Thomas Hoover - Project Daedalus

"Congratulations."

"It was two years ago."

"Well, congratulations anyway." He was beginning to wonder if she really had mellowed. Back in the old days her Russianness was her way of making a statement. An identity. How much could she change, want to change? She'd always been a firebrand: throwing things was her preferred mode of communication. Not to suggest she wasn't verbal: she was always passionately happy to see him, passionately sad when bad things happened, passionately angry when she didn't get her way. Everything she said was flirtatious, carrying a sexual innuendo. Sometimes he thought she made Jean Harlow sound like Jeane Kirkpatrick.

"Your call caught me a little off guard." He glanced over. "I never expected to hear from you again after you disappeared into the labyrinth of NSA." He knew she'd been with the National Security Agency for eight years now, but he hadn't heard that she'd been promoted to director of Soviet satellite intercepts. Of course, NSA didn't spend a lot of money on press releases. Still it was no surprise. Eva knew her stuff when it came to the Soviets, their satellites, their codes. "I must say, though, this is a hell of a long way to come for a catch-up chat."

"It's been way too many years since we've seen each other. I've missed you."

"Hope you mean that." Did she? he wondered. Even if she did, that wasn't the real reason she'd come. He knew her too well.

"Guess you'll have to try and find out," she said, her voice holding an instinctive, automatic invitation.

"Guess I will." Already it felt like the old days. How did she know so precisely where all his buttons were? The only thing I'm sure of so far today is that this morning's little accident was no accident." He'd told her about seeing Novosty, but not what they'd talked about. Why drag her into it? Besides, she'd known about Alex a lot longer than he had. Just one more piece of the past that didn't need to be stirred up. "Somebody got taken out. The question is, Who? We both know Novosty's a survivor, old school, but…"

"I probably shouldn't say this, Michael, but I assume you're aware he's KGB, part of T-Directorate." Her voice had grown serious. "That executive VP slot he has with Techmashimport is just his cover. We've had a file of intercepts on him for years."

"Of course I know about him. Good old Alex and I go back a while. You're slightly out of date concerning my most recent fun and games."

"All right. I mean, I wouldn't even bring it up, but I think you should be warned. KGB's in a big turmoil, looking for something…" She paused. "Whenever this happens, there're plenty of stray arrows sure to be flying. Just stay out of the crossfire. A word to the wise."

"I may already be in it. Thanks to Novosty's little 'welcome aboard' breakfast." He remembered the letter Alex had given him. "But I'm beginning to think I'd damn well better find out."

She looked around sharply. "What happened? Did he say something?"

"If you believe him, somebody in Moscow mislaid a few million dollars. Darndest thing."

"It's better left alone, darling."

"I'm on vacation, remember?" He winked at her. "With better things to do."

"I should hope so." She leaned back again and studied his profile. "Well, at long last it's happened. I finally have to admit I need you for something." Her long, dark lashes fluttered. Warming me up, he thought. Now we're getting down to business. "Which is why I wanted to meet you here."

They were five minutes out of Iraklion, on an unpaved back road he loved, headed for the palace at Knossos, and so far she'd done nothing but hint about what was on her mind. Everything was still a puzzle. For one thing, she never needed anybody. She was the stalwart Russian who'd ended their affair eleven years earlier just as casually as she had begun it. This afternoon, though, she seemed to be deliberately keeping the lid on, holding back. Uncharacteristic.

"The truth is," she went on, "I've been thinking about us, the old times, and the palace."

She'd called him in Nassau four days earlier, wanting to get together. It was the old Eva, darling this and darling that. When he said he was going to Crete, she'd grown strangely silent. Then she'd said-in a curious, tiny, voice-"Why don't I just meet you there? In fact, that's sort of why I rang…"

"So why's the palace suddenly so important to you?" He examined her, still trying to read her mood. "I need to go back out today. Try and brush up a bit. But that place was part of our problem back when, not part of the solution."

She didn't answer. Instead she shifted the conversation sideways. "Speaking of the palace, I suppose I should congratulate you on finally being proved right. Did the Stuttgart team really ask you to look in on their dig?"

"Call it the ultimate capitulation," he grinned. "Remember, they were the ones who led the critical fusillade when the book first came out. That makes it doubly sweet."

"Right. I also remember that book of yours caused such a stink that no serious university would consider hiring you. Which, I assume, is why you ended up a part-time spook. Probably it was the only job you could get."

"You're closer to the truth than you know." He laughed, wondering for the ten-thousandth time if he should have stuck out the academic slings and arrows. No, the secret truth was he was bored with the university regimen. He yearned for the real world. He knew it then and he knew it now.

"Then the next thing I heard, you were down in the Bahamas, goofing off and renovating some old yacht." She looked him over once more, shaking her head. "What did you end up christening it? The Fuck Everybody?"

"Crossed my mind. But then I chickened out and called her the Ulysses." He leaned back and reflected momentarily on the forty-four-foot Bristol racing sloop he'd restored, having picked it up for a song at a customs-house sale on Bay Street. Formerly the possession of a Colombian in the export business, it had a hull of one and three-quarter inch planked cedar, with a trim beam, did an easy fifteen knots in a decent breeze. He loved her. He'd installed a fortune in electronics, including a Micrologic Commander LORAN and a Navstar satellite navigation system. "It started out as a hobby, and three boats and a mortgage later it ended up a business."

"And what do you do down there all day? Just sit around and drink margaritas?"

"Sure. About once a month." He reached up and adjusted the open top of the car. "Hate to admit it, but on a typical day I'm usually out of bed by sunrise. Check the weather, then maybe take a short swim to get the oxygen flowing. After that I go to work. The 'office' is up forward in the Ulysses. My main discovery is that chartering is pretty much like any other business. Mostly problems."

It was. There were always tourists who came to Nassau thinking they wanted more than the standard hotels, topless shows, and casinos on Paradise Island and Cable Beach. They wanted a taste of what it was like sailing through the Family Islands, away from the glitz, a feeling for the real Caribbean. Or so they thought. That was until they discovered the hard way that the real thing included broiling sun, jellyfish stings, nosy sharks, hangovers, seasickness, close-quarters quarrels with spouses and significant others, snapped fishing lines, generator failures, unexpected weather…

"And you manage to do okay, right?"

"Nobody ever got rich in the charter business, at least the kind I'm in. If you're not running high-priced South American produce, you have to do it for love, not money."

His real livelihood, which he didn't bother to mention, came from elsewhere. In between managing Bahamian skippers and crews he also kept a hand in another occupation. In years past he'd served as a financial consultant for the CIA, helping monitor the flow of illicit drug and terrorist money passing through the banking laundries of Geneva and the Caribbean. When the Company finally formed its own section to handle that work, he'd moved on and hired out his expertise to a free-lance organization called ARM, the Association of Retired Mercenaries. They were retired, all right, but only from the antiterrorist units of a half dozen European nations. They still saw plenty of covert action, squelching those terrorist activities European governments wanted dealt with outside official channels. He was their money man and they paid him well, which was how he kept his three vessels shipshape and lived a yachtsman's life of "ease."