As the blood and pain continued to leak out of the seemingly impervious boy all over the holy text, the faces would appear.
Iraqi, Russian, Palestinian, Vietnamese, South American, European, and Asian faces that just floated in the carmine-stained mist; quietly taking in the destruction of the boy who—as a man—would take their lives.
Or cause their lives to be taken.
They never spoke, never revealed so much as an expression or thought in their dead eyes. But they floated and they watched the piecemeal devastation of Xenos’s younger self.
Then all froze; all became stilled and quiet.
Xenos turned to his father, as he knew he must. For he was no mere observer in this dream/horror. He was dragged along on its vicious current with no more power to alter its path than he’d had to alter his own.
The old man stood, walked over to the boy, gently smoothed a vagrant lock of hair out of the now blind but still clear eyes, then turned to the man that the boy would, must, become.
“I have no son,” he said sadly yet firmly. He gestured at the slowly immolating boy. “He was my boy, my life, my future.” He sighed as his eyes locked with Xenos’s. “You’re just a corpse. A dead man. A stranger to me now and forever.”
He reached up, violently tearing the lapel of the best suit he’d ever owned. Shaking his head, crying unheard tears, then covering his eyes with his right hand as he began reciting the ancient prayer of mourning.
“Yis’kadal v’yiskadash, shme raboh. There be some who have left a name behind them; whose remembrance is as sweet as honey in all mouths. People will declare their wisdom and the congregation will tell of their goodness.”
“And there be some who have no memorial; whose names have vanished as though they had never been. They lie at rest in nameless graves. Their resting places in far-off forests and lonely fields are lost to the eyes of their revering kin. Yet they shall not be forgotten.”
The old man lowered his hand, staring deeply into Xenos’s sad eyes. And the old man’s voice was firm as stone and hard as iron.
“My son is lost to me, now and forever. His name will be vanished, his memory as though he had never been.”
Then, as if on cue in this kaleidoscopic horror that haunted Xenos virtually every time he closed his eyes, the mother he had never known stood beside them, crying deeply, her voice begging.
“No!” Avidol, don’t do this! He is your son! You cannot—
“I have no son, was the old man’s simple, pained,” inelastic reply. “He is a stranger to me. Yis’kadal v’yiskadash, shme raboh.”
And the scene would grow dark, insubstantial, as Xenos would reach out—through—the image of his father. Would be racked with a soul-deep pain that threatened to do what countless evil men’s bullets could not do.
Destroy the man he had become.
As the scene would shimmer, blink from existence, then repeat itself in even greater strikes of torment and anguish.
He awoke with a start, instinctively grabbing the person he sensed above him by the neck, pulling the person down, his knife pressed hard against the exposed throat.
“Emai Eleni!”
A quick glance around the tiny room confirmed that they were still alone.
“What is it?”
“Soldiers,” she whispered urgently. “Downstairs!”
“Have you seen the bastard or not? the lieutenant spat out in Greek through his thick Cypriot accent as two enlisted men held the bartender’s arms behind him.”
“I know nothing,” the bartender slurred out from somewhere in his battered face.
A baseball bat to the groin was the lieutenant’s response.
As the man collapsed to the floor, the soldiers began kicking him.
The lieutenant casually turned to the nearest prostitute, a trembling girl in her early twenties.
“Listen, grandmother,” he said to the old woman in broken English so that he would not be understood by his men. He may have been speaking to the old woman, but his eyes never left the girl in front of him as his bat began to work its way beneath her skirt. “We do business here. I give you piece of commander’s reward, yes? You get rich, I get richer, an enemy of the state is removed, and your girls stay…” The bat lifted the skirt, then tore it away. “… Charming. Parakolutheô?”
A commotion upstairs caught his attention and he drew his pistol. The soldiers with him cocked their weapons and looked nervously at the stairway. An almost endless moment later the bodies of the two soldiers who had been sent upstairs came rolling down.
Blood still spurting from gaping wounds in their throats.
“Attention!” the lieutenant ordered. But it wasn’t necessary. His men couldn’t have been more aware of the gore and threat in front of them if they’d tried.
It came from two weeks of “hunting the Devil.”
“Attention,” the tense man called out in Greek. “This is Lieutenant Kazamakis of the Cypriot Provisional Guard. You will immediately surrender all weapons and slowly come down the stairs, hands above your head.”
No answer.
Knowing what his men did not, he repeated the order, in English this time.
“Yeah, right,” came the slow atonal reply.
The soldiers shivered at the lack of humanity in that voice. Some overturned tables or moved into the cover of doorways. Others crossed themselves and prepared to die.
“If you do not surrender immediately, we will be forced to come up and get you, the lieutenant said with less strength than he would have liked.”
“The stairs are in front of you. Come ahead.” A pause that seemed to last many lifetimes. “I’m waiting.”
“Spiros, Hector! Ketagatay kati!”
But the men the lieutenant had ordered forward just looked at each other, looked at their friends bodies in the stairwell, then slowly shook their heads.
Before a reprimand could be issued, new orders contemplated or screamed out, a new sound filled the room.
Heavy footsteps coming down the stairs.
