The Phoenix

by Sidney Sheldon

  Next time he must try to slow down.

  Andreas knew of his brother’s fate, although he assumed Perry’s grizzly murder had been at the hands of a pimp, or the ‘friends’ of one of his playthings. Not sharing his brother’s perversions, Andreas did not perceive himself to be at risk. Charming and handsome, with a slender frame and an immaculate taste in bespoke tailoring, the younger Kouvlaki was popular and well liked, playing the part of the respectable businessman to a tee. Women flocked to him and men competed to become his friend, oblivious to the raw human misery on which his business empire was based.

  But Andreas had become complacent, and sloppy. No one was infallible, as the assassin well knew. And he was here to carry the job through. The day of reckoning had arrived.

  Slowly emerging from his hiding place, wincing as the blood flowed back into his straightened legs, he moved towards the guardian’s cottage. If his calculations were correct, the dogs should pick up his scent in approximately fifteen seconds, beginning a cacophony of barking that he must extinguish as soon as possible.

  Fifteen, fourteen … ten …

  Reaching into the bag slung across his chest, he pulled out the two dripping steaks, each generously laced with an odorless horse tranquilizer, holding them in front of him like a talisman.

  Two … one …

  Right on cue the Dobermans leaped out of the darkness like twin hell hounds, barking loudly, but the steaks stopped them instantly in their tracks. He hung back as they sniffed, then ate, unaware of the sedative racing into their bloodstream. Both animals were on the ground unconscious within a minute.

  Screwing the silencer onto his gun, he knelt down and stroked each of their sleek coats. He wished he didn’t have to do it, but it couldn’t be helped. With a heavy heart, he shot a bullet deep into each animal’s brain.

  They’re Kouvlaki’s victims, not mine, he told himself as he reached the door of the cottage, easily unpicking the lock. Moving swiftly up the stairs, he paused for a moment at the Jamets’ bedroom, looking at the old couple sleeping side by side, their sun-weathered faces still visible in the shadows, peeking out above the duvet like two pickled walnuts. He climbed up onto the bed and held a chloroformed rag over monsieur and madame simultaneously before either had a chance to stir. Less than a minute later, with both the guardians knocked out cold and handcuffed to a bedpost, he was back outside, headed towards the main house.

  The last remaining obstacle was Laurent, Andreas Kouvlaki’s lazy and useless night watchman. Most large homes on the Cote d’Azur employed such a person these days, supposedly to deter car thieves or would-be burglars, although most of the young men who accepted these deathly boring jobs were unemployed local youths, totally untrained and of considerably less use than the guard dogs. Nonetheless, it made people feel better to know there was somebody patrolling their homes with a flashlight while they slept. And Kouvlaki had at least gone to the trouble of providing Laurent with a gun, putting him one step above the rest.

  At five foot eight and slightly built, however, Laurent was no match for the assassin. Approaching the boy from behind and clamping a third rag over his nose and mouth, just as he had with the guardians, he soon had Kouvlaki’s last line of defense bound, gagged and locked in an outdoor toolshed.

  A chill wind blew as he jimmied open a ground-floor window and climbed easily into the dark bastide. But he didn’t feel the cold any more. Instead a slow, satisfying warmth crept through him as he considered what he was about to do and why.

  I am an angel of vengeance.

  A servant of the righteous.

  A destroyer of evil.

  Smiling, the assassin began climbing the stairs.

  Inspector Anjou rubbed a jaded hand across his eyes.

  ‘La vache!’ He whistled through his teeth. The scene in front of him was like nothing he had ever come across in over twenty years of police work. What had begun in the evening as a couple’s bedroom now looked like an abattoir. Like one of those appalling videos that animal rights activists or militant vegans post online. Except that the mutilated corpse in the center of the carnage did not belong to a calf or a sow, but to a young man in the prime of his life.

  ‘Is the girlfriend talking?’ Inspector Anjou asked one of his officers, his eyes still fixed on the slashed, bloodied mulch that had once been Andreas Kouvlaki.

  ‘Not really, sir,’ the officer replied. ‘Screaming, mostly. She’s still in shock.’

