by Jack Hardin
“Florin, do you remember not long after we first met, and I invited you to go ice fishing in Siberia?”
“How could I forget? I almost lost my toes to frostbite.”
“This problem. It is not dissimilar to that.”
“How so?”
“I am thinking of the man who cut his ice hole not far from us. The man who had been drinking too much vodka.”
Florin remembers like it was yesterday. The real horror of it all had never really diminished. “And what about him?” he asked.
“You are that man, Florin. You get Mother Russia on your hook, land her perfectly, and then fall into the hole yourself.” Mikhail shook his head. “I can only hope that, like that man, you don’t get stuck under the ice and drown.”
Florin had a sudden urge to get off the boat. To get his feet on solid ground and go for a long walk. Perhaps that’s what he needed. He would go for a walk in the city. It would help to loosen his legs—his thighs were already tightening—and ponder for the hundredth time a viable way out of his dilemma.
“You are still having the party here on your yacht next week, are you not?” Mikhail asked.
Florin’s gaze found the coastline again. He had planned a soiree to celebrate the most recent milestone of their project—and to break the news of the next phase of the project. But now there was nothing to celebrate. He forced a smile. “Yes. Of course.”
“Everyone is expecting it to be in Naples. Yet, here your yacht is in France?”
“It will be in Naples as scheduled.”
“Excellent. This is a challenging time for you, Florin. For me as well. I gave you a tremendous amount of my capital as well. And I vouched for you with the other investors. But the party will be a good chance for you to talk with them, to set things straight and set their mind at ease.”
“I have nothing to set their minds at ease with,” Florin snapped. “Do you think a solution is going to just fall out of the sky?”
Mikhail offered a thin-lipped smile. “Something will assert itself. I will not claim to know what. But stay the course. Things will work out. And if not, well… We’ll talk about that when the time comes.”
Florin stood up. Teto materialized from around the corner. “Teto, have Miren prepare the tender. And I will take it out myself. Tell him I do not need him to drive me. And let Saria know that Mr. Ivanov will be requiring a massage.”
“Of course.”
“Thank you,” Mikhail said.
“Stay as long as you wish,” Florin said. “I am going into the city for a while. Teto is at your service. If he can get you anything or have the galley make something for you, just tell him.”
“Thank you, Florin. I think I will do just that.”
Florin set his glass down and walked across the deck.
“Florin.”
He stopped and turned around.
“You are a smart man. You will find a way.”
Teto had the tender ready within minutes. Florin climbed aboard and got underway, trying to enjoy the easy ride over the smooth water of the bay. The vessel was beautiful. It was a Boesch 750 Portofino de Luxe, twenty-four feet of brown mahogany that gleamed like dark honey in the sunlight. The boat featured a rambling sundeck, a spacious cockpit for up to six people, and a wraparound L-bench with an air-cushioned, height-adjustable pilot’s seat.
The bimini was down and the breeze cool as he eased the throttle up and got the boat up on plane. He was at the marina in less than five minutes. An attendant was waiting for him, and Florin tossed him the bitter ends of the lines and waited for them to be secured to the dock cleats before turning off the engines. He climbed out, handed the attendant the key, and provided a general reference for when he might return.
Florin took his time walking into the city, strolling its cobbled streets with his hands in his pockets with no particular sense of destination. Soon enough, he found himself in the fashion district and mindlessly observed the contents of the shops’ windows.
He reached the end of the row, crossed the street, and slowly retraced his route. His gaze wandered across the street. He stopped.
Florin did not believe in God. His mother had been a devout Orthodox believer. When he was a young boy, she would drag him to services every week, where he would sit quietly in the cathedral as the priest droned on about things unseen. He had enjoyed singing, even if the angelic voices of the choir were made less ethereal by the addition of the common worshippers. But that was all he liked, and by the time he was ten or eleven years old, even that had lost any charm. In the end, his mother’s piety did not transfer to her son. Some people needed fairy tales to live by. He, however, did not and soon enough adopted the atheism of his father quite willingly.
