The SUV pulled away and turned right at the first street off the promenade.
The woman leaned toward the front seat. “Take us back to the plane.”
“Whoa, I’m not going anywhere on a plane.”
She sat back and turned her head to face Kharon. “I understand, but I must leave, and by the time we reach the airport you and I will have concluded our business, one way or the other.”
He met her look, though he couldn’t see her eyes through her sunglasses. “And what’s that supposed to mean?”
She shrugged. “Nothing more than what it seems. Either we shall reach a deal or decide to go our separate ways. A talent such as yours is too precious to waste, and I assume I’ll have your word as a gentleman that if we cannot reach an agreement you will not divulge what we’ve talked about.”
“Why do I think that won’t be enough of a guarantee for you?”
“Because you’re cautious. But once you know who I am and what I have in mind you’ll realize that if you talk about what I am about to tell you, it won’t hurt me. It will just show me that I cannot trust your discretion, and that would be a dangerous mistake for you to make.”
“You’ve not yet made me a believer.”
“But you have all the guns.” She pointed at his shotgun and messenger bag. “What do I have to match them?”
“How about what Helen used to launch a thousand ships?”
She smiled. “Why, Kharon, you’re a charmer, too.”
“But is it enough to keep the cobra from striking the charmer? That’s all I want to know.”
She leaned forward, pressed a button, and a dark plexiglass screen rose up out of the back of the front seat to the ceiling. “There. That gives us both privacy to talk and a sign to you of my good faith.”
“What sign?” said Kharon.
She smiled again. “That divider screen is made of bulletproof plexiglass. Had you blasted away with your shotgun when it was down, the shot wouldn’t have penetrated beyond the back of the front seats. If I’d wanted, I could have killed you anytime I wished.”
Kharon pursed his lips and raised an eyebrow. “Make that two thousand ships.”
Chapter Seven
“Maggie, come in please,” Andreas yelled from his office.
Maggie poked her head in the doorway. “Do you mean all the way in, or is the head enough?”
“Nope, this will require the full-body experience.”
“Are you lonely for your playmates?” She walked over to his desk.
Andreas smiled. “Funny you should say that. Yianni and Petro are preparing to chase down our sole lead on Greece’s bomba kingpin, and your boyfriend is off doing only the devil knows what trying to generate another lead. So, I figured it’s time we pitch in too.”
“What’s with the ‘we’? Apparently, unlike some people, I’ve got a lot of work to do.”
“We are going to do some Internet research on the counterfeit wine business.”
Maggie smiled. “Have you punched ‘counterfeit wine’ into your browser yet?”
Andreas gestured no.
“Then do so, please.”
Andreas inhaled, typed in the words, and exhaled.
“Stop with the passive-aggressive breathing. There’s a point to this.”
A rush of headline world media coverage—ninety-nine percent of it in English—popped onto Andreas’ screen.
“As you can see, Boss, there’s more than enough material there to keep you busy all afternoon practicing your English language skills. You’ve got back issues of the world’s leading financial newspapers, a mass of wine industry publications, and recorded British and U.S. television news reports to listen to.”
She smiled. “Sadly, my English isn’t good enough to be of much help.”
Andreas quickly scrolled through the list of articles. “How did you know about all this?”
“I went online after Tassos asked me what I knew about counterfeit wine. I’d told him not much, because it hadn’t been a big problem in Greece and I didn’t collect expensive French wines, a pursuit fraught with counterfeit-related risks.”
“‘Fraught?’”
“Yes. I came across ‘fraught’ in the first sentence of the first English language article I found on the subject. That’s about when I decided to give up on my Internet research project. All I can tell you is the amount of money at play boggled my mind, Worldwide annual wine sales approach thirty-four billion bottles, distilled spirit sales run at about the same rate, and demand for both continues to grow.”
“That explains the big push into counterfeit.”
Maggie nodded. “And I couldn’t find anything about counterfeit in the Greek press that we didn’t already know.”
“Meaning?”
“That it took bomba-induced sex in public, crowds on drunken rampages, and a flood of counterfeit euros into one of the country’s most notorious, busy tourist locations to get that community united enough to demand police action. The bottom line reality is, only when a bomba death of a foreign visitor threatens Greece’s tourism image will authorities drop a highly publicized, but selectively administered, hammer on bomba sales.”
“For a while.”
Maggie pointed at the screen. “There’s a lot there that might interest you. Let me know when you find something exciting.” She smiled as she turned and headed back to her desk.
Andreas thought to ask her just who did she think was the boss, but he already knew the answer.
He began to read, hoping that somewhere in all that information he’d find what drove the counterfeit alcohol market, and from that perhaps deduce a clue to the sort who might be involved in Greece. But what he learned was there were different markets, driven by different motives.
What drove counterfeiting in places like China had nothing to do with lower prices, but with a lack of access to the product. Chateau Lafite Rothschild ranked as the hottest expensive wine in China, yet estimates put only one of every ten bottles sold there as genuine. Counterfeiters rebottled good, fifty-euro bottles of Bordeaux and sold them as fifteen-hundred-euro bottles of Lafitte to palates not used to the difference.
