Zanni Kostopoulos looked at his watch. It was still early. His assistant wasn't due in for another half-hour. Things weren't going as planned and he worried the media might turn on him. They would for sure if they ever found out. He tried not to think about it.

Zanni wasn't an easy man to get to know, and an even tougher one to like. He'd achieved his wealth the old fashioned way: stolen, bribed, and laundered for it. And, if the truth to rumor could be measured by its persistence, he'd killed for it more than once. Today, though, the Kostopoulos name was 'a pillar of Athenian society.' At least that's what his third wife paid several publicists to get virtually every society reporter in Greece to repeat ad nauseam. If you linked 'respected international businessman' and 'philanthropist' to a name long enough, people started believing it. Or so went the theory.

Mrs Kostopoulos' plan certainly had worked on her husband; Zanni was intoxicated with himself, never missing a word uttered about him in the media, and bothered to no end when the press did not grasp that his vast fortune made him right in all things and deserving of public esteem equivalent to his wealth. Each morning, the assistant he'd hired solely for the purpose of keeping track of his fame gave him a folio containing clippings and tapes of every recorded mention of his name in the past twenty-four hours. His mood for the next twenty-four depended upon the size of the package she handed him.

Where is she? Zanni stepped away from his desk and paced around the room. He'd experienced the media turning on him before and didn't like it one bit.