This was not particularly good news for Stratton. He wanted to ask if anyone else could do the task, but it did not take much to work out that either he went on the assignment or he let the side down. The facts were obvious. He was familiar with the job and its linch-pin, namely Gabriel. Saying no to Sumners now would be saying no to any other MI job in the future.
Stratton stood up with the phone to his ear. ‘I’m on my way,’ he said sighing to himself.
‘Stratton. One more thing.You still have your ID, don’t you?’
Stratton automatically felt his pocket where his wallet was, not so much with his hand as with his mind. ‘Yes,’ he said.
‘I don’t suppose it ever crossed your mind why I never asked for it back?’
Oddly enough, it had not.
‘When you arrive in Athens one of our people will meet you and give you some bits and pieces,’ Sumners continued. ‘I’ll talk to you later.’
‘Sumners?’ Stratton quickly said.
There was silence for a moment and Stratton thought Sumners had gone. ‘What is it?’ he said, sounding as if he wished he had disconnected.
‘I’d like some extra tools,’ Stratton said.
‘Tools?’
Stratton felt Sumners was being deliberately obtuse. ‘You know what I mean. We’re heading east. This job could end up anywhere. What if we have another incident like last time?’
‘I see what you mean. I’m afraid I can’t do much about that right now. Greece is a difficult one at the moment. She’s being a bit of a bitch. I’ll see what I can do . . . Anything else?’
Sumners hadn’t even tried to disguise the insincerity in his voice. Greece wasn’t the only bitch being difficult. ‘No,’ Stratton answered.
‘Have a good trip,’ Sumners said in the same tone, and the phone went dead. Stratton put it in his pocket as he dug out his MI6 ID and looked around for the security desk. He wondered why Rhodes and what Gabriel had seen in the time since they were last together.The remote viewer had obviously recovered from his concussion.
Stratton headed across duty-free to where he knew there would be a security checkpoint to stop arriving passengers from entering the shopping hall. Two guards in blazers and smart slacks were seated on swivel stools behind a desk in front of a set of doors that led to the gates. As Stratton approached, one of them, a large red-headed Gaelic type with a gut that hung over his belt, eyed him coldly from head to toe. Stratton held up his badge for the man to see.
‘Hi,’ Stratton said, forcing a polite smile.
The man maintained his ‘I’m hard and important’ expression.
‘I need to get over to terminal one right away.’
‘You need to do what?’ the man said, as if he hadn’t heard.
‘Do you know what this badge is?’ Stratton asked, the smile gone on hearing the attitude.
The man raised a hand to take it and Stratton pulled back the badge. ‘I’ll hold it as close or as far back as you need.’ Stratton opened the flap to reveal the special enamel and silver crown that declared the badge owner was Military Intelligence on Her Majesty’s Service and that all assistance was to be rendered to the bearer on request.
Stratton might as well have shown him a Blue Peter badge for all the reaction it got, other than the man picking up a phone.
‘Who you ringing?’ Stratton asked.
‘Get verification,’ the man said tiredly.
‘Verification of what?’ Stratton asked.
‘Your pretty little badge, sir,’ he said sarcastically.
Stratton put his hand firmly on the man’s, pushing the phone down with superior strength, and stared closely into his eyes. ‘When you got this job you were shown a slide of this badge and told that the bearer represented the Queen and you were to move the airport a foot to the left if that person asked you to. Now you’re going to get off your fat arse and show me the back way to terminal one where a plane is being held for me right now, or I will thrash the shit out of you and have you slung in a cell for a week under the prevention of terrorism act for obstructing justice. Do I make myself clear?’
Stratton had to give credit to the man. If he was concerned, he didn’t show it even though he got to his feet and straightened his jacket, all the while looking at Stratton.
‘Be back in a bit, Fred,’ he said to his partner. ‘This way,’ he then said to Stratton and headed across the corridor to an airport-staff-only door.
