by Trevor Scott
“Most are,” Rob said. “But the Halsey family goes back a long way in Texas. Before it was a state. We’re talking super rich.”
“Still. . .”
“They’ve sent two of the best private detectives in the country to try to find Sara Halsey Jones. Neither has been heard from since.”
“Maybe she doesn’t want to be found. Perhaps she paid off the detectives.”
“That’s the problem, though. She has no money. She’s a thirty-five-year-old historian and mathematician on a leave of absence from Rice University, where she is a full professor. She was last seen studying the writings of the Greek historian Polybius in Athens.”
“Great,” Jake said. “I’m not well liked in Athens.”
“That’s all right. We don’t think she’s still there. Her last passage through any customs was into Rome a month ago.”
Jake considered this man’s proposition. After leaving the Agency years ago, Jake had started his own security consulting business, taking on jobs mostly in Europe. He rarely took on missing persons cases. His jobs were usually much more complicated than that. But what choice did he really have? He could stay in a Tunisian jail and hang or get shot for having killing a useless pile of human DNA, or take off to Italy to find some poor rich girl. He also knew that jobs rarely turned out as easy as they first seemed. After all, the U.S. state department was not accustomed to calling in favors like this with marginally friendly countries without having to give up something in return. He imagined money had probably changed hands from Texas to Tunis, and Jake would never know the truth of that play.
“What kind of choice do I have?” Jake asked the cultural affairs officer. “But maybe I don’t need a break like this.”
“Your friends in high places would disagree.” The tall, gaunt man left it like that, saying without really saying anything. But Jake knew that the Agency director and perhaps his old friend Toni Contardo had something to do with this deal.
“Fine. When can you get me out of here?”
“They’re willing to pay you quite a bit to find Ms. Jones.”
“That’s not my hesitation,” Jake said. Although he could use some walking around cash, he had plenty hiding around Europe in various bank accounts. “I’ll take what they want to give me, but I won’t drag some mid-30s tree hugger yelling and screaming all the way back to Texas. If she wants to go back that’s fine, but I won’t force her.”
The state department man raised his hands palm out. “I understand. So, let’s go.”
Jake looked at himself down to his bare feet. “Just like that?”
“Yep. I’ll do my best to get your personal belongings back, including your passport, credit cards and cash.”
Jake shook his head. “Don’t bother. I had about fifty Euros worth of Tunisian dinars, which have probably deflated to nothing in the past week.”
“But you’ll need your passport.”
That’s how Jake knew the Agency was somehow involved with this whole matter. Jake had used a fake passport from one of his old Agency personas, which had been flagged when the Tunisian authorities inquired about him. He hadn’t used his real civilian passport in at least five years.
“You’re right, of course,” Jake said, appeasing the man. “Please get that for me.”
Smiling, the man pulled Jake’s passport from inside his pocket and handed it to him, along with a Visa card that was insignificant. There was perhaps a thousand dollars of available credit and Jake only used it for rental cars and hotels. Totally untraceable to the real Jake Adams.
With no grace or pleasure, Jake strolled out of the cell and Draconian prison just a few miles from ancient Carthage, wondering if anything had really changed in this region since the last Punic War.
3
Washington D.C.
A black Ford Expedition with tinted windows slowed along a quiet Georgetown street lined with tony restaurants peopled by the rich and powerful and influence peddlers of America. The SUV pulled up in front of a Greek café and stopped at the curb. The driver, wearing the requisite black suit and hat, looked into the rearview mirror at the man in the back seat—a man with a suit worth more than the driver made in a month.
Senator James Halsey was on his cell phone with an important campaign investor. Not that Halsey needed anyone’s money. He was an old money Texas billionaire, his family earning every penny in cotton, cattle, oil and shipping. No, Halsey let his donors think they had some influence with him. But he was beholden to no one. And that’s the way he liked it. Yet, there were times like this, with his sister going off the reservation, or something, where even money didn’t seem to be a great advantage.
Halsey clicked off his phone and started for the door handle.
“Sir,” the driver said. “Please wait for our men to check out the restaurant.”
Halsey always forgot the security protocols. In Texas on his sprawling fifty-thousand acre ranch, he could throw on a pair of jeans and a Stetson, strap his vintage 1847 .44 caliber Colt Walker to his right hip, and ride his favorite horse for hours until his backside was chafed. All with nobody to babysit him. He watched as two large men with visible bulges in their suits where they held their guns, came back out the front door of the Greek restaurant and nodded for the senator to come out.
“Thanks for the reminder, Steve,” the senator said to his driver. With some embarrassment for all the attention, Halsey hurried out of the car and into the restaurant.
Seeing the pretty woman with long dark curly hair in the far corner booth, far enough away from any other patrons to be heard by anyone, Halsey smiled and approached her. This would be their third meeting in the past three weeks—ever since Halsey discovered his sister missing somewhere in Europe. He only knew that her first name was Maria, and that she had great influence in the U.S. government. But he suspected she had worked at one time with the Agency or the FBI. She had that feel about her. As a member of the foreign relations committee, Halsey had been briefed enough times by people like Maria to know she could probably kill him before he even had a chance to retrieve his little concealed .380 auto from inside his jacket.
