The Phoenix

by Sidney Sheldon

  Mak’s voice came first. ‘You are certain?’

  Then Cameron’s. ‘Yes. The birth was listed in public records. There’s been no attempt to conceal it as far as I can see. Praeger, Ella Jane. Born 28 May 1994, to Rachel, née Franklin, and William.’

  At the sound of her own name, Ella felt her stomach liquefy with fear.

  There was a pause on the line, then Mak spoke again. ‘The same age as Persephone …’ He sounded thoughtful. ‘Any pictures?’

  ‘Two. One from Paradise Valley High School Yearbook. Another from Berkeley. It appears Ms Praeger attended in 2012 as a computer science major.’

  This was bad. Very bad.

  ‘And?’ said Mak.

  Ella couldn’t breathe as she waited for Cameron’s answer.

  ‘It’s her. There’s no question. It’s the same girl.’

  A deafening silence followed. In the distance, Ella could make out the lights of the yacht where Makis was waiting for her. Where she would be trapped, helpless, with no hope of escape.

  ‘What would you like me to do?’ Cameron asked.

  This time’s Mak’s answer was instant. His voice was resolute and his tone harder than Ella had ever heard it, every shred of his legendary warmth gone, squeezed out like pips from a crushed lemon.

  ‘Nothing. I’ll take care of it.’

  ‘Be careful, Makis. It would be safer – cleaner – if you kept some distance. Let my people handle this. It’s what we do.’

  ‘I said I’ll take care of it!’ Makis snapped. ‘We’ll talk again in the morning. When it’s done.’

  The line went dead.

  For a moment, Ella froze, paralyzed with panic.

  ‘I’ll take care of it.’

  ‘When it’s done.’

  He’s talking about me. About killing me. He wants to do it himself.

  She thought back to all the horror stories she’d read about Spyros Petridis and the ways in which he disposed of his enemies. Torture. Strangulation. Burying alive. Drowning.

  Like my mother.

  Mak had been Spyros’s enforcer back then, the servant, learning his tradecraft at his master’s feet. Now, he had enforcers of his own to do his dirty work, men like Cameron McKinley and his ‘people’. They’d almost certainly killed Nikkos. ‘It’s what we do.’ But this was different. This was personal. ‘Persephone’ had betrayed Makis Alexiadis, made a fool of him. He must mete out her punishment himself, look her in the eyes as he hurt her, terrorized her, extinguished her life with his own bare hands …

  Ella sat bolt upright, shaken suddenly from her trance. If she wanted to live she must act, and act now. But what could she do? No one knew where she was. She was unarmed, alone, and with no hope of rescue. The Argo was clearly visible up ahead of them, vast and impressive, looming like a great white death star from which there could be no escape. In less than two minutes they would reach it.

  I’m as good as dead.

  The boss was shouting. Screaming, in fact.

  Gabriel held the phone away from his ears. He’d landed back in the States yesterday, exhausted and emotionally drained by the grim circumstances of Nikkos Anastas’s murder and having to break the news to Ella. Everything in Greece was unraveling faster than ball of yarn tossed from a clifftop, and Gabriel couldn’t shake the sinking feeling that worse was yet to come.

  Checking into a cheap hotel near JFK, he’d taken a pill and slept solidly for fourteen hours. When he woke, it was to Mark Redmayne’s borderline hysteria.

  ‘She’s gone!’ he bellowed, as if shattering Gabriel’s eardrums was going to solve the problem. ‘Ella’s gone. She gave the new handler the slip in Athens and she never showed up for her flight.’

  ‘Shit,’ muttered Gabriel.

  ‘You lost her!’ Redmayne roared. ‘How the hell could you have lost her?’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘You told me you’d convinced her the mission was aborted!’ Redmayne boomed. ‘That she was coming back here. You said it was sorted.’

  ‘I thought it was.’ Gabriel rubbed his eyes blearily. If Ella hadn’t caught her flight to New York, there was only one place she was headed.

  Redmayne was still incandescent, expletives firing off his tongue like bullets from a machine-gun, as if indiscriminate anger was going to help the situation. Not for the first time, Gabriel wondered how this man had ever risen to become head of The Group.

