Seven Against Greece (1967)

  (The twenty-six book in the Killmaster series)

  Version 0.9

  Dedicated to The Men of the Secret Services of the United States of America

  CHAPTER 1

  THAT SUMMER rumors in Athens were plentiful. There was talk of political discontent; that Gorgas, the terrorist leader, had escaped from exile in the Indian Ocean and the inflammatory word enosis was heard once more in the land. Of course, the tourists who crowded Constitution Square were only interested in knowing if there was any danger to them. They were reassured, by those parties who profited from the tourist trade, that rumors were simply rumors; wishful thinking on the part of certain failures, malcontents and the unemployed.

  So the tourists came by plane, train and boat and, if they happened to be Americans, their stay was made more rewarding by a bright new public-relations agency which, though privately financed, was the government’s pride and joy. The people behind this outfit seemed to know more about what free-spending Americans liked than P. T. Barnum and Mike Todd combined. Athens’ share of the overseas tourist dollar climbed disproportionately to the rest of Europe. And the political handwriting on the wall merely added spice to the tourist’s visit like the throbbing of guitars at the outdoor night clubs. Who could keep track of Balkan politics anyway?

  A good many miles from Athens a young American had been keeping close track of events for some time. He now desperately wished to communicate his findings. He sat among other men, huddled in their sheepskins against the cold, for the nights even in summer are chilly in the high places. But he wasn’t going to communicate anything to anyone. His hands were tied. He knew that he was about to die.

  He sat there and stared at the water which seethed far below. Was it the Aegean or the Ionian? He didn’t really care. It was amazing the way your professional instincts worked up to the very end. Points of reference, the identifying features of the men who were about to kill him—that was all pretty academic by now. He ought to be thinking about his boyhood, he supposed, or the girl he left behind.

  The man who was about to die wasn’t frightened. He felt only that tension which always preceded action; the pre-kick-off. flutters he always got playing ball back at Ohio State. The fear would come later he thought. Then he realized that there would be no later. If he had one official last thought, he decided, he wished he could send one last cypher transmission telling what he now knew to a man named Hawk in Washington. It was frustrating as hell to have cracked the case and not be able to report it.

  One of the sheepskins came over and placed a cigarette between the young man’s lips without meeting his eyes.

  The black tobacco tasted awful but the casual act of humanity nearly made the young man lose his hard-pressed self-control and start to beg for his life. These men can’t be so bad, he thought. Life was very sweet and desirable at that moment. It seemed a terrible foolishness on everyone’s part that he was about to leave it. The American was young in years but old in experience. He wasn’t about to ask for his life because they weren’t going to grant it. He spared himself the. indignity. Pride, he thought ruefully, is probably the only baggage we can take to hell.

  Then one of the sheepskins who was on the telephone hung up.

  “The woman says now. Tonight,” the man said.

  It was the signal for action. The whole party rose, went out of the hut and began climbing the old goatherd’s trail up the hillside, the sheepskins prodding the young man with their pistols when he showed signs of faltering and boosting him over the hard places.

  The man behind the American, the one who had been on the telephone, was wearing a sheepskin but he was not of the sheepskins. He was the leader.

  “Fearful sweat these goat trails, aren’t they, old man?” said the man behind the American. The American said nothing. He was thinking that it was foolish of him to be cooperating with his murderers but he couldn’t see any other choice. He had been drugged for some time and wasn’t feeling very strong. If he jumped from the trail—well, the slopes here weren’t steep enough to do more than add a great deal of suffering to his death. He had never thought he could be so analytical about it.

  At one point the young man stumbled.

  “Do you think you can cope, old man?” The voice behind sounded genuinely concerned.

  “I’ll be all right,” the American said.

  “Of course you will,” the man behind him said. Then he shot the American in the back of the head and the American didn’t even hear the gun go off.

