“Tell me again the name.”
“The Life and Times of My Black Hat Protector. Nikoletta’s hacker calls himself a ‘black hat.’”
“I know, but what I missed was the name of the taverna you’re in.”
She told him.
“Don’t move an inch. We’ll be there in twenty minutes.”
“Please drive safely; we don’t need another accident.”
Andreas smiled. “Yes, dear.”
He pushed back from the table and stood. “Let’s go. We’ve got a lot of ground to cover in the next twenty minutes.”
Yianni raised his eyebrows.
“What are you talking about? We just ordered,” said Tassos.
“Lila said they think they may have found Nikoletta holed up in Apeiranthos. I’ll tell you all about it on the way, but it’s on the other side of the mountains from where we are, so we’ve got to hustle.” He canceled the order, left a twenty-euro tip on the table, and raced out the door, followed by Yianni and Tassos.
They drove south past Halki and through Filoti before turning north, lights flashing all the way until a kilometer before Apeiranthos. Andreas parked in the plaza next to Lila’s SUV.
“The taverna’s just past the tower. Let’s try to look casual so as not to spook the townsfolk.”
“Spook them over what?” asked Yianni.
“No idea,” said Andreas, “but in this village I’m sure there are more than enough guilty consciences to get some folks thinking raid anytime they see a cop, let alone three.”
The men sitting at the tables lining the cops’ way to the taverna turned away as the trio passed by.
“What do you think?” said Andreas.
“I smell lookouts,” said Tassos.
“For what?” asked Yianni.
“I guess we’ll find out soon enough.” Andreas pointed ahead to the left. “There’s the taverna.”
As they entered, Lila jumped up from her table and waved for them to come out onto the veranda. Maggie and Toni remained seated, talking to a young woman Andreas assumed was the waitress who’d set off their mad dash across the mountains.
Andreas smiled and extended his hand to the woman, “Hi, I’m Andreas, Lila’s husband.”
The woman stood and shook his hand. “A pleasure to meet you.” She waved to Tassos and Yianni. “And you, too. Please, come sit, we’ll pull together another table.”
Andreas motioned for her to sit down. “No reason to bother. We won’t be staying long.”
She looked surprised. “I don’t understand.”
Andreas sat. “I’m a chief inspector with the Greek police, and these gentlemen are also with the police.”
Her face blanched but she said nothing.
“Don’t worry; you did nothing wrong, and we’re not here to arrest anyone. We’re here to find a missing woman.”
“What missing woman?”
Andreas reached into his pocket, pulled out a photo of Nikoletta, and showed it to her. His eyes fixed on hers, searching for any sign of emotion.
She jerked back in her chair. “Oh, my. It’s the woman in the tower.”
Andreas didn’t bother to wonder what emotion his face betrayed at hearing those words. His rapidly beating heart had answered that question.
“What is your name, Miss?”
“Sofia.”
“Ah, a beautiful name, the same as our daughter’s. There are a few things I need to know that perhaps you can help me with. First of all, is there anyone else in the tower besides the woman?”
“No, not that I’ve noticed. That is, aside from Christina, who’s the housekeeper. But she’s only there in the mornings.”
“Have you seen anyone other than Christina in the tower since the woman arrived?”
“No.”
“Have you noticed any strangers hanging around the tower?”
“No.”
“Are you certain.”
“Ye-es.” She strung out the word oddly, or so it seemed to Andreas.
He glanced at Yianni, who nodded.
“When do you usually deliver dinner to the woman?”
“Before we get busy, which would be around now.”
“Do you have a key or does she let you in?”
“I press a button at the terrace door, she asks who it is, I tell her, and usually she comes down to open the door for me. Sometimes she just buzzes me in.”
“I need you to go with us to the tower. When she asks who it is, don’t tell her we’re with you. As soon as she opens the door, get out of the way. We’ll take it from there.”
She looked around the table. “Really? You’re making me worry.”
“There’s no need, Sofia. We’re being cautious for the sake of the woman, just in case there’s someone with her you don’t know about.”
“Don’t worry, I’ll be with you,” said Toni, patting Sofia’s hand.
“The hell you will,” said Yianni.
“Don’t mind him. That’s my overprotective boyfriend, worried that I’ll somehow mess up this very simple food delivery. Isn’t that right, Chief Inspector?”
Andreas spoke through a clenched jaw. “Does that work for you, Sofia?”
She nodded yes and squeezed Toni’s hand.
Andreas sighed and looked to Yianni. “Then I guess that’s how we’ll do it.”
“What about video surveillance?” said Tassos. “Security’s a big concern among homeowners these days.”
“It wasn’t so different four hundred years ago,” said Maggie. “Why do you think they built this tower like a fortress?”
“And pirates still found their way in,” said Sofia.
Andreas nodded. “I’m sure we will too.”
