by Nick Carter
"I wouldn't bother," Nathaniel said. "We had no evidence that she was involved in any way."
"Somebody told Graves we were on the island."
"Yes, of course. But even if it was she, it wouldn't necessarily implicate her. After all, visiting yachtsmen who rent bicycles aren't exactly common at this time of the year."
"Well…"
"But I suggest we return to our boat and make for home tonight. There's no point in making too many assumptions, is there?"
Four
By the time we were back at the mooring late that night, Nathaniel seemed to have forgotten the ugly little incident on Block Island. He was as serene and self-possessed as ever as we walked into the darkened house, and when I did a quick check of the rooms, he looked at me with a kind of amusement.
"One cannot live in constant fear of assassination, you know," he remarked. "Otherwise, what's the point of living? We do the nasty little jobs we do and are more or less prepared for the consequences. So do a great number of other people in this world. And just imagine. Mr. McKee, how it would be if we all worried about who might be lurking around the next corner. Why, who would possibly have the gumption to run for president? Will you join me for a sandwich and some coffee?"
* * *
During the next few days, when we weren't sailing I was studying, mostly catalogues and old clippings about the New York Boat Show. Nathaniel had a file drawer stuffed with working designs of every imaginable type of sailing craft, from day-sailers to ocean-going trimarans, together with photographs and advertisements from newspapers all over the country. We visited a number of boatyards in the vicinity, inspected hulls of those boats that were hauled out and the interiors of a whole lot of others. A couple of times he took me to Christie's, a sprawling restaurant on a dock in Newport where the service and food were superb, and where you could run into a stray yachting Vanderbilt or a fuzzy-cheeked ensign from one of the local Navy bases. Nathaniel knew them all, and after a couple of visits I was pretty well established in my cover role as Daniel McKee, yacht broker from the west coast of Florida. I was even beginning to believe it myself.
The "exam" at the yacht club wasn't all that easy. The members were men who knew their boats; they weren't dockside cocktail-partiers, and the only yachting cap I saw was nailed to the wall above the bar. Nathaniel led the conversation at a big, round table, guiding it casually — maliciously, I thought — into technical areas where I was forced to come up with some answers. I guess I passed, because nobody in the crowd looked dubious. At any rate, when we left — very late — Nathaniel clapped me on the shoulder and looked very pleased. Walking back to his house, we stumbled in the sand a lot and I don't know which of us held the other up.
It was still dark when an urgent pounding on my door woke me up. My head was a little fuzzy — they didn't stint on the bourbon at that club — but I was on my feet instantly.
"What is it?" I demanded.
"Nick!"
"I'm Dan!" I snarled back.
"Yes, yes," Nathaniel said. "But you have to get up and get moving."
"Now?" I wondered what else he was going to put me through.
"It's urgent. You're to catch a flight for Tampa, and we barely have time to make it to the airport."
"Tampa?"
"I don't know why. David just called, and it's top priority. Now get dressed. Hurry!"
Tampa, I thought as I shucked out of my pajamas. This was becoming one of the most confusing assignments I'd ever been on. And if the job was in Greece, I sure wasn't getting any closer to it.
Five
Contact was simple; a message for Daniel McKee at the Tampa airport, informing me that reservations had been made in my name at a motel close by. I checked in and had just finished a quick shave — no chance before I left Nathaniel's house — when there was a light tapping at the door.
I hesitated, looked at my suitcase where Wilhelmina lay in her special compartment. But I didn't think I'd need the stripped-down Luger, not now. As far as I knew there was no reason for anyone to be looking for me who wasn't likely to be friendly. Not at this point. Still, I opened the door with caution, and when I saw Hawk standing there I felt an odd kind of relief.
He came in without so much as a word of greeting, sat down on one of the pair of oversized beds and looked up at me. I swiped at a stray dab of lather, turned around the chair in front of the plastic-imitation-wood desk and planted myself in it facing him.
