The Stone of Archimedes (15 page)

It was Elisa.

He let her in and she wandered around the room as he closed the door and locked it behind her.

“Have a good nap?” she asked him.

Jake ran his fingers through his hair and yawned. “I guess so. First real sleep since before Tunisia.”

She sat on the end of his bed. “What happened in Tunis?”

He explained his situation. How the man had pulled his gun and tried to kill him. Self defense. Jake was lying to her and himself. If he hadn't tracked down the man in the first place, he wouldn't have had to defend himself. Also, after the first encounter with the man, once the shooting started, Jake could have simply walked away. But instead he'd run after the man, funneled him into that dead end alley, cornering him like a rat, and gone in with his gun blazing.

“I'm not here to judge you, Jake,” she said. “I understand this man was an international terrorist.”

“That he was.” As well as the last man involved with the murder of his girlfriend.

“Then we should shed no tears.”

Jake set his gun onto the nightstand and took a seat at the head of the bed. “How is the good professor?”

“She might be on to something, but she really needs her sleep as well. She said she hasn't really slept in weeks, being on the move so much.”

“I'm not sure we should leave her alone, though,” Jake said. “Do you want me to babysit her for a while?”

“Not necessary,” she said, smiling. “I made her a cup of tea in the room and gave her a sedative. She'll be sleeping like a baby for hours. Which should be enough time.”

“For?”

Elisa rose from the bed and lifted her shirt over her head in one motion, exposing nice round breasts barely held back in a black lace bra. She unhooked the bra from the front and let them escape to their full glory.

Jake could feel himself getting immediately excited.

She slipped out of her linen slacks and wore only a black matching thong. As she lowered that, Jake could see she was shaved clean.

He got up from the bed and they closed the distance, embracing tightly and kissing passionately.

She quickly undressed him and became even more excited once they were both naked. Jake shoved her onto the bed and she landed on her back, her eyes focused on his erection as he crawled toward her. Their first time would be fast and furious. It could be no other way, after the tension they had both felt since their first forced kisses at the Rome airport. Then, with time, they would explore their subjects much more thoroughly.

A while later they lay in bed, still naked, only a sheet covering them.

Jake said, “You've probably read a file on me somewhere, but I don't know that much about you.”

“What do you want to know?” she asked.

“Well, first of all, you speak Italian with a Slavic accent, and your English seems to have a hint of Irish. Is that even possible?”

She ran her hand across the hair on his chest. “Your file was correct. You don't miss much. My father was Italian and my mother was from Prague. But my father was a businessman. We traveled to Ireland often for summers. I learned my English there.”

“Nailed it.”

She slapped his chest. “That's not nice to say.”

“I didn't mean sexually,” he explained. “I meant I got it right.”

“Sure.”

Jake thought about what had just happened, a great distraction from the reality of life, such as it was. He had been with just one other woman since Anna's death, a German friend of his who worked for their intelligence service. They had been good together, but they had parted ways when she went back to work. He had no idea the nature of their relationship, or if they even had one currently. They had defined it more like friends with benefits. Something they both needed at the time. Perhaps that's what just happened tonight with Elisa.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

“Yeah. I'm just a bit confused with this case.”

“That makes two of us.”

He hesitated, like a poker player about to reveal his winning hand. “When did you plan on telling me?”

Her brows furled. “Tell you what?”

“That your agency told you to stop your investigation of the Greek billionaire, Petros Caras,” he said. He had gotten that brief message from Toni at the CIA, along with a short briefing on Caras. “Why would they stop you?”

She threw the covers away from her, exposing her smooth skin and perhaps trying to distract him. Letting out a long breath, she said, “I don't know for sure. They were all for it and then they were all against it. I got mad and they sent me on vacation.”

Jake could easily relate to that sentiment. The same thing had happened to him when he was active in the Agency. “So, they have no idea what you're doing.”

“I don't think so,” she demurred. “But you know how our governments work. They seem to know much more than they should.”

Yeah, he knew. It was one of the reasons he left government employment. Why he allowed himself to get pulled back in was a constant disturbance in his mind. This time, of course, had something to do with spending the rest of his life in a Tunisian prison. When that government abolished the death penalty for cruelty reasons, like all do-gooder-governments, they did those on death row no favors. It was far more cruel to leave someone in a prison with those conditions for the rest of their life than to allow them to leave this earth with some dignity intact.

“When do they expect you back to work?” he asked.

She rubbed her hand over his body and stopped on a scar. “I have another week or so. I haven't taken vacation in a while. What happened here?”

“I got shot.”

“And the knee?” She slipped her hand across one of the scars on his left knee.

“I got shot there also. Had to have a knee replacement.”

“My God, what about this long one on your waist?”

“Now that was a knife.”

“I hate knives,” she said. “You don't have a chance for them to run out of bullets.”

He couldn't argue with that. “What do you plan to do with the Greek once you have enough on him?”

She shrugged and said, “I don't know. Maybe I can turn everything over to Interpol.”

“Sounds like a plan. Now, you should get back to your room.”

“Am I being dismissed?”

“I think you might need your sleep also. Tomorrow could be a long day.”

Reaching down between his legs, she grasped him and started to stroke him back to life. “First, I think we should do this one more time.”

It was damn hard to disagree with her under these circumstances.

●

Elisa got back to her room a half hour later and she picked up her cell phone on the table. She never forgot her cell phone. But maybe she needed that uninterrupted distraction. She had two text messages. The first one was from her boss in Rome telling her to enjoy herself on vacation, which made her smile considering her encounter with Jake Adams. The second message was from her contact. It just read ‘Midnight.' She checked her watch and realized it was just a few minutes to midnight right now. Glancing at the two small beds in the room, she could see that the American professor was still out of it, her breathing hard and constant. Nearly snoring.

