“Hey, guys, turn on the television!” Maggie raced into the office and straight for the TV remote. She tuned to a news channel, catching a reporter in midsentence. “No explanation yet for what went wrong, but the tragedy couldn’t have come at a worse time for the family. Its patriarch has been engaged in a protracted battle to salvage the family’s reputation, but now this.”
“What the hell is this?” yelled Yianni at the TV.
Maggie pointed. “It’s there on the chyron running across the bottom of the screen.”
PUBLISHER OF LEADING ATHENS NEWSPAPER DIES IN HELICOPTER CRASH.
“Can’t be,” said Yianni.
Andreas stared at the screen. “I hope no one else died.”
“I heard it was just him. He had a helicopter-pilot license.”
“Where did it happen?” asked Yianni.
Maggie pointed at the TV as the reporter continued. “We’re here with the Naxos chief of police, who’s taken personal charge of the investigation. What can you tell us?”
“Hey, it’s Dimitri!” said Yianni.
“We know,” said Maggie, putting a finger to her lips.
Dimitri spoke directly into the camera. “The matter is currently under investigation by the U.S. military. What we know so far is that a United States drone based on Crete unexpectedly locked on to the victim’s helicopter as it flew from Naxos to Crete and launched a missile that destroyed the helicopter in midair. As yet, the United States has offered no explanation for how such a tragic accident could have occurred.”
“Seems poetic justice, doesn’t it?” snipped Maggie. “Dimitri reporting on the investigation of the publisher’s accidental death.”
“Turn it off,” said Andreas.
“Why? He’s not done yet,” said Yianni.
Andreas barked, “I said turn it off.”
Maggie turned it off. “What’s bothering you, Chief? Were you wishing he’d die, and now that it’s happened, you feel guilty?”
“Maybe.”
“Or maybe what else?” asked Yianni.
Andreas ran his hands through this hair and ended by rubbing the heels of his hands into his eyes. He looked at them and exhaled. “Maybe I could have prevented this.”
“How?”
“I don’t know, but with so many people angry at this guy, I should have done something to dampen down their rage.”
“Bullshit,” said Yianni. “You always took the high road.”
“While letting everyone else take the low,” mumbled Andreas.
“STOP. Enough already,” said Maggie. “This guy had more people wanting to kill him than lined up to murder Samuel Ratchett on the Orient Express. No way you could have stopped them all.”
“Not to mention that one of us would have had to do the job that drone did if that piece of shit had ever tried hurting your family.”
Andreas rubbed at his eyes some more.
A message ping came through on Andreas’s mobile. He looked at the screen. “It’s from Nikoletta. Just after the publisher’s death was announced on the news, she received an anonymous comment to one of her online columns. The one titled, ‘I Defend My Friends.’” Andreas cleared his throat. “It reads, ‘As you see, I also defend my friends. Your fan, Soter.’”
Read on for an excerpt from Island of Secrets
Book 10 in the Chief Inspector Andreas Kaldis Mystery series.
Available now!
Chapter One
He never wondered about the purpose of life or how he turned out as he had. It all just sort of happened. He became a cop because he saw it as the surest way for a kid born into Greece’s working class in the tumultuous early 1960s to make a living. He got lucky when, after the fall of the Military Junta in 1974, he joined the youth movement of a left-wing political party that came to power in 1981 and remembered to reward its loyal friends.
As he rose in rank, the more friends and money he made, the more power he amassed. He kept careful track of where the bodies were buried and possessed an uncanny instinct for digging up the ones he needed to achieve his purposes. An effort by the opposition party to paint him as corrupt failed when the prosecution’s main witness died in a boating accident. An investigation into the witness’s death faded away soon after he announced his decision to retire from the Hellenic Police force with the rank of colonel.
That’s when he began to make truly big money, capitalizing on his contacts and former position as head of police for the South Aegean Region, home to Greece’s most popular tourist islands for the rich and hard-partying globe-trotting crowd.