"This room has been thoroughly checked out," Hawk said. "One of our electronics men spent last night here, and it's been under surveillance ever since."
I glanced automatically at the wall behind him; most motels seem to be built out of cheesecloth these days, and even a senior citizen without his hearing aid can hear everything that goes on in the next unit.
"Don't worry," the old man said. "We've booked the rooms on either side; no one will overhear what we say."
That satisfied me; I never doubted the Chief's ability to think of every detail.
"Zenopolis is doing it our way," he said without further preliminaries. "The precise date hasn't been set yet, but it will be within a week. He will cross the Albanian border and make his way to Korfu. Time and place of rendezvous to be established at that time."
I nodded, then frowned. "How am I to be in contact with him?"
"Through his sister."
Hawk said it so matter-of-factly it didn't register at first. "How was that again?"
"His sister. Her name is Christina, and she is his only living relative. At present she is a student nurse in Athens, but she is taking a vacation on the western coast. You will pick her up, and… I don't have to go into details."
But he did anyway. Christina, it developed, was twenty-two, hadn't seen Alex since he defected fifteen years earlier. But Alex, according to Hawk, wanted his sister to be present when we met; he had a bad case of suspicions, and after the preliminary negotiations with our people had insisted on bringing Christina into the deal. The only one he could trust, he said, and also, Hawk and I agreed, he was using her as a buffer between himself and possible betrayal to the Greek government.
"I won't pretend to understand exactly what he's doing," Hawk admitted, "but it seems worth our while to go along with him as far as seems feasible."
My assignment seemed relatively simple: I was to fly to Athens, hire a car and spend a few days nosing around boat yards along the coast. At Pirgos I would pick up the girl ("quite attractive, I'm told," Hawk assured me), then rent a sail boat for a short cruise up to Korfu. There, on that island which lies more off Albania than Greece, the two of us would contact Alex Zenopolis.
"We've had several communications with him since you and I last spoke," Hawk explained. "It's none of our concern how he gets there, but now he indicates that he has information of critical importance to give us. Possibly, possibly not, but you'll have to make every effort to get him away as planned; we have to assume he's telling the truth until we learn otherwise."
"I still say why not take him over to Taranto in a fast boat? This sailing business could take a couple of days."
The old man shook his head. "It's vital that you in no way allow attention to be drawn to you or to Zenopolis. He assures us that his breakout will go undetected for at least a few days, but he insists that our efforts on his behalf must be totally inconspicuous. There's a time element involved, which he hasn't explained fully; at any rate we have to respect his advice for now. No, Nick, you will take your rented sailboat to Taranto with a secret stowaway. You will not do anything to attract the attention of the authorities in Greece or any other country until Zenopolis is safely in our custody. At any rate," he added with a tiny smile, "if it came to a chase across the water, no power boat you could obtain would be able to outrun the ships and planes the various governments would send after you."
Either way, he had me. I thought that was all, but Hawk had another little surprise for me.
"By the way," he said, glancing toward my open
suitcase on a rack against the wall. "On this assignment you will carry no firearms. Or anything else that might be incriminating should you be caught and interrogated."
"Nothing?" I demanded.
"You may carry your knife, I suppose, but not in that forearm sheath you use. As a yachtsman, you'd be expected to have a blade of some sort, though yours is hardly the sort of tool found aboard most boats. In the end, however, you may need it."
"You think so?"
"Yes. You see, Nick, we have to consider the possibility that this whole operation is a trap of some sort set up by the other side. As you know, we're in a period of extraordinarily delicate negotiations with the Russians and Chinese. There is, in fact, a sort of tacit moratorium on our operations against those countries and their satellites. Should you decide, during your crossing from Korfu to Taranto, that Zenopolis is working for their purposes, to throw us into a bad light, let's say, then you will see to it that he is… lost at sea."
That didn't faze me; I wasn't given the rating of "Killmaster" because I flinched at the idea of sticking a knife into an enemy agent, even if he was a man who used to be a friend.
