The Phoenix

‘A million dollars cash, Rog. He’s good for it, believe me.’

Dr Butler’s Eton-educated drawl reverberated down the corridor behind him.

‘Lovely to meet you, Miss Yorke. I’ll be in touch.’

Ella waited for the elevator in a trance. She remembered nothing of her twenty-minute interview with Dr Henry Butler. He, no doubt, had talked about rhinoplasty. She had sat and stared and nodded and tried to swallow the fact that she had come within seconds, seconds, of ending another human being’s life. By mistake.

Was this really what her ‘gifts’ were for? For killing? For vengeance?

Had her parents truly wanted that for her? And even if they had, did that really matter? This was her life after all, her choices. If ‘Mrs Hambrecht’ – whoever she really was – had wound up dead today, then she, Ella, would be responsible. Not Rachel or William Praeger.

Me.

Were these awful choices what her grandmother Mimi had been trying to save her from for all those long, lonely years? Had Mimi tried to protect her, in her own way, by isolating her from the world up at Paradise Ranch? Perhaps Mimi had been the only one who truly loved her, after all.

Today was a wake-up call, Ella decided, letting the laundry man into the elevator before turning around to pull the metal gates closed. I’ll tell Gabriel I’ve changed my mind. I’m out. It’s not my ‘destiny’ to kill anyone. I’ll go back to San Francisco and my old life. To Bob and Joanie and …

It happened so suddenly she had no time to react. Strong, male hands grabbing her from behind, one across her chest pinning both her arms to her sides, the other clamped hard over her nose and mouth. The doors were closed and the elevator was moving, grindingly slowly. The man with the laundry hamper had her completely incapacitated. Ella felt his knee dig into the small of her back and his left arm, the one forming a straitjacket across her torso, begin to move upwards, towards her neck. She knew then that he was going to try to kill her. She’d done it herself, to injured livestock on the farm. She’d used her knee as a brace, gripped the head and pulled sharply around and up, snapping the neck.

Not me. Not today.

Unable to breathe, she thrust her jaw forward and bit hard on the fingers covering her mouth. Blood spurted everywhere and her assailant let out a muted scream of agony.

‘Bitch!’ he muttered under his breath, using his other arm to take a firmer grim on Ella’s entire skull. Ella’s heart pounded. One well-timed twist and she’d be dead. She had to break free from that grip right now.

With a strength and agility she didn’t know she had, she drew one leg up behind her in a painful reverse twist and shot her foot as fast as she could, jack-rabbit style, into what she hoped were his genitals. A second scream, louder this time, signaled she’d found her target. His arm involuntarily loosened just a fraction, but it was enough for Ella to drop down to her knees, slipping her head free from his grip. Reaching down, maddened with pain, he changed tactics and wrapped both, bear-like hands around her neck, squeezing her windpipe until Ella could feel her eyeballs bulge and the blood throb in her temples. She flailed her arms and legs as the elevator cranked slowly down, down, but it was no use. She’d be unconscious, if not dead, by the time they reached the ground.

Looking up into his eyes, she could see her attacker’s anger turn to satisfaction and finally to a sort of sadistic triumph. He’s enjoