'Lord, no,' said the other. 'And anyway I wouldn't have let you. You were just a tourist having himself a good time, that's all. Too much sun during the day, and too much booze through the night. And what the hell, there were plenty of other Brits around who made you look positively sober!'
'And Manolis Papastamos?' Jordan was rueful now. 'He must have thought me an idiot!'
Papastamos was their local liaison man, second in command of the Athens narcotics squad, who had come across to Rhodes by hydrofoil to get to know the pair personally and see if there was anything he could do to simplify their task. But he'd also proved to be something of a hellraiser, even a liability.
'No,' Layard shook his head. 'In fact he was more under the influence than you were! He said he'd join us on the harbour wall at 10:30 to see the Samothraki dock — but I doubt it. When we dropped him off at his hotel he looked like hell. On the other hand… they do have remarkable constitutions, these Greeks. But in any case we'll be better off without him. He knows who we are but not what we are. As far as he's concerned we're part of Customs and Excise, or maybe New Scotland Yard. It would be hard to concentrate with Manolis around making conversation and creating a mental racket. I hope to God he stays in bed!'
Jordan was looking and feeling a little healthier; the sunglasses had helped somewhat; fresh coffee arrived and Layard poured. Jordan watched his easy movements and thought: Just like a big brother. He looks after me like I was a snot-nosed kid. He always has, thank God!
Layard was a locator, a scryer without a crystal ball. He didn't need one; a map would do just as well, or an inkling of his quarry's location. A year older than Jordan, he stood a blocky seventy inches tall, with a square face, dark hair and complexion, expressive, active eyebrows and mouth. Under a forehead lined from accumulated years of concentration, his eyes were very keen and (of course) far-seeing, and so darkly brown as to border on black.
Looking at Layard through and in the privacy of dark lenses, Jordan's thoughts went back twelve years to Harkley House in Devon, England, where he and the locator had formed their first real partnership and worked as a team for the very first time. Then as now they'd been members of E-Branch, that most secret of all the Secret Services, whose work was known only to a handful of 'top people'. Unlike now, however, their work on that occasion had been far less mundane. Indeed, there had been nothing at all mundane about the Yulian Bodescu affair.
Memories, deliberately suppressed for more than a decade, sprang once more into being, full-fleshed and fantastic in Jordan's ESP-endowed mind. Once more he held the crossbow in his hand, chest-high and aimed dead ahead, as he listened to the hiss of jetting water and the girl's voice humming that tuneless melody from beyond the closed door, and wondered if this were a trap. Then -
He kicked open the door to the shower cubicle — and stood riveted to the spot! Helen Lake, Yulian Bodescu's cousin, was utterly beautiful and quite naked. Standing sideways on, her body gleamed in the streaming water. She jerked her head round to stare at Jordan, her eyes wide in terror where she fell back against the shower's wall. Her knees began to buckle and her eyelids fluttered.
'But this is just a frightened girl!' he told himself-in the moment before her thoughts branded themselves on his telepathic mind:
Come on, my sweet! she thought. Ah, just touch me, hold me! Just a little closer, my sweet…
Then, jerking back away from her, he saw the carving knife in her hand and the insane glare in her demonic eyes. As she drew him effortlessly towards her and lifted her knife in a gleaming arc, so he pulled the crossbow's trigger. It was an automatic thing, his life or hers.
God! — the bolt nailed her to the tiled wall; she screamed like the damned soul she was and jerked herself free of splintering tiles and plaster, staggering to and fro in the shower's shallow well. But she still had the knife, and Jordan could do nothing but stand there with his eyes bulging, mouthing meaningless prayers, as she advanced on him yet again …
… Until Ken Layard shouldered him aside — Layard with his flamethrower — whose nozzle he directed into the shower to turn it into a blistering, steaming pressure-cooker!
'God help us!' Jordan gasped now, as he'd gasped it then. He blotted the unbearable memories out, came reeling back to the present. In the wake of mental conflict, crisis, his hangover seemed twice as bad. He breathed deeply, used the tips of his fingers to massage the top of his head where it felt split, and wondered out loud: 'Christ, what brought that on?'
Layard's eyes were wide; he bent forward across the table and grasped Jordan's forearm. 'You too?' he said.
Jordan broke an unspoken rule among E-Branch espers: he glanced into Layard's mind. Receding, he felt the echoes of similar memories and at once broke the contact. 'Yes, me too,' he said.
'I could tell by your face,' Layard told him. 'I've never seen you look like that since… that time. Maybe it's because we're working together again?'
'We've worked together plenty,' Jordan flopped back in his chair, suddenly felt exhausted. 'No, I think it's just something that was squeezed up in there and had to be out. Well, it took its time — but it's out now and gone forever, I hope!'
'Me too,' Layard agreed. 'But both of us at the same time? And why now? We couldn't be in a more different setting from Harkley House than we are right now.'
Jordan sighed and reached for his coffee. His hand trembled a little. 'Maybe we picked it up from each other and amplified it. You know what they say about great minds thinking alike?'
Layard relaxed and nodded. 'Especially minds like ours, eh?' He nodded again, if a little uncertainly. 'Well, maybe you're right…'
By 9:45 the two were down on the northern harbour wall, seated on a wooden bench which gave them a splendid view right across the Mandraki shallows and harbour to the Fort of St Nikolas. To their left the Bank of Greece stood on its raised promontory, its white-banded walls and blue windows reflected in the still water, while on their right and to the rear of the promenade sprawled Rhodes New Town. Mandraki, being mainly a shallow-water mooring, was not the commercial harbour; that lay a quarter-mile south in the bay of the historic, picturesque and Crusader-fortified Old Town, beyond the great mole with the fort at its tip. But their information was that the drug-runners moored up in Mandraki, taking on water and some small provisions there, before proceeding on to Crete, Italy, Sardinia and Spain.
A little cannabis resin would be dropped off here, by night (probably carried ashore by a crewman in swim-trunks and fins), and likewise in various ports of call along the way. But the great mass of the stuff — and the main cargo, which was cocaine — was destined for Valencia, Spain. From where, eventually, a lot of it would find its way to England. Such had been its route and destination in the past. Meanwhile the E-Branch agents had the task of determining (a) how much of the white powder was aboard; and (b) if the amount was small, would a pre-emptive bust simply serve to tip their hands to the drug-barons; and (c) where was the stuff kept if it was aboard?
Only a few months ago a boat had been stripped to the bones in Larnaca, Cyprus, and nothing had been found. But of course, that one had been handled by the Greek-Cypriot police, whose 'expertise' perhaps lacked that little something extra — like co-ordination or even intelligence! This time it would be a combined effort, terminating in Valencia before the bulk of the stuff could be off-loaded. And this time, too, the boat — a wallowing, wooden, round-bottomed barrel of an old Greek thing called the Samothraki — would be stripped not just to her bones but the very marrow. And in the interim Jordan and Layard would shadow her along her route.