by Glenn Smith
Flint asked the room number of Mohammed Bahaar. The woman behind the desk demurred until one of the soldiers spoke with her in Greek. She said his room was the entire fifth floor, their premier VIP area.
One soldier knocked at the door. No response. They waited, knocked again. The door was opened by the man who was talking to Ava when Flint was hustled out of the hotel.
Bahaar was nowhere in the suite. His well-spoken emissary, Jafe, could not say when his employer would return. He had been called away suddenly. Mr. Bahaar had asked Dr. Milan to examine the woman who reclined on the sofa seeming to be asleep. The woman's companion from the restaurant was no longer present. He had left when Bahaar departed.
Ava picked up Mary's hand bag and walked toward the door. Flint followed her out. One soldier left with them. Downstairs the soldier said that the officer in charge of the detail would be back in touch if they needed to talk further.
It would soon be an hour past midnight. Ava asked Flint how he felt about heading back to Naples.
"Let’s go," he said. He quickly told Ava about the Russian truth serum and Bahaar’s intent to get information about her from Flint but that the Greeks had used it on his captors instead.
"I have things to tell you," Ava continued, "but I will do it as we fly. Let’s get out of here."
Flint changed enough money for the taxi. They stayed silent during the nine mile drive that took twenty-seven minutes. No point in giving the driver information to sell to anyone.
The Sabreliner was on the ramp. Flint removed the wheel chocks, performed a normal preflight inspection, entered the cabin door after Ava, and took the left seat. By then the sleepy line-boy had the Auxiliary Power Unit connected. Flint filed IFR with air traffic control while the left engine fan spun faster and faster. He was saying the clearance details back as he lit the engine’s fire, then did the same for the right engine.
Ava squeezed Flint's arm as he taxied but stayed silent because he was busy with a check list. As the nose gear lifted off the runway to a climb attitude, Ava started telling him what had transpired in Bahaar's room. Eight minutes and twenty-seven seconds later. he leveled at 33,000 feet, set the throttles for Mach .71, trimmed for efficient cruise. By then he knew that Mo had threatened Ava with exposure as a teen aged call girl if she did not hypnotize the bronze beauty in his room. Flint also knew that the purpose of the hypnosis was to program the woman to have sex with four men whose names Bahaar had supplied.
"So what did you do?" Flint asked.
"I used an instant induction and she went into a deep trance," Ava confided. "I didn't do it to keep Mo from exposing my past. He will probably do that anyway. He likes to inflict pain, not only as a pressure tactic but also to watch a person hurt for no reason."
"He told you that?"
"He only hinted, but I know his personality type. He implied that you would be tortured if I failed to cooperate. He left the impression that someone else had made that decision, but he lied. He can't rest unless he knows that he is supremely in charge."
The reason I want to get out of Athens fast is that I took a big chance."
"Tell me."
"I had Pagana, that’s the woman’s name, in a deep trance quickly. I spoke to her in Italian. She doesn't know English and I don't speak Greek. Pagana knows Italian fluently as does Mo who was right there watching and listening. Suddenly he got a phone call that sent him out the door. His unexpected departure left his factotum, Jafe, and me with Pagana. I did some fast experimenting and concluded that Jafe doesn't know Italian.
"So you didn't do what Bahaar ordered you to do?"
"That's right. In fact I did the opposite of what he directed. I learned from Pagana that she is a party girl who likes sex but does not need money. She had sex with Mo three times about a month ago. He has since watched her once with Jafe, but he has expressed no more erotic interest for himself. She does not know the four men whose names Mo handed me written on a sheet of hotel letterhead.
I hypnotized Pagana to not have sex with the four guys. In fact I hypnotized her to have no sexual interest at all for the next thirty days. And I put a hypnotic seal on her so no one else but me can hypnotize her. I suggested that she would spend private time with each of the four and that she would tell anyone who asked that she did have sex with each during the private time. I left her with no conscious memory of the suggestions that I made during the session."
“That was a bold move! Hats off to you,” Flint said in admiration. “What happened to her escort?"
"He left with Mo. I think he is part of the Bahaar coterie."
Flint caught Ava up on his conversations with Zeta and Harry. By then, Napoli Radar assigned Four Six Double Tango the Instrument Landing System (ILS) approach to runway 24. Fog had settled in.
Visibility was down to fifty meters. Any less and the airport would have closed. Naples approach handed the Sabreliner off to the tower. On final, Flint could see no light outside of the cockpit. Crossing the middle maker with half a mile to the runway, still no outside lights were visible. Flint’s right hand was poised on the throttles. Seconds ticked off on the elapsed time readout. One more second and he would push the throttles open, declare a missed approach. Intense runway approach lights began to glow fuzzily. Suddenly Flint saw four dim dots of light on either side of the runway, not distinct but enough. He pulled the throttles back as his left hand kept the nose up until the main tires squealed. Then he let the nose wheel touch. Reverse thrust and brakes applied, Flint’s eyes were on the directional gyro which did not vary from 240° as the aircraft slowed noisily. He might get chewed out for too many decibels of reverse thrust, but it was better to awaken the neighbors at 2:27 A.M. than run out of runway in the fog.
