Thursday 6:28 A.M.
The morning air was sharp and she wished she'd grabbed one of Adriana's black knit shawls before going out. Could she pass for one of those stooped Greek peasant women? she wondered. Not likely. She shivered and pulled her thin coat around her.
The rain was over now, leaving the air moist and fragrant, but the early morning gloom had an ominous undertone. They'd found the key to open the first box, but the message inside still had to be translated. What was it? What could possibly be in the protocol that would make somebody want to kill her?
She stared down the vacant street leading away from the square, a mosaic of predawn shadows, and tried to think.
Alex Novosty was the classic middleman, that much was a given. But then she'd known that for years. Yes, she'd known about Alex Novosty all her life-his work for the KGB, his laundering of Techmashimport funds. She knew about it because they were second cousins. Fortunately their family tie was distant enough not to have made its way into NSA's security file, but around the Russian expatriate dinner tables of Brighton Beach and Oyster Bay, Alex was very well known indeed. He was the Romanov descendant who'd sold out to the Soviets, an unforgivable lapse of breeding.
But for all that, he wasn't an assassin. For him to do what he'd done tonight could only mean one thing: he was terrified. Very out of character. But why?
The answer to that wasn't hard: He must be mixed up in Project Daedalus, whatever it was, right up to his shifty eyeballs. But what about Michael? What did Alex want from him?
The answer to that could go a lot of ways. When she first met Michael Vance, Jr., she'd been smitten by the fact he was so different. Always kidding around, yet tough as steel when anybody crossed him. A WASP street fighter. She liked that a lot. He was somebody she felt she could depend on, no matter what.
She still remembered her first sight of Mike as though it were yesterday. She was taking notes on Etruscan pottery in a black notebook, standing in a corner of the Yale art gallery on Chapel Street, when she looked up and-no, it couldn't be. She felt herself just gawking.
He'd caught her look and strolled over with a puzzled smile. "Is my tie crooked, or-" Then he laughed. "Name's Mike Vance. I used to be part of this place. How about you?"
"Vance?" She'd just kept on staring, still not quite believing her eyes. "My thesis adviser at Penn was… you look just like him."
And he did. The same sharp chin, the same twinkle in the blue eyes. Even when he was angry, as Mike certainly had been that day, he seemed to be having fun.
Thus it began.
At first they were so right for each other it seemed as though she'd known Michael Vance for approximately a hundred years, give or take. She'd been one of his father's many ardent disciples, and after finishing her master's at Penn, she'd gone on to become a doctoral candidate at Yale, where she'd specialized in the linguistics of the ancient Aegean languages. She'd known but forgotten that Michael Vance, Sr., had a son who was finishing his own doctorate at Yale, writing a dissertation about Minoan Crete.
That day in the museum he was steaming, declaring he'd dropped by one last time as part of a ritualistic, formal farewell to archaeology. The decision was connected with the hostile reception being given a book he'd just published, a commercial version of his dissertation. As of that day he'd decided to tell academia to stuff it. He'd be doing something else for a living. There'd been feelers from some agency in D.C. about helping trace hot money.
In the brief weeks that followed they grew inseparable, the perfect couple. One weekend they'd scout the New England countryside for old-fashioned inns, the next they'd drive up to Boston to spend a day in the Museum of Fine Arts, then come back and argue and make love till dawn in her New Haven apartment. During all those days and nights, she came very close to talking him out of quitting university life. Close, but she didn't.
He had put off everything for a couple of months, and they had traveled the world-London, Greece, Morocco, Moscow. Once their parents even met, at Count Sergei Borodin's sprawling Oyster Bay home. It was a convocation of the Russian Nobility Association, with three hundred guests in attendance, and the air rang with Russian songs and balalaikas. Michael Vance, Sr., who arrived in his natty bowler, scarcely knew what to make of all the Slavic exuberance.
Shortly after that, the intensity of Michael became too much for her. She felt herself being drawn into his orbit, and she wanted an orbit of her own. The next thing she knew, he'd departed for the Caribbean; her father had died; and she'd gone back to work on her own doctorate.
