Sea of Gold

by Nick Elliott

  On day ten I was discharged. Eleni collected me and we returned to the flat up on Profitas Ilias. That evening, we sat on the balcony, each with our ouzo, looking down at the glittering lights scattered along the coast that eventually led out to Cape Sounion and the temple of the sea god, Poseidon. The evening air was warm and the scent of jasmine and honeysuckle mingled with the smell of Eleni’s cooking.

  ‘I’m sorry, Eleni. Life’s gone crazy these past few months. Will you forgive me?’

  ‘You know I do, agapi-mou. Always.’

  ‘I don’t deserve you.’

  I know you don’t agapi-mou,’ she said, leaning over to kiss me.

  CHAPTER 40

  It was mid-April. The storms had passed and the island had awoken from its winter slumber. Orthodox Easter was coming. Houses, even the surrounding steps and pathways, were freshly whitewashed. The caiques too were getting freshened up and readied for launching into the clear waters below their winter hardstandings. The first tourists were arriving, mainly walkers and bird watchers; and the more committed taverna owners were putting out their chairs and tables and unwinding their awnings. The sun was warm during the day but it was still too early for the beachgoers, and the evenings had a chill to them.

  ‘What’s that tree? It’s all over the hillsides.’

  ‘With the magenta blossom? It’s the Judas Tree. He was supposed to have hanged himself from one.’

  Claire stopped and looked at me, misreading my thoughts perhaps. ‘I deceived you, Angus, I know, because I had to, but I would never betray you.’

  We were up on one of the island’s labyrinth of tracks in the high pastures above Alastair’s home.

  ‘I know that,’ I said. ‘It’s known as the Love Tree too. Its leaves are heart-shaped.’

  ‘I much prefer that name.’

  The view from up here was spectacular. To the north a broad channel separating this island from its neighbour ran up into the distance. The white triangle of a yacht’s sail artfully punctuated the deep blue of the sea. Another island was visible beyond. Its craggy outline gave it a mysterious, other-worldly look.

  ‘I know I encouraged you to pursue this case. You were determined to anyway, but had you not been I would have pushed you harder. You need to know that. I would have had to somehow convince you to follow it.’

  ‘I’m beginning to realise that.’

  ‘It doesn’t alter the way I feel about you.’

  Then she seemed to set aside her emotions. ‘Is that where the monastery is, that island?’

  ‘Yes. We’ll go there sometime,’ I said carelessly.

  She turned to me. I’d last seen her with a gun in hand having just killed a man. She’d looked in a state of shock then. Now, a month later, her composure had returned. She was dressed in a fleece and jeans. The wind was blowing her hair about in a way that a fashion photographer might contrive to arrange. She was tanned, presumably from the Caribbean holiday. Had she curtailed it to come to Perama that night?

  She interrupted my thoughts. ‘Edward and I are making a fresh start. For the sake of the children,’ she added formally.

  ‘That’s good, Claire. You all deserve that.’

  ‘Yes. We really mean it too.’

  ‘Then it will work.’

  ‘I wanted …’ but I put my hand on her arm.

  ‘There’s no need for long explanations.’

  ‘I wanted to say that I love you.’ She spoke softly. ‘I can’t help that. I had to tell you.’

  She moved close to me and I took her in my arms.

  ‘It will pass,’ I told her. It sounded a lame thing to say.

  ‘When I saw you on the quayside that night I thought you were dying.’

  ‘You saved my life, Claire. And don’t think I don’t feel the same way about you. But if you’ve made your decision we will abide by it.’

  ‘You’re right, I know.’ She was trying hard to keep her composure. ‘What about Eleni?’

  ‘Eleni and I belong together. We’ve made our commitment to each other.’

  ‘How does it feel to be loved by two women, Angus?’

  ‘And to love two women? I’m struggling.’

