by Joseph Badal
Bob’s speech raised the eyebrows and appeared to raise the spirits of the team members. After answering their questions, Bob said, “Let’s meet here tomorrow afternoon at three.” Then he moved toward his office, while asking, “Tony, can you get me Rodney Townsend’s telephone number?”
Bob dialed the number for the British team’s offices. When he was put through to Townsend, he arranged to meet him at a restaurant in the Plaka—the old part of Athens, just below the Acropolis—at 1:00 the next afternoon. Based on the Englishman’s short and unfriendly tone, Bob guessed he was in for an uphill battle in trying to get the man’s cooperation.
***
Tony drove Bob to the Grand Bretagne Hotel at the end of the day. The drive from Glyfada took them along the beach, bracketed by sea and sand on the left and shops and high-rise residential buildings on the right. Bob commented on the amount of traffic and the wall-to-wall buildings. “If I didn’t know this was Athens, I would swear I had landed in Mexico City. I can’t believe what a difference three decades can make. There were about one million people in Athens when I lived here before.”
Fratangelo laughed. “There’s four million today, and that doesn’t include the immigrants from places like Albania, which the Greeks have no way of counting.”
Fratangelo turned onto a main boulevard that led slightly uphill toward the center of town. The Acropolis, wreathed in a smog cloak, sat majestically, high above the city. They drove for a minute in silence while Bob absorbed the sights.
Fratangelo’s cell phone suddenly chirped. He frowned, flipped it open, and blurted a curt “Yes.” He listened for a minute, a smile now showing on his face, and said, “I’ll see you in twenty minutes.” After closing the phone and slipping it back into his shirt pocket, he said, “That was my wife,” he said. “Okay if we pick her up; it’s on our way.”
“No problem,” Bob said. “Where is she?”
“On Vassileas Sofias Boulevard; near the Hilton. She had a doctor’s appointment.”
Bob laid his head against the headrest and closed his eyes. He just wanted to rest for a moment. He was surprised and a little embarrassed when Fratangelo’s voice woke him. He pointed up the boulevard. “About fifty yards up the way. There they are by that tree.”
Bob rubbed his face. His eyes burned from lack of sleep and pollution. Squinting against the smog-filtered brightness of the sun, he looked up the block and saw a pregnant woman seated on a two-foot-high wall, her back against thick wrought iron bars rising from the top of the wall to a height of about ten feet. As they approached the spot where the woman sat, Bob noticed that strands of her strawberry-blond hair stuck to her forehead and her face was so red she appeared to be sunburned. A little boy of about six, wearing shorts and a T-shirt, moved in front of her, making a valiant effort to catch one of the fifty or so pigeons strutting around the sidewalk, curb, and gutter pecking at whatever it was pigeons seemed to find of interest in the dirt. The boy had braces on both legs and was on crutches. He walked in a straight, splayed-legged manner that made his pigeon hunting problematical.
Fratangelo honked the car horn, eased up to the curb, and started to get out of the car; but the woman raised her hand, as though to tell him to stay put. She flashed a radiant smile at Fratangelo, pushed off the wall with obvious difficulty, and shepherded the little boy in front of her toward the car.
When they had climbed into the backseat, Fratangelo made the introductions. “This is Mr. Danforth.” He turned to Bob and said, “My wife, Michelle, and my son, Andrew.”
“Achilles, Daddy,” the boy shouted. “My name is Achilles.”
“Oh, I forgot,” Fratangelo said, winking at Bob. “This is my son Achilles.”
“Good to meet you, Michelle,” Bob said, as he twisted around enough to look the woman in the eye. He then looked at the little boy and said, “It’s nice to meet you, too, Achilles.” Bob turned back to Michelle and added, “My name’s Bob.”
She smiled at him. “Welcome to Athens.”
Then Fratangelo asked, “Michelle, what did the doctor say?”
But before she could respond, the boy said in a high-pitched, astonishingly loud voice,” Are you my daddy’s new boss?”
“I guess I am,” Bob answered, turning again to look at the boy. “Is that okay with you?”