  ‘Did she see it happen?’

  ‘No,’ said the officer. ‘She was drugged and tied to the bed. The intruder dragged Kouvlaki outside. That was the last she saw of him alive, apparently. When she woke up he was …’ The young man nodded towards the body but averted his eyes. He already looked green and fit to puke. Inspector Anjou didn’t blame him.

  ‘She called us though, didn’t she?’

  The young officer nodded. ‘The killer deliberately placed the phone next to her on the bed. He must have wanted her to get help.’

  Inspector Anjou grunted. ‘Oh yeah. He was a gem of a guy, all right.’

  ‘Of course not, sir. But it is striking that he didn’t harm anybody else on the property,’ the young man pointed out. ‘Apart from the guard dogs. I mean, it was clearly Mr Kouvlaki he was after.’

  And boy did he get him.

  Anjou knelt next to the body. He was careful not to touch anything, but roamed over Andreas Kouvlaki’s injuries in as much detail as he could, examining the killer’s handiwork with disgust. The face had been battered into an indistinguishable pulp, probably with a fist or the blunt handle of a gun. Most of the other wounds had been administered with a knife, although the killer clearly had a gun as well. There were bullets in the feet and lower legs – perhaps used to stop the victim when he tried to run? The throat had been cut, repeatedly. But the most striking features on the corpse were the two mutilations that, Inspector Anjou hoped, had been inflicted after death.

  One was a letter ‘P’ scorched into the chest like a cattle brand.

  And the other was the right hand. It still bore the victim’s gold and diamond rings. Whoever did this clearly wasn’t interested in money. But the index finger had been cleanly severed.

  He kills dogs, Inspector Anjou thought. He’s wildly violent. He leaves ‘signs’ on his victims and he keeps body parts as trophies.

  But … he leaves a phone for the girlfriend to call for help. And he lets all the staff live.

  What kind of psycho was this?

  Back in the safety of his rented room, the assassin showered, changed into sweatpants and a clean T-shirt, and lay back on the bed. He was exhausted, physically, but he knew he wouldn’t sleep. Nothing could calm his frantic, buzzing mind.

  It wasn’t killing that was the rush. That gave him no pleasure. He wasn’t a monster, after all. But it was the sense of completion. Of justice served. Of a mission, not yet completed, but in motion. He was doing his duty, not for himself, but for others.

  Andreas Kouvlaki had been a clever man. Like his brother, he’d pleaded for his corrupt, worthless life. But unlike his brother, he’d had a strategy – offering to lead the killer to the most important target of them all.

  ‘I can get you access to the Athens townhouse,’ he’d babbled to his killer. ‘That’s where he is right now. Believe me, I hate him as much as you do. Everything I did, I did because he forced me to.’

  The assassin hadn’t believed him. Not for a second. But his promise of access was interesting. Interesting enough to delay his death.

  ‘How? How can you get me in?’

  ‘The codes to the outer perimeter gates and the front door are saved on a memory stick in my safe,’ said Kouvlaki. ‘I’ll give that to you now. The safe’s in one of the guest bedrooms. But the codes will only get you so far. At night he sleeps with the master bedroom laser-alarmed. You need biometric access to get in, and I’m one of only four people who have it. You’ll need my help.’

  The assassin looked thoughtfully at the groveli
ng man at his feet. He remembered the first time he’d seen Andreas Kouvlaki, far, far away from here. On that day the sun was shining, and Andreas too had shone, radiating authority and confidence, his power and wealth in stark contrast to the poverty and misery and desperation all around him. Like a silver dolphin, swimming through a sea of filth.

  How the tables had turned.

  ‘Please!’ Andreas begged. ‘We can do this together. You need me. Let me help you.’

  ‘Thank you,’ the assassin said quietly. ‘I will.’

  And he had. Reaching into the bag by the side of his bed, he pulled out the night’s two treasures, holding each lovingly.

  The first was a memory stick, containing the access codes to his next victim’s estate.