  We walked on in silence as we headed back down towards the coast. We came to a beach I’d been to before. Like most of the beaches on the island, it was covered in flat, smooth pebbles. The sand began only when you entered the water. It was deserted. We lay down in the sun and after we’d warmed ourselves we swam, striking out fast in the cold water. After a while I returned to the beach and watched her moving with smooth, graceful strokes. Sunbeams were glittering on the patch of water just where she swam, points of sharp, brilliant light flashing with every ripple, and Claire in the middle, sparkling in a shower of diamonds as she cut through the water. She came out and I held a towel for her. She pressed herself against me and we kissed wet salty kisses. Then slowly, gently, I drew away.

  We sat in silence and watched the sun as it began to sink. Quite suddenly it seemed, the sea changed colour, turning into a sheet of shimmering gold.

  ‘A sea of gold,’ she said. And after a while she asked, ‘Do you think that’s how they saw it: seas of gold; limitless riches from a world free of rules and interference?’

  ‘Something like that,’ I said. ‘Lords of impunity, that’s what Alastair calls them.’

  After a while I broached something that was on my mind. ‘Why did Alastair let you shoot Hamilton-Hunter? Why didn’t he do it himself?’

  ‘It was personal.’ She was looking down as if searching for something amongst the pebbles. She picked one up and examined it. Then after a long time she looked up. ‘Years ago, shortly after I met you in Georgia, he came on to me. It was after a staff dinner. We were all staying in the same hotel up in Perthshire. It was a beautiful place. He came to my room. I should never have opened the door. He pushed his way in. It was very unpleasant.’

  ‘You don’t have to go into it, Claire.’

  But she continued. ‘He’d tried to charm me over dinner. But when he came to my room I’m sure now he was just seeking to exert his power, to gain control over me by means of sexual aggression … I resisted.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘And then he raped me, or that’s what it amounted to.’

  ‘Christ! Did he … did you report him?’

  ‘He was a big shot with influence, Angus. I was a junior trying to make a career for myself. No, I hid it, from Edward, from everyone, including myself. But that night in Perama, when I saw who it was and Alastair had confirmed it, I knew. I’d had my suspicions but now I knew. I had a gun. I had the training. And he would have killed you.’

  I put my arm around her.

  ‘I handled it. And I knew one day I’d get him. I just didn’t expect it to be there and then. I have no regrets. At first I felt shocked by what I’d done. Then I felt good about it.’ She hesitated. ‘I still do.’

  ***

  The following morning the three of us gathered round a table on Alastair’s terrace overlooking the bay. His little boat was in the water now, a pretty twenty-eight foot gaff-rigged yacht with dark blue hull and teak decking and cabin, moving gently on its mooring.

  Dimitra served coffee and a plate of loukoumades, fried pastry balls soaked in honey and cinnamon and sprinkled with powdered sugar. In ancient times they were served to Olympic champions. I wondered if Alastair had asked her to make them for the occasion.

  ‘Listen, Angus,’ he started. ‘I want to make this clear from the outset. I know you have questions but there are some things we simply cannot divulge whether you ask them or not. You must understand that. But everything I do tell you now is absolute fact.’

  ‘And just who exactly is “we”?’

  ‘You’ve asked me this before, and I’ve told you. The British government can’t have dangerous groups like the Revival running around destabilising already precarious parts of the world. They felt you needed a little help in your endeavours. We, in this case Claire and I, hav
e acted, at their behest, as proxies to the IMTF, who as you know, are not mandated to conduct this kind of operation themselves.’

  I turned to Claire. ‘How long have you been acting as the IMTF’s proxy?’ My words sounded more accusing than I’d intended.

  She faced me. ‘Actively? Only a few months. Since you uncovered the link between the frauds.’

  ‘Actively?’

  ‘Prior to that Claire was passive,’ Alastair interjected, saving her from saying it.

  ‘A sleeper you mean? Since when? Oxford?’

  She sighed. ‘The IMTF use many people like me, Angus.’ I knew it went a lot further than that. She’d been trained to kill, for God’s sake.

  ‘What about the Med Runner case then?’ I asked. ‘Was it a coincidence that you were there and making contact with Boris Kaliyagin, who would go on to become a part of the Revival?’