She drifted off toward the restroom and waited for her call, which came right at the designated time.

“Everything all right?” Elisa asked her contact in Italian.

“I don't know,” she whispered. “We were at dinner in Messina when this man with long hair, a man named Zendo, came in and sat down for a drink.”

“You're in Sicily?” she asked, her voice a little louder than she wanted.

“Yes. We came here today from Malta. Anyway, this Zendo was ordered to go to Syracuse to find the American professor and this man named Adams.”

They had discussed Jake Adams in the past, but Elisa had been cryptic with her knowledge of the man.

When Elisa didn't say anything right away, the woman asked, “Are you in Siracusa?”

“Yes. But how did Petros Caras find that out?”

“I don't know,” she said, “and it's not like I can ask the man. He thinks I don't speak or understand Greek. Should I get off the yacht?”

Her contact sounded scared and desperate—two characteristics Elisa had not seen in her before. “Anything else?”

“Petros said not to harm the American professor, but that Zendo can do anything he wants with Adams.” She paused. “And you. They're going to kill him.”

“They can try,” Elisa said.

“You don't understand. It's not just the Greeks now. They have hired the Sicilian Mafia to help them. And they might already be there. The Greeks will be there in the morning. Someone's coming.”

The line went blank and Elisa just stared at her phone now. She wasn't normally concerned with the Mafia. At least not in northern Italy. But those in Calabria and Sicily could be quite brutal. Could she tell Jake? Warn him? If so, how would she explain how she knew this?

Somehow Jake had been able to fall asleep, but he didn't stay that way for long. He woke up a number of times. Got up for a drink of water and to relieve himself.

It was one of these times when he thought he heard a noise outside his door. Perhaps it was Elisa coming back for round three, he thought. But something didn't seem right. The hair on the back of his neck caught the breeze from the ceiling fan and sent a chill down his back.

He picked up the gun on the nightstand and quietly peered out the peep hole. All he could see was darkness. Damn it! He dove to the floor just as a bullet smashed through the peep.

Scurrying to the end of the bed, the door crashed in followed by three flashes.

Jake shot twice, the report of his 9mm breaking the silence, and he rolled to his right.

More flashes with bullets hitting the floor where he'd just been.

Then he heard another crash and he realized the intruders were going into the room across the hall. Raising his gun up over the bed, two more shots came his way. He was pinned down. Nowhere to go.

Two loud shots broke through the night air and the familiar sound of a man hitting the ground a second later. Followed by yelling in Italian. A man and a woman. Elisa.

Jake rushed to his feet and to the edge of the door. As he aimed his gun out, he saw Elisa across the hall crouched only in her undergarments, her gun trained in his direction. She pointed toward the staircase to his left. A man lay on the floor outside his door, so Jake dove out behind the man and aimed his gun down toward the staircase.

Nothing. The other one had gotten away.

Checking the man's pulse, Jake shook his head at Elisa. He was gone.

“You all right?” Jake asked her.

She simply nodded.

“And Sara?”

“Still out cold.”

“Let's go. Get dressed and gather your stuff. We can't explain this to the local Polizia.”

Within less than a minute they had gotten back into their clothes and rounded up their backpacks. Jake hoisted Sara Halsey Jones over his shoulder, thankful the woman was petite. They hurried downstairs, Elisa leading the way in case the other man was waiting downstairs for them. At the bottom of the staircase was the old man who ran the pension, his stomach and chest bloody from knife wounds.

Just as they got through the patron entrance, a car cruised by on the street out front. Jake grabbed Elisa by her collar and yanked her to the ground as the bullets flew from the front passenger window. They rolled onto the pavement unable to shoot back as the car squealed its tires and rushed off around the corner.

Jake checked over the two women on the ground. “Are you all right, Elisa?”

She brushed herself off and got up. “Yeah. How is she?”

“She's fine. She landed on me.”

He got up and was able to lift the professor back over his shoulder with ease.

Sirens sounded in the distance and Jake knew they had just moments to get the hell out of there. But they had no car. There was only one way to go and that was back through the narrow streets of the old town of Siracusa—streets that dated back a few hundred years before Christ. As the sirens got closer to their former residence, Jake could hear the cars a few blocks away. They were swiftly putting distance between the Polizia responding to the shooting and their escape. But he couldn't carry this woman all over the city. Someone would notice them and conclude something wasn't right.

When they came across a small, dark park, they sat onto a bench to rest, Jake taking the time to slap the professor a few times across the face to try to wake her.

“Christ, how much did you give her?” Jake asked.

“Not that much,” Elisa said, concerned.

“We've gotta keep moving, but we really stand out with her over my shoulder.”

“What about a taxi? We could say she had too much to drink.”

“No. They might have heard about a shooting. Siracusa is still a pretty small town. Did you get a good look at any of the shooters?”

Elisa shook her head. “Only the one I shot. You?”

“Same here. But I don't think either of them, three with the driver, were Greek. They looked like local talent.”

“Mafia,” Elisa concluded.

“Great. Now that Greek billionaire has hired the Mafia? We'll be lucky to get out of Sicily.” Who knew how many the Mafia had killed over the years and either sunk in the waters off the coast or buried somewhere in the surrounding mountains? But at least he understood their motivation. They worked for money and not ideology. He could deal with that. “Watch her. I'll get us a ride.”

Jake ran off toward a bar at the edge of the park. He went inside and took up a position at the end of the bar. This place resembled a bar in the U.S. more than those found in Sicily. It was dark and the music was provided by a jukebox. At this hour, after midnight, he guessed most of the patrons would be well on their way to forgetting all of their various troubles. He ordered a beer and paid the young bartender when it came. By then he had identified his target—a young man who looked trashed—just a few positions down the bar from him.