The flight from Tallinn to Larnaca International Airport, in Cyprus, was uneventful; the storms preceded it. Calvin Garth had not been pleased when Belknap told him that he needed to make use of the chartered jet—there were flight plans to be filed, logistics to be accounted for—but finally relented. A version of old-school ties. Gennady Chakvetadze, after no little grousing of his own, had taken care of the paperwork. He retained his contacts within the Estonian ministry of transport; the impossible was made possible.
The darker storm clouds accompanied the conversation with Andrea Bancroft.
“I don’t want to talk about it right now,” she told him when he asked about her visit to the Rosendale facility. “There’s stuff I’m still processing.” There was something in her voice that disturbed him, some sense of a trauma undisclosed.
He debated telling her about Jared, about his fears, but held back. That was his problem; he would not make it hers. He did tell her about Nikos Stavros; here, he knew, her experience with corporate due diligence would be helpful. She rang off and called him back ten minutes later, with a swift précis of the man’s holdings and recent activities, at least according to the available business records.
Once more, though, the brittleness of her tone alarmed him. “About the archives in Rosendale,” he began again, “at least tell me this. Does the foundation have any Estonian holdings?”
“Some infant-morality, prenatal-care programs in the early nineties. That’s about it.”
“Suspiciously little?”
“Non-suspiciously little. On par with Latvia and Lithuania. Sorry.”
“Anything else raise a flag?”
“I told you, I’m still processing…” This time there was a quaver in her voice, he was certain of it.
“Andrea, what happened?”
“I just…I need to see you.”
“I’ll be back before too long.”
“Tomorrow.”
“You said you’re flying to Cyprus, right? Larnaca? Kennedy has direct flights there.”
“You don’t know what risks you’d be running.”
“I’ll be careful. I’ve been careful. I used my credit card to book a flight out of Newark to San Francisco, assuming the account’s being monitored. Then I got a friend to book two seats on a flight to Paris, JFK to Orly, using his card, with me as the fellow passenger. My name will show up on the flight manifest but not in the financials. And it gets me into the same international terminal as my flight to Larnaca—a flight that’s not going to be fully booked. Forty minutes before the jet to Larnaca departs, I’ll just show up at the counter with my passport and cash and buy a ticket. People make last-minute trips all the time—death in the family, urgent business meetings, whatever.” She paused. “I’m just saying, I’ve thought this through. I can do this. And I’m going to.”
“Dammit, Andrea. It’s not safe.” If his worries about Jared Rinehart were borne out, he brooded, no place was safe for him. “Larnaca especially. You’re barging into a realm where you don’t belong.”
“Tell me where I do belong. Tell me where it is safe. Because I’d like to know.” She sounded on the verge of tears. “I am flying to meet you whether you like it or not.”
“Please, Andrea,” he protested, “be reasonable.” The wrong words to use, for her and for him.
“I’ll see you tomorrow afternoon,” she told him, and he could hear the finality in her voice.
The prospect of seeing her gladdened him and frightened him. She was an amateur; and Larnaca—his Larnaca—could easily turn into a killing field, especially if he was going to be confronting Genesis. The thought of harm coming to her chilled him. If I didn’t know better, Castor, I’d say you were bad luck.
Reclining in his seat, Belknap let the eddies and whirlwinds swirl through the landscape of his mind.
Nikos Stavros. In the rare interviews he had given, he spoke of having enlisted in the Cypriot merchant marines out of high school, and described his father as a hardworking fisherman. He spoke vividly about fishing on a moonless night, shining a five-hundred-watt lamp at the water and attracting a school of mackerels that he would throw a net around. What he tended not to mention was that his father owned the largest fleet of fishing vessels in Cyprus. Nor did he dwell on the fact that his company, Stavros Maritime, made much of its income by ferrying crude for the major oil companies. What distinguished him from competitors with larger fleets was a gift for anticipating the spot market in oil. His tankers could ferry twenty-five million barrels of crude at any time, the value of the cargo varying wildly depending on the fluctuations of the commodities market and the vagaries of OPEC. Stavros was generally credited with a remarkable acuity in predicting those chaotic fluctuations; his fortunes had risen through an acumen usually associated with the canniest Wall Street traders. His own net worth was unknown; he was believed to have extensive holdings, but hidden within a battery of private and unreported partnerships. It was all very suggestive: but of what?