Flint used some of the final two thousand feet of runway to slow down to taxi speed. Soon he saw the dim outline of Terminal One, recently refurbished and brightly lighted. The airport serves both military and civilian aircraft. Ground control directed the Sabreliner to the military part of the field, assigned a parking spot at the edge of the military buildings. A pickup truck with “Follow Me” in bright florescent lights slowly led the way.
With the plane secured, and refueling underway, Ava borrowed Flint’s phone and called Gina. Thirty five minutes later, Gina herself unlocked the gate to let Ava and Flint enter her garden and then the house. Ava brushed her teeth and turned in. Flint accepted a blanket and pillow from Gina for use in the library where he would sleep on one of the leather sofas.
Flint draped his blazer over the back of a strait backed chair at the desk and removed the very heavy army .45 from the right hand pocket. The MP officer had not asked for it. As Flint examined it closely for the first time, he noticed how perfect the piece was—no scratches, quiet slide, magazine came out smoothly, not like the government issue model he had qualified with many years earlier in the Marine Corps. Someone had spared no expense in assembling this one from specially prepared components.
As he laid the pistol carefully on the desk top, Flint’s phone sounded. Laura Syms said, “hi, Flint.”
“Hey Laura. It’ll be 4:00 A.M. here in a few minutes. Where are you? What’s up?”
“I’m at Casa Chapala, a Mexican café in Austin at the corner of San Jacinto and Caesar Chavez. Do you know it? I’m waiting for Zeta and her partner Christine to meet me for dinner. It is nearly 9:00 in the evening here.”
“Say hi to Christine for me,” Flint requested. He had met Christine and Zeta in Punta del Este, Uruguay two months earlier in a story that has been told in Erotic Resolution. “Ava and I landed a little over an hour ago in Naples. We just got to Gina’s house.”
“Zeta told me that a moment ago. She tracked your phone’s GPS. I’m calling to tell you that I have a bad feeling about Freddy.”
“Gina said she can’t locate him,” Flint said.
“I haven’t told you till now, but I sometimes get strong intuitions that usually turn out to be right. I have one of those now. But I don’t know if it m
eans Freddy is dead . . . or if it means he is not to be trusted. I keep thinking I hear him whispering. I’m not sure if I hear him say “help” or if he is saying “hate.”
“When did the whispers start?”
About noon my time, nine hours ago. The fifth time was right before I dialed you. I had parked in the Chapala lot behind the café. I closed my eyes for a few seconds and thought I could see his face moving away from me—but not distinctly. Then I heard more than the other four times. Something like “har, hate, help”—I heard separate words that were almost identical sounding.”
Flint thought a second and said, “Maybe it was “Bahaar hates me, help. Or is that too many words?”
“Not too many words. It might have been that. The first part of each word was not quite distinct.”
Laura told Flint about Shana living with her. As she was finishing that, Christine and Zeta walked in to the restaurant. Flint said hello to each in turn with Laura’s phone passed to them. Flint thanked Laura for calling. He was asleep within a minute of hanging up.
Chapter 12
Abdu Koreim reentered the Grande Bretagne Hotel after his twenty-five minute walk. He again took a cross legged position on his meditation mat. That was where he still was when Flint and Ava got to Gina’s house in Naples a few minutes before 5:00 A.M., Athens time. He stood up. Knowing the sun was still more than two hours from peeking over the horizon, he showered, dressed, zipped his small meditation rug into his carryon, called the front desk, stopped by the breakfast buffet, then entered a taxi.
On the way to the airport, 7:17 A.M., Rome time, Koreim used his tablet computer to call the number left when Mo Bahaar had phoned him a few hours earlier. Bahaar himself answered.
“Mo, you can see from the caller ID on your phone who this is. I am headed to the airport to take a flight either back to India or to Rome. Which place I go, depends on you. If you permanently abandon your plans toward Ava Milan and anyone close to her, I will procure a ticket to Hyderabad. Otherwise I will proceed wherever I need to go to oppose you to the ultimate.”
“Oh my dear Abdu. I had not realized the extent of your interest in the little Italian whore now living in Texas. Please be assured that I will have no further interactions with her.”
“You lie. So it is inevitable that we see each other in Rome. Be advised that all aspects of your scheme, including your plan to infect with a deadly virus four men from different countries, will receive my full attention. I know the first of the four is arriving from Brazil earlier than you anticipated, and I know you are waiting for his flight. I know where you are in the airport. I know who the other three are and that they are in motion to arrive today.”
Bahaar switched to Urdu, began speaking in a loud voice. But the call was over. Koreim had hung up. Bahaar looked at the passengers emerging toward baggage claim. Abdu Koreim was among them. He looked straight at Bahaar. Suddenly a well-dressed, attractive man in his forties appeared, closed the distance with his hand extended.
“Hello,” he said. “My name is Davi Thiago Ruiz Neto dos Santos. From Fortaleza on the northeast coast of Brazil.”
Bahaar was still staring at where he had seen Koreim. He snapped out of wondering if he was seeing things or if Koreim had really been where he saw him. He found himself shaking hands with a tall dark skinned man who was saying, “everyone calls me Davi, accent on the final syllable.”
