by Glenn Roug
his face. I just saw a silhouette coming out of the cave entrance and disappearing, and then he was behind me."
"What is your name?"
"Ben Durand."
"Show me ID please."
"He took it. Also my money and a bag. I was robbed I tell you."
He nodded, half in understanding, half in frustration. "You from America?"
"Yes."
"Why did you come to Crete?"
"I'm a tourist."
Again the nod. He swiveled his chair to the other side, where a PC screen stood with its back to me, and asked me to spell out my name. He keyed it in. His facial expression did not change, but he said something into a microphone that was attached to the wall next to him. A moment later another officer appeared. The desk sergeant pointed to me, and the other officer went behind me and pulled one of my arms up and put handcuffs on it. He repeated it with the other arm before I was able to blink. "What are you doing?" I cried.
The desk sergeant stood up. "Ben Durand, I detain you."
"For what?"
"They will tell you."
"Who's they?" I shrieked.
"The FBI. Your FBI. They want to talk to you."
"Am I wanted for anything?"
"No. Not wanted. They want to talk to you. It's in the computer."
"If I'm not wanted for anything, then I don't want to talk to them."
He shook his head. "You have to. They coming now." He motioned with his hand and the other officer took me down a short corridor to a small cell with green and white walls and a single metal bench. I sat down on the bench and awaited the FBI agents. This time there was to be no evading them.
XV.
It took over two hours for the FBI agent to arrive. I wondered if this would be Terry or the driver of the car that picked me up or someone else who worked for K. But what would they be doing in Crete? The man who finally arrived was someone I did not know. He was in his late thirties, and dressed in a sports jacket. The local cops let him into my cell and closed the door behind him and went away. He smiled at me and flashed a badge. "Hello, Al. I'm agent Dan Rodriguez."
"I'm not Al. My name is Ben Durand."
"And I'll call you that when you legally change your name. Until then you are still Albert DeSalvo."
It was a losing battle and I did not want to prolong it any longer than I had to. "You work for K, right?" I asked instead.
"Who?"
"I don't know her full name. I assume it begins with a K based on the e-mail address she gave me. That's the woman who interviewed me when you guys first approached me. That's who I've been in contact with over the past couple of weeks."
He sat down on the bench beside me. "I work for someone named George."
I rubbed my forehead and looked down at the floor. I wished he was not there. "Look, I told her and her people and now I'm telling you: I don't want your help. I don't want you to hide me away. Your organization leaks everything to them. I can't trust you."
"Who's them?"
"You know very well who I'm talking about."
He nodded. "The organization you believe is after you."
His attitude upset me. I got up. "Believe? It was you guys who first told me about it. You guys who warned me. You guys who would have me change my name and go into hiding somewhere where they cannot reach me. Now all of a sudden it's 'the organization you believe is after you'?"
He reached a calming hand. "Take it easy. I'm here to help you."
I took a step away from him. "So were the other agents. You did a crappy job. You help me and inside of five minutes they find out where I am through your precious Bureau who can't seem to keep anything to itself. I had enough near-death experiences to last me a lifetime and I'm not hungry for more thank you very much."
"No leaks this time. No one will know I talked to you."
I pointed to the sergeant desk, which was visible at the end of the corridor. "He knows. It's in the computer now. If the database here knows, if you know, if your superior knows, then they know."
He had a confident smile that I hated: it was not his ass that was on the line; he had no right to smile about it. "No they don't," he said. "Trust me on that."
I began to pace up and down the cell. "Why should I trust you? Do you even grasp the danger I'm in? They're here. They're close. I was kidnapped today."
"I know you were kidnapped. I know all about that. They tied you up and put you in the back of a green truck. Am I right so far?"
I turned towards him as if stung by a bee. "How do you know all that? The color, too? I didn't know the color of the truck myself until after I escaped, and I didn't tell any of that to the desk sergeant."
