“He’s a better pilot drunk than most pilots are sober.”
That didn’t give Kate much comfort, but it wasn’t like she had any choice. It had to be tonight. She had to jump during a full moon so she could see where she was landing. And there weren’t many pilots who were willing to drop her over Athos, and probably none who’d do it for nothing. But Spiro was grudgingly repaying a debt to her father, and neither one of them would tell her what it was. All she needed to know, her father insisted, was that Spiro had a plane and two choppers and could fly them, even if he couldn’t pass a field sobriety test.
Spiro returned to the table, drained the last drop from the ouzo bottle, and chased a flock of roosting hens out of his plane. He said something in Greek and made some hand motions that Kate interpreted as Let’s get this stupid mission over and done so I can crack open another bottle of ouzo.
So here she was, flying twelve thousand feet above the Halkidiki peninsula at midnight, a mere two weeks after laying out her plan to her father. Her hair was cut pixie-style under her helmet, and her breasts were minimalized by a compression sports bra. She had her Glock and a pair of handcuffs in special pockets on the thighs of her jumpsuit, an altimeter strapped to her left wrist, gloves on her hands, and the tracking device for Nick’s satellite phone in a pack on her stomach.
Judging from the smile on her father’s face, Kate was guessing this was definitely more fun than another round of golf at the Calabasas Country Club.
Kate gave her father a kiss on the cheek, and he put his arm around her.
“You’re going to be fine,” he said.
“I know that,” she said. “I’m just glad you’re here.”
“So am I,” he said. “We should do this more often.”
Spiro peed into the coffee can at his feet, and Kate couldn’t help seeing it as an expression of his feelings about their conversation.
Jake checked his handheld GPS. “We’re at the drop point,” he said, turning to Kate. “Are you ready?”
“I can’t wait.”
Kate stood up, adjusted her goggles, and opened the door. A blast of air roared through the plane, making it shake and rattle.
“Good luck,” Jake yelled, and Kate jumped into the darkness.
She stretched out into the box position, belly to the earth, her arms out at her sides, her legs bent. Although she was dropping at 120 miles per hour, she didn’t feel like she was falling. She felt like she was flying. Kate moved through the air as if she’d been born with wings. It had been two years since her last skydive, and she’d forgotten how exhilarating and liberating it could be.
She flew over fortresslike monasteries rising dramatically out of the sea mist, and over honeycombs of earthen hermitages clinging like mud dauber nests to the jagged faces of gorges and cliffs, and over the stone huts that blended into the meadows and forests. It was like no landscape she’d ever seen before. She felt as if she’d traveled into the past, not as it ever existed but as imagined by the Brothers Grimm.
At three thousand feet she reached down with her right hand and yanked the small leather strap behind her, releasing her canopy. The chute caught the air and yanked her up, feet to the earth, so she was now dropping in a standing position.
Kate headed into the wind to slow her descent and steered toward a clearing that was a safe distance from the monasteries and far from the dangers posed by the cliffs and dense chestnut forests. She’d been trained to land within a ten-foot square on a drop zone, so she knew she could be precise.
The drop was smooth, fast, and silent. She landed on her feet, quickly gathered up her chute, and dragged it into an olive grove that bordered the clearing. Kate stood for a moment to get her bearings. It was so quiet that the silence was unsettling, as if the volume of the entire world had been shut off. She saw lights coming from within the fortified walls of an imposing monastery on the nearest peak, but she wasn’t concerned about that. The monks were already deep into hours of prayer. She wasn’t likely to run into any of them as she made her trek, unless Nick was hiding in the monastery, but she doubted that.
She took the tracking device out of her pocket, hoping she’d made a good choice in landing on the western side of the peninsula. If Nick was on the eastern edge she’d face an arduous journey on foot, over a mountain pass. The tracker looked like a standard handheld GPS, but was designed to pick up a signal from a satellite phone. If it turned out Nick didn’t have a satellite phone or didn’t have it powered up, she was screwed. She turned the tracker on and nearly collapsed with relief when, almost immediately, a red dot began pulsating on the map of Athos. There was a satellite phone emitting a signal a few miles north of her present position. The good news was that there was a satellite phone nearby. The bad news was that its location appeared to be on the edge of a cliff, and she hadn’t brought any rappelling gear.
