The Stone of Archimedes (12 page)

Without thinking, Jake thrust his right foot into the man's stomach, sending him flying back into the restroom. Then he followed the man inside and forced the door shut behind him. They wrestled in the tight quarters, neither able to get a good punch off. Finally Jake shoved his elbow upward into the man's jaw and knocked him out. Then he searched the man's pockets for identification. This was the same man he had encountered on the ferry from Tunis to Trapani after he took the Glock from his friend—the one Jake had just killed in Malta. All he found was a wallet, which he shoved into his pocket. And, of course, another Glock 19 under his left arm and two extra magazines under his right. He had just seconds to get the hell out of there before someone came. Smiling, he decided to make things a little more difficult for this guy. Jake stripped the man's pants off, along with his boxers, and rolled them up under his arm. Then he put the man back onto the toilet as if he was doing something sordid.

Opening the door slightly to see if anyone was there, Jake saw nobody. He slipped out and threw the man's pants into a garbage can. Then he hurried back toward his seat. Somehow these guys had gotten on the same train. This could have been a coincidence, but he didn't like the odds.

Back at his seat he reached down to Sara and said, “Let's go. They found us.”

“What? How?”

He led her by the hand up the corridor toward Elisa, who could see he was concerned. She got up and said, “What's up Jake?”

“The Greeks found us,” he said. “Yeah, she's with us, Sara. I'll introduce you later. Right now we need to get off this train.”

Lucky for them the train seemed to stop in every one-horse town between Catania and Taormina. But he was sure they would be watching for them. Within a minute the train slowed for a small station. Instead of getting off immediately, Jake held them there until the conductor said the doors were about to close. Just at the last second Jake pulled the two women out onto the platform and hurried away from the train. He didn't look back until he was sure the train had left the terminal. They had gotten off clean. But now they needed transportation.

“What happened?” Elisa asked.

“Wait. Who is she?” Sara asked.

Jake introduced them and said they were all on the same team. He explained what had happened to the man on the train, then he started to walk outside and handed the Glock to Elisa. “A spare.” He went through the man's wallet, but it only held a driver's license with a photo barely recognizable. He kept the forty Euros and threw the wallet into the garbage as they left the tiny terminal.

“We need a ride,” Jake announced. “Any ideas? The rest of the Greeks will get off at the next stop and come back for us. Someone would have been on lookout for us getting off the train.”

The two women looked around. There were no taxis and the bus might come in five minutes or a half hour. However, there was a small parking lot with cars left behind by commuters. Jake went from car to car testing driver's doors. The only one unlocked was an old beat up Fiat Uno. It would have to do.

“Get in,” Jake demanded.

They did as he said, with Sara running around to the front passenger seat and Elisa throwing her bag into the back and sliding in next to it.

Jake dug around under the dash until he found the ignition wire. He was about to start stripping wires when he saw the hole where the key should go into the ignition. Instead of a key hole there was a simple button. Christ, this guy was asking for his car to be stolen. He pressed the button and the tiny engine sputtered to life. Half a tank of gas. On this car that would almost get them to Rome, if it didn't break down in a couple of miles. Jake ground the shift stick into first and then burned some rubber and got them onto the road toward Taormina.

Washington D.C.

Toni Contardo stepped lightly through the nice Georgetown brownstone, checking the clock on the fireplace mantel—it was just after one a.m. Her black curly hair was up in a pony tail at the back of her head and she was dressed in tight black clothes, nothing that could possibly get caught on anything, and her shoes were a practical high-top with non-squeak soles. She moved in the darkness as if she actually lived there. She knew there was no dog. No kids. No wife this night. And the security detail had given way to a fallible electronic security system that she had broken in less than fifteen seconds.

When she came to the wooden staircase, she hesitated for a second. These could squeak, she knew. But she could also hear the man upstairs snoring loud enough to wake the neighbors. With great stealth, she kept to the outer edge of the wooden stairs. Not a sound.

