JACKET NOTES: The three members of the Red Brigades carried out their mission suc- cessfully. The minister of justice was dead, a victim of the terrorists' gunfire as his car drew up in front of a kindergarten school in Verona. The minister's six-year-old daughter and his bodyguard were also murdered.
The two Brigades killers and their leader, Anna Cuozo, had a precise getaway plan, but a car crash forced them to flee on foot. It would have been just a question of time before they were caught if Anna had not seen the waiting tourist bus in a hotel parking lot. Here was their chance to get out of Verona. The five stunned bus passengers would serve as hostages. Two of them were English-Jill Bingham and her father: the other three--the middle-aged Potters and Jay Merrick, a foreign correspondent--were American. Frightened and helpless, the captives were carried off on the terrible journey. Even though she expected each moment to be her last, Jill pitted her wits against Anna in a desperate life-and-death gamble, knowing that the odds were against her winning.
Alerted to the murders and the kidnapping, a huge police operation swung into action. Captain Rocco Franzoni of the antiterrorist section in northern Italy had found a crack in the Brigades security system, but he was blocked by an informer within his own department. Yet it was Franzoni who played a major role in the grim denouement.
Here is an extraordinarily powerful novel of the war between the Red Brigades and the law: of the five innocent people who were pawns in a deadly battle: and of the inner workings of the Red Brigades-a ruthless organization whose brutal crimes have long shocked the world.
(© Dodd, Mead & Company)