If you were wrong about Jared Rinehart, what else were you wrong about? The question seared him. Maybe his life’s journey had been no journey at all, but a manipulated march through a labyrinth of deception. His sense of resolve, his sense of himself, had been compromised beyond retrieval, so it seemed to him. Rage at what had befallen Jared had been his soul’s own sustenance: He had put himself in harm’s way for Jared; would, indeed, have given his life for his.
And now?
For all he knew, Jared Rinehart was himself Genesis. Hadn’t he been in all the right places? The guile, the stealth, the mastery of machination—all these traits equipped him for the role. He had declined promotions that would have taken him out of the field, reduced his mobility, compromised his ability to travel freely. And all the while he was constructing a shadowy realm of terror.
A shadowland that encompasses the globe. Yet its creator would remain anonymous, never glimpsed, never sighted, never recognized. Like the dark side of the moon.
Was Rinehart capable of such enormities? Belknap’s very soul rebelled at the possibility. Yet he could not rule it out.
As Belknap reclined in a fuguelike state, images and information and uncertainties swirled through his mind in a dust storm of data, until he heard the hydraulic whine of the plane’s landing gear. He had arrived.
The Republic of Cyprus, a third the size of Massachusetts, held an outsized fascination for the contending powers that had divided the island back in 1974. Cyprus was much nearer to Beirut than to Athens, and in more than geographical terms. While the breakaway Turkish polity of Northern Cyprus languished, the Cypriots of the south had created a haven of relative prosperity, nourished by tourism, financial services, and shipping. The Republic of Cyprus, a Greek client state, had six excellent ports and a merchant marine with almost a thousand large container ships, not to mention another thousand that sailed under the flags of foreign nations. Given that the island had twenty airports as well, it was inevitably a transshipment point for heroin between Turkey and Europe, a region where the associated activity of money laundering took place all too freely. It was frequented by American tourists, and, with equal diligence, American DEA agents.
Larnaca was named for a Greek word meaning “sarcophagus”—named after death. It was among the most charmless cities in all of Cyprus. Its streets were laid out in a maze that only a longtime resident could make sense of—and even they could not keep track of the frequent name changes—while Lebanese immigrants huddled in urban squalor in the north of the city. The surrounding land was parched, barren, the local restaurants crowded out by franchises of international chains: KFC, McDonald’s, Pizza Hut. It had all the charm of a Bridgeport strip mall set down in a desert. Sand flies made the beaches unappealing for sunbathers. But, past the scrubby salt pines and the long, pencil-like wharfs, its marinas were crowded with yachts and with freighters, and not a few of each were the property of the legendary shipping mogul Nikos Stavros.
After a long delay, aluminum stairs were motored over to the plane, the door opened, and he stepped out into blue-skied morning. Passport control was cursory. He did not dare reuse the Tyler Cooper papers; he had to trust that the papers that Gennady had furnished him were, as the retired spy had assured him, truly uncompromised. So far as he could tell, they were. The taxi ride into town took fifteen minutes. It would take him longer to content himself that he had picked up no unsought companions.
Belknap found himself struggling not to wilt under the strong Cyprus sun, which made everything seem preternaturally bright, and almost disguised the seediness of the city and much of its surrounds. He had seven hours before Andrea’s flight would arrive. Much of this time would be spent scouting out Stavros’s residence.
Was he being followed? Almost certainly not, he decided. But he would spare no precautions. He spent a full hour darting in and out of the shops and stalls in the old Turkish quarter, changing his wardrobe twice—he put on a couple of cheap kaftans before changing back to a Western tourist’s ensemble of guayabera shirt and khaki trousers.
The address he had, 500 Lefkara Avenue, was at once accurate and curiously uninformative. He finally determined that Nikos Stavros essentially owned a hillside and adjoining beach on the very outskirts of Larnaca. The residence overlooked the sea, and was little less than a citadel. The walls were vast, unscalable, and wire-topped, with security cameras mounted every ten yards; even from the sea, a series of buoys hinted at precautions like flat-nets and perimeter cable. A bomb dropped from the air could shake the place. Other than that, however, it would be difficult indeed to penetrate.
