The Poison Secret

by Gregg Loomis

  “You aren’t sure?”

  The Greek took a moment to dab at his bleeding cheek with an already bloody shirtsleeve. “Couldn’t recognize the voice after all that time, but the electronic transfer came from the same account in Barclay’s Bank of the Cayman Islands as before. I was curious. I checked account numbers.”

  “Anything else you can tell me?”

  “Nothing more I needed to know. I had instructions and cash.”

  Gurt had put away the knife and substituted her iPad. “Dystra Pharmaceuticals. Grassley is the seeo.”

  “Seeo?”

  “How else is C-E-O pronounced?”

  “CEO, chief executive officer. Think, head of the company.”

  “Whatever. It is located in Atlanta.”

  “That should make it easy enough,” Kolstas lisped, edging toward the door.

  Lang brought the Glock to bear. “Where the hell you think you’re going?”

  “My face . . . I need medical . . .” The Greek’s eyes widened as he realized what was about to happen. “You promised!”

  “I promised I’d forgive you and I have. Like John Kennedy said, though, ‘Forgive thy enemies but remember their names.’ I remember you are the one who tried to have my son kidnapped.”

  Before Kolstas could speak, Lang shot him squarely between the eyes. He died with an unspoken protest on his parted lips.

  Gurt and Lang watched his open eyes roll back into his head as though to examine the red spot on his forehead, as his grip on the desk relaxed and he slithered to the floor.

  “It is to hope you have no regrets,” Gurt said.

  “I could have no regret bigger than for him to live and be successful next time,” Lang responded. “Now, let’s get out of here before either the cops or more of his goons come looking for us.”

  And they did.

  CHAPTER 55

  Mandraki Harbor

  Rhodes Town

  Island of Rhodes

  The Next Morning

  Lang and Gurt Could have been tourists admiring the twin harbors. The smaller of the two, Mandraki, was host to yachts, sailboats, and small working craft, while cruise ships, cargo vessels, and the occasional military ship occupied the other. Across the harbor, they could see the roof of the city’s old synagogue; over their right shoulders, the tower and dome of the Mosque of Suleiman. To the right was the tower of St. Paul. All testimony to the fertile soil of religion that had nurtured a variety of faiths over the ages. And why not? Asia Minor was a ghost in the northern haze; European culture as close as the next island. Here the colossus of the sun god, Helios, had supposedly straddled the entrance with a light visible to the Aegean’s ancient mariners for 20 or so miles, a beacon extinguished when it tumbled into the sea as a result of an earthquake in 237 B.C.

  The truth, Lang suspected, was that the 100-foot-plus stature had actually been mounted where the Palace of the Grand Masters now stood on a slight hill behind him, thereby increasing the distance at which the light could be seen. The fourteenth-century fortress itself had survived earthquake and siege only to succumb to an accidental explosion of its powder magazine in 1856. Mussolini had it carefully restored during the Italian occupation of the 1930s before the island was returned to Greece in 1947 after 700 years of foreign rule.

  Although rich in both scenery and history, the harbor itself held little interest for either Lang or Gurt. Lang idly watched a ferry dock across the quay in the larger harbor. Passengers swarmed down a none-too-secure gangplank like ants sallying from a nest under attack.

  Gurt turned her head, seeming to take in the entire panorama from behind oversized sunglasses. Actually, she was looking for a familiar face, anyone who might have shared the Aegean Airlines Airbus A300 from Athens. The ordinary tourist would head straight from Diagoras International Airport to his hotel; a business traveler to his destination. The purpose of anyone who traveled the eight-plus miles from the airport directly here could well be following Gurt and Lang.

  Unlikely, but possible.

  After wiping the knife clean of prints and finding and pocketing the single shell casing of the shot that had killed Kolstas, Gurt and Lang had left by the front entrance on the theory they would be less likely noticed than exiting through the tavern. A block away, two police cars screamed past. Someone in the neighborhood had finally noticed what had gone on in front of 37 Trikoupi Street, or one of the Greek’s minions had made a grisly discovery.

