by Blake Banner
“Because ownership is a big deal with him. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but he likes to own things. People included.” She shrugged and looked away at the sea. I insisted. “Have you had a good look at Charlotte?”
“Charlotte! Charlotte! You are so obsessed with Charlotte, why don’t you dine with her instead of me?”
“Don’t be childish. I’m trying to show you what happens to women he is through with.”
“OK, so you showed me. Now, no more Gabriel and no more Charlotte.”
She had neatly avoided my question. I had little doubt he had sent her, but I was going to have to wait and see what for. Her next question told me I wasn’t going to have to wait very long. The waiter delivered our drinks, she ordered kalamari and roast lamb without consulting me, picked up her gin and tonic and sipped it, eyeing me over the rim of her glass.
“So what are you really doing here, Bob?”
I sighed. “You know what? It is not so strange for a guy like me, who has spent eight years almost nonstop in combat zones, behind enemy lines, when he leaves the army to look for a way of life that has a bit of an edge to it: a bit of adventure, exploration in remote places. It is not so strange. He sent you to pump me, didn’t he?”
She pointed her finger at me like a gun. “Mention him again and I will get up and leave. He does not own me, Bobby. To tell you the truth, I am getting a bit bored with him. I am curious about you. I want to know for me, for myself.”
It was almost convincing. I sipped my drink and sat back in my chair. “OK, I apologize. The real reason I am here is to escape; to escape from the city, to escape from my past, to escape from the kind of people who live in the hive.” I paused, watching her eyes to see what they said. They said she was curious, so I went on. “I am trying to escape from face masks, smoking bans, people who believe they have the right to make rules for other people’s lives, political agendas and people who try to define their identity by using ever longer acronyms.”
“Wow, you are definitely not woke.”
“I am definitely not asleep, either.”
“You don’t think your sexual identity defines you?”
“No. I haven’t got a sexual identity. What the hell is a sexual identity, anyhow? I am me. I like sex. I like women. How complicated can that be?”
She laughed. “You are a little primal, Bob. Current thinking…”
“Screw current thinking. How many identities do I need? Do I need a food identity, a drink identity, a clothing identity? How about a breathing identity?”
“OK, OK…you made your point. So you came here to escape from a crazy world that has lost touch with reality. It was pure coincidence you arrived here the day before we did.”
I threw my head back and laughed out loud. Several people glanced over. “Boy, that really is narcissism taken to a whole new level. You believe I flew New York, London, Athens, Naxos and then hired a yacht and sailed to Koufonisi, all in a desperate attempt to be in The Divine Presence for just a few hours? Come on, Marianne, get real. Where do you people get off? He has a lot of money. That is about as interesting as Gabriel Yushbaev gets. There is exactly nobody I would fly halfway around the globe to pretend to bump into. But if I did, it would be somebody a damned sight more interesting than your ego-freak boyfriend.”
“Wow.” She gave a small, humorless laugh and I saw that her cheeks had colored. “You are some kind of a son of a bitch. Do you have to be so intense? ‘Don’t be silly’ would have been enough.”
“Sorry.”
“He is not so bad. He is an interesting man.”
“Well, he sure thinks so. Shall I tell you why I came here, Marianne? I came here not for Gabriel Yushbaev Almighty, not for you, not for anybody else. I came here for me. Because I was tired and burned out, and I wanted a rest on a remote Mediterranean island. So now you know I wasn’t spying on Mr. Fascinating, have you lost interest in dining with me? Do you want me to drive you back?”
She sighed. “No. I am sorry. Perhaps I have been living with him too long and I am infected with his idea that the universe revolves around him. We shall start again. When you are not oblivious and ignoring billionaires in the Mediterranean, what are you doing? What fascinates you? What makes you happy?”
Eleven
We managed to get through the next couple of hours in comparative peace, and even laugh a bit. We avoided the subject of Yushbaev, but talked about pretty much everything else. I had decided she had been sent to find out if I was any kind of threat, and she had come to the conclusion I wasn’t. So all I had to do now was put her to bed in the hotel, go and terminate Yushbaev and collect the colonel.
