Riptide

“Listen, Adam, we don’t know that. Officially, Vasili Krimakov hasn’t come into this country in the past fifteen years. He was here once back in the mid-eighties, checking around, trying to sniff me out. That was when he killed that assistant of mine simply because he’d seen her with me and decided that she was my mistress. But I got away that time and he left, returned to Crete. We’ve learned he went to England a number of times, but he hasn’t gone back there recently. Unofficially, he could have bounced in and out of the United States with a dozen different phony passports. Who in Greece would catch on to that? Or if they did, even care?”

“Still, we have to assume that he was in Crete most of the time. For God’s sake, he was married. He eventually had a kid with this woman. So he simply can’t know his way around here all that well.”

Thomas said, “Becca is right. He’s a monster, no matter the excuses I make for the man I knew more than twenty years ago. Of course I didn’t really know him. He was just a target to me, always on the opposite side, the black king to checkmate. Now we’re forced to wait, to gnaw our elbows. Krimakov will find us, count on it.

“Oh yeah, Tellie Hawley and Scratch Cobb are coming tomorrow morning to speak to Becca. Maybe that’ll be good. I think she liked them both when she met them in New York. Maybe she’ll remember more talking to them. They’re pretty desperate, as you can well imagine. Hawley is eating himself alive with guilt. They were his agents, all four of them, and now they’re dead.”

“Yes,” Adam said, and streaked his fingers through his hair, sending it on end. “Since Savich found Krimakov’s apartment in Iráklion, our people will go in. Just maybe they’ll find something.”

Becca leaned her forehead against the closed door, listening to their voices as they moved off down the hall. She turned then and leaned back against the door, her arms crossed over her chest, just as Adam had done when he’d first come into her room. She closed her eyes.

He’d murdered four more people. Like Thomas, she knew Krimakov would find them. It was as if he were somehow programmed to find Thomas and kill him. And her, too, of course. He would do anything, go anywhere, kill anyone in his way, to gain his objective.

How could he have killed his wife and her two children, his stepchildren? And his own son was in a burn hospital in Switzerland. Had that one truly been an accident? No, there were no accidents when it came to Krimakov. It was beyond terrifying.

She returned to her bed, curled up, hugging her arms around her knees. It was warm, very warm, but she was cold all the way to her bone marrow. Suddenly, she heard her mother’s voice, sharp with impatience, telling her that if she even considered going out with Tim Hardaway—that juvenile delinquent—she would lock her in a closet for a month. Now she smiled with the memory; then, at sixteen, she had believed her life was over. She wondered what her mother would think of Adam. She smiled, then shivered a bit, remembering that hard, fast kiss. Her mother, she thought, would love Adam.

Suddenly, she heard a whispery sound. She jerked up in bed, her heart pounding, and looked toward the window. Again, that whispery brushing sound. Her heart pumping fast and faster now, she walked over and forced herself to look outside. There was an oak tree there, the end of one leaf-laden branch lightly brushing its leaves over the windowpane.

But he was close, she knew that. On her way back to bed, she kept looking over her shoulder out the bedroom window. She didn’t want to speak to any more agents. Oh God, just how close was he?

How close?

Now everyone in the world knew about Krimakov. Adam watched the old photograph of him flash on CNN and all the major networks. Then it was set beside the photograph the CIA artist had aged, showing what Krimakov would probably look like today. It was a fine job. With luck, it matched enough so he could be recognized. Becca hadn’t remembered anything more, however, when she’d looked at the photos.

Everyone wanted to interview Becca Matlock, but no one knew where she was.

The New York cops wanted to talk to her, but this time, she didn’t have to put up with Letitia Gordon. The FBI had told them to stuff it after the murder of the four FBI agents in NYU Hospital. There was a lot of name-calling, a lot of rancor, but at least she wasn’t in the middle of it now. She’d been lost in the shuffle. She was safe.

As for Thomas Matlock, his identity had leaked quickly enough, but at least no one knew where he was, either. If there had been a leak, they knew media vans would be parked in the yard and microphones would be sticking through the windows of the house.