From the nearest hillside, a sandy, scrubby elevation, he could make out the dazzling emerald turf, obviously the product of intensive irrigation. The house was a vast three-story Levantine mansion of white stucco with elaborate balconies and gables, the whole structure extending outward into several points, like a vast starfish or a work of sharply folded origami, whose symmetries took a while to detect. Surrounding it was perhaps forty acres of land. Close to the house, he made out elaborate flower gardens, sculpted bushes, a sheltering topiary of cypresses. Through binoculars, Belknap took in the various outbuildings: stables, swimming pool, tennis court. He saw several low hutlike structures, positioned over a berm line, that would have been invisible from the main house: kennels for guard dogs, without a doubt. They would help patrol the place at night, their powerful jaws as deadly as any bullet. Uniformed figures patrolled the perimeter; focusing on them closely, he could see that they carried assault rifles.
He lowered his binoculars, feeling overwhelmed. He recalled what Gennady had said about trail dogs and catch dogs. Was he playing out of position? Had he exceeded the limits of his competence? Even if the technology of surveillance was surmounted, the shipping magnate was protected by an armed brigade. Exhaustion coursed through him.
The situation is hopeless but not serious: something Jared Rinehart liked to say. Remembering Jared’s voice caused something close to physical pain, like regurgitating lye. It could not be true. It had to be true. It could not be true. It had to be true. A spinning solenoid of doubt and conviction—an alternating current of recognition and denial—was consuming his ebbing powers of concentration.
Why was he even here? For the past nine days he had been consumed with the mission of rescuing Jared Rinehart—or avenging him. He had been propelled by a certainty that had perished the previous evening. Now the Hound was chasing after something else, something hard, inviolable, essential. He was chasing after the truth.
Andrea’s voice: Tell me where it is safe.
A shadowland that encompasses the globe.
Nowhere was safe. Nowhere would be safe. Not until Belknap had made it so. Or was killed in the attempt.
The sun was brilliant—noon in the Mediterranean, the sky that inimitable Mediterranean azure—and yet it could all have been inky blackness. Belknap prided himself on seeing through deceptions, yet he had spent much of his life as a victim of one. His belly clutched and cramped. Maybe it was time to admit the futility of his efforts. And let Genesis have his way?
Out of the pain came a renewed sense of determination. Stavros’s estate was ultra-secure. But it surely had at least one weakness. Swirling mists gave way to crystalline clarity, and another line of Jared’s: When there’s no way in, try the front door.
Half an hour later, Belknap drove up to the estate in a rented Land Rover; to a pebbly-faced man at the outermost gate he passed on a message that was relayed to another, and another. He and his vehicle were searched, and then waved on through. He parked as directed, on a shaded graveled lot, as tidy and carefully raked as a Japanese sand garden. At the front door, he repeated his message to a manservant in formal attire. It was simple, and it was powerful: “Tell Mr. Stavros that Genesis sent me.”
Once again it proved its efficacy. The manservant, a gaunt man in his sixties with a slightly jaundiced complexion and hollows beneath his brown eyes, did not offer Belknap a drink or issue any other pleasantries. He spoke English with a vaguely Levantine accent, but his movements were stiff and proper, almost prissy—another residue, perhaps, of the island’s colonial past. The foyer had elaborate coffered ceilings of mahogany; intricate wainscoting adorned the coral-hued walls.
“He will see you in the library,” the manservant told him. As the man turned, Belknap caught a fleeting glimpse of a small blued-steel Luger inside his black jacket. He knew he had been meant to see it.
The library had more oak paneling than bookshelves; overhead, an intricate crystal chandelier looked as if it were taken from a Venetian palazzo, and probably had been. So far, the place was very much as Belknap had envisaged it, from the Regency period furniture to the minor Old Master paintings.
Nikos Stavros, however, was not. Belknap had expected a barrel-chested man, a strong jaw, and piercing gaze, and beefy grip—the familiar type of the Greek shipping magnate, the sort who had grown to appreciate the finer things while not shying from the rough-and-tumble of the shipyard when necessary.
The man who scrambled to his feet and took his hand in a clammy, limp handshake was, on the contrary, an unimpressive specimen. His gaze was watery and distracted. He was slight of build: sunkenchested, with narrow wrists and the spindly calves of a boy. His thinning, almost colorless hair was gathered in stringy clumps that lay flat against his scalp, sweat-pasted in place.
“Nikos Stavros?” Belknap scrutinized him closely.
Stavros dug into one ear with a long-nailed small finger. “You can leave us, Caius,” he called to the gaunt man. “We’ll be talking in private here. Everything’s fine.” His tone belied his words. The man was obviously frightened.