  And the second was Andreas Kouvlaki’s right index finger, the biometric ‘key’ to the master bedroom suite, tightly wrapped in a bag of ice.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Ella pressed her forehead against the plastic plane window as they dropped down through the last layer of clouds towards Eleftherios Venizelos, otherwise known as Athens International Airport. Having never left the United States before, she was fascinated by everything she saw. Even from fifteen thousand feet, it was clear that she was entering not just a different country, but a different world.

  A sky so bright blue it looked like something from a child’s coloring book shimmered over a patchwork of brown and green fields, crisscrossed with tiny roads, along which were scattered white buildings of various shapes and sizes. Beyond the fields, an aqua sea lapped at a white-sand coast. The plane continued its descent and soon Ella could make out rivers and churches and what might have been an amphitheater, or some sort of ruin? A lone red sailboat headed out into open water. It all seems so peaceful, Ella thought.

  Thanks to the briefing that she’d finally been handed at San Francisco Airport, and had read over and over again for the last ten hours straight, she now knew that this strange, colorful place was Attica, the region surrounding Greece’s capital.

  She also knew that, somewhere down there, her parents had lost their lives.

  Not ‘lost’, Ella corrected herself. William and Rachel Praeger had been robbed of their lives, brutally murdered. Now, at long last, Ella knew who to blame.

  Her father William had died first, shot in the head at point-blank range by members of an organized crime gang run by a man named Spyros Petridis. He’d been on assignment in Europe, part of a team attempting to expose a vast money-laundering operation headed by Petridis and involving numerous senior European government officials. According to Ella’s briefing, William was killed somewhere on the Greek mainland. Although his body was never found, The Group had since intercepted multiple communications from within the Petridis empire confirming his murder.

  Ella’s mother Rachel had suffered an even more appalling end. Lured to Greece by the Petridises, in search of her husband (in reality already dead), Rachel was kidnapped, taken to a remote beach and drowned in the Aegean by Spyros Petridis himself, while his wife Athena looked on. Personally enraged by the damage that William Praeger had done to his ‘business interests’, he had vowed to wreak a vengeance on The Group that went beyond just William’s murder. Killing William’s wife, and in such a sadistic manner, had been an act of rage and of terror, designed to strike fear into the uppermost echelons of The Group’s anonymous leadership.

  Instead, it had the opposite effect. Revolted by the murder of the Praegers, two of its most brave and brilliant young operatives, The Group struck back, successfully assassinating Spyros Petridis and his wife Athena the following year by sabotaging a helicopter in which they were both passengers, causing a fatal crash. Until a few months ago, the world believed that both the Petridises had perished in this ‘accident’. But recent events suggested to The Group, and those in the know, that Athena Petridis might in fact have survived the crash and had been in hiding all this time.

  Ella’s mission was to establish whether this was true and – if it was – to find Athena Petridis. Find the woman who had stood by and watched while Ella’s mother was drowned, like a rat. The Group hoped that Ella’s unique abilities to receive and interpret data transmissions, as well as her personal investment in the mission, would help her succeed where traditional operatives had failed. ‘Once located,’ Ella’s briefing asserted bluntly, ‘the target will be destroyed.’

  At first Ella was disappointed by the lack of detail about her parents’ deaths. In a seventy-page briefing, less than two pages were devoted to the murders of William and Rachel Praeger. The other sixty-eight pages focused on the Petridis criminal empire, past and present, and what little concrete information The Group had so far on the possible whereabouts of Ella’s target, Athena Petridis.

  But as Ella read on, she found herself putting her parents’ murders to one side as she began to comprehend the scale of the Petridis gang’s crimes; if you could even call such a vast and sophisticated organization a ‘gang’. The depths of misery that Spyros Petridis and his henchmen had inflicted over the years was breathtaking, especially for a group that, until today, Ella had never even heard of. Even if only a fraction of the report was accurate, these people had to be right up there with the Mafia and the Triads on the torture-and-killing stakes, and perhaps were even more successful when it came to white-collar crime, amassing eye-watering levels of wealth. As well as vast fortunes made from illegal activities such as prostitution and narcotics, the Petridises had defrauded, embezzled and intimidated their way into countless ‘legitimate’ businesses, from real estate to shipping to mining and investment banking. At the end of their reign of terror, in the years immediately prior to the crash, they’d even expanded into education, investing heavily in private, inner-city schools in the United States. Ironically, this had proved to be one of their most profitable sectors to date, a simple business model that involved luring poor but aspirational white and immigrant families into a lifetime of debt and, effectively, servitude to the Petridis machine.

