“You want to be a stowaway?” Leila raised her eyebrows.
“Sure.”
She shook her head. “Bad idea.”
“Oh, come on. You don’t mean to actually buy tickets for a ride on a cargo ship?”
“Xander, really.” She let out a huff. “If we hide on board as stowaways, what if we get caught? Then the whole thing is over. We need to use our aliases and act like normal passengers.”
Xander ground his teeth. Again, she had a point. The whole thing was risky, no matter what they did. She wanted to play it safe. Well, as safe as possible.
“I’m not going to hide on a cargo ship.”
“Right.” He closed all the browsers and logged off. “We’ll do it your way.”
“A couple booking tickets for a ride to Athens shouldn’t raise any alarms. It’ll be the last thing the SIS expect.” She flashed a smug smile.
If only she knew…
CHAPTER 22
A light wind blew against Xander’s face as they cruised through the city in the back of a taxi, windows down. Buildings, houses, and trees rushed by. Uniformed children walked home from school, and tourists ambled down the sidewalks in their beach coverups. Once again, he could almost forget they were on the run. Hopefully, the SIS decided that Soliman was a more pressing issue than following him and Leila.
He glanced where Leila sat to his left. Her knuckles were white as she gripped the seat belt crossing her chest.
Ah, yes. Thanks to Drake kidnapping Leila in a taxi once, she had avoided them ever since.
“Sorry,” he said. “I guess we should have taken a bus to Beer Sheva.”
“Yeah,” she said breathlessly. “It’s fine. I’m fine.” She looked like she would throw up.
“It’s only a two-hour drive.”
Leila nodded, then turned to the window. “Why can’t Eilat have a train station?” she groaned.
He, of course, had no answer for that.
Soon, they left the city behind and drove down a desert highway. Mountains, villages, and rolling hills lined with olive tree groves flashed by, eventually blurring together and completely vanishing as Xander dozed off.
He woke when he realized they were in stop-and-go traffic. The street signs among the high-rises indicated they were nearing the train station, so he reached over and shook Leila’s shoulder, waking her.
Leila’s coloring returned as they made their way up the train station steps to the platform, though her gaze nervously explored their surroundings. He couldn’t blame her. The place was full of surveillance cameras. With his hands casually shoved into his pockets, he paused at the map of the rail system and studied the web of colorful lines. Their destination lay in the northern-most part of Israel, a hundred-twenty-mile ride from their current location. The route seemed easy enough, and they wouldn’t even have to switch trains. If they caught the next one leaving in five minutes, they should get to the port some time after twenty-hundred. Hopefully it wouldn’t be too late to talk to a fleet manager.
After buying tickets, they raced to the platform and darted onto the red double-decker wagon a second before the doors slid shut. Xander settled into a seat across from Leila. The train was quiet except for the voice over the PA announcing each station and deboarding instructions in Hebrew. Vineyards, mountains, and palm trees streaked past, endless blue water glittering in the distance as the locomotive whisked them up the Mediterranean coast.
A golden glow had settled over Haifa when they reached the city. Hoping they weren’t too late, they raced to the taxi line waiting outside the station and caught a ride to the seaport.
Things had gone without a hitch so far. Either they were very lucky, or their luck was going to run out. He glanced at Leila, who kept her gaze out the window, her features pensive.
The driver let them out at a chain-link fence that blocked the harbor from public traffic. The gate, however, was open, so the two of them walked through.
Recalling the departure schedule for one of the companies, Xander sought out the ship with the blue bottom and white top. It had another two hours until departure, so he hoped they would be arriving at a time when the crew wasn’t too busy to bother with hopeful passengers. He spotted the cargo ship in the distance, and they followed the concrete walkway for what felt like a mile. The waves lapped at the dock on each side, filling the air with the scent of salt and sea. They passed beneath towering cranes and the blue sides of a giant ship rose above them.
Outside the ramp, a man wearing a hard hat and a bright orange vest stood with a clipboard in his hand and a phone to his ear as he spoke rapid Greek. Xander stopped and Leila waited beside him.
“Now what?” she whispered.
“Now, we make some friends.”
The man hung up and glanced up at them.
Xander stepped forward. “Any room for two passengers?”
The man scowled. Though he looked to be middle-aged, his whiskered face was weathered and pitted. “Passengers?” He shook his head, then glanced down at his clipboard. “No passengers.”
“Aw, come on. We don’t take up much room. We just need a ride to Athens.”
“No, no.” The man shook his head again. “No passengers.”
“Not even for one hundred?”
The man flipped a page on the clipboard.
“One-fifty?”
“I said no passengers.”
Xander slid his jaw to one side. If the man meant it, he would have walked away by now. “Two hundred.”