  ‘Be quiet,’ he said eventually and with characteristic bluntness, his need to think overriding everything else. ‘We need to find her and get her out of there.’

  ‘Do you think I don’t know that?’ Redmayne’s decibel levels were reaching dangerous proportions. ‘The question is, where the hell is she?’

  ‘She’s with Makis Alexiadis,’ Gabriel answered instantly. ‘We need to track down his yacht.’

  Mak watched from the upper deck as the tender approached. He first made it out from almost a mile away, a mere speck of light flying over the tops of the waves like a skimming pebble. Inside him, he felt the monster start to grow.

  It was a feeling he used to know well, but one that he rarely experienced nowadays. The excitement, quasi-sexual, of exerting the ultimate dominance over another human being. Since rising to such dizzy heights of power, the physical rush of killing was something he largely delegated to others. He hadn’t missed it. In fact, it had been a relief to take a step back, to be able to conduct the operations of the Petridis empire as if it were any other business. These days, in middle age, Mak had the luxury of indulging in reflection, and introspection. If he’d never met Spyros, if his life had taken a different, more prosaic turn, might he never have killed at all? He did not, after all, consider himself innately violent, or criminal, or cruel. It was more that, like a kitten watching its mother hunt mice, he had learned those skills – learned to trap, to terrorize, to kill, to devour – and he had also learned to develop the emotions that went with them. He wasn’t a monster. But he did have a monster inside him. Over the years, his evil, abhorrent feelings had become entwined with all his other regulated emotions, so that he could no longer fully separate the normal from the abnormal, the acceptable from the psychotic.

  Waiting for Persephone to arrive – he would always think of her as Persephone, right to the end – he felt both sickened and aroused. Angry and excited. Longing, yet full of a hatred so poisonous it threatened to burn through his skin like lava spewing through the cracked earth.

  He let his mind roam ahead, picturing himself greeting her, touching her, seducing her and then, once he’d taken everything he wanted, everything she owed him, killing her, as slowly and painfully as he could. Lying bitch.

  The Argonaut II was drawing nearer now. Mak could clearly see Ioannis and Evangelos, his crew members, at the helm. All he could make out of Persephone was a slumped figure at the back of the boat, wrapped in blankets against the cold. Soon she would be warm and naked in his bed. For the first and last time.

  After what felt like an age they pulled up alongside the yacht.

  ‘Finally,’ Makis beamed, walking down the steps to the deck to greet them.

  Ioannis tethered the tender while Evangelos walked to the stern to help Ms Hamlin up. When he turned around, he looked like a ghost, his face drained of color.

  ‘What is it? What’s the matter?’ Makis demanded. Every sinew in his body had tightened like an overstrung violin. Jumping down into the boat himself, he pushed past both men.

  Persephone’s suitcase was propped against the bench. Next to it, a pile of cushions lay covered with Makis’s monogrammed blankets.

  ‘Where is she?’ Mak growled menacingly.

  ‘She … We picked her up at the harbor …’ Evangelos stammered. ‘She was sitting right there.’

  ‘So?’ Mak bellowed, the unsated monster roaring out in fury from within. ‘WHERE … IS … SHE?’

  At first the water felt like her enemy.

  Slipping silently off the back of the boat into its dark embrace, the paralyzi
ng cold knocked the breath from Ella’s body. Her clothes coiled themselves around her like deadly snakes, encasing her, gluing her limbs to her sides, dragging her down. Waves that had seemed so shallow, so gentle from the safety of the boat, now loomed like monsters over her, crashing painfully over her head and robbing her of what little sense of orientation remained. She no longer knew up from down, still less which direction led back to shore and which to open water. While her heart raced in panic, the rest of her body and mind slowed, first to a crawl, and then to a total stop.

  The speedboat had gone. Ella was alone in the world. Everything was darkness and cold.

  And then, just as suddenly as it began, the panic left her. The painful aching of her frozen limbs switched off like a light – gone. Her body was numb, her mind and spirit calm, and her heart barely beating, its rhythm slowed to a barely discernible boom, boom, boom, as much of an echo or a memory as an actual sound.