The two identical bottles Theo had shown him in their Skype call—one real, one phony—were an example of how modern technology, designed to aid an industry, had actually made it easier for counterfeiters. Widely available better printing, bottling, and packaging techniques made it so almost anyone could create first-rate copies virtually identical to the originals, and the Coravin syringe system allowed wine to be removed from a bottle without destroying what remained, making it possible to extract from a single bottle of a great vintage just enough to mask any number of bottles of counterfeit with a touch of the real.
Maybe somewhere in all this I’ll find the name of someone to talk to, Andreas hoped—a cop or prosecutor who’d successfully brought down a major counterfeiter.
But there wasn’t much reported on that score, and nothing helpful. Most of the mainstream media attention focused on the independent efforts of an American billionaire wine collector, fed up at being defrauded by counterfeiters, who decided to take matters into his own hands.
The collector estimated he’d spent four and a half million dollars on four hundred twenty-one bottles of counterfeit wine—out of his total collection of over forty thousand bottles—and another twenty-five million dollars on lawsuits going after his swindlers. One defrauder, called the “Bernie Madoff of the wine world,” received a ten-year sentence for fraud tied to his selling thirty-five million dollars’ worth of bogus wine at auction. Another of the industrialist’s targets, described as a “super counterfeiter,” allegedly sold him four bottles of a bogus Chateau Lafite 1787 purportedly purchased by U.S. president Thomas Jefferson in 1790 for four hundred thousand dollars. The American continued to pursue that seller, but he’d given up on
collecting wines, saying he’d tired of being swindled by con artists and crooks.
Andreas did find some news stories about various governments’ efforts at controlling the counterfeit wines and spirits markets, but in many places—notably China, Turkey, Russia, Eastern Europe, and Southeast Asia—enforcement seemed driven more by deaths brought on by consuming alcohol adulterated with poisons than any serious desire on the part of authorities to go after the counterfeit alcohol industry.
Andreas shook his head and mumbled aloud. “It’s the same everywhere. Unless you’re stupid enough to piss off the super-rich or powerful, or do something that gets someone killed, this sort of thing simply isn’t a police priority.”
Andreas pushed back from the screen and swung his chair around to stare out the window. Counterfeit booze offered extraordinary profits with low risk of prosecution. The perfect business for attracting organized crime. No surprise there. But once his unit got an angle on who’s behind it all, there would be surprises. Of that he was certain. With something this big he had no doubt there’d be big-time political protectors involved.
Andreas bit at his lower lip. This is going to get interesting.
***
“If I might offer a suggestion, it would set a far more civilized tone for our conversation if you pointed your shotgun away from my chest. Besides, I can assure you I’d find it most unpleasant if our brief time together were cut even shorter by reason of one of your country’s notorious roadway potholes.”
Kharon didn’t move. He studied the woman’s face. As far as he could tell she wore no makeup and he guessed her to be around twice his age. “I have every confidence in your car’s suspension system.”
“Very well.” She brushed another strand of hair away from her sunglasses. “I’ve heard very impressive things about you. From the performance I witnessed back there, and continue witnessing here, I must agree.”
“I don’t advertise.”
She smiled. “There is no way someone in your line of work can operate in Europe and not come to my attention. Assassins attract interest among those most likely to be their targets. It’s rather important we keep informed of who’s out there.”
“Must be pricey information.”
“Yes, but in the long run not as costly as ignorance.”
“Should I know you?”
“I’d hope not. I take even greater care than you not to ‘advertise.’ Notoriety is bad business for both of us.”
“I’m getting the impression our conversation has more to do with your business than mine.”
She turned her head away from Kharon and faced the side window. Traffic was relatively light along Vassilias Sofias Avenue as they drove toward the Hilton Hotel and the back streets that would connect to the highway taking them to the airport.
“I’m an international businesswoman involved in diversified industries. Recently I expanded into another world.”
“I assume you’re not talking about time travel or ghosts.”
Kharon caught a smile in her reflection in the window. “No. The world of alcoholic beverages.”
“What kind?”
“Wine, whiskey, vodka, tequila, rum, whatever sells.”
“What brands?”
“All of them.”
“You’re a distributor?”
“Yes, and a producer of top quality reproductions of the world’s leading brands.”
“You’re a bomba bootlegger? That must set you against all kinds of nasty competition.”
He saw another slight smile in her reflection. “I’m quite pleased with our progress at increasing market share, though I prefer you not categorize my products as bomba.”
“Call it what you want, it’s still counterfeit.”
She nodded. “That I’ll accept. Imitated, adulterated, manipulated alcohol has been around since an anonymous lucky soul back in ancient times discovered a wonderful surprise in a batch of moldy grapes unwittingly left to ferment. You may not know, but many of today’s accepted practices for creating some of the world’s finest wines and spirits were once treated as criminal acts, punishable by death in certain societies.”
