Omar stepped from the elevator promptly at 2:45, once again playing against type. This time a hotel employee hailed a taxi for him. I scrambled to the Piaggio, swerved past a bus, and followed the taxi east along the northern side of the National Garden. Was he headed to Krieger’s hotel? I suspected as much when the cab turned north into Kolonaki, whizzing past pricey boutiques and a splendid green square. But we kept on going, straight up an incline to the lower slope of Lycabettus Hill, the city’s mightiest summit. The taxi finally ran out of roadway just outside the station for the funicular railcar that climbed the rest of the way to the top. Omar paid the fare and went inside the station.
I parked to the left of the entrance, where the street came to a dead end, and then waited outside a few minutes to give Omar enough time to buy a ticket. I entered just as the cable car was leaving on its uphill journey through an underground tunnel.
“When’s the next one?” I asked at the ticket window.
“Fifteen minutes.”
Damn. Whoever had planned this rendezvous chose wisely. A pursuer afraid of being spotted would never have boarded the same car, but by the time you got to the top in the next car any meeting might be over. And if Omar made the return journey on foot he might take any of several walkways.
A crowd of Japanese tourists arrived just as my car was about to depart. They bustled past me through the turnstile and crowded into the seats, shooting videos of the dark tunnel as we rose. Halfway up we passed a descending car, lit up like ours. Omar was in it, and I cursed under my breath. He didn’t see me, thank goodness. If anything, he seemed preoccupied, and just before he eased out of sight I saw a green parcel beneath his arm. It looked like the envelope Krieger had carried from the museum.
At least now I knew who he had been meeting, unless Professor Yiorgos Soukas was handing out these envelopes all over town. Maybe Omar was now headed to a bank, but I would never catch him in time to find out. Krieger was probably gone, too, so I decided to plan my next move in the café at the summit. I bounded into the sunlight and took the curving walkway at full stride, only to find myself looking straight through the glass doors at Herr Doktor Krieger, who fortunately was reading a menu.
I faltered, then veered quickly to a marble stairway on the right, which circled up to a small white chapel. Flushed and breathless, and not daring to look back, I crossed to the far side of a little terrace outside the chapel and sat down on a low stone wall.
I faced away from the direction I’d come from and looked back across the city. The Acropolis was well below us in the gathering haze of late afternoon. Farther out, sunlight reflected in a blaze of burnt orange on the Aegean. I began to breathe easier, and when I checked behind me there was no sign of Krieger. Maybe he hadn’t seen me. Or if he had, maybe he hadn’t recognized me. I wasn’t wearing sunglasses now.
I passed the next half hour reading my
Herald Tribune
and admiring the view. A distant thunderstorm was skirting the northwest edge of the city. Olympian bolts of lightning crackled in plumy clouds. A falcon flew past just below, searching for dinner. I decided to stride past the café and head quickly downhill. If he followed I could always walk faster.
As I passed the glass doors I saw that he was still at the table, smoking now. He looked right at me. I checked an urge to speed up as I rounded the corner toward the station. A funicular was waiting to depart, thank goodness, so I quickly showed my return ticket and sagged into a seat.
Most people made the return journey on foot, so only four other passengers were in the car. The speakers announced the last call. Just before the doors slid shut, Herr Doktor Krieger stepped aboard.
He took a seat on my row, against the opposite wall. There was nothing else for me to look at except the floor and ceiling, or the tunnel ahead. The only sound was some silly Greek techno music playing from speakers. I glanced in his direction and he nodded in recognition, as if he had been lying in wait.
“Good afternoon,” he said in halting Greek.
I responded in kind, hoping to sound like a native. Then I noticed he was looking at my lap, where my
Herald Tribune
was open to the front page, its English headlines announcing me as an impostor.
The car began its slow descent. Did he have a camera, some miniature bit of hardware that even now was taking my picture? Or was he, too, just dabbling at this, making it up as he went along?
The latter possibility calmed me. Maybe he was the one who should be worrying. So I looked over again and took further note of his appearance. His hairstyle and clothing were old-fashioned—wool and tweed and thick white socks. Up close he looked older than before, although still not old enough to have fought in the war. It was easy to picture him behind a university desk, walled in by books. Herr Doktor Professor, perhaps.
