by Joseph Badal
“You told me your men were reliable. We haven’t heard a thing from them in over twenty-four hours. What’s going on, Theo?”
The woman stood statue-like. “Ich wiss nicht, Herr Leidner.”
“I pay you to know, Theo. Do I need to remind you of that?”
“Nein, mein Herr. I shall take care of it immediately. I will fly to Samos first thing in the morning and take over this . . . investigation myself.”
Leidner stopped in midstride and fixed his gaze on the woman’s eyes. He pointed a long finger at her. “Investigation, my ass,” he said. “Your people have made a mess of a very simple problem. It’s time I took charge. You find out where this John Hammond is. Then book us both on a flight.” He turned again toward the bank of plate glass windows, then suddenly spun around. “And arrange for more men to join us. It appears we will not be able to rely on Hans and Josef.”
CHAPTER FORTY
Christo ordered one patrolman to remain on board the Penelope, then he and the others left the boat and took a Coast Guard launch to shore. Christo drove Nick, Zoë, and John from the dock to the Vathi Hospital where Layla Vangelos was in intensive care. While Nick and Zoë went in to see their mother, John and Christo found the waiting room.
“Do you think you could track down information on this boat . . . the Sabiya?” John asked.
“Maybe. If it ever legally entered a Greek port we might be able to come up with something. But don’t be surprised if I find nothing. After all, seventy years have passed since this Sabiya was supposed to have sunk.”
An hour later, Nick and Zoë joined John and Christo in the waiting room.
“How is she?” John asked, wanting to put his arms around Zoë to comfort her. But he didn’t believe Nick would be able to handle the implications of his embracing Zoë on top of everything else that had occurred.
“Stable,” Zoë said. Her voice broke. “She looks so weak, so old.”
Nick hugged his sister, while he looked over the top of her head at John and Christo. John shuddered at Nick’s angry look.
“You realize this isn’t the end of it,” John said. “Sooner or later there will be more men sent after us.”
Nick nodded his head in agreement. “Why don’t you and Zoë stay ashore? I’ll go out and clean up the Penelope,” he said. “Get a meal and a good night’s sleep and come back out to the boat in the morning?”
“It would probably be a good idea for you to get some rest, too,” John said.
“I need to keep busy,” Nick said.
“I’ll drive you all back to Pythagorio,” Christo offered.
“Good!” Nick said. “Then John and Zoë can get rooms at a hotel there while I go back out to the boat.”
“I’ll send a guard to watch the lobby,” Christo said.
Nick laid a hand on John’s shoulder. “You take care of my sister.”
John and Zoë watched Nick pilot a dinghy out from the dock, then they turned away from the water and started toward a hotel. John thought Zoë looked as though she’d run a marathon. He felt like she looked. It was only mid-morning, but all he could think about were clean sheets and a soft mattress.
While Zoë continued across the quay to the hotel to secure a room, he stopped at a taverna and picked up bottles of water. Then he joined her in the hotel lobby.
They leaned against one another and plodded up three flights of stairs to their room.
While Zoë used the bathroom, John kicked off his shoes and lay down on the double bed to wait his turn. That was the last thing he remembered until late that night when music drifted up from one of the many seafront restaurants and wakened him. He started at the sound, momentarily confused about where he was. He looked at Zoë sleeping soundly next to him. He carefully slipped out of bed and tiptoed to the bathroom. The thought of a shower and a shave seemed almost erotic. The hot, harsh drum of the water against his skin felt even better than he’d anticipated.
After he toweled dry, he moved back to the bed and crawled in next to Zoë. She made a humming-like sound and pressed against him.
They lay together and didn’t move. Her head was buried in his shoulder and he held her as though he didn’t dare let her go. As though he couldn’t take the chance of her disappearing. He knew she was real; but he felt that she was too good to be true. And the feeling swept through him that, like a wraith, she might disappear into thin air.
Suddenly, she spoke into the curve of his neck. “I keep thinking about that man on the boat, how he was about to shoot you.”
“You saved my life, Zoë.”
“I didn’t want to lose you. I was just beginning to like you.”
John laughed and leaned back to look at her. “Like me?” he asked.
She pinched his arm. “Don’t push it, buster.” Then she kissed his cheek and got out of bed.
MAY 7-8
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
John knew he should be relieved about the deaths of the two killers. The one named Josef had told him before he died that he worked for a guy named Fritz Leidner. John guessed Leidner did not yet know what had happened to the two men. But Leidner could have other men on Samos. So John wasn’t about to let his guard down. His instincts told him it would only be a matter of time before they became targets again.
He and Zoë walked down the stairs from their room to the hotel lobby. A uniformed policeman got up from a chair there. John waved at him. He tipped his head in response. Good old Christo, he thought.
It was a cool, cloudy night. The tavernas along the edge of the bay were doing only a modest business—their waiters stationed out front vied with one another to attract the few tourists that strolled along the quay. John and Zoë picked the least crowded taverna and took seats farthest from the entrance. It was after 10:00, so they decided to eat a light meal—avgo limono (egg and lemon) soup and a horiatiki salad and then try to get a few more hours sleep before they returned to the Penelope. The police officer from the hotel lobby now stood about ten yards from the front of the restaurant.
