by Gregg Loomis
He never finished.
Two shots from opposite directions were fired so closely that they could have been one.
Leon spun, his right hand gripping his left shoulder as blood seeped between his fingers.
Cornrow, his weapon slipping from his lowered hand, took two steps forward before his body realized his brain was no longer in command. A good part of it had departed with the back of his head, which had been only inches from the muzzle of the Glock in Gurt’s hand.
Manfred, terrified, screamed.
Grumps, uncertain, howled.
Leon, near sure he had been killed, moaned.
Gurt, relieved, put the gun down on the chopping block and reached out to comfort her son. Years with the Agency had prepared her for action, some of which, in the organization’s euphemistic jargon, was “wet.” But nothing had prepared her for the gore in her own kitchen, the hysterical fear of her child, or how very close the little boy had come to being kidnapped or worse.
She searched through her purse for her phone, noting with objective interest that it took three tries for her hand to quit shaking long enough to input 911.
By that time Manfred had not only calmed down, he was surveying the carnage with fascination.
“Awesome!” he said.
CHAPTER 39
Piraeus
“Back up to your office,” Lang ordered.
Alex snorted. “You can’t wait my men out forever, you know.”
Lang tightened the lamp base against the man’s neck. “Let me worry about that.”
At the top of the stairs, Lang half-shoved, half-dragged his prisoner to the end of the short hallway.
“There’s no other way out,” Alex commented. “Sooner or later . . .”
“Alex, a man like you doesn’t put himself in a one-exit situation. The question is whether you tell me where the other one is before I lose patience and choke you to death.”
For emphasis, Lang curled the lamp base like a dumbbell, sending Alex into a series of gasps and gags.
“Now, let’s take another look at your office, shall we?”
Once inside, Lang bolted the door. The lock was a substantial dead bolt that should withstand attack. Not so with the door. It hung from old, partially rusted hinges that would yield to the first body slammed against it. The flimsiness of the arrangement strengthened Lang’s suspicions. No way would a criminal like Alex feel secure with a door that would not deter a determined attack and no other way out.
“Okay, Alex, have a seat at your desk, hands behind the chair.”
The lamp cord made satisfactory, if temporary, binding.
“I’ll get you for this, Reilly.”
Lang was running a hand along the wall. “You said that. Maybe I should make sure you’re not in a position to.”
The Greek’s lips curled in a snarl. “You’re too chickenshit, Reilly. You could no more kill an unarmed and tied-up man than you could fly. You don’t have the balls!”
Lang was examining the tapestry behind the desk. He was close enough now to make out the figures: Flemish, likely fifteenth century. Lords and ladies, horses in pursuit of a stag the size of a cow.
“Don’t tempt me, Alex. I . . . hmm, lookie, lookie!”
Lang snatched the fabric from the wall, revealing a small door. It had no knob, needing only a gentle push to swing open.
He patted Alex on the head with the same condescending geniality he might show Grumps. “Well, looks like I’ll be seeing you in the old familiar places, Alex.”
“You’ll regret this, Reilly, believe me. In fact right about now, your family . . .”
Lang pressed the Glock against the man’s cheek. “Alex, be real certain that you won’t live a week past the date something happens to my family. Now, I really must go.”
He was already too far into a low, narrow passage to make out the reply. The way was totally dark and, judging from the cobwebs that brushed his face, unused in recent times. Glock in his right hand, he felt along a wall. Even so, he almost fell when he reached a staircase. Fifteen steps down, a turn to the right. Light was leaking around a door just ahead.
Lang pushed without result. He groped for a handle, a knob, anything he could pull. Following the sliver of light between door and jamb, he saw a bar, a latch. If only it was on this, rather than the other, side of the door . . . He held his breath until his fingers touched a simple sliding bolt.
The door opened.