  Even if they hadn’t killed my parents, Ella thought, these people were evil to the bone.

  Closing her eyes, she decided to practice Dix’s technique. Allowing the receiver part of her brain to open, she tried to tune in exclusively to the dialogue between air-traffic control and the cockpit. To her delight, she found she could do it easily. Not that the jargon-filled exchange meant much to her. But it was incredible to think that just a few short weeks ago, all she would have heard was an incomprehensible crackle, accompanied by a nausea-inducing headache.

  Grudgingly, she admitted that she did have The Group to thank for some things.

  With a single, hard bump they were on the ground.

  ‘Welcome to Athens. We hope you had a pleasant flight.’

  ‘It’s like, a billion degrees here! And two billion per cent humidity. I’m melting like the Wicked Witch of the West.’

  Ella was talking to her friend Bob a few blocks from her hotel, struggling to hold on to her cell phone with clammy, sweat-soaked hands.

  ‘I mean, I only came out to get a soda, but I seriously need to take all my clothes off and jump in a fountain or something.’

  ‘Don’t do that,’ said Bob, who both loved and hated the fact that Ella had called him at four in the morning his time, after three weeks of radio silence – from Greece – but was now acting as if they’d just spoken yesterday. Like everything was normal.

  ‘You didn’t die in the woods, then. That’s good.’ He rubbed his eyes sleepily.

  ‘What woods?’ asked Ella.

  ‘California woods. Weird Suit Guy. Coordinates. The cult?’ Bob reminded her of their last conversation, on her drive up to Camp Hope.

  ‘Oh, no,’ said Ella, in an ‘old news’ tone of voice. ‘I didn’t die. And it’s not a cult. Well, not exactly. I mean I guess you could say it sort of is …’

  ‘Jesus, Ella.’

  ‘Why are you whispering?’

  ‘I’m whispering because it’s the middle of the night a
nd Joanie’s sleeping next to me,’ Bob explained. ‘What are you doing in Greece?’

  ‘I can’t really tell you.’

  ‘Or you’d have to kill me?’ Bob joked.

  ‘Don’t worry. I would never kill you,’ Ella replied, deadly seriously. ‘Even if they asked me to.’

  Bob sat up in bed. ‘Ella, what’s going on? You do realize this is not normal? Like, none of this is remotely normal. Can you tell me where you are exactly? Or how long you plan to be?’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Ella.

  ‘Well, can I at least go check on your apartment while you’re gone? If you’re planning to be gone a while, which I really hope you’re not. I want to do something, Ella. I’m worried about you.’

  ‘Thanks, but you don’t need to be. I just wanted to call to let you know I’m OK. Also to say sorry for asking you to have … to sleep with me. Before.’

  Bob could feel her blushes down the phone. ‘That’s OK, Ella.’

  ‘No, it wasn’t OK. I see that now. I’ve been working on controlling my impulses.’

  ‘Well … good,’ said Bob. Perhaps there was some silver lining to Ella falling in with this bunch of weirdoes. ‘That’s good. So you’re not going to take your clothes off and get in that fountain. Right?’

  ‘But it’s so hot!’ Ella groaned. ‘Oh my God, you have no idea.’

  ‘And don’t ask random Greek men to have sex with you,’ Bob added, hoping her last comment was a joke.

  ‘I won’t,’ said Ella. ‘Take care, Bob.’

  ‘No, no, no, don’t hang up yet!’ pleaded Bob. But it was too late.

  Ella looked up for the waiter.

  ‘Chimos portokali, epharisto,’ she instructed him confidently. He nodded and disappeared.

  Ella’s spoken Greek was improving by the day, and her accent already natural enough that locals didn’t immediately take her for a tourist. But Gabriel wasn’t impressed.