The Phoenix

by Sidney Sheldon

  ‘It’s not easy at first, so don’t get frustrated,’ he told her, moving a few yards along the shore with his own rod.

  If only he knew how frustrated I am! thought Ella. Out loud, she said, ‘I won’t,’ nodding brusquely and flipping up her rod, performing a cast so exquisitely graceful and perfect it was like watching ballet. Mak watched in awe as her line sailed through the air, twice as far as it had when he’d helped her, and her fly descended onto the water as softly as a piece of thistledown.

  ‘You’ve done this before,’ he said admiringly.

  ‘Once or twice,’ Ella grinned. ‘Up at the ranch where I grew up, I used to go fishing all the time.’

  He frowned. ‘The ranch?’

  Ella’s stomach lurched as, too late, she realized her mistake – and this time it was unforced. Persephone Hamlin grew up in the city. They’d made small talk about their differing childhoods only a few hours ago at the jetty. Mak had told her about the poverty he knew in his Athens tenement block, and ‘Persephone’ had described her family home in Los Angeles’s luxurious Brentwood Park neighborhood.

  Oh God, how could I have been so stupid?

  ‘Well, I mean, didn’t literally “grow up” there,’ Ella scrambled, hoping her face was not as red and her heartbeat not as loud as she feared they were. ‘I grew up in LA. The ranch was more of a vacation place. My grandmother lived there.’

  ‘Really?’ said Mak, his gaze shifting out to the water as he cast his own line. Or was he looking further out? Towards the trawler? Surely he couldn’t suspect …

  ‘That sounds nice. What was her name?’

  Ella panicked. Shit, shit shit.

  ‘My grandmother?’

  ‘Mmm hm.’ He watched intently as his fly began to move.

  ‘Lucy,’ said Ella, the name popping into her brain out of nowhere. ‘Hey, I think you’ve got something!’

  Mercifully, the fish on the end of his line enabled her to change the subject. And Mak seemed happy enough to drop it as he struggled to land a decent-sized sea bream, eager to impress Persephone once again. Ella hoped she’d got away with it this time, but it was a stupid, stupid mistake.

  With a sinking heart, she realized she would have to tell Gabriel about it tonight.

  ‘What were you thinking?’

  The anger in his voice seemed to crackle like a hot, white flame.

  ‘I’m sorry. It just slipped out,’ said Ella.

  ‘You even gave her a name?’

  ‘He asked!’ Ella protested. She was lying on the bed in her hotel room in a pair of striped silk pajamas, holding the phone away from her ear to shield herself from Gabriel’s yells. ‘What was I supposed to do?’

  ‘Stick to the story! You were supposed to stick to the story. That’s what “undercover” means.’

  ‘Oh really? Well what about you, deciding to tag along for the ride without warning me? Using that damn boat as a transmitter? Monopolizing all my frequencies? Putting me off my stride with all your “do this, do that … Be careful.” As if I hadn’t thought of that!’

  ‘If today was you being careful, I dread to think what a reckless mission might look like,’ Gabriel answered waspishly. He wasn’t about to admit that she had a point about him ambushing her. And he definitely wasn’t about to admit that he couldn’t resist interrupting Makis’s dangerous attempts at seducing her.

  ‘You didn’t trust me to handle Makis on my own.’

  ‘And now you know why!’

  Ella sighed. ‘I came up with the most generic name I could, OK?’ she said defensively. ‘I mean, I know it was a mistake, but is it really such a big deal? Couldn’t Persephone have had a grandma named Lucy?’

  ‘Of course she could,’ Gabriel explained, lowering his voice and drawing on reserves of patience he never knew he had. ‘But that’s not how these things work, Ella. Grandma Lucy wasn’t in the story, and now she’ll have to be. That means I need to create another, entire online presence to validate this new person’s existence. And that’s complicated. There needs to be a ranch, with deeds in her name, and a sales history. She needs a birth certificate and a death certificate and a reference in the electoral roll, so she seems real if anybody goes looking for her. Because if Makis Alexiadis suspects anything – anything – believe me, he will go looking. He’s already run searches for Persephone Hamlin and Nick Hamlin, but we covered all that before we sent you in. Mocked up wedding shots, mentions in the society pages, all of that. That’s your armor, Ella, do you understand? And today you just … took it off.’

