Jake drove an extensive surveillance detection run as he headed southwest. Athena was at her office in Glyfada but had asked him to meet her at the family home in Vouliagmeni. He took the highway and local roads, he made cover stops at a gas station and a convenience store, and as he pulled through the open gates of the Romanos estate and drove into the olive grove, he knew that he hadn’t been followed.

It was an unseasonably warm day in Greece and Giánnis was lounging on the sunlit terrace. The shipowner was attired in his typical casual elegance, white pants and a thick cashmere sweater. Jake was still wearing the frayed khakis and untucked shirt that had become his de facto uniform in Mogadishu, but Giánnis greeted him warmly and asked one of the household staff to open a bottle of Malagousia wine. Neither man was particularly hungry, but the staff whipped up a spread of souvlaki and spanakopita to politely obscure the fact that it wasn’t much past ten thirty in the morning.

With some prompting from Jake and the wine, Giánnis began to regale the younger man with tales of his past. Though the shipowner often struggled to recall minor details from his short-term memory, he could recount stories from fifty years earlier as if they were happening right in front of him. He spoke of a deal where he’d made a fortune buying eight half-finished tankers from a shipyard that had gone bankrupt at the bottom of a cycle, and he told of the time he’d purchased a pair of cutting-edge deepwater drillships at the absolute peak of the market. He lost half a billion dollars on the two ships by the time he finally found a buyer to take them off his hands, but Giánnis told both stories with equal enthusiasm, grateful to have been in the game and lived to fight another day.

Jake had many stories of his own, but most were classified and he still had to maintain cover. Officials from the State Department’s Maritime Security Division didn’t evade Iranian assassination teams and prosecute drone strikes in Yemen, so Jake revealed the loss of his parents at a young age and told how it had troubled him until he’d found camaraderie and a sense of belonging in college. He spoke of pouring himself into his friendships and his career, until he’d once again lost everything that was important to him—Jake couldn’t reveal that his change of identity drove the seclusion that troubled him—but he could see in the shipowner’s eyes that the older man’s dementia was isolating him in much the same way. Though the two men had led very different paths, they had much in common and had built a natural rapport during Jake’s visits to the family compound.