  ‘It was felt Claire would benefit from the experience,’ Alastair said. ‘Up to that point she had had very little field experience. But I believe now that Kershope, Hamilton-Hunter, or some other CMM staffer who was, or still is, a member of the Revival, saw the case file and decided Kaliyagin would be worth enrolling. It was fortuitous. The charterparty fraud they’d planned for the Med Runner hadn’t worked out, but the silver lining to that cloud was encountering Boris.

  ‘Of course, we had our suspicions long ago. You just confirmed them. You became our stalking horse, and a bloody good one at that. It was the only way to snare the bastards. You deserve one hundred and ten per cent credit for hunting them down and for setting the trap. Brilliant. You used two sprats and you caught the mackerel. Corralled them all in.’

  He was in danger of tripping over his own metaphors. ‘We intervened in Perama to finish off the job for you. That’s all. You knew we were planning to take over the operation. We discussed it when you were last up here. I just couldn’t give you the methodology. It was extremely sensitive getting the clearances from London and setting it up with the Greeks.’

  I didn’t pursue Claire’s role with him. Once I’d started digging into the fraud cases, she had effectively become my case officer without my knowing. It was a deception, one I would have to live with.

  ‘Sure,’ I said. ‘I set the trap without really knowing how I was going to spring it.’

  ‘You were winging it, eh Angus? Tends to be your style. But let me say, there are times when fortune favours the impulsive. There’s too much dithering and swithering these days; too much risk assessment in a risk-averse world. Your courage led us to a highly satisfactory conclusion. And in the end the whole matter was finessed beautifully.’

  ‘What about the rest of the Revival? Will they be prosecuted? Do we know who they are?’

  ‘Now that is sensitive too, but no, for now we won’t. The Revival was extremely opaque and there are jurisdictional difficulties. Their membership is not limited to the UK we now understand. But Claire will continue to delve discreetly and monitor them. They may attempt to re-form. My guess is they will, in which case, will they revive the links Kershope forged with the rogue factions within the FCO and the intelligence community? Incidentally, we believe those same factions were manipulating Kershope, using him and his organisation to achieve their own neo-imperialist ends. We don’t want to wade in now and end up amputating only one limb.’

  ‘So who do you work for ultimately then, you two spooks?’

  ‘As you well know, Angus, the IMTF.’

  ‘The IMTF’s just your cover. You’re with Defence Intelligence aren’t you. The Admiralty’s naval intelligence unit was never really killed off was it, just subsumed into the MOD.

  ‘And that was a black op you mounted in Perama, right? Who were those guys you used, the 71st Airmobile Brigade? “Pontos” they call them, don’t they?’

  ‘This is pure speculation on your part, Angus. You’ve been reading too many thrillers. I can understand why you would wish to have all the answers but I cannot comment further, except to say that “black op” is not a term I recognise. Incidentally, we will need you to sign the Official Secrets Act, old boy. Not that we don’t trust you, of course.’

  I’d wondered when that was coming. He resented my probing, but I wasn’t ready to give up just yet.

  ‘Who signed off on it, Alastair? Persuading a foreign military force to act on your behalf can’t have been straightforward, especially here.’

  ‘I can assure you, in the end they needed very little persuading. Criminal acts were being committed on their territory. And to be frank, I believe they were keen to prove themselves. They don’t get much credit for anything they do these days.’

  ‘So who signed it off on our side?’ I repeated. ‘The SIS or their masters at the FCO? How far up did it have to go? Or was it kept under the radar?

  ‘Let it go, man. God, I can understand why they value you. You’re so bloody persistent.’

  ‘I don’t like being kept in the dark.’

  He sensed my frustration. ‘I know that, but we won didn’t we?’

  I wasn’t so sure. Over twenty people had died even before the Greek Special Forces raid and now Alastair was talking of allowing the Revival to re-form.

  ‘No winners, Alastair. Only survivors.’

  ‘We don’t always get definitive answers in this business, Angus, just probabilities which we work with as best we can. And this time we were dealing with two particular individuals whose sanity, frankly, was in question.’

  ‘Kershope, yes. But what about Hamilton-Hunter? A psychopath?’