“So, how can I help you?” Stavros asked Belknap. “I sound like a shopgirl, don’t I?” The man emitted a short dry laugh and licked his lips nervously. “But seriously. My whole career has been based on cooperation.” He clasped his hands together in an effort to stop them from trembling.
Belknap turned around and saw that the manservant remained standing on the threshold to the library.
The door closed quietly; the interior surface was upholstered with stud-tufted leather in the Jacobean style.
Belknap took a long step toward Stavros, who seemed to cower in his presence.
Yet he had let him in. Why? Because he felt he had had no choice, obviously. He did not dare incur the wrath of Genesis.
“Cooperation is one thing,” Belknap said gruffly. “Collaboration is another.”
“I quite see,” said Stavros, who obviously did not. Here was an immensely wealthy man, yet he was practically quivering with fear. Belknap was amazed. “I’m always game for collaboration.”
“Collaboration.” The operative’s eyes narrowed. “With our adversaries.”
“No!” Stavros yelped. “Not that. Never that.”
“Decisions have been made on the strategic level. As to which operations to acquire. Which subsidiaries to spin off. Which partnerships to shut down.” Belknap’s references were veiled, vague, threatening; his aim was both to confuse and to connect.
Stavros nodded vigorously. “Tough calls, I bet.”
Belknap ignored him. “Let’s talk about Estotek,” he said. Though he was feeling his way through the part, he could betray no hint of uncertainty or hesitancy. He would bear down, ask what he needed to ask, and improvise if necessary.
“Estotek,” Stavros repeated, swallowing hard. “Sounds like a birth control pill.” A strangled chortle. Once more, the magnate licked his lips nervously. They look chapped. Spittle had gathered in the left corner of his mouth. This was someone under stress.
Belknap took another menacing step closer to the Cypriot shipper. “Do you think you’re funny? Do you think I’m here for an ice-cream social?” Belknap reached out and grabbed the magnate’s white silk shirt, jerking him closer to him in a gesture that hinted of bottomless reserves of violent fury.
“I’m sorry,” Stavros said. “Now, what was the question again?”
“Would you like to live out the remainder of your existence in a wholly immobilized state of unbearable pain and nauseating disfigurement?”
“Let me think—no?” Stavros started coughing wildly. His face was flushed when he turned to face Belknap again. “Estotek. It’s a shell company, isn’t it? A storefront, basically. It’s how we do business. But you know that.”
“What’s at issue isn’t my knowledge. It’s your conduct.”
“Quite. I quite understand.” Stavros turned to a small cluster of liquor bottles and, with shaking hands, poured a drink for himself. “Where are my manners?” he said. “I should have offered you one. Here, take this.” He handed the heavy-bottomed tumbler to Belknap.
Belknap took it and immediately threw its contents in Stavros’s face. The alcohol stung the Cypriot’s eyes, and he blinked tears away. The behavior was outrageous; but Belknap intuitively knew that it was crucial for him to test the limits of such outrage. Only someone backed by extraordinary power would dare abuse the magnate like this.
“What did you do that for?” the Cypriot mewled.
“Shut the hell up, you goddamn shit sausage,” Belknap growled. “You’re becoming a greater liability than an asset.”
Stavros blinked. “You’re from…”
“Just came from Lanham.”
“I don’t understand.”
“An alliance was formed. An acquisition was made. You’re part of us now.”
Stavros opened his mouth, but nothing came out.
“Don’t lie to me,” Belknap rumbled. “You did wrong. You sailed too close to the wind.”
“Please, I didn’t tell them a goddamn thing! You’ve got to believe me!”
Now he was getting somewhere. “Who?”
“Those investigators got zip. I gave them nothing.”
“Tell me more.”
“Nothing to tell.”
“What are you hiding, goddammit?”
“I’m telling you. They got nowhere, those Washington bastards in those brown suits. The lawyer that Lugner recommended was with me. John McTaggart, right? You guys can ask him. Those Kirk Commission drones made all kinds of noises, like you’d think. But we stonewalled all the way.”
“Except that wasn’t your only meeting with them, was it?”
“It certainly was!” A squawk of fear and indignation. “You’ve got to believe me.”
“Now you’re telling us what we have to do?”
“No! I didn’t mean it that way! Don’t misunderstand me.”
“Again with the orders.” Keep him off-balance.
“Please. I don’t know how the Kirk Commission learned what it learned but I do know I wasn’t the source. Why the hell would I have leaked? What sense does that make? It’s my ass that’s in a sling. They were talking about deregistering my fleet if I were found in contempt of the U.S. Congress. Like that. I reminded them I’m a Cypriot national! They kept going on about one of my American subsidiaries. They were way out of line. And I told them so.”
