He frowned. “Perhaps…Let me think.” He actually tapped his forehead. “Yes. She got a package. It was tea from her family.”

Rania’s stern but pretty face tightened in a grimace. “Yes, I remember.”

He pointed to a locker. “I think she put it in there.”

Ercole opened the lid and handed Sachs a brown cardboard carton.

Sachs held the box to her nose.

A sigh.

“This too,” Ercole said. He’d found plastic wrapping for a cheap mobile phone, but not the label that gave the phone’s number or details of the SIM card; Fatima had taken that with her.

Pulling on her headset, she speed-dialed a number.

“What?” came the abrupt response. “We’ve been waiting.”

“She’s not here, Rhyme. And she got a delivery: C4, maybe Semtex. Like the others, looks like a half kilo. And another phone. For the detonator.”

Mobile phones had supplanted timers and radios as the most popular way to set off explosive devices.

“A bomb? Are we the target here?” Rania asked Sachs in a grim voice.

Those in the Questura had heard and, after a brief discussion, Rhyme answered, “No, very unlikely. The whole point of the plot is to sabotage the immigration legislation in Parliament. That means Italian citizens have to be hurt, not refugees.”

Khaled found his own mobile and asked, “Should I call her? Try to talk her out of this madness?”

Rhyme and Spiro, she could hear, were debating this.

But McKenzie came on the line. “Never mind. Meade says it’s dead. They’ll keep monitoring but I’ll bet she tossed it.” Then the woman said, “Wait. They’ve got something.” There was a pause and Sachs could hear computer keyboard clatter. “This could be good. The NSA bot just logged a call to the coffeehouse in Tripoli from a burner mobile in Naples that was just activated this morning. It’s still live.”

“Gianni?” Sachs asked.

Rossi said, “If we are lucky. Where is it?”

McKenzie called out longitude and latitude, and a moment later, after some keyboarding, the police inspector said, “At the Royal Palace. Downtown Naples. I’m sending a team there now.”

Chapter 61

Luigi Procopio, for this job known also as “Gianni,” was presently leaning against his car parked on the edge of the plaza in front of the Royal Palace of Naples, the massive and impressive structure that had once been home to the Bourbon kings, when they were rulers of the Two Kingdoms of Sicily, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Procopio loved his Italian history.

Procopio came from the Catanzaro district of Calabria, a region south of Campania.

Calabria is the very tip of the boot of Italy. This region is known for its fiery pork paste, stoccafisso dried cod and many types of preserved foods, owing to the hot climate, which traditionally meant that meats and seafood should be cured to avoid spoiling.

Calabria is known too for the ’Ndràngheta, the famed organized crime outfit. The name “’Ndràngheta” means “loyalty,” and it was a well-known fact that the six thousand members of the organization were true to their comrades, who made up the 150 or so small cells within Italy. But that didn’t mean that members might not strike out on their own—they could, and did, as long as no conflicts of interest existed.