Read Online Deadly Impact--A Richard Mariner nautical adventure by Peter Tonkin - Free Book Online Page A

trained, and perhaps second only to Jim Bourne himself in the world of commercial intelligence. He was as usual in shirtsleeves, though his heather mixture Donegal tweed jacket was hanging over the back of his chair.
    â€˜Francisco Alberto Lazzaro?’ he rumbled in answer to Robin’s question. ‘Yes. I’ve heard of him, all right.’
    â€˜I’d like to know all about him, please, Pat.’
    â€˜You want a drink? It’ll be a long night and you’re going to need one.’
    â€˜I bet you say that to all the girls. What’ve you got?’
    â€˜Whisky.’ He was shocked that she’d even had to ask.
    â€˜Bushmills?’ she hazarded, knowing his tastes of old.
    â€˜Black Bush,’ he nodded. ‘And as it’s yourself, I’ve the twenty-one-year-old malt.’
    â€˜That’ll do nicely. Straight up. No ice. I’ll sip.’
    â€˜That’s the only way we serve it – and that’s the only way to drink it,’ pontificated Pat. ‘Now, you’ll need to shuffle round to my side of the desk while I pour the drinks. I’ll show you what I’ve got on my laptop.’
    Five minutes later, Robin was nursing a quadruple measure of one of the finest liquors in the world, with the chocolate, toffee-rich taste of it chasing bursts of mint along her tongue, paying no attention at all to the heavenly savour as she watched the pictures on Pat’s laptop. A camera panned over a bullet-pocked car in which a dead driver slumped spattered with blood, and zoomed in on the first of five other corpses lying on the road partially covered with white sheets. White sheets through which more blood was leaking. ‘This is Germany,’ Pat was explaining. ‘Duisburg, North Rhine-Westphalia. Ten kilometres north of Düsseldorf. Fifteenth of August, 2007. Six dead.’
    â€˜Who are they?’ asked Robin, willing to take it as read that this was relevant – something to do with Lazzaro. ‘Neo-Nazis? What?’
    â€˜Italians,’ he answered. ‘Calabrians, in fact. Like your Francisco Lazzaro. They were slaughtered as part of a long-running vendetta. The
San Luca
feud.’
    â€˜OK. Robin looked at the shocking pictures and took another sip of Bushmills. ‘What are Italians doing in north Germany?’
    â€˜These Italians were looking to expand the family business,’ said Pat weightily. ‘And it seems that this particular family business involved cocaine.’
    â€˜So Lazzaro is really a drug smuggler?’
    â€˜What,’ asked Pat by way of an answer, ‘if there was an organization that ran parallel to the Mafia? Only it was more secret? Better organized in some respects? Richer and more powerful, but most people have never heard of it?’
    Pat clicked on to Wikipedia, and Robin read: ‘
The ’Ndrangheta is a criminal organization in Italy, centered in Calabria (near Sicily). Despite not being as famous abroad as the Sicilian Cosa Nostra, and having been considered more rural compared to the Neapolitan Camorra and the Apulian Sacra Corona Unita, the ’Ndrangheta managed to become the most-powerful crime syndicate of Italy in the late 1990s and early 2000s. While commonly lumped together with the Sicilian Mafia, the ’Ndrangheta operates independently from the Sicilians, though there is contact between the two, due to the geographical proximity, and shared culture and language of Calabria and Sicily. A US diplomat estimated that the organization’s drug trafficking, extortion and money-laundering activities accounted for at least three per cent of Italy’s GDP.
’
    â€˜Three per cent,’ said Robin. How much is that?
    â€˜Italy’s GDP is about two point two trillion dollars. Three per cent of that, off the top of my head, is in the region of sixty-six billion, give or take, if I’ve got my noughts in the right place