Savage Recruit (Ryan Savage Thriller Series Book 8), стр. 8
He reached the end of the row, crossed the street, and slowly retraced his route. His gaze wandered across the street. He stopped.
Florin did not believe in God. His mother had been a devout Orthodox believer. When he was a young boy, she would drag him to services every week, where he would sit quietly in the cathedral as the priest droned on about things unseen. He had enjoyed singing, even if the angelic voices of the choir were made less ethereal by the addition of the common worshippers. But that was all he liked, and by the time he was ten or eleven years old, even that had lost any charm. In the end, his mother’s piety did not transfer to her son. Some people needed fairy tales to live by. He, however, did not and soon enough adopted the atheism of his father quite willingly.
But what he had just seen made him reconsider, even if for the briefest of moments. It was as if Prometheus himself had stolen a delicious idea and planted both the idea and the means to accomplish it directly into his mind. This was what the faithful referred to as providence. He had an urge to thank some higher power—but he couldn't, of course. As he reminded himself, such a power surely didn’t exist.
He brought out his phone and dialed a number. “Mikhail…” He paused, and when he decided his eyes were not playing tricks on him, that he had not had too much rum on the yacht, he smiled—a sweeping, wolfish grin. “I believe I have just discovered the solution to our problem.”
Chapter Two
Present Day
The private business jet crawled to a stop on the tarmac, and the engines wound down as the captain switched them off. I stood up and grabbed my pack from the chair beside me, shouldering it as I made my way to the open door at the front of the fuselage. The stairs lowered, and after thanking the captain and co-pilot for the safe and smooth ride, I stopped at the edge of the top step and took in a deep breath of fresh morning air.
The climate in Athens wasn’t much different from the one I had left behind in the Keys twelve hours earlier. It was sunny, in the mid-seventies, and infused with the fresh, subtle scent of saltwater.
I made my way to the bottom of the stairs where a golf cart waited for me on the tarmac. A young man wearing a red beret and the mountain camouflage of the Greek Military jumped out and extended his hand. We shook. “Agent Savage. I am Lieutenant Ambrosia. How was your flight to Greece?”
“Fine, thank you. How far to the base from here?”
“Twenty minutes across the city.” He took my pack and placed it on the rear seat. After we settled into the front, he disengaged the brake and got us underway. “A temporary command center has been established at base headquarters. General Diakos is coordinating an effort with the Athens police chief, your ambassador, and various intelligence services.
“Have any leads surfaced yet?”
“No, I’m afraid not.” The lieutenant guided the golf cart through a narrow gate in a long run of chain link fence crowned with concertina wire and headed into the section of the airport zoned for military use. Up ahead, short rows of twin-engine Chinooks, Bell 205 transport helos, and F-16 Fighting Falcons, sat on the tarmac, all of them perfectly staged and ready for the next drill or deployment.
Lieutenant Ambrosia pulled up beside a desert brown Iveco Light Multirole Vehicle, the Italian version of the ubiquitous Humvee, and got out. Grabbing my pack from the golf cart, I joined him in the Iveco. Within five minutes we had passed out of the airport and were at cruising speed on the highway, heading for Ayioi Anargyroi Military Base on the west side of the city.
I looked out my window and caught a glimpse of Mount Parnitha to the north as I found myself on my third continent in less than a week. Greece was one of the more popular tourist destinations in the world; people came from every corner of the planet to walk the sacred ruins of the Acropolis, the Roman Agora, the party resorts of Mykonos, and to visit its sun-soaked coasts while enjoying the gracious climate. I had always wanted to visit myself, but not under the current circumstances.
Six days ago, I was at the helm of a luxury catamaran, sailing back from the Dry Tortugas when I was called back from the much-needed time away to meet with the Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security, Jonathan Watts, and the Director of Joint Interagency Task Force South, Coast Guard Rear Admiral Marvin Speights.
Sitting in a secure conference room at NAS Key West, I was told that the previous day a Peruvian local had walked into a police station in Lima, claiming to have information on an attack being planned on a high-level American target in the region. An agent working out of our DEA office down there took down all the relevant information and secured a safe house for the man who had been brave enough to risk the leak. But after that, things didn't go as planned. Later that evening, they were tracked down and before they had arrived at the safe house, dozens of rounds of semi-automatic gunfire had been discharged, leaving our agent dead in a city alleyway and the informant vanishing without a trace.
Watts and Speights commissioned me to not only find the missing informant, but to assess if his information was even credible, and, if so, to identify the target of the planned hit. I was on a plane headed south before the sun went down.
Throughout the following days, I traversed the urban slums of Peru and the isolated jungles of Brazil, stowed away on a cargo plan run by South American drug dealers,