He turned away from my stare. Now he was the one getting nervous, looking out his window at the passing wall, where the lights winked slowly past in our descent. He glanced over, then quickly looked away while I held my gaze. He pulled a handkerchief from a trouser pocket to blow his nose. Maybe he was in over his head. I knew I was, even though I currently held the upper hand. I was quite willing to bully while I had the chance, but were reinforcements awaiting him at the bottom? This thought made me waver, and each of us spent the rest of the ride avoiding the other’s gaze.
I exited first, and walked quickly to my scooter, exhaling in relief as I twisted the handle to rev the engine. But, of course, with the street at a dead end, I had to pass the station entrance to make my getaway. I took a deep breath and accelerated into a wide U-turn. And there he was, out front on the sidewalk, now holding pen to paper. His right hand worked furiously as he stared at my bike. He was taking down my tag numbers, which was alarming until I remembered I had rented the bike with a fake name. Thank God, at least, for that bit of help from Black, White, and Gray. Trust the professionals to get it right. If Herr Doktor Krieger’s employers bothered to track me, they would turn up only some unknown visitor named Robert Higgins.
Relieved, I scooted down the hillside, glad to be rid of the old German. But I needed a drink to calm my nerves, so I crossed town to the Monastiraki district near the city’s flea market, took a table in the sun, and ordered a gin. Two drinks later, and feeling tipsy, I remounted the Piaggio. Almost immediately after turning into traffic I was overtaken by two motorcycles, one on either side. I expected them to blow on by. Instead they matched my pace, and squeezed toward me like pincers. Were they trying to force me to the curb, or merely following me? Neither possibility calmed my overactive imagination, which was now primed by alcohol. My palms were slippery on the handlebars. As we throttled down into a curve I braked to let them pass, but to no avail. Then I accelerated, herky-jerky with a flush of blue smoke, but they nimbly matched my every maneuver, herding me along like a pair of border collies. Whenever I dared a glance, they stared impassively at the road ahead. Was it me, or did the faces beneath the Plexiglas shields look Middle Eastern? With Greeks it can be hard to tell the difference. All I knew for sure was that neither was the fellow with the Jersey accent.
We pulled to a stop at a red light, and they sidled up closely, still looking straight ahead. It was as maddening as it was worrisome, and I flashed on a vision of myself riding deep into the suburbs and then onto country lanes, mile after mile with these two at my flanks until I ran out of gas and they beat me to a bloody pulp.
“Why are you doing this?” I shouted, but I was cut short by car horns as the light changed, and they pulled off with me. Finally, a mere block from Nikis Street, they dropped back and peeled away as I turned right toward my hotel. My shirt and trousers were clammy with sweat. I rolled the scooter to the curb and locked it for the night. I had told myself that nothing more of this nature would frighten me. But my legs were so rubbery that even the small g-force of the elevator nearly buckled my knees.
I took a long, slow shower to calm down, then pulled back the bedspread and stretched out naked on the clean sheets. I felt old, past my prime. Cuckolded, too, for all I knew, even as I lay here trying to puzzle things out. What had this latest effort at intimidation been all about? And by whom? Black had already made his point, emphatically. Anything more seemed like clumsy overkill. And I doubted Herr Doktor Krieger could have produced results so fast. If so, then he was probably good enough to figure out my true identity. Maybe Omar would soon know I had been following him, and in that case I might as well not even board the flight back to Amman.
Maybe it was some sort of escort, a bizarre safe passage to protect me against intervening forces I had failed to detect. But if that was my employer’s idea of protection, I wanted no further part of it.
I mustered enough nerve to step out for dinner around nine, and chose a small, well-lit taverna only four blocks away. Taking comfort in its clientele of local families and a few quiet Scandinavians, I ate slowly, trying not to dwell on Mila while I sipped my way through a carafe of cheap retsina as a sleeping aid. I wondered how many spies became alcoholics.
Walking back, I glanced over my shoulder several times, but no one seemed to be paying undue interest. I toyed with the idea of another trip to Aunt Aleksandra’s but decided I was too exhausted. Why not wait until my work here was done? Yes, that would be better.
All things considered, I slept pretty soundly. By the time I’d had a morning coffee I was feeling restored enough to entertain the possibility that the young men on scooters had simply been a pair of assholes who got their jollies scaring slow old farts on Piaggios. I’d certainly seen worse behavior on the roads of Greece. With my equilibrium nearly restored, I decided to return to my room to prepare for one last stakeout at the Grande Bretagne. Omar was due to leave Athens this afternoon.