We’d moved on from roast lamb to cheese, dates, black coffee, cognac and whisky and Marianne had just drained her glass. She was about to signal the waiter when I said, “You fancy a nightcap at the hotel?”
She pouted with half a smile. “You want to get rid of me already?”
“No, I was hoping you’d stay.”
“Don’t you think Charlotte will mind?”
“You’d have to ask somebody who gave a damn.”
She giggled. “OK, that sounds nice. But will you allow me one envie?”
I managed to frown and arch an eyebrow at the same time. “I might if I knew what an ‘on-vee’ was.”
“A caprice?”
“Sure, what do you want?”
“There is, just here, two hundred meters, no more, a bar on the corner. It is a small bar, with only tables outside. From there we can see the moon rise over the sea and have our first nightcap. Then we can have another in your room. OK?”
The damned moon. It would be halfway to its zenith by the time I reached Pori Beach. It was not fatal to my plan, but it sure as hell would not help. I smiled.
“That sounds like a beautiful idea.”
I signaled the waiter, paid the check and we strolled back to the Jeep. We climbed in and slammed the doors, and I fired up the engine. The headlamps laid amber funnels on the dusty road and the world around us slipped into deeper darkness. I lowered the windows and we rolled down the path at a steady twenty miles per hour. Marianne was silent, looking out at the stillness through the open window. We covered the two hundred yards and the road turned left, following the coastline. I slowed. To the right there was a small harbor with a handful of fishing boats pulled up on the sand among low, rocky outcrops. Opposite, in the crook of the bend, there was a small, whitewashed building, a kiosk, not quite a house but bigger than a shack, with a small veranda out front. It was dark and closed up. I said:
“Looks like your bar is closed,” and it sounded unnaturally loud in the darkness.
She said, “Stop the car.”
I slowed to a crawl, looking at her face. “Why?”
She smiled. “We could go down to the fishing boats and watch the moon rise from there. We could swim naked…”
She trailed off. I returned the smile. “OK, Marianne, I’ll give you your petit envie.”
I killed the engine and we climbed down from the truck. She took my hand and led me to a narrow flight of uneven steps that had been hewn from the rock and wound their way down some six feet to the sandy cove. The air was cooler down there, and the only sound was the quiet ripple and sigh of the tiny, transparent waves as they lapped the shore. She took both my hands in hers and kissed me softly.
“Look,” she whispered, “the moon is just rising from the horizon. It is like lava, boiling up from the center of the Earth. It is like your feeling for me, and my feeling for you.”
I turned to look. The cool breeze touched my face and I saw the fat, warping ark of orange light swell above the horizon.
“I am sorry,” she said. I frowned down at her, but she was looking past me, up at the road. There was no expression on her face and I went suddenly cold inside. I turned to face the road and saw the fan of light from some approaching headlamps. There followed the hum of an engine as it slowed and stopped. I gripped her arm and scowled. “Why?”
/> “Come on, Harry. You didn’t really think we bought all that Bob Foley bullshit, did you? He’s been waiting for you to show up since you killed Cavendish. When you showed so much interest in the yacht we were both alerted, and when you started talking about the rumors concerning Cavendish’s death, that was the clincher. That and the fact that Bob Foley and Harry Bauer have lived exactly the same lives.”
Four doors slammed like gunshots above us. Four guys with that unmistakable look of Russian special ops thugs appeared at the top of the steps. Two dropped to the sand and the others skipped down the steps.
I would not have used her as a hostage, but she didn’t know that. She yanked her arm free from my grip and ran toward her boys. One of them grabbed her and pushed her toward the stone steps. She didn’t climb them. She sat and smiled at me.
“Time to die, Harry.”
It is not advisable to engage in wisecracks when people are trying to kill you. Instead I slipped my right foot forward with my left hand open, up by my chin and my right fist aimed toward my target. I am not left-handed, but I’m a southpaw. I like to have my heavy artillery up front to get the job done as fast and as decisively as possible.