She got to the man's bedroom. The door was open and she could barely make out the man in the bed alone. Next to the bed was a small table with a padded chair under that. Looking in the drawer, she found a little .380 automatic handgun. She picked that up and then sat on the chair and watched the man sleep for a while. Then she clicked on the small table lamp and crossed her legs.

The man startled up in bed, and started to reach for the drawer where he kept his gun, until his wide eyes finally found recognition. “Maria?” he said. “What the hell are you doing here?”

Toni went with it, almost forgetting that the senator only knew her by that persona. “We have to talk.”

Senator James Halsey lay back against his pillow and drew the sheet up to his chin. “Careful with the gun,” he said. “It has a hair trigger.”

She smiled and then put the gun back into the drawer. “Sorry about that, but your first instinct was to reach for the drawer.”

He nodded. “What can I do for you?”

“Our man found your sister in Italy.”

Halsey sat up again. “That's great. So she's okay?”

“Yes. As far as we know. You sound surprised.”

“Not at all.” He ran his fingers through his tussled hair. “You have to understand Sara. She's always believed she's invincible. She has more guts than most men I know.”

She was confused now, not knowing quite how to broach this subject. “How well do you know your lawyer Brock Winthrop?”

“Pretty damn well,” Halsey said. “We went to college together.”

“What's his relationship with your father?”

“He's his lawyer as well.”

“Then you agree with your father going back to Texas?”

“Of course. Nobody tells Buck Halsey where he can die.” He checked the clock on the end table. “In fact, I'll be following him there today. First I have to vote on an important bill before the senate.”

“When's the last time you talked with Brock Winthrop?” she asked, even though she already knew the answer to this.

The senator picked up his phone from the night table and checked the call record. “It was earlier this evening. Why do you ask?”

“Because he got an e-mail from Jake Adams saying he found Sara more than an hour ago. Why didn't he call you?”

Halsey shrugged and then looked at his phone again, checking his e-mail.

“Any e-mail?” She also knew the answer to that was no, since she had been monitoring all of Brock Winthrop's communications, along with those of Jake Adams and the good senator. But she couldn't let the senator know this without implicating her Agency in domestic spying—a huge violation of civil liberties.

He shook his head. “Hey, how the hell did you get in here?”

She got up to leave and simply stared at him. “Really? That's what you want to know? You should be asking why your lawyer has failed to tell you about our guy finding your sister.”

“He probably wanted to let me sleep,” Halsey posited. “He knows I'll have a long day in the senate and then flying back to Texas.”

“Yeah, that's it,” she said and started for the door.

“Wait. How did you get in here?” he asked her desperately.

She stopped and turned to him. “Through the front door. I'll send you an e-mail with suggestions on how to upgrade your system. You'll need to charge it after I leave. Then get back to sleep senator. I was never here.” With that she slipped out through the bedroom door, down the stairs and back outside.

The Greeks were stuck on the train all the way to Taormina, not able to get off to find Adams and the American woman. The man whose name Demetri still didn't know had made quite a scene when he came running from the restroom naked from the waist down, his manhood hiding among the furry forest. They eventually found his pants and boxers in the garbage can, but Niko and Kyros had gotten quite the laugh.

On the train, after losing Adams and the woman, Demetri had called Zendo to get instructions. Zendo had just landed at the Catania airport and would take a bus the 40 kilometers to Taormina to catch up with them within an hour or so. He was not happy that they had lost the American professor after getting so close. She was like a fish that they tried to catch with their hands—the tighter they squeezed the faster she slipped through their fingers.

Now, regrouped and standing at the base of the mountain at the Taormina-Giardini train station, Demetri glanced up the mountain and decided they needed to take a taxi the two kilometers to the top. After being up all night flying from Malta, his men needed a little break. And some food.

“Anyone hungry for some breakfast?” Demetri asked them.

