Free One Way or Another: A Novel by Elizabeth Adler Page B

half-dead young woman in the Aegean right then. He gave orders to turn the Lady Marina around, asked the master of Zeus his exact nautical location, and set off to get Angie back. To “rescue her,” he thought with a sardonic smile. Now he would have to start all over again. And now there were witnesses.
    Of course he had not pushed Angie off the deck of his boat. There had been no need. Enough pills in her champagne, the kind of pills roving guys out for an easy hookup slyly slip into women’s drinks at a bar, worked like a charm. Once Angie was sufficiently doped, all he had to do was threaten her, let her escape onto the deck, where Mehitabel was waiting with the bottle of champagne. He watched Angie take the blow, watched her slip to one side, fall overboard. Then they had taken off smoothly across the green waters, leaving her to her fate.
    She’d had to be gotten rid of. The lonely, isolated young women he employed to “help” in his business, secretly delivering parcels of cash, or documents, when he bought and sold armaments, always had to go. In fact Ahmet was surprised none of them ever understood that was part of his game; that he was hardly likely to keep them around after they had done what he’d asked, done their job, so to speak, so afterward they could sell their tale to the tabloids, or go to the international police. Murder him, in a way. Did that make him a serial killer? Though he enjoyed killing them, it was, after all, part of the sexual thrill, Ahmet thought not. He was simply a man doing what he had to do in order to survive. Survival of the fittest, wasn’t that what it was called? In fact, more likely it was survival of the cleverest.
    The MV Lady Marina was named, he always told guests, for the goddess of the sea. He was not too sure of his facts about the sea goddess but it gave him an air of intellectual authority he needed, coming from his background. In fact, though Ahmet claimed to be Greek, he was of mixed Egyptian and Armenian-gypsy heritage, something he would never have admitted. There was no need with his fabricated story of an upbringing in a wealthy Greek family forced to roam the world, as he did himself now, when the rich were replaced by a socialist regime and no longer ruled their own world of autocrats and playboys and demimondaines, of which Ahmet claimed his mother was one.
    Ahmet acknowledged secretly, and only ever to himself, that his mother was a slut. However, he also acknowledged it was her very sluttiness which had paid for his upbringing in the small apartment in Cairo, on a urine-smelling alley teeming with shady men in white caftans and women in black burkas, their faces hidden, something which excited him. He’d longed to see what lay behind those veils. That urge had never left him. A voyeur he was and would forever be.
    Angie’s great tumbling mass of flame-colored hair had the same effect as that of a garment hiding her nakedness: it had turned him on so completely he had contemplated allowing her to stay. But of course he could not. He’d given her a job to do, a package to be delivered to a man who would meet her in a café he specified in the port of Fethiye in Turkey, where afterward Ahmet would pick her up. Angie did not know that the package contained several million dollars in various currencies, part of a drug deal Ahmet had made for a client.
    He’d kept the promise he’d made to Angie, in bed in that expensive hotel room. She was flown to the destination by private plane—not his own, because he did not want any connection made between the two of them. It was rented from a commercial airline and paid for from an Argentinian company account that would be impossible to trace back to him. But Angie had been allowed to go shopping before she left. Thrilled, she’d bought a load of things, undergarments from La Perla, dresses from Prada and Dior, shoes from Louboutin and Manolo.
    “After all, a young woman on such an important journey will need