  Two blocks over, they had taken a cab to the Acropolis, a common tourist destination. From there, a bus to the sculpture-lined walls of the Dafni Metro Station and on to the airport. Neither Gurt nor Lang detected anything to indicate they were being followed.

  The same seemed to be true here in Rhodes Town.

  Doing an about-face, the pair strolled through the yellow stone, crenelated double towers of the Marine Gate to enter the walled part of the old city.

  A right turn followed by a left into Odos Ippoton brought them to the slight incline that was the medieval Street of the Knights. More yellow stone, this time twin rows lining the north and south sides of the road. It was here the Knights of St. John, subsequently called the Knights of Malta, took refuge after the fall of Jerusalem in 1291. Buying the island of Rhodes from a Genoese pirate whose title was doubtful at best, they then conquered the native Greek population before fortifying their acquisition and building this series of buildings or inns, each with the crest of its residents’ native land displayed in stone beside or above the door.

  On the south side, below a bridge arching over the street to connect the inns of Spain and Provence, an open gate gave into a large courtyard, formed into a rectangle by the rears of buildings facing four separate streets. As a casual tourist, Gurt stepped through. Lang remained behind, ostensibly fascinated by the armorial bearings of France carved in a wall above his head. He waited until he was surrounded by a tour group of chattering, camera– and cell phone–clicking Japanese behind a woman hoisting aloft a standard consisting of a bright red bow, tied to an umbrella shaft. As she began her lecture, he slipped inside.

  Again, he and Gurt were not being followed, as far as he could tell.

  Once inside the square, sheltered from the sea breeze, the dry heat was debilitating, although it seemed not to adversely affect the profusion of oleander and bougainvillea that painted whitewashed walls with rainbow colors. In front of Lang a dozen or so tables were shaded by umbrellas bearing the logos of several beers. The place was full of lunching day-trippers. Gurt sat at a table with an older lady, who, despite the heat, had a shawl draped around her narrow shoulders. Her hair was in a tight steel-colored bun.

  Lang stood beside her. “Dr. Kalonimos?”

  She extended a hand road-mapped with blue veins and smiled with teeth that showed a lifetime lived with tobacco. “You noticed I was the only woman here with a shawl in this beastly heat, as I told you I would be. And you can call me Phoebe.”

  Her British accent hinted at Oxford or Cambridge.

  Lang slid into a chair to her left, Gurt’s right, and waved to a passing waiter. Unsurprisingly, the man looked in every direction but Lang’s. Lang had long suspected some secret worldwide union of servers demanded its membership direct eyes away from customers at all times.

  Realizing he was likely to perish of thirst before he got the waiter’s attention, Lang stood up. “What might I get you ladies?”

  Gurt wanted a beer, Phoebe a chilled glass of Argyros.

  Lang went to a small bar set up in the green shade of a cedar tree, waited until he had the barkeeper’s attention, and asked, “Beer? Wine?”

  He was presented with a menu unreadable in Greek letters and unpronounceable in the English subtext. Must be a lunch menu, not a list of drinks.

  He waived until he had the barkeep’s eye again. “Cold beer?”

  This time he had better luck. He was given a list of beers that would have done credit to any well-stocked American tavern. Budweiser, Heineken, Amstel. Everything but
a Greek beer. For not the first time, Lang was puzzled. In major cities across the world — or at least the western part of it — Mythos was available. Sometimes Hellas or Athenian, too. Everywhere except Greece. The tavern at the museum had been an exception. Was Greek beer so superior that it was more profitable to sell in the sounder economies of Western Europe or America? Was there a national conspiracy to keep the golden lager of Mythos from foreigners? Was the mysterious servers’ union part of it?

  “You are woolgathering?” He hadn’t noticed Gurt had come to stand beside him. The question was her expression for daydreaming, staring into space, or being oblivious in general to one’s surroundings.

  “Er, no. I was hoping to get a Greek beer.”

