Unknown 9 by Layton Green (each kindness read aloud txt) 📕

“I don’t see,” he said as he returned her hand, “how that could be possible.”

“Such a Casanova. What brings you to the jewel of the Caribbean?”

“I’m an overworked physicist from New York who needed some time in the sun. And you?”

“What a coincidence! I’m an overworked reporter from New York who needed some time in the sun.”

“You don’t sound like a New Yorker.”

“I was raised in Greece, and neither do you.”

“Touché,” he said. “Then I have to say, indeed, what an incredible coincidence this appears to be. What are you investigating in Cartagena?”

“At the moment, a physicist.”

He grinned back, appreciating the wordplay. “Wouldn’t that be a pair of physicists?”

A coy smile was her only response.

He bought her another glass of wine. After a depressing examination of the My Lai Massacre and the other tragedies of the Vietnam War, they escaped to a playful discussion of free love, art, and global literature. What an intelligent and free-spirited woman this was!

When Dr. Corwin asked her back to his room, she leaned in so close her hair brushed his arm. The combination of alcohol and sun-kissed flesh, underlaid with a light rose perfume, made him dizzy. She whispered, “I prefer mine.”

“I’m afraid that’s impossible,” he said.

“Why?”

“Because I don’t trust you in the slightest. How is Hans, by the way?”

She batted her almond-shaped eyes. “Who?”

He chuckled, stood, and held out an arm. “Are you coming? Shall we ‘ascend’ the staircase side by side?”

After pursing her lips and affording him a lingering look he couldn’t quite decipher—and which he found quite thrilling—she accepted his arm.

Upon entering his suite on the top floor of the hotel, which included a four-poster bed and a balcony overlooking the city, Dr. Corwin said, “I’ll need to search you, of course.”

“That’s not very gentlemanly.”

“I’m unsure whether you were sent to kill me or seduce me. If the former, I’ll need to confiscate your weapon. If the latter, well, perhaps I’ll take my chances.”

As he reached for the hem of her dress, she cocked her head, bemused, and raised her arms above her head, entwining her wrists like a belly dancer. Watching for sudden movements, he lifted off her dress and set it aside. There was nothing underneath except lace underwear and smooth Mediterranean skin.

“Satisfied?” she asked in a throaty voice.

“Oh, I’m a long way from that.” He placed his thumbs on the edge of her underwear, sliding it slowly down her hips as she arched into him and purred with pleasure. “I’m afraid I’m a very thorough man.”

Their lovemaking was the most intense sexual encounter of Dr. Corwin’s life. Like him, Ana was a passionate and experienced lover who enjoyed exploring every inch of her partner. The fact that each knew the other was an enemy, yet chose to accept the danger and vulnerability of the encounter, ratcheted his desire to new heights. It seemed to do so for her as well, though he had to wonder if she was acting. He thought not—he liked to think he could tell the difference—but that, too, was part of the excitement.

Bah, he thought, ashing a cigarette in the marble ashtray beside the bed when they were finished. He was holding a glass of rum from the minibar in his other hand, and Ana was sleeping soundly beside him in a surprising show of trust.

Or is it because the Ascendants know we’re not ruthless like them and I won’t kill her in her sleep?

After ensuring there was no gun planted in the bedside table or under her pillow, he lay awake and pondered the conversation with Alvaro for the umpteenth time.

And then, all at once, infused with the warmth of the rum and the high of the nicotine and that strangely lucid indolence that follows a pleasing sexual encounter, it came together in his mind.

Tromereo was a very unusual surname. So unusual, in fact, that Dr. Corwin could find no mention of the name anywhere, whether belonging to a physicist or not. He had thought it sounded Italian, but a search of phone books from New York and major European cities had uncovered no entry. Apart from that troubling fact, there was something about the name that had plagued him all day, some confluence of vowel sounds that had lodged in his subconscious.

Sitting upright in bed, he had started rearranging the letters in his mind, and discovered a shocking result.

Oh Mother Mary. It was so simple. That look of secret knowledge on the curandero’s face during their discussion . . . the sly old devil had known all along.

The name Nataja Tromereo possessed the exact same letters as Ettore Majorana.

   7   

On the way to Dubai, where Andie and Cal were scheduled to catch a private jet to Kolkata, the helicopter pilot stopped twice during the night to refuel at semi-abandoned estates in remote locations. One was a whitewashed manor house in western Turkey; the other, a flat-roofed adobe compound somewhere in the undulating red-gold dunes of the Saudi Arabian desert.

The journey in the cramped copter was arduous. At each of the stops, Andie visited the restroom and stretched her legs before climbing wearily back into the folding seats behind the cockpit, grimly aware it might be too late to reach the science institute before the Ascendants.

She and Cal were carrying the clothes on their backs, the Star Phone, and the contents of the pouch Zawadi had given them. In particular, Andie missed her jade ring with the band of entwined silver her mother had given her the night she’d left home. The Ascendants had taken the ring in Venice. Andie felt a twinge of phantom pain, once buried as deep as an ocean trench, on the finger where the ring used to rest.

Andie had never really voiced, even to herself, her reasons for hanging on to the ring through the years. She always told herself that she liked the way it looked—which was true—but