“How the hell did some blue-collar dickweed understand English?” Lynn Saxon demanded. He looked younger without his mustache, which had been the only part of him of any consequence actually burned off in J. J. Flash’s attack. “We’ve got the dossier, and J. J. Flash no more speaks Greek than my ass can whistle ‘The Stars and Stripes Forever.’”
“Jeez, Lynn, that’s something I’d like to see,” his partner said.
“Shut up, Gary.”
“Far from being a noxious plant, Mr. Ipiotis is a very skilled worker, highly educated,” the colonel said briskly. “He learned to speak English in school, as many of our children do. Our educational system is quite advanced, Mr. Saxon. How many American children learn Greek?”
“Why should they? Who the fucking hell speaks Greek?”
Helen Carlysle had taken a seat at the table. She cocked her forearm and opened her hand as if flicking water off the fingers at him. “Agent Saxon, you are being highly unprofessional”
“Put a rag in it, babe. You don’t talk to us about professional; you’re just a rich civilian on a ride-along, you got that? And while we’re on the subject, sweetheart, you’re the one who lost him.”
Hera turned from the window and growled low in her well-muscled throat. She was not one of the Greeks who knew English, but she could read tones of voice well enough. Saxon went dead pale. Hera had once arm-wrestled New York-born Israeli ace Sharon Cream in London for the title of World’s Strongest Lady Ace. The match had gone on eleven hours and sixteen minutes before both parties agreed to a draw. And Sharon Cream had destroyed a Syrian T72 main battle tank barehanded in the Golan Heights in 1982…
Kallikanzaros held up a weary hand. Hera colored – she did that readily, and rather prettily to Belew’s eye – and walked over to stand with her back to the door.
“Hearts and minds,” the mercenary murmured.
“What did you say?” Saxon demanded, glaring at him through his bangs like a crazy man in elephant grass.
“Just an old Special Forces saying.”
“Yeah, well, I got one for you, too, old man: ’Grab ’em by the balls, and their hearts and minds’ll follow.’”
The colonel cleared his throat. “We gave you our complete cooperation,” he said, “and the result has been a complete debacle. The Interior Ministry is in a roar-up. And though our media are better disciplined than yours, enough has happened that we cannot prevent embarrassing questions from being asked in the newspapers and on the television. I must therefore ask what your intentions are now.”
Hamilton looked at his partner, who had gotten up and was staring out the floor-to-ceiling louver blinds at the atherosclerotic traffic on the Syntagma. “I guess, hunker down and start scouring the city section by section until we run him down,” the blond agent said, “We still got this advantage, that Meadows does tend to stick out in a crowd.”
“He won’t be here,” Helen Carlysle said.
Saxon half turned from the window. Sunset light spray-painted his narrow face with shadow strips. “Look, will you just butt out and let the people who know what they’re doing handle this from here on in?”
Hera laced her fingers again and cracked her knuckles. It sounded like target shooting with a nine-millimeter. Saxon jumped.
“It is impossible that he should have left the city” the colonel huffed. “We are watching the roads, the airports, the harbor, everything.”
“It’s impossible for a man to fly and shoot fire from his hands, too, Colonel,” Belew said mildly. “Or change the shape of his body, for that matter.”
He flicked his eyes to the American woman. “How do you figure this, Ms. Carlysle?”
She took a deep breath. “He’s run every time we’ve caught up with him.”
Belew shook out his pipe and tamped it with a little fold-up silver tool he carried in his pocket. “Not the very first time, in Amsterdam.”
Color flamed up on her high cheekbones, but she controlled herself “He just thought that was a, a fluke, an accident. And it was, in a sense. Once he realized we were going to persist, were going to be able to track him down if he stayed in Amsterdam, he took off. Why should he behave differently this time?”
Belew staffed some more tobacco in his pipe, put it back in his mouth, and relit it, studying Carlysle the while. She faced him with her head thrown back, flushed and defiant.
“I think she’s got a point, gentlemen.”
“Oh, horseshit,” Saxon said. “Colonel, we want more help. We want to take this town apart.”
“Agent Saxon,” Belew said, “maybe I should remind you that this operation -”
“Screw you, and screw the CIA,” Saxon spat. The colonel’s eyebrows shot up. “Hamilton and I are still DEA, and we’re still on the case. We’re going to do this the right way. Got that?”
Helen Carlysle was visibly knotting with anger. Murmuring low in her throat, Hera crossed to her, put her big hands on the American’s trapezius muscles to either side of her neck, and began to massage her with the carefully controlled power of those armor-crushing hands. Mistral’s eyes bounced back and forth in her head like tennis balls, seeking escape.
Belew laughed and spread his hands. “Confucius tells us that ‘the superior man does not set his mind either for anything, or against anything; what is right he will follow.’ Have it your way, boys.”
Chapter Ten
Mark sat beneath a cypress tree like bonsai on steroids with his knees up under his chin and watched the last fingernail fragment of sun, red and not particularly bright, disappear into the horizon. He shivered, though it wasn’t cold. He wasn’t even wet; Aquarius had grumpily emerged from the water before returning to Mark-form, and Aquarius’ slick delphinoid skin shed water.
He still felt waterlogged, the way he always did after taking Aquarius out for a spin. It was something he had never done that often; there was water all around Manhattan, but not so you’d want to swim in it. Besides, Aquarius resented the baseline Mark persona worse than any of Mark’s other friends. There was always a chance that he’d take it in mind to just swim way out of sight of land before making the transition back.
It was a risk Mark was taking now, again and again. Ironically the silvery-gray powder that summoned Aquarius was the cheapest and easiest to make of Mark’s five potions – four, now. So he had made up an especially large number of doses of it, back in Athens, figuring he might have to try to split via water. The Aegean was ideal for that, dotted as it was with small and mostly uninhabited islands like this one. Aquarius’ dolphin-form could swim at just upward of twenty knots – Mark had once gotten Tach out in the Hudson in a boat to time him – and that meant he could island-hop, taking time out as Mark to recuperate.
Jumpin’ Jack Flash could fly a lot faster than that of course. But, small as he was, a flying man was not exactly inconspicuous. And being J. J. took a lot out of Mark, emotionally as well as physically. Jumpin’ Jack lived with an intensity Mark found almost as alien as the mind of Aquarius’s dolphin-form. When he was J. J. Flash, it really was like being on a drug trip, a sort of blazing speedball rush.
Mark opened the fluorescent green fanny-pack he’d bought way back in Rome. Aquarius, human or Tursiops, was bulkier than Mark; when he made the transition, he somehow sucked up enough ambient matter to make up the difference: air primarily, but also things like personal effects. It was a handy way to carry things.
Inside the fanny-pack were a mess of extra vials of powder, some figs, and a few Mars bars. Mark knew from experience that he had to get his blood sugar up in a hurry after being either Aquarius or J. J. Flash, or get the shakes real bad, plus nausea and dizziness. If Aquarius hadn’t scarfed a lot of fish en route, he’d be barely conscious now.