 'OK, nothing special'. He was told she was
    'predictable' and that she had taken time 'to think on it'.
    'You know, Bill, we don't even have a name for this. It is ridiculous, but we don't even have a name. So, we don't have a file, that's good, and we don't have computer space, that's better, but we should have a code name, do you not think?'
    Giovanni Crespo, aged forty-two, captain of carabineri, member of the specialist Reparto Operativo Speciale team tasked with securing the arrest of Mario Ruggerio, would never speak a confidence even on a line scrambled with state-of-the-art electronics. On the island he trusted no man. In his life he trusted only one man. He had taken the letter posted by Angela Ruggerio, sister-in-law of Mario Ruggerio, to Rome and to the one man he