He took a seat across from this beautiful woman, noticing she was sipping a glass of white wine. She had to be at least in her mid-forties, Halsey guessed, but could easily pass for a decade younger. Very elegant. If he wasn’t more or less happily married, he might make a run for her.
“What’s the word?” Halsey asked her.
“First, you must try this wine,” Maria said. “Here, take a sip. It’s a Dafni from Crete. Very nice.” She held the glass for him.
Reluctantly he took the glass and sipped. It was good. He handed the glass back to her and motioned for the waiter to bring him a glass.
“Very good,” he said. “I’ve never been to Crete. Is it nice this time of year?”
“Crete is nice any time of year.”
That was their code phrase, meaning all was well and on schedule. Halsey glanced around the room and waited for his glass of wine to be set down in front of him. He sipped it and then told the waiter to bring the bottle.
“So you have someone who can help me find my sister,” Halsey said.
She smiled. “I like working with Texans. You get right to the point.” Maria hesitated long enough to take another drink, but her eyes surveyed the man across from her as well as the entire restaurant. “Yes. It took some influence, but we were able to get him out of prison in Tunisia. Thank you for your help with that.”
The waiter set a fresh bottle of the white wine from Crete between the two of them and swiftly walked away.
“Well, we’ve been dealing with the cotton trade in that country for decades,” Halsey said. Really, he had only made a single call to a man he knew in the new government. Money still meant something in that part of the world. “Have you heard anything about the two previous investigators sent to find my sister?”
Maria took a sip of wine, her eyes concentrating on the senator. “Nothing,” she
said, setting her glass onto the table. “We had their passports flagged, so if they’re still alive they will show up eventually.”
Still alive? Could this situation be that grave? He had simply put the ball in motion hiring the first man from New York, a former detective there, a week after he had found out his sister had vanished in Athens. When that man made only one call to the lawyer brokering the search before also disappearing, Senator Halsey had taken a more active role. He had recommended the second man to go find his sister, a former Texas Ranger from Houston, but just a week ago the senator had found out this man had also gone missing. That was when Halsey took over completely, quietly enlisting the help of his government contacts.
“What can you tell me about this new man?” Senator Halsey asked her.
She smiled. “He’s highly capable.”
“I thought the last two were as well.”
“Not like this man. He’s not a man to be taken lightly.”
Halsey noticed something in her eyes when she talked about this mystery man. “You have a special relationship with him.”
Shaking her head, she said, “Not really. We were friends once.”
But there was more, he knew. “What makes you think he can find Sara?”
“If she’s alive he’ll find her. If she’s dead. . .you’ll know that as well. He’s never failed at anything in his life.”
Senator Halsey leaned across the table toward Maria. “The state department said he killed a man in Tunisia. The authorities there were holding him in some disgusting prison for the past week. What do you know about that?”
She finished her glass of wine and poured half a glass more for herself and topped off the senator’s glass. Throughout the action, her eyes kept watch around the room. “I’ve heard the same thing. But this man doesn’t kill someone unless they deserve it. The man he killed was a wanted international terrorist. A man who had killed the girlfriend of the man you just hired.”
“Shucks. Sounds like divine retribution to me. I’d like to meet this man.”
She laughed. “Only if he wants to meet you.”
“Where do we go from here?” the senator asked.
Maria sucked down the last of her wine and got up. “The trail went cold in Rome. Our guy will start there.” She started to leave and turned back. “Next time maybe you could buy dinner.”
With that she walked off and the senator watched every sway of her hips out the door, as did every other man in the restaurant. Halsey checked the wedding band on his left hand and considered taking it off the next time they met.
●
Santorini, Greece
High above the azure ocean in a stark white villa, Petros Caras sat on his balcony overlooking a 350-foot yacht, the blue and white colors matching the Greek flag that flowed in the soft breeze at the stern. It was his new expedition yacht, where he spent most of his time. He only came to his villa for meetings with those who did not deserve to step foot on his yacht, his real home. This villa, although ten thousand square feet of splendor and opulence, was a shell filled with expensive furniture and peopled, more than not, with the Euro-trash and nearly illiterate actors of Hollywood—all of whom seemed to want something from him, and mostly money and financing for their next project. But Petros Caras hated American movies. They meant nothing to him, other than pure investment. And they better deliver or they would never get another Euro from him.
Caras shifted his gaze from his yacht to the naked woman laying on the lounge chair a few feet from him. What was her name? No idea. She was Czech and that’s all he needed to know. He only had sex with Slavic women, and only those who were real. So those American women with their fake boobs and even more fake disposition, would never find a way to his bed.
The Czech woman stood up and slipped on her high heels, bringing her lithe body to nearly six feet. She had been a super model in her youth, but was now in her mid-thirties, he couldn’t remember exactly how old. Yet, she was still a striking figure. Gorgeous. She had seen the inside of his yacht on the trip from Italy last week.