  The man with the pistol took a long pull from a silver flask and stared at his work with satisfaction. Then he started down the rocky slope to tell the woman. The American chap had been a bit of luck all right. This sort of job was out of his line and cost his employers extra. Money that he could certainly use.

  Washington, D.C., was almost as hot as Athens but it was the more oppressive, sultry heat of summer in the so-called temperate zones. To the people who had to work there it was a hot, sticky, overcrowded city no more glamorous than any other. Congress stood adjourned and that afternoon the Senators had clinched last place in the

  American League with a spectacular loss to their nearest rivals for that distinction, the Boston Red Sox.

  In the traffic streaming away from the ball park was a new, low-slung, black limousine, showroom-shiny despite the dusty appearance of most of the other cars on the road. It eventually drew to a stop in front of the undistinguished offices of the Amalgamated Press and Wire Services on DuPont Circle. Inside the air-conditioned car, the Vice President of the United States turned to his companion.

  “Are you sure I can’t drop you in Georgetown?” the Vice President asked. “Remember with this new economy drive, the air conditioning in Government office buildings goes off at five o’clock.”

  The gray-haired man beside the Vice President shook his head.

  “Thanks very much, but no. Be sure your sins will find you out. I might have known I couldn’t get to a ball game without something coming up. I’ll just have to suffer.”

  After some further joking about what could be so important as all that, the Vice Presidential limousine and its following Secret Service limousine drew away. The gray-haired old man who had been the Vice President’s guest threw a friendly wave at the departing limousine, then turned and walked into the office building and ascended by a private elevator to the top floor.

  He was very lean and erect, this old man, with a posture that suggested the career soldier and the direct, analytical gaze of a country-newspaper editor. Friend of Wild Bill Donovan, Allen Dulles and others, he had been around Washington a long time. Not too widely known even in this inbred city. A strange situation when you considered the fact that he met daily with the Secretary of State and monthly with the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

  His gray hair was somewhat wispy now but his stride and bearing had the athletic ease of a man twenty years younger. He wore tweeds which looked as if they had been cut in London. His eyes, which could twinkle with ancient humor or remain as cold as a vivisectionist’s, were merely thoughtful as he entered his private office, a large room, expensively furnished but almost as sparse and stripped for action as its owner. The old man walked directly to his heavy oak desk, nodding a greeting to the man who was already in the room and who appeared to be concentrating on blowing a perfect smoke ring.

  The. old man’s name was Hawk. From that desk he ran the United States Government’s highest and most secret intelligence agency. The big man seated in front of him was N3, his top agent and a man after the old man’s heart. Which meant, in practice, that he usually gave N3 a harder time than he did anyone else.

  The old man sat back in his chair and leveled an appraising glance at his number-one agent. He knew, of course, that N3 had passed his Phys-Psych clearance for another mission with flying colors. But other agents had passed, then cracked under pressure in the field. He took his time looking N3 over. In the end he seemed satisfied with what he saw.

  “Good vacation, Carter?”

  “Never better,” the agent said. His name was Nick Carter. He was big and looked somewhat like a professional athlete, who had the savvy to move on to advertising or public relations when his playing days were over. His hard, classically handsome face was saved from collar-ad prettiness by a leavening of intelligence and a readiness to laugh, indicated by the lines around his eyes. Now he lounged in his chair, relaxed and tanned after three weeks aboard a sport fisherman in the Florida Keys and nights of love and laughter with the sweet swinging daughter of the tennis pro at the local luxury hotel.

  “MacDonald’s dead,” Hawk said flatly.

  “I know. I heard on the way in,” Nick said. “Greece, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes,” Hawk said. “It was Greece.” He took an evil-looking black cigar from a humidor on his desk and lit it. “You know I thought that boy was going to go a long way with us. Came to us from Army Security. Splendid record.”

  Nick said nothing. He knew a lot of dead men with splendid records. Dwelling on the deaths of agents didn’t pay.