The desk clerk offered her usual smile, and as I rode the elevator to the third floor I was more convinced than ever that I had overreacted the night before. I then threw open the door to find a shambles of overturned furniture, scattered clothing, and tossed drawers. The place hadn’t merely been searched, it had been turned upside down. And the worst of it, I quickly discovered, was that my laptop was gone.
The message seemed unmistakable. Someone was telling the fool Robert Higgins that he had better get the hell out of town.
I began packing, quite happy to oblige.
19
O
n any country road in Greece, the dead are always with you. They stalk you at every turn, haunting their points of exit from life in the form of tiny memorials that resemble bird boxes. Gathered at blind curves and steep drop-offs, their mournful huddles warn each passing motorist: Beware. Pay attention. Watch your back.
Mila and I once counted 129 of these little shrines on the fifty kilometers between Sparti and Tripoli. At first we laughed as the number quickly mounted, but by the time the toll reached a hundred we were sufficiently spooked never to try it again.
I mention this because I was feeling a particular kinship with the dead just then. I, too, was engineering a sort of departure from life. I was officially on the lam. Absent without leave. Vanished without a trace.
Or so I hoped.
From the moment I viewed the wreckage of my hotel room in Athens I wanted out. That probably accounts for the recklessness of my exit. I dashed down the block, having left behind razor, toothbrush, and scooter. Clothes bulged from my unzipped suitcase as I pushed through the glass doorway of a tiny rental car agency and demanded a car, any car, from a bewildered clerk whose broken Greek had come by way of Albania. He seemed relieved to be able to set me up right away with a cramped Hyundai shaped like a thumb. I paid in cash using my real name. Robert Higgins was dead, slain on the battlefield of intimidation. I had tossed his passport and credit card into a Dumpster.
Without so much as glancing at a map, I folded myself into the cockpit and set out in the general direction of the expressway leading to the Peloponnese. Why the Peloponnese? Partly because it was close. Partly because I had been there with Mila, and knew its hiding places. Partly because its remote roads would allow me to see any pursuers. But mostly because I was in a raging panic to flee Athens, and I needed someplace,
anyplace,
where I could pause to take stock.
So there I was, on an empty road in a pretty Arcadian valley somewhere between Levidi and Karkalou, at an elevation where the bracing air of autumn had already come to stay and the yellow leaves of hardwoods fluttered into sheep meadows and roadside streams. The road behind me was clear.
With each passing mile my panic eased its grip, and by the time I reached the smoky mountain village of Stemnitsa at midafternoon I was ready for coffee.
I took a seat at a rustic café that offered a view of both the highway and the steep valley below. The only other customers were a young couple with a baby.
A stooped old woman straight out of Grimm poured a muddy cup of Greek coffee from an hourglass pot of hammered brass. The grainy first sip worked its magic, linking this time and place to all the old routes of trade and conquest from centuries past. I experienced an eerie moment of kinship with each soldier and spy who had ever been on the march in these lands. Already I knew enough of the way the game worked to realize that I wouldn’t be able to just drop out like this. Sooner or later, someone would find me, and I would have to return to Amman. The question, then, was how to best use my time once I went back. I figured I had a day or two at the most to come up with an answer.
I finished the coffee and felt better. Deep in the valley, a bank of clouds crept across the treetops like the smoke of an advancing wildfire. Two gunshots echoed up the hillside. Hunters, probably, shooting birds. I decided to order lunch even if it meant I would be here another hour. I knew from experience that I had better make the most of every peaceful moment while I had the chance. This was not the first time I had gone on the lam, even if my previous flight had been more of a mental journey, an escape to a place deep within, where only Mila could reach me. She, alone, had been able to lead me back to the surface. It’s one reason I vowed never to let her learn her true role in the events that led to my downfall.
But I suppose it is time to come clean on those matters, if only to better explain how Black, White, and Gray were able to coax me into accepting this assignment. As I have hinted, it all goes back to Tanzania in the fall of ’99, the misadventure that Black was about to detail—his version, anyway—back at the DeKuyper villa on Karos. But the seeds of that tragedy were planted in the other episode Black dredged up, the one three years earlier in Rwanda.
