The Phoenix

Number one, according to the balances on his phone’s internet-banking app, his funds were severely depleted. This was mostly down to poor investments, stock-buying decisions that he hadn’t had time to check properly since being on back-to-back missions over the summer. But it didn’t help that Mark Redmayne, in an epic fit of pique, had made good on his threat to stop Gabriel’s regular monthly payments from The Group.

‘You’re paid to work for us, on specific assigned missions. Not for yourself,’ Redmayne had reminded him caustically during their last telephone conversation, the day Ella left the Genoa hospital and, as far as Redmayne was concerned, disappeared.

‘I’m hardly working for myself, sir,’ Gabriel countered. ‘I’ve been tracking Mood Salim, like you asked me to.’

‘Well, now I’m asking you to stop.’

At first, Gabriel had resented being asked to pause the hunt for Athena in order to track down Salim, a Libyan migrant whom The Group had tried to recruit months ago, after his family drowned on one of the Petridis organization’s migrant boats. By all accounts the man was a walking mountain of rage, hell-bent on avenging his wife and daughters. And yet, after some initial, tepid interest in joining The Group, Salim had vanished, with various reports suggesting that he was responsible for a string of subsequent murders connected to Athena’s network.

‘If he’s acting alone, that’s one thing,’ Redmayne told Gabriel. ‘But he seems to have access to some very sophisticated intelligence that suggests otherwise. He’s a loose cannon and I want him watched.’

Whatever annoyance Gabriel had felt at the boss’s paranoia evaporated once he heard Ella’s description of the ‘giant’ at Sikinos. It had to be Salim – there weren’t that many six-foot-seven Arabs out there hell-bent on murdering Athena Petridis. But Redmayne was right: there was no way an uneducated Libyan migrant would have found ‘Sister Elena’ on his own. Which meant there was more to Salim’s story than met the eye. So when Gabriel obtained some good intel of his own last week, placing Mood Salim in Istanbul, he had jumped on the first flight. Only, infuriatingly, to find himself being slapped down by none other than Mark Redmayne.

‘You know how crucial it is to act quickly on leads like this, sir,’ he pleaded. ‘I missed him in Italy, and in France, and in Germany. He’s been all over the map since Sikinos. He’s definitely working for someone, although whether that’s—’

‘You’re not listening to me Gabriel,’ Redmayne interrupted. ‘You have been recalled. Forget Salim, forget Athena. I expect you back in the States within forty-eight hours. You and Ella Praeger, I know damn well you know where she is.’

‘I’m sorry. We can’t come home, sir. Not yet,’ Gabriel replied, triggering an explosion from the boss the likes of which even he had never heard before. Apparently it was his use of the word ‘we’ that rankled most. Ella was The Group’s single most valuable asset, not part of some sort of rogue duo with him. Gabriel had ‘zero authority’ to engage her on missions without The Group’s consent – which meant Redmayne’s consent.

‘We’ll find her and bring her back by force if we have to,’ Redmayne threatened, adding ominously. ‘And we’ll cut you off. You’re expendable, Gabriel. She’s not.’

Evidently stage one of ‘Operation Cut-Off’ was to be Gabriel’s money. No one joined the Group to get rich, but at the same time it rankled to be spending grueling days risking one’s life to rid the world of evil, and then told to pay for your own Turkish coffee.

Gabriel’s second reason to be depressed was the fact that, having risked so much to follow him to Istanbul, Mood Salim’s trail had suddenly gone ice cold. All the leads that had seemed so promising last week, the whispered sightings and overheard conversations that had seen Gabriel flit from Genoa to Paris to Munich and finally here, to a former ISIS sleeper cell of disaffected young Muslim youth on the outskirts of the city, had petered out like a dried-up river, leading him nowhere. If nothing came up in the next twenty-four hours, he would fly to London and rejoin Ella, who’d already begun her surveillance of Athena’s former flame, the dreadful Mr Lovato.

If Antonio Lovato was involved enough to have posed as a priest, of all things, to help spirit Athena out of Sikinos, it stood to reason that he knew where she was now. But so far, Ella had been frustratingly unable to gather any new intelligence. And with Redmayne no doubt scouring the globe for her as Gabriel sat here, sipping his coffee, and quite possibly planning some rendition-style kidnap to smuggle Ella back to New York and ‘safety’, their time might well be running out.

Just as he was mulling over this dispiriting thought, his new burner phone rang. Ella was the only person who had the number.

‘Any news?’

‘Yes! Finally.’ The excitement in her voice was palpable, and contagious. ‘I got into the flat while he was there and was able to blink-scan some documents.’

‘While he was there? You mean he saw you?’

Ella sighed. It really was uncanny the way that Gabriel never failed to pick up on the one thing she was hoping he might miss. The man was like a heat-seeking missile of disapproval.

‘Don’t worry, he didn’t suspect anything.’

‘But Ella, he saw you before! At the convent.’

‘Trust me, he barely glanced at me,’ Ella lied. ‘In any case, the point is he’s been corresponding with a private surgery facility on Wimpole Street on behalf of a Mrs Hambrecht.’

Gabriel felt the hairs on

the back of his neck stand on end. Athena had been ‘Mrs Hambrecht’ once, before she met Spyros, before the whole nightmare began.

‘Lovato’s been negotiating the price on a whole bunch of procedures,’ said Ella. ‘I think it must be for Athena.’

‘I agree.’ Tossing down a few coins on the table, Gabriel stood up and walked outside. He couldn’t imagine either of the wizened old Kurdish men playing chess in the corner were tuning into his conversation, but you could never be too careful. ‘Do you have the name of the clinic?’

‘Yes. And the surgeon,’ Ella said triumphantly. ‘I’ll pay him a visit tomorrow. See what I can find out.’

‘Be careful,’ Gabriel said. ‘Doctors aren’t usually in the habit of letting slip information about their patients. And if anyone suspects you, you could be in danger.’

Ella’s gifts were incredible and her instincts often good. But when her blood was up, she had scant concern for her personal safety. Worse, Gabriel was starting to pick up on a certain thrill-seeking streak in Ella that seemed to have grown exponentially since she left Mykonos. The fact that it mirrored his own didn’t make it any less worrisome. Ella was her mother’s daughter in more ways than one, and it wasn’t just Mark Redmayne who had trouble getting through to her. Treating these missions like a role-playing adventure game was not a helpful trait when you had Makis Alexiadis’s trained killers out hunting for you, not to mention Redmayne determined to implement a ‘rescue’ at any cost.

‘I’ll be fine,’ said Ella, with worrying nonchalance. ‘I’ll let you know what I find out.’