She headed north and had only walked a short distance when she came upon a collection of primitive huts arranged around a lopsided church no bigger than a double-wide mobile home. In the front yard of one of the huts was a small vegetable garden, a pile of cut wood, and a clothesline strung between two crooked chestnut trees from which several pairs of pants and shirts had been hung to dry. The clothes looked as if they’d been sewn together from gunny cloth and old potato sacks.
Kate snatched a shirt and a pair of pants that seemed to be about her size and slipped them on over her jumpsuit. She crept out of the village, following the course set by her tracking device. She hiked along a narrow footpath through the dense woods, across a crystal-clear creek, and then up a steep, rocky hillside that had a rope strung through bolts hammered into the stone to use as a handrail.
After about an hour of climbing she came to a centuries-old stone and earthen hut built out from the mouth of a cave. A curl of smoke rose from its chimney. A stream originating from the wooded peak high above spilled down from a wide crevice beside the hut and turned a paddle wheel. She assumed that the paddle wheel powered the steady light that glowed warmly behind the single small window. The setting had such a storybook quality to it that she half expected the Seven Dwarfs to pop out, singing as they headed off to work.
Kate doubled-checked the tracker. The satellite phone was inside the hut, and it was on. Her gut told her she’d found Nick Fox’s hideaway, and judging by the light and the smoke, he was awake. She put the tracker back into the stomach pocket of her jumpsuit and removed the Glock from the pocket on her thigh. She tiptoed slowly up to the large wooden door and pressed her ear to it. She could hear the crackle of the fire, the burbling of the stream, and the churn of the paddle wheel.
Pressing her left side against the door, she carefully tested the latch and decided it wasn’t locked. She took a deep breath, threw her entire weight against the door, and burst into the room.
Nick Fox smiled at her from across a small table. He was wearing an aloha shirt, board shorts, and flip-flops. And he was eating a sandwich and drinking tsipouro, a clear liquor made on Athos from the residue of the wine presses. He didn’t seem especially surprised to see her or alarmed that she had a gun pointed at him.
“You’re under arrest,” she said.
“Is that how you greet everyone?”
“Only international fugitives.”
She kicked the door closed and looked around the tiny room. It was a bleak hermit’s cell, built for quiet spiritual contemplation and little else. A small fire burned in the stone hearth behind Nick, and a ragged curtain was drawn across an archway leading back to the cave.
“You really ought to try ‘Hello, Nick, it’s nice to see you’ as a greeting one of these days.”
“I’ll try it the first time I visit you in prison.”
Nick’s eyebrows raised a fraction of an inch. “You’d visit me in prison?”
“No,” she said. “I lied.”
Nick smiled, and Kate sank her teeth into her bottom lip to keep from smiling with him. The man was irresistible. What’s with that? she thought. It w
as like wanting to bake cookies for the spawn of Satan.
“Would you like some wine?” he asked her. “Why don’t you sit down and relax?”
She kept her gun trained on him. “This is how I relax.”
“Okay, that’s just scary. Would you like half of my corned beef sandwich?” he asked. “It’s direct from the Carnegie Deli in New York.”
“Meat is forbidden on Athos.”
“So are women,” Nick said. “But here you are.”
“Did you really think a thousand years of sexist doctrine would keep me from getting you?”
“No, I didn’t. In fact, you might ask yourself how this corned beef got here.” He took a bite of the sandwich. “Or how I did.”
“You had help from whoever is behind that curtain.” She gestured to it with her gun. “How many men are there?”
“Two,” Nick said. “I was getting a little midnight snack while they slept, but thanks to you slamming the door they’re probably awake now.”
“Are they armed?”
