Dimitri Mantzaris held the note up to the light with shaking hands. At eighty years old, the former premier’s eyesight wasn’t what it used to be. But it was good enough to read the four lines in front of him, lines that filled him with a mixture of anticipation and dread.
Written in a code Dimitri hadn’t encountered for many, many years, the note said simply: I am coming.
Soon.
Need your help.
Contact to follow.
It wasn’t signed. It didn’t need to be.
The enormous breakfast the old man had just eaten – six bougatsa, traditional Greek breakfast pastries, filled with custard and rolled in powdered sugar – churned in his distended stomach now like sour milk, all the pleasure they had brought him gone. Not even the soothing sound of the waves crashing on his beloved Vouliagmeni beach could calm his jangled nerves.
Athena’s last ‘message’ had been indirect, a sign sent to the world. But now she was reaching out to him directly, enticing yet deadly, like a black widow spider, eager to mate.
Unlike the male spider, however, Dimitri Mantzaris did not have the option of refusing her.
It was too late to run, and he was too old to hide.
Athena was calling in a debt, and Dimitri must prepare to honor it.
On the northern bank of the Thames, not far from Vauxhall Bridge, Dolphin Square in Pimlico was one of London’s iconic addresses, considered a landmark example of 1930s architecture. Once the height of modernity with its red-brick façade, grand art-deco arches and, to modern eyes, tiny windows, the flats had become synonymous over the year with political intrigue. Occupied by the Free French in the 1940s and a temporary home for General de Gaulle, and later by Mandy Rice-Davies and Christine Keeler, the girls at the center of the Profumo scandal, according to Ella’s Hidden London guidebook, Dolphin Square was also the London address of Maxwell Knight, the inspiration for ‘M’ in Ian Fleming’s James Bond books.
A jaded lothario and former personal trainer like Antonio Lovato might not merit a mention as one of the famous flats’ ‘celebrity’ residents. But one could argue he had earned his place as part of Dolphin Square’s long tradition of secrecy, espionage and dirty politics. Like just about everyone who had once been part of Athena Petridis’s inner circle, a strong whiff of corruption surrounded him and his growing empire of gyms and ‘wellness centers’.
Ella landed at Heathrow on a Monday afternoon, and spent the night at one of the countless Pimlico bed and breakfasts surrounding Victoria Station. Her room was dingy and depressing and smelled of wet towels, and the breakfast was quite the most revolting mess Ella had ever seen on a plate, consisting of congealed animal fat, deep-fried stale bread and something that might or might not have been an egg. But the Excelsior Guesthouse did at least provide a quiet space where
she could practice tuning in and out of different frequencies amid the deafening clamor of London’s unrelenting data traffic. Dix’s techniques had worked faultlessly in the relative peace of Camp Hope and the remoter Greek islands. But Ella had yet to put them to the test in a major metropolis, and she had to admit that a growing part of her was excited by the prospect. So far Athens had been the only urban center she’d spent time in whilst in the field, her first taste of city life since San Francisco, back when the signals she received had been a frightening, debilitating jumble of white noise. But comparing Athens to London was like comparing the ‘Moonlight Sonata’ to hardcore thrash metal, cranked up to full volume. This was going to be a challenge.
If she were going to be able to isolate any of Antonio Lovato’s emails, texts or phone communications, she would need to get physically closer to him. Tailing him in the street or on public transport would have been the simplest way to achieve this, but by Wednesday he hadn’t left his flat once, other than for two short excursions along the river to walk his Pekinese, Mitzi.
‘He’s a recluse,’ Ella complained to Gabriel, after a second fruitless day of observations from a café across the road. She was itching to make a move, to feel the adrenaline rush she’d started to learn to love, just as her parents had. ‘Not one trip to his new London gym. No coffees with a friend, no shopping, no nothing. What the hell is he doing in there all day?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Gabriel. ‘But he may be contacting Athena. Can you really not pick up anything from his devices?’
‘I’m trying!’ Ella said defensively. ‘It’s not like tuning in a radio, you know. It’s like trying to isolate one instrument in a concert hall the size of two baseball fields, where ten symphony orchestras are playing different pieces, all at once. I need to get inside the building.’
‘So?’ Gabriel hit the ball back to her. ‘What’s your plan?’
Antonio Lovato pouted at his reflection in the mirror as the doorbell rang. He resented being disturbed, almost as much as he resented the deep grooves on his forehead that would insist on returning each time his Botox wore off, or the fact that, no matter how many crunches he did, his ‘six-pack’ was now forever destined to be marred by his sagging, aging, paper-dry skin. Age was a ruthless enemy, and one against which his vanity had no adequate defense.
‘Yes?’ Opening the door of flat 49B, he barked at the intruder.
‘Sorry to trouble you, sir. But I’m afraid we’ve ’ad a complaint.’ Alfred, the fat building supervisor, hovered obsequiously on the doorstep. ‘Mrs Burton from the flat below.’
‘Well, what about her?’ snapped Antonio.
‘Well, sir, it seems she’s been ’aving problems with ’er dining-room ceiling, sir. Damp patches and that. Looks like it might be a problem with the pipes under your floorboards. We’ve called in a plumber to ’ave a look. If it’s convenient …’ he added, wilting under Antonio Lovato’s disdainful glare.
Antonio opened his mouth to explain forcefully that it wasn’t convenient, nor would it ever be convenient; that there was quite plainly nothing at all wrong with his pipes and that Mrs Burton was an appalling, desiccated old hag with nothing better to do than invent problems and bother her neighbors in a pathetic and disruptive attempt to draw attention to herself; when fat Alfred stepped aside and the ‘plumber’ stepped forward. Hovering shyly on Antonio’s doorstep was a quite breathtaking girl in her twenties, blonde and elfin, wearing a charming pair of tomboyish overalls that Antonio felt an instant and overwhelming urge to remove, and carrying a toolbox (which, if this were the opening scene in the porn movie already playing in Antonio’s mind, ought surely to contain a variety of dildos and sundry other sexually explicit gadgets).
For half of a moment, he felt as if he’d seen her before. But his had been a life so full of young, attractive women, whom in his youth he’d consumed as greedily and prolifically as a whale gulping down plankton, she was as impossible to place as a single star in the sky. The important point was that this was not what plumbers looked like in Italy. Or anywhere else, in Antonio’s experience. His aging reflection forgotten, he felt suddenly cheered. What a marvelous city London could be!
‘I see,’ he demurred. ‘Well, it’s not terribly convenient. But as you’ve already called this young lady out, I suppose she may as well take a look. Follow me.’
With an openly lecherous smile at Ella, he shut the door firmly in fat Albert’s face.
Gabriel sat glumly at a table in the back of Mehmet’s Café in the upmarket Istanbul suburb of Ortaköy. Usually he’d be happy to be in Turkey, a country he’d always loved for its warmth, both literal and metaphorical, its rich, melting pot of a culture, its gorgeous, curvaceous, sensual women and perhaps, above all, its coffee, so strong and sweet you wanted to drink it with a spoon. But today, he had multiple reasons to be depressed.