  ‘How do you know he’s run searches?’ Ella asked.

  ‘Because we can track any hits to the links we planted online, and we’ve had some. Who else would be researching a woman who doesn’t exist?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Ella said again, feeling foolish. All the adrenaline and bravado of earlier had left her now. She wasn’t an invincible spy after all, it turned out, but an amateur, making rookie mistakes. It had taken her almost five full minutes to get around Gabriel’s blocking techniques and shut off his distracting voice. Back at Camp Hope she’d had that down to seconds, but in the pressure of the moment, things were very different. Worse, deep down she knew that part of the reason she’d been resenting his intrusion was that she’d been trying to impress Mak at the time. She wanted to deny it, but the uncomfortable truth was she was attracted to Makis Alexiadis.

  ‘It’s OK,’ Gabriel reassured her. ‘I’ll work through the night tonight and make sure we get this covered. But you must be more careful in future.’

  ‘I will be. As long as you back off and let me do my job. Anyway, I do have some good news,’ said Ella, eager to please him and earn her place back in his good books.

  ‘Oh yeah, what’s that?’

  ‘Mak asked me to move into his villa. I’m checking out of here in the morning.’

  The pause on the other end of the line was so long that at first Ella thought Gabriel had hung up. When at last he spoke, his voice sounded different, high pitched and strangled.

  ‘So you, er … you hooked up today then, did you? After we lost contact.’

  ‘Hooked up? No.’ Ella sounded surprised. ‘Was I supposed to?’

  ‘No! No, no no. Absolutely not! No one expects you to make that sort of sacrifice,’ said Gabriel, audibly relieved.

  It wouldn’t be that much of a sacrifice, Ella thought, but she wisely kept that to herself.

  ‘I just assumed, when you said he’d asked you to move in to Mirage.’

  ‘No. He was quite the gentleman about it,’ said Ella. ‘I’ll be staying there as his guest. I’ll have my own suite, my own living room and bathroom and all that.’

  ‘That’s great,’ said Gabriel, genuinely pleased. ‘Great that you’ll be inside the villa. You need to get as much information out of there as you can.’

  You think? thought Ella, but again she held her tongue.

  ‘Try to get us something concrete on Athena,’ Gabriel went on. ‘And then get out, as soon as you can. But for God’s sake, Ella, you really must be careful this time. You’re in the lion’s den now.’

  ‘Understood,’ said Ella, adding wistfully, ‘I mean, obviously he wants to sleep with me. But I’m holding him off.’

  ‘You see that’s what I mean. You must stay in character. No more slips. He doesn’t want to sleep with you, he wants to sleep with Persephone Hamlin,’ Gabriel reminded her stiffly. ‘Persephone’s holding him off.’

  ‘Right,’ said Ella. ‘For now.’

  Gabriel hung up.

  He did not feel comforted.

  He did not feel comforted at all.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Makis Alexiadis felt the burning sensation in his shoulders intensify as he plowed his way through the water, his strong arms propelling him forwards on the last of his one hundred lengths. He’d always found swimming a great stress reliever, ever since his early days working for Spyros Petridis, when he’d had to learn to execute innocent people for his master and t
hen go to sleep at night with the sounds of their screams and pleading playing on an endless loop in his head.

  Of course, ‘innocent’ was a subjective term. Usually the marked men were bad debtors, businessmen who’d taken loans from Spyros and then failed to make their interest payments.

  ‘That’s theft,’ Spyros would instruct the teenage Makis. ‘They are thieves and liars. And it’s not as if they haven’t had warnings.’

  That part at least was true. Torched homes, kidnapped loved-ones, even severed fingers were all a part of Spyros’s repertoire of ‘warnings’ back in those days. As he got older, Makis was expected to participate in all of them. The stress was appalling, but swimming saved the young boy’s sanity. There was a community pool in Athens he used to go, to swim and swim and swim until his skinny arms could no longer move, and his lungs were screaming for air. And when he emerged from that water, he told himself his guilt was washed away, and he taught himself to believe it.

  I’m a survivor. My only duty is to survive.