The lieutenant grabbed the old woman, holding her in front of him as a shield. Men crouched, lay flat, their fingers pressing on the triggers with ninety percent of the force necessary to fill the air between them and the stairway with a solid wall of lead.
“Don’t die for this, boys,” Xenos’s voice called out from very near the bottom of the stairs. “Tota esos na say afisso na zis.”
One of the soldiers near the back of the taverna dropped his weapon as he ran out the door. “E zoe enai glikeah!”
“Open fire!” the lieutenant screamed, and the air was shattered by the remaining seven AR-15s emptying their clips into the wall by the stairway.
After ten seconds of violent noise, a silence filtered into the place. No one moved. No one spoke. Everyone prayed that it was over.
Silently the lieutenant ordered two men forward to check it out. When they hesitated, he carefully aimed his pistol at them and gestured again. With more caution than any of the others had ever seen before, the two men reluctantly crept forward, into the stairwell.
Less than a minute later they returned, carrying an empty pair of climbing boots and a small cassette recorder.
“I’m still waiting, Xenos’s voice said calmly from the tape player.”
“Shit, the lieutenant muttered, a moment before he felt the cold steel of Xenos’s knife pressed against the base of his skull from behind.”
The men gasped at the man in stocking feet who held the knife to their officer’s head and pointed a gaping .44 Magnum at the rest of them.
“Order them to drop their weapons or you die first,” Xenos said in a voice very much like the devil’s, the lieutenant thought in an instant.
“English no good,” the lieutenant stammered out in an attempt to buy time and think of something.
Xenos smiled spasmodically. “You understand well enough.”
The lieutenant was trembling so hard that he was almost impaling himself on the rock-ste
ady knife. He instantly issued the order. “Do it for God’s sake!”
Most of the men did as they were told.
Two didn’t.
“Release lieutenant,” one of the last yelled out, “or we kill you and others!” He leveled his rifle at Xenos.
Xenos looked almost sympathetically toward the young, cleanest cut of the soldiers. “Don’t die, boy. Not for him. Not over this. This has nothing to do with you. Tota esos na say afisso na zis.”
For thirty seconds the standoff held, then the young soldier’s finger began to tighten on the trigger.
The shot that exploded through the room lifted the soldier into the air, slamming him into the wall; his life created an abstract on the clay as he slid to the floor, already dead.
“Dumb,” Xenos whispered as the last armed soldier threw his guns across the room.
“Dureté!”
Xenos whirled around, almost pushing his gun into the face of an old man, who instantly paled. But the younger man who had called out the name was standing behind and to the side of the first man.
“You going to shoot everyone today?” He laughed. “Or just your old friend?”
“You ain’t that good a friend, Franco.”
The young man laughed again. “You got that many in this room you can be so picky?”
Xenos shrugged as he lowered his gun, and allowed the old man—the taverna owner—and his sons, who were waiting outside, to round up the surviving soldiers and lock them in the cellar.
“What are you doing here, Franco? Xenos asked as he poured himself a glass of goat’s milk five minutes later.”
The young Corsican sniffed at the pitcher, turned up his nose, then grabbed a nearby bottle of ouzo. “You know this is a safe haven for my group.” He took a deep drink of the acidic wine. “Just walking the property, like you Americans say.”
“No.”
“I haven’t asked you anything yet.”
Xenos turned to the bar’s mirror to study Franco’s reflection. “The answer’s still no.”
“There’s no trust left in the world, Dureté. No trust.” He stepped out of the way as one of the soldiers with his throat cut was dragged out of the taverna. “Something I should know about?”
“I thought you knew everything.”
“So did I.”
They drank in silence for a few minutes as the room was cleaned of all traces of the short-lived battle. The wall and floor were being scrubbed, fresh clay applied to the walls, tablecloths torn for gags.
“Okay,” Franco finally said. “I heard some things.”
Xenos just poured himself another glass of milk.
Franco studied the man he’d known for ten years, but knew almost nothing about. “Like I know that half the fucking Cypriot Army is looking to exterminate Xenos. And that the local Greek militia has orders to stay out of it.” He raised his eyebrows. “I must admit, that did pique my interest.”
“I killed the Cypriot commander’s son,” Xenos said simply.
“Yeah, I heard that too.” The briefest of pauses. “Any particular reason? If it can be told, of course.”
Xenos took his gun from the bar and slid it into its holster. “How long can you hold these guys?”
“How long do you need?”
A deep sigh. “The son, and some of his friends, were running charters for college kids in the islands. Then stranding them here on Naxos, robbing and torturing the men, raping and sodomizing the women. Shooting videos of it and selling it to other tourists.”
“So?” Franco seemed completely unaffected, almost bored.
“I found their last charter. Including a nineteen-year-old girl who died naked and bloody in my arms.”
Franco looked into his associate’s eyes. “I can hold them as long as it takes to get you off this rock.” He smiled broadly. “Of course there’s going to be a price, amico mio.”
Xenos put his knife in his boot, threw his last roll of bills on the bar, then started for the door. “No, grazie. I can take care of myself.”
