Stratton might as well have shown him a Blue Peter badge for all the reaction it got, other than the man picking up a phone.
‘Who you ringing?’ Stratton asked.
‘Get verification,’ the man said tiredly.
‘Verification of what?’ Stratton asked.
‘Your pretty little badge, sir,’ he said sarcastically.
Stratton put his hand firmly on the man’s, pushing the phone down with superior strength, and stared closely into his eyes. ‘When you got this job you were shown a slide of this badge and told that the bearer represented the Queen and you were to move the airport a foot to the left if that person asked you to. Now you’re going to get off your fat arse and show me the back way to terminal one where a plane is being held for me right now, or I will thrash the shit out of you and have you slung in a cell for a week under the prevention of terrorism act for obstructing justice. Do I make myself clear?’
Stratton had to give credit to the man. If he was concerned, he didn’t show it even though he got to his feet and straightened his jacket, all the while looking at Stratton.
‘Be back in a bit, Fred,’ he said to his partner. ‘This way,’ he then said to Stratton and headed across the corridor to an airport-staff-only door.
Chapter 7
Stratton sat in the empty arrival hall of Paradisi Airport in Rhodes on the end of a fixed row of seats with his feet stretched out in front of him and looking as uncomfortable as he felt. It was six in the morning and the next connection from Istanbul was due in any time soon. The café and kiosks were shut for the winter by the look of them. It was off-season and hard to imagine that in the summer the large hall would be literally packed twenty-four hours a day with people coming and going from all over the world. This time of year the tourist resorts would be ghost towns since even most of the Greeks who lived on the island either left to find work elsewhere for the winter or the ones who had made a good income from the tourists were themselves on holiday until the start of the next season.
Stratton scrolled through the directory of numbers on the satellite phone his contact had given him on his arrival a couple of hours ago, along with a credit card, money and the request to keep receipts or he would be charged. Since the man did not offer Stratton a weapon there seemed no point in asking for one, but Stratton hinted at it anyway, getting nothing but a strange look in reply.The contact was a local runner for whoever ran the island’s office and would know nothing about the operation anyway.
As Stratton read the phone list, many of the entries first names only, it became clear that the operative who had the phone last did not erase the directory, which was not an uncommon mistake. One of the names was Aggy, and Stratton wondered if it was Melissa - Aggy being her undercover name - a former partner from the Northern Ireland undercover detachment. She was beautiful and in many ways a perfect match for him.They had worked together for over a year and gotten to know each other well, though not intimately.What made Melissa special was that she knew the world of military intelligence and understood its influences on Stratton, since it affected her in the same way. They were very much alike, and in the world of undercover operations it made sense to be with your own kind. There was no need for their professional lives to be hidden from each other; they could discuss practically everything, and they did not have to put up a wall of secrecy when suddenly one of them had to leave on a job. He thought about calling the number, his finger hovering over the button, but stopped himself. It would not have been cool, not right now, and he would not have known what to say to her anyway. Despite genuinely missing her and often wondering if anything might have come from their relationship, he also knew his wanting to call was symptomatic of a desire for female company, a friend and confidante he could hold closely and be affectionate towards. Melissa could fill those criteria, if she was still available, but this was not the time or place.
Movement suddenly caught his eye. Staff in uniform, immigration or customs officers, were milling about, a good sign that the plane he was waiting for, and the only one scheduled to arrive for the next six hours, had landed.
There was also activity in the baggage hall and Stratton’s expectations began to look justified. The conveyor belt started up and then a few seconds later died with a terrible crunching sound. Stratton looked through the windows to the taxi rank outside where just two cabs were waiting. As he turned back to face the doorway from the customs hall, Gabriel walked through it.
Stratton got to his feet, put his hands in the pockets of his old leather jacket and waited for Gabriel to find him, which was not going to be difficult in the empty hall.
Gabriel spotted him and as he closed in, Stratton saw he was wearing a slight smile.
‘Stratton. How you doing?’ he asked, as if they were friends.
