Kate Shaw was a woman who had lied and deceived and tried to kill me. A woman who had sold out my father to a terrorist organization, and whom I had, in turn, framed and delivered to the CIA in my quest for answers. Kate Shaw was a woman I had hoped to never see again. But there she was, reclining on a chaise lounge less than two feet away, her dress hiked up to get some sun, my fate in her hands.
There was no way Kate thought I was the mole. She knew me too well. She knew what motivated me. She knew that I would never betray my father. But here she was, treating the situation as if she didn’t have a care in the world, and all the while lubing me up with a pretty good reproduction of a Cuban cocktail. Still, I was no fool. I let her talk first.
“You want to know why I saved your ass?” Kate said.
I didn’t say anything. Faruk was elsewhere and so were his men, but it didn’t mean the deck wasn’t bugged.
“Relax, Michael. Nobody’s listening. If I was going to blow your cover, the moment would have been back there. This is my show. I vouched for you, so you’re good.”
“What about Meryem?”
“We don’t want your girlfriend. She’s fine.”
Something about the way she said girlfriend made me take notice. She seemed to be testing me, waiting for me to offer up more. I didn’t. There was still too much I needed to know.
“What do you want?” I said.
“Your help.”
I picked my tall glass off the deck and sipped the pale-green drink, careful to keep the mint leaf out of my mouth. The rum was strong, but the cocktail was refreshing. Honestly, I was having difficulty adjusting to my new circumstances. I had set this woman Kate Shaw up for a terrible fate. I had handed her over to a CIA interrogation team. I knew it was a terrible fate because I had endured a mock interrogation during training. It was not an experience I wished to repeat. But one question kept racing through my head. What did Kate really want? She seemed to read my mind.
“Relax, Michael, we’re going to dinner. There’ll be time to tell you all about it.”
The yacht was a big boat, but I didn’t realize how big until I got into her tender, a small wooden-decked speedboat, and checked her out. Along the waterline, I reckoned the yacht to be no less than a hundred and sixty feet long, complete with a helicopter and a landing pad on the rear deck. Her steel hull was deep navy blue and she had the clean classic lines of a cutter. I had seen yachts like her before, but I’d never been invited aboard. They were the kind of thing that appealed to Internet billionaires and Russian oligarchs. Strangely, I realized the ship’s allure was more pronounced from afar. Once onboard, you were just sitting on a boat.
I directed my attention back to Kate. She had removed her heels and carried a pair of sandals in her left hand while she piloted the tender away from the yacht with her right. I sat on the bench seat beside her.
“Like old times,” she said.
“Not quite, Kate.”
“Really? How so?”
“You’re supposed to be in a cell.”
“You’re supposed to be dead. Or you would be if Faruk had his way. I fixed that little problem for you.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Say thanks.”
I thought about it. No need to have a miserable evening.
“Thanks,” I said.
“Good then. Let’s get to shore, shall we?”
Kate hammered the throttle and the tender took off, its big inboard motor churning the calm water of the Mediterranean into a frothing wake behind us. It was a powerful boat, more powerful than the inflatable that had brought us there with bags over our heads. Kate scooted us up the coastline and into a wide-necked cove. There was a dock there and a small beach, but nobody else. She gracefully piloted the boat alongside the wooden dock and killed the engine.
I threw out the plastic bumpers. Kate may have been a liar and cold-blooded killer, but I saw no reason to scratch her pretty vessel. Besides, she obviously had something she wanted to tell me or she wouldn’t have brought me out there. Antagonism wasn’t the best friend of communication. Surprised as I was to see her so soon after I’d delivered her to what I thought was a long stay in a secret penitentiary, I wanted to hear what she had to say. And so far, I thought it was going to be interesting, because she had already told Faruk that I was the Green Dragon mole inside the CIA, which was a brazen lie. To lie like that, I knew that Kate had other plans for me. Now I just needed to find out what they were.
Chapter 30
I hopped out of the launch and tied the bowline to a cleat. Kate secured the stern behind me. I figured if she was going to stab me in the back, which I was sure she was, she’d take her time about it — otherwise there was no point in bringing me out to the island. No, Kate wanted something from me, which put me into a position of strength. I simply had to figure out how not to give it to her.
“We’re in the southern Mediterranean, off the Turquoise Coast.”
“Turkey?” I said.
“Yeah. You bet Turkey. You don’t get your get-out-of-jail-free card yet.”
“I wasn’t looking for one. I kind of like it here.”
“Good. That’ll make what comes next easier.”
I looked at Kate. I hated her. I hated her for what she had done to my father. I hated her for what she was capable of doing to me. But I had to admit that a part of me, a small part, also liked her. I liked her cool, calm resolve. I liked her brazen ruthlessness. I liked the way she smiled out of the corner of her mouth when she talked. Her hair was a little mussed from the boat ride and her cheeks were flushed, but there was no denying that she looked good. Very good. In a different world, a parallel universe perhaps, I thought we might have gotten along well. Maybe even better than well. Not in this world, though. I shuddered even as I thought it. I reminded myself of how she had sold my father out to the Green Dragons. Then I focused on the reality of the situation.
“What comes next?” I said.
“We work together.”
I just laughed. Kate smiled back at me. We reached the end of the dock where there was a long wooden walkway leading to another cove. I saw a small maintenance structure, but no people. Kate led the way down the boardwalk.
“There is a sand here so unique, it’s found nowhere else in the Mediterranean,” Kate said. “The grains are called ooids. Calcium carbonate collects around a fine grain of sand that, combined with the wave action, creates a perfect sphere. Mark Antony brought it here for Cleopatra, over three thousand years ago. That same sand is still here today.”
“Why did he do that?” I said.
“He loved her,” Kate replied. “Legend says that he told her that this way she would never have to set foot on any land that wasn’t Egyptian.”
“How romantic,” I said. “But I’m sure there was more to it than that.”
“He wanted to cement their political relationship, of course,” Kate said. “The alliance between the two superpowers of the age: Egypt and Rome.”
As we neared the other cove, I saw that it was smaller with a table for two set on the beach slightly below the waterline, waves lapping at the chairs.
“Cleopatra wanted the finest beach in the world and Mark Antony gave it to her. The beach here is protected, you’re not even allowed to touch it.”
The boardwalk dead-ended in the sea on the edge of the beach.
“Then what are we doing here?”
“We’re having dinner.”
Kate stepped off the boardwalk and into the gently lapping waves. She didn’t seem terribly concerned about her dress getting wet. I slipped off my shoes and followed her, the Mediterranean warm on my feet, the strange, exotic sand seeping up between my toes. I picked up a handful of it. It didn’t even feel like sand, more tiny round grain. A waiter approached from the boardwalk. Tanned with dark, longish hair smoothly slicked back, he carried a bottle of wine and two long-stemmed glasses.