  I’m drowning, thought Ella. And it’s OK. It’s peaceful.

  All I have to do is let go.

  Images stole into her brain, freeze-frames from a slow-playing home movie.

  Her mother, holding her, gazing into her eyes. Ella was a baby, an infant. She felt safe and cocooned in her sea-swaddled limbs. The water and darkness surrounding her became a womb, and the soft swoosh of the tide her mother’s heartbeat. For a moment, it was lovely. All Ella had to do was let go and she could live in that state forever. Returned to her mother. To Rachel. The idea was intoxicating. Wonderful.

  Ella’s lungs emptied. She began to sink, deeper and deeper into nothing, the beckoning abyss.

  But then, unbidden, new images came.

  Her mother again, but this time fighting for breath, for her life, struggling vainly against the strong, male arms that held her down.

  Athena Petridis, standing on the shore, watching.

  Gabriel, standing in her apartment in San Francisco, his handsome features turned witheringly towards Ella as he mocked her attempts to resist joining The Group. She could hear his voice now: ‘That’s not what I would call a life. But perhaps we have different standards?’

  After that, other voices and faces forced their way into her consciousness.

  Nikkos, screaming as the hot metal burned into his flesh, pleading for his life.

  The little boy washed up on the shore, sightless eyes staring upwards at the blue sky, pleading for justice. For vengeance.

  They all want vengeance. And I’m their weapon. I’m their avenging angel. If not me, then who?

  Ella’s eyes snapped open.

  I can’t let go. Not yet!

  She began to move, to kick. First her feet, then her lower legs, then her whole body, arms, neck, head, straining upwards. It was too dark to see the surface, to know how far it was, or whether she would make it or not. All she could do was try, to reach up blindly, clawing her way back to life and breath and all the pain that went with it …

  ‘Ahh!’ Her upper body shot out of the water like a breaching whale, or a submarine-launched missile. Gulping down air, her lungs filled painfully. It felt as if her chest might explode. She could picture her ribcage shattering, the bones flying left and right. All at once the cold was back, and the fear. A desperate alertness took over.

  Think, Ella. Don’t panic. Think.

  She was a decent swimmer, but her chances of making it back to the shore from this distance and in these temperatures were nil. She needed rescuing.

  Makis might already have boats out looking for her. She must avoid those at all costs. Better to drown than fall into his sadistic, murderous hands. Closing her eyes, she let herself float still for a moment as the waves calmed. Remembering the techniques Dix had taught her back at Camp Hope, she let her conscious mind switch off while she tuned herself into any surrounding signals.

  At first all was quiet. But within a few minutes she was picking up shipping signals, both radio calls between different fishing boats and the coastguard or harbormaster, and the more sophisticated satellite communications from larger vessels. There was one, very faint signal from a lifeboat crew, doing their routine nightly check of waters where foolhardy teenagers sometimes attempted to paddleboard at night. But they were more than halfway back to Portofino, an impossible swim.

  Then it came to her. Something else Dix had told her, back at Camp Hope, the day they first met. He’d been riffing about her visual capabilities and how far they might take her, beyond what even her parents had envisaged. Something to do with satellite technology …

  You could use satellite coordinates to navigate, for instance. To visualize vast areas of land or sea, or even space.

  Satellite coordinates. That was it! Like a GPS. If she could receive the boats’ satellite signals, she could accurately work out which one was closest – theoretically at least. Where she was. Where they were. All she had to do was keep calm. Clear her mind. Let the data flow into her, like the lapping waves. Let the map appear, like a vision of stars in the night sky. She could save herself. But she had to believe it. Believe in her powers. Believe in her gifts. Believe she would survive.

  Do you, Ella? A voice from inside her seemed to be asking, as the cold salt water splashed her face. Do you believe?

  She closed her eyes and let the magic begin. It wasn’t one sense but all five, mingled inexplicably into an explosion of stimuli, a beautiful web of data, its myriad threads all pulling Ella towards hope, towards rescue. Lights at first, pinpricks in the darkness. Then numbers. Coordinates. Patterns, flying at her like shooting stars. Sounds too: the rhythmic whoosh of the waves melded with Ella’s heartbeat, and her breath, and the numbing cold that froze her limbs, yet somehow liberated a deeper energy within her, a deeper determination to live. To conquer. To win.