“Your ass was in a sling, all right,” Belknap said. “That’s how those Washington aliens gave you an anal probe. Come clean. It’ll be better this way. We just need to hear it from you.”
“You got the wrong idea. I squeezed my cheeks hard. Hey, I’m a Cypriot, we know what you gotta do. Nothing got through, nothing came out. I was like a drum. Please—McTaggart will vouch for me. You have to…please trust me on this.”
Belknap was quiet for a long moment. “At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter whether I trust you.” He dropped his voice to a hushed tone. “What matters is whether Genesis trusts you.”
As he said the word, the shipping magnate blanched visibly.
Belknap was proceeding on instinct, taking advantage of a basic mechanism of paranoia. As the corpulent princeling in Oman had made clear, much of Genesis’s power stemmed from the fact that nobody knew precisely who he was or who might secretly be in his employ.
“Please,” the Cypriot whimpered. His eyes darted restlessly. “I need to go to the bathroom,” he stammered. “I’ll be right back.” He darted to an adjoining room, and then through a small door.
What was he up to? Not summoning backup; he could have alerted his armed manservant with the press of a button. Something else, then.
Suddenly Belknap knew. He’s calling his partner in Tallinn.
When Stavros returned a minute later, he looked at Belknap strangely; a host of small doubts had sprouted, it seemed, like plant life in a desert after a rain. “Richard Lugner is—”
“Dead,” Belknap said. “That’s right. See, he tried to renegotiate terms with Genesis. Let that be a lesson to you.”
Stavros’s veal-white face paled even further. He stood there stiffly, his silk shirt stained with Scotch, but also darkened by sweat around his underarms and shoulders. He shuddered as Belknap held his gaze. “He—he…”
“Was lucky. It was quick for him. It won’t be for you. Y’all have a good day now.” Belknap gave him a look of smoldering contempt as he left, shutting the heavy door behind him. The sense of triumph was fleeting, dissolved by a maelstrom of uncertainties—and, as well, by the recognition of a certain truth: Wounded animals were always the most dangerous.
As Belknap drove his Land Rover down the sandy escarpment and along the coastal road, he found his mind spinning. The meeting with Stavros had proved informative in ways that Stavros would not have been able to appreciate—but Belknap himself hadn’t yet fully parsed its content. One fact was surely significant: To Stavros, Genesis was a feared enemy—an enemy that needed to be placated and appeased, but an enemy all the same. Lugner had not been an agent of Genesis, but an adversary. That was a surprise. Would there be a way to play one entity against the other?
He admitted to himself, if reluctantly, that he welcomed Andrea’s help, her expertise…maybe even needed it. But not just her help. Her—what? Her keen intellect. Her perspective. Her capacity to consider and explore contradictory ideas. But there was still more to it, wasn’t there? As strenuously as he had sought to discourage her from coming, he had been secretly grateful when she had persisted. He had planned to join her at the Livadhiotis Hotel Apartments, on Nikolaou Rossou. She would be arriving there within the hour if her plane were on schedule.
In his rearview mirror he saw another car leaving the narrow hilly road that led only to Stavros’s estate. Was it Stavros himself? The car veered off into the large marina, and, maintaining a careful distance, Belknap now followed. Through a line of scrubby pines, he saw someone—not Stavros—get out of the car and walk toward the waterfront with powerful, confident steps. Belknap moved closer.
The man was tall and slim but moved with coiled strength, like a mountain cat. He was talking to the man in a booth by the parking lot, and when he turned and gestured toward his sedan, Belknap felt his stomach plunge.
No, it couldn’t be!
Short brown hair, elegantly elongated limbs, eyes concealed behind sunglasses—but Belknap knew those eyes, knew their soulful gray-green gaze, because he knew this man.
Jared Rinehart.
His friend. His enemy. Which was it? He had to know.
Belknap had leaped from his car, was on his feet and running—racing, sprinting—before he realized what he was doing.
“Jared!” he called out. “Jar-ed!”
The tall man turned to look at him, and what Belknap saw in his eyes was plain and undisguised: fear.
Jared broke into a run, fleeing as if afraid for his life.
“Please, stop!” Belknap called out. “We need to talk!”
