A Sudden Death in Cyprus

by Michael Grant

  ‘Wait,’ I said. ‘The primary beneficiary of a dead Ramanda is Panagopolous, right? He’s the guy she was giving up.’

  ‘But he seems to have a foot in both camps, the pedos and the Russians. He works for ExMil and banks at AZX. But we also know he’s a trafficker, or at least was.’

  ‘Maybe he’s the go-between, the guy negotiating a separation between the two operations. Like a Wall Street lawyer working out a divestiture deal. The Russians don’t want to burn the pedos, they don’t give a damn about kids, they just want that whole thing as far away from them as possible. Which means getting the pedos off Feed the Forgotten’s cash flow. The pedos don’t want war with the Russian mob, but that whole NGO scam has been working pretty well for them.’

  I think we reached the same conclusion at the same time. I let her say it first.

  ‘The pedos killed Ramanda,’ Delia said. ‘They were most directly threatened if Panagopolous was busted and flipped. And they wanted to send a message to the Russians: we can play rough, too. And we will take risks …’

  She frowned, sensing that last bit wasn’t quite right. ‘Worse than that,’ I said. ‘They were signaling that on Cyprus they can do anything they like, as publicly as they like, because at least at this end of the country, the Paphos end, the British expat end, they had nothing to fear from public displays of ruthlessness.’

  ‘Kiriakou.’

  ‘Kiriakou,’ I agreed. ‘When can you arrange a very public murder and use it to send a message? When you’re the cops.’ I had my phone and opened my WhatsApp. ‘I’m texting my credit bureau guy.’

  ‘Applying for a mortgage?’

  ‘Finding out if Kiriakou has kids,’ I said. ‘After he confronted me at the mall, he bought a few things, including something from a kid’s clothing store. And I remember kids’ clothes on his credit card. My sex-worker friend fingered him as a danger to kids and like an idiot I assumed she meant he was just on the take. But Kiriakou shows up at Petra Romiou and is followed too soon by Berthold who just happens to be a board member of Feed the Forgotten. Berthold, who employs Breen and evidently has a desperate desire to stop us from poking our noses into things. And Kiriakou, according to Dame Stella, asked to attend the party and meet me. Why? Because he’s protecting the Russians? No, because Kiriakou is all about keeping the murder investigation from going anywhere, and I’m a wild card they weren’t expecting.’

  Delia nodded. ‘If I were here in an official capacity, I’d contact local authorities and get a warrant to search both Kiriakou and Berthold’s homes and offices.’

  I cocked an eyebrow at her. ‘You know I can still hear the ellipses, right? The dot-dot-dot?’

  ‘I would certainly never advise you to do anything illegal,’ Delia said without the slightest conviction.

  ‘Right. You draw the line at torture, but not at a bit of second-story work.’ I was about to call her a hypocrite, but the truth was we were pretty much on the same page. In fact, we were both in compliance with the prison code: property crime was one thing, child rape was a whole different monster. If Delia wanted to slice the cake that way, fine by me: it left me on her side, and, to my own surprise, I wanted that. I nodded. ‘Yeah, okay, I can live with that.’

  My credit bureau guy was up, it being just four p.m. on the west coast of the US. My app dinged. Two words: No kids.

  I smiled and showed my phone to Delia.

  ‘Kiriakou wears cheap clothes and shoes, shows no sign of corrupt money. But he’s childless and buys kids’ clothing,’ Delia said. ‘And can’t locate one of the few Africans on this all-white island.’

  I thought it over for a while and Delia let me do it. She was watching the hatching of a crime. I knew Kiriakou’s address in Tala, a large suburb of Paphos best known for being the ancestral home of Cat Stevens. Well, best known by Cat Stevens fans, anyway. Cyprus, unfortunately, does not have Google Street View, but I pulled up both the grid view and the satellite view on my laptop and I did not like the look of it.

  I sighed and said, ‘He’s a cop, living in a tight cluster of homes. He’ll have neighbors with eyes out for him, and he’s married so his wife may be home during the day. And he’s careful, it’s not like he’ll leave a signed confession lying out on the kitchen counter. But you know what? Just realized something. It’s not his house we want, it’s where he goes. It’s his car.’

