‘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.
‘It’s still not good enough,’ he’d informed her bluntly, on their last phone call before she left Camp Hope for the airport. ‘Work harder.’
‘Thanks for that, Obey One,’ Ella took umbrage. ‘That’s super encouraging.’
‘In the field, the way you speak is as much part of your cover as anything else,’ he explained, unapologetically. ‘It can be the difference between life and death.’
‘Oh yeah? Well if you wanted my Greek to be fluent, maybe you should have trained me for six months, not six minutes,’ snapped Ella. ‘It’s not as if the language is all I have to learn. I’m with Dix four hours a day, plus there’s physical training. You try it!’
Ella’s orange juice arrived, inexplicably without ice – either the Greeks didn’t feel the humidity or they were suckers for punishment – and Ella sipped it slowly, drinking in the scene around her. Just a few blocks away was a busy road, narrow but choked with honking traffic and roaring with all the usual sounds of city life: babies screaming, merchants yelling, music playing on corners and in open-fronted bars. Yet here, on this tiny square, it was almost eerily quiet. Apart from Ella and a handful of other patrons, the café was empty. The few brave souls who’d ventured out in the heat at all were wisely sticking to the shadows, smoking under trees or porches, or sitting silently on the steps of the tiny church. One woman dressed all in black, who looked so ancient she surely ought to be dead already, muttered over her rosary beads in a corner like a wicked peddler-woman from a fairy tale. Ella tried to imagine being that old, or belonging to this old world with its church bells and rituals and strange mingled scents of incense, coffee, onions, jasmine and sweat. Sitting here, the modern world she’d just left back in America already felt like a dream.
Then again, most of the last month felt like a dream to Ella, and one from which she was no longer sure she wanted to wake up. She was, she admitted to herself, excited.
The clock on the church belfry told her it was now three in the afternoon. In three hours, one of The Group’s Greek agents was coming to pick her up from her hotel lobby to take her for a ‘briefing dinner’. Enough time for her to return to her room, shower (again), change, and perhaps read the information Gabriel had given her for the hundredth time. Her limbs ached and she longed for sleep after her journey, but she knew that the moment she closed her eyes, no force on earth could wake her.