Riptide

Sherlock said slowly, studying a bruised knuckle she’d gotten when she’d clipped Tyler McBride’s jaw, “We’ve got to get him back. We’ve got to set up a meeting somehow.”

“Next time I’ll speak to him,” Becca said. “I’ll set one up.”

“You won’t be bait,” Adam said, his voice sharp as a knife. “No way.”

“Look, Adam, he wants me. If you made yourself the bait, he’d just shoot you and walk away. But not so with me. He wants me up close and personal. Only me. Help me figure out a way to do this, please.”

“I don’t like it.”

18

Hatch, a short, built like a young bull, sporting a large mustache, pulled off a tweed Sherlock Holmes hat to show his shaved head. For some reason she couldn’t quite fathom, Becca thought he was so impishly cute she wanted to hug him. She thought from the cocky grin on Sherlock’s face that she wanted to hug him right along with her.

This guy was potent. He had more charm than a person deserved, she was thinking a few minutes later when Adam held out his hand and said to him, “Give me the pack of cigarettes in your right pocket, Hatch, now, or you’re fired.”

“Yeah, sure, boss.” Hatch obligingly handed Adam a nearly full pack of Marlboros. “Just one, boss, no more, and I didn’t inhale much. All I had, just one. I don’t want to smoke anywhere near sweet Becca. I wouldn’t want to ever take a chance of hurting her lovely lungs. Now, tell me what to do to catch this creep so Becca can go back to writing speeches and smiling a lot.” Then he turned those dark-brown twinkling eyes on her and said, “Hi.”

Becca grinned and pumped his hand. “Hi, Hatch. Listen, I’m ready. The next time he calls—I’m ready. We’re going to set a trap for him. I’m going to be the bait.”

“Hmmm. I don’t think the boss likes that. His jaw is all knotted up.”

Adam unknotted his jaw. “No, I don’t like it. It’s crazy. I don’t want her to take this kind of risk. Ah, shit, I can tell by the look on your face, Becca, that you’re going to do it regardless of what I think.”

“Look, Adam,” Savich said, “if I could think of another way, I’d dive on it, but there are enough of us to keep her protected. Now, Hatch, according to Adam, you have a pretty awesome reputation to maintain. Tell us what you’ve found out.”

Hatch took a slim black book out of his jacket pocket, licked his fingers, and ruffled some pages. “Most of this is from Thomas’s guys, who’ve been working their butts off trying to verify Krimakov’s death. Thomas got everyone working on it right away. Now, the CIA has actually spoken to the cop who was the one who poked around his body. Apollo—no shit, that’s his name—said Krimakov went over a cliff on the eastern end of Crete, near Agios Nikolaos, died instantly, one would suppose from the injuries. It could have been murder, he allowed, but nobody checked into it all that much for the simple fact that no one really cares. Nothing obvious about it, so they closed the case until our agents flew in and spread out and wanted to see and examine everything.”

“So he’s really dead,” Becca said.

Hatch looked up and gave them a big grin. “Nope, not necessarily. Here’s the kicker. Krimakov’s body was cremated. You see, for the longest time, our people were stonewalled by the locals, who wouldn’t allow them to view the body. It was only after the Greek government got involved that they let it out of the bag that they’d cremated him right away. Why? I don’t know, but there was a payoff, somewhere.”

No one said a word for a very long time.

“Cremated?” Adam repeated, disbelieving.

“Yes, burned to ashes, poured in an urn. Thing’s still sitting on a shelf in the morgue.”

Sherlock said, “So there is no definitive proof because there’s no body to examine.”

“Right,” Hatch said. “Now, while we all chew on that, let’s go back a bit. Krimakov moved to Crete in the early eighties. Just showed up and stayed. He was into bad things, but not bad enough so anyone would dig and find out exactly who and what he’d been in Russia. Actually, the impression is they never tried really hard to do any nailing. He probably paid everyone off.”

“Damn,” Adam said. “Okay. Now we’ve got to search his house, top to bottom and under the basement. If he ever was involved in this, there will be something there.”

“Our agents have gone over his house, didn’t find anything. No clues, no leads, no references at all to Becca. We heard that he had an apartment somewhere, but we don’t know where it is. That might take a little time. There aren’t any official records.”