They sat at the table for over an hour, talked about their families, educations, interests, and goals. He was fascinated, but not surprised, to learn she’d received her Doctorate in Archaeology from Oxford University, and had been the head of the Department of Antiquities at the University of Athens for the past three years.
“My father had only a few years of formal schooling,” Zoë explained. “But he taught himself by reading books he borrowed from the library and from everyone he knew on the island. People joked about how he always had his nose in a book. Some people thought Papa couldn’t really read, that the books were only for show. They had no idea Papa was anything other than an uneducated fisherman.” John saw a flash of anger cross her eyes, her face redden. But the moment quickly passed.
Zoë’s eyes suddenly went round. She looked surprised, stopped talking, and put her right hand over her heart while she stared over John’s shoulder. John turned in his chair. She giggled at his reaction. “It’s nothing,” she said. “Just a thought.” He turned back and she put her hands on his.
“There has to be something significant about what my father wrote on the back of the map.”
“I thought you and Christo were in agreement that it was nothing but rhymes.”
“Up to this moment, I did think that. But now I wonder if there may be another explanation. You see, my father read history, archaeology, literature, mythology, medicine—everything. But his favorite subject was mathematics—perhaps because the philosopher mathematician Pythagoras came from Samos. Papa taught me the Pythagorean Theorem before I was eleven years old.”
“So?”
“Part of what he wrote was, ‘Remember, Pythagoras is our friend.’ Let’s go back to the room and look at the map. Maybe we can come up with something.”
John nodded, but didn’t feel optimistic. Petros Vangelos’s wor
ds on the map seemed to John like the babbling of an old man. Even the drawing could be the result of some far out fantasy. Maybe even his application for salvage rights was a pipe dream. But then John erased all those thoughts as he remembered that the killers Fritz Leidner had sent to Samos weren’t fantasies. And neither were the deaths of Petros Vangelos and Officer Stavros Zantsos.
John stood and took Zoë’s hand. “Come on, let’s go to the room. Perhaps you’re right. We’ve got nothing to lose by trying.”
In their room, Zoë laid the map out and re-read what her father had written on the back. Then she flipped it over and studied the drawing.
She drew a crude copy of the map on another piece of paper and drew lines between the circles in a variety of ways, but nothing seemed to solve the puzzle. They worked on it for two hours, until they could barely keep their eyes open. Finally, John refolded the map and placed it in his knapsack. Zoë phoned the front desk to request a wake up call and then they undressed, curled next to each other on the bed, and almost instantly fell asleep.
It seemed only a few minutes had passed before John’s old dream shocked him awake. His heart rate had nearly settled down to normal when the telephone shocked him anew. He couldn’t believe it was already 4:30 a.m. He thanked the hotel operator for the wakeup call and then gently rubbed Zoë’s back and felt his heart swell when she rolled over and smiled as though nothing could have made her happier than to wake to the sight of him.
MAY 8-9
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
John and Zoë, driven by the policeman Christo had assigned to them, visited Layla in the Vathi Hospital at 6:00 that morning. Layla was awake and considerably more alert than on the previous day. Although still weak and in intensive care, the doctor told them he was cautiously optimistic.
After their policeman guard drove them back to Pythagorio, they all took a motor-powered dinghy back to the Penelope.
The policeman climbed aboard first. John followed Zoë up the ladder and watched brother and sister embrace. With one of his arms draped over his sister’s shoulder, Nick said, “Well, you two look rested.”
Was there some other meaning in his words? John decided to respond indirectly. “We visited your mother. She’s much better.”
Nick’s face lit up. “That’s great news.”
Then John changed the subject. “We went over your father’s map again last night. Zoë thinks the words he wrote on the back have some hidden meaning. But we haven’t been able to figure it out. Maybe you’d have better luck.”
“I’ll give it a try, but first we need to move the boat out to the fourth circle on Papa’s map. I want to see if there’s anything down there before anyone else tries to kill us.”
Nick asked Zoë to make breakfast. He spoke to her in a way that made it clear cooking was woman’s work. John expected some sort of outburst from her and his expression must have telegraphed his expectations. But she just smiled at him and quietly said, “Every time I return home it’s as if I go back in time. But I’d rather cook than clean blood and guts off the deck.”
When they were under way, Zoë brought hot coffee and rolls up to the wheelhouse. While they ate, they rehashed everything that had happened during the past ten days and tried to make sense of it all. But all they had by way of explanation was Josef’s dying declaration.
One thing gnawed at John: If there was valuable cargo on the Sabiya, why hadn’t this mysterious Fritz Leidner just negotiated with Vangelos? Why kill him?