Agreement all around with nods and shoulder shrugs.

Demetri said, “Kyros get us a taxi.”

Their designated driver ran off to grab a taxi out front.

“What about Jake Adams?” Niko asked.

“Now we wait for Zendo in town,” Demetri said. “Get something to eat, some coffee. Then we move on to Messina.”

Out at the curb Kyros shoved a man and woman out of his way and when the man looked like he would fight Kyros, he simply lifted his shirt a little to show his gun. The man and woman drifted away.

Demetri shook his head. That man could mess up a free night with a whore. With a flick of his head, the three men joined their friend at the taxi.

●

Jake followed the directions given to him by Sara Halsey Jones from the little village to a church near the ancient ruins of Taormina, their acquired Fiat sputtering along but still running. He guessed they would have most of the day to drive it before they had to dump it, since the owner had probably driven it to the station and commuted to Catania, where traffic could be a nightmare.

He shut down the engine and turned to Sara. “Before we go any farther, I need to ask you a few questions.”

She looked concerned. “Sure. What do you need?”

“What information did you get from the professor in Malta?”

“Nothing to do with this place in Taormina,” she assured him. “He talked with me about places in Messina and Siracusa.”

“What kind of places?” he asked with more edge than he wanted to.

Hesitating, collecting the right words, Sara finally said, “There's a man in Messina who works with a new dig outside of the city that dates back to just before a huge earthquake in the late sixteen hundreds. I made it sound like I was very interested in this dig to the Malta professor to throw him off my real interest.”

“Siracusa,” Jake said.

“Right.”

Finally Elisa shifted her body forward and asked, “What is this all about?”

Sara turned to her and said, “It's complicated. But it's kind of like Texas poker. Are you familiar with that?”

“I've heard about it,” Elisa said.

“Well, with poker you let your opponent think you have a better or worse hand than you do. That way you can either get them to shove more money into the pot or fold their hand, depending on your intent.”

“I understand subterfuge,” Elisa assured her. “But what I meant was why are the Greeks after you? What do they hope to get from you?”

That was a question Jake also wanted to ask.

“I don't really know,” Sara said. “I'm just writing a book about Archimedes. He's always been a hero of mine.”

“What do you expect to find here?” Jake asked Sara.

The professor glanced out the window toward the old church, which had seen much better days. The white stone structure looked like someone had peppered the walls with a 50-caliber machine gun. Which could have actually happened during WWII. “This church, the Church of San Pancrazio, was built in the sixth century. It's Roman Catholic, but it's built on a Greek temple from before Christ. Saint Pancras was a Greek who died in Sicily as a martyr in forty A.D.” She looked back at Jake. “There are a number of ornate gravestones in the crypt beneath the church. I've seen photos but nothing with great detail. I hope to gain some insight into my research here.”

She was still being cryptic herself, Jake thought. The good professor wasn't telling him everything, but that wasn't his concern. It was his job to find her, which he did, and now he just needed to get her home to Texas in one piece.

“All right,” Jake said. “Let's do this.”

Since it was so early in the morning, they were the first to make their way into the church, other than a few actual older women who seemed to be present praying in every Catholic church in every city in Europe.

They found their way down into the cellar, a dark, damp place lit by lights strung overhead. But there were shelves built into the thick walls where candles had been before electricity, and stood by now in case of a power failure.

Sara moved from one tomb and gravestone to the next as if she were looking for just the right one.

Jake caught up to her. “Are you looking for something in particular?” he asked.

The professor kept walking, her eyes scanning. She stopped and had her camera in her hands now with an image visible. “This one,” she said, showing him the photo.

To Jake it looked just like all the others. Elisa nudged in next to Jake for a view, but she said nothing.

Moving deeper into the cellar, it seemed to get darker the farther they went. It was obvious the tombs were getting older. And in this area the gravestones were in their own little rooms with metal bars enclosing them, like they were in an eternal prison.