did he get here before us?”
“They said he was a sharp sonofabitch. And the man is well motivated.”
“I’ll say,” Tyrell agreed. “But this isn’t going to make our job easier.”
“No,” Lipton said, tight-lipped. “No it won’t.”
Chapter 49
The cell in which they’d been placed was small and very cold. A tiny window in one wall was dark. Kathleen lay on one of the cots, still only semiconscious, but Elizabeth sat on the stone floor in the corner, her knees hugged to her chest. Her head was spinning from the aftermath of the drugs she’d been given since Grenoble, with the almost total lack of food or water, and with what the woman-Liese Egk-had done to her aboard the boat.
She shuddered, not so much because of the damp cold, but because of what had happened.
She felt dirty and used; as if she had been forced to age a hundred years overnight.
Yet there was enough defiance in her that she could fantasize about what would happen to her captors once her father got here.
“Keep your head down, because I’ll be coming in swinging,” he would say.
She could see him dressed in black, darting silently down a dark corridor, moving like a deadly jungle animal that no one could resist.
He’d have to be warned about the woman. It was the only trap they could possibly set for him, and yet in her heart of hearts she knew that her father would see through Liese Egk. He would recognize the woman for what she was.
“I wasn’t born yesterday. I’ve been around. I’ve seen a few things.”
In the end the Germans would be dead, Armond’s murder avenged. And she could almost feel her father’s strength flowing into her as he led her and her mother away. It would be morning. The sun would be brightly shining, warm on her shoulders and head.
Her mother said something, but her voice seemed muffled and indistinct, and for a moment Elizabeth was confused. In her fantasies only her father ever spoke.
She remembered her father from when she was a young girl, but lately she’d had a difficult time visualizing exactly how it had been. At times she wasn’t certain if she was recalling genuine memories or her fantasies.
“Elizabeth,” Kathleen said thickly.
Elizabeth looked up out of her thoughts. Her mother had rolled over. She was clutching the thin blanket up to her chin but she was still shivering. “Are you all right, mother?”
“What’s happening? Where are we?”
“I don’t know for sure,” Elizabeth grunted, getting painfully to her feet. She had to stand for a few seconds, holding onto the stone wall for support lest she lose her balance and fall.
“My God, what happened to your head?” Kathleen asked in shock.
Elizabeth raised her fingers to her bald skull. Already a light stubble had begun to appear. “Your head is the same. They wanted us to look like hospital patients.”
“But why?”
“So that they could take us across the border without question.”
“We’re not in Switzerland?” the older woman asked, panicking a little. She seemed very frail and weak.
“We’re in Greece, I think,” Elizabeth said. “The island of Santorini. Or at least I hope we are.” She tottered over to the window.
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.