I scanned my opponents. There were four of them, in their late twenties, tall and powerfully built. The guy on my far right had a shaved head and was hunched forward with a big bowie knife in his hand. By the way he moved I figured he liked to wrestle. He’d try to take me to the sand and gut me.
On my far left was a guy I’d seen on the yacht. He had short black hair and a goatee. He was lean and athletic, and he also had a bowie knife. There was no mistaking the intention to put an end to Harry Bauer that night.
In the middle was a muscular blond who was gym-fit and eager to show what he thought he could do. Him and the goatee would be throwing kicks and punches. They were probably from Tae Kwon Do. To his right was the boss of this rag-tag band. He was older than the other three, maybe in his early thirties. He was more muscular, more sure in his movements. His strength and his skill didn’t come from the gym anymore. He’d learned what he knew by killing people.
These two also produced knives and came at me.
The slow burn in my gut told me I might die that night, right there on the beach. The immediate presence of your own death is a powerful motivator. I shuffled back to where the sand was damp and it was easier to move.
As a general rule of thumb, if you have your right side forward, any movement you make to your left will tend to open your guard. So it’s best to move to the right, back foot first. The guy I wanted was the boss, the big guy in the middle. So I moved fast, like I was going for him, then crossed my left leg behind me and charged into a low side kick and smashed my heel into the bald guy’s right knee. I felt it crunch and before my foot hit the ground I had smashed my right fist into his jaw. His fight was over.
Mine wasn’t, but I had at least flanked them and now had all three of them in a line, scrambling in the sand, the goatee and the blond harmless behind the boss. He charged me, the knife held low in his right hand. I sprang back in a long step, then took a short step and lunged forward and to his left, away from his knife. I smashed my rear, left heel into his right knee and as my foot hit the sand I flicked my hip and drove a right hook right through his jaw.
That left two of them. They both looked worried. I didn’t stop to pick up a knife. The blond started for me. I pushed my right foot forward like I was lunging in a fencing match, then drew my rear foot in, put all my weight on it and smashed my right instep into his balls. He went down on his knees, wheezing. I put my hand in his face and pushed him aside.
The goatee knew that if he went back without my head, he was dead meat. He rushed me, thrusting the knife fast and hard at my body. I don’t like knife disarming techniques. The risk is too high and the benefits are dubious. A knife is only marginally more dangerous than a well-used fist, unless you try to grab it. Then it becomes a real danger.
So I leaned back, like he’d thrown a cross, and trapped his forearm against his body with my left hand. Then, fast as a viper, I stabbed my fingers deep into his eyes. He dropped the knife he had intended to kill me with and groped at the ugly mess that was his face. He was making ugly noises, high-pitched and pitiful.
I bent down, picked up his blade and thumped it hard into his back, deep into his heart. Being blind wasn’t a problem anymore. He fell face down, jerked a couple of times and rattled his goodbye into the cool sand.
I bent and wiped my prints from the handle. Behind me I heard the roar of a powerful engine. I ignored it. I knew it was Marianne, running. I went to the big boss guy. His leg was broken and he was semi-conscious, groaning softly. I drove his knife through his neck and death came quickly for him. I killed the other two in the same way, wiped my prints off the weapons and made my way back to the Jeep.
I drove to the hotel and sat a moment drumming my fingers on the wheel. Marianne would be back at Pori Beach by now. She would have called Yushbaev and warned him what had happened. There was no way I could get to them and plant the mines before they took off. I had to reformulate my plan. I had to think it through and intercept them either in Istanbul, or follow them all the way to Divnomorskoye.
I swung down from the Jeep and walked into the hotel. The lounge-cum-lobby was empty, but for Charlotte sitting in an Emmanuelle-style wicker chair by the door to the pool. She had a tall gin and tonic in her hand and looked like she might be slightly drunk.
“Hello,” she said. “Did you enjoy your evening? Was Marianne entertaining for you?”
