Brian Drake - The Glinkov Extraction

“That’s classified.”

Cohen laughed again. “Ah, spies. Tell you what. Go somewhere away from here and do some serious thinking. You might like Athens and a casino there called Regency Mont Parnes. Lots of good play. Lots of attractive women. Like those over there.”

“You probably know them.”

Cohen took the opportunity to glance at the three women over the top of his aviators. “Nope. Not those.”

Stiletto said, “How long should I think about things?”

Cohen shrugged. “Couple days. I’m sure the answers you’re looking for will come to you quite quickly. Be seeing you.”

Stiletto watched Cohen cross the roof to the elevator, walking with a casual gait, shoulders relaxed. He didn’t look like a veteran of various secret campaigns carried out in defense of his country.

Then again, Stiletto didn’t look like a killer, either.

And Stiletto had a talent for killing bad guys.

Stiletto waited a few more minutes to give Cohen time to get to the lobby and back to his car and away. He leaned his elbows on the railing and gazed out at the Mediterranean.

Of course he took missions personally. Well, some of them. It was a flaw, and his bosses at the Agency had pointed that out many times. But there were some who deserved a champion, somebody who could fight the battles they could not. Stiletto considered himself that champion. It was thankless; it was crazy, yeah, but when one has the power to make a difference, one should exercise that power. Responsibly. Carefully. Devastatingly.

He needed a victory over el-Gad for another reason. Everything felt upside down, inside out, and out of control. He’d felt the same when his wife died.

Stiletto and Maddy had married young and struggled greatly during the early years of Stiletto’s military service. Their daughter Felicia added further complications, but they were a happy family for a while, despite Scott’s constant travel for special operations missions that took him away from home for weeks at a time. When he retired from the army with the rank of major, he was all set to take a cushy security job in New York City when Maddy died of cancer. After that, Felicia decided she didn’t want anything to do with her father, and took off on her own. Scott had no idea why his daughter hated him; she never explained, and his mind often spun in circles trying to discern the reason why.

His latest situation wasn’t as bad as losing his family, and he could at least cope with the changes.

But it was still hard.

The Med offered no comment. Only the ocean and the land lasted forever; everything else around him would someday be gone, same as the civilization that preceded it had faded into history. What would it look like then? From that perspective, Stiletto wondered what the point was. Why risk his neck when history would eventually forget he existed and the only witnesses, the ocean and the land, forever presiding over human folly, couldn’t talk? Then he realized he was thinking way too much.

A splash behind him. Somebody screamed. Stiletto turned to look. Some knucklehead had cannonballed into the water and the splash made a direct hit on the bikini-clad IDF women, who were laughing it off now as they dried themselves, one shooting a nasty look at the fellow as he swam lazily, pleased with himself.

Stiletto returned to his hotel room on the eighteenth floor. Using his laptop, he booked a flight to Greece.

THE CABLE car swayed as it traveled upward, the slope of the mountain below a carpet of dark green. The treetops looked bristly from above, and very unforgiving should the cable car somehow fall through the forest canopy to the ground below. Stiletto had to admit it was a nice view, though. Behind them, the lights of the city blazed against a curtain of black. Ahead, more lights, but isolated in a single spot. The lights of the Regency Casino Mont Parnes were almost as bright as the city lights, but not as dazzling.

Stiletto loved Greece, especially the coastal areas, and had once spent a week of vacation at a seaside resort, but he hadn’t been back in several years, despite his quip to Cohen. This trip, and the reasons for it, made the venture less enjoyable than if he’d been on holiday, but if he could finish what Mossad had hired him to do, he might change his tune.

There were two ways to get to the Regency. The first was to follow Parnithos Road which wound through the mountain, twisting and turning its way through the forest and requiring special attention, especially at night. There were no lights on the road, and a driver who was tired, slightly inebriated, or simply not paying attention faced disaster should he or she run off the road or overcorrect on one of the hairpin turns.

The other way, and the most popular, was the cable car, which started at a station far down the mountain just outside Acharnes, a suburb of the greater Athens area. The cable cars were always packed, and Stiletto stood against the Plexiglass window with a crush of other Regency guests behind him. Standing room only. The parking lot at the cable car station had been full when he arrived by taxi, so that meant anybody taking their own car would have to brave the road.

Stiletto had been visiting the casino every night for the last three days, tracking Jafar el-Gad, his girlfriend, and his two-man entourage of security. Asaf Cohen’s suggestion of finding the Palestinian at the casino had been so spot on, Stiletto knew they’d been tracking the target even before Stiletto made his plea to continue the mission. He didn’t fault the Mossad man. A lot of things in the spy business happened based on suggestions, hints, and creative interpretations of other men’s words. It was up to people like Stiletto to make sure they made correct assessments of such indirect instructions.

Sometimes it was enough to make a guy crazy. Why couldn’t they say things directly, like normal people? That, Stiletto thought with a short laugh, assumed that spies were indeed normal people. He seriously doubted that they were.

As the cable car continued to creep along, the voices of the people surrounding him slightly muting the groans and whines of the thick cables holding the cabin aloft, Stiletto ran through what he knew about el-Gad.

El-Gad and his crew visited for a round of poker which often ended in el-Gad losing money. They avoided the cable car. El-Gad’s bodyguards drove him around in a four-door Jaguar XJ, white in color. The reason was obvious. The cable car represented a cage in which el-Gad could be trapped. Stiletto would have made the same call, except tonight he needed the cable car. He’d left his own car in the casino parking lot, positioned near the exit, and planned to follow the Palestinian back to whichever hideout he had secreted away in Athens. Their use of the road meant Stiletto could, if he made the effort, find an ambush point and blast the Jag off the road, but that would endanger civilians also using the road. If he were still with the C.I.A., they could do a drone strike as the car traveled, but he no longer had that option. He was on his own. He had to solve the inevitable problems that always came up in such a way that required nothing more than his ingenuity. He could do it, but he wished he didn’t have to. He wished he had help. He wished a lot of things.

He let out a sigh that created a small patch of condensation on the Plexiglass. The cable car was almost to the top. Stiletto wanted to be there now .

The cable car finally docked at the receiving platform and Stiletto waited while the other passengers disembarked into the dazzling and brightly lighted casino. He heard a lot of Greek, foreign languages, and some English. The Regency catered to tourists and locals alike. Stiletto made his way through a floor of buzzing and dinging slot machines, weaving around clusters of people trying to navigate their way around, and presently exited the front of the casino into the parking lot. His shoes scraped the outside steps and tapped a rhythm on the blacktop. It looked like every parking spot had a car in it, bright lamps lighting the way. His rented BMW sat in a farthest corner. Stiletto dropped behind the wheel and let out a deep breath. He couldn’t see the white Jaguar from where he sat, but there was only one exit, and he’d see the car for sure when el-Gad and his people departed.