“Bomba kills.”
“So can the real thing if you drink enough of it.”
“I’m talking about adding turpentine and antifreeze. Stuff that can blind you, if not kill you.”
“Yes, yes. I know.” Her voice had taken on an edge. “But I’m not talking about that sort of garbage.” All at once she swung her head around, pulled off her glasses, and fixed her eyes on his. “No, as a matter of fact I am.”
He blinked but his eyes stayed drawn to a lustrous amber fire burning deep within dark, almond shaped eyes.
“I am surrounded by shortsighted, grab-the-money-and-run hoodlums who cannot give up their old bomba-making ways. They see poisons of the sort you named as a cheaper way of making their products, and never think of the market they’re destroying.”
She pointed her glasses at Kharon. “The annual worldwide market for alcohol is a trillion US dollars. That means every year there is another trillion dollars to be made, and virtually none of it comes with any of the serious risks or complications of trading in illegal drugs. Virtually all the affluent world finds drug traffickers morally reprehensible, yet they glorify bootleggers as romantics. Drugs draw special prosecutorial attention, but alcohol in one form or another is accepted as a staple in many of those same societies.
“Counterfeit alcohol presents a wide-open growth market at every level. From supplying cheap booze to bars and liquor stores under high-end labels, to offering big-time hustlers the sort of two-hundred-dollar product they can pass off at five or even fifty times more than what they paid for it. Plus every sort of product you can imagine in-between.”
She shook her sunglasses at Kharon’s chest. “I’m not about to let a bunch of ignorant, macho assholes destroy my potential piece of that pie. One tenth of one percent of that annual market is one billion dollars.”
“I get your point, but what do I have to do with any of that? Booze isn’t my business.”
She smiled and put her glasses back on. “I’m quite familiar with what your business entails. That is why I wish to employ you. To protect my golden goose from those who do not appreciate its value.”
“I’m not following you.”
“For a modest return above my costs and expenses, I provide my collaborators with identical labels, bottles, packaging, and instructions on how to make my products in their countries. All I ask in return is that they adhere to my specifications. In some instances I’ve supplemented their marketing methods with my own, successfully eliminating much of their competition. All of them are now far richer than they’d ever imagined.”
She shook her head. “But sadly it is the nature of such men to steal. I think it is the risk that excites them, for their rewards cannot possibly match the consequences of failure. And so they manufacture my products using cheaper ingredients than specified, stealing from me in the process, and then from their customers by selling their garbage as mine, hoping the customer won’t notice. But they do notice, they complain, and they buy elsewhere. It is not the customer I blame, it’s my people.”
“Why don’t you just switch representatives?”
“It’s not easy setting up such an operation, especially in an EU country. All of them have contacts in place, each unique and necessary to their businesses. It’s an elaborate network of customers, producers, distributors, police, tax, customs, and other cooperative government officials. Besides, as I said, it’s the nature of such men to steal. They’re all alike.” She shook her head. “No, new collaborators are not the answer. I need another approach.”
“And you think I’m that approach?”
“I need a quality-control person, one who can enforce my production specifications.”
“And how
do you suggest I do that?”
“I’m sure you can come up with appropriate methods.”
“You want me to kill someone.”
She nodded. “If necessary. Which I think is quite likely. But if done once…or twice…in an appropriate manner, I’m fairly confident that no further significant violence will be required.”
“Sounds like you’re asking me to kill one of your collaborators as an example to the others?”
She shook her head no. “I don’t want any of them killed. As I said, they’re too valuable to me. But I want them to think that I will and to know that I could do so at anytime, anywhere I wished. They’ve grown complacent, think they don’t need me anymore, and that their hordes of bodyguards can protect them from me.”
“You make it sound as if they should be afraid of you.”
She shrugged, modestly. “One can only hope. And that’s where you come in.”
Kharon moved the shotgun to where it no longer pointed at the woman. “That’s quite a story you tell, complete with very impressive numbers, so I assume you’re about to offer me a substantial sum to be your ‘quality control person.’”
“Enough to set you for life.”
“That sort of arrangement always worries me, as it motivates one side of the deal to find a way to reduce the payout period.”
She smiled. “Then let’s say, tell me what you want and I’ll let you know if I agree.”
“Please excuse me for saying this, but you’re offering me a lot to get a simple ‘you better behave’ message across to some mobster. That’s not a complicated problem. You must know any number of people out there willing to do what you want for a lot less than you’re offering me. Many of them already in your employ.” Kharon shook his head. “I don’t get it. And that concerns me.”
“I’m afraid you underestimate yourself, young man. Unlike with alcohol, I’m a firm believer in one getting what one pays for. And in this instance I need someone with a subtle touch, not a machete, to bring my network in line. I’m not looking to start wars with my collaborators. I want them to realize they’re better off following my methods.”
Devil of Delphi: A Chief Inspector Andreas Kaldis Mystery Page 7
