‘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