I ignored her, picked up the brass bell on the desk, and rang it hard. Kostas Minor shambled out of what I figured was the kitchen and jerked his chin at me.
“Whisky, bring the whole bottle.” He stared at me and I turned to Charlotte. “Tell him to bring me a whole bottle of the best damned whisky you have. And a glass.”
She said something in cool, languid Greek and Kostas Minor shambled away, back into the bowels of the kitchen.
“You look upset, Bob. Bad date?”
I went and stood by the open doors, looking out at the pool. The dark sky above was paling in the light of the rising moon. A moon that would no longer be a problem. She watched me a moment.
“Are you going to talk to me, or shall I just talk to myself while you stand there and look moody?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well that’s something.”
“What do you do for cops on this island?”
Her eyebrows shot up. “Cops? Nothing. There’s no crime here. If we need the police, which we never do, they come over from Naxos.” She hooted a little laughter. “Don’t tell me that little bitch has stolen your credit card!” She trailed off and a look of horror, tinged with delight, came over her face. “Don’t tell me you… You haven’t raped her, have you?”
Kostas Minor shuffled in with a tray bearing a bottle of the Macallan and a large tumbler. I took the bottle and the glass and addressed Charlotte without looking at her.
“Tell him to go away.”
She said, “Fyge!”
I poured myself a generous measure and pulled off half of it. As the warmth of the spirit spread through my belly I realized I needed her help.
“No, I didn’t rape her. But there are four men lying dead on the beach to the right of the port.” I turned to face her. She was staring at me, expressionless. “They are four of Yushbaev’s security goons. He sent them to kill me. I had to kill them. It was self-defense.”
She sat forward, blinking. “You killed four men? And now they are lying there, on the beach, dead?”
I drained the other half of my drink.
“Yeah.”
“Yeah? That’s it? Yeah? What the hell are you going to do about it? What on Earth did Gabriel want to kill you for?”
I sighed. “It’s a long story.”
“But, I mean…” She looked at me helplessly. “I’ll have to phone the police in Naxos! I’ll have to phone him! He owns th
is place! He’ll have to come –”
I cut across her. “Get a grip, Charlotte! Stop babbling. Yushbaev will already be pulling out of the island on his way to Istanbul. He and Marianne will have cast-iron alibis long before the cops get here, and you can be damn sure he will not be investigated.”
She was quiet for a long moment. It was dawning on her what I wanted. She said, quietly, “Why did he want to kill you?”
I poured another drink and sat.
“He’ll sell this place. He’ll want to disassociate himself from it in every way. I can guarantee it will be on the market by tomorrow morning.”
“Bob, why did he try to have you killed?”
“Listen to me! I can have this place bought for you, in your name, and the deeds sent to you within a week. I just ask one thing in return.” She didn’t say anything. She just stared at me. I said, “If anybody ever asks, I took my yacht and left this island earlier today at midday.”
“You’re after Gabriel, aren’t you? You want to kill him.”
I shook my head. “No, he has a friend of mine on his yacht. He knew I was here to recover her. So he used Marianne to lure me to the beach, and then his four goons showed up.”
“Who is your friend?”
I knew I shouldn’t tell her, but who would believe her anyway? I smiled. “A United States Air Force colonel.”
“You must be CIA or something.”
“Something. Are you going to help me?”
She stood and walked to the sliding doors and stood framed in the waxing light of the moon. “In exchange you will buy this hotel for me, and it will be mine?”
“Yes.”
She shook her head and turned to face me. “No,” she said, and there was cold rage in her eyes. “I want something more.”
Twelve
I was standing by the pool. The moon appeared to be under the turquoise water, looking up at me from a luminous, liquid sky framed by warping palms. On the other side of the pool, beyond the lawn and the patio, the sliding doors stood open onto an empty lounge, where Charlotte sat in a wicker chair, staring at her third gin and tonic. I dialed the brigadier’s number. When he answered he had a frown in his voice. He knew the timing was wrong.