Andrew held Bob’s gaze for a few seconds, then nodded and said, “Only if you tell him to not work too much. Daddy works all the time.”
“Oh jeez,” Michelle sighed.
Bob laughed. “I don’t know if I can promise that, An . . . Achilles. You know your daddy has a very important job.” As soon as the words rolled off his tongue, Bob felt guilty. He knew he would work Tony Fratangelo long hours and long days, the same way he always worked himself. And, as a result, this young father would ignore his family the same way Bob had ignored Liz and Michael.
The boy was scowling now.
Finally, Bob said, “I’ll see what I can do.” But from the look on the boy’s face, he could see the kid didn’t believe a word of it.
CHAPTER EIGHT
JULY 28, 2004
Stavros Theodorakis’ heart quickened. He was afraid that his face showed his excitement. It felt hot. He glanced around at the other workers and, when he was satisfied no one was watching him, ran his hands through his thick black hair. He quickly snatched his handkerchief from his back trouser pocket and mopped away the perspiration that had popped out on his forehead and on his upper lip.
Every day for the past seven years, he had performed his job as a clerk at the Ministry of Justice with a pathological attention to detail. His work ethic distinguished him from the drones in the ministry. Stavros looked around the large room, with its fourteen desks, gray-painted concrete floor, and glaring fluorescent lighting and felt only contempt for his fellow workers. Unlike them, he never left his office to go home until he had completed his daily tasks. Despite standing out among the other clerks in the office, Stavros had never been offered a promotion. His co-workers and supervisor considered him a boring, nitpicking little man who didn’t have the personality or the imagination to move up.
Stavros had come to the conclusion that his co-workers’ opinions of him were not too far from reality. He was boring; there was nothing remarkable about his appearance, his personality, or his place in the world. Only his cousin, Demetrios Mavroyianni, made Stavros feel important. Demetrios had handed him the key to the door that would allow him to periodically escape his pedestrian existence.
The Greek Government mandated that all passenger manifests for all flights entering Greece be electronically transmitted to the Greek Ministry of Justice no later than one hour after the flight’s departure for Greece. This meant that hundreds of these passenger lists arrived in Stavros Theodorakis’ computer every day. Mondays were particularly onerous, because Stavros had to deal with all the manifests that had accumulated over the weekend. But Wednesdays, like today, weren’t bad.
Loaded on Stavros’ office computer were a myriad of reference software programs from Greek law enforcement and Intelligence agencies, Interpol, British MI-6, the CIA, the FBI, and a dozen other such organizations. It was Stavros’ job to compare the names on the passenger manifests against these software programs to try to identify criminals or terrorists who might enter Greece, and to report any match to the ministry’s Criminal Investigation Division. The programs not only included the real names of the criminals and terrorists, but also their known aliases. Unfortunately, most matches would be made after the criminal had already landed at the airport and melted into the Athens population. But the authorities figured it was better than nothing.
No one in Stavros’ department knew he had also loaded on his computer the names of hundreds of agents and thousands of run-of-the-mill employees of Intelligence services from the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Turkey, Israel, and many other countries. These names had been
provided to Stavros by his cousin, Demetrios, who had let it slip one time, after too many ouzos, that many of the names had come from a former CIA Case Officer. The list of names had been updated periodically from sources in France, Germany, the Middle East, and, especially, from Demetrios’ many contacts inside the Greek Ministries of Justice and of Public Order.
Every so often, Stavros matched a name on a flight manifest against one of the legitimate lists in his computer. In the case of a common criminal, Stavros was diligent about immediately reporting the match to his supervisor. As far as terrorists were concerned, Stavros cleared any matches with Demetrios first. Sometimes, Demetrios told him to bury the information. But what Stavros was most interested in finding was a match between a passenger on a flight list with a name on his secret software program. That had just happened.
“Demetrios,” Stavros said jauntily into his telephone, “are we still on for dinner tonight?”
