Trevor's fine,' Layard answered his anxious query. 'I think. He's getting dressed, anyway. What's happening your end?'
Papastamos spoke English the same way he spoke Greek: rapid-fire. 'We're watching the boats — both of them — but nothing,' he said. 'If anything has come ashore from the Samothraki it couldn't have been very much, and certainly not the hard stuff, which is about what we expected. I've checked out the Lazarus, too; unlikely that there's any connection; its owner is one Jianni Lazarides, archaeologist and treasure-seeker, with good credentials. Or… let's just say he has no record, anyway. As for the crew of the Samothraki: the captain and his first mate are ashore; they may have brought a very little of the soft stuff with them; they're watching a cabaret at the moment, and drinking coffee and brandy. But more coffee than brandy. Obviously they plan on staying sober.'
Jordan had meanwhile finished with dressing and was heading for the door. He moved like a zombie, and his clothes were the same ones he had worn this morning. But the nights were still chilly; plainly he hadn't so much chosen these light, casual clothes as taken them because they'd been handy. Layard called after him: 'Trevor? Where do you think you're going?'
Jordan looked back. "The harbour,' he answered automatically. 'St Paul's Gate, then along the mole to the windmills.'
'Hello? Hello?' Papastamos was still on the phone. 'What now?'
'He says he's going to the windmills on the mole,' Layard told him. 'And I'm going with him. There's something not right here. I've known it all day. Sorry, Manolis, but I have to hang up on you.'
'I'll see you down there!' Papastamos quickly answered, but Layard only caught half of it as he was putting the phone down. And then he was struggling into his jacket and following Jordan where he made his way doggedly downstairs into the lobby, then out of the door and into the Mediterranean night.
'Aren't you going to wait for me?' he called out after him, but Jordan made no answer. He did glance back, once, and Layard saw his eyes staring out of his sick-looking face like holes punched in pasteboard. Plainly he wasn't going to wait for him, or for anyone else for that matter.
Layard almost caught up with his robotic partner as Jordan crossed a road heading for the waterfront, but then the lights changed, engines revved, and mopeds and cars started rolling in the scrambling, death-wish, devil-take-the-hindmost fashion of Greek traffic. In that same moment he found himself separated from Jordan by bumper-to-bumper metal; and by the time the exhaust fumes had cleared and the lights changed again, the telepath had disappeared into milling groups of people where they thronged the streets. Hurrying after him, Layard knew he'd lost him.
But at least he knew where he was going…
Jordan felt that he was fighting it for all he was worth, every step of the way, even knowing it was useless. It was like being drunk in a strange place and among strangers, when you lie on your back and the room spins. It actually seems to spin, the corners of the ceiling chasing each other like the spokes of a wheel. And there's nothing you can do to stop it because you know it isn't really spinning — it's your mind that's spinning inside the head on top of your body. Your bloody head and body but they won't obey you… you can't make them do what you want no matter how hard you try!
And all the time you can hear yourself trapped in your own skull like a fly in a bottle, buzzing furiously and banging repeatedly against the glass, and saying over and over again, 'Oh, God, let it stop! Oh, God, let it stop! Oh, God… let… it… stop!'
It's the alcohol — the alien in your system, which has taken control — and fighting it only makes you feel that much worse. Try lifting your head and shoulders up off the bed and everything spins even faster, so fast you can feel the centrifugal force dragging you down again. Force yourself to your feet and you stagger, you turn, begin to spin with the room, with the entire bloody universe!
But only lie still, stop fighting it, close your eyes tight and cling to yourself… eventually it will go away. The spinning will go away. The sickness. The buzzing of the fly in the bottle — which is your own battered, astonished, gibbering psyche — will go away. And you'll sleep. And it's possible the strangers will roll you and rob you blind.
Roll you? They could steal your underpants — even rape you, if they felt inclined — and you couldn't stop them, wouldn't feel it, wouldn't even suspect.
It was a replay of Jordan's first violent experience with alcohol. That had been when he'd started university and got homesick — of all bloody things! A couple of fellow students, college comedians thinking to have a little fun at his expense, had spiked his drinks. Then they'd played a few tricks on him in his room. Nothing vicious: they'd rouged his cheeks, given him a cupid's bow mouth, fitted him up with a garter-belt and stockings and stuck a Mickey Mouse johnnie on his dick.
He woke up cold, naked, ill, not knowing what had happened, wanting to die. But a day or two later when he was sober, he'd tracked them down one at a time and beaten the living shit out of them. Since when he'd only ever got physical when there was no other way around it.
But by God, he wished he could get physical now! With himself, with this mind and body which wouldn't obey him, with whoever it was that was doing this to him. For that was the terrible thing: he knew it was someone else doing it to him, jerking him about like a puppet on a set of strings, and there was still nothing he could do about it!
'Stop!' he kept telling himself. 'Get a grip of yourself. Sit down… throw up… hold your head in your hands… wait for Ken. Do anything — but of your own free will!' But before his runaway body could even begin to obey such instructions:
AH… BUT IT IS NOT FREE! YOU CAME SPYING, INVADED MY MIND — AN ANT IN A WASP'S NEST! SO NOW PAY THE PRICE. GO ON: PROCEED JUST AS YOU ARE. GO TO THE WINDMILLS.
That terrible, gonging, magnetic voice in his head — that will which superimposed itself over his will — that telepathic, hypnotic command of some One or Thing as powerful, more powerful, than anything he'd ever imagined before, which made a mockery of resistance more surely than any Mickey Finn.
Jordan's legs felt like rubber — almost vibrating, twanging at the knees — as he strained to hold them back. As well hold back opposite magnetic poles, or a moth from a candle. And still he followed the waterfront to the mole, and along its rocky neck, until the ancient windmills stood visible there against a horizon of dark ocean.
Dressed all in black, Seth Armstrong was waiting, crouching in the shadows where the sea wall was shaped like a castle's battlements, after the style of the old Crusaders whose works were still visible all around. He let Jordan go stumbling by, looked back into the darkness of the mole, under the winking lights of Rhodes Old Town where it sprawled on the hill. He heard footsteps, running, and a voice, panting:
'Trevor? For Christ's sake, slow down, will you? Where the hell do you th — ?' And Armstrong struck.
Layard saw something big, black, gangling, step out of the shadows. One eye glared at him from a slit in a black balaclava. Gasping, he skidded to a halt, spun on his heel to flee — and Armstrong rabbit-punched him down to the night-shining cobbles of the path. Out like a light, Layard lay crumpled at the foot of the sea wall. And Jordan, feeling the strictures on his will slacken a little, turned back.