"Okay," I said, getting up to walk over to my bag. I took out the Luger and handed it to Hawk. "Take good care of her; she's treated me well."
"It will be ready when you return," he said, tucking the weapon into his briefcase.
I sat down again. "One more thing."
Hawk quirked a shaggy eyebrow at me.
"What the hell am I doing in Tampa?"
"Of course. I was about to explain that. You will stay here for two days and familiarize yourself with the various marinas and yacht brokers." He took a small envelope from his briefcase and put it on the bed beside him. "This is a list of brokers who have recently gone out of business; you have worked for all three of them and are now taking some time off while attempting to set up your own business. Perhaps we're being overcautious, but if someone asks you who you worked for, you can give information that can't be readily checked. It shouldn't be necessary, actually; this operation will only take a few days. But it would be silly to have it blown through some chance encounter."
"Boating people are pretty close all over the world," I agreed. Nathaniel Frederick had convinced me of that.
"Precisely. In your travels along the coast of Greece you will possibly encounter other Americans who know this area. Better to be glib than to stammer and hedge, eh?"
* * *
So I did as Hawk told me, spending every daylight hour, and not a few after nightfall, prowling around marinas, salesrooms and boatyards like an out-of-work yacht broker. In my travels I picked up names of managers and salesmen, harbor-masters and the kids who manned the gas pumps at various docks. Maybe all of the detail would never be needed, but if some American at, say, Piraeus should start reminiscing with me about the nutty old character who worked at that boatyard outside Clearwater, I'd be ready with my own story about him.
At the end of the second day I drove across the Florida peninsula to Miami, where I took a plane that put me in Madrid early the next morning. There I got a connecting flight to Athens, and it was just coming up dark when I finished clearing customs — they weren't at all excited about the double-edged knife I carried in my luggage when they learned my supposed business — and went out to find a taxi. The night had that peculiar clarity that you find, I think, only in Greece and the Levant; it's as though the sky traps and distills all the exotic scents, those of olive and fig trees mixed with burning charcoal and roasting lamb, then chills them all just a little so they don't become cloying. It's a sort of elusive perfume that no woman could wear, but Athens does it with style and grace.
And then I checked in at the Hilton, losing it all in the anywhere-in-the-world blandness of American air conditioning. As a matter of fact, when I turned on the television set in my room, I got Gunsmoke. So much for the Cradle of Western Civilization.
I indulged myself the next morning with a quick tour of the city. It's a terrible thing to say, but I've traveled so much that the cities of the world have begun to have a disappointing similarity to me. No matter where you go, it seems, there's an American overlay on everything; the fawning rug merchant speaks English and makes sure you know about his brother in Akron, and though you may not actually see a Coca-Cola sign on any given street, there's always the feeling that one is just around the corner.
So I'm cynical. I was also edgy. This assignment seemed almost too simple, and I had to psyche myself up, like the Super Bowl champion getting ready to take on the College All-Stars. The game should always be a cinch for the pros, which means they have to be especially careful not to consider it a walkover. My problem wasn't exactly the same, but the casual life I was expected to live for the next few days, spiced with an encounter with a, hopefully, attractive girl, could easily make me lazy in the head if I wasn't careful.
Besides, I missed Wilhelmina. At the time, I didn't know how much; in a short time I was to find out.
