An Aegean Prophecy - Jeffrey Siger [55]
Andreas shook his head. ‘I don’t understand why they keep looking for me. The minister made it clear all media on this goes through him.’
Kouros smiled. ‘That’s what she keeps telling them, and they keep saying, “Yeah, but we want to talk to someone who actually knows what’s going on.”’
Andreas smiled. ‘I prefer having the entire Greek military at our disposal and letting the minister have the press.’
‘What did you say to inspire him to get us that kind of help?’
‘I told him we thought we’d cornered the killers, but unless we had immediate coast guard cooperation, there was a guaranteed hostage situation involving professional killers and the likely deaths of more innocents on Patmos during Easter Week.’
‘So he got the hint.’
‘And the chance to claim credit for the capture, but I told him not to put it out to the media until we’re certain they are the ones we are looking for. Because if they aren’t, they’re monks from Mount Athos on a true pilgrimage and wrongfully accusing them of killing a fellow monk would get career-ending pressure from the church for everyone involved.’
‘I assume he got that point, too.’
Andreas nodded. ‘So now it’s time for us to join our coast guard friends and their new guests. We’re meeting them on one of those virtually deserted islands between here and Turkey.’
‘Why there?’
‘Can’t risk word leaking out that we might have caught Vassilis’ killers. The media would be all over us. No way the press will find us where the coast guard is taking them. The only ones living over there are isolated families subsidized by the Greek government to stay put, so that the Turks can’t claim the islands are abandoned.’ Andreas opened the back door of the police car and put some of the bags inside.
‘How do you plan on getting them to talk?’
Andreas lifted the rest of the bags. ‘Something will come to me, but if not, I’m sure you’ll come up with suitable ideas.’
Kouros burst into a broad smile and nodded in a way reminding him of Tassos.
‘Yianni, remember, innocent until proven guilty.’ He said that as much to remind himself. But no cop really believed it. Not if they wanted to stay alive among scum like those three murdering bastards.
Evening prayers during Easter Week always exerted particular strain on Zacharias. The sound of the mallet striking the long wooden cymbal-like symantron signaled another long night alone in his cell wondering what was going on outside the monastery walls. Tonight he simply couldn’t concentrate until, in a glance from the abbot, he sensed that his disinterest might be showing. Instantly, his demeanor changed, and once more Kalogeros Zacharias was among the holiest and most dedicated of the prayerful. A fact he actually believed was true.
The rapes, the murders, the genocide had not been committed by him but by some nonexistent being out of a past cleansed pure by his dedicated piety, rejection of the corruptions and temptations of the temporal world, and single-minded commitment to spreading those same values throughout his church. But that required an army of brave men, thirsting for change, inspired by a goal. Those were not of the sort to be found among the powerful, for their zeal ran only to protecting their privileges. No, he knew where to find his warriors; the same places as he had in the past: on the fringes of life, men who felt powerless, waiting for a message to unite them in common cause.
And with the ‘we must find a savior’ message he’d fashioned from Revelation, he found his men among each monastery’s neglected and overlooked and unified them around a passionate, shared priority: Mount Athos must become home to the Ecumenical Patriarch, and the vast riches of the church made to pass through the largesse of a lens of moral piety, not bartered away in marketplace corruptions.
He knew their goal faced serious obstacles, but he saw only two: rivals in the church, and the Russians. The first was proving not as insurmountable as he once thought. Jealousies among the monasteries