Michael. He was driven, obsessive, always determined to do what he wanted, just as she was. But the tension that likeness brought to their relationship those many years ago now made everything seem to click. Why? she wondered.
Maybe it was merely as simple as life cycles. Maybe back then they were just out of synch. He'd already survived his first midlife crisis, even though he was hardly thirty. When they split up, she'd been twenty-five and at the beginning of a campaign to test herself, find out what she could do.
Well, she thought, she'd found out. She was good, very good. So now what?
She was relieved to see the car was still parked on the side street, actually a little alley, where she'd left it. Thinking more clearly now, she realized she'd been a trifle careless, stashing the car in the first location she could find and then running for Zeno's.
As she headed down the alley in between the white plaster houses, she suddenly felt her heart stop. Someone was standing next to the Saab, a dark figure waiting. She watched as it suddenly moved briskly toward her.
Alex Novosty.
"What?" She couldn't believe her eyes.
"Budetya ostorozhyi!" He whispered the warning as he raised his hand and furtively tried to urge her back.
"Kak! Shto-?" She froze. "How did you find the car?"
"The hotel. They directed us to a kafeneion near here, but then I noticed your car. I thought…" He moved out of the shadows, quickly, still speaking in Russian. "Just tell me where you have the copies of the protocol, quickly. Maybe I can still handle it."
"Handle what?" That's when she saw the two other men, in dark overcoats, against the shadow of the building.
"The… situation." His eyes were intense. "They want it back, all copies. I've tried to tell them that killing you won't solve anything, but-" He glanced back with a small shiver. "You must tell them Michael has a copy, stall them."
"It's true. He does."
"No! Then say there's a copy back in your office. Just let me try and-"
"Alex, I'm not going to play any more of your games."
"Please," he continued in a whisper, "don't contradict anything I say. Let me do the talking. I'll-"
"You're in it with them, aren't you?" She tried to push past. "Well, you can tell your friends we're onto their 'project.' If anything happens to me, Michael will track them down and personally take them apart. Tell them that."
"You don't understand." He caught her arm. "One of their people was killed tonight."
"The one trying to shoot Michael and me, you mean?" She was trying to calm the quaver in her voice.
"He was killed by the KGB. I had nothing to do with-"
"Is that what you told them?"
"That's the way it happened. There was an argument."
"Over what?"
"Everybody wants you. It's the protocol." His look darkened. "Eva, they are in no mood for niceties."
"Neither am I." She noticed the two men were now moving toward them. One was taller and seemed to be in charge, but they both were carrying what looked like small-caliber automatic weapons.
The protocol, whatever it was, was still in code. She didn't know what she didn't know. How could she bargain?
It was too late to think about it now. Their faces were hard and smooth, with the cold eyes of men who killed on command. My God, she thought, what had Michael said about the Mino-gumi?
The Japanese mob.
The taller man, she was soon to learn, was Kazuo Ina- gawa, who had been a London-based kobun for the Mino-gumi for the past decade. He had a thin, pasty face and had once been first kobun for their entire Osaka organization, in charge of gambling and nightclub shakedowns. Even in the early dawn light, he wore sunglasses, masking his eyes.
The shorter one was Takahashi Takenaka, whose pockmarked face was distinguished by a thin moustache, an aquiline nose, and the same sunglasses.
Alex, she realized, must have lied to them, covering up what really happened out at the palace. Now he was bluffing for his life.
"You can just tell them I don't know anything about it." She felt the cold air closing in.
"Eva, that's impossible. They know you were given the protocol. Now where is it?"
He clearly wanted her to say it was somewhere else. But why bother?
"It's in the car. In my purse." She pointed. "Why don't they just go ahead and take it? By the way, it's still encrypted."
She fumbled in her pockets. "Here's…"
Then she realized she'd left the key in the car. There it dangled, inside the locked door. Her purse rested on the seat across from the driver's side.