Chapter 7
Stratton sat in the empty arrival hall of Paradisi Airport in Rhodes on the end of a fixed row of seats with his feet stretched out in front of him and looking as uncomfortable as he felt. It was six in the morning and the next connection from Istanbul was due in any time soon. The café and kiosks were shut for the winter by the look of them. It was off-season and hard to imagine that in the summer the large hall would be literally packed twenty-four hours a day with people coming and going from all over the world. This time of year the tourist resorts would be ghost towns since even most of the Greeks who lived on the island either left to find work elsewhere for the winter or the ones who had made a good income from the tourists were themselves on holiday until the start of the next season.
Stratton scrolled through the directory of numbers on the satellite phone his contact had given him on his arrival a couple of hours ago, along with a credit card, money and the request to keep receipts or he would be charged. Since the man did not offer Stratton a weapon there seemed no point in asking for one, but Stratton hinted at it anyway, getting nothing but a strange look in reply.The contact was a local runner for whoever ran the island’s office and would know nothing about the operation anyway.
As Stratton read the phone list, many of the entries first names only, it became clear that the operative who had the phone last did not erase the directory, which was not an uncommon mistake. One of the names was Aggy, and Stratton wondered if it was Melissa - Aggy being her undercover name - a former partner from the Northern Ireland undercover detachment. She was beautiful and in many ways a perfect match for him.They had worked together for over a year and gotten to know each other well, though not intimately.What made Melissa special was that she knew the world of military intelligence and understood its influences on Stratton, since it affected her in the same way. They were very much alike, and in the world of undercover operations it made sense to be with your own kind. There was no need for their professional lives to be hidden from each other; they could discuss practically everything, and they did not have to put up a wall of secrecy when suddenly one of them had to leave on a job. He thought about calling the number, his finger hovering over the button, but stopped himself. It would not have been cool, not right now, and he would not have known what to say to her anyway. Despite genuinely missing her and often wondering if anything might have come from their relationship, he also knew his wanting to call was symptomatic of a desire for female company, a friend and confidante he could hold closely and be affectionate towards. Melissa could fill those criteria, if she was still available, but this was not the time or place.
Movement suddenly caught his eye. Staff in uniform, immigration or customs officers, were milling about, a good sign that the plane he was waiting for, and the only one scheduled to arrive for the next six hours, had landed.
There was also activity in the baggage hall and Stratton’s expectations began to look justified. The conveyor belt started up and then a few seconds later died with a terrible crunching sound. Stratton looked through the windows to the taxi rank outside where just two cabs were waiting. As he turned back to face the doorway from the customs hall, Gabriel walked through it.
Stratton got to his feet, put his hands in the pockets of his old leather jacket and waited for Gabriel to find him, which was not going to be difficult in the empty hall.
Gabriel spotted him and as he closed in, Stratton saw he was wearing a slight smile.
‘Stratton. How you doing?’ he asked, as if they were friends.
‘Fine thanks,’ he said, surprised by Gabriel’s joviality. ‘How’s your head?’ he asked.
‘I think it was more shock than injury,’ Gabriel said. ‘I’m not used to getting knocked on the head.’
Stratton could see the scab-covered bump clearly.
‘You have all your baggage?’ Stratton asked, looking at the one bag he was carrying.
‘I’m set,’ Gabriel said. ‘So,’ he continued, still wearing his smile. ‘Where are we off to?’
Stratton had a sudden flashback to the first time they set off together. ‘Don’t get mad but I really don’t have a clue,’ Stratton answered. ‘Do you mean accommodation? That won’t be a problem. There’s plenty of room this time of year.’
‘No,’ Gabriel said, his smile fading. ‘I mean, where do we go?’
‘Why would I know? I don’t even know what we’re doing here.’
Gabriel’s smile was gone.
‘Why don’t you tell me why we’re here,’ Stratton said, trying to keep it together before it all fell apart.
Gabriel nodded, controlling his annoyance. He had vowed to act more like a partner this time, and, anyway, it was clear that this was going to be as much about them versus their bosses as it was looking for the mysterious demon. ‘I had another image while in Turkey,’ he said.
‘I gathered that much,’ Stratton said. His doubts about Gabriel went up and down like a big dipper. At this moment they were very high.
‘I saw medieval walls and buildings, Knights . . . crusaders I suppose, and they were on a Mediterranean island.’
