Act of Treason

8

R etsina is a Greek wine that is preserved with pine resin. To some deluded Greek nationalists it is the wine of the gods. To anyone who has ever tasted a decent bottle of French Bordeaux, retsina is about as enjoyable as drinking turpentine. Gazich hated retsina, and so did Andreas. The old man’s promise that he would set aside his best bottle of retsina could have been taken as an attempt at humor. One friend ribbing another, but Andreas did not stay on the line to listen to his tenant’s response. He didn’t even laugh. He hung up right after taking his shot. That was not Andreas’s style. He liked to goad and tease.

Something was wrong. Gazich could feel it. His house was in the hills on the outskirts of Limassol. He was tempted to go there first, but he resisted the urge. He had the cab drive him by his office nice and slow, but not too slow. He saw the man sitting behind the wheel of the parked car and the other man on the sidewalk. Gazich then asked the driver to take him to the Amathus Beach Hotel where he checked into a room, cleaned up, and plotted his next move.
Gazich was not someone who was quick to anger. He was more apt to stew over things and let them come to a boil. That was what happened while he ate his dinner on the private balcony of his hotel room. In his mind it was already a foregone conclusion that these a*sholes who had hired him had decided to go back on their word. There was a chance that the law had come looking for him, but it was slim. Gazich had followed the FBI’s investigation in the press and their was no mention of them looking for a lone trigger man. Everything coming out of Washington suggested that they were going after several terrorist groups. Gazich did not have a complete sense of the FBI’s capabilities, but he did know it was next to impossible for them to run an investigation without leaking to the press.
Running would be the smart thing to do. He had over three million stashed in various banks around Europe and the Mediterranean. Invested properly, he could live in relative luxury in any third world country of his choosing for the rest of his days. He had grown attached to Cyprus, though. His house, his office, the lax banking laws. It was the perfect fit. An island nation unto itself. The more Gazich thought about it, the angrier he became, and not just at his double-crossing employer, but at himself. Why had he been in such a rush to take their money? The answer was obvious. The money. He should have followed that old axiom—if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
There was the issue of Andreas and his family to consider. Gazich could only guess what kind of pressure was being put on him. They were good people trying to make an honest living, and now they were sucked into this lethal drama. The easy thing for Gazich would have been to leave the island. Hop on the first ferry in the morning and forget about Cyprus, his assets, and the friendships he’d forged there, but he was tired of running. For over ten weeks he’d been packing and unpacking every few days. Running may have been the smart thing to do, but it was also the cowardly thing to do.
Gazich was no coward. Never had been. Never would be. He knew he was a thrill seeker. Someone who needed action. Someone who often liked to choose the path of most resistance. He did it to test his skills. He did it to prove that he was better than all the others. He needed to prove he was king of the jungle. In DC he had gone elephant hunting. Here on Cyprus he was going to turn the tables on the hunters.
The objective was survival. The side game would be to kill these men without getting caught or even raising the attention of the local authorities. One more body dumped in the Mediterranean was nothing. Although a couple of men killed on the sidewalk in front of Andreas’s café might actually be good for business. Either way, the end game was to find the man, or men, who had hired him, and kill them. That was the only way to finish it. The tricky part would be keeping one of these guys alive long enough to get something useful out of him.
Gazich checked his watch. It was a Saturday night, which in Limassol meant the dance clubs and bars would get hopping soon. He would have to make one stop and then by the time he arrived at the café things would be nice and busy. These men would never know what hit them.