Hooked (16 page)

She concentrated not just on her physical health but on her spiritual well-being as well. She read philosophers, poets and psychologists and reflected on the purpose of life. She sought wisdom from a local imam and studied with a Greek Orthodox priest. She explored every part of her psyche in her quest for understanding and self-knowledge.

She was now functioning at full capacity just as Gavin Jenkins said every human being was capable of — but she was doing it without drugs or the adulation of crowds. There was a purity about Adriana’s existence now that showed in everything that she did.

She was at this stage of her new life — a new life devoted to vengeance — when she and Cleo sat on a terrace facing the Aegean and shared a lunch of mezze and grilled fish. The two women talked for hours about the past and the future and the urgent steps Gail and Suzanne were taking to help the President.

“It’s Nicky,” said Adriana. “James Santana would never have heard of Gavin Jenkins without Nicky. Ames Bostwick wouldn’t be in a straightjacket in a sanitorium if it weren’t for Nicky. I lost my art, my fortune, my will to live because of Nicky—”

At first, he didn’t recognize her. The last time he’d seen her was in the photographs taken at the end of her comeback tour when she’d been ravaged by age, drugs and disappointment. Now she was radiant, her russet hair, once again thick and luxuriant, gleaming with reddish highlights, her skin fresh and taut, her posture powerful and erect. Her transformation, he thought, was due to more than just the effects of a talented hair colorist or a gifted facialist or the result of plastic surgery. She glowed with inner health and new vitality.

She was sitting in the Bemelman’s Bar of the Carlyle Hotel sipping a glass of Evian. How odd of her, he thought. He was so used to her vodka martinis.

“Adriana?” he said tentatively.

She nodded. “Nicky,” she said, extending her hand. “You almost didn’t recognize me, did you?”

“No,” he admitted, ordering a vodka martini for himself. “You look lovely,” he continued, more conscious than ever of his own aged appearance and diminished abilities. “Better than I’ve ever see you. What have you done to yourself?”

“I’ll tell you later,” she smiled, opening her purse and taking out a piece of paper. A letter, Nicky realized, as she handed it to him. “First there’s something I want to talk to you about—”

Nicky looked more closely at the letter. Recognized it.

“Where did you get this?” he asked.

“That’s not the point,” she said.

“Gavin Jenkins gave it to you?” he said, pressing the question.

“The point is I have it now,” Adriana said. “As you well know, the release of this letter to the press will cause massive upheaval in Egypt and perhaps the entire mid-east. It will also ensure that you face execution or, at the very least, spend the rest of your life in prison. For ordering the murders of Sadun, X and the girl, Seema—”

Nicky, who had spent his life calculating the financial value of everything, did a quick calculation.

“Five million?” he asked.

Adriana shook her head. “Double—”

Her bank account was down to zero and she needed the money. She had been obliged to compensate the concert venues for lost revenue when she canceled the tour and failed to perform.

Nicky’s tight smile told her she had won her point and she opened the briefcase on the settee next to her.

“I’ve had my lawyers draw up the papers,” she said. “All you have to do is sign—”

Nicky, knowing he was trapped, took out the fountain pen given to him by Willy Cranford, uncapped it and signed.

“The cashier’s check will be deposited to your account tomorrow morning,” he told her.

“Yes,” she said with a wisp of a smile, as she folded the lawyer’s document and put it back into her briefcase. “I imagine it will—”

Nicky was reluctantly impressed that he had been out maneuvered, something that rarely happened. He also could not get over the fact that Adriana had apparently discovered the fountain of youth.

“I can’t believe how wonderful you look,” he said. “I don’t believe in miracles but you’ve transformed yourself. What happened? Who helped you? How did you do it?”

“Why do you ask?”

“As you can see, I’ve aged in the past year,” he said. Then he confided in her as only a man can with a former still-admired mistress. “I’m not as mentally sharp. I’m sexually fatigued. Just now, you out maneuvered me. For years, no one could. Not even you, Adriana. I want to be young again. Like you—”

“It’s easy,” Adriana said, smoothing back the thick russet hair, revealing the full strength and beauty of her face. She handed him Ames’s kit — the one she had taken from his bathroom at the Imperial Hotel in Vienna. It was still full, its ampules, vials and syringes undisturbed. “It just takes a few shots—”

“And that’s it?”

Adriana nodded. “You can use as much as you want,” she said. “You’ll feel wonderful again. Just like your old self—”

“So this is your miracle?” he said, holding the kit with suddenly trembling hands. “As simple as this?”

She nodded. “Yes, Nicky,” she replied. “As simple as this. You’ll see—”

She was right. Within a week, Nicky felt his energy return along with sexual desire and the ability to do something about it. His erections were those of a young man.

“What’s your secret?” Gail asked after a long bout of love-making. “You can go for hours—”

“No secret,” Nicky smiled. “All I need is the right inspiration. You—”

With that he pushed her head down to his penis, once again hard.

Later, he asked her about the President’s decision about whether or not to rescind the oil shale concessions.

“Has he made up his mind?” he asked.

“Not until he returns from Hillside,” said Gail.

“You mean his vacation, don’t you?” Nicky asked, puzzled.

“His press secretary called it a vacation and that’s what the press is reporting,” replied Gail. “But It’s no vacation. He’s in detox—”

Nicky, worldly and extremely cynical, looked, if not shocked, then at least surprised. “He’s a drug addict?”

“That’s what his doctors say,” said Gail. “He’s been under a lot of stress, Suzanne says.

He was going to cave in to them, Nicky thought. James Santana was President but he was also a political animal responsive to special interest groups, and now, according to Gail, he was a drug addict, more erratic than ever, prone to lashing out and making impulsive decisions.

Nicky did not intend to have his next fortune rest on the whims of an unstable man. He turned, as he had in the past, to his only trusted associate.

The Soviet Secret Service had noticed Rudy Sarvo’s violent proclivities when he was a child guarding the tobacco warehouses in Izmir. At the age of twelve, Rudy had been taken to Moscow where he had been given the name Akardy Boukarev by the KGB and assigned to the Volga Commissariat, the division specializing in murder and assassination, where his skills were honed.

Akardy took part in massacres in Ukraine, Belarus and Poland and finally escaped his hated KGB minders in Krakow. Moving mostly at night, he had made his way across Eastern Europe to Turkey.

“Rudy,” said Nicholas Kiskalesi, breaking into tears at the sight of his younger brother and embracing him. “I thought you were dead—”

But he wasn’t.

Rudy had changed his name from Kiskalesi to Sarvo when he was being hunted by the Izmir police for killing the Chinese tobacco buyer with an ice pick to the brain. Now that the two orphans were united again after so many years, they vowed that forever after they would defend and protect each other. A blow to one was a blow to both.

Later, Rudy had murdered for his brother again — on the island of Cilek, in Cairo and in Chile. Now they were going to make sure James Santana did not cancel Nicky’s oil shale concessions.

Rudy had the advantages of KGB training and contacts in Moscow, the Ukraine and Bucharest. From Gail, Nicky possessed secret details about the President’s route unavailable to the public. The brothers, pooling their advantages, planned to strike and laid out a detailed plan. They chose their method, their weapon, their means of escape. They would not permit their next fortune to rest in the hands of a weak, drug-dependent man, even if that man was the President of the United States.

The President’s campaign trip ended in tragedy with the assassination of James Santana. According to initial press reports and later confirmed by a special governmental commission, the President had been killed by a lone gunman shooting from the window of an office building. The assassin, alleged to be an alienated Russian defector living in Mexico City, had subsequently died in the basement of a Texas police station as a result of what a lengthy internal investigation cited as “unknown causes.”

Gavin Jenkins was secretly spirited out of the country by the CIA in the hours immediately following the assassination and, in a nation distracted by a lengthy period of public mourning, the Kiskalesi oil concessions remained in place. For Rudy, though, riches turned to ashes when he found Nicky’s body, the syringe still hanging from his arm, on the floor of
Lydia’s
master bedroom.

Gavin Jenkins had been in Switzerland for over a year and was settled into a regular routine. He woke at precisely five o’clock
A.M.
and spent the first moments of his day looking out the window of his room toward the snowcapped Alps in the distance. Their physical beauty and the pleasures of living and working in the mountains delighted him endlessly.

He got up, his bed a thin mattress on top of a wooden pallet and put on a pair of black pants and a black shirt that comprised his entire wardrobe. He had two identical sets and washed one every evening in the small basin in his room and let it dry for a day before putting it on again. He could have given his things to the laundry that handled the clothes and the bedding of the patients but found it satisfying to do the washing himself.

He slipped into his surgeon’s clogs and walked outside with a porcelain basin and filled it with clean, fresh snow that had fallen overnight. He brought it back into his room, waited a few moments until it began to melt, and then washed his face with it and shaved. He kept his head shaved too, so he did not have to groom himself. It saved time and made life simpler.

After he had cleansed himself, it was time for his morning workout. Each day he did exactly twenty-four exercises from a series he had devised from yoga and succeeded in exercising every muscle.

Then it was time for his daily breakfast of a single thin wheat wafer, which he washed down with melted snow water. His austere diet had resulted in the loss of fifteen pounds — once lean, now he was gaunt. He was pleased with his skeletal appearance, because he believed that being fifteen to twenty pounds underweight helped prolong life. The masses of civilization, he thought, were committing themselves to an early death by overeating.

Once he was finished with his morning meal, he left his room and walked three-eighths of a kilometer to the building that housed his office. There each morning he found a plain lined white pad left by his assistant. Written on it were any unusual matters pertaining to the next twenty-four hours and any overnight developments that might require his attention.

His practice was now as simple as his life. He limited himself to two dozen patients, and they each paid one hundred dollars a day. He refused to accept less or more, although many individuals were willing to pay millions to receive his treatments. He selected each patient himself from a large list of applicants. His practice was international now, with patients coming to him from Guyana, Syria, India, Brazil, and Indonesia.

His patients had a number of things in common. They were all rich: not merely millionaires, but men controlling assets in the billions of dollars. They were powerful and influential; some were rulers who governed countries; others controlled international cartels in gold or copper or precious earth minerals. They were men whose decisions affected the population and the energy resources of the world.

His patients all had one other thing in common: each of them depended on his doctor.

On the lined pad this morning, there were two items written in his assistant’s familiar block printing. The first was about the recent, unexpected death of the Turkish tycoon, Nicky Kiskalesi. From an amphetamine overdose, according to the attached newspaper clipping.

The second item on the pad informed him of the arrival that afternoon of a new patient at two
P.M.

His name was Akardy Boukarev.

***The End***

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BRAINWASHED

By the authors of HOOKED, the bestselling thriller with multiple appearances on Kindle’s prestigious Movers & Shakers List.