“I don’t think so, but unlike you I don’t make a practice of patting down everyone I meet.”
Kate aimed her gun squarely at Nick and faced the curtain. “Both of you come out nice and slow, because if you startle me, I might accidentally splatter the wall with Nick’s head.”
A man’s hand reached out from behind the curtain, grabbed the edge, and slowly lifted it to one side. Kate gaped at the man and felt all the air leave her lungs in a single whoosh. It was Carl Jessup, her boss. He stood there in a cable-knit sweater and old jeans and he didn’t seem all that worried at being discovered.
The sting of betrayal that Kate felt was every bit as sharp as a physical slap and raised the same red tint on her cheeks that his hand would have. Now she knew how Nick was able to slip out of the courthouse, and the country, so easily and without leaving a trace. He had help at the highest level of law enforcement.
“Well, now I know why you wanted me off the case and put a boob like Ryerson on it,” Kate said to Jessup. “You engineered Nick’s escape, and you knew if I was on the hunt I’d get him. Your mistake was that you believed I’d actually sit on the sidelines if you assigned the case to someone else. You should have known me better. Then again, I guess I hardly knew you either, did I?”
“It’s not what you think,” Jessup said.
“You’re here, aren’t you?”
“Yeah, but I’m not alone.”
Jessup stepped aside to allow the man behind him to come out.
The second man behind the curtain was gray-haired, ten years younger than Jessup, and looked like he’d been born wearing a tie. He was in his casual wear, a cardigan sweater that would have made Mister Rogers proud, a long-sleeved blue dress shirt buttoned at the cuffs, a pair of khaki pants, and shiny loafers. He was Fletcher Bolton, deputy director of the FBI, the highest position an agent could reach within the agency without being appointed by the president of the United States.
Kate glanced at Nick, who clearly thought this was a lot of fun. He poured a glass of tsipouro, and slid it toward her.
“You’re going to need this,” he said.
Kate looked back at Jessup and Bolton. “The Bureau set this idiot free?”
“Officially, no,” Bolton said. “He’s a fugitive from justice and wanted on three continents. He’s being actively pursued by dozens of law enforcement agencies, including the FBI.”
“And unofficially?” Kate asked.
“He works for us now.”
Nick held up his drink in a toast to Kate. “Welcome to the team.”
“Sit,” Bolton said to Kate, motioning to a chair.
Kate took a seat at the table, arms folded over her chest, the expression on her face saying ex–Navy SEAL in kill mode.
“First, I wanted this meeting to take place somewhere so remote that there was virtually no chance anyone besides the four of us would ever know that it had occurred,” Bolton said. “Second, it was the ideal audition. I wanted to see how far you were willing to bend the law to enforce it.”
“I wanted to see how far you’d go to see me,” Nick said, smiling.
“To arrest you, or shoot you,” Kate said. “Or if I was really lucky, both.”
Bolton took a chair and leaned forward, elbows on the table. “My feeling was that if you showed up here, halfway around the world and in a place where women have been forbidden for a thousand years, then there was no question that you’re the right person for this job.”
“And clearly you’re game for anything, especially if it seems impossible,” Nick said. “Just like me.”
“Believe it or not,” Kate said, “the whole world doesn’t revolve around you.”
“Your world does,” he said.
“Don’t flatter yourself.”
“You’re here, aren’t you?”
In her mind, Kate briefly relived the glorious moment when she’d hit his car with a bus. Channel the bus, she thought. Be the bus.
She turned to Bolton. “Where is this going?”
“We want you to do the same thing you’re doing now. Catch the bad guys.”
“Like this one sitting across from me?” Kate took the half of the corned beef sandwich that Nick had offered her earlier and ate it.
“Bigger,” Jessup said.
“But only half as charming,” Nick said.
“As effective as we are at what we do,” Bolton said, “there’s still a class of criminals that operates outside of our reach, people so rich and powerful that they can manipulate the legal system so they never have to answer for their crimes, assuming that they are ever caught at all. We’re going to change that.”
