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By Root 328 0

she tries to work out how much he’s good for. The house is a disappointment, there’s no sign of a wife around, and that means no jewellery. The guy had to stop for cash, so there’s probably nothing more than loose change on his bedside table; maybe, if she’s lucky, a watch or some gold ring or neck chain, though he didn’t look like the type to wear anything that expensive. She makes up her mind that the best bet is to sting him for a special ‘overnight’ rate, on account that she agreed to come back to his place. Five hundred bucks for the rest of the night, that’s what she is going to ask him for. Or at least that will be her starting price. She guesses that if he’s an accountant, then probably the only thing he’s good at is figures, and that means he may want to bargain her down a bit. Yep, start around five hundred dollars, Lu; if you’re smart, you might end up with two fifty to three hundred.

She finishes off, flushes the toilet and runs water in the sink. Staring into a mirror over a dirty glass shelf, she sees her eye-shadow and liner are smudged and the whites of her eyes are starting to look bloodshot. Hardly a picture of beauty, but what the fuck, this ain’t no Hollywood audition, and the weak-spined mudak out there with a hard on ain’t goin’ to be saying no to what she’s offering. Maybe, if all goes well here, then tomorrow she’ll give herself some time off, rest up a bit and cut Oleg a slice of tonight’s extra cash as though she’d been out on her early shift as usual.

Lu powders some shine off the bridge of her nose, kisses her newly lipsticked lips together and opens the door, ready to demand her five hundred bucks and put up with anything the useless little creep wants in return. ‘Okay, mister, it’s playtime!’ she shouts, heading back into the lounge.

From behind her, a rope noose is slipped over her head and jerked viciously back. Ludmila Zagalsky is swept from her feet and crashes head first to the ground, her fingers clawing as the rope bites and burns into her neck, choking off all air from her lungs.

‘Welcome to Spider’s web,’ says a cold and stutter-free voice from above her.

20

Florence, Tuscany

The railway station in Florence was a cauldron of heat, cooking a human minestrone of travellers from all over Europe. Tempers boiled as tourists bumped and banged into each other, searching for directions to their trains. Finally, streams of people surged, spilled and dribbled down their chosen platforms, squeezing into the baking-hot carriages.

Jack was fortunate enough to find an empty one at the far end of the Siena train but it was still unpleasantly hot and stank of a thousand strangers’ bodies. He chugged back half a bottle of lukewarm water he’d taken from the fridge at the Sofitel and shook his shirt from his sticky body.

He tried to open a window but it was jammed. As he sat back on the broken springs of the dusty seat, he could see that outside a couple of members of the transport police, the Polizia Stradale, were sharing a cigarette in the shade after making what had currently become a routine check for terrorist bombs. Above their heads robot CCTV cameras scanned the tracks. Jack recognized them as state-of-the-art IMAS cameras. Even here, in historic Florence, Bill Gates was present. The Microsoft-based Integrated Multimedia Archive System powered more than three thousand cameras on Italian tracks and had become the global standard-setter for video capture and information analysis.

On the sticky table in front of Jack was the still unopened envelope given to him by Orsetta, on behalf of Massimo Albonetti. He and Mass had become friends a long time ago, during an Interpol exchange held in Rome. A year later, Massimo had helped Jack crack a paedophile ring in Little Italy when New York’s Italian underworld had closed its doors to local cops and sought to settle the problem the traditional Mafia way using torture and murder. Albonetti was a no-nonsense cop, who, like Jack, had a degree in psychology and saw profiling merely as a powerful tool to help investigators focus on behavioural