As you may recall, the instigator was the well-armed thug and scoundrel M. Charles Mbweli, who first approached me in Rwanda with a corrupt proposition. Mbweli controlled the suppliers and transporters for all humanitarian aid in the vicinity. So when he talked, you had to listen.
I remember clearly the first time he walked into my ramshackle headquarters. As usual, he was carrying a gun, an ugly model that he waved like a big stick of candy. He tapped it on the edge of my desk and announced that it was time to negotiate.
His pitch was pretty much as Black described it: Mbweli would be the broker to provide all emergency food, tents, and medical supplies, and in order to guarantee safe and timely delivery we were supposed to order 20 percent more than we needed. He would then pocket the additional money without providing the additional supplies. His means of keeping all of us worker bees from grumbling too loudly would be the forcible injection of some of the nectar into our bank accounts. Yeah, twist my arm, you may well be saying, just like Black did.
But Mbweli did twist my arm, as a matter of fact. Initially I turned down his offer.
“Out of the question,” I said. “We don’t do business that way.”
At first, Mbweli was speechless. He shifted his weight in the squeaking chair and let his camouflage jacket fall open to reveal yet another gun, bulging from a shoulder holster. Then he leaned close enough for me to smell the garlic on his breath from lunch. He liked to dine at a terrible Italian joint where they made pizza crust out of stolen UN flour and used ketchup for the sauce. To his uninformed palate the cuisine was equal to Rome’s finest.
“But you must do this!” he finally said, adopting the tone of a spoiled child.
“Sorry. If my requisition exceeds need by 20 percent, the bean counters might cut my next request. I can’t operate on that kind of risk.”
“You are wrong. No risk. Next time you again ask too much, so you still have enough after they cut it. You see?”
“No. I don’t see. I’ll lose credibility and maybe my job. No can do.”
He rapped the gun barrel twice on my desk.
“You are wrong! Yes can do!”
He never actually pointed the gun at me. For Mbweli it was more of a business tool, his version of a BlackBerry. But it still looked threatening, propped there a foot or two from my face. I mustered the remnants of my dwindling fortitude and said, “I really am sorry, Charles. But this goes higher than me.”
Mbweli let out a deep sigh and rose slowly like a boiling thunderhead. For a moment I thought he might shoot me and have his men cart me away on a UN stretcher. But I suppose he realized how bad that would have been for business, so he tried a new approach that showed he had some brains to go with his brutality.
“Then I
no can do
security guarantee for your Feeding Station Blue.”
Feeding Station Blue was a magic location on my list of our outposts. Mila ran it, and somehow Mbweli had found out.
“They are on the fringe, you know,” he continued. “Bad guerrilla country there. A lot of shooting and raids. No guarantees there.
No can do
for security. You see?”
I could have moved her, of course. I had enough authority to engineer it. But his mind had already considered the same possibility.
“If you move her,” he said, “I will find out where. So no tricks with me, you see? You make deal or I make tricks with you and your woman. Station Blue or wherever else. You see?”
Maybe I was tired. Or maybe I thought he just might do something foolish like having one of his men kill or kidnap Mila. Whatever the reason, my resolve crumbled on the spot. Mbweli got his money, we got our supplies, and most everyone who got wind of the shaky arrangement dismissed it as the price of doing business in a landscape of guns and chaos.
Mila eventually heard a few details of the dirty deal—complaints about Mbweli were rampant in those days—but I made sure she never learned of the threat that sealed it. And I figured that with any luck, next time I wouldn’t be operating within range of Mbweli.
But three years later there he was, back on my doorstep with his hand out. We had set up shop just down the way from Rwanda in the borderlands of Tanzania, this time to await a surge of refugees fleeing the Republic of Congo.
Frankly, I was surprised to see him so far afield. One’s sphere of influence in such matters generally depended on connections with local clan leaders and village elders, and I knew Mbweli had few such contacts in Tanzania. Furthermore, he had a powerful rival in the local marketplace, a fellow named Paul Uwase who was willing to ease the provision and delivery of the goods for only a few small bribes, and nothing even approaching the 20 percent cut demanded by Mbweli. We had also recently fortified security at all our feeding stations.
Yet he demanded the same arrangement as before. So I told him no. He raged for a few minutes, uttered a vague threat or two, and then departed. End of story.