The smell, the mouth-watering aroma of . . . what? Lamb cooked gyro-style. A quick glance told him he was in the rear of a taverna. A wooden crate overflowed with a leafy vegetable. Two hens, perhaps aware of their fate, clucked forlornly from a wire cage. Stalactites of loukanio sausages hung from the ceiling. The smell of fruit beyond its prime competed with gyro.
Ahead, Lang could see where the hall joined the dining area. Perhaps a dozen white-clothed tables jammed a space that could have comfortably accommodated half that many. The twang of recorded bouzouki music drowned out any conversation, had there been any.
He pocketed the Glock, keeping a hand on the grip, and sauntered into the dining area as casually as though he were a customer returning from the men’s room. A tavli board was on a table between two old men bent over glasses of ouzo.
The only other occupant was a man behind the counter that ran the length of the room. He looked up as Lang strolled by. A glance from Lang to the rear of the building and back again. A cell phone appeared in his hand.
He held the other up, gesturing stop.
“Just passing through,” Lang said genially.
Then he bolted for the door.
Outside, he ducked into an alley. At the end, facing a main thoroughfare, was an open stall selling t-shirts. Lang brushed under a rack bearing English-language maps of various islands and into the street. Amid a blare of horns, he dashed to the other side and into the back seat of a canary yellow cab waiting for the light to turn green.
The driver said something in angry Greek, his hands crossing back and forth, no.
Off duty?
Reaching into his pocket, Lang produced a handful of euro notes. There was a decided change in attitude.
“Acropolis,” Lang said.
He certainly wasn’t going back to the hotel, the first place Alex and his boys would look, and the milling horde of tourists at the Acropolis, at least those undeterred by burning automobiles, riots, and general civil unrest, would provide some cover.
Now that he was at least temporarily relieved of having to deal with Alex, he took out his iPhone and input the code for the United States and his home number.
Gurt answered on the second ring.
“Gurt, it’s me. I’ve had a little difficulty here.”
“Is two of us.”
“Huh? What happened?”
She told him, finishing with, “. . . and your difficulty?”
“Never mind. I’ll be home tonight or tomorrow, soon as I can get a flight.”
A flight. That was the problem. The airport was second only to the hotel as a place Alex would expect him. But maybe not the very port here in Piraeus, a port with day trip and overnight excursions to the Greek Islands leaving several times an hour.
“Driver,” he said, making a circling motion with his hand. “Turn around.”
CHAPTER 40
Piedmont Driving Club South
Eight Days Later
Lang arrived home two days later by a route only slightly less circuitous than Magellan’s: a ferry 200-plus miles to Cyprus, flight from Heraklion’s Nikos Kazantzaakis International to Ataturk, Istanbul, to De Gaulle, Paris, and, finally, to Hartsfield-Jackson, Atlanta. No business or first class available.
He didn’t dare count the total hours of cramped seating, miserable, if any, food, and uncaring, if not downright rude, flight attendants. Tourist, he decided, was today’s steerage class, that inexpensive, cheerless, uncomfortable lower deck of a steamship in which most nineteenth-century emigrants made their way to Ame
rica.
Yellow crime scene tape still encircled the house like an ugly wound.
Manfred was so eager to recount his and Grumps’s part in the affair that he forgot the standard query about the gifts from afar usually distributed upon his dad’s return home. Gurt described the security devices she was meticulously and methodically employing. And Leon’s pivotal part.
There seemed to be little else that could be done until Lang finished his present court schedule and could contact Dr. Kalonimos on Rhodes. He did ask Detective Franklin Morse of the Atlanta Police Department if the local patrol car could make an extra pass by the house every shift.
Some years ago, the detective had actually asked for a reassignment away from Lang’s precinct. He had observed that death and violence were like a stray dog fed once too often: they seemed to habitually follow Lang. The policeman had been less than happy when Lang and Gurt appeared on his newly assigned beat by moving into the house on Lafayette Drive.
“Dunno, Mr. Reilly,” the immaculately dressed black cop had said. “Two perps dead. We could direct ever’ home invasion your way, the APD could furlough half its officers.”