“Petros,” she said, her lips in the perfect pout that all models could emulate, “you said you would take me to bed this afternoon. I’m horny.”
God he loved her accent. She spoke not a word of Greek, only her native Czech, Italian and some English. So to understand each other, they only spoke English.
“I have a meeting in five minutes,” Caras said, shrugging his shoulders.
“I need more than five minutes,” she whined.
“So do I. Go to the bedroom and wait for me. My meeting will take ten minutes, maybe less.”
She smiled and started for the double French doors, but then stopped, lowered her sun glasses, and said over her shoulder, “I could be finished by then.”
“We all have to make choices,” Caras said. “You can wait.”
She huffed and walked away as if still making her way down a runway in Milan.
Moments after the woman left, one of the villa staff members escorted in a man wearing a white linen suit, dark hair to his shoulders, and a tan behind three days growth of beard. Normally the man had his hair pulled back in a ponytail.
Zendo was the fixer for Petros Caras. At one time he had studied at the Greek Orthodox seminary in Athens, a profession that would have never suited the man. He was far too independent and lacked the discipline to follow any higher authority—with the exception of Petros Caras, who paid him quite nicely for his expertise. Zendo turned his military intelligence experience into a long career with the Hellenic Intelligence Service. He would have still been with that organization, but Petros Caras paid better.
“Have a seat, Zendo,” Caras said. Then he waived for his butler to close the door behind him and leave them alone.
Zendo sat on a chair near the stone wall, over which was a sheer drop of some one hundred feet to sharp rocks. Without thinking, he pulled his hair back and attached a rubber band at the base of his skull, making a perfect ponytail that most women would kill to have.
“How was Rome?” Caras asked.
Adjusting his sun glasses and trying not to make direct eye contact with this powerful man, Zendo said, “We lost the woman.”
“I guessed that much,” Caras surmised. “Otherwise you would have simply called for further instructions.” He gazed back to the ocean at his yacht, thinking he could just forget this whole affair. But that was the problem. He had all the money any one man could spend in dozens of lifetimes, but that which could not be reasonably purchased, those things that had value beyond what could be appraised, were even more cherished by Petros Caras. Which is why he began collecting items that no others would have, or could obtain. “What about those who came looking for her?”
Zendo smiled now. These were things he could control. “Athens and Rome can both be dangerous places.”
“Perhaps not as bad as New York or Houston,” Caras reasoned. He noticed a shift in disposition on Zendo’s face, from his normal incertitude to something bordering on concern—a characteristic Caras had never seen on the man. “What’s the matter?”
Clearing his throat, Zendo said, “I’ve heard they have hired a new man to find the American woman.”
“So.”
“So, this is not a simple cop like the others,” Zendo explained. “He’s a dangerous man.”
Caras smiled. “Like you and your men?”
“I wish I had a dozen men like Jake Adams.”
“I’ve never heard of him.”
“You probably wouldn’t have. He’s former Air Force Intelligence, and then he worked for the CIA for years before opening his own security consulting firm in Austria.”
“And he’s that good?”
Zendo nodded his head. “He once took down an entire Kurdish terrorist group single-handedly.”
Caras was impressed, which didn’t happen often. He wondered if the American would consider finding his way into his bed. He might make this one exception to his anti-American aversion. “Wha
t do you suggest?”
Smiling, Zendo said, “I’ve already taken steps to see if my intel is correct. I sent two men to simply follow him.”
“Good plan. If he’s as good as you say he is, you should be able to follow this Adams to the American woman.”
“That’s the plan.”
“Good. Why don’t you head back out and coordinate the effort personally.”
“Yes, sir.” Zendo took that as his sign to leave. He got up and smoothly strut away, his ponytail swishing side to side across his back like a metronome.
Sitting by himself now, Caras thought about this crazy American who could take down a terrorist group by himself. Now he would have to go upstairs and take that Czech woman, whatever her name was, from behind and consider the American spy as he did so.
●
Still naked, high heels kicked to the side of the bed through the balcony doors, Svetla Kalina had listened carefully to Petros Caras and his fixer discuss some woman who they sought. Her Greek was nearly native, since her maternal grandparents had spoken almost nothing else to her while she grew up in Prague. They even sent her off to spend her summers with her cousins on the island of Crete. This language knowledge was one of the reasons she had been chosen for this assignment. The other, of course, was the well-known fact that the billionaire Petros Caras had a special place in his heart for Slavic women. But she also got the feeling that he would prefer a man instead. And this was her first assignment that involved her actually sleeping with someone. Sure she had used her body to seduce suspects for the Czech Security Information Service (BIS), but she had never had to go this far. The BIS had been asked by some other world organization, she wasn’t sure which one but she suspected the Americans, to get close to Petros Caras. She could get used to this life, the Santorini villa, the amazing yacht, the great food and drink, if it were not for her requirement to sleep with an old fat man. She had to put her mind in a special place when he entered her, trying her best to think of anyone but him as she faked multiple orgasms. Perhaps her only saving grace was the fact that he preferred to take her from behind, like he did with his male toys. Thank God he had a small penis, which she could barely feel inside her.