  “Funny,” Hawk went on, “I didn’t think it was really dangerous when I sent him in there. It was, though. They found his body in the mountains with a little hole in the back of his skull and no face left in front. Hands were tied. Summers get pretty hot there and they bury bodies quickly. No qualified autopsy. Death by the hand of a person or persons unknown.”

  Hawk removed the cigar from the corner of
his mouth and regarded it thoughtfully. He was in the position of a man who designs and builds expensive racing cars. His agents were the drivers. No matter how well he conceived and staged an operation it was up to the agents to carry it through to success. All that he could really do was set tilings up and keep his fingers crossed.

  Nick Carter almost never let him down. Others did more often. Often they payed with their lives when that happened. Therefore, Hawk never criticized one agent to another. That didn’t mean he liked losing, though.

  “MacDonald was investigating an Athenian public-relations outfit,” Hawk said, “that’s gone into business the last couple of years promoting travel in Greece and the Islands. Call themselves Golden Island Promotions. A slick outfit with plenty of cash behind them.”

  He used the cigar to indicate a pile of glossy American magazines on his desk.

  “They spend a fortune courting American reporters and communications people. Special press junkets to the Greek Islands via jet. Treat ‘em like royalty while they’re there. Result is, it’s very much the fashionable thing these days to spend your vacation in Greece. And,” he said leaning forward and staring quizzically at Nick, “to come back home with a Greek wife or upstairs maid or sponsored student or what have you. Anyone you can get on a preferred quota.”

  He sat back and tapped a folder in front of him.

  “It was the immigration quota figures that told me something was wrong. Way out of proportion. We have a flood of Greeks coming into the States, all sponsored, one way or another, by American clients of Golden Island Promotions. What do you think about that?”

  “Sounds worth having a look into.”

  “That’s just what I thought. Just worth a look. So I sent MacDonald to look. Now I’m drafting a letter to his parents.”

  “Of course he could have gotten mixed up in something else,” Nick suggested. “From what I hear, Athens is a pot that’s about to boil over.”

  “Of course that occurred to me, too,” Hawk snapped. “That’s what you’re going to do. Go to Athens. Follow MacDonald’s footsteps. Find out what he was onto and where he went wrong. Most important, find out what these Golden Island people are up to.” Hawk leaned back and attempted to relight the cigar, which had gone out. “And come back alive,” he added generously.

  “Did MacDonald get anything back to us before he died?” Nick asked.

  Hawk shook his head. “Apparently he had just gotten hot when they caught onto him. We sent him in as a big-time journalist. Thought it might give him a little leeway if they caught him snooping around. It made communications much easier too. In any case, something obviously went wrong. I don’t know at what point.” Hawk paused.

  “You’re going to Greece as an archeologist. That’s a man who digs around in old cities to find out what they were like.”

  Nick said, “Thank you.” Deadpan. Hawk suppressed a smile.

  “That cover should bring the Golden Island people running, eager to sell you on the idea of bringing some of their young people—‘hosts and hostesses,’ they call ‘em— back to the States through your contacts at American universities and colleges. I have already taken steps to make you a very well-known archeologist.”

  Hawk sat back and pointed to a statuette on the window sill.

  “Know what that is?”

  “Venus of Cyrene,” Nick said promptly. “Bronze reproduction. Expensive. Good copy.’”

  “Carter, you continually astonish me.” Hawk had the faintly puzzled look he always affected when N3 demonstrated knowledge unrelated to the world of counterespionage or sexual dalliance.

  “Put it down to all the time I spent hanging around drafty museums waiting to be contacted by shifty-eyed guys with folded newspapers.”

  “I’ll put it down to your obsession with the female figure.”

  Nick cocked an eyebrow and let himself relax deeper into his seat.

  Hawk cleared his throat.

  “Permit an old man his whimsies, Carter. Remember you’re going off to the sunny Grecian Islands and I’m facing another hot summer with the bureaucrats of Foggy Bottom. You’re going to Greece, yes,” he added, “but fust you’re going to school.”