  She ran a finger down the list of international beers. “They have Lowenbrau, Pauli Girl, Becks. Why would you want Greek beer?”

  Gurt could be downright chauvinistic when it came to beer. But then, she was German.

  They ordered and returned to the table, bottles and a carafe of white wine sweating in their hands. Seated, Lang took a grateful pull. After the heat, he could not have enjoyed the finest champagne more. He took several more greedy gulps and was surprised to find the bottle empty.

  He ordered another and turned to survey the small taverna’s patrons. About an even mix of men and women, most fair-skinned and showing varying degrees of sun exposure. As at the harbor, no one seemed to be paying any attention to him.

  None of that meant a lot. A true professional would blend into any gathering like a chameleon against its native backdrop. Lang noted with unease how many windows faced the small plaza, any one of which could easily conceal an observer or assassin. His and Gurt’s only real defense was that he had severed the head of the snake, left Kolstas’s criminal organization without its leader. He was playing this fact off against plan B — taking a time-consuming, circuitous route to Rhodes by means of an indirect path to the island, a series of ferries where no one took passengers’ names.

  With a little luck, the Pakistanis who manned the dead Greek’s unlawful enterprises would never know he and Gurt were still in Greece, let alone Rhodes. It was also possible the removal of Kolstas would mean the disintegration of his gang or that the members of it would be too busy in-fighting for leadership to consider revenge.

  Phoebe was pouring her second glass from the carafe. “From your phone call, I understand you are interested in old King Mithradates, or at least his genetics.”

  Lang considered the possibly debilitating effects of a third beer and decided water would combat the heat almost as well, even if he had to buy the bottled variety. “Well, I’m interested in whether his self-attained immunity to poisons was a trait that could be inherited.”

  Phoebe sighed, disappointed. “Always the toxins with Mithradates. No one seems to care he was the greatest Hellenic leader of the post-Classical period, that he gave the mighty Roman Republic a scare they hadn’t seen since Hannibal. They pulled their greatest general, Pompey, off another campaign just to prevent Mithradates from pushing Rome out of Asia.”

  “By ‘Asia,’ you meant modern-day Turkey?” Lang asked.

  “Essentially.”

  Lang regarded his now-empty bottle with remorse. This heat was going to make him very thirsty. “I acknowledge the man doesn’t get the fame history owes him, but what I’m interested in . . .”

  Phoebe nodded. “The genetics, could they be passed along like the genes that give some people blue eyes or blond hair.”

  Lang had not noted Gurt leaving the table. He did notice the frosty plastic bottle of Evian she placed before him.

  He looked up. “How did you know?”

  “That you were thinking about another cold beer and if it would be too many? You kept looking at the bar instead at Phoebe.”

  Maybe so, but he never got used to the way she read his mind. He turned his attention back to the professor. “We were talking about the genetics of blue eyes and blond hair.”

  Phoebe reached over, took the Evian bottle, and poured about a third of it into her now-empty wineglass.

  “Or the possibility of inheriting them.”

  She paused to take a sip. “There are traits that are clearly passed along, generation to generation, and those that are not. It was once believed that the tendency to be a, say, criminal, was inherited. Today we know that criminality is more a product of environment than bloodline. The question is, where do you draw the line between the two? For example, dogs are the only members of the canine family that are domesticated. It is thought they descended from wolves man tamed. Yet puppies are born domesticated. Genetics or environment?”

  “Dogs?” Lang asked skeptically.

  He would have said more, but a gesture from Gurt told him to listen, not talk.

  “Russian scientists are conducting an interesting experiment with Vulpes Lagopus, the arctic fox: dogs, the only domestic canine, wag their tails, the only canine that does. The Russians have raised a number of fox cubs as pets and those foxes’ descendants, though far from completely domesticated, wag their tails.”

  “I’m not sure I get your point,” Lang said.

  Not quite true: he had not the vaguest idea of what her point might be.

