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.