There was a momentary pause on the other end of the line. Stavros guessed that Demetrios had been surprised at his use of the code words: Are we still on for dinner tonight? After all, it wasn’t every week, or even every month that Stavros matched the name of a foreign Intelligence agent against one of his flight manifests. In fact, it had been several months since the last match: the British Defense Attaché, Harvey Cornwell.
CHAPTER NINE
JULY 28, 2004
Rodney Townsend had cultivated a reputation for being cool under pressure. An informant he had worked with in Communist East Berlin in the early eighties had wondered aloud whether Townsend had had a nerve-ectomy. Townsend had smiled back at the man, waved goodbye, and then, using false ID, driven across the border into the British Zone . . . with an East German defector hidden in a secret compartment beneath the floor of his lorry. Townsend dropped off the defector, returned to his hotel room, and spent the next thirty minutes embracing the toilet and shaking like a leaf in a windstorm.
The “cool” Rodney Townsend displayed to others was all an act, one worthy of an Academy Award. He was an emotional boiling cauldron; but had learned as a child to hide his feelings out of fear his father would use any display of emotion as one more excuse to beat him black and blue. When he went out on his first mission for MI-6 in 1981—to plant a listening device in the bedroom of a Red Chinese operative in Hong Kong—he was caught in the act by the man’s Canadian mistress. He’d thought his career with British Intelligence had come to a quick and ignominious end. Instead, when the woman asked him what he was doing, there was something about her that made Townsend act rashly and, he thought at the time, stupidly. He told her exactly why he was in her boudoir. She’d reacted with wide-eyed astonishment, and, after a few seconds, devolved into hilarious laughter. “This might be fun,” she’d said. Townsend wound up recruiting the woman as an undercover agent after a long night with her of slap and tickle. She’d thought that was funny, as well. He’d returned to his hotel room in the early morning and threw up until dawn.
At first, he’d thought he was a coward because of the fits of uncontrollable sweating and nausea after returning from a mission; but, as time went on, he realized that his physical reaction to dangerous situations didn’t make him a coward. Running away would have. Barfing and shaking were his way of releasing stress, while others might explode in anger, get drunk, or even cry.
Townsend was at this moment seething with anger. Harvey Cornwell had been his best friend. Cornwell was an English patriot and one of the best and brightest in the British Navy and in British Intelligence. His death was a terrible loss for Cornwell’s family, for England, and for Townsend.
And now the damned Americans were sending over some desk jockey to work with his team. It was bad enough that their so-called allies, the Greeks, were putting up roadblocks every time he and his team tried to gather information; now he had a sodding Yank he would have to baby-sit.
The secure telephone on his desk jarred Townsend from his thoughts. He jerked the receiver from its cradle. “Townsend here, may I help you?” he answered, ever the gentleman, despite the rage in him.
“Everything alright over there, old man?” the voice on the other end of the line asked.
Townsend recognized Brigadier Jeffrey Watkin-Coons’ nasal tone. The man was upper-upper crust. Townsend knew his boss was solid. The man couldn’t help it that he had been raised as a member of the British aristocracy and sounded like Prince Charles. “About the same,” he said. “It’s like pulling teeth getting the locals to cooperate with us. I talked with Inspector Spirothetis with the Greek Police about getting access to the information about Brigadier Cornwell’s murder. He’s thinking about it.”
“Anything I can do?” Watkin-Coons asked.
“Thank you; but it’s better that I handle it. I need the man’s cooperation. If we go over his head, he’ll do nothing but obstruct my efforts going forward.”
“Um, I see,” Watkin-Coons mused. “Understood. Has that fellow from Langley arrived? Have you heard from him?”
Townsend sighed. “Yes, on both counts. We’ve arranged lunch for tomorrow.”
“Let me know how it goes,” Watkin-Coons said. “We should cooperate with the Americans.”
Townsend wasn’t sure if his boss was just going through the motions, or if he was serious.
“Of course, sir,” Townsend said. “You can be sure of my cooperation with the Yanks.”
After Watkin-Coons hung up, Townsend smiled and thought, I’ll cooperate with the Yanks, all right. I’ll send them on a wild goose chase.