Morse had a perverse sense of humor.
Today, Lang’s immediate court obligations were completed, he had taken two golf lessons, and was ready to demonstrate his newfound skills to Francis. For convenience sake, they began on the ninth tee, the one immediately behind the clubhouse, one of two fairways along the lake.
There was a swish as Lang’s driver split the air, the crack of contact, the splash as it hooked into the lake. “Your mulligan,” Francis said, not being particularly successful in suppressing a grin.
What Lang had to say was mercifully blotted out by a departing 777.
“I’m glad I didn’t hear that,” Francis said.
Lang was teeing up another ball. “Me, too.”
“Try keeping your head down,” Francis suggested.
“That’s what the pro said. Problem is, I can’t see the ball that way. Fact of the matter is, I don’t see the whole damn game. You play for the lowest score instead of the highest, if you’re right-handed, you play left-handed, and you use implements ill-suited to the purpose.”
Francis was teeing up his ball. “Vanitas vanitatum, omnis vanitas.”
“All may be fruitless, but I’ve got a fortune invested in these new clubs.”
“Vilius argentum est auro, virtubus aurum.”
“I doubt Horace ever played this game. I see damn little virtue in it.”
Lang watched Francis’s drive. The ball ascended a gentle arc, sliced right, hit a pine tree, and bounced onto the fairway 150 yards away.
“Why do I have the feeling I’m not playing against just you?”
Francis said nothing as he picked up the stump of his tee, grinning again.
“No comment? Not even a Deus vult?”
The priest was handing his driver to the young caddy. “The battle cry of the Crusaders, ‘God wills it?’ That would be a bit egotistic, wouldn’t it, thinking God wills the flight of one’s golf ball?”
“No more than the so-called ‘Divine Right of Kings.’”
“Which, as I recall, died some time ago.”
Lang was teeing up his second, post-mulligan, shot. He tried to avoid discussing religion with his friend. Although he, personally, supposed he conceded the possibility of a Higher Being, he was fairly certain that Being was not the benign, loving entity Francis espoused. Lang had seen too much of the real world to accept that anything with good intentions ruled it.
He didn’t answer. Instead, he hit his ball and tried to conceal his delight when it hit squarely in the fairway and rolled a dozen feet past Francis’s. Perhaps the Ruler of the Universe had a beneficent side after all.
The two men were walking across the lush grass of a manicured course to an even smoother green followed by the caddies when Francis asked, “Did you ever find out who those thugs were?”
The roar of jet engines low overhead contrasted with the serenity of the golf course on a weekday afternoon. It also prevented Lang from being sure of what Francis had said. “Say again?”
“Those men who broke into your house while you were in Greece, the ones Gurt, er, took care of.”
“I’ll say. What about them?”
“Ever find out who they were?”
Lang shook his head. “Not yet. I think the police know. I’ve threatened to file a Freedom of Information request.”
Francis squatted, frowning, either at his putting possibilities or what came next. “I’m afraid to ask why you want to know.”
“Then don’t,” Lang snapped, then regretted the edge on his reply. “Look, Francis, I can’t just sit by and hope the problem will go away. First, Gurt gets kidnapped in Turkey, then I’m abducted in Athens and threatened at about the same time there’s an attempt to take Manfred. These people, whoever they are, want the Foundation to give up what might be the greatest medical discovery since penicillin.”
“Is it worth human life?”
“Depends on whose.”
He saw the expression on his friend’s face. “Francis, we may be on the verge of a universal antidote, not just for poisons but all sorts of reptile and insect venom. Think of the lives to be saved! If I can find out the names of those bastards who tried to snatch Manfred, I might be able to find who hired them.”
Francis got up and inspected his lie from the other side of the green. “What makes you think they were hired?”
“Didn’t you hear me? There has been a series of attempts to abduct me and my family. That’s not coincidence.”
Francis looked at Lang. “If you find who is behind these attempts, promise me you’ll let the authorities handle it.”