  ‘You’re going to tail a cop in a Mercedes? Or even in my rental car?’

  ‘Nope. We’re going to track him. I have the two GPS trackers I took off my car. I’ll download the apps and see if I can get one or both working. Failing that we can just plant an iPhone and use the find-a-phone feature.’

  ‘You still need to get it on his car,’ Delia said, ‘And neither of us is inconspicuous or unknown to Kiriakou.’

  ‘I will do it.’

  Delia and I jumped and spun around and one of us yelped in surprise.

  Chante stepped out onto the patio wearing men’s boxers and a tank top emblazoned with a faded Ramones logo. She was cute enough, if you didn’t know she was evil, and she was acutely aware of being semi-clothed. Not because of me, of course, but because of Delia whom Chante favored with a shy smile.

  There followed the inevitable protests from me, demanding to know what the hell she was doing sneaking up on us at two in the morning, followed by the equally inevitable bland explanation that the plumber had not come, so of course she was on my couch, it was hardly her fault that I was so unobservant as to not have seen her.

  For the life of me I could not explain how it happened, but somehow I was the jerk. Again.

  ‘How much did your hear?’ Delia asked her.

  ‘Everything since I heard your voice, Delia.’ She leaned over my laptop, aiming her drooping neckline in Delia’s direction, and swiped around the maps application, looking for police headquarters. ‘There it is.’

  I annoyed my credit-bureau guy again and it cost me another five bills to find out the make and model of Kiriakou’s car. A five-year-old, tan VW Golf. There was only really one obvious route from Kiriakou’s home to his place of work. We could position Chante at an intersection on a scooter and she could track Kiriakou the last few blocks and see exactly where he parked his car.

  Delia said, ‘Chante, I have to tell you that this may be dangerous. There are some bad people involved, possibly a bad policeman.’

  ‘It is nothing.’

  Delia put her hand over Chante’s on the table. ‘Listen to me, I’m not joking. I can’t have you getting into trouble on my account.’

  ‘It would not be for you, Delia,’ Chante lied huskily. ‘But for the refugees. My family, too, were once refugees.’

  And damned if Chante didn’t pull it off, because by nine a.m. the next day, we had a tracker on Kiriakou’s car.

  And oh, the places he went.

  TWENTY-NINE

  While my uninvited semi-roommate was crawling under Kiriakou’s car for love of Delia, I drove up to the gate at Kofinou Refugee Funhouse and demanded to see Calix Petrides. I was not waved through, rather Calix came to see me. She was nervous about it and as we talked she shook her head no again and again, emphatically, for the benefit of anyone watching.

  ‘Mr Mitre,’ she said.

  ‘Ms Petrides.’

  ‘I have nothing to say to you.’ Big head shake. ‘If you had called, I would have saved you the trip.’

  ‘I’ll make this quick. The boat that came ashore the other night. My partner counted nine children on that boat. I want to know how many made it here.’

  ‘As I explained the other day—’

  ‘Yeah, I don’t have time for the bullshit, and neither do you because I’m guessing you want this over as soon as possible. See, Ms Petrides, there is trafficking in underage refugee kids going on and you don’t strike me as a woman who would have any part in that kind of thing. Am I wrong about that?’

  Old trick: put them on the back foot then create common ground that gives them a sense of safety
. You wouldn’t be involved in this bad thing, would you? Come, join me on Team Righteous.

  ‘Of course not,’ Petrides protested forcefully. ‘If I knew of any such thing—’ Another emphatic head shake for any observer’s benefit.

  ‘Yeah, yeah, but whoever warned you off me the other day either knew about it, or knew just enough to know he didn’t want anyone looking into it. That Irish guy. He’s with Feed the Forgotten, isn’t he?’

  I took silence as confirmation. Her face was troubled, not just nervous, but troubled. The way decent people look when they hear of something heinous. I made a mental note to log that facial expression and try it out myself. It might come in handy.

  ‘When the shit blows up, Ms Petrides, and boy is it going to blow up, it splatters all over the place. If you don’t want to be one of the splattered, the time is now.’

  She shook her head no and backed away. Even as she said, ‘Only six children were taken in from that boat.’