‘Why Rhodes?’ Stratton asked. ‘There must be hundreds of islands with medieval buildings. European knights were all over the Med.’
‘I saw thousands of homes crammed around a horseshoe harbour. Our people came up with this place. Apparently Rhodes’ old city is medieval, densely packed with buildings and has a horseshoe harbour.’
Stratton was beginning to feel trapped on this assignment. ‘The man you see, the one who hit you in the wood, is he here too?’ he asked.
‘If this is the right place,’ he said.
‘Have you actually seen him?’
‘I’ve never seen him,’ Gabriel said pressing one hand to his forehead with the other held up, stopping the conversation.‘Stratton, I want to apologise to you.This last week I’ve had time think, and I, well, I realised what a difficult position you must have been in when we first met. I never took a moment to consider it from your point of view.You were thrown in the deep end, with someone you didn’t know, who claimed to do something that must’ve sounded wacky to you - and probably still does. I not only expected you to believe in me without question, but to help me as much as you could at the same time. I am arrogant and I apologise . . . Truth is, you did pretty good back there in the forest.You took me to the right place and you didn’t block me.That’s more than I’ve gotten from most decoders I’ve ever used. But asking for you to rejoin me was thoughtless. I didn’t stop to think that working with me was the last place you wanted to be . . . If you want to go, I’ll tell them it was my fault and I was unhelpful and impossible to work with.’
An apologetic smile crept on to Gabriel’s face as he looked at Stratton. ‘But I need help on this. I can’t do it alone. I’d like you to stay on.’
Any anger Stratton had for the man dissolved in the face of such sincere contrition. It was nevertheless tempting to accept Gabriel’s offer for him to get out, but he could not. It was a plea for help and it would be desertion. Like it or not, it seemed he was stuck with this old man for the immediate future.
‘Okay . . . Partners. Just explain something to me. Why can’t you see his features?’ Stratton asked.
‘I see into his heart, not his face,’ Gabriel said.‘And through his eyes, but not like they are windows. I feel his emotional reaction to things. He’s nostalgic. Something he saw allowed him to imagine himself as a knight, on castle battlements, fighting an enemy who came in wooden ships by their thousands. The knights did not lose the fight and the enemy left in their boats. That’s the adventure he had and what I saw. I told that to our people, they decoded it and they sent us here.’
Stratton sighed. He was not enjoying this. ‘Why don’t we find a hotel and take it from there?’ he suggested.
‘Agreed.’
They picked up their bags and headed out of the airport to the waiting taxis.
Gabriel sat in the back of the car while Stratton sat beside the driver as they followed the coastline. Twenty minutes later they reached the twentieth-century outskirts of the city of Rhodes where they left the beach and climbed a hill. The modern houses gave way to a cluster of ancient remains signposted as the Acropolis and a mile further on they came to an imposing medieval wall with a vast moat in front of it. They followed the road in front of the wall for another mile, gradually downhill and back to the sea, then along the front of a harbour where ships lay at berth. Suddenly the taxi turned in through an arch and the road became narrow and changed from tarmac to cobblestone. They stopped in a cramped, sloping square with a fountain in the centre and shuttered shops on the higher ground facing the arched entrance and battlements.
Stratton asked the driver if he knew of a hotel but the man did not appear to want to spend any more time with them than he had to and shrugged ignorance.
A moment later they were standing in the square overshadowed by the heavily fortified ramparts on one side and two-storey buildings tightly packed together on the other, holding their baggage, the taxi gone, and looking at the narrow streets that led away in every direction.There were few people about and, in short, the atmosphere was ghost town.
‘This isn’t it,’ Gabriel said.
Stratton said nothing but inwardly sighed. Why was he surprised, he asked himself. There were some sixteen hundred Greek islands, six hundred of them inhabited, and then there were the thousands of miles of mainland coastline and all the towns along that - not to mention places in Turkey that could match the description. The whole idea of detailed research was to avoid pointless journeys such as this. If they had got it wrong with all the databases at their fingertips, what chance had Stratton and Gabriel of finding the place.