Free (#60) The Greek Symbol Mystery by Carolyn Keene Page B

shirt collar.
    “There he is!” she exlaimed. “In the lifeboat!”
    Before anyone could catch him, though, the burly man leaped out of it, crashing through piles of crates. He dashed to the other side of the deck and vaulted quickly over the railing. Bess and the policeman sped after him while Fotis gripped Nancy’s arm.
    “Let me go!” she insisted, pulling away abruptly to join her friends. “Can we chase him?” Nancy asked when she saw Isakos fleeing onto a small cabin cruiser.
    Shouting to the crew in Greek, the policeman raced toward the gangplank. Helen and the girl detectives followed him, running every step of the way to a patrol boat moored nearby.
    “We’ll never catch him!” Helen cried as they watched Isakos disappear behind a jetty.
    Nancy, too, became tense as their own boat chugged slowly into the harbor, picking up speed only after they passed an incoming barge. They skirted the jetty and found themselves in the open sea with only the shoreline in sight. Could Isakos’s small boat have outdistanced theirs so quickly?
    Impossible, Nancy thought.
    Then she saw it. The boat lay abandoned on the beach.
    “There’s a trail of footprints,” Nancy observed as they pulled close to shore.
    “Bess and I will stay with the boat if you and the officer wish to search for the man,” Helen offered.
    “We’ll be back before you catch any fish!” Nancy called.
    The footprints were still wet, making them easy to track. They led to an unmarked road which seemed to be in the middle of nowhere.
    “Isakos must’ve been picked up by a passing car,” the policeman concluded.
    “Or a waiting one,” Nancy said.
    When they returned to the patrol boat, she saw the eager expressions on her friends’ faces and shook her head.
    “No clues? Nothing?” Bess asked, obviously disappointed.
    “Zero.”
    As Nancy spoke, the officer took the cabin cruiser in tow and headed back to the harbor. Shortly, the white-banded freighter came into view. Fotis stood on deck, holding binoculars.
    “He’s watching us,” Bess remarked. “Are we going to board the ship again?”
    “I do have some questions for the crew,” Nancy replied.
    “And I intend to see their cargo,” the policeman put in.
    To everyone’s amazement, Fotis was less irritable, almost compliant, when the group spoke to him the second time. He instructed a crewman to lead them below deck to storerooms that held a variety of crates. Many had olive oil labels, others cotton, and pelts of fur hung in large refrigerators.
    Nancy whispered to Helen and Bess. “What better place to hide stolen artifacts—”
    “Than in bales of cotton,” Bess interrupted.
    “Right.” Helen grinned. “What companies import these?” Nancy asked the crewman.
    He did not understand English, however, so Helen translated the question. “He doesn’t know,” she said.
    “Has he seen your cousin? And what does he know about Constantine’s shipment of cargo?”
    Again Helen spoke to the man. “He says he has never heard of my cousin.”
    “I doubt that very strongly,” Bess said. “The sailor on the dock told me Constantine shipped something on this freighter recently.”
    “Then either this man is lying or the person you spoke to was wrong,” Nancy replied.
    Now the policeman gave orders for two of the crates to be opened. The crewman balked, muttering in Greek. He threw up his arms as if to tell everyone he had just finished packing the boxes.
    “I don’t care,” the policeman said brusquely, slipping from English back into Greek.
    Watching every movement the man made, Nancy concentrated on the crates that contained bales of cotton. Was anything else inside? The crewman seemed to struggle unnecessarily with the staples that secured it. Nancy wondered if he was trying to stall.
    Finally, though, the top loosened and the policeman wrenched it off. He opened the bale, then quickly dug into the contents, pulling out a cloud of fiber. It dropped gently to the