  Nick groaned inwardly but said nothing. Hawk’s painstaking methods paid off. When Nick finished his cram course in archeology he would be able to pass as an expert among other experts. He would not be given away by a stupid technical slip,

  “Be happy in your work, my boy,” Hawk said gleefully, noting Nick’s woebegone look. “You will return to us from Greece even more magnificently bronzed and with an erudition in classical lore that will be the talk of Washington.”

  That made them about even as far as wisecracks went. Hawk continued more seriously.

  “The only trouble with this cover is that it won’t let you get around easily in the seedier sections of town or be seen with sonic of the types you may want to talk with. So first we’ll send you in as Professor Harding, as bait for the Golden Island’s people. You’ll hang around the archeological diggings in the old city for awhile. Then an emergency will call you back to the States for an indefinite period.”

  The slim old man leaned forward, his eyes dancing with a schoolboyish excitement. Nick grinned. Hawk delighted in this sort of sleight of hand.

  “I’ll fix things up with the captain of a freighter that calls regularly at Piraeus. You’ll have papers and a berth. Once you go ashore in Piraeus you can use them or not as you see fit. The captain will back you up in anything reasonable. Just remember that he has to answer to the owners, not me, so he can’t go too far for you.”

  Nick understood perfectly. Nobody, but nobody, loved an agent in the field. When things went wrong you were the original invisible man.

  The rest of the interview was taken up with technical details; methods of cash transfers for expenses, communications systems and the long system of contacts that would turn Nick Carter into Professor Andrew Harding and Able-bodied Seaman Thomas Evans.

  The mills of American Intelligence, Hawk was fond of saying, grind slowly but they grind exceedingly fine. From the pressurized cabin of the Apollo Airways jet, the traveler could look down at the rocky spine of the Balkan Mountains, gray and brown in the blazing sunshine. From the air, it was a dead land rising sparse and barren out of the deep blue of the Aegean Sea. As the jet began its long descent into Athens, the passengers were afforded a closer look at the tiny harbor towns perched precariously on the rock shelves where the mountains plunged into the sea. In the valleys the river beds were white trails, dry now in the summer sun.

  The seat-belt sign went on and a moment later the aircraft lurched as the flaps went out. The passengers stirred, anticipating relief from the boredom of the long flight. Then they began to look nervous as they always did when their airborne living room gave signs that it was just another flying machine. The hostesses passed up the aisle checking seat belts with quick professional glances.

  “Comfortabley Professor Harding?” The hostess paused at the seat of the big American in the summer suit. “Is there anything else we can do for you before we land?” Her dark-eyed glance flicked over him with a knowledgeable approval that was more than just professional courtesy. She had been especially attentive throughout the whole flight.

  The big American’s smile was disarming, for it managed somehow to be both dazzling and rather unworldly at the same time. The loosely knotted tie, the rumpled hair and the pile of old, unjacketed books in his lap contributed to the charming impression of scholastic preoccupation.

  “I don’t think so,” he said. “You’ve all been most kind. A wonderful flight really. It seems as if we just left New York.”

  The hostess smiled prettily, thanked the Professor and went on up the aisle. If that one in the summer suit was a professor, she thought, things had changed a great deal for the better since she had left school.

  The Professor smiled to himself. He was pleased. He could tell by the slightly patronizing way that people spoke to him that they were buying his act; the good-natured, bookish fellow more interested in ancient verse than a well-turned leg, a fumbler for boarding passes, unable to figure local currencies but a sound man on early Minoan pottery.

  The pert airline hostess would have been shocked, or perhaps thrilled, to learn that the rumpled Professor knew several different ways to kill a man in total silence; that he had used a number of these in action during the last few years; that the Professor was known in certain circles in Washington, Moscow, Peking and perhaps half a dozen other cities as Killmaster; that his name was Nick Carter and that in a number of those cities there was a substantial price on his head.