  These days his stresses were different. Persephone, damn her to heaven, still refused to sleep with him, and was even talking about returning to America to ‘have things out’ with her husband, whatever that meant. If she were less well connected, and less rich, he would have forced himself on her by now, and/or had the useless coke-head husband conveniently disposed of. But wealthy American heiresses tended to have people looking out for them, not least an army of lawyers, and Makis couldn’t afford that sort of mess, not with everything else going on right now. More disturbingly, however, he had a sneaking suspicion that he might actually be developing feelings for this woman. Real, deep, affectionate feelings, of the kind he hadn’t had since … well, not for a long time. There was just something about her, some magical quality, not unlike the one that the world had associated with Athena Petridis, back in the day.

  Athena. Even the word filled his chest with tension and rage. She, of course, was the other source of his stress, rising like a kraken from the depths after all this time to try to take back her empire, to curtail his hard-won power. Oh, she was all reassurances, of course, whenever they corresponded. Makis had done a wonderful job. She was too old and too tired and physically depleted to try to take back the reins full time. He, Makis, would remain in charge day to day and she would merely offer strategic advice. ‘Like a chairman to her CEO’, as Athena put it. (Not an analogy Mak favored. CEOs reported to their chairmen.) But her analogies didn’t matter because Makis didn’t believe a word of it. Actions spoke louder than words, after all, and what was the brand on the migrant boy’s heel if not a surefire sign that Athena’s years as a silent partner were over?

  ‘L’ didn’t stand for Lagonissi, as some fools had been suggesting. Not any more. That had been Spyros’s sign, before he ever met Athena. The simple mark of a peasant risen to power. But Spyros was long gone, and Athena was no peasant. Her ‘L’ represented something very different, and Mak knew it. It was one piece of a much larger puzzle, a far more complex mosaic. Just weeks ago, not one but both the Kouvlaki brothers, Perry and Andreas, two of Makis’s most trusted subordinates, had been brutally murdered and had their corpses branded with different letters – ‘A’ and ‘P’. Athena herself may not have been behind the killings. But whoever ordered the Kouvlakis’ murders knew her intimately and understood her secret code and what it meant. How it spoke of her past loss and present rage. Of her need to reclaim control, no matter what the cost. Her need to dominate. To win.

  These signs were not to be taken lightly.

  Heaving himself up out of Villa Mirage’s indoor, Olympic-sized lap-pool, he rubbed himself dry and walked over to the poolside table where Cameron McKinley was waiting for him. The Scottish lawyer-cum-fixer had risen to become a central player in Big Mak’s inner circle over the last few years, advising him on almost every aspect of his business empire. Tall and thin, almost to the point of emaciation, Cameron was albino pale, with translucent skin and pale, wispy, reddish-blond hair and ice-blue eyes, the physical opposite of his employer. Frankly, he’d always given Mak the creeps with his long, bony fingers and his mealy-mouthed way of talking, so softly spoken that he seemed to be almost whispering. Thankfully it was rare that they had to meet in person. Cameron was based in London, and the two men typically communicated only by phone. (Mak had trust issues when it came to lawyers and emails.) But on this occasion the matter in hand was so sensitive that only a face-to-face meeting would do.

  ‘What do you have for me?’ Mak demanded, taking a seat opposite the suited Scotsman in his damp Vilebrequin swim trunks.

  ‘Sister Elena’s still at the convent,’ Cameron whispered. ‘But my guess is she’ll make a move soon.’

  ‘Based on …?’

  ‘Her daily routine’s been changing. Subtly, but it has. She’s spending more time outside the walled cloister, more time by herself. And some of Athena’s old allies have been making moves too.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Konstantinos Papadakis, for one. He just turfed his long-standing tenants out of his fortified guesthouse on Corsica. He also brought his plane to Athens last week with a full-time pilot on standby.’

  Konsta Papadakis was an old friend of Spyros Petridis’s and had been best man at his wedding to Athena.

  ‘You think he may be trying to move her?’ Mak asked.

  Cameron nodded. ‘I do. And he’s not the only one gearing up.’ Cameron went on to list a string of Athena’s past admirers and wealthy Petridis loyalists who’d transferred funds to the same anonymous Cayman Islands bank account in the last month. ‘She’s been reaching out to old friends for sure.’

  The tightening sensation in Mak’s chest intensified. He ran a hand through his wet hair.