  I had Chante’s video on my phone. ‘See that girl? Beautiful little girl, isn’t she? Have you seen her here?’

  This time her negative head shake was for me.

  I showed her a boy. No, she hadn’t seen him, either.

  I let her go, drove a few hundred yards away and texted Mustafa.

  Telephone pole time.

  Where are you?

  Out the front gate, walk a quarter mile.

  Fifteen minutes.

  He made it in ten. The car actually bounced from the weight of him.

  ‘Thanks for coming,’ I said.

  ‘No, it is I who must thank you,’ he said moistly. ‘The other night was … it was … it had been a long time, you understand. And to meet Minette … A wonderful night.’

  ‘How did you get home that night?’

  ‘Oh, Minette drove me in the morning at first light. The sunrise was very beautiful.’ He smiled. ‘Very beautiful.’

  I hated him pretty hard right then, but we had business to conduct, and anyway it was no business of mine if Minette wanted the big lummox instead of someone more refined and sophisticated.

  ‘I came a bit too close to being dead the other night and I could use someone watching my back.’

  ‘Anything,’ he said, as grateful as a dog with a T-bone. ‘I can never repay you for the many hours of pleasure …’

  I considered choking him but recognized that my two hands would not go around his water buffalo neck. ‘How do you feel about guns?’

  That knocked the starry memories of Minette from his head. ‘Guns?’

  I produced a SIG Sauer that had been Breen’s. Delia had the other pistol. ‘I’m not a gun person, but some of the people we’re dealing with are, and I was able to obtain this one.’ Manly understatement, you see. Ruined a bit when I added, ‘He was ex-MI6. And there were two of them. Three if you count the one Delia took down.’

  But he was no longer listening. He’d taken the pistol, popped the clip, checked the chamber, looked down the barrel, and slid it under his coat. Almost as if he was a guy who was really familiar with guns.

  Just then I got a ping from Delia informing me that Chante’s GPS was live. Sure enough, when I opened the app there was a bright blue dot where the police station lot was.

  We met Delia outside a do-it-yourself store. She’d gathered a few useful things – bottled water, snack food, a couple of half-meter lengths of lead pipe and electrical tape, some thick zip ties, a pair of bolt cutters, a short crowbar, flashlights and two black canvas gym bags.

  ‘Lousy tradecraft,’ I chided her. ‘You always want to buy some extra stuff to throw off the … you know, to confuse people like you. And a potential jury.’

  We decided on separate cars, that way if we were spotted we’d have a backup vehicle. Chante drove with Delia, I got Mustafa.

  Kiriakou was on the move. We followed from a distance, and when he stopped we sent Chante to reconnoiter.

  ‘There was a robbery,’ Chante reported back. ‘He was called to the scene.’

  After that we tracked him back to headquarters, and then to lunch, and then to an apartment building where he entered accompanied by a uniformed officer, and then to a coffee shop.

  And then home.

  I had spent the entire day with Mustafa and it was enlightening. His view of Middle East history diverged somewhat from the usual narrative. His version was much more exciting and involved overlapping conspiracies dating back to the Knights Templar. But aside from the impromptu history lesson, we had accomplished nothing. The four of us assembled for dinner at a seafood restaurant just out of town and ate fish and drank wine and discussed Minette’s movie career with insights from Chante and Mustafa.

  Having not seen her movies, having in fact only seen photos on the internet which had only tangentially to do with movies, I sat glumly watching Kiriakou’s blue dot as it refused to do anything but sit in his driveway.

  Until just after ten p.m., when the dot moved.

  ‘Probably called to a crime scene,’ Delia said, but we piled into our cars and went after him. Out of Tala, the suburb where he lived, up into the hill country.

  It was full dark with a half-moon obscured by heavy clouds that had been rolling in all evening. The air carried the chill of impending rain. We stayed well back, well out of sight as Kiriakou drove on and up, on and up. But the maps left little doubt where he was going.

  The dot stopped. The satellite view showed us a small cluster of buildings, a farmhouse with a barn and another outbuilding at the end of a half-mile of dirt road. It was the place Panagopolous had stopped off the day before. Checking on the location’s security, maybe? Looking for someone, perhaps?