Davi Ruiz was seventh generation Brazilian on his father’s side, with more recent African and Portuguese roots on his mother’s. He had a bachelor’s degree in geology from Sul Ross University in Alpine, Texas, a graduate degree in petroleum engineering from the University of Oklahoma. He had started life with no money, worked in the Tupi oil field off the coast of Rio de Janeiro, invested there and made multiple fortunes in stock and had sold little of it, preferring to live on a good salary from Petrobras, the big Brazilian oil holding company.
As Davi and Mo shook hands, a phone sounded. Davi excused himself to answer. It was a colleague from Suriname—a small country, a former Dutch colony, between Guyana and French Guiana on the northeast coast of South America.
“Davi. Jonathan Temple here. I am in London at Heathrow. I plan to arrive in Rome about 5:00 P.M. Have you met our host Mohammed Bahaar yet?”
“Just this moment, Jonathan,” Davi replied.
“Any impressions?”
“Several.
Jonathan waited, then spoke. “Ah—you are not free to speak just now?”
“Sim.” Davi said the most usual word for yes in Portuguese.
“Got it. See you in a few hours. Bom dia, good morning.”
“Later,” Davi responded.
Bahaar escorted Davi to a seriously stretched limo waiting near the taxi stand. On the way to Hotel L’Orange , located a ten minute walk from the Vatican, Mo Bahaar regaled Davi with talk of oil quadrupling in price in the near future.
“My dear chap,” Bahaar said in his most cultivated English accent. “You know that OPEC, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, at present has twelve members. Only two of those—Ecuador and Venezuela—are in the western hemisphere. That made sense a couple of decades back, but there will soon be discovered more oil reserves in the Americas than in all of the rest of the planet. I have two goals. One is to deny the United States access to as much of this oil as I can. The other is to acquire more money than any person in history has been able to do. In the process I propose to make you and a small number of other men richer than you have believed it possible to be. What do you think of that?”
Davi said with conviction, “the aristocracy in Saudi Arabia controls OPEC overtly and behind the scenes. It is time for a counter force.”
“My thoughts exactly,” echoed Bahaar.
Davi and Mo expanded their shared understandings on the forty-seven minute drive to the Orange Hotel. The time was 8:36 A.M. at the front desk. As Davi headed for his room after check in, Jafe appeared with the stunning blond named Pagana.
“Excuse me, Mr. Davi Ruiz?” asked Jafe.
“Yes.”
“This is Miss Pagana Sarantos. Mr. Bahaar has asked her to make sure that you are comfortable.”
Pagana curtsied nearly imperceptibly as she extended her right hand. Davi took it, kissed it with a bow. Mo was gone. Jafe disappeared.
Meanwhile, in Naples, Mary and Ava joined Flint who was drinking coffee with Gina and Murphy in Gina’s kitchen. Flint had explained his experience with the Greek military police and their discovery of the Russian truth drug. Ava added her account of being forced to hypnotize Pagana to have sex with four men.
“So this whole Athens thing,” Murphy said, “had nothing to do with Freddy or Gina or Stevenson Karbouski or the angel trumpet society? It’s simply a coincidence?”
Silence. No one answered. Then Murphy’s phone sounded.
“Oh, hello Harry,” he said. Two and a half minutes elapsed in silence as Murphy listened. He hung up. Everyone was looking at him. “Harry’s Texas Ranger colleague Zeta thinks it is all connected. She believes Mohammed Bahaar knows about Gina’s and Ava’s and Freddy’s problem with the angel trumpeters and that he is using it as a smokescreen to hide his move to use Ava to help him corner the global market in crude oil. Zeta is certain that the one hypnosis session in Athens is not all Bahaar has in mind for Ava.”
Flint spoke as Murphy paused. “Bahaar for sure knows that I am still alive and that Ava left Athens with me. We should assume that Bahaar may be able to track one or more of us by our mobile devices.”
“I agree,” Murphy said, “and there are two more things from Zeta by way of Harry. She has tracked a six million dollar money shift from one of Bahaar’s secret accounts to the head of the angel trumpet group. That happened about one hour ago. And the other item is that Bahaar is flying some men to Rome for a meeting in the Hotel L’Orange about three blocks from the Vatican. The blond woman whom Ava hypnotized is there.”
Gina spoke next. “Flint, you must know this Zeta person
. How can she find out such secret information. I don’t like trusting some Chinese girl’s hunches. You ready to bet your life on what she says?”
Flint looked straight at Gina. “Absolutely! When we have more time, I will tell you why I trust her so much. But right now I have a couple of questions for Zeta that Harry might already know her answer to. I would call her directly, but she has hardly slept since all this started five days ago.” Flint took out his smart phone and called Harry who answered on the second ring,
“Flint. Glad you are still among the living.”
“Thanks Harry. I have you on speaker, and Murphy, Ava, Gina, Mary, and I are wondering about our next moves. Two questions that Zeta may have already answered: Did she have time yet to get backgrounds on the names Bahaar gave to Ava? And are they the guys Bahaar has invited to Rome?”