Lang’s caddy handed him his putter. “That I can’t do. I can only promise these attempts will end.”
A departing 767 spared Lang the reply.
CHAPTER 41
Boardroom of Dystra Pharmaceuticals
The Same Day
William Grassley wished he were on the golf course. Or at home. Or anywhere but here and with just about anyone but the company’s chief financial officer and chief operating officer.
The CFO, Ralph Hassler, was reviewing a statement from a bank on Grand Cayman. A statement that had no duplicate, either electronically or hard copy. There was no such thing as an electronic file, bank account or no, that could not be hacked into, given sufficient time and skill. The company didn’t need for an offshore account to be made public, particularly one used for business best kept here in this boardroom
Hassler peered over half-moon glasses. “I thought we weren’t paying the Greek unless we got results.”
Grassley whipped the puchette from the breast pocket of his suit jacket and started to wipe the beads of sweat from his forehead. The candy-ass little piece of silk was Hermes, a gift from his wife, he remembered at the last minute. Probably cost as much as his tailored suit. “For show, not for blow,” she had said as he had managed to show far more enthusiasm for the gift than he felt.
No reason to be perspiring, anyway. The damn suite of offices was kept at a constant 70 degrees year round. He replaced the scrap of silk and picked up one of the paper napkins beside the coffee urn. It came away from his face soaked.
Ralph Hassler was still waiting for an answer.
“He did. He was to draft the account.”
“Did what?” Hassler persisted. “Best I can tell, all he did was kidnap Reilly from the street. Lot of good that did us.”
“My call,” Grassley defended. “Those aren’t the kind of people you want to piss off. Besides, he has connections with a national black gang here, maybe part of the Bloods or Crips or something like that. He laid out his own money to have them snatch Reilly’s kid.”
“‘Them’ consisting of two dead gangbangers,” Hugh Wright, the COO, spoke for the first time. “Fuck lot of good that did us.”
Grassley reached for another napkin. “The hell was I supposed to k
now Reilly’s wife was some kind of Wonder Woman? Account in the papers said she handled both of those punks alone.”
“Maybe we should give up on forcing Reilly to come up with the blood sample, quit while we’re ahead.”
Grassley glared at his chief operating officer. “Ahead? How do you figure that?”
“We’re not in jail.”
“Goddammit, Wright, if you don’t have the guts for this, resign.”
The room was quiet while Wright seemed to consider the option.
Grassley broke the silence. “Another bit of bad news: Our lawyers have received a cease and desist letter from Johnson & Johnson’s legal department. They’re claiming we’re infringing their patent for that heart drug, ReoPro.”
Wright shook his head. “Prevents cardiac complications. They patented the fucking drug six years before it went on the market, a common practice, as you know. They didn’t extend, so the drug could legally go generic February a year ago. Tell ‘em to shove it.”
“Not quite so easy,” Grassley said. “You’re right, but the cost of litigating could put us out of business even if we win, and those people know it.”
“But we’re already producing the generic,” Wright protested. “It’s our most profitable product.”
Ralph Hassler cleared his throat, and the other two looked his way. “If we can’t produce our generic of ReoPro, we’ll be out of business unless . . .”
Grassley was reaching for another napkin. “Unless what?”
“Unless we get what we need from Reilly and can use it to patent the universal antidote, or something damn close to it.”
“Any ideas as to how we go about dealing with Reilly?” Grassley asked. “He and that wife of his aren’t people easily intimidated.”
“Award of the year for most masterful understatement,” Hassler observed dryly.
“I’d sure like to figure a legal way,” Wright interjected.
“I’ll settle for any way we can,” Hassler said. “Surely someone in this room can figure a way.”
“Maybe we should just stay here until we do,” Grassley said.
“Anyone consider the possibility of getting our own sample?” Hassler asked. “I mean, getting a sample from that kid in Turkey has got to be a fuck of a lot easier than dealing with Reilly and his superhero wife.”