Or it would have been, if not for the well-meaning actions of my wife.
As I mentioned, Mila had been a vigorous interventionist ever since her disaster in Sarajevo. She took advantage of every chance to right bureaucratic wrongs, or tweak the system to ease suffering, even if she had to skirt the rules. This practical brand of zeal was almost always a plus, and whenever we set up shop somewhere new Mila cultivated local sources to help circumvent corrupt officials and opportunistic thugs. She was particularly effective in connecting with women, whose potential influence was often overlooked, and in Tanzania that fall she quickly developed ties with the wives and concubines of the local elders. In fact, Mila was my initial source for the knowledge that Uwase, not Mbweli, was the prevailing local power broker.
So it was that when she heard through her women’s grapevine of Mbweli’s visit to my office, she set her network into action. I suppose she feared I might cave in otherwise, based on what had happened before, although at the time we never discussed it. We were somewhat out of touch during those crucial few days. The roads were unsafe and in terrible condition, radio communication was patchy, and Mila had been dispatched temporarily to a location several hours away. That meant I didn’t hear about her actions until days later, from an indignant Uwase himself, and by then it was far too late to repair the damage.
As best as I’ve been able to determine, the events unfolded something like this:
Mila, hoping to stop Mbweli in his tracks, spread the word through her network that Mbweli was trying to cut in on Uwase’s action. If allowed to succeed, she warned, he would insist on a rapacious 20 percent cut, and everyone would suffer. This news filtered back to Uwase the day after he and I struck a deal. By then, Mbweli was out of the picture.
Given the weird logic that rules in such chaotic locales, I suppose Uwase’s reaction was predictable enough. Rather than be grateful that someone had helped block the competition, he felt instead that he had been played for a fool. Outraged at having settled for peanuts when he, too, might have raked in up to 20 percent, Uwase decided to change his terms without telling me or anyone else—meaning that Mila never heard either. So he took the full payment, but when the convoys arrived with our food and supplies, they were 20 percent short of the expected load.
I was stunned, but not overwhelmed. Shortages had occurred before on my watch, and I had always managed to overcome them. Up to that point, refugees had been reaching our area at a manageable rate, and as long as nothing unexpected happened we might still hold out fine until a supplemental order could be filled.
Then the unexpected happened. A sudden flare-up of fighting sent tens of thousands more rushing our way. The first two days were bad enough, when malnourished children bore the brunt of the suffering. To stretch our thin supplies, we weighed all the young arrivals to determine the most urgent cases. I hoisted bony infants and toddlers onto a swing scale one by one, weighing each like some meager offering to be shrink-wrapped for a supermarket on the wrong side of town. They seldom cried. Their mothers, too, were oddly subdued, abiding the long lines with the patience of people who have been waiting all their lives. Flies swarmed every head, seeking entry to cuts, mouths, eyes, nostrils. With their boundless energy and incessant buzzing they were like jazzed electrons orbiting inert nuclei, the quantum mechanics of slow death.
Just as we began thinking we might actually make it through with only hundreds of deaths instead of thousands, the third day brought a measles epidemic. It engulfed everyone rushing toward us and quickly spread into the camps, where, due to our shortage of tents, thousands of people were exposed all day to the brutal sunlight.
By noon of the third day death had gained the upper hand, and by sunset the rout was on. The horror of the days that followed remains with me still, and I doubt that even a thousand sunsets on Karos could diminish its potency.
One of my worst moments occurred when I was pressed into duty on a burial detail. Already worn out from lack of sleep, I was directing a backhoe to the lip of a trench when I stumbled over the edge, and landed with a sickening slap against the cool, soft flesh of two rotting bodies. Too exhausted to climb out unaided, I stood for several dreadful minutes before anyone could lend a hand, my footing unsteady atop flesh and bone. I averted my eyes from what my nose told me was below, but to my fevered mind the maggoty squirm of decomposition seemed palpable through the soles of my shoes, and the stench was so unbearable that I nearly passed out. I strained to raise my face above the edge of the trench as much for a fresh breath of air as to escape what had suddenly become the grave for my sanity.
And that was not all. With food running out at our stations, hundreds of encamped refugees gave up altogether and headed overland through dangerous territory. Around noon the next day a radio flash alerted us to the consequences for one such group, which had been ambushed on a vulnerable stretch of highway.