  ‘I must be seen to support her.’

  ‘Indeed,’ said Cameron.

  ‘People need to know I welcome her return. That I’ve only ever seen myself as a caretaker. In accordance with Spyros’s wishes.’

  ‘Quite.’

  Makis leaned back in his chair. ‘If anything were to happen to her it must appear to be an accident. Or some sort of natural event. Like a heart attack.’

  Cameron’s watery blue eyes didn’t blink. ‘Not impossible. She’s in late middle age now, and her body’s been through considerable trauma.’

  ‘Or a fall?’ Mak was thinking out loud.

  ‘That happens.’

  ‘Into water, perhaps?’

  Cameron nodded. ‘There are some dangerous currents throughout the islands.’

  Mak bit his lip and relapsed into thoughtful silence. If Cameron was right, and Athena was already lining up supporters and an escape plan from her present hideout, then the time to act was now. Fortune favored the bold and, although Mak wasn’t bold enough to take Athena on directly (he knew enough of his former master’s wife to be deeply afraid of her and her capacity for vengeance), he also wasn’t about to roll over like a puppy while she waltzed in and took what was his. What he’d earned.

  ‘How about this?’

  Leaning forward, Mak outlined a plan while his fixer listened intently. It was risky, certainly. But it wasn’t impossible. Saying it out loud lifted his spirits. For the first time in days, Makis Alexiadis began to wonder if there might just be a chink of light at the end of the tunnel.

  While Makis and Cameron plotted strategy, at the foot of the cliffs a man stood still as a statue watching every movement up at Villa Mirage, just as he had for the last two days. He knew every delivery truck that went in or out, and the times of every household servant’s arrival in the morning and departure at night. He knew the timers on the pool lights and the morning and evening routine of the master of the house. When he took his shower; had his morning coffee; exercised; ate dinner; made love; slept. He learned the rhythms of the house like a loyal dog, memorizing the movements of its master, anticipating his every need.

  And he waited.

  Mark Redmayne smiled magnanimously as Gabriel approached his breakfast table
.

  ‘Please. Sit.’

  The two men had never warmed to one another. Redmayne found The Group’s star agent rude and challenging to the point of insubordination, while Gabriel considered his boss to be an arrogant, card-carrying narcissist, and about as trustworthy as a snake-oil salesman at a con artist’s convention. This morning, however, Redmayne at least was in a forgiving mood.

  For one thing he was in Paris, and staying at his favorite hotel in the world, the Georges V. A serendipitous business conference had offered him a cast-iron excuse to come to Europe and check up on The Group’s various ongoing missions there. For another thing, his wife, Veronica, had decided to stay in the Hamptons this time around, leaving Mark free to enjoy all that Paris, and specifically the girls at the Crazy Horse, had to offer. But best of all, after a shaky start, Ella Praeger had finally broken her duck last night and intercepted some priceless information. If the stars were aligned, the girl might lead them directly to Athena Petridis.

  Taking the seat opposite his boss, Gabriel was immediately provided with a fresh cup of the finest Peruvian coffee.

  ‘Are you hungry?’ Redmayne asked. ‘The avocado toast is incredible.’

  ‘No,’ Gabriel replied, employing all of his customary charm and tact.

  Redmayne stiffened. ‘Suit yourself. To business, then?’

  ‘I assume you’ve seen the intel?’

  ‘I have.’ Redmayne smiled broadly. ‘I knew we were right to send her in there. The stuff she’s been intercepting from inside that villa? Gold dust.’ He took another satisfying bite of his own breakfast. ‘Could this “Elena” be her? Could she be Athena?’

  ‘It’s not impossible,’ admitted Gabriel.

  Redmayne frowned. ‘Well what are the alternatives? In your view,’ he added pointedly.

  ‘She could be a close associate. A go-between,’ said Gabriel, not entirely convincingly.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said Redmayne. ‘The location would have been perfect for Athena all these years: remote and secure. Plus Ella’s been intercepting communications between Alexiadis and multiple close associates that suggest “Elena” is much more than just a “go-between”. She’s clearly a vitally important figure within the Petridis organization. Ella’s intercepts also suggest a borderline obsessional interest in this “Elena” on Makis’s part. All of that points to Athena herself.’