"Please. We both did what we had to."
"I still do. Life's too short for anything else." He turned back. "Now how about telling me what's on your mind."
Vance was firm-muscled and lean, with the leathery skin of a man who drank his tequila straight and preferred spending his days in the sun, two habits that also had bestowed a network of threadlike smile lines at the corners of his sea-blue eyes. Aleksei Ilyich Novosty had phoned him at the Athenaeum Inter-Continental half an hour earlier, begging to meet him, saying it was of the utmost importance. A cab was downstairs. The driver had taken him to the old flea market at Monastiraki Square, where Alex's own black limo waited. But now Novosty was playing games, and the days for KGB games were supposed to be in the distant past. What did the man want?
"My friend, give me a moment. . . ." Novosty wiped his brow, manicured nails glistening, then looked up and pointed. "By the way, I've always believed that one is the most exquisite female in the world. That one there. What do you think?"
"Sexy, plenty of style." Vance swept his eyes over the figure, loving how the cloth was shaped by her breast, the vague hint of thigh as one leg brushed against the gauze of her tunic. "But the lady next to her's a looker too. Always seemed a tough call."
Above them, the stone caryatids smiled down, their pale faces timeless and ethereal. They were Greek statues that served as columns for the south porch of the Erechtheum, the Ionic temple standing across from the Doric Parthenon. Down below the steep north wall of the Acropolis, the dark-glazed rooftops of Athens, city of Pericles, droused mutely in the early haze.
"Yes, perhaps you're right." Novosty brushed awkwardly at his patchy stubble, searching for an opening. He knew Vance never made the first move, always waited for the other side to show its cards. "Michael, I ... is it true you occasionally still take an assignment? I mean, outside the usual work for ARM. I made some inquiries in Geneva last week. The word is—"
"Hang on. I think you're getting your team colors mixed. I work for the other side, remember?" He stooped and picked up a handful of the grainy red soil at their feet, massaging it in his fingers and wondering why it had taken him so long to get back here, to Greece. This was where he belonged. This was the place, the ancient people, he still dreamed about. But could he fit in again after so many years away? Yes, he'd make it work.
Michael Vance, Jr., had the sangfroid of one who moved easily among the decision-makers of two continents. He was to the manner born—Yale—and he'd long since concluded it was the way man was meant to live. In years past he'd been a field archaeologist, and a good one; then he'd had a brief consulting stint for the CIA. These days, he lived at the Nassau Yacht Club marina, where he moored his restored forty-four-foot Bristol racing yacht, the Ulysses, headquarters for his three-boat charter operation. He was mortgaged to the hilt, but he didn't really care. When things got tight, he could always take on a quick money job for the Association of Retired Mercenaries, ARM.
"The situation is not necessarily what you're thinking," Novosty pressed. "So perhaps you would consider—"