It was a nearly comical understatement. But so much emotion surged into Belknap’s chest—not least the hope against hope that Rinehart could explain everything to him, could help his life make sense again, anneal the hairline cracks by the clarity and logic and sanity that seemed his natural element. Please, stop. Yet Rinehart was charging across the marina as if Belknap posed a mortal danger. He swept down the long wharf with remarkable speed, his feet ghosting along the planked surface. Belknap was gulping air as he gave chase. He let himself slow down a little. A pier, projecting into the water. Where could Pollux go, for God’s sakes?
A stupid question that was answered moments later, when Jared leaped onto a motorboat that was docked nearby. The key was in the ignition, in compliance with marina rules, and, seconds later, Rinehart had sped off into the green waters of Larnaca Bay.
No! He had spent the past two hundred hours searching for this man. Now that he was in his sight, he would not give up.
Acting on unthinking impulse, he leaped onto a small runabout—a Riva Aquarama, elegant as a high-end sports car, with a helm of polished dark wood and chrome, a hull of fiberglass. Belknap released the ropes that trussed it to the wharf-side posts, pushed up the hatch over the engine, and twisted the key. The motor turned over and then rumbled.
The helm console, too, looked like the dashboard of a vintage sports car: large round dials, light-blue lettering against black, set in glossy dark wood; a ridged steering wheel of white and powder blue, with chrome spokes. Now he pushed the throttle. The rumble became a roar, matched by a splashing sound as the propellers churned away. The orange needle in the oil-pressure gauge moved up in jerky increments; the amperes gauge swung all the way forward. As the motor surged, the boat lurched higher in the waves. But where was Rinehart?
He peered through spume and spray and the glare of sun against the ocean; it was like peering through a heat scope at someone lighting a cigarette. Too much flare. The waters had looked deceptively placid from the shore; in fact, the waves were powerful, heaving like a leviathan struggling for breath, rising higher the further out he got. Ahead of him and to his right, above a bermlike swelling of the waters, he caught a glimpse of Pollux, his lithe frame protruding above the helm. Spume from bow and stern thrusters told Belknap that he was turning, preparing for some maneuver. Belknap kept the throttle at full speed. It was physics at this point. Rinehart was on a larger boat, a Galia, with oversize propellers that left a wide foamy wake. It was a bigger boat and a more powerful one: but not a faster one. It was the difference between a sedan and an eighteen-wheeler. Another upheaval of water occluded Belknap’s view. He was now perhaps a mile and a half from the shore, and Rinehart was turning his Galia in an arc that actually was helping Belknap to gain on him.
Belknap’s hands cramped around the boat’s controls; his heart pummeled his chest. He was getting closer, closer.
He could see Rinehart in partial profile now, see his high cheekbones and the shadows beneath them.
Don’t run from me!
“Jared!” he bellowed.
The other man did not reply or even turn around. Had he heard him over the drone of the motor, the churning water?
“Jared! Please!”
Yet Rinehart remained erect and immobile, his gaze fixed on some unseen destination.
“Why, Jared? Why?” The words spilled from Belknap in a roar like that of the ocean itself.
The drone of the Galia grew louder, and then disappeared into another, enveloping sound: the bass blare of a freighter’s horn.
At the same time, Jared did something with Galia’s controls and the boat thrust upward, and then surged forward, swiftly widening the distance between them.
The large ship had been coming in along the sea lane from Akrotiri Bay, to the west. A vast black-hulled vessel flying a Liberian flag, it was one of those behemoths that seem impossible to miss, but at any distance are easily overlooked on the full-horizon vista of the open seas. Now Pollux maneuvered his Galia over to the bow end of the freighter. Madness! He was coming suicidally close to its bow. As a high wave blocked Belknap’s view, he wondered whether suicide was, indeed, Jared’s intention. After the wave crested, Belknap realized Rinehart’s game.
No splinters. No wreckage. Nothing at all. Jared had succeeded in his aim: to conceal himself behind the freighter.
Belknap knew the limits of his own nautical experience well enough not to try to pull up close to the freighter or approach its hazardous wake. Instead, he moved at an angle past it, in order to gain a sight line on the waters behind. Standing at the cockpit, Belknap swung the car-style steering wheel hard to the right while peering over the spray-fouled windshield.