Chapter Eighteen
A group of three couples armed with maps and snapping photos with their phones wound their way up beside a tower along a twisting path of marble steps. The steps led to a pair of bronze-clad doors framed in marble and crowned by the emblem of Venice carved in stone. The women stopped a few paces before the doors to snap photographs of the valley below, while the men argued over where to visit next. The group seemed oblivious to the young woman carrying a tray of food up the steps behind them.
As the arguing intensified, the three women turned away and started back down the steps, yelling back at the men that they’d be waiting at the car for them to make up their minds. The men kept up with their argument but slowly followed the women, stopping every step or so to accentuate a point.
The young woman with the tray pressed a button next to the doors and stood watching the men argue.
One of the doors swung open wide and a smiling, dark-haired woman appeared. “Good evening, Sofia.”
“Evening, keria.” As Sofia stepped inside, the three arguing men sprinted for the doorway.
Panic spread across the woman’s face, and she tried to slam the door shut, but Sofia and her tray blocked the woman just long enough for the men to grab the door and force their way inside.
The woman screamed for help.
“Relax, Nikoletta, we’re the police,” said Andreas, pulling his ID out from beneath his shirt.
Yianni and Tassos did the same.
“You scared the bloody hell out of me,” said Nikoletta.
“Are you alone in here?”
“Yes.”
He turned to Yianni and Tassos. “Make sure that she is.”
Yianni and Tassos headed into the tower, guns drawn.
“Is everything okay in here?” said Toni, stepping through the doorway.
“Seems to be,” said Andreas.
“Who is she?” asked Nikoletta.
“More like who are they?” said Lila coming up behind Toni with Maggie.
“Don’t I know you?” asked Nikoletta.
&nbs
p; “I’m Lila Vardi.”
“The socialite,” she turned to face Andreas, as Lila frowned at the description, “married to Andreas Kaldis, chief of Special Crimes.”
Andreas bowed. “At your service.”
“I’m flattered by all this attention.”
“Your newspaper is very worried about you.”
“I bet. I’m sure they can’t wait to hear my story.”
“Personally, I can’t wait to hear it myself. Why don’t we start with a basic question: Where is your kidnapper?”
“Kidnapper? I’ve not been kidnapped. I’ve been protected.”
“By whom and from whom?”
“I truly wish I knew. Why don’t we go inside where we can sit down? I can try to answer your questions, and perhaps you can answer some of mine?”
“Sounds good to me.”
Nikoletta turned to Sofia. “Please bring the tray inside.”
“I’m sorry, ma’am. I had no choice. They are the police.”
“Don’t worry. I know you were only trying to help me.” Nikoletta paused and looked at Andreas. “Are you expecting any others to join us?”
Yianni came out of the tower, followed by Tassos, caught Andreas’s eye, and flashed him a thumbs-up.
He turned back to Nikoletta. “None of the invited sort.”
* * *
Nikoletta led them to a second-floor library that could have passed for a museum dedicated to seventeenth-century baroque furniture. A large rectangular table fitted with marble inserts and adorned in elaborately carved cupids and shells dominated the center of the room. Bold scrolls embellished the table’s legs and the legs and arms of twelve matching chairs. A comparably carved gilded writing desk sat to the side between two windows. An open laptop computer atop the desk served as the room’s only visible sign of the modern age.
Nikoletta sat in a chair on the side of the table closest to the desk. She pointed at the computer. “I assume you know I’m working on a book about this experience.”
Andreas smiled as he sat directly across from her. “We’d prefer not having to wait until it’s published to learn what happened.”
Yianni and Tassos sat next to Andreas, while Lila, Toni, and Maggie sat at the end of the table farthest away from the others.
“I’m sure you have a lot of questions for me, but before we get to them, I have one that’s been gnawing at me since the night I disappeared from the hotel.”
“What is it?” asked Andreas.
“Why hasn’t a single word appeared anywhere in the media about my disappearance? Not even in my own newspaper.”
“If you’re able to answer my questions as easily as I can answer yours, I’ll be a very happy cop.” Andreas told her that keeping a lid on her disappearance was all his doing, and he’d done so out of concern that if she had been kidnapped, the inevitable avalanche of publicity might cause her abductor to panic and harm her. He emphasized that her publisher did not agree with his strategy.
“Thank you. I feel better knowing there were people out there who cared.” She took a sip of water from a plastic bottle. “Where do you want me to start?”
“How about with what happened the night you disappeared.”
Nikoletta shut her eyes, took a deep breath, opened her eyes, and began. “My planned final evening on Naxos had me joining some new friends for dinner in Chora, which in the inevitable Greek way led to way too much drinking and a very late night. I literally staggered out of the taverna, and in my haste to get back to the hotel, I decided to take a shortcut that involved leaving paved roads to climb a very dark, rocky dirt path that ran alongside a steep cliff high above the sea.”
She paused. “That’s all I know firsthand, because I reached my hotel without incident. The rest of what happened I learned from Soter.”
“Who’s Soter?”
Nikoletta laughed. “Sorry, I’ve been so immersed in my writing that I only think of my interviewee-turned-protector by the name I created for him in the book. In Greek mythology, Soter represented the male personification of safety and deliverance from harm.”
