Ben left the corpses lying there and started cleaning up the house. The broken wall-lamp had sprayed glass shards over part of the floor, and he swept them up with a dustpan and brush and shook them out into the bin. In a kitchen cupboard he found a mop and bucket and a bottle of bleach. He filled the bucket with cold water, lugged it through to the other room and started mopping up the worst of the blood. Once that was done, he used a kitchen knife to hack at one of the doorframes, where a bullet had embedded itself deep into the wood. He dug the flattened 9mm bullet out and dropped it in his pocket. He winced at the mess he’d made of the doorframe.

As he worked, he was thinking hard. Kaplan and Hudson hadn’t been the best surveillance and hit team he’d ever seen, but they hadn’t been the worst, either. The two Berettas were the exact same make and model. The serial numbers had been expertly removed. Those kinds of details pointed to a professional outfit. He was pretty certain that they had been sent to kill Nikos Karapiperis. If Nikos had really been involved in drugs, he wouldn’t have gone to Charlie for help to find Zoë. So the killers had planted the drugs on him. That was a neat touch. Then the bombing had been orchestrated to eliminate Charlie, after they’d seen him talking to Nikos. And it wasn’t a difficult step from there to figure out that they’d come after Ben for the same reason.

Those pieces slotted together neatly enough. But when Zoë Bradbury was factored into the equation, it started falling apart. There was no ransom demand. No apparent reason for snatching her. Her parents were hardly the kind of people who could be screwed for millions to get their daughter back. If Tom Bradbury had been in politics or some other kind of position to be privy to valuable information, it might have made sense. But he wasn’t. He was a theology scholar in one of the world’s dustiest institutions, about as remote from the real world as it was possible to get.

So whatever reason was driving someone to these extremes, it had to come from Zoë herself. But what was it? He thought about the money. She’d apparently got hold of twenty thousand dollars fairly easily, and was expecting a lot more to come soon. It certainly sounded like a blackmail deal. Whoever she was extorting the money from had to be pretty rich and powerful, and they were clearly desperate. Which meant that whatever she was threatening them with, it was real enough to be taken very seriously.

But why go to the trouble of moving her halfway across the world to the States, when it would have been so easy just to put a bullet in her head right here on Corfu? He thought about it and could come to only one conclusion. She had something they wanted, and they wanted to keep her alive until they got it.

But that led to another problem. Kaplan and Hudson weren’t soft types. They were ready and willing to kill. And Zoë wasn’t a soldier trained to resist interrogation. If all they wanted was to make her talk, it would have taken just a few seconds to get the information out of her. Just the sight of a knife or a gun and, like the vast majority of ordinary people, she would fold instantly.

After that, they probably would kill her. And after twelve days, there was a good chance that she was dead already.

At three-thirty in the morning, the beach taverna started closing up for the night. The last of the stragglers wandered off homewards. The music stopped and the lights went off, leaving the beach in darkness.

Ben watched and waited for another half hour. The sands were deserted. He stuffed a Beretta in each of his jeans pockets, pushed open the front door and dragged Hudson’s corpse out across the sand, sliding him along on the plastic sack.

It was a long drag, and a dead body on sand was a heavy weight. The pull on the stitches in Ben’s neck was agonising, and the muscles in his shoulders and forearms were pumped full of lactic acid by the time he reached his chosen spot a hundred yards away. He left the corpse in a nook between two dunes and walked back, breathing hard.

Back at the house, he took Kaplan’s wrists, gritted his teeth and hauled her out onto the beach. As her head lolled and bounced he kept imagining that her staring eyes were meeting his. He didn’t like to see a woman dead like this, and he was glad that he hadn’t been the one to kill her.

With the two bodies piled up next to him in the moonlight, he kneeled in the sand and dug a shallow hole in the crook of the two dunes. He rolled them in one at a time with his foot. Kaplan flopped in first, and Hudson sprawled in on top of her with a meaty sound as their heads collided.

Ben filled the hole back in with sand. They were food for crabs now.

Searching around, he found the barnacled carcass of an old rowing boat and hauled it across the sand. He laid it over the shallow grave and walked away towards the water’s edge. Retracing his footsteps he kicked over the tracks in the sand to hide them. Then he stripped the two pistols and threw the bits into the sea.

Dawn was creeping up on the horizon by the time he finished cleaning up at the house. He showered and changed, burned the bloodstained jeans and shirt on the beach, and stamped the ashes into the sand. He left five hundred euros on the table and a note to apologise for breaking a lamp and damaging a doorframe, saying he’d drunk too much of the fine wine Spiro and Christina had left for him.

Then as the sun was breaking free of the sea, he left the house and started walking towards town. He took a taxi to the airport, careful that he wasn’t being followed. The last thing he needed now was for Stephanides’ men to grab him just as he was about to leave Greece. He’d be in America long before they even noticed he was gone.

At the airport he retrieved his passport from the locker, and used his return ticket to board an early flight to Athens. At midday, Greek time, he was sipping whisky on the rocks in the half-empty business class section of a 747 heading for Atlanta.

He didn’t know what awaited him in the USA. But he was going to find Zoë Bradbury, dead or alive.

And then, someone, somewhere, was going to pay.

Chapter Twenty-Three

Georgia, USA

The thirteenth day

Georgia wasn’t any noticeably hotter than Corfu, but it was about twice as humid. Ben’s shirt was stuck to his back within fifteen minutes of stepping off the plane at Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson Airport.

He adjusted his watch to US time. The zone shift meant that he was arriving pretty much the same time he’d left Greece, and the sun was high overhead. He hired a big silver Chrysler at the airport and drove the long distance to Savannah with the windows down and the wind in his hair.

It was late afternoon by the time he got there. Savannah was rich and verdant with picture-perfect colonial homes that looked as though they hadn’t changed since Civil War times. The first thing he did was to phone the number on Steve McClusky’s business card. But when he tried it, all he got was a message to say the number had been cut off. There was no landline number, and there was no S. McClusky, Attorney, listed in Yellow Pages. But he still had the address. He checked his map and turned the big Chrysler round.

He found McClusky’s building on the edge of town, far away from the opulence of the old houses and the tree-lined streets. He’d been expecting some kind of proper law firm offices, either an imposing glass-fronted modern building or some elegant old colonial-style place with columns and steps leading up to the front door. What he found instead was a little old barber’s shop in the middle of a crumbling block. There was a small parking space outside, with yellowed weeds growing though the cracks in the concrete. He looked twice at the address on the card. It was the right place.


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