The Phoenix

/> ‘Sure. Go ahead.’

The lead on Andreas Kouvlaki had put him in an unusually forgiving mood.

Lying stock-still on the floor, Mood Salim – conversely – felt anything but forgiving.

If the Greek bastards thought he was unconscious, so much the better. He no longer cared about his interrogators, any more than they cared about him. He had a name now. Three names, in fact:

Andreas Kouvlaki. Perry Kouvlaki. And Makis Alexiadis.

Mood wouldn’t rest until all three men were dead and buried.

Until their rotten, murderous souls burned in hell.

Just like his.

CHAPTER TEN

Makis Alexiadis stood on the balcony of his sumptuous modernist villa, watching his guests arrive. They were an impressive group, models and movie stars, tech billionaires and real-estate moguls, rock stars and politicians, and even a smattering of European royalty, the women all draped in couture and the finest Israeli diamonds, the men flashing their Louis Moinet Meteoris watches, fresh off their Heesen superyachts and BD-700 private jets.

Ah, Mykonos in the summer! Surely life didn’t get any better than this?

Named after the grandson of the great god Apollo, Mykonos had always been the jewel of the Aegean and, in Makis Alexiadis’s opinion, Greece’s most beautiful island. It might not be lush and green like the others – the constant, fierce winds made it hard for vegetation to thrive, leaving a landscape renowned for its steep, barren and rocky hills, plunging dramatically down to azure waters – but Mykonos boasted a unique, windswept, desert-like beauty all its own. Simple whitewashed fishing villages clung to the beaches, while up in the hills around Ano Mera, larger, grander villas perched like eagles, braving the winds in exchange for spectacular views of Delos, and beyond.

Lying between its more modest neighbors, Tinos, Syros, Paros and Naxos, at eighty-five square kilometers, Mykonos was by far the largest and ‘flashiest’ of the Cyclades, and had attracted the world’s elite, playboy class to its idyllic shores long before Makis Alexiadis became one of their number.

Classically handsome in the Greek fashion, with thick, tar-black hair, olive skin and gray eyes like sea mist in the morning, Makis was of average height and stockily built, like a bull. Even when he was poor, growing up in a rundown apartment building in the Athenian suburb of Sepolia, women had been drawn to him like flies to honey. But Makis Alexiadis wasn’t poor any more. A career that had begun, aged only fifteen, as Spyros Petridis’s gopher-cum-driver-cum-golf-caddy-cum-all-round-lackey, had flourished twenty years later into wealth and power beyond even Makis’s wildest dreams. Since his boss’s death, ‘Big Mak’ Alexiadis had run the Petridis crime empire day-to-day, simultaneously growing his own ‘front-of-house’ business as a property developer, tycoon, philanthropist and all-round Greek media superstar. By exploiting the ‘synergies’ between his two lives, Makis Alexiadis had amassed a fortune that now rivaled his mentor Petridis’s net worth back in his heyday.

These were good times.

In a paradise awash with billionaires, there were naturally numerous contenders for the title of Mykonos’s most luxurious private residence. But Makis’s beloved Villa Mirage must surely have made most people’s top three. Fifteen thousand square feet of glass and marble, perched on the top of a cliff in Agios Lazaros, nestled amid five acres of manicured, formal gardens that glowed emerald green amid the surrounding red rock, Villa Mirage commanded ocean views so beautiful they had been known to make Makis Alexiadis weep. Which was quite an achievement. It would be an understatement to say that ‘Big Mak’ Alexiadis was not a sensitive man. Those who had been unlucky enough to cross him in business, or in life, knew him to be as stone-hearted as the huge boulders scattered around his beloved island, said by legend to be the petrified testicles of the Titans, mythical giants supposedly slain by Hercules on this very spot.

Makis Alexiadis’s platinum Samsung Galaxy S III buzzed in his jacket pocket. He frowned. He only used this particular cell for his most private and important business, and it never left his side, not even while he slept. Theoretically a text at this time of night might be good news, but in this case he doubted it. He was right.

Pulling out the phone he read the message. ‘Cargos lost at Lesbos and Chios. Two vessels sunk, one seized. More to follow.’

‘Damn it!’ Big Mak cursed aloud. That was the fourth lost shipment this month alone. Four hundred and twenty migrants at an average total profit of three thousand euros each … He totted up the value of the lost human life as if they were so many corn husks or sacks of sugar. Not that it was the money itself that mattered most. In the grand scheme of the Petridis empire that Big Mak presided over, 1.2 million euros was small potatoes. But the growing business of people-trafficking and, in particular, control of the profitable Aegean route, could be worth hundreds of millions to whichever gang gained ultimate supremacy. Losing not one more boat, but two on the same day, was a major setback. We’ll look like a laughing stock, Makis thought bitterly.

Worse, he would have to explain this to the one person to whom, nominally at least, he still answered. That was not a prospect he relished, quite apart from the fact that any communication with this particular person exposed both Makis personally and the organization to serious risk, not to mention the logistical challenges involved.

It wasn’t easy, communing with the dead.

‘There you are, Angel.’ Tatiana, Makis’s live-in Ukrainian companion, stepped out onto the balcony and coiled her lithe limbs longingly around him, like a hungry snake. ‘I’ve been looking for you everywhere. People are asking for you, baby. Is everything OK?’

Two inches taller than Makis, with a mane of brunette hair, swollen, bee-stung lips and a cartoonishly sexualized body that she’d barely covered tonight in some sort of woven gold, chainmail attire, Tatiana was every red-blooded male’s fantasy. At that moment, Makis felt simultaneously aroused and so irritated he could have happily wrapped his bare hands around her slender, gazelle’s neck and snapped it like an irksome twig.

‘No,’ he snapped, grabbing her hand and placing it over his rock-hard cock anyway, more from habit than desire. ‘Everything’s not OK. Tell them all to leave.’

Tatiana laughed nervously. ‘I can hardly do that. The French president is here, my love, and the—’

She gasped as Makis spun around and grabbed her by the hair, pulling her face so violently towards his own she thought for a moment he was going break her nose with the top of his skull, the way she’d seen him do to other underlings who’d annoyed him.

‘Would you defy me?’ He snarled at her like a dog.

Terrified, she shook her head vehemently. ‘No, Mak. Never! I’ll do whatever you want. I’m sorry.’

Mollified by her groveling and the unmistakable look of fear in her eyes, he let her go.

‘Get me a pencil and paper,’ he growled. ‘And get Frankie up here. Now.’