“I told you. You can’t go rogue and expect not to get punished.”
“I’ll kill you!”
“No, you won’t. Because if anything happens to me, you’ll have the full weight of the Agency hunting you down and killing you.”
The Greek forced himself to his feet and settled back into his chair. “I can’t believe you hit me in the balls. Do you know how that feels?”
“I’ve heard. But no. I can’t say I know for sure.”
The two of them sat for a moment in silence, the yacht swaying them back and forth.
Toni broke the silence. “This affair with the American professor. Tell me about your interest in her.”
His eyes widened. “What woman?”
“Come on, Petros. You’re a terrible liar. You don’t think you can mess with the sister of a U.S. senator, a wealthy one at that, and not catch our attention.”
The Greek appeared to be considering his options. Finally, he said, “She has something I want.”
“Like what?” This was one thing the Agency had not properly briefed Toni on, since the man’s motive was still not known.
He hesitated and then released a breath and said, “An artifact of my Greek heritage.”
“Quit being so cryptic,” Toni demanded.
“I have to be. I’m not entirely certain of what she’s discovered. But I have contacts in the academic world, and they let me know that this professor Sara Halsey Jones was on to something important.”
“Such as?”
“Like the lost manuscripts of Archimedes.”
She didn’t know a lot about that man, other than what she learned in school. “You’re already worth billions. What more could you need?”
He shook his head vehemently, like a drunk who no longer controlled his neck muscles. “No, no, no. The find would be priceless. Well, everything can be priced. But this would be more important than money. It is a matter of Greek national pride. Archimedes has never gotten the recognition he deserves. Instead, Galileo and Newton and others have always been in the spotlight. This could be our chance to change history.”
“Then why not let the American professor do her work?”
“I can’t trust academia to get it right. They’ve covered up the truth for more than two thousand years.”
Toni guessed this guy had either lost his mind or was actually starting to believe in something other than himself.
“Well you need to leave this American professor alone,” she said. “Do you understand?”
Petros Caras simply stared at her. He could have been thinking, in deep meditation, or in a coma. “This is too important.”
“You don’t understand. I can control only so much of the equation.” She didn’t want to mention the fact that Jake Adams would eat this guy for a light snack if the Greek didn’t shut down his men.
He smiled. “You mean Jake Adams?”
With Jake’s name spoken aloud, the Greek’s men returned to the lounge. But this time they were all armed with automatic weapons. Toni had no choice but to turn over her gun. “You’re making a big mistake.”
“Adams is already dead,” Petros Caras sneered. “I will drop you off in Sicily in the morning, assuming you don’t resist and try something stupid.”
This man was crazy, she thought, if he even contemplated taking on the entire Central Intelligence Agency. Was Jake dead? She was sure she would sense it, and she felt nothing now. Maybe it was just that she was now truly over the man.
The Greek men hauled her back to her room and locked the door from the outside. She was slipping. She hadn’t even noticed the locking mechanism on the outside of the door.
23
Moving quietly through the dark, the wind blowing rain against their faces, Jake and Elisa made their way through the alley leading up to a house on the outskirts of Siracusa. Jake had been able to pinpoint this house as the last location of the iPad owned by Sara Halsey Jones.
Jake stopped Elisa with a hand to her arm. “I saw movement on the second level,” he whispered.
She nodded and mumbled, “I can’t officially be here. I’ll lose my job.”
They had discussed this on the short drive from their motel in Augusta to Siracusa. He knew she was right, and he couldn’t ask her to give up her employment for a case he was working.
“All right. Go back to the car and bring it around to the front and wait for my signal.”
“What will that be?” she wanted to know.
“I don’t know. Hopefully I’ll be the one dragging Sara from the house as a bunch of guys shoot at me. Anything short of that and you get the hell out of here. I’ll make my way back to the motel. Understand?”
She agreed with a slight nod.
With that she took off into the darkness and Jake turned back toward the house. He had no intel whatsoever on this place. So, there were only a finite number of options. Knock on the door, kick in the door, break in quietly through the door or a window, or make some noise and draw someone outside. But only one option seemed to resonate with him.
Slowly he stepped toward the back door, the rain soaking his hair and dripping down to his face. He kept his gun in its holster for now. Once he reached the door he could hear music inside and guessed someone was having a good time. Quietly he tested the door lever with his gloved hand. It wasn’t locked. Now he pulled his gun and held it at the side of his leg as he gently swung the door open and moved inside to a small country kitchen.
A light shone in from the living room where the music was blaring, some version of Italian heavy metal, with the singer screaming like a banshee.
As Jake swiftly entered the living room, the two men there startled and then went for their guns. Jake shot the first man in his right shoulder, knocking him back against the white leather sofa, his blood splattering against the couch and the white wall and the man grasping his wound with his free hand.
The other man froze, his hand just a few feet from his gun. Jake shook his head and the man backed into his lounge chair.
“What do you want?” the unharmed man asked in Italian.
Jake answered in English. “If you do what I say, you just might live. Where’s the woman?”
“What woman?”
So the guy understood English. Good. “Let’s not play stupid, although in your case it might not be an act. Where is she?”
“We don’t know about a woman,” the wounded one said through clenched teeth.
Moving around the room, his gun shifting from one man to the next as he walked, Jake pointed to an iPad on the coffee table. “That’s her iPad.”
“We found it,” said the one without a bullet in him.
“Right. It fell off the back of a truck. Where is she?”
Jake picked up the iPad and turned it on, his eyes still on the two Italians. He checked out a few folders on the desktop and found the pictures Sara had taken.
“We don’t have the woman,” bullet-free said.
“She was here, though.”
Neither said a word now. That was his answer. Damn it. They had already moved her. That’s what he might have done.
The one with a bullet in him looked faint.
“Where did the Greeks take her?”
“I don’t know.”
Jake moved over and collected the two guns from in front of the men. He put his back into its holster. There wasn’t a man alive who wanted to get shot with their own gun. But he needed to make this guy talk and knew that it wasn’t always easy to make it happen. Moving closer to the Italian, Jake swung swiftly and smacked the guy on the side of his head, knocking him out. Then he checked on the wounded one. The blood was already starting to clot. His bullet had smashed through the top of the guy’s shoulder shattering his socket, but the wound wouldn’t kill the guy. So Jake looked around and found some plastic zip strips. Yeah, they had brought Sara here. In less than a minute he had the two of them tied up. Then he dragged the one without the bullet wound into the kitchen.