  One light, red, brighter than the others, called her on.

  A boat. The closest boat. A chance.

  Turning towards it like a moth to the moon, commanding her paralyzed body back to life, Ella began to swim.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Mark Redmayne turned the incline on his NordicTrack to the maximum fifteen and increased his pace. Hill running had become his therapy, and he found himself turning to his treadmill more and more, the burning of lactic acid in his thighs and the painful constriction in his lungs providing a welcome distraction from his growing anxiety. Things in Europe were spinning out of his control at an alarming rate, and for once Mark Redmayne was unsure what to do about it.

  Nikkos Anastas’s death had been unfortunate. Losing Ella Praeger was potentially catastrophic, although he still hoped to rectify that situation sooner rather than later. And today he found himself dealing with the fallout following Noriko Adachi’s unfortunate death in London, at the hands of one of Athena Petridis’s thugs.

  Katherine MacAvoy, who usually wouldn’t say boo to Redmayne’s goose, had suddenly decided to take umbrage at the boss’s tactics regarding the illustrious Japanese professor.

  ‘You sent that poor woman to London as a lure,’ MacAvoy had accused him on this morning’s conference call, a call that had been joined by a large number of The Group’s senior leadership. ‘You threw her to the wolves!’

  ‘Not at all,’ Redmayne had replied coolly, keeping his head. ‘Noriko was following up on a lead.’

  ‘What lead?’ demanded MacAvoy.

  ‘A lead regarding Athena’s potential operations in the UK and northern Europe,’ Redmayne answered vaguely. ‘And, as tragic as it was, Professor Adachi’s death and the letter branding on her body have provided us with the clearest evidence yet that Athena has indeed taken back personal control of her criminal network from Big Mak, and that she’s keeping tabs on everyone she considers a threat to her power. Including us.’

  ‘And an innocent woman’s life was worth that, was it?’ Katherine MacAvoy’s emotions were getting the better of her, unusually for the Camp Hope chief. ‘Did she know she was being sent in as bait? As a canary into Athena Petridis’s mine, which we all know is a black hole from which hardly
anyone emerges alive?’

  ‘As I said Katherine, Noriko was following up a lead.’ A steely edge had crept into Redmayne’s voice that was not lost on any of the call’s participants. ‘She volunteered to join us because she wanted to do something concrete to avenge her son’s death. The woman was being eaten alive by grief when I met her. Trust me on that.’

  Grief which you exploited, thought Katherine MacAvoy, but she said nothing further. She already knew she’d gone too far.

  ‘I think Katherine’s right to raise concerns though, sir.’ Anthony Lyon, The Group’s London chief of staff, piped up, his cut-glass British accent further fraying Redmayne’s nerves. ‘Professor Adachi’s murder was particularly gruesome. We must do all we can to reduce this sort of collateral damage. Apart from the moral considerations, we now have the Metropolitan Police sniffing around our operations in London, which we could do without.’

  Moral considerations, Redmayne thought bitterly, increasing his speed yet again. Pompous prick. At the end of the day, he and he alone led The Group, and he expected loyalty from his senior lieutenants. Even so, he recognized that Noriko Adachi’s death was bad news, on a number of levels.

  Athena Petridis must be stopped. That much was clearer than ever. But the currents swirling around her were as strong and as dangerous as ever, For all Mark Redmayne knew, Ella Praeger, The Group’s most precious weapon, was out there being sucked down into the maelstrom right now, this very instant.

  It didn’t bear thinking about.

  The first thing Ella saw was light. Not blinding, or constant, but low, flickering, a sort of warm glow that faded in and out, on and off, like the dying embers of a fire.

  For a moment she wondered whether this was heaven. But then she heard his voice and realized categorically that it wasn’t. If there was such a thing as an afterlife for the virtuous, there was no way on earth that he would be in it.

  ‘Ella? Can you hear me? Ella!’

  The touch of his hand made her start. So the voice wasn’t in her head this time. He was actually here. With an effort she opened her eyes.