Tonight, the Colonel was far away from all that glitz and glamour. He sat in a restaurant in a nondescript, middle-class eastern suburb of Athens, virtually equidistant from downtown Athens, its port town of Rafina, and Venizelos International Airport.
“A convenient place for a meeting,” said the one who’d arranged it.
The Colonel leaned back in his chair and yawned. The conversation had been as boring as the meal. Everything about the place was mediocre, from its tired, thirty-year-old decor to the hookers at the bar, and the ruddy-faced, pudgy man sitting across the table from him who had yet to say why their mutual business acquaintance thought they should meet.
“Am I keeping you awake, Colonel?”
“Barely.”
Ruddy Face smiled. “How do you like my place?”
The Colonel leaned forward. It was long past time to get down to business. “If this is your joint, why don’t you just tell me why you wanted to meet? You sure as hell don’t need my services to run this operation.”
“You’re right, it’s a dump.” Ruddy Face paused. “But I have plans.”
“What sort of plans?”
“I’m buying a club on the islands. It’s going to be first-class in every way.” He nodded toward the bar. “Including the girls.”
“Which island?”
“One you control.”
“Control is a mighty big word.”
Ruddy Face smiled. “Let’s just say, I don’t like the idea of getting involved in a business where my investment isn’t secure.”
“That’s prudent of you.”
“Can you help me?”
“If you’re asking for security, the answer is yes.”
“I’m talking about protection for all aspects of my business.”
The Colonel shrugged. “It’s all a matter of price. You tell me what you want, and I’ll tell you what it will cost you.”
“I hear you’re pricey.”
“You heard right. But I make sure things run smoothly.”
“How do you do that?”
“I don’t have competitors stirring things up, jockeying for business. I maintain order among the chaos.”
“They might see things differently.”
“If by they you mean competitors, there are no they on my island. I’m the only game in town.”
“I get your point,” said the man. “I’m sure we’ll come to terms.”
“If you want to open a club where I’m in business, I’m sure we will.”
The Colonel declined an offer of coffee, and the two men agreed to talk again once Ruddy Face had a better idea of what he might need from the Colonel.
He walked the Colonel to the front door, shook his hand, thanked him for coming, and wished him safe travels. “Kalo taxidhi.”
But the Colonel only made it as far as the front door of his Mercedes.
* * *
Greece’s General Police Headquarters, better known as GADA, sat close by the heart of Athens’s bustle, next door to a major hospital, down the block from Greece’s Supreme Court, and across the street from the stadium of one of Greece’s most popular soccer teams. GADA’s Special Crimes Unit, charged with investigating potential corruption and other matters of national concern—at
least those that piqued the interest of its Chief Inspector Andreas Kaldis—occupied the eastern side of the fourth floor.
Andreas had been at his desk since shortly after sunrise. With two early-rising young children at home, it wasn’t unusual for him to flee the morning domestic chaos for the relative calm of tracking down bad actors. His wife, Lila, never seemed to mind when he abandoned her to the ruckus, undoubtedly because she rightly considered him an active accessory to their children’s early-morning mischief.
It wasn’t as if he were leaving his wife alone to deal with their son and daughter; she did have a housekeeper and nanny to help, a decidedly suspicious luxury on an honest cop’s salary. But all of that, and more, had come with his marriage to the daughter of one of Greece’s most respected and wealthiest families. He appreciated his good fortune and considered himself a lucky man.
Too bad he couldn’t say the same thing for the guy plastered all over the morning news headlines: RETIRED POLICE COLONEL STAVROS AKTIPIS ASSASSINATED. That summed up virtually everything the various news stations had to report on the shooting, though they tried their best to spice up their coverage with references to corruption allegations that had haunted the victim.
All the allegations preceded Andreas’s time as chief of Special Crimes, but he’d heard the stories and much more about the Colonel. Instinctively, Andreas believed the victim had been corrupt, for the system far too often brought temptations to one in his position. Yet, if Andreas pursued every case of official corruption brought to his attention, he’d need all the offices in the building to house his staff—not to mention an unimaginable number of additional prosecutors.