“By letting Nick Fox go free?” Kate said, and looked at Jessup. “Am I the only one who sees the contradiction here?”
“He’s not free,” Jessup said. “Nick Fox escaped from custody and is a fugitive. If he’s caught, he will go back to prison. But in the meantime, it’s the perfect cover.”
“It’s not a cover,” Kate said. “It’s who he is.”
“That’s why it’s perfect,” Bolton said. “Nick Fox is going to do what he does best. Only now he will be doing it for us, for the next five years, while remaining a fugitive. After that, you’ll capture him, but then he’ll be set free, and all charges will be dropped, when prosecutors discover that the case you put together was fatally flawed and won’t stand up in court.”
“Yes, it will,” she said.
“I think you’re missing the big picture here,” Nick said.
“I think I’m the only one in this hut who isn’t,” she said, turning to Jessup. “If I understand you right, you broke Nick Fox out of prison so he could swindle and steal for you.”
“For the FBI and the greater good,” Bolton said sternly. “He’s going to help us bring down criminals we can’t catch by conventional methods.”
“By that you mean the legal ones,” Kate said.
“That’s one way to look it at,” Bolton said.
“It must be the only way, or we wouldn’t be meeting in a cave on Mount Athos.”
“We aren’t meeting,” Jessup said.
“This is fun already,” Nick said, pouring himself another drink.
“This is surreal,” Kate said. “Am I dreaming? Am I being punked?”
“To bankroll Nick’s scams, swindles, and heists against the targets we select, and to finance his requisite glamorous lifestyle, we’ll be tapping a secret fund made up entirely of money and assets confiscated from convicted criminals,” Bolton said. “I consider it poetic justice.”
“What happens if he gets caught by a mark or by some law enforcement agency?” Kate said.
“He’s on his own,” Jessup said.
“Even if he’s apprehended by the FBI,” Bolton said.
“Okay, now I am really confused,” Kate said. “We’re going to be chasing him?”
“Of course,” Bolton said. “He’s a federal fugitive.”
“But we’re the one
s who set him free,” Kate said. “He’ll be out there doing missions for us.”
“We don’t know that,” Jessup said.
“Yes, we do,” Kate said. “That’s the deputy director of the FBI sitting next to you.”
“It was worth getting arrested just for this moment,” Nick said.
“Fox is still going to be on our Most Wanted list,” Bolton said to Kate, “and every agent except you will be on the lookout for him.”
“What will I be doing?” she asked.
“Keeping him from getting caught,” Bolton said. “While pretending to be pursuing him, of course.”
“Of course,” Kate said, and she finally knocked back her glass of tsipouro. “What happens if I get caught covering for him or helping him in one of his schemes?”
“You will be arrested and prosecuted,” Bolton said.
“That’s nice,” Kate said. “That makes me feel all warm inside.”
“Probably that’s the tsipouro,” Nick said.
Kate turned to Bolton. “What’s to stop him from stealing that secret slush fund from us or using it to pull off scams and heists of his own?”
“You,” Bolton said.
“What’s to stop him from ditching us and really going on the run?”
“You,” Bolton said.
She nodded. “I see a fatal flaw in your plan.”
“What’s that?” Bolton said.
She pointed at Nick. “Him.”
Bolton wanted Kate’s decision in the morning, though she had no idea what he would do, or what she would do, or what would happen to Nick Fox, if she refused to participate in their operation.
Bolton and Jessup chose to sleep on the cots behind the curtain. Kate opted to sleep on a bench in the main room. She liked the hard wood under her back and head. It kept her aware of her location and her bizarre situation. In fact her situation was so bizarre, she wasn’t sure it was real. Maybe she only thought she’d had a perfect landing when she parachuted in. Maybe she’d hit her head and she was hallucinating.
“Out of curiosity,” Kate asked, staring at the aged beams holding up the pitched ceiling, “how long have Jessup and Bolton been here?”