Franco roared with laughter. “Of that there is little doubt!” He put a hand on the bigger man’s shoulder. “But let me do this for you. It’ll make it easier for me to ask you for my favor.”
Xenos shook his head. “I thought I already said no.”
“There are all sorts of no’s.” He followed Xenos out onto the predawn street. “And the job is in New York. Don’t you have family in New York?”
Xenos stopped, with his back to the Corsican. “I don’t have any family,” he almost whispered, his dream gnawing at his consciousness. “In New York or anywhere else.” He started off.
Franco watched him for a few seconds. “But I do, Dureté! I came to this godforsaken rock because of this. To find you! You can at least hear me out. You owe the Brotherhood that much.” He immediately regretted saying it.
Xenos turned around, slowly walking back to Franco. His face a frozen nothing mask. A soulless, blank evil.
“Io non devo niente a nessuno! Capito?” His voice was hoarse, choked with violence and black possibilities. “I owe no one a fucking thing. Not anyone.”
But Franco never backed down, never took a backward step.
“You owe us at least the courtesy of listening.” He paused. “For that we will guarantee your safety off this island and back to Toulon.”
Xenos thought about it. The hills of Naxos were impassable and crowded with blind canyons, caves, and ancient labyrinths. He could easily avoid the army until calmer heads prevailed and the pressure came off.
But how many more young soldiers with an overdeveloped sense of duty would he have to kill between then and now?
“You have a car, Franco? Or we going to have to walk?”
Franco nodded slightly in silent understanding, then held up his hand. A minute later a windowless panel van rattled to a stop. “Do I ever walk, amico mio?”
Five minutes later, after giving explicit instructions to the taverna owner and assuring him of his group’s protection against reprisals, Franco climbed into the van beside Xenos.
“I got a boat at Mikolas.”
Eighteen hours later, under cover of darkness, Xenos Filotimo sneaked aboard the fishing smack Orphelin and, with the tide, escaped into the warm waters of the Mediterranean for the long voyage to the French port of Toulon.
Once clear of the waters off Naxos, the big man stretched out on the foredeck, his backpack as a pillow, and closed his eyes.
But he didn’t allow himself to sleep.
The streets of Georgetown were about as different from the Greek islands as possible. The first frost of the year clung to the barren trees and bushes; the grass on the rolling hills was browning up, and people frowned with the sure and certain knowledge that winter was in offing.
But the streets of the Washington, D.C., suburb were no less dangerous than those outside the taverna.
The two people saw each other at a distance, walking diagonally toward each other on two of the quaint paths that bordered the university. They both adjusted their pace to ensure coming together at the right point at the right instant. As they both did their sums in their heads.
Do I recognize any faces or cars?
Does anything appear different from how it should be?
Any windows open, exhaust coming from parked vans, workmen on power poles?
Any reason at all to walk on by?!
As they came to the intersection of their paths, the older of the two checked the time. The younger yawned. A moment later they fell into step alongside each other as they began to meander through the carefully manicured university paths.
“Do you need to come in?” the older asked.
“No,” the younger replied. “I’m clean.”
“Do you need to deliver anything?”
“No.”
“Are you intact?”
The younger one hesitated before answering. “That’s what I’m here to find out.” The voice was brittle; scared but under tight con
trol.
“Are you intact?” the older one repeated, insisting that this rendezvous go by the numbers, as had countless clandestine meetings before.
Sighing, the younger replied, “I’ve detected no changes in the flow across my desk, in my assignments. My phone was clean as of 0930 today, and I’ve detected no surveillance.”
“Very well.”
They turned into a darker corner of the grounds, to a narrow strip of grass that wound between two buildings.
“So,” the younger one began without further explanation, “am I intact?”
The older one shrugged. “We believe so.”
“Thank God.”
The older one smiled. “God and Canvas.”
“Sure.” The younger one stopped for a moment.
“Is something wrong?”
“I don’t trust him. Where he is, what he’s doing for us; he could make us all very, uh, exposed.”
“The cost of doing business, I’m afraid,” the older one said simply. “But Canvas’s loyalty is based on money, and we cannot be outbid for his services, rest assured of that.”
“He knows a lot.”
A shrug from the older one. “A necessary evil. Canvas is a consummate professional and must have access to all sorts of information in order to do his part in this.”
A long silence.
“Does he know me? The younger one’s voice rose with anxiety.”
The older one smiled reassuringly. “He no more knows you than he knows anyone with whom he is not directly involved. He has detailed information only as far as his specific assignment goes and no further.” The smile vanished. “In any event, the knowledge he does have dies with him at the end of the operation.”
“And when is that?”
Now the older one sounded tense. Barely. “Access is not what we had hoped for, there has been resistance to the suggestions. But we hope that the affair can be concluded within six months.” The briefest of pauses. “A year at the most.”
“A year’s a long goddamned time,” the younger one whispered as a student moved past on a bicycle. “And it’s been getting worse since the, uh, thing.”
The older one nodded in agreement. “The incident was unexpected. Unfortunate.” It might’ve even been catastrophic, but Canvas performed admirably on that score. The older one smiled warmly. “I think we can return to the original timeline now.”
The 4 Phase Man Page 2
