The Phoenix

Perhaps it was a blessing Ella couldn’t respond, as his dictatorial tone was really starting to tick her off. After about twenty seconds of silence, he gave her some map coordinates, which he repeated twice. Ella scribbled them down. There were just the numbers, nothing more. Then came a curt ‘goodbye’ and the man’s voice shut off, as suddenly as it had begun.

Feeling marginally less agitated than she had before, Ella climbed under the covers.

Tomorrow, she would see this ‘Group’ first hand. She had no intention of joining them. Of being brainwashed and corrupted the way her parents had been. And she certainly wasn’t going on any ‘mission’ for this bunch of lunatics. Instead, Ella would turn the tables. She would take what she needed from them, on her terms. She would make them teach her how to control and perhaps even switch off the ‘transmissions’ that were making her life so unbearable. To disable her ‘gift’. And, she’d extract more information about her parents, especially her mother. The least this cult could do after all the havoc they’d wreaked was to fill in the gaps. When she was done, she would leave, free of her headaches, free of her grandmother, free of her parents’ expectations, free of everything. She would begin building the normal, happy life she wanted. The life she deserved.

For the first time since Mimi’s funeral, Ella fell almost at once into a deep, contented sleep.

CHAPTER SIX

Daphne Alexandris turned to her husband Stavros. ‘Did you hear that noise?’

‘What noise?’ Stavros looked up from his iPad.

‘That … clattering. There it is again!’

The Alexandrises were sitting at opposite ends of the grand drawing room in their colonial mansion in Putre, Chile. A friend of Stavros’s had sold it to him for a song back in the days when Stavros had been riding high as Greece’s interior minister and Dimitri Mantzaris’s right-hand man. In exchange, Stavros had green-lighted some apartment developments in a slummy part of Athens, that might or might not have fully complied with Greek fire regulations. In any event, the house in Putre was an oasis of calm and peace, a place where Stavros and his wife could escape the pressures of Greek politics – or anything else they might need to escape. Set back from the ancient pueblo of the pretty mountain town, with the peaks of the Taapaca Volcano rising up behind it like benevolent deities, the mansion was at once luxurious and supremely comfortable, furnished with an array of priceless South American antiques. One could live like a king in Chile on reasonably modest means, and the Alexandrises’ means were far from modest. Good security, of course, was a must. But luckily they could afford that too.

‘It’s probably just foxes or possums,’ said Stavros, yawning. It was late, and he was no more than one more good brandy away from his bed. ‘Scrabbling at the trash. I’ll send Juanita out to take care of them.’

Reaching to his left, he rang a small silver bell on the table beside him, like a Victorian lord of the manor. Sure enough, the housekeeper arrived like a summoned genie.

‘Go and see what’s making that racket would you, Juanita? The noise is bothering Señora Alexandris.’

‘I don’t know how you can be so calm, Stavros,’ Daphne Alexandris hissed, her thin neck straining with stress so that the sinews bulged beneath the crepey, sixty-year-old skin. ‘What if it isn’t foxes? What if it’s her? No one close to Mantzaris is safe. You said so yourself. That’s why we’re here, isn’t it?’

Walking over to his wife, Stavros laid a skinny hand on her shoulder. ‘We are here because it is safe here, my darling,’ he reminded her. ‘Athena’s business – if she truly is alive – is in Greece. Trust me, Chile will not even be on her radar. She wouldn’t waste resources sending somebody trekking all the way up here, to the top of the world, just to find the likes of us.’

Turning away from her, he walked across to the bar and poured himself a large measure of Frapin Extra Grande Champagne Cognac.

‘Will you have one more, Daphne? Calm your nerves before bed?’ he asked, reaching up for a second brandy glass. ‘Daphne? Did you open a window? It’s terribly—’

Turning around he froze, letting both glasses drop to the floor and shatter into a thousand pieces across the Persian carpet. His wife sat just as she had been before, perfectly still, her eyes wide open. Except that now there was a bullet hole right through the middle of her forehead. The sash window behind her stood open, its lace curtains fluttering in the evening breeze.

A slow, cold terror crawled over him, rooting him to the spot.

Stavros had heard nothing. Nothing! Not a shot. Not a breath. Not a sound.

Black spots swam before his eyes.

Why? Why Daphne? Why not him? Surely it was him she wanted. That bitch! Dimitri’s she-devil …

He looked around him at the empty room, and the darkness beyond the window, wild panic in his eyes.

Then, like a hunted animal, he turn

ed and ran.

‘Shall we?’

Ella looked up again at the two-foot-thick wooden gates in front of her. Set into a barbed-wire fence, they were twice her height, and would have looked vast anywhere else. But here, deep in the California forest, dwarfed by redwoods that towered over everything like a battalion of ancient giants, they seemed almost comically small, like the gateway to a children’s fort.

The journey here had been long and bizarre. It had been a six-hour drive from Ella’s hotel to the coordinates the man had given her last night. If, indeed, what she’d heard as she lay on the bed really was the man trying to contact her, and not a sign that she had finally lost the plot and needed to check herself into a mental facility as soon as possible, whether she liked it or not.

Her satnav had sent her on a narrow road that wound higher and higher into the hills. The scenery was breathtaking. Wilder and more rugged than the rolling pastures of her grandmother’s ranch, but every bit as beautiful, this part of the state was like a Tolkienian fantasy, all pines and rocks and deer and bears and dazzling blue skies that seemed to stretch to eternity. Watching eagles soar above her, and waterfalls cascade down the rocks beside the road, so close in places that if Ella opened her driver’s window and stretched out her arm she could almost touch them, she found herself forgetting everything else as she lost herself in the wonder and majesty of nature. Her grandmother’s rigid version of religion had never appealed to her, never seemed real. But places like this – the peace, the beauty – made Ella want to believe in God, or at least in something outside of herself, something bigger and more important. Something she could trust in.

The tranquility was interrupted by the next leg of the journey. Ella was met at the designated coordinates by a young woman called Agnes, who led her on a two-mile hike up a steep escarpment, littered with loose rocks, and then insisted on blindfolding her in the back of an expensive-looking Range Rover Velar for a bumpy, tortuous forty-minute drive through the forest. Disorientated and exhausted, Ella had been on the brink of demanding to go home. But after eight, grueling hours, she had to see this through.

The property Ella glimpsed looked more like a well-maintained hotel than the prison camp suggested by the gated front. Small white bungalows were dotted amongst neatly mown lawns, and soft outdoor uplighters revealed lovingly planted flower beds and charming brick walking paths snaking throughout the grounds. Here and there, parked golf carts, some piled high with bags of what looked like dirty laundry, only heightened Ella’s feeling that she was checking in to the San Ysidro Ranch, and not potentially risking her life at the mercy of some obscure and secretive cult.