Shepherd One Read Free

off balance, she
gave them a drunken tilt. Something she would fix later.
    Her steps were soft and quiet, the floorboards beneath her
feet as cold as the pooling shadows.
    From beneath the door leading to the bedrooms, light fanned
out from the crack underneath the door.
    “Basilio?”
    The door opened slowly in invitation, as full light spilled
into the corridor.
    “Mama?”
    “ Basilio, che cosa l'inferno voi sta facendo? ”
Basilio, what the hell are you doing?
    When she opened the door, she found her children sitting
along the couch with Basilio, who embraced his younger sisters into a huddled
mass, the children crying.
    Standing beside them with the point of his assault weapon
leveled was a man of dark complexion, wearing military fatigues and a
red-and-white keffiyeh . Attached
to the barrel of the assault weapon was a suppressor that was long and thin and
polished to a mirror finish.
    Sitting in a chair opposite the couch with one leg crossed
over the other and his hands and fingers tented before him as he rested his
elbows on the armrests, sat a man who appeared marginally older than her
fifteen-year-old son, who looked upon her with the calm and casualness of an
old friend. He was slight of build with an unkempt beard. His eyes, dark and
humorless, studied her for a long moment before he finally directed his hand to
a nearby chair.
    “Please,” he said, “no harm will come to the children if you
do as I say. This I promise you.” The man’s voice was gentle and held a honeylike
quality to his tone. His Italian was flawless. “Please.”
    Vittoria pulled the fabric of her gown across her cleavage and
took the seat as required. Her chin began to quiver gelatinously as she eyed
the intruder. “What do you want?” she asked.
    The man did not answer. He simply appraised her while
bouncing the fingertips of his tented hands together in contemplation. 
    “We have money. You can have it all. Just take it and leave
us alone.”
    “This isn’t about money,” he said. “This is about . . .
ideology.”
    She stared at him as if he was a living cryptogram, her head
slowly and studiously tilting to one side.
    “But I need your help,” he added. “I need something only you
can give me.”
    She pulled the fabric of her gown tighter. 
    The young man nodded to his counterpart, who lowered the
point of his weapon and withdrew a knife from a sheath attached to his thigh.
In a deliberate motion he brought the point of the blade up and rested it
beneath the underside of her chin, the action drawing a crimson bead from her
slightly parted flesh, which caused her children to cry out for clemency.
    “What I want from you,” the man stated in perfect Italian,
“is something quite simple.” He then pointed to a mini-cam recorder sitting on
a tripod across the room. The indicator light was in the ‘on’ mode, the camera
running. “What I want you to do,” he said, “is to look into that camera and
scream.” He then leaned forward and spoke to her in a tone laced with menace.
“I said . . . scream.”  
    And that’s exactly what she did.
     

 
     
     
    CHAPTER THREE
    Ten Miles South of the Arizona/Mexico Border
    The Following Day
     
    The Mexican version of a coyote was
one who guided illegal aliens into US territory undetected. On this day,
however, Juan Pallabos escorted an exclusive clientele who paid an admission
price of $25,000—an incredibly sweet windfall—from three Arab men who wore
nondescript clothing, such as non-patterned shirts and Dockers. None of them
spoke or acknowledged the Mexican in any way, making Pallabos feel less
significant in their presence. But for 25,000 American dollars, he could have
cared less. In fact, he would have sealed his mouth shut with thread, if that’s
what they wanted.
    As the van moved unevenly along the desert terrain, its
tires kicking rooster-tail plumes of dust in its wake, the Arabs sat quietly as
the temperature soared to more than 110 degrees in the