I rented a Volkswagen from the local Hertz agency and started my yacht-broker's tour. Piraeus was my logical first stop, and I spent an afternoon wandering around the docks of that busy port city. Playing the businessman-tourist, I asked questions, made a show of examining designs and rigging with an expertise I'm sure Nathaniel would have applauded. No one I encountered seemed to question my cover; I was Daniel McKee, on a busman's holiday in the part of the world some people call a sailor's paradise. Funny thing was, I'd only been in that part of the world once before, and it was a sailor's paradise, but not the way they mean it now. To explain what I was doing in the US Army fifteen years earlier would be much too complicated. Just say it was a part of my advanced training with AXE, and even the Army can bend some rules when it seems advisable. The only time I wore a uniform during that stint was while I was going through Counterintelligence Corps School at Fort Holabird in Baltimore. That was mostly for show, the first thing they taught us was how to type, because of all the reports an agent had to fill out, and I wore the innocuous bars of a second lieutenant. Afterward, when I was assigned to a post in West Germany, any top brass who demanded to know what my rank was got the word that I was a major. That's the way the CIC worked then, and I knew one or two corporals, operating in plainclothes, who also had the "rank" of major if anyone asked.
But rank had nothing to do with the way I met Alex Zenopolis and the operation we pulled off together. Briefly, our Army was being plagued by a heroin ring that was bringing the stuff into Germany and selling it to our troops. Nothing like the way it's been in Vietnam in recent years, but still serious then. It was discovered that a handful of GIs were the suppliers, and they were getting the horse from a couple of Greek sailors who had connections in Turkey. The point of exchange was Naxos, the largest island in the Cyclades.
One of the GIs, a young sergeant, had picked up one of those cushy jobs every soldier dreams of; he piloted a small twin-engined plane that carried VIPs, brass and civilians, to sunny spots in places like the Greek islands and Lebanon. It was a cinch, returning empty to Munich, to set down at a small airfield on Naxos and take on a load of the white stuff. He didn't have any customs to clear, and a couple of mechanics at his home base were in on the deal; they took the dope away and moved it out among the small-time pushers.
I wasn't in on the preliminaries; it was mostly a job for the CIC people of the MPs, but when it became clear there were Greek military personnel involved it got a little touchy for the military cops. Strictly speaking, it wasn't a CIC job either; the mission of the Corps is basically to stop any clandestine threat to the Army, but that's pretty broadly interpreted. Either way, I was tapped for the job of putting the dope smugglers out of commission, and to make sure nobody in any of the governments involved made a big stink about it. Or heard about it, if I could help it.
It was a killing job; I knew it as soon as my briefing was over. And when I met Alex Zenopolis in Beirut, all I had to do was look at him to know he was a good man to have working
with me. Alex was a bull of a man, a little taller than my own six feet-one and just about as wide. He was with his country's Naval Intelligence then, but in a dark civilian suit he looked like a character out of a Humphrey Bogart movie, black hair and mustache, fierce eyes that looked as though they could pin you to the wall and leave you dangling there until he decided to let you go.
"You are Carter," he said when we met at a noisy cafe. A Sinatra record was playing on a jukebox while an overfed belly dancer tried to compete with the music.
I admitted I was; I could still use my own name in those days.
"Very simple." His English was good, but he didn't waste words. "Two of our people meet two Americans at airfield. You and I, we eliminate them."
"How do we know when the American plane will arrive?"
"There's a place overlooking the landing site. Set up by us, a goatherder's shack; he has gone to hospital, poor fellow." Alex laughed, showing a large gap between his front teeth. "Little stomach problem, something in his drinking water. He is old man, but he will recover."
"And how long do we wait?"
Alex shrugged massive shoulders. "Until they come. Are you in a hurry?"
We took a clackety old boat that seemed to stop at every island in the Cyclades, not to mention Crete, before we arrived at Naxos. Tourists we were supposed to be, and we didn't speak to each other after we disembarked. I checked in at what passed for a hotel in the port city, then played the eccentric American who wanted to go off on a hiking trip up into the hills, a forerunner, I guess, of the present-day hippies who swarm all over the world with their knapsacks.
I found Alex at the goatherder's cottage overlooking the landing strip. Fortunately he had a pack of worn but serviceable playing cards, and somehow had managed to lay in a tremendous store of ouzo along with the weapons we would need. The waiting, it was more than two days, wasn't bad, but if we'd been playing pinochle for real money I would still owe Alex Zenopolis just about everything I've earned since then.