"Get it," Inagawa commanded his lieutenant. Takenaka bowed obediently, then turned and tried the door handle, without success.
"So." He frowned.
Inagawa muttered a curse and brutally slammed the butt of his automatic against the curved window. The sound of splintering glass rent the morning air.
Quickly Novosty stepped forward and reached through to unlock the door. Then he pulled it open and leaned in.
Why is he doing it? she wondered. Easy answer: He's trying to keep control of the situation.
Whose side is he really on?
Then he backed out and handed her the brown leather purse while he tried to catch her eye.
She took it, snapped it open, and lifted out the gray computer disk. "There," she said as she handed it to Inagawa, "whatever's on it, you'll have to figure it out for yourself."
"That can't be the only one," Novosty sputtered. "Surely there are other copies."
"That's it, sweetheart."
Inagawa turned it in his hand, then passed it to Takenaka and said something in Japanese. The other man took it, then barked “Hai” and bowed lightly.
"Are you sure this is the only copy?" Inagawa asked.
"The only one."
He nodded to his lieutenant, who began screwing a dark silencer onto the barrel of his automatic.
Oh my God, she thought. They're going to finish the job.
"Wait." Novosty reached for his arm. "She's lying. This is a disk from a computer. There must be other copies."
"Yes." She was finally coming to her senses. "There are plenty of other copies. In my computer. In-"
"Where is it?" Inagawa looked at her.
"It's-it's at the hotel. The Galaxy." She was trying desperately to think. "And then I left another-"
"You're lying. We have been there. They said a tavern keeper came and took all your luggage." He was staring down the street, toward Zeno's place. "They also told us where he could be found. We will go there now."
"My friends," Novosty interrupted again, "it would be most unwise to attempt any violence on a Greek national here. The consequences could be extremely awkward, for all of us."
"We must retrieve it."
"But why not do it the easy way?" He tried to smile. "There's another man here, traveling with her. We should work through him. I know he will deal. He's a professional."
"Who is he?"
"An American. If we hold her, keep her alive, we can use her to make him bring it to us. We can offer a trade."
"No. We will just find him and take it." Inagawa started to move. "Now."
"He's armed, my friends," Novosty continued evenly. "He's also experienced. There would be gunfire, I promise you. If that happened, you could have the entire street here filled with rifles in a minute. You do not know these people as I do. They still remember World War Two and the Resistance. Killing unfriendly foreigners became a way of life some of them have yet to forget."
Alex is bluffing, she thought. Again. Michael doesn't have a gun. Does Zeno? Who knows?
"Let me try and talk to him," Novosty continued. "Surely something can be worked out."
"You will stay here, with us." Inagawa seized his arm, then turned and began a heated exchange with his partner. Again Takenaka bowed repeatedly, sucking in his breath and muttering hai. At last they seemed to arrive at a consensus, though it was the taller man who'd actually made the decision, whatever it was.
"She comes with us."
"Oh, no I don't." She looked at Novosty, who seemed defeated, then back at the Japanese. She suddenly realized she was on her own. Novosty had played all his cards. "If I don't reappear in Washington day after tomorrow, you'll have the entire U.S. National Security Agency looking for me. People know I'm here. So think about that."
"That is not our concern." Inagawa reached for her. "We do not work for the American government." Then he turned to Novosty. "Tell your friend that this woman will be released when we have all copies of the protocol. All. Do you understand?"
"But how can I tell him if you won't let me-?"
"That is your problem."
"Perhaps… perhaps we should just leave a message here," Novosty sputtered. "I'm sure he'll find the car."
"Alex, I'm not going anywhere with these animals." She drew back.
"Don't worry. I'll take care of everything."
"No, I'm not-"
That was all she could say before a hand was roughly clapped against her mouth, her body shoved against the broken window.
Mike Vance and Zeno Stantopoulos searched for over half an hour before they found the Saab. When they did, the left-hand window was broken, and Eva's purse was missing. She was missing too. The only thing remaining was a hastily scrawled note from Alex Novosty.