  I pulled off before the dirt road and Delia drove up beside me and rolled down her window.

  ‘This is it,’ I said.

  ‘There’s no way we can drive up that road.’

  ‘Nope.’

  We left the cars in the lay-by, as far back from passing headlights as we could get and started to hike. The possibility of cameras kept us off the dirt and gravel road, so we stumbled over endless rocks, picked our way around bramble patches, avoided stands of cactus and generally took far longer than a half-mile hike should take.

  We saw a vehicle’s lights coming up the road, strobing through the tree trunks. And ten minutes later, a second vehicle. Delia and I locked eyes and nodded: yes, this was feeling more and more like the place. The place for what, I wasn’t sure. I had some ideas, but I didn’t like them much and hoped it was just my overactive imagination at work.

  Like the world’s most mismatched special forces squad, we crept the last hundred yards in total silence, an FBI agent, a giant cockblocking Arab, a mean French lesbian, and a retired gentleman grifter and thief. And there it was: a farmhouse. And a barn. And a shed. And parked in front of the farmhouse, five cars, a BMW, a Citroën, a Toyota RAV, Kiriakou’s Golf and a cherry TR6.

  ‘This is when I would normally call for backup,’ Delia observed dryly.

  ‘Nah,’ I said, playing along, ‘and spoil the fun?’

  Mustafa had one bag, I had the other. Chante was to be our videographer. Delia and Mustafa had our two guns. I wrapped electrical tape around one of the pipes to form a grip.

  I’d felt right, in control, comfortable, with my little data theft from Petrides, and my nocturnal surveillance of the refugee center, and even creeping Tatiana the banker’s house. All of that was familiar territory, I could regress back into that life with the ease of sliding my toes into well-worn slippers. But things had taken a bad turn with Thorne Breen, a bad turn into danger of the violent kind.

  And he represented a threat even now, my friend Breen. He was Berthold’s tool, which meant he’d have briefed Berthold on our set-to. This could quite easily be a trap we were walking into. But I thought not. Berthold had all the arrogance in the world and a high-ranking cop in his pocket, he wouldn’t expect us to go over to the attack, certainly not this soon. He knew Delia was FBI and would reasonably expect her to make con
tact with local authorities, which would be blocked by Kiriakou.

  I was holding a lead pipe in my sweaty fist and asking myself with some seriousness exactly how one would use such a thing. Wondering how you know when a blow is hard enough but not too hard. Lead pipes and guns in the night are not part of my métier – though evidently toilet lids were – and the fear climbing up my spine was different in kind, not just degree. I could be killed right here. Tonight. Thirty seconds from now.

  I worried, too, that I might run. It had been nice of Delia to call me brave, but I’m the calculated kind of brave, the cost-benefits-analysis kind of brave. What I was feeling now wasn’t the hyper-alert, mind-racing-to-analyze-every-bit-of-data kind of fear that I knew well; that fear was a rush. This was not a rush, this was dread. I didn’t want to be doing this. I didn’t want to be here.

  I did not want to be around people with guns. I’m a sneak, a grifter, a glib bullshit artist with solid brass balls, but bullshit doesn’t work against bullets. A couple of pounds of pressure on a trigger … an explosion of gunpowder … a lead slug flying at a speed measured in feet per second. I’d written that scene too many times, it was vivid and real in my head.

  But what was I going to do, run away and leave Delia and Mustafa and Chante? The funny thing was that I was too much of a coward to do that. Not funny ‘hah hah,’ more funny ‘isn’t it ironic, Mr Master Criminal gets his brass balls shot off following an FBI agent.’

  I sucked air and tried not to sob on the exhale.

  We decided to start with the shed, which was nearest to the edge of the trees and farthest from the light spilling from the farmhouse windows and peeking through the seams of the barn’s timbers.

  The shed was padlocked. Delia whispered, ‘If we cut it, there’s no way to hide the fact.’

  ‘I got this,’ I said, pretty smug, and set to work with my picks and just like the movies had it open in three seconds … or possibly twenty minutes of whispered cursing and searching for dropped picks in the dirt, all without managing to inhale completely because my heart was beating the air out of my lungs.