But what he had just seen made him reconsider, even if for the briefest of moments. It was as if Prometheus himself had stolen a delicious idea and planted both the idea and the means to accomplish it directly into his mind. This was what the faithful referred to as providence. He had an urge to thank some higher power—but he couldn't, of course. As he reminded himself, such a power surely didn’t exist.
He brought out his phone and dialed a number. “Mikhail…” He paused, and when he decided his eyes were not playing tricks on him, that he had not had too much rum on the yacht, he smiled—a sweeping, wolfish grin. “I believe I have just discovered the solution to our problem.”
Chapter Two
Present Day
The private business jet crawled to a stop on the tarmac, and the engines wound down as the captain switched them off. I stood up and grabbed my pack from the chair beside me, shouldering it as I made my way to the open door at the front of the fuselage. The stairs lowered, and after thanking the captain and co-pilot for the safe and smooth ride, I stopped at the edge of the top step and took in a deep breath of fresh morning air.
The climate in Athens wasn’t much different from the one I had left behind in the Keys twelve hours earlier. It was sunny, in the mid-seventies, and infused with the fresh, subtle scent of saltwater.
I made my way to the bottom of the stairs where a golf cart waited for me on the tarmac. A young man wearing a red beret and the mountain camouflage of the Greek Military jumped out and extended his hand. We shook. “Agent Savage. I am Lieutenant Ambrosia. How was your flight to Greece?”
“Fine, thank you. How far to the base from here?”
“Twenty minutes across the city.” He took my pack and placed it on the rear seat. After we settled into the front, he disengaged the brake and got us underway. “A temporary command center has been established at base headquarters. General Diakos is coordinating an effort with the Athens police chief, your ambassador, and various intelligence services.
“Have any leads surfaced yet?”
“No, I’m afraid not.” The lieutenant guided the golf cart through a narrow gate in a long run of chain link fence crowned with concertina wire and headed into the section of the airport zoned for military use. Up ahead, short rows of twin-engine Chinooks, Bell 205 transport helos, and F-16 Fighting Falcons, sat on the tarmac, all of them perfectly staged and ready for the next drill or deployment.
Lieutenant Ambrosia pulled up beside a desert brown Iveco Light Multirole Vehicle, the Italian version of the ubiquitous Humvee, and got out. Grabbing my pack from the golf cart, I joined him in the Iveco. Within five minutes we had passed out of the airport and were at cruising speed on the highway, heading for Ayioi Anargyroi Military Base on the west side of the city.
I looked out my window and caught a glimpse of Mount Parnitha to the north as I found myself on my third continent in less than a week. Greece was one of the more popular tourist destinations in the world; people came from every corner of the planet to walk the sacred ruins of the Acropolis, the Roman Agora, the party resorts of Mykonos, and to visit its sun-soaked coasts while enjoying the gracious climate. I had always wanted to visit myself, but not under the current circumstances.
Six days ago, I was at the helm of a luxur
y catamaran, sailing back from the Dry Tortugas when I was called back from the much-needed time away to meet with the Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security, Jonathan Watts, and the Director of Joint Interagency Task Force South, Coast Guard Rear Admiral Marvin Speights.
Sitting in a secure conference room at NAS Key West, I was told that the previous day a Peruvian local had walked into a police station in Lima, claiming to have information on an attack being planned on a high-level American target in the region. An agent working out of our DEA office down there took down all the relevant information and secured a safe house for the man who had been brave enough to risk the leak. But after that, things didn't go as planned. Later that evening, they were tracked down and before they had arrived at the safe house, dozens of rounds of semi-automatic gunfire had been discharged, leaving our agent dead in a city alleyway and the informant vanishing without a trace.
Watts and Speights commissioned me to not only find the missing informant, but to assess if his information was even credible, and, if so, to identify the target of the planned hit. I was on a plane headed south before the sun went down.
