The helicopter touches down.
Gray stone. Twelve thousand square feet. A circular drive. A fountain that has not run in a decade. The kind the Morettis maintained for generations until they lost the property, and the Greek family that bought it never picked up the habit.
They walk me through the front door, across a foyer, down a hallway whose walls have been bare since 1999. The room at the end is a study.
Mahogany walls. Mahogany desk. Old leather chairs. The chairs Vittorio Moretti sat in when he came up here in 1985, when Alessandro was still a baby, and the twins had not been born yet.
The estate has not been a Moretti estate since 1999. The chairs are still the chairs.
There is a man in one of the chairs.
The man is in a wheelchair.
Seventy-four years old. Small. Smaller than I imagined. I have been studying this man for two years. The study gave me a man whose dimensions I made up from the architecture of his network.
The body weighs less than I do.
Oxygen tank on a small wheeled cart. A tube under his nose. A half-finished cup of tea on the side table, gone cold, going to stay cold.
He looks at me. He smiles.
The smile of a man who has been waiting forty years for me to walk into his study.
The chair beside him is empty.
"Please, Ms. Ferraro."
His voice in this room is older than the voice on the phone in Crane's container. Not operational at all. The voice of a man speaking to a granddaughter he has not seen in a long time.
I sit.
Two men move before the door closes. Plastic bites into my wrists first. Then my ankles. By the time we are alone, I am attached to the chair.
The door closes. We are alone.
"You have been tracking me for two years."
"Yes."
"The work has been good."
"Thank you."
"I have been letting you do it."
"Yes."
"You knew?"
"Last night. Crane told me. Before he died."
"Crane was very fond of you."
"Crane was a man who set me up at twenty-five and watched me for twelve years."
"Yes. He was very fond of you."
The look of a man who has spent forty years building a network that is ending in the next several hours, and has decided to enjoy the ending.