  ‘Undoubtedly. From what we’ve learned about him since Perama, he’d have passed the psychopath test with flying colours: charismatic, manipulative, grandiose estimation of himself, pathological liar, no sense of guilt, total lack of empathy, coercive, preyed ruthlessly on others, deceitful, violent. I could go on.’

  ‘And Barclay – a hired assassin?’

  ‘If anything, Barclay was even more complex. He was their hitman. An assassin is often motivated by political beliefs, but Stephen Barclay was a hired hand. You’d need to take a closer look into his background, which no doubt our people will be doing before the file is closed. He was with the Royal Engineers but attached to the Royal Marine Commandos you know, which is where he must have learned his lethal skills. At the end of the day though, he was a serial killer. It can become a habit, an addiction. They do it because they can and that gives them a rush – a sense of power and control.’

  He looked out across the bay. ‘You know, I watch the Eleonora’s falcons we get here in summer. They learn to kill for food. But they’re like all raptors – efficient killing machines not just preying for food but because it is their instinct to do so. Maybe there was something of the raptor in Barclay, the desire to hunt down and kill – because he could.’

  ‘How about the CMM?’ I said turning to Claire. ‘Was Grant in on all this?’

  Again, Alastair answered for her. ‘Grant is a friend. Of course he’s in the picture.’ Yes, I thought, I bet he is. Wasn’t ‘friend’ a euphemism for a fellow spook in their parlance? Yet at one point I had suspected he might be part of the Revival. At least I’d got that wrong.

  ‘So what was that charade all about when he fired me?’

  Claire answered. ‘His hand was forced. Not by H-H directly, by others who we now believe were Revival members acting at H-H’s behest.’ They knew you’d do less harm to the Revival’s fraud programme if you were no longer working for the CMM. For one thing you wouldn’t have access to the case files. Also, they reckoned you’d be too preoccupied with finding other clients to go nosing into their business. So Grant played along with them for the sake of the end game. Normally he’d have resisted. He did initially, until I filled him in.’

  ‘Grant knew of the Revival then?’

  ‘By then, yes. I had to tell him. We were trying to keep this covert. It was bad enough for Kershope to know you were onto him. We didn’t want him to think anyone else was.’

  ‘I see,’ I said. I wasn�
�t just the stalking horse, I was the fall guy as well.

  ‘What about the proceeds from the frauds? I never got far down that alley.’

  ‘They seem to have been laundered through several banks in Hong Kong and Zurich,’ Alastair said. ‘They’ve been damned difficult to trace but we will.’

  I had one more question. ‘How did you know about the palace coup within the Revival, Claire, the overthrow of Kershope I mean; was there a mole?’

  She looked across at Alastair. I knew I wasn’t going to get an answer.

  ‘Enough for now, old boy,’ Alastair replied. ‘Have another loukoumades.’

  CHAPTER 41

  I’d been on the island long enough. I was frustrated by Alastair and Claire’s evasiveness and the more I thought about it the more I realised how I’d been played. But it was Holy Saturday and in the evening Claire and I borrowed Alastair’s Land Rover and drove to the port to watch the ritual lament: the Procession of the Epitaphios of Christ, mourning his death on the cross. The symbolic coffin, with a carved canopy attached and decorated with flowers, was carried down from the church through the streets, accompanied by hundreds of islanders carrying candles. Bells rang the funeral toll. Balconies overlooking the procession were packed with people, all holding their lit candles.

  We climbed up a steep side street to a point above the harbour. A couple of years ago I’d sat up here with Eleni enjoying an ouzo and mezze as the sun went down. Now, darkness had long since fallen, and the bar had not yet opened for summer. The procession had reached the harbour and we looked down over the edge of the sheer cliff to watch the spectacle.

  ‘It’s poignant and beautiful both at once,’ Claire said. ‘I love the way the Greeks hold their rituals so close.’

  I was about to reply when I sensed a movement behind me. He could have pushed us both and we’d have plummeted over the low railings there and then but instead, as I was turning, he grabbed Claire from behind, his right hand clamped over her mouth before she could scream, his left gripping a knife. I lunged forward, reaching up to grab his left wrist but I wasn’t close enough in to gain the purchase I needed and the knife was plunging towards her shoulder.