Ник Картер - The Liquidator

“We’ve had several communications with him since you and I last spoke,” Hawk explained. “It’s none of our concern how he gets there, but now he indicates that he has information of critical importance to give us. Possibly, possibly not, but you’ll have to make every effort to get him away as planned; we have to assume he’s telling the truth until we learn otherwise.”

“I still say why not take him over to Taranto in a fast boat? This sailing business could take a couple of days.”

The old man shook his head. “It’s vital that you in no way allow attention to be drawn to you or to Zenopolis. He assures us that his breakout will go undetected for at least a few days, but he insists that our efforts on his behalf must be totally inconspicuous. There’s a time element involved, which he hasn’t explained fully; at any rate we have to respect his advice for now. No, Nick, you will take your rented sailboat to Taranto with a secret stowaway. You will not do anything to attract the attention of the authorities in Greece or any other country until Zenopolis is safely in our custody. At any rate,” he added with a tiny smile, “if it came to a chase across the water, no power boat you could obtain would be able to outrun the ships and planes the various governments would send after you.”

Either way, he had me. I thought that was all, but Hawk had another little surprise for me.

“By the way,” he said, glancing toward my open suitcase on a rack against the wall. “On this assignment you will carry no firearms. Or anything else that might be incriminating should you be caught and interrogated.”

“Nothing?” I demanded.

“You may carry your knife, I suppose, but not in that forearm sheath you use. As a yachtsman, you’d be expected to have a blade of some sort, though yours is hardly the sort of tool found aboard most boats. In the end, however, you may need it.”

“You think so?”

“Yes. You see, Nick, we have to consider the possibility that this whole operation is a trap of some sort set up by the other side. As you know, we’re in a period of extraordinarily delicate negotiations with the Russians and Chinese. There is, in fact, a sort of tacit moratorium on our operations against those countries and their satellites. Should you decide, during your crossing from Korfu to Taranto, that Zenopolis is working for their purposes, to throw us into a bad light, let’s say, then you will see to it that he is... lost at sea.”

That didn’t faze me; I wasn’t given the rating of “Killmaster” because I flinched at the idea of sticking a knife into an enemy agent, even if he was a man who used to be a friend.

“Okay,” I said, getting up to walk over to my bag. I took out the Luger and handed it to Hawk. “Take good care of her; she’s treated me well.”

“It will be ready when you return,” he said, tucking the weapon into his briefcase.

I sat down again. “One more thing.”

Hawk quirked a shaggy eyebrow at me.

“What the hell am I doing in Tampa?”

“Of course. I was about to explain that. You will stay here for two days and familiarize yourself with the various marinas and yacht brokers.” He took a small envelope from his briefcase and put it on the bed beside him. “This is a list of brokers who have recently gone out of business; you have worked for all three of them and are now taking some time off while attempting to set up your own business. Perhaps we’re being overcautious, but if someone asks you who you worked for, you can give information that can’t be readily checked. It shouldn’t be necessary, actually; this operation will only take a few days. But it would be silly to have it blown through some chance encounter.”

“Boating people are pretty close all over the world,” I agreed. Nathaniel Frederick had convinced me of that.

“Precisely. In your travels along the coast of Greece you will possibly encounter other Americans who know this area. Better to be glib than to stammer and hedge, eh?”

So I did as Hawk told me, spending every daylight hour, and not a few after nightfall, prowling around marinas, salesrooms and boatyards like an out-of-work yacht broker. In my travels I picked up names of managers and salesmen, harbor-masters and the kids who manned the gas pumps at various docks. Maybe all of the detail would never be needed, but if some American at, say, Piraeus should start reminiscing with me about the nutty old character who worked at that boatyard outside Clearwater, I’d be ready with my own story about him.

At the end of the second day I drove across the Florida peninsula to Miami, where I took a plane that put me in Madrid early the next morning. There I got a connecting flight to Athens, and it was just coming up dark when I finished clearing customs — they weren’t at all excited about the double-edged knife I carried in my luggage when they learned my supposed business — and went out to find a taxi. The night had that peculiar clarity that you find, I think, only in Greece and the Levant; it’s as though the sky traps and distills all the exotic scents, those of olive and fig trees mixed with burning charcoal and roasting lamb, then chills them all just a little so they don’t become cloying. It’s a sort of elusive perfume that no woman could wear, but Athens does it with style and grace.

And then I checked in at the Hilton, losing it all in the anywhere-in-the-world blandness of American air conditioning. As a matter of fact, when I turned on the television set in my room, I got Gunsmoke. So much for the Cradle of Western Civilization.

I indulged myself the next morning with a quick tour of the city. It’s a terrible thing to say, but I’ve traveled so much that the cities of the world have begun to have a disappointing similarity to me. No matter where you go, it seems, there’s an American overlay on everything; the fawning rug merchant speaks English and makes sure you know about his brother in Akron, and though you may not actually see a Coca-Cola sign on any given street, there’s always the feeling that one is just around the corner.

So I’m cynical. I was also edgy. This assignment seemed almost too simple, and I had to psyche myself up, like the Super Bowl champion getting ready to take on the College All-Stars. The game should always be a cinch for the pros, which means they have to be especially careful not to consider it a walkover. My problem wasn’t exactly the same, but the casual life I was expected to live for the next few days, spiced with an encounter with a, hopefully, attractive girl, could easily make me lazy in the head if I wasn’t careful.

Besides, I missed Wilhelmina. At the time, I didn’t know how much; in a short time I was to find out.

I rented a Volkswagen from the local Hertz agency and started my yacht-broker’s tour. Piraeus was my logical first stop, and I spent an afternoon wandering around the docks of that busy port city. Playing the businessman-tourist, I asked questions, made a show of examining designs and rigging with an expertise I’m sure Nathaniel would have applauded. No one I encountered seemed to question my cover; I was Daniel McKee, on a busman’s holiday in the part of the world some people call a sailor’s paradise. Funny thing was, I’d only been in that part of the world once before, and it was a sailor’s paradise, but not the way they mean it now. To explain what I was doing in the US Army fifteen years earlier would be much too complicated. Just say it was a part of my advanced training with AXE, and even the Army can bend some rules when it seems advisable. The only time I wore a uniform during that stint was while I was going through Counterintelligence Corps School at Fort Holabird in Baltimore. That was mostly for show, the first thing they taught us was how to type, because of all the reports an agent had to fill out, and I wore the innocuous bars of a second lieutenant. Afterward, when I was assigned to a post in West Germany, any top brass who demanded to know what my rank was got the word that I was a major. That’s the way the CIC worked then, and I knew one or two corporals, operating in plainclothes, who also had the “rank” of major if anyone asked.