The distance to the fourth circle on Petros’s map was only about one point one miles from shore, a half-a-mile outside the harbor entrance. They “guesstimated” the location and anchored. According to their interpretation of the map, they had to be lined up with the tip of the mole and the top of Mount Kastri. It would have been difficult to determine the exact distance from the mole to the fourth circle, but the range finder Christo had borrowed from the Greek Army made the task simple.
John gave a short course of instruction to Nick on the use of the range finder. “This is an optical device. It determines the distance from a reference point to a distant object.” He showed him how to line up the range finder on the two reference points—the mole and Mount Kastri—and then how to make the appropriate calculations to determine distance.
Never in his life did John contemplate having to use a range finder again after leaving the military, and he said a silent thanks to the instructors at Fort Sill. It took him nearly an hour to get comfortable again with the equipment.
According to the map, they needed to be at a spot that lined up through the mole and the top of Mt. Kastri. Based on his calculations, the Penelope lay one hundred and thirty-seven meters too far out.
Zoë raised the anchor again and Nick repositioned the boat. They repositioned the boat two more times until John estimated they were now right on top of the spot indicated by the map’s fourth circle.
They couldn’t have asked for a better day. By the time they’d fixed their location, the sun sat directly overhead and the sky was absolutely clear. To make things even better, the Aegean was smooth as glass.
John helped Zoë check the tanks, masks, weight belts, buoyancy control devices, and regulators. Satisfied everything was in working order, they suited up and were just about ready to enter the water when Nick brought one of the Coast Guard charts over and spread it out on the deck.
“It looks like we’re about fifty to sixty meters from the end of the reef, which comes out at an angle from the harbor,” Nick said. “The top of the reef is only two fathoms below the surface—about four meters. But the depth at the bottom of the reef is closer to ten fathoms, or about nineteen meters. There’s a gap of nearly sixty meters across between the end of the reef and the other side of the harbor entrance—and the depth in the gap is over forty-five meters, which allows almost any ship to pass into the harbor. If there is a boat below us, it must have missed that gap and struck the reef.” Then as an afterthought, he said, “But how in the world could a ship have been on the bottom below us here without being detected? Papa and I alone must have dived this area a hundred times.”
No one had an answer for Nick.
After they studied the chart, Zoë and John—in their flippers—slapped their way across the deck to the side of the boat, sat on the rail, and backflipped into the sea.
The sun overhead, the relatively shallow depth of the water—about sixty feet—and the white sand on the bottom combined to make visibility extraordinarily good. A rainbow of creatures swam around them. Two bright-blue fish darted in front of John’s face mask, while an array of yellow, pink, and gray fish watched them from about ten feet away. Jet-black sea urchins studded the reef and John saw a tiny octopus jet away from its hiding place between two large rocks.
They didn’t need to dive all the way to the sea floor. If there was a boat below them they would surely be able to see it from almost any point below the surface. John thought about Nick’s question. If a boat had sunk here over seventy years ago, why hadn’t others discovered it by now?
He let Zoë set the pace. For thirty-five minutes they criss-crossed a large area of the sea floor, always orienting themselves on the Penelope’s keel. The sand at the bottom looked undisturbed and they saw no wreck, not even any bits of debris that might have come from a boat that had ripped its hull on the reef. With twenty minutes of air left in his air tank, John signaled Zoë it was time to surface. He could see disappointment on her face through her mask but, like all good divers, she followed her diving partner’s lead and began to move upward. They ascended slowly and reached the surface with plenty of air to spare.
Nick climbed down the Penelope’s ladder, grabbed their tanks, and passed them to the policeman on deck. John and Zoë tossed their flippers over the rail and then followed Nick into the boat. John was disappointed too that they hadn’t found anything. But Zoë seemed disconsolate.
“I hop
e we’re more successful the next time,” she said. “I would hate to think someone murdered my father over a patch of empty sand.”
“We could be diving in the wrong location,” John said.
Zoë closed her eyes and wagged her head.
They dove again later that day and early the following morning, each time moving farther from the Penelope. But the results were the same—no wreck. John guessed that even seventy years of storms roiling the bottom would not have been enough to completely bury a large boat with sand.
John voiced his doubts about the accuracy of Petros’s map. But neither Zoë nor Nick would listen.
“There’s nothing wrong with my father’s map,” Zoë insisted. “We’re just reading it incorrectly.”
“Yeah,” John said, “but how in God’s name could the measurements on your father’s map be accurate. It’s not as if there are mileage markers in the sea.”
“I don’t know exactly how Papa would have done it,” Nick said, sounding angry. “But I assure you every one of the marks on this map was put there for a reason. When taken together, they will tell a story. We just haven’t figured it out yet.”
John regretted the words as soon as they’d escaped his lips, but the frustration he felt needed a release. “Did you two ever consider that perhaps your father just plain made a mistake? Hell, maybe he was playing a joke on you.”
Zoë and Nick glared at him. He braced himself, anticipating one or both of them to respond. But then he had a sudden flash of insight. He almost shouted, Archimedes-like, “Eureka!”
MAY 9
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
John moved across the deck to his backpack, took out the copy of the map, and spread it out on an equipment locker.