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Page 13.
Scene 3. Valley of the Temples
 As Louis stepped outside, those same imposing young Sicilian men accompanied him. On cue, the same black SUV rolled slowly around the fountain and stopped to load up Louis Cartouche for the return ride to Palermo, and a flight on that Bombardier Learjet that would have him back home in Quebec-Nation by tomorrow.
During a silent ride of twenty minutes, something odd began to strike Louis. He caught glimpses of the driver when the car was aimed just right, turning on tight street corners so the full sunlight beam in with X-Ray invasiveness. Sunbeams penetrated the murky front cockpit of the car, not unlike how surface light penetrated the lost world of Roman forums and villas sunken in the Bay of Naples millennia ago. The man was not the same as Pino, who had brought him here. Or was it an illusion? As the car flowed through the estate's main gate, Cartouche peered closely through a smoky glass bullet-shield that had not been there before. The driver's silhouette was stockier, and the head rounder, than Pino's had been. Louis could not become any more nervous than he’d already been all day, so he sat still and counted his own throbbing heart beats.
At the airport in Punta Raisi, the SUV did not turn right as expected, toward the corporate terminal where the Bombardier-Learjet stood waiting.
Instead, it turned left and headed toward a peripheral commuter terminal catering to local and regional flights around Sicily. It was now clear: he was being abducted. Being abducted was a common, frightening, and often deadly adventure in southern Italy. He pounded his fist on the bullet-proof glass until it hurt, but the Asian-looking driver did not respond. Cartouche nursed his sore fist, and sat helplessly back. The door locks would not open, or he might have thrown himself onto the street and asked for police assistance.
The SUV turned and entered a peripheral air strip. This had its own small control tower, no doubt networked with Punta Raisi's radars and main tower. For several minutes, the SUV cruised along rust- and fuel-stained tarmacs glistening with puddles from a recent coastal downpour. Along the runways were parked all manner of sporting and aeronautical acrobatic single engine planes in sporting colors, as well as twin-engine propeller cargo planes, and a few smaller corporate jets. The SUV rolled to a stop in a parking spot beside the tower and the field's only hangar.
Men in paramilitary camouflage surrounded the car. They wore ski caps rolled down over their faces, and peered through eye holes. They brandished compact, matte black Czech-made CZW-438 caliber submachine guns—high performance caliber with massive stopping power, capable of shredding body armor. Cartouche, from his understanding as an armorer, estimated that whoever was employing these men possessed wealth, sophistication, and purpose at least as focused and capable as Global Anaconda's. Could it be Anaconda's No. 1 rival, Camelback Consortium, the world's largest corponation?
His anonymous guards ushered him to a small HA-420 HondaJet, capable of seating just five passengers. Louis and one powerful looking Korean guard were the only travelers on this flight, along with two pilots who might also be Korean. At roughly 40x40 (wingspan x length), the plane had a range of 1,400 nautical miles, and a service velocity just over 300 knots true airspeed.
The Korean did not converse, nor did he need to, if he even spoke French or English. He wore a dark blue blazer, gray trousers, and sturdy black Doc Martens boots over rugged looking charcoal crew socks. The Korean sat hunched a bit, with his raw-knuckled fists linked between resting knees, like a man who wished he were in a larger aircraft. As his jacket fell slightly open, the grip of a 9mm commando Glock signaled not to mess around. The Korean tried to smile. He raised and lowered his hand, palm down, in calming gestures.
Nor did Cartouche want to mess around. By his calculations, nobody could physically take the half million from him that he had just signed into his Montreal bank account. This was clearly a kidnapping, but there was no sign of desperation or violence. Instead, Cartouche caught a heady whiff of competition in the air, and decided to sit back and relax. Maybe he could find yet a better deal than that he'd just signed. After all, the plans for Pollux were still in a Montreal bank vault in his name. Anaconda had Castor, but not yet Pollux. It would take them several hours to send an armed convoy to take possession of the Pollux subsystem—the size of a small car, and shaped like a cross between a torpedo and a satellite. Emboldened by both his ridiculous gamble today, and his heady near-orgasmic joy, Louis speculated hysterically on the riches yet to be farmed from these greedy bastards. He was a misunderstood genius who would go down in the history books as a great man—as Blechstein had said—and most of these people were, after all, stupid in comparison with him. Greed and ruthlessness were their parameters, whereas lofty mathematics and impeccable engineering were Louis Cartouche’s standards of operation.
The jet took off over Sicily. It stayed below its service ceiling of 43,000 feet as it slammed along at a comfortable 200 knots at half a mile altitude. The aircraft streaked over inland hills. It left its contrail across powder-blue skies. Below lay fields that had been under the plow since long before Homer's weapon-bristling warships had sailed the wine-dark sea of immortal poetry in the late Bronze Age.
A short time later, a bell in the cabin dinged softly. One of the pilots, with a sense of humor, leaned just far enough so his face showed, and said: "Prepare for landing. All cigars and other smoking materials must be extinguished. Keep your seat belt fastened or that gorilla will break your arm. We are landing in Agrigento in just ten minutes."
The gorilla gave a friendly smile, and Cartouche smiled back. What was the old saying? You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. The gorilla was trying to smile sweetly out of a scarred, battered face.
