A very wet, very annoyed Michael Vance rapped on the door of Zeno Stantopoulos's darkened kafeneion. He'd walked the lonely back road into Iraklion in the dark, guiding himself by the rain-battered groves of plane trees, olive, and wild pear, trying to figure out what in hell was happening.
To begin with, members of the intelligence services of major nations didn't go around knocking each other off; that was an unwritten rule among spooks. Very bad taste. Maybe you tried to get somebody to talk with sodium pentathol or scopolamine, but guns were stupid and everybody knew it. You could get killed with one of those things, for godsake.
So this operation, whatever it was, was outside the system. Good. That was the way he had long since learned to work.
There was a lot on his mind, and the walk, the isolation, gave him a chance to think over some of the past. In particular, the austere Cretan countryside brought to mind an evening five years ago when he'd traveled this little-used route with his father, Michael Vance, Sr. That occasion, autumn brisk with a first glimmering of starlight, they'd laughed and joked for much of the way, the old man occasionally tapping the packed earth sharply with his cane, almost as though he wanted to establish final authority over the island and make it his, once and for all. Finally, the conversation turned serious.
"Michael, don't tell me you never miss academic life," his father had finally brought himself to say, masking the remark by casually brushing aside yet another pale stone with his cane. "More and more, your theory about the palace is gaining credence. You may find yourself famous all over again. It's an enviable position."
"Maybe one turn in the snake pit was enough," he smiled. "Academia and I form a sort of mutual disrespect society."
"Well," his father had gone on, "the choice is yours, but you know I'll be retiring from Penn at the end of this term. Naturally there'll be some vicious in-house jockeying to fill my shoes, but if you'd like, I could probably arrange things with the search committee."
Vindicated at last, he'd realized. It seemed the only sin in academia greater than being wrong was being right too soon. But the small-minded universe of departmental politics was the last thing he wanted in his life. These days he played in the big time.