‘Fine thanks,’ he said, surprised by Gabriel’s joviality. ‘How’s your head?’ he asked.
‘I think it was more shock than injury,’ Gabriel said. ‘I’m not used to getting knocked on the head.’
Stratton could see the scab-covered bump clearly.
‘You have all your baggage?’ Stratton asked, looking at the one bag he was carrying.
‘I’m set,’ Gabriel said. ‘So,’ he continued, still wearing his smile. ‘Where are we off to?’
Stratton had a sudden flashback to the first time they set off together. ‘Don’t get mad but I really don’t have a clue,’ Stratton answered. ‘Do you mean accommodation? That won’t be a problem. There’s plenty of room this time of year.’
‘No,’ Gabriel said, his smile fading. ‘I mean, where do we go?’
‘Why would I know? I don’t even know what we’re doing here.’
Gabriel’s smile was gone.
‘Why don’t you tell me why we’re here,’ Stratton said, trying to keep it together before it all fell apart.
Gabriel nodded, controlling his annoyance. He had vowed to act more like a partner this time, and, anyway, it was clear that this was going to be as much about them versus their bosses as it was looking for the mysterious demon. ‘I had another image while in Turkey,’ he said.
‘I gathered that much,’ Stratton said. His doubts about Gabriel went up and down like a big dipper. At this moment they were very high.
‘I saw medieval walls and buildings, Knights . . . crusaders I suppose, and they were on a Mediterranean island.’
‘Why Rhodes?’ Stratton asked. ‘There must be hundreds of islands with medieval buildings. European knights were all over the Med.’
‘I saw thousands of homes crammed around a horseshoe harbour. Our people came up with this place. Apparently Rhodes’ old city is medieval, densely packed with buildings and has a horseshoe harbour.’
Stratton was beginning to feel trapped on this assignment. ‘The man you see, the one who hit you in the wood, is he here too?’ he asked.
‘If this is the right place,’ he said.
‘Have you actually seen him?’
‘I’ve never seen him,’ Gabriel said pressing one hand to his forehead with the other held up, stopping the conversation.‘Stratton, I want to apologise to you.This last week I’ve had time think, and I, well, I realised what a difficult position you must have been in when we first met. I never took a moment to consider it from your point of view.You were thrown in the deep end, with someone you didn’t know, who claimed to do something that must’ve sounded wacky to you - and probably still does. I not only expected you to believe in me without question, but to help me as much as you could at the same time. I am arrogant and I apologise . . . Truth is, you did pretty good back there in the forest.You took me to the right place and you didn’t block me.That’s more than I’ve gotten from most decoders I’ve ever used. But asking for you to rejoin me was thoughtless. I didn’t stop to think that working with me was the last place you wanted to be . . . If you want to go, I’ll tell them it was my fault and I was unhelpful and impossible to work with.’
An apologetic smile crept on to Gabriel’s
face as he looked at Stratton. ‘But I need help on this. I can’t do it alone. I’d like you to stay on.’
Any anger Stratton had for the man dissolved in the face of such sincere contrition. It was nevertheless tempting to accept Gabriel’s offer for him to get out, but he could not. It was a plea for help and it would be desertion. Like it or not, it seemed he was stuck with this old man for the immediate future.
‘Okay . . . Partners. Just explain something to me. Why can’t you see his features?’ Stratton asked.
‘I see into his heart, not his face,’ Gabriel said.‘And through his eyes, but not like they are windows. I feel his emotional reaction to things. He’s nostalgic. Something he saw allowed him to imagine himself as a knight, on castle battlements, fighting an enemy who came in wooden ships by their thousands. The knights did not lose the fight and the enemy left in their boats. That’s the adventure he had and what I saw. I told that to our people, they decoded it and they sent us here.’
Stratton sighed. He was not enjoying this. ‘Why don’t we find a hotel and take it from there?’ he suggested.
‘Agreed.’
They picked up their bags and headed out of the airport to the waiting taxis.
