The Mark of the Assassin

books. Kristos, the man from the home supplies
    store, offered to find good men to help with the work, but the Frenchman
    politely refused. He replaced the kitchen appliances and laid a new
    ceramic counter-top. He repainted the entire interior. He carted away
    the old furniture--ghastly modern pieces--and filled the rooms with
    rustic Grecian chairs and tables. In March, when the weather warmed, he
    turned his attention to the exterior. He patched cracks in the walls and
    put down a coat of gleaming whitewash. He replaced the broken tiles on
    the roof and the broken stones on the terrace. By the middle of April,
    the villa no one wanted was the finest in the village.
    THE ITALIAN RACING BICYCLE arrived that same week. Each morning he rode
    along the winding coast roads and up and down the steep hills in the
    center of the island. Gradually, as the days lengthened, he spent more
    and more time in the village. He dawdled over the olives and rice and
    lamb in the marketplace. A few afternoons each week he took his lunch in
    the taverna, always with a book for protection. Sometimes he bought
    broiled sea bass from the boys on the beach and ate the fish alone in a
    grotto where gray seals played. He ventured into the wine shop. At first
    he drank only French and Italian wines, but after a time he developed a
    taste for inexpensive Greek varieties. When the clerk suggested more
    costly vintages, the Frenchman would shake his head and hand the bottle
    back. The renovations, he explained, had put a dent in his finances.
    AT FIRST HIS GREEK WAS LIMITED, a few staccato sentences, a vague
    untraceable accent. But remarkably, within two months he could conduct
    his business in passable Greek with the accent of an islander. The
    village women made gentle advances, but he took no lovers. He had only
    one pair of visitors, a small Englishman with eyes the color of winter
    seawater and a mulatto goddess who sunbathed nude in the May sunshine.
    The Briton and the goddess stayed for three days. Each evening they
    dined on the terrace late into the night.
    IN MAY he began to paint. At first he could hold his brushes for only a
    few minutes at a time because of the scar tissue in his right hand.
    Then, slowly, gradually, the scar tissue stretched and gave way, and he
    was able to work for several hours at a time. For many weeks he painted
    the scenes around the villa--the seascapes, the clusters of whitewashed
    cottages, the flowers on the hillsides, the old men taking wine and
    olives at the taverna. The villa reflected the changing colors of each
    passing day: a dusty pink at dawn, a filtered raw sienna at dusk that
    took weeks of patient experimentation to re-create on his palette. In
    August he began painting the woman. She was blond, with striking blue
    eyes and pale luminous skin. According to his cleaning lady, he worked
    without a model from a handful of crude pencil sketches. "Clearly," she
    told the other girls in the village, "the Frenchman is working from
    memory." It was a large work, about six feet by four feet. The woman
    wore only a white blouse, unbuttoned to her navel, tinged with the raw
    sienna of the setting sun. Her long body was draped over a small wooden
    chair, facing backward. One hand rested beneath her chin; the other held
    something that looked like a gun, though no one would put a gun in the
    hand of a woman so beautiful, the maid said. Not even a recluse
    Frenchman. He finished the work in October. He placed it in a simple
    frame and hung it on the wall facing the sea.
    ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The events portrayed in this novel are entirely the
    product of the author's imagination, as are the characters that populate
    it. Still, several men and women similar to the people in this story
    gave me invaluable assistance, without which this work would not have
    been possible. The expertise is all theirs; the mistakes,
    simplifications, and dramatic license are all mine. Several current and
    former members of the American intelligence community allowed me to peek
    behind the curtain into their world, and I wish to express my gratitude
    to them, especially the professionals at the CIA's Counterterrorism
    Center in Langley, Virginia, who patiently answered as many of my
    questions as they could and generously shared a few pieces of their
    lives along the way. So much has been written about working in the White
    House, but several people from various administrations helped me fill in
    the blanks with their personal