“Do you know his real name?”
“No. I wish I did.”
“You’re probably better off not knowing,” said Tassos.
“What did he tell you?” asked Andreas.
“On the day after my article about him appeared in the paper, he received an offer over the Dark Web to kill me. Obviously, the person making the offer didn’t realize he was the man I’d interviewed. Though he turned it down, he knew someone would take the contract because the fee was extremely high. That’s when he started following me.”
Nikoletta picked up the water bottle. “At the time, he thought I’d been targeted because of his interview. He felt responsible. That his bragging had put me in danger.” She took another sip. “The night of my disappearance, he’d been watching me from outside the taverna, and after I left, he followed me on a motorbike. When he saw me stop to stare up the hillside path, he guessed I’d take it, so he parked and made it onto the path some distance ahead of me. As he hurried up the hill, he saw a man crouched in the shadows across and back from the path at its closest point to the cliff edge. He recognized the man as a professional assassin—definitely not top-drawer, was how he later described him to me. The man did not recognize Soter or realize he’d been seen and stayed focused on my struggle up the hill. Soter walked by the man as if he hadn’t noticed him, then circled back down and around to come up behind him. He knew the man had to be planning to push me off the edge of the cliff to make it appear an ‘accidental death.’” Nikoletta used finger quotes for emphasis.
“But, as we all know, it didn’t end up that way.”
Nikoletta cleared her throat. “I was oblivious to all of that. After I’d safely reached my hotel, Soter made his way down to the rocks and stripped the now-dead would-be assassin of his mobile phone and identification. Once he’d finished with him, he called me on the man’s phone and told me to meet him outside my hotel. He’d long before then culled my number from my mobile provider.”
“But how did he know the password to unlock the phone?” asked Yianni.
She smiled. “Funny you should ask. I had the same question. He told me he didn’t, but he just ran through the five most common passwords and 111111 worked.”
“Clever guy,” said Toni.
Nikoletta nodded. “When we met, he told me someone was trying to kill me and I had to come with him immediately. I told him my mother hadn’t raised a fool, and I wasn’t about to go off in the middle of the night with a nearly total stranger, especially one who’d recently bragged to me about being a master criminal. He told me my mother was a wise woman, but she wasn’t here to protect me, and in a few minutes he wouldn’t either. He walked to the edge of the cliff and shone a light down onto the rocks.
“He told me, ‘The body down there would have been you if I hadn’t intervened.’ I looked over the edge and saw the man on the rocks. I almost fainted. ‘He was waiting for you on your walk home,’ Soter told me. ‘Someone tipped him off that you were on your way back to the hotel. You have two choices. Come with me to a safe house I know while I figure out who’s after you, or stay here and be a target. You’ve thirty seconds to make up your mind.’”
She exhaled. “Longest thirty seconds of my life. Obviously, I went with him. We took his motorbike to a parking lot in the harbor, where we switched to a car and drove directly here. When we got to the village, it was still dark, and no one saw us walk from the car to this fortress.”
“You must have been frightened,” said Lila.
“I believe the technical term is scared shitless.”
“What did you two talk about on the ride up from Chora?” said Tassos. “That was a long trip, especially at night along strange roads.”
“He knew the roads. He said he’d hidden o
ut in the tower several times, and the local people knew him. He said this time he wouldn’t stay in the village but had arranged for some locals to keep an eye on me. He didn’t say, but I got the impression locals knew what he did and might even have used his services.”
“Why do you think that?” said Tassos.
“Because when I asked if the locals who’d be keeping an eye on me could be trusted, he said, ‘They know what would happen to all of them and their families should any one of them ever break his word to me.’”
“That’s quite a reputation,” said Andreas.
“You said something before that piqued my curiosity,” said Maggie.
“What’s that?”
“You said, ‘At the time’ Soter thought you’d been targeted because of the story about him. Did his thinking change?”
“The second day I was here he called to say that he didn’t think our interview was the cause.”
“Why did he say that?” asked Andreas.
“He said there was still a contract out on me, but a new contract had just gone up, offering even more money for anyone who immediately took out another target on Naxos, this time an Athens cop. That contract was attracting a lot of attention from a low-end crowd of thugs, indicating a state of panic on the part of whoever had put out those contracts. Soter’s clients would never use such unprofessional types, nor would they have hired the inept one who intended to kill me outside my hotel.
“Besides, it made no sense for someone afraid of what Soter might say to go after the person to whom he’d told his story. He could tell his story to any number of journalists. The only way to keep more stories like it out of the press was to kill Soter, not the writer. All of which led him to believe there must be another motive behind why someone was after me.”
“Any idea what that motive might be?” said Andreas.
“That’s the kind of ‘step back and think out of the box’ approach I’m never good at when it comes to looking at myself.”
“As the cop whose contract kill price topped yours, permit me to offer a possible answer.” Yianni leaned in across the table. “You kept a sixth notebook. I’ve seen five of them. What’s in the sixth?”
A Deadly Twist Page 21