Throughout the following days, I traversed the urban slums of Peru and the isolated jungles of Brazil, stowed away on a cargo plan run by South American drug dealers, and teamed up with a band of state-sponsored mercenaries. The investigation finally terminated in a bloody firefight on the streets of Rio de Janeiro.
There had indeed been a conspiracy targeting a high-level American. As it turned out, that target just happened to be the very man who sent me to investigate the claim in the first place, Jonathan Watts. A powerful Rio businessman was out for revenge after his wife had been killed in a local raid spearheaded by Homeland Security. In a move that was still being investigated, Augusto Santillo had gotten a glimpse into Watts’s travel itinerary, and when Watts arrived in Rio for a meeting at Brazil’s Ministry of Justice, Santillo’s pinchers closed down on his short motorcade, ambushing it just north of downtown.
Amid brass casings pinging the pavement, RPGs detonating, and depraved hitmen looking for blood, I managed to get Watts out of harm's way before paying Augusto Santillo an unexpected visit at his high-rise office downtown.
I had hardly returned home to Key Largo and started on my first beer when my phone rang. It was Jonathan Watts. Answering that call would have me leaving my favorite watering hole and taking off on a private jet to Greece within the hour.
My boss, Kathleen Rose, reported directly to Deputy Director Watts. After deciding to take her first real vacation in years, Kathleen had flown to southeastern Europe and stepped aboard a cruise that, over the next two weeks, took her across the Mediterranean with stops in Athens, Mykonos, Cyprus, and Catania. Prior to that, she had spent a week at a luxury hotel in Barcelona. Kathleen wasn’t married and didn't have a boyfriend. The only familial relationship she had outside of work was her foster daughter, Zoe Cross. Through a series of events associated with a previous investigation of mine, seventeen-year-old Zoe had been transferred out of the Louisiana state foster system and had come to live with Kathleen, who had welcomed the girl with open arms.
Other than daily photos and the occasional phone call to Zoe, Kathleen had taken her vacation completely unlike the workaholic that she was. During the entire time she’d been away, she had only called me twice and called into the office just three or four times. She seemed to be taking the whole concept of a vacation more seriously than anyone had anticipated.
While my feet were dangling off a dock over the saltwater and I was talking with my girlfriend, Charlotte, about the recent events down in Brazil, Watts had called to inform me that Kathleen had gone missing.
Her final calling port had been Port Piraeus in Athens, where her Seabourn cruise docked early yesterday morning and planned to cast off for open water again at 1800 hours. Kathleen had disembarked and then failed to return. The ship’s captain had to leave without her.
Cruise lines have to accommodate the frequent risk of passengers losing track of time and failing to return in a punctual manner. There are always stragglers. A small party may have had too much to drink and start making their way back to the boat without the proper enthusiasm. Somteimes guests get lost returning from an excursion or just simply loose track of time. And then others enjoy the thrill that comes with flirting with irresponsibility, arriving back at the last possible second. Cruise lines are on tight schedules for good reason. Leaving late from a port of call means they have to use more fuel to make up the time. More fuel means more money that they wouldn't have to spend otherwise. So they set a hard deadline for passengers to return. When that time expires, any guests who failed to return are left to find their own way to the next or final port of call.
Seabourn Cruises had notified Kathleen’s primary emergency contact of her failure to board in Athens. Because of her elevated position in a federal executive agency, and because her work entailed bringing down some of the most ruthless drug cartels and terrorist networks in North and South America, Kathleen’s emergency contact was an agency administrator at Homeland’s headquarters in Washington D.C.
Headquarters tried calling her cell phone with no luck. They pinged her location. Her cell phone’s GPS was not issuing any signal. A hurried look into her recent texts and emails inferred no prior plans to remain in Athens. Her belongings were still in her cabin; nothing appeared to be missing. She had simply vanished. Gone without a trace.