At last Belknap had the angle he had sought. The Liberian behemoth was a bulk carrier, he noticed; its cargo could be ore or orange juice, fertilizer or fuel. Once containerized, they all looked the same. The vessel itself was perhaps forty thousand deadweight tons and at least five hundred feet long. Now he could see to either side of it. He scanned the seas, glimmering and glinting in the overhead sun like desert sands, and felt something cold wash over him.
Jared Rinehart—his friend, his foe—had disappeared.
As Belknap returned to the marina, the roiling in his mind matched that of the ocean. Had Rinehart ever really been kidnapped in the first place? Had that, too, been an elaborate ruse?
The anguishing suspicions returned. The idea that his best friend and soulmate—yes, Pollux to his Castor—was a traitor, a traitor, not least to him, was like a knife to the heart. For the thousandth time, he cast about for another explanation. He flashed back on Jared’s stricken face: the face of someone to whom Belknap was a threat. Why? Because Belknap could now see through the subterfuge—or was there some other reason? The questions surged and swelled and filled him with a nausea that battered at him like seasickness.
Amid the turbulence was a single point of solace: the knowledge that Andrea was here. His watch told him that. His career had been short on companionship and long on isolation. It was one reason that Pollux had come to matter so much to him. Field agents were discouraged from putting down roots, and those who could not accustom themselves to loneliness never stayed the course. But one could tolerate a condition without welcoming it, and now, more than ever, he yearned for a reprieve, a respite. He glanced at his watch again.
She would be in the room, waiting for him. He would be alone no longer.
As he drove to the Livadhiotis Hotel Apartments, on Nikolaou Rossou, he had to force himself to pay attention to the road, the traffic, the other vehicles. His speed was determined not by the posted signs, but by what other drivers had established as normal, which was considerably faster. The hotel had been chosen not for its comfort, but for its proximity to the major roadways, and Belknap took in the various trucks and trailers that were headed either to the harbor or to the airport. There was a yellow-and-red DHL van, its driver with his hirsute arm out of the open window, as if propping up the roof. A green-and-white tanker with its long cylindrical cargo of liquid propane. A cement truck with its slowly rotating drum. A white, windowless Sky Café van.
He felt his scalp prickle, and he glanced yet again at his watch. It was wrong to have let her come; he should have tried harder to dissuade her. He didn’t, because her mind was made up. Yet was it also because, on some level, he wanted her to come?
The Livadhiotis Hotel Apartments had a large brown marquee with its name in mock stone-and-chisel–style lettering. The flags of nine nations, chosen apparently at random, projected out from the marquee in a failed attempt to signal some sort of international stature. Above the ground level were three floors with arched, almost semicircular windows. The rooms came with kitchenettes—that was what made them “apartments”—and the place had the familiar old-sponge smell of cheap housing in hot climates. A man in a motorized wheelchair barked a greeting when Todd Belknap entered. His vein-webbed face had a sheen that made Belknap think of the leaves of certain tropical plants. His hands were gnarled and powerful-looking. Something in his gaze seemed veiled, at once aggressive and furtive.
But Belknap was in too great of a rush to dwell on the curled lip of the crippled hotel clerk. He collected his key—it was the old European system, the room key attached to a rubberized weight, and returned to the front desk when the guest left the building—and made his way to the room he had checked into that morning, one floor up. The elevator was slow and small; when he got out, the hall was dim. The hall lights were on a timer, he remembered: another cost-saving measure. Inside the room, the old-sponge smell grew stronger. He closed the door behind him. He saw Andrea’s bags on the floor near the veneer-on-fiberboard dresser and felt something like relief fluttering in his chest. She had been in his thoughts far more often than could be explained by the nature of his pursuits. Her fragrance, her hair, her soft, glowing skin: He had not been able to leave these things behind when he flew across the Atlantic.
“Andrea,” he called out. The bathroom door was open, the room dark. Where was she? Having a coffee at one of the nearby cafés, perhaps—adjusting to the time zone. The bedspread looked rumpled, as if she had stretched out on it to have a nap. Then his heart started to trip-hammer, swifter at comprehension than his head. The folded white paper on the small bedside table: It was a note.
He picked it up, read it quickly, and was struck by a bolt of fear and fury. He forced himself to reread it more slowly. His stomach was a small, hard ball.
Everything about it heightened his sense of dread. The paper was hotel stationery; the writing was in pencil. Both features would stymie any attempt at forensic scrutiny. Nor was the message worded as a kidnapping note. We have taken possession of the package, the note said. Enjoy your stay. Yet what truly made his blood freeze was its sign-off: GENESIS.