The annoying smile never left his face. "I just know, and for now let's leave it at that. We are very close to cracking this."
"If I had a nickel for every time I heard that."
"This time it's true, Al."
I pointed to the desk again. The sergeant was still sitting there. "And that's another thing: how did you know who I was based only on the name I gave him? There's nothing in any database connecting Ben Durand with my real name."
He sighed and tilted his head to the side and closed his eyes for a moment as a school principal about to scold a misbehaving pupil. "You came into this country with somebody else' ID. That's not a good move. We found out."
I sat back down on the bench. "I thought that ID was foolproof."
"It was. But someone told us."
"You won’t tell me who of course."
"Of course."
What do you want from me now?"
"I want you to come with me."
"Where?"
"I can't tell you. Not in this place. You need to come with me; then you'll see."
Something was not right. He knew too much and gave away very little. He asked me to trust him but trusted me with nothing in return. It did not compute. He behaved differently from the FBI agents I knew. They left me alone when I asked them to; he would not. I did not like the idea of putting my life in his hands. "You have no jurisdiction here," I said. "You don't even have a right to question me."
"Yes we do. There is something called a proxy detention, by which, at the behest of the US government, friendly governments — like Greece's — may make their own citizens or people staying within their borders available for an interview with us. We asked and the Greek government consented. It's a simple process, especially if we ask to speak to a US citizen like yourself."
"Am I under arrest?"
He shook his head.
"Then I don't want to come with you."
He sighed again. "You are not under arrest yet. We can see to it that this changes. You came into this country with a fake passport and used this passport even when dealing with local law enforcement agencies. That is a federal felony and it may carry up to ten years in prison."
"That passport was not a fake."
"Technically no, but it belonged to someone else. It is still fraud. Now, given that you did that to save your hide and not to commit a crime, we may choose to look the other way. But only if you help us with the investigation. Otherwise we will put in an official request for extradition. You will be detained in a local prison until the process completes and then be transported back to the States in handcuffs to face charges. Is that what you want?"
He won. There was no way for me to leave this cell and be free again unless I cooperated with him. I was like a deer on the run from hunters who suddenly finds himself outside the forest on exposed ground with no trees to hide behind. This man sitting next to me held the key to my fate and there was nothing I could do about it. They will find out now where I was if they did not know already. The only thing left for me to do was hope that this man would prove better at fighting them off than the other agents I had met. "There was an agent who paid with his life for trying to protect me. Are you ready to make that sacrifice?"
"If necessary." He was calm. Was he naïve or another mole?
I had no arguments left. I nodded reluctantly. He called the sergeant and signed a paper and then walked me out of the police station and into his car. It was a rental, a small silver Toyota. He told me to get in and did not put handcuffs on me and did not insist that I sit in the back. "No handcuffs?" I asked.
"I told you you're not under arrest."
"Suppose I bolt at the first traffic light and you never see me again?"
He did not look at me as he answered, and his relaxed tone of voice never wavered. "You have no money and cannot leave the island, and you would stick out like the tourist that you are. How long d'you think it would be before the local police picks you up if we made you a wanted man?"
I had nothing left to say. It was pointless to argue with this man. He did not seem eager to make conversation, either. He did not even turn on the radio or hum. There was a confidence about him that did not require any outside stimulants to maintain. He focused instead on the road, peeking at his GPS from time to time to make sure he was on the right path. After a while I realized that we were going back to Mires. Of course, if he knew everything about me, he also knew which hotel I stayed in. But when we had nearly arrived at the inn he took a turn in another direction and brought us to a different part of town. We drove through a small residential neighborhood. Those were narrow, one-way alleys with the ubiquitous whitewashed two-story houses. Some of the houses had shops in the first floor, and here and there we passed an old man or woman sitting on a wooden chair outside them. Every few yards, a tree sprung out of a hole in the pavement to add a dash of green to the overwhelming white and grey of the town.
Suddenly he made a turn