CHAPTER TEN
JULY 29, 2004
“Malaka! I don’t care what the fucking Americans think. This is Greece, not Grenada. Those bastards wouldn’t dare jeopardize their relationship with our country.” Deputy Prime Minister Dimitris Argyropoulos smirked. “They need us more than we need them. Without Greece as a buffer against the Balkans, against Turkey, think of the chaos that could occur in the region. The Americans are scared to death.”
Nicolaos Koufos, the head of the Ministry of Finance’s Economic Development Department, felt hot; sweat dripped down his back, and he wiped his forehead with his handkerchief. He didn’t want his nervousness to show, but he couldn’t help himself. It wasn’t only Argyropoulos’ rhetoric that frightened him. The man had become more and more volatile over the last few years. The Deputy Prime Minister reminded Koufos of the Adolf Hitler he’d seen in old movies and newsreels. The man’s right hand chopped the air the way the German madman used to. Even Argyropoulos’ strutting step and dark hair and mustache resembled Hitler’s.
Koufos laced his fingers over his copious belly and squirmed in his chair in an effort to find a more comfortable position. His short legs barely touched the carpet and his shirt collar was starting to feel like a garrote. He had been in complete agreement with Argyropoulos in the beginning, back in the seventies when they were students demonstrating against the Military Government. Argyropoulos was the charismatic leader of that student movement. But that was nearly thirty years ago and the environment had changed. Hell, their party was in power now. The situation had spun out of control, and he knew in his gut the longer this insanity continued, the worse the ultimate outcome would be. He suspected Argyropoulos was fooling himself about the Americans’ state of mind. The man mistook American patience and attempts at diplomacy for weakness. The players on the international geopolitical chessboard were in active flux. What if the Americans decided to let Greece flap in the wind and moved their southern European operations to Bulgaria, for instance? Argyropoulos had carried the Party’s original antipathy for the U.S. beyond the Party’s original intent.
“I, like you, hate the Americans for what they did in 1967. The overthrow of our elected government and the imposition of a military dictatorship were terrible violations against the Greek people. It’s a new century, however; the Olympic Games will be here in less than a month. We must make changes.”
A
rgyropoulos leaped to his feet, shoving his chair back with such force that it slammed against the wall and toppled over. His face was almost purple with rage. “Don’t you talk to me about change,” he spat. “The American CIA overthrew our government. They took over our country. They . . .” His voice had become hoarse and he seemed to have run out of words.
“I meant no disrespect,” Koufos said, trying to placate the Party’s designee to be the next Prime Minister, “but Photos and his people are out of control. They’ve murdered Greeks, not just Americans, Englishmen, and Turks. Do we even know what these people stand for anymore? And the Olympics could be a disaster. If they follow through with their plans, Greece might never recover.”
Argyropoulos stabbed his finger at Koufos. “I know what they stand for: Revenge. Payback for what our enemies did to us.” He turned and righted his chair. After sitting in it, he looked at Koufos and the smirk returned. “And, remember, Koufos, you’re no innocent bystander. You’ve been up to your neck in this since the beginning, since 1975, when 17 November killed the CIA Station Chief. So, don’t think you can walk away.” The Deputy Prime Minister wagged his finger. An evil glint sparked in his eyes. “The Olympics will be like a gourmet for a pride of lions. I’ve waited for this for years.”
Koufos felt a tremor of fear course through him. What had he gotten himself into? The fall of 17 November had been a disaster. But at least none of the group’s members could implicate him. That wasn’t the case with Greek Spring. Giorgos Photos had been a student with him and Argyropoulos in the seventies, and he had funneled money to the terrorist cell through Photos. Greek Spring could ruin Greece’s future and his own life. The entire world would be looking at Greece this summer because of the Olympic Games. It was the country’s opportunity to pull itself up from the third world to the modern world, and this maniac, Argyropoulos, would jeopardize it all to avenge the ouster of the Greek Government thirty-five years earlier . . . and to accelerate his rise to Prime Minister.
