“I told you,” Elisa said, suddenly understanding the direction of the conversation.
“All right,” Jake concluded. “So will you keep me informed of their location?”
“Will do.”
With that the two old friends clicked off and Jake shoved his phone back into his pocket. He thought about the conversation with Kurt Jenkins and still thought the man was holding out on him. But that was also the nature of the spy game. Nothing was black and white.
“How’s the wireless here?” Jake asked.
She shrugged. “Considering the overall maintenance of this place, the wireless is quite good.”
“Could I use your laptop for a minute?”
Elisa got up from her chair and put her hand out toward her tiny computer. “It’s all yours. I was going to take a shower anyway.” She smiled and went off to the bathroom.
Thinking about his gateway, Jake ran his password through his mind. Once he got into his system, he made sure he would not be traceable back to Elisa’s IP address or any of his own. But who could he use? He would spoof a series of computers, from a library in Sydney to a nursing home in Michigan, on and on through ten different levels around the world. Then he quickly made his inquiry, finding the iPad for Professor Sara Halsey Jones. He knew the IP for that system from day one, but she had only turned on the device when they got to Taormina and then Siracusa. It took him just ten minutes to find the location and track it by GPS. Damn it. It was still on. Why didn’t he think of this sooner?
The shower stopped and Jake looked toward the bathroom. He got off her laptop and deleted any trace of his use. In deep thought now, he paced back and forth in the small room, considering his next move. It was not easy to do an extraction with just two people, and he wasn’t one hundred percent right now. Yet, he knew he couldn’t wait. The yacht would come and pick up Sara, probably as early as the next morning. Even worse, perhaps, was the fact that the Greek would force her to show him the stone carved by Archimedes in the catacombs. The billionaire would likely steal it and have in enshrined at one of his mansions. It sounded like the guy was out of control and needed a good spanking. He only hoped the Agency would have the balls to follow through.
The door to the bathroom opened and Elisa came out completely naked, drying her long hair as she stopped five feet from Jake.
“What?” she asked. “Are you telling me a little bullet hole is going to stop you from taking advantage of this?” She spread her arms out.
He wasn’t thinking that at all. He just knew they needed to do it quickly so they could track down Sara.
Stripping down without saying a word, Jake took command of the situation with ravishing speed. They went at it hard and fast. There would be time for slow and proper once this case was over and his body was healed.
Five minutes later Jake told her he’d found Sara’s iPad and they gathered their gear to leave.
22
Laying on her side on the bed in the dark room, Sara could hear the muffled voices of her captors in the outer room. She was still bound like a hog with her hands behind her back at her ankles with plastic strips. She had long ago decided there was no way she could break the thick plastic straps that would only dig into her wrists deeper with each effort. Instead, she tried her best to keep her mind in the game.
She had been terrified when the men took her from the catacombs. The only reason she went toward the Greeks was to spare the other two, Jake and Elisa. They promised. But then she heard the shooting as the Greeks dragged her from the catacomb and she knew they had lied to her. Then they brought her to a small house on the outskirts of Siracusa, questioning her thoroughly. She thought they would do things to her sexually, but they had not. It seemed like they had orders not to harm her, which she had used to her advantage. Not by blatant disrespect or defiance, but through subtle actions.
A few hours ago they moved her from the first house to this three story house just a few blocks from the ocean in the old town. Before they left, though, she had figured out that Jake and Elisa had probably survived the attack, because an Italian man had come and argued with the Greeks about her. He said some of his men had been killed and he would make them pay, but not until he first let his men have sex with her until they could no longer do so. The Greeks had their orders and it had almost come to a shoot out.
Sara didn’t know how much longer she could go without telling the men what they needed to know. And she had cried for the first time since she was a young girl. Something she never thought she would do again. She was stronger than that. Perhaps she could hold out. Because if she told these men anything, then the Greeks would just turn her over to the Italians.
Suddenly the door opened and a stream of light came in, through which came the main man she had dealt with, the one with the hair to his shoulders that she had dubbed Yanni. He closed the door behind him and clicked on a small lamp before taking a seat on the bed next to her.
“Are you ready to talk?” the man said in Greek. He pulled out her digital camera from his pocket and clicked it on.
She mumbled through the gag and he untied it from behind her head. “Thanks. I told you I’m just a college professor researching a book on Archimedes.” That was the truth, but it didn’t tell the whole story now.
He looked like he wanted to punch her. “Eventually you will tell us what we need to know.”
“And what is that?”
“That you have discovered the lost text of Archimedes,” the Greek said. “This text is a national treasure of Greek civilization.”
She wished she had found something that impressive. But her discovery would still be written about in history books for some time. It could change the understanding the mathematics community had of the genesis of Calculus.
“I don’t know of the lost text,” Sara said sincerely. “I’ve heard that there might be something out there, especially after the find in Istanbul a few years ago. But I have not found it. I only came to Siracusa because this was his home and where he died.”
The Greek swished his hair back behind his ears as he let out a heavy sigh. “These pictures on your camera tell a different story.” He slowly clicked through all the photos she had taken at the last catacomb. Luckily she had sent a set of the photos from Taormina to herself by e-mail. But she hadn’t been able to do the same with these last images.
“That’s nothing,” Sara said. “I was just taking photos of old tombs in the catacomb and only those with Greek writing, hoping to find something…interesting for my book. Being Greek, I’m sure you understand.”
Long hair let out a little grunt. “This is old Doric Greek. I don’t know anyone who understands this. Perhaps scholars in our country.”
She kept her mouth shut now, not wanting to let him know that she could read Doric.
“All right. I can send these photos to someone in Athens.”
He put the gag back onto her mouth, turned off the light, and left her alone again in the dark.
She held back tears again. Somehow she needed to find strength within herself to survive. Which shouldn’t have been a problem, she knew, since she was a Texan. But perhaps she had been coddled too much with money.
Zendo went back into the unfamiliar surroundings of the Mafia house they had been allowed to use. He sat down in the small living room next to Demetri, who was the only one of his men who had not been drinking heavily. Sitting across the room at the dining room table were Kyros, Niko and that other man whose name he never knew. Maybe he should have found the time to learn the guy’s name. No, he was a Cypriot anyway.
“How is our American professor?” Demetri asked.