Outside, a cloud deck flitted by. Beyond it, he could see the broad expanse of the Mediterranean ahead. Another 131 miles, and they could land in Africa—in Tunisia, to be precise, site of Rome's enemy Carthage. Cartago delenda est, said the arch-conservative Roman statesman Cato the Censor after every speech in the Comitium and in the Senate, some 2,200 years ago. Sure enough, invading Roman armies, wishing to finish the job after having destroyed Hannibal two generations earlier, did exactly that: Carthage was indeed annihilated. Roman forces leveled the ancient Phoenician colony, killed its men, sent women and children into slavery, and were said to have plowed salt into the ground so nothing would ever grow there again. Now that was how you destroyed a place, Cartouche reflected. Or you just shot its leading citizen from orbit with a sniper rifle, and avoided all further unpleasantness in an effective and world-changing way. Hannibal delendus est, might have been the simpler answer. Hannibal must be destroyed, and that would have avoided the Second Punic War that changed history.
Whoever his kidnapers were, however—their business with him lay not in Africa but right here in Sicily.
They weren’t following the typical playbook of a great corponation like Camelback Consortium or Global Anaconda. They were not the Mafia; of that, he was already sure. Then who were they?
The Hondajet whispered toward the ancient city of Agrigento on the southern edge of the largest island in the Mediterranean. Greek colonists had founded Akragas (High Place) around 600 BCE, along a high ridge offering a good fortified position for the indigenous Sicel people. In coming centuries, as conquering Romans drove Carthaginian and Greek forces from Sicily, they Latinized the name from Akragas to Agrigentum.
Today, under its modern Italian name, Agrigento was home to a haunting archeological site and tourist venue, called the Valley of the Temples.
In Agrigento, the jet landed, and a small cavalcade of black SUVs carried Louis to an as yet undisclosed location.
A small fleet of U.S.-made SUVs left twin trails of dust in the air as they tooled along a country road out of Agrigento. In the back seat were Cartouche and his giant Korean bodyguard, who still made calming gestures and tried to smile.
To the ancient Greeks who first colonized Sicily, and drove its native Sicels inland, Sicily was a promised land of wine and plenty, a Megale Hellas (Greater Greece). It was, to the ancient Greeks, the equivalent of those promising Off-World Colonies in the 1982 movie classic Blade Runner. “Come to the offworld colonies for a better new life…” the ancient Greeks told their eager settlers as they left on sailing ships for this new world. Sicily and southern Italy were advertised to would-be colonists in the Greek homeland as Oenotria, Land of Wine, much as the Vikings would speak of a wonderful western land called Vineland, over a millennium later.
In classical Mediterranean style, Sicily is famous for its tuna and sardines. Its agricultural produce includes lemons, oranges, olives, olive oil, almonds, grapes, wine, pistachios, and herd animals. Its most famous wine is the Marsala, a classic fortified wine as sweet, potent, and richly moody as its Iberian cousins in Oporto ('port') and Jerez de la Frontera ('sherry'). Like its cousins, Marsala lies on the lips of Europe, but revels in the kiss of Africa as the sirocco blows in over the narrow Tunisian neck of the central Mediterranean Sea.
According to road signs in English and Italian, which Louis followed with eager eyes, this area contained a World Heritage site called the Valley of the Temples. Cartouche saw the passing ruins of a half dozen great Doric temples and tall statues, and many smaller structures, from the ancient Greek and Roman ages of Sicily's rich heritage. Each of the great temples was unique, a ghostly memory of its own period and milieu, and preserved from natural and human abuse.
These silent ruins, sweltering in a bloody egg yolk Mediterranean sunset, silently spoke of a magnificent and long-ago age. Civilizations had come and gone, wars had left their blood and gore and ghosts in the rich loam, but the countryside remained fertile. Phoenician traders, Carthaginian sailors, Greek tyrants, Roman consuls, Arab and Berber emirs, Norman barons, Renaissance cardinals, modern kings and presidents had filled the air with their bluster, and then vanished as if they never existed. Popes, bishops, and abbots had pontificated over this land, as had animist shamans, polytheistic priestesses, mystery cults, Islamic imams and muezzins, Turkish viziers, Byzantine metropolitans, and modern-day movie directors.
Sicily was so ancient that ancient Rome was a new child by comparison.
Nations and peoples came and went, kingdoms and empires crumbled into dust, armies spilled blood without their soldiers' or even their generals' names being remembered, but Sicily endures, along with the people diligently tilling its soil.
Louis Cartouche was a man outside history, wanted by no nation, himself the son of an independent French-Canadian nation-state that might or might not one day finally be independent, teetering between nationhood and oblivion like so many other ethnic blood-soil shadows Blechstein had mentioned back at the Villa Caproni—among them Scotland, Ireland, Kurdistan, and many others.
Louis Cartouche felt dazed and numbed by the twists and turns of what had become the most scary and amazing day in his life. Anything was possible, it seemed. He felt drunk with the evening sun-liquor of this enchanted place. He understood that finally, for the only time in his life, during this brief moment, he might touch the pulse of history. After a lifetime of being shunned, his powerful and terrifying invention might influence the course of human events. But now some unknown group of Sicilian assassins and Korean dojunim had kidnapped him—to what end?
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Copyright © 2018 by Jean-Thomas Cullen, Clocktower Books. All Rights Reserved.
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