Gabriel sat in the back of the car while Stratton sat beside the driver as they followed the coastline. Twenty minutes later they reached the twentieth-century outskirts of the city of Rhodes where they left the beach and climbed a hill. The modern houses gave way to a cluster of ancient remains signposted as the Acropolis and a mile further on they came to an imposing medieval wall with a vast moat in front of it. They followed the road in front of the wall for another mile, gradually downhill and back to the sea, then along the front of a harbour where ships lay at berth. Suddenly the taxi turned in through an arch and the road became narrow and changed from tarmac to cobblestone. They stopped in a cramped, sloping square with a fountain in the centre and shuttered shops on the higher ground facing the arched entrance and battlements.
Stratton asked the driver if he knew of a hotel but the man did not appear to want to spend any more time with them than he had to and shrugged ignorance.
A moment later they were standing in the square overshadowed by the heavily fortified ramparts on one side and two-storey buildings tightly packed together on the other, holding their baggage, the taxi gone, and looking at the narrow streets that led away in every direction.There were few people about and, in short, the atmosphere was ghost town.
‘This isn’t it,’ Gabriel said.
Stratton said nothing but inwardly sighed. Why was he surprised, he asked himself. There were some sixteen hundred Greek islands, six hundred of them inhabited, and then there were the thousands of miles of mainland coastline and all the towns along that - not to mention places in Turkey that could match the description. The whole idea of detailed research was to avoid pointless journeys such as this. If they had got it wrong with all the databases at their fingertips, what chance had Stratton and Gabriel of finding the place.
‘Why’s it wrong?’ Stratton asked.
‘There aren’t any people.’
‘It’s out of season,’ Stratton reminded him.
‘What I mean is I saw hundreds and hundreds of houses, more than a thousand maybe, but no people. Just a few. The houses are nearly all empty.’
‘Like this,’ Stratton pointed out, holding on to his frustration.
‘No. The houses in my viewing have been empty for a long time.’
‘Was it an ancient town like Pompeii?’ Stratton asked.
‘No. That’s too far back. The houses still stand but many are in ruin. Walls collapsed. No windows or doors. Overgrown.’
Stratton tried to think of any town destroyed by a natural disaster, or chemical or radiation attack which was still empty but nothing came to mind.
‘I wish I could draw it for you,’ Gabriel sighed, ‘But I can’t. All I can say is this place doesn’t fit what I saw.’ He looked away as if he did not want to think about it any more.
Stratton thought about reporting back to Sumners. Perhaps the boffins could draw up a list of possible towns for them to check out, or at least get pictures of to show Gabriel and save some travelling. He wondered why they had not done that in the first place.
‘You hungry?’ Stratton asked him, trying to think of something to help ease the tension he could feel rising in Gabriel.
‘I haven’t been very hungry lately . . . I don’t think you realise how serious this is.’
Gabriel was right. Stratton did not.
‘We’re running out of time. Each day he gets closer to his goal, whatever or wherever that is; he pushes relentlessly towards it.’
He could feel the change in Gabriel. Back in London and Thetford he was tired and frustrated, but now he looked more drawn, weaker and sounded much more desperate.
A man sipping a hot drink from a mug stepped from a shop nearby and looked at them.
‘Hello,’ he said in a charming manner. ‘Can I help you?’
Stratton turned to him. He was middle-aged, small, comfortably dressed and as harmless looking as he sounded.
‘You are English,’ he said confidently, then, when Stratton did not answer immediately, he looked unsure. ‘Françoise? German? My Dutch is not so good.’
‘English,’ Stratton said.
‘Ah. I thought so. I am rarely wrong. I am Cristos,’ he continued, remaining in his doorway with his free hand casually in his pocket. ‘This is my travel shop. If you need anything: car, boat, flight, hotel, I can help you.’
Stratton thought about asking him for a hotel, but he was habitually untrusting of strangers and liked to find his own accommodation, especially when on the ground himself. ‘We’re fine, thanks.’
