And there the vessel stayed – Nikolaides and his guests relocating every day from the boat’s huge sun deck up to the town’s restaurants and nightclubs and back down again.
Meanwhile, half a continent away, I waited on a street corner in Geneva for a phone to be answered. When it did, I said three words to a man sitting in a clifftop café. ‘That you, Reno?’ I asked.
‘Wrong number,’ he said, and hung up. Jean Reno was the name of the actor who played the assassin in the movie Léon, and the team leader sitting in the café knew it meant death.
He nodded to his colleague, who immediately called the other three agents, who were sitting among milling tourists at other cafés. The five of them rendezvoused just near the beautiful Rastoni bar and restaurant, looking for all the world like a group of affluent European holidaymakers meeting up for lunch. The two women in the squad were the primary shooters, and that, I’m afraid, was my mistake.
It was just before two, the restaurant still crowded, when my so-called holidaymakers walked in. The three men spoke to the harried manager about a table while the women moved to the bar, ostensibly to check their make-up in its mirror but in fact noting in the reflection the position of every person in the vaulted space.
Christos and his posse – three Albanian bodyguards and a clutch of chicks his mother had probably warned him about – were sitting at a table looking straight out at the harbour.
‘All set?’ one of our women asked her male colleagues in passable Italian, framing it as a question but meaning it as a statement. The men nodded.
The women had their tote bags open, putting away their lipstick, reaching for their camera cases. They both pulled out stainless-steel SIG P232s and turned in a tight arc.
Christos’s bodyguards, with their True Religion jeans, muscle-man T-shirts and Czech machine pistols, didn’t have a chance against real professionals. Two of them didn’t even see it coming – the first they heard was the sound of bone breaking as bullets slammed into their heads and chests.
The third bodyguard made it to his feet, a strategy which succeeded only in presenting himself as a bigger target for the team leader. Shows how much he knew. The agent hit him with three bullets, which was unnecessary, as the first one pretty much blasted his heart out the back of his chest.
As is usual in these situations, a lot of people started yelling, to absolutely no effect. One of them was Christos, trying to take command, I guess, scrambling to his feet, reaching under his flapping linen shirt for the Beretta he kept in the waistband of his pants.
Like a lot of tough guys who don’t do any real training, he thought he was well prepared by keeping the safety catch off. In the panic of a genuine firefight, he pulled the weapon out, put his finger on the trigger and shot himself through the leg. Fighting the pain and humiliation, he kept turning to face his attackers. What he saw were two middle-aged women, feet planted wide, who – had there been a band – looked like they were about to start a strange dance.
Instead, they both opened up at seven yards, two rounds each. Most of Christos’s vital organs – including his brain – were finished before he dropped.
Immediately, the five agents sprayed their weapons across the mirrors, creating a lot of impressive noise and maximum panic. Terrified diners sprinted for the doors, a Japanese tourist tried to film it on his phone and a ricocheting bullet hit a female member of Christos’s party in the butt. As one of our women agents told me later – given the way the chick was dressed, the last time she had that much pain up her ass she was probably getting paid for it.
The flesh wound was the only collateral damage – no small achievement given the number of people in the restaurant and the unpredictable nature of any assassination.
The agents pocketed their weapons, burst out of the front door amid the exploding panic and yelled for someone to call the cops. At a prearranged location – a tiny cobblestone square – they regrouped and boarded four Vespa scooters, permitted for residents only but secured earlier in the day by a large payment to a local repair shop. The team sped into the town’s narrow alleys and the leader used his cellphone to call in two fast boats waiting in the next bay.
In three minutes, the assassins reached a scenic cable car that offers an alternative – and far quicker – descent than the donkeys. It takes less than two minutes to take the 1,200-foot drop, and already the boats were pulling into the wharf. The team was halfway to the next island, hurtling across the sparkling blue water in a plume of white spray, by the time the first cops arrived at Rastoni.
To the Greek cops’ ribald amusement, they quickly learned that Christos, the first-born and best-loved son of Patros Nikolaides, had been gunned down by two ladies in capri pants and Chanel sunglasses. And that was my mistake – not the killing of him, the women. I genuinely hadn’t given it a thought, I just sent the best people for the job, but, as I have to keep relearning, it’s the unquestioned assumptions that get you every time.