The Wolf by Lorenzo Carcaterra Read Free Book Online

get bogged down in a war that will take years to resolve?”
    “It will cost twice any number you have in mind,” I said. “But I’m telling you that it will cost us triple that if we don’t do anything to bring a halt to these crews now. All that damage you laid out, that’s going to happen on its own if we let them continue to do business with us acting as if they’re not even out there.”
    “You say you can’t talk to them, but have you truly considered making a deal?” Orto asked.
    It would be the Albanian to suggest we do business with terrorists and their financial backers. The Albanians were bottom-feeders, and in the past had no trouble brokering deals with groups that would give pause to the other criminal factions in the room. They never drew a line in the sand, not if there was a chance they could profit from those standing farther down the beach. At some point down the road, Orto would need to be handled. I had no doubt he would be the only one in the room who would pass my intentions on to the Russians. I glanced over at Big Mike and knew he was thinking the same thing.
    Jannetti, red-faced and angered by the question, jumped in. “We do not do business with terrorists,” he said. “I don’t give a fuck if they pay us in barrels of cash. No one in this room deals with those pricks, not if they want to stay in this room.”
    “Look,” I said, not wanting tempers to flair at a meeting I called, “if there was another way, a less costly way, I would pursue it. But there isn’t. This is our only exit, not just to keep the businesses we have but to grow new ones. No one handed us a damn thing. We took what we needed, what we wanted, and we built from there. And we stopped anybody, big or small, who stood against us. So, sure, this is going to be a bigger battle than we’ve faced in the past. But we wouldn’t be who we are if that kind of news made our legs tremble.”
    “Sounds as if you’ve made up your mind,” Qing said.
    I nodded. “If we want to keep what we have, this is what we need to do,” I said.
    “What’s a win in this for us?” Big Mike asked. “It’s not like we’re going to do a full-scale wipeout, that’s just not numerically possible. So how will we know if we won or lost?”
    “No,” I said, “you’re right. There’s no way we can kill them all. But we can regain our advantage. Put them on the defensive and leave them there.”
    “I don’t need to hear any more,” Weiner said. “In fact, I didn’t need to hear any of what I heard. You ask me, this is a fight we should have brought to them ten years ago, when they weren’t as strong, weren’t as mobilized. But we bring it to them now, once and for all.”
    “Tell us what you know about our enemies,” Qing said.
    “There are 191 terrorist organizations operating around the world, spread across forty-two countries,” I said. “Some are small—150 members, tops. Others have close to 200,000 in their ranks with thousands more offering secondary support. About 25% are kids willing to die for a cause they’ve been told to believe in. The rest have been fighting wars since they were old enough to hold guns. About 45 percent are from the Middle East, 40 percent are from Europe, the rest are USDA homegrown, from militias to neo-Nazis to biker gangs. They got the guns and the money and can move without worry from country to country.”
    “In Italy, they are making moves into high-end art,” Zambelli said. “That’s new turf for them. They hit home museums and hire out pros to help move the works out of the houses and into the black market. In less than seventy-two hours the art is turned into cash.”
    “In my country as well,” Carbone said. “These terrorists don’t know enough about that world to have gone into it on their own. They were guided there—by the Russians, would be my guess.”
    I noted how Carbone took Zambelli’s lead and did his best to follow it. Carbone was an easy buy and I nodded