  “The point is, why do the pet foxes wag their tails, something no other wild canine does? Has there been some mutation of genes, or has the environment of their parents influenced the behavior of yet-unborn pups? In Mithradates’ case, did his linage inherit an acquired immunity just as the fox pups inherited an acquired trait, or was it something in the environment?”

  Lang was beginning to realize that, as is so often the case, this woman, an academic, was more interested in the question than the answer.

  Gurt gave him a look that said to be patient.

  “I was told there was an antitoxin in a young Turkish boy’s blood, an immunity to snake venom among other things,” Lang ventured.

  Phoebe was looking covetously at the bottle of Evian. Lang gallantly poured the remaining water into her wineglass, once again empty.

  When she had emptied that, she said, “Yes, but was the immunity hereditary or developed from the environment in which the child lived?”

  Lang felt he was chasing his tail. “I guess it really doesn’t matter how his immune system developed. The important thing is whether or not it, whatever ‘it’ is, can be isolated so as to be shared.”

  She was looking around, distracted. “If it is in his genes, so to speak, there is a process by which it can be isolated. If environmental . . .” She stood. “You would think they have a loo, a W.C., somewhere.”

  Gurt pointed. “On the other side of the bar.”

  The geneticist pushed her chair back. “Oh, thank you! Excuse me!”

  Gurt and Lang watched her hurriedly pick her way between tables before Gurt observed, “She is no help. We know no more than we did an hour ago.”

  “A little more, maybe, including the fact we’re going to be picking up her lunch tab if we stay much longer. Problem is, she has no clue if we’re talking about a Mithradates gene or the effects of living on the northern Turkish coast. She . . .”

  Phoebe’s return interrupted the conversation. Lang stood as she seated herself.

  “Well, now, where was I?”

  “Isolating genes.”

  “Oh, yes. Gene therapy — the adding or modifying of certain genes in human cells, usually to combat a disease. Hemophilia B, for instance, has been successfully treated by gene therapy.”

  Whatever she had done in the ladies room had changed her personality from obtuse to informative. Both Gurt and Lang sat in amazement that they tried not to show as she continued.

  “The current thinking is that some form of gene therapy might prevent contracting the HIV virus.”

  “Another form of immunity?” Lang asked.

  “Possibly. But modified genes cannot be inherited.”

  “Then Mithradates’ descendants could not have acquired his immunities to poisons and toxins.”


  Phoebe shrugged. “Mr. Reilly, science has barely scratched the surface of differentiating between environment and genetics. Just like the foxes I mentioned, no one is sure where one begins and the other ends. We know that inherited immunity is a genetic immunity to disease. An acquired immunity is like an immunity to certain diseases a person has survived. One who lived through the plague, for instance, will never have it again because certain cells of the body have a memory that activates the immune system if that particular antigen is contracted again. That, like inoculation, would be environmental immunity.

  “Certain immunities are clearly inherited, the most common example being those passed from mother to child through prenatal inoculations or breast milk. How long they last varies, and it is doubtful they can be inherited a second time.

  “There are racial and ethnic immunities also. Most native Africans have varying degrees of immunity to malaria, while sickle-cell anemia is uncommon among those of European linage.

  “I cannot deny the possibility that certain ethnic groups can develop unique immunities such as those of the child you mentioned, quite likely through a Darwinian ‘survival of the fittest’ process. Many Africans who don’t develop immunity to malaria die before they can pass on their genes. Perhaps a resistance to the venom of a particularly common snake was a condition of survival in the area the child lived in.”

  “Could the resistance to malaria, the gene that causes it, be isolated and transferred to a European?”

  Phoebe shook her head. “So far, no. But then, there are a number of preventatives available. The big incentive these days is to engineer a gene that resists cancer and can be artificially transmitted.”

  Lang slouched back into his chair. He was getting progressively more uncomfortable as rivulets of sweat were making the back of his shirt damp. “So, basically, what you’re telling us, Dr. Kalonimos, is that so far as you know, an immunity is not something that could be passed down for two millennia from family to child?”