Now, sixteen hours later, there was still no sign of her. What everyone had initially hoped was just a misunderstanding of some kind was now being treated as an aggressive, nonvolitional disappearance—murder or kidnapping.
Things were already moving. CIA assets in the region had been put on alert, and Army Special Forces had deployed out of Fort Bragg and were on standby in the event that Kathleen was located and required a covert and clandestine rescue.
Lieutenant Ambrosia exited the highway and turned onto the main road that led to the military installation. Tall, slender firs lined both sides of the street. Ambrosia brought the Iveco to an abrupt stop in front of a yellow concrete barricade. An armed enlisted soldier stepped out of the guard post and checked Ambrosia’s credentials before waving us around the barricade.
The base’s buildings, like most military installations around the world, were an eclectic mix of old and modern architecture, the more recent administrative buildings and barracks a testament to the military’s more recent expansion. After driving deep into the base and passing a motor pool and a well-groomed parade field, Ambrosia pulled to the curb in front of a large, three-story neoclassical building. Its white columns and marble walls gleamed in the bright sunlight. A flagpole displayed the blue and white striped flag of Greece, and another held the white compass of NATO.
“If you don’t have anything in your baggage that you would like to keep close,” Ambrosia said, “then I will ensure it is placed in a room we have designated for you in the barracks.”
My .45 was on my hip. It was all I needed. “That would be fine, thank you.” We exited the vehicle and I followed him up the front steps and into the base’s headquarters. Ambrosia removed his beret as we stepped inside and acknowledged a soldier behind the front desk. We took an elevator to the third floor and entered a wide room. Over a dozen people were working at their computers, on phones, or in a conference with a colleague. Clearly, Greece wanted to get out in front of what could end up becoming a major diplomatic disaster.
A distinguished man in military dress greens noticed us and made his way over from across the room. His peppered mustache was perfectly groomed and his brown, hawkish eyes were piercing. He presented a perfectly curated bureaucrat's smile.
Ambrosia snapped a salute that was immediately returned, albeit with less enthusiasm. Ambrosia said, “Agent Savage, this is General Diakos. General, allow me to introduce you to Special Agent Ryan Savage with Homeland Security.”
“Ah, yes.” Diakos offered his hand, and we shook. “You just missed your ambassador
. He came to personally review the command center we have established.”
“Lieutenant Ambrosia suggested that there hasn’t been any progress in the search?” I asked, getting right to the point.
Diakos grimaced slightly. “I am afraid not. But please be assured that we are working on it. I have been commissioned to lead the domestic task force in charge of finding Ms. Rose. She went missing in our country, and Greece is committed to taking whatever steps are necessary to find her.” He gestured across the room. “Over there is a technical unit with our Military Police, and over here is an agent with Greece’s National Intelligence Service—our version of your CIA. And the Hellenic Police Service is using those desks. All of them will be sharing any and all information. For the duration of this investigation, they all report to me.”
“What do we have so far? I was told that some video footage at the port appeared suspicious.”
“That has been cleared up. Unfortunately, it does not apply to Ms. Rose’s disappearance.”
“What does it apply to?” I asked.
“A woman was kidnapped at the port last night, just three commercial slips from where Ms. Rose’s cruise ship was. A prostitute. She was found alive early this morning, and the men who took her have been apprehended. They know nothing about Ms. Rose’s disappearance, and their alibis from before they took the young woman have checked out. My team has thoroughly vetted them and their known associates regarding this incident.”
“What did Kathleen visit after disembarking in Athens?”
“Come with me.” Lieutenant Ambrosia dismissed himself, and General Diakos led me through a maze of desks to the rear wall of the room where a large map of Greek’s largest city hung. Three red-tipped pins and a solitary blue one were placed on the map. Diakos pointed to a red pin. “Ms. Rose disembarked at 1008 and took a taxi to the Acropolis, where she remained for nearly two hours.”