Compounding all of that, innovative criminal types from around the world kept introducing new schemes and methods into Greece that added to his caseload. Overwhelmed as his unit was, and Greece a decade into a crippling economic crisis, he knew he’d be wasting his time asking for more support from the government. That left Andreas with little choice but to pursue the most egregious offenders, hoping to make an example of them in a manner that discouraged others from doing the same.
What happened last night to the Colonel, he knew, would be headed straight for his desk, in a file marked NASTY in all-red letters. The Colonel had been murdered for a reason, and it wasn’t robbery. His wallet, filled with euros, and an expensive watch were untouched. Three quick bullets to the back of his head as he stood at his car door. No witnesses, and no terrorists claiming credit for the killing. At least none so far.
Andreas held a remote in his right hand, surfing through local news coverage on the wall-mounted TV screen to his right, while drumming the fingers of his left hand on his desktop. He looked at his watch. Detective Yianni Kouros should be at the scene by now. Andreas had called him at home as soon as he’d heard the early morning news. Yianni had been his right-hand man since their days together on Mykonos, back when Andreas was the island’s police chief and Yianni a brash young bull of a rookie cop.
Andreas bit at his lip. Killing cops, retired or not, wasn’t something even the most hardened criminals undertook lightly, especially when the victim was an ex-colonel. He’d been assassinated for a serious reason, most likely with the blessing of serious people. That’s why he’d sent Yianni to the scene. He wanted his own people in on the investigation from the start. Screw-ups early on—unintentional or otherwise—haunted investigations, at times serving as a convenient pretext for bad guys getting away with murder. Not this time, though. Not if Andreas could help it.
Yes, this definitely would be a nasty one.
Island of Secrets
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Acknowledgments
Anastasia Antoniadou; Mihalis, Roz, and Spiros Apostolou; Marios Assimakopoulos; Vassilis Condilis; Diane DiBiase; Andreas, Aleca, Mihalis, and Anna Fiorentinos; Eleftherious Fiorentinos; Flora and Yanni Katsaounis; Panos Kelaidis; Giannis Nikiforou Konstantakis; Bogdan and Martina Kopec; Vicky Koromina; Marine Lascaris; Nikoletta Lianos and Dimitris Lianos; Linda Marshall; Tottie Mitchell; Terrence, Karen, and Rachel McLaughlin; Barbara G. Peters and Robert Rosenwald; Amargyros Protonotarios; Spyros Protonotarios; Dora Rallis; Alexander Reichardt and Katharina Bolesch; Grand Master Mark Shuey (founder of Cane Masters); Jonathan, Jennifer, Azriel, and Gavriella Siger; Ed Stackler; Yiannis Vassilas and Sophia Dimakopoulou; Barbara Zilly.
And, of course, Aikaterini Lalaouni.
About the Author
Photo by Thanasis Krikis
Jeffrey Siger was born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, practiced law at a major Wall Street law firm, and later established his own New York City law firm, where he continued as one of its name partners until giving it all up to write full-time among the people, life, and politics of his beloved Mykonos. A Deadly Twist is the eleventh novel in his internationally bestselling and award-nominated Chief Inspector Andreas Kaldis series, following up on Island of Secrets (first published as The Mykonos Mob), An Aegean April, Santorini Caesars, Devil of Delphi, Sons of Sparta, Mykonos After Midnight, Target: Tinos, Prey on Patmos, Assassins of Athens, and Murder in Mykonos.
The New York Times described Jeffrey Siger’s novels as “thoughtful police procedurals set in picturesque but not untroubled Greek locales,” and named him as Greece’s thriller writer of record. The Greek Press called his work “prophetic,” Eurocrime described him as a “very gifted American author…on par with other American authors such as Joseph Wambaugh or Ed McBain,” and the City of San Francisco awarded him its Certificate of Honor citing that his “acclaimed books have not only explored modern Greek society and its ancient roots but have inspired political change in Greece.” He now lives in Greece.
A Deadly Twist Page 27
