It was pitch-black outside, and she couldn’t make out a thing. Even the dim light from a tiny bulb in the ceiling overpowered her night vision.
“What’s out there,” her mother asked anxiously.
“I can’t see yet,” Elizabeth said. She climbed up on the edge of her cot so that she could reach the bulb, and gingerly unscrewed it, plunging the room into darkness.
“Elizabeth?” her mother cried.
“It’s all right, mother. I just want to look outside. I’ll put the light back on in a minute.”
“But I can’t see. I’m frightened, and I’m cold.”
Elizabeth felt her way across to her mother’s cot and sat down, taking her mother’s hands in hers. She leaned in close and lowered her voice in case someone was standing on the other side of the wooden door listening to them.
“Father will be coming to rescue us very soon,” she whispered.
Kathleen’s grip tightened. “How do you know?”
“I left a clue for him back at the chalet. In the fireplace. I’m sure he’s found it already and is on his way with help.”
“What kind of clue? What do you mean?”
“Don’t worry about it. Father will know what it means, and he’ll come for us.”
“But that’s what they want. Elizabeth, what have you done?”
“What do you mean?” Elizabeth asked, a sudden sick feeling coming to her stomach.
“I came to bring you back to Washington. One of your father’s friends warned me that he was in danger. That we all were in danger.”
“Daddy’s working for the CIA again. Is that it, mother?”
“I think so. These people want to trick him into coming here so they can kill him.”
“He’s too good for them.”
“He’s only one man, my darling. And there’s too many of them. They’re too well organized.”
“But before, back in Switzerland, you said that he would come for us.”
“I know, but I was wrong for wanting it.”
Elizabeth pulled her hand away and got up. Her mother was a contradiction. First she was weak, a simpering idiot, and then she was suddenly strong. What was happening?
Elizabeth went to the window, tears beginning to well up in her eyes. It was the drugs and everything that had been done to them that made her confused. That made them both confused, and say things they didn’t mean.
At first she wasn’t able to make out a thing; just as amorphous blackness, a featureless nothing. But then she thought she was seeing a movement far below. A white, almost ghostly swirl that lasted for a second or more, but then was gone.
“Elizabeth?” her mother called, but she ignored her.
The white swirl came again, rushing inward, far below, until suddenly she understood that she was seeing waves breaking on the rocks. The room they were in was perched on the edge of a hill, or a sheer cliff that plunged down to the sea. They were in a castle of some sort. A medieval keep. Perhaps a Roman or Greek ruin.
She was about to turn away when a tiny flash of light directly below caught her eye, and she sucked her breath.
Someone was outside, just beneath her window. Father?
She searched with her fingers in the darkness for a latch, and finding one, fumbled it open, breaking two of her fingernails against the stonework.
The window opened inward, a rush of fresh air bringing the odor of the sea into the room. Standing on tiptoes she was just able to look out over the edge. Barely ten feet below her a man dressed in black dangled from a series of ropes. He was concentrating on doing something directly in front of him. It seemed as if he was stuffing something into a big crack in the stones.
She almost called to him, but something made her hold back. It wasn’t her father. He was the wrong build, his hair the wrong color. Even in the darkness she could see that.
He switched on a small flashlight for just a second or two, shielding it from the sea, but not from Elizabeth’s view, and kept it long enough for her to see what he was doing.
She pulled back into the room, her heart pounding. The man had been attaching wires to whatever it was he’d stuffed into the crack in the wall.
Wires leading to explosives that when they blew would send this entire side of the castle into the sea far below.
Chapter 50
McGarvey stood just within the hatchway that Papagos had disappeared through, and held his breath as he listened for a sound, any sound. But the ship was dead. Nothing moved, not even a whisper of air.
This entire thing had been a setup from the moment he’d shown up in Piraeus looking for a boat to bring him out to Santorini. Spranger had anticipated his every move and had stayed at least one step ahead of him since France.
“Kathleen.” he shouted. “Elizabeth?” He stepped to the opposite side of the corridor, flattening himself against the bulkhead in the darkness.
There was no answer. No cry, no pistol shot, no movement. Nothing. But Papagos could be anywhere. There were a thousand places aboard for him to hide in the darkness.
A thousand ambushes.
The question was, were Kathleen and Elizabeth aboard now? Was it Spranger’s intentions to let them go down with the ship, knowing that an enraged, out-of-control McGarvey would come after him? Or was this just another of the man’s obstacles before the final confrontation?
Straight down the corridor, about midships, a stairway led up to the bridge deck.
He was going to have to search the ship for them.
Now. Immediately. Which meant he was going to have to start taking chances.
Tightening his grip on his pistol, McGarvey darted down the corridor and took the stairs two at a time. At the top he halted for just a second.
A narrow landing led to an open hatch onto the bridge. No lights illuminated any of the instruments or gauges, and only a very dim light filtered in from outside.
A figure of a man was lying on the deck. He was dead, there was little doubt of it.
All the crew would be dead, and the hatches locked in the open position so that when the sand kickers blew out the ship’s bottom she’d sink in a couple of minutes, attracting no attention from shore.
Something moved below, on the main deck. McGarvey turned and looked down the stairs, but he couldn’t see a thing. He’d heard a noise, lightly, metal against metal, perhaps.
But there was nothing now.
Papagos trying to get off the ship?
McGarvey started down the stairs, and halfway to the deck he dropped low so that he could see into the corridor. The figure of a bulky man was outlined against the open hatch, his back to McGarvey. Something outside, on deck or out on the water was apparently holding his interest.
He backed up and turned around as McGarvey came the rest of the way down, and he stopped short. It was Papagos. He held what looked like a Russian Makarov automatic loosely at his side, the muzzle pointed down.
“Your wife and daughter are not aboard,” he said. He was clearly agitated. There was no insolence about him now.
“Who’s out there?”
“I don’t know. I thought I saw something.”
“Is that why you didn’t jump ship?”
“Did you bring someone with you?” Papagos asked, his eyes narrowing. He looked like a cornered rat getting ready to spring.
“I didn’t bring anybody. It could be Spranger.”
“He wouldn’t come here now.”
“This boat is going to blow up. When?”
“I don’t know. I swear to God, I don’t know.”
“Where are my wife and daughter, if they’re not aboard now?”
“On the island. In the monastery.” Papagos nervously glanced over his shoulder.
“How do I know you’re telling the truth?”