‘Looks like a storm is coming,’ Cristos said.‘Maybe tonight. A good time to find a cosy restaurant with a log fire and a nice bottle of wine.’
Stratton could go along with that suggestion, although he doubted it was what Gabriel had in mind.
‘You look like you have just arrived . . . Would you like some tea or coffee?’
Stratton considered the offer. A cuppa would be nice and there wasn’t a café open in the immediate area. He looked over at Gabriel who was staring at the battlements and the rooftops, shaking his head, compounding his belief this was not the place.
‘Gabriel? Cup of tea? We need to take a moment to consider our next move.’
Gabriel looked at him, thought on it a few seconds and nodded his head.
Stratton looked back at Cristos with a smile. ‘Tea would be great, thanks.’
Cristos beamed. ‘Come in, come in,’ he beckoned and stepped inside his shop.
The travel shop was long and narrow, and covered with posters displaying inviting beaches, advertisements for boat trips, maps, charts and souvenirs. Cristos was standing by a little table where there were half a dozen mugs and an electric kettle.
‘Come in,’ Cristos said.‘How do you like your tea?’
‘Milk, one sugar,’ Stratton said.
‘And you?’ he said to Gabriel.
‘Black no sugar.’
‘Ah. American, no?’
Gabriel acknowledged it with a forced smile.
‘Please. Sit,’ Cristos said.
A row of chairs extended from the door to the back of the shop, intended for people waiting to make bookings.
Stratton and Gabriel studied the premises. One wall was practically covered with postcards from satisfied customers from all over the world.
‘If you don’t mind me saying, you looked a bit lost outside.’
‘Not lost.We were expecting to meet some friends but it seems no one else has turned up.’
Cristos nodded understandingly as he handed them a hot mug each. ‘Are you planning on staying long?’
‘No. Just passing through,’ Stratton said as he sipped his tea. It tasted good. ‘Nice cuppa.’
‘Where are you off to next?’
‘Not sure.’
‘If you need transport, you are in the right place.’
‘We certainly are,’ Stratton said, smiling politely.
Gabriel sat down and nursed his tea as he stared into space.
‘We don’t get many tourists this time of year. Usually the ones more interested in the island’s ancient and medieval history prefer to come when the crowds of holiday makers have gone.’
‘That’s us.’
‘Are you interested in anything in particular? This city was built in the fourteenth century, but we have places dating much further back.’
Stratton stared at Cristos as he considered something. ‘You probably know the Mediterranean pretty well.’
‘I am second-generation travel shop. My father and mother had this place forty-eight years ago. There’s not much I don’t know about this part of the world.’
‘If I were to describe a town that had a horseshoe-shaped harbour, that once had a large population - several thousand people, a thousand houses say - but only a few people now lived in it, where would you think I was talking about?’
Cristos grinned.‘Kastellorizo,’ he said without hesitation. ‘Have you been there?’
‘No.’
‘Well you have just described it as if you have seen it for yourself.’
‘Kasta . . .?’
‘Kastellorizo. It’s an island. Kastellorizo means red castle.’
‘It has a castle too?’
‘Yes. The same knights who built this place built it. The soil is red so they called it château roux, which in bad Greek means Kastellorizo.’
‘Where is it?’
‘Off the coast of Turkey, about seven hours from here by boat and forty minutes by plane.’
‘And this place is practically deserted?’
‘Before the First World War it had seventeen thousand people on it. It was . . . how you say . . . when people are taken from a sinking ship?’
‘Rescued?’ Stratton offered.
‘Yes, but . . . evak . . .’
‘Evacuated.’
‘Yes. It was evacuated during the Second World War by the British Navy before the Germans came. Then it was mostly burned down. Some say it was the Germans who looted it, some say the British. Who knows? Someone does, I suppose.Then, after the war, everyone was happy in their new countries, and so only a few people went back there. There was not much to go back to. There’s a ferry every few days and not many people go or come from there.’ Cristos smelt the potential business. ‘You want me to check on flights or ferries for you?’ he asked.
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