gone to church.'
'You're a real saint,' he said. 'But what's Midas doing spending three of his precious seven days with the Bilderbergers?'
'The Achillion was Baron von Berg's headquarters during the war,' Mercedes said. 'Midas had hoped to find some clues the baron might have left behind.'
'He didn't leave any,' Conrad said. 'He kept everything in his head.'
'I know. So I can't help you. And you can't help me.'
Conrad, holding her hand, got down on one knee. 'I told you, Mercedes. Come with me to Dubai and we'll figure it out.'
She shook her head. 'You know more than anybody else that there's no escaping the Alignment.'
'Then come with me to Dubai,' he told her. 'Andros has the jet waiting. We'll be there in under three hours.'
'And then what, Conrad?' She challenged him with her eyes. 'We live happily ever after? Or you ditch me again?'
'I'm not going to ditch you, Mercedes.'
'But you're going to leave me.'
'I'm not going to stay with you, if that's what you mean.'
'Then what's the point?'
'I want to help you,' he said.
She looked at him with disdain, seemingly surprised by his naivete. 'I don't care how much money your crazy Arab friends have, Conrad. Nobody runs away from Midas. He'll find you. And your friends will give you up in a heartbeat for less than the price of this.' She held up her hand to show the glittering diamond bracelet dangling from her wrist. From the looks of it, Conrad calculated that it had cost Midas at least $1 million. A trinket for him, a handcuff for her.
'I'll give you thirty minutes before I call Midas,' she said with finality. 'Enough time to make it to the airport and take off.'
'And you?' Conrad asked as he stood up and walked to the closet.
'I'll tell him you were asking about the Flammenschwert and that I offered to put you up at my apartment in Paris. Old Pierre will let you in.'
Conrad pulled out his bag and slung it over his shoulder. 'What happens when I don't show?'
She shrugged. 'We'll all know you lied. Like you always do.'
12
Vadim was parked across from the service entrance of the Andros Palace in the dark, making his calls while he waited for Mercedes to emerge. He set his 9mm Rook on the passenger seat next to his copy of The Four-Hour Workweek.
Despite his boasting to Yeats, his Vadimin vitamin supplements were not selling as well as he had hoped. So while Yeats was undoubtedly making love to Sir Midas's French blyad, Vadim was on his cell phone making calls on behalf of the collection agency Midas owned in Bangalore to shake down money from customers behind on their credit card payments. He took perverse pleasure in squeezing money from the debt-ridden pockets of Americans and their knowledge that foreigners were doing it.
A figure stepped outside the hotel-Yeats, from the looks of him at a distance-and climbed into a black BMW 7 series sedan. Vadim started his car and caught a glimpse of his own face in the mirror. He saw the patch over his eye and cursed. The BMW drove off.
Vadim pulled out and had started to follow it around front when Mercedes emerged from the hotel's main entrance and walked toward him. He stopped and let her climb in the back.
'You were supposed to kill him,' Vadim said as he drove off after the BMW.
'So were you,' she said sharply. 'He's going to the airstrip.'
Vadim looked up in the mirror. 'And from there?'
'Athens, Dubai, God knows where,' she said. 'I invited him to my place in Paris.'
Very clever, Vadim thought. She had guessed that Vadim's orders were to kill her as soon as she killed Yeats. This way she had hoped to keep herself alive a while longer. But if Yeats got off the island alive, Vadim's orders were to kill Mercedes instantly and make it appear that Yeats had done it. The time of death would be vital for the Greek coroner's report.
The car with Yeats stopped ahead. Two police cars were blocking its path. Vadim slowed down and watched as the police made the passenger step out of the limousine for inspection. Only it wasn't Yeats. It was a slightly younger man-Chris Andros III, the Greek billionaire.
'What is the meaning of this?' Andros asked.
'Signomi, Kyrios Andros. We thought you were somebody else.'
'Obviously, you're mistaken. What do you want?'
'Where are you going?'
'My jet. I have business in Athens, as you know.'
'Our apologies,' the police officer said.
Vadim didn't bother to watch Andros get back in his sedan; he had already reversed course and was driving back on a small dirt road. In the mirror, he could see Mercedes getting nervous.
'Where are you taking me?' she said.
Vadim pulled to a stop and looked over his shoulder at her. She was scared. She should be. 'Did you lift Dr. Yeats's fingerprints like Sir Midas requested?'
'Yes, off a bottle of wine,' she said, and handed him a white card with Dr. Yeats's fingerprints trapped on clear tape. 'What is Conrad supposed to have done now?'
'Killed you with this gun,' said Vadim as he leveled his Rook over the seat and shot her twice in the chest.
13
At the Corfu airport, the twin turbofan Honeywell engines of Serena's private Learjet 45 hummed while she ran through the preflight checklist with the pilot and copilot. Both had more hours in the air than she did, and both were former Swiss special forces airmen she trusted with her life, let alone a short fifty-minute hop to Rome. But she hadn't heard from Conrad yet, and this took her mind off him for the moment.
'Check the thrust reverters again,' she said when she was finished. 'I thought I heard something.'
She went back into the passenger cabin, sat down in a recliner seat, and glanced outside her window at all the private Gulfstreams lined up to go. The scene was the same in Davos, Sun Valley, San Francisco, and everywhere else she had ever seen the billionaire set meet. Her own Learjet was a hand-me-down from an American patron who had moved on to an even more expensive pair of wings. All the planes on the tarmac this morning resembled a line of luxury cars exiting a parking lot after a sporting event. Only this event-the sixtieth Bilderberg meeting-had barely begun.
Now it was over.
Conrad was right: Every European and American master of the universe was scrambling to escape the island before the police and paparazzi could question him or her. The weekend conference was in shambles, along with Sir Roman Midas's great superyacht, which no doubt was going to fire the imaginations of Bilderberg conspiracy theorists for years.
The truth, of course, was much simpler: Conrad Yeats.
Wherever he was.
The Vertu phone she was clutching in her hand vibrated. It was Marshall Packard, calling from his private jet
