28

She was with a girlfriend, Dez learned, a short woman with blondish brown hair

“And where is she staying?” he asked the man whom La Duca had asked to call him from Naples.

“Grand Hotel Vesuvio.”

“Good work.”

Since his mole first called him, Dez had done more homework on la testa rossa. He’d called some of the old guard Camorra in Napoli and asked who was this father she was talking about? He learned that her father was indeed a traditore. And one who paid the ultimate price. Pathetic the rossa even cared enough to ask about him.

The man in Naples spoke. “The duke wants to know. What do you want to do with the redhead now?”

He beamed internally that the duke still trusted him, was letting him help run this game. And yet the question he’d just been asked was at once the easiest and toughest. He knew what he wanted to do to her. In fact, it would be facile, easy. But while the authorities wouldn’t blink at the killing of a Camorra drug pusher or even a higher-up, they wouldn’t turn away from the killing of an American woman. They couldn’t. Such an event would get too many headlines, bring too many eyes. And that was exactly what Dez was looking to avoid.

So Dez came up with a slightly different plan. He would scare her back to the United States. And when she was here in the red, white and blue, he would make sure she was red, white and dead.