MALTA
Luke’s attention alternated between the phone and the woman in the boat across the water, one arm keeping the rifle trained. He was having trouble hearing over the hum of the outboard, so he cut the engine.
“Who is she?” he asked Stephanie.
“She wanted me to bring her on, noting you might need help. I asked how she knew anything about anything, but she offered nothing. I told her you could handle it without her help.”
“Any reason you didn’t pass that intel on to me?”
“Her call just came about an hour ago. I tried to reach you, but you didn’t answer.”
He’d left his phone in the rental car.
“I answered this call because it’s the same number from earlier,” she said.
He was drifting away from the other boat and watched as Laura Price maneuvered herself back near him. He lowered the rifle, deciding she was no longer a direct threat. But that didn’t mean she wasn’t trouble.
“Tell me about her,” he said.
“What makes you think I know anything?”
“We wouldn’t still be talking if you didn’t.”
He’d worked with Stephanie long enough to know that she never left anything to chance. She ran the Magellan Billet with military efficiency, accepting nothing less than perfection from her agents. Thanks to her personal relationship with his uncle, former president Danny Daniels, Luke liked to think that he enjoyed a closer connection with his boss, though he knew she would never show favoritism. Stephanie expected her people to do their jobs. Period. Who you were mattered not. Mistakes were barely tolerated. Results. That’s what she wanted. And she’d diverted him here to get results.
But he’d messed up.
Bad.
“She works for the Malta Security Service,” Stephanie said.
“This little island has an intelligence agency?”
“Part of the Armed Forces of Malta. It’s not big, but it does exist. She worked at the CIA for a few years. They remember her at Langley. Seems she doesn’t follow orders well. An adrenaline junkie. A loose cannon, but generally one that fires in the right direction.”
“That sounds like me.”
“My thoughts exactly.”
“Any idea why the Maltese are involved in this?”
“Not a clue. But she’s apparently been on you the whole time.”
Which he’d missed.
Another mistake.
He stared across the water at his stalker. She was blond and striking with high cheekbones and a pretty mouth. Straight, squared-off bangs highlighted a narrow brow. She wore jeans, belted at the waist, with an open-collared shirt that revealed deeply tanned arms. A looker. No question. And she seemed in terrific shape, muscle-hardened in a way he liked. Obviously, she knew how to drive a boat, shoot a gun, and try to make herself useful. Combined with the balls of an alley cat he could see how she might be regarded as a loose cannon.
“What do you want me to do?” he asked.
“I don’t like pushy people or liars. Get rid of her.”
He smiled to himself. “It’d be my pleasure.”
“Tell me what happened with Gallo.”
“A slight problem. But I’ll fix it.”
“Do that.”
And the call ended.
He continued to speak into the phone, pretending the conversation was ongoing, but assessing the situation. He still held the rifle. Laura Price lingered about twenty feet off his port side. He simulated ending the call and motioned with the phone that he needed to return it to her. If he kept it cool he may just be able to catch her off guard. Things were bad with the cardinal, but he’d find that trail again. Crap happened. The trick was not to let it stink everything up.
The rifle was pointed down toward the deck.
He motioned with the phone and she worked the boat closer. He tossed it over. She caught the unit and he used that moment to level the weapon and fire three rounds into her engine.
She lunged to the deck.
The outboard erupted in sparks and smoke.
He chuckled.
Those three hundred horses were now useless.
He turned the key and brought his own boat to life, spinning the wheel, engaging the throttle, throwing out a wake as he motored away that soaked the other boat. A glance back and he saw Price rebound to her feet, but he was already too far away for any meaningful shot from her on a pitching deck.
He threw her a wave, hoping never to see her again.
Time to find Gallo and get back on track.
He glanced toward shore and the Madliena Tower. The cardinal and the other man were gone. He worked the wheel and avoided some of the larger chops, paralleling the coast, cruising east toward Valletta where his rental car awaited. Vibrations from the engine rattled up through the deck and energized him.
No one was following.
Clearly, Laura Price would have to find a lift back to shore.
But those were the breaks.
He tried to fool himself into thinking that he understood women. But truth be told, he didn’t. He liked to toss out a devil-may-care attitude and make the ladies think he was some kind of bad boy they could tame. That worked in his favor more times than not, but there was always the occasional disaster.
Actually he was a mama’s boy, calling that saint of a woman every Sunday, no matter where he might be in the world. She knew that he was an intelligence agent. Stephanie had allowed him to reveal that to her and she’d loved it. Of her four children—whom they named Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—he was the wild child. The others had respectable jobs, families, homes, mortgages. He alone remained single, traveling the world, doing what the Magellan Billet needed done.
He’d yet to find that perfect combination of lover, companion, confidante, and partner. Maybe one day. Women seemed to marry a man expecting him to change, but he doesn’t. Men marry a woman expecting that she won’t change, but she does. That was a problem. What had one potential bride told him? Husbands are like cars. They’re all good the first year.
Lots of truth to that one.
Career, achievement, independence, and travel were tops on his list at the moment. Marriage and children not so much. Danny Daniels being his uncle may have cracked open a few doors that might have otherwise been closed, but those doors stayed open thanks to him being damn good at what he did. Of course, the past half hour had not been his finest moment.
He kept the boat headed south, recalling more of what he’d read last night.
After the Great Siege of 1565, when the Turks tried to forcibly take Malta, Grand Master Jean Parisot de Valette decided to build a fortified town on a barren limestone peninsula on the north coast. It would be Europe’s first planned city since Roman times, laid out on a grid, with a moat on its southern side and bastion walls all around. Harbors shielded to the east and west, providing ideal anchorages. For a seafaring power like the Knights of Malta, the location proved a perfect headquarters, and they eventually adapted the island into an impregnable naval base.
Two miles long and a mile wide, Valletta’s cluster of tightly packed buildings had long housed the knights and everything needed to support them. The city remained the sole witness to four centuries of hard work and magnificence. Its churches, shops, residences, palazzi, storehouses, forts, and the grand master’s palace had somehow survived, even after Hitler relentlessly bombed every square inch during World War II.
Its buildings stood in straight lines, purposefully packed close to shade the streets from the intense Mediterranean sun and to allow a sea breeze to pass through unimpeded. All told, about two thousand structures of noble elegance had been built within five years. But it took another twenty-five years after to perfect it. Little had changed since the 17th century. Luke particularly liked what de Valette had said about his creation.
Built by gentlemen for gentlemen.
The white battlements of Fort St. Elmo came into view, standing point guard at the end of the towering peninsula, commanding a stunning view of the open sea. He imagined its cannon blasting out into the harbor, repelling the advancing Turks. The whole Great Siege seemed the stuff of Hollywood. Suleiman the Magnificent—what a name—sent 40,000 warriors and over 200 ships to take Malta for Islam. De Valette commanded 500 knights, 1,100 soldiers, and 6,000 local militia. Despite pleas, no Christian king lifted a finger to help, as they were too busy killing one another.
So de Valette stood alone.
The invasion came furious and bloody, all happening during a miserably hot summer. Fort St. Elmo held out a month before finally yielding. But a lack of supplies, little fresh water, and dysentery ravaged the Turks. Terror ran rampant on both sides. Dead knights were mutilated, their headless bodies floated across the harbor on crosses to the occupied forts on the other side. Grand Master de Valette’s reply was to decapitate Turkish prisoners and fire their heads back as cannonballs.
Talk about tit-for-tat.
Finally, in September 1565, reinforcements arrived from Sicily and the Turks retreated. If things had turned out differently, Muslim shipping would have ruled the Mediterranean from a Maltese base and all of Europe would have been at risk.
But the knights saved Christendom.
He angled the boat past Fort St. Elmo and headed into the Grand Harbor, still girdled by forts and watchtowers. Waving flags cast a colorful welcome along the bastions and across the harbor in the Three Cities. A cruise ship nestled close to one of the long wharves, its passengers flooding onto the docks. Another was anchored offshore. He angled toward the marina. The towboat from earlier was nowhere to be seen. The boat’s engine lost its steady thumping beat and slowed, ready to reenter the protected haven crowded with yachts swinging peacefully at anchor.
His car waited in a small lot a few blocks away.
He eased the boat close to the dock, killing the engine and tying it off to a couple of empty cleats.
He hopped off, leaving the rifle in the boat, and trotted ashore.
Two men cut him off.