A Deadly Twist by Jeffrey Siger (free novel reading sites .txt) 📕

I’ll be a very happy cop.” Andreas told her that keeping a lid on her disappearance was all his doing, and he’d done so out of concern that if she had been kidnapped, the inevitable avalanche of publicity might cause her abductor to panic and harm her. He emphasized that her publisher did not agree with his strategy.

“Thank you. I feel better knowing there were people out there who cared.” She took a sip of water from a plastic bottle. “Where do you want me to start?”

“How about with what happened the night you disappeared.”

Nikoletta shut her eyes, took a deep breath, opened her eyes, and began. “My planned final evening on Naxos had me joining some new friends for dinner in Chora, which in the inevitable Greek way led to way too much drinking and a very late night. I literally staggered out of the taverna, and in my haste to get back to the hotel, I decided to take a shortcut that involved leaving paved roads to climb a very dark, rocky dirt path that ran alongside a steep cliff high above the sea.”

She paused. “That’s all I know firsthand, because I reached my hotel without incident. The rest of what happened I learned from Soter.”

“Who’s Soter?”

Nikoletta laughed. “Sorry, I’ve been so immersed in my writing that I only think of my interviewee-turned-protector by the name I created for him in the book. In Greek mythology, Soter represented the male personification of safety and deliverance from harm.”

“Do you know his real name?”

“No. I wish I did.”

“You’re probably better off not knowing,” said Tassos.

“What did he tell you?” asked Andreas.

“On the day after my article about him appeared in the paper, he received an offer over the Dark Web to kill me. Obviously, the person making the offer didn’t realize he was the man I’d interviewed. Though he turned it down, he knew someone would take the contract because the fee was extremely high. That’s when he started following me.”

Nikoletta picked up the water bottle. “At the time, he thought I’d been targeted because of his interview. He felt responsible. That his bragging had put me in danger.” She took another sip. “The night of my disappearance, he’d been watching me from outside the taverna, and after I left, he followed me on a motorbike. When he saw me stop to stare up the hillside path, he guessed I’d take it, so he parked and made it onto the path some distance ahead of me. As he hurried up the hill, he saw a man crouched in the shadows across and back from the path at its closest point to the cliff edge. He recognized the man as a professional assassin—definitely not top-drawer, was how he later described him to me. The man did not recognize Soter or realize he’d been seen and stayed focused on my struggle up the hill. Soter walked by the man as if he hadn’t noticed him, then circled back down and around to come up behind him. He knew the man had to be planning to push me off the edge of the cliff to make it appear an ‘accidental death.’” Nikoletta used finger quotes for emphasis.

“But, as we all know, it didn’t end up that way.”

Nikoletta cleared her throat. “I was oblivious to all of that. After I’d safely reached my hotel, Soter made his way down to the rocks and stripped the now-dead would-be assassin of his mobile phone and identification. Once he’d finished with him, he called me on the man’s phone and told me to meet him outside my hotel. He’d long before then culled my number from my mobile provider.”

“But how did he know the password to unlock the phone?” asked Yianni.

She smiled. “Funny you should ask. I had the same question. He told me he didn’t, but he just ran through the five most common passwords and 111111 worked.”

“Clever guy,” said Toni.

Nikoletta nodded. “When we met, he told me someone was trying to kill me and I had to come with him immediately. I told him my mother hadn’t raised a fool, and I wasn’t about to go off in the middle of the night with a nearly total stranger, especially one who’d recently bragged to me about being a master criminal. He told me my mother was a wise woman, but she wasn’t here to protect me, and in a few minutes he wouldn’t either. He walked to the edge of the cliff and shone a light down onto the rocks.

“He told me, ‘The body down there would have been you if I hadn’t intervened.’ I looked over the edge and saw the man on the rocks. I almost fainted. ‘He was waiting for you on your walk home,’ Soter told me. ‘Someone tipped him off that you were on your way back to the hotel. You have two choices. Come with me to a safe house I know while I figure out who’s after you, or stay here and be a target. You’ve thirty seconds to make up your mind.’”

She exhaled. “Longest thirty seconds of my life. Obviously, I went with him. We took his motorbike to a parking lot in the harbor, where we switched to a car and drove directly here. When we got to the village, it was still dark, and no one saw us walk from the car to this fortress.”

“You must have been frightened,” said Lila.

“I believe the technical term is scared shitless.”

“What did you two talk about on the ride up from Chora?” said Tassos. “That was a long trip, especially at night along strange roads.”

“He knew the roads. He said he’d hidden out in the tower several times, and the local people knew him. He said this time he wouldn’t stay in the village but had arranged for some locals to keep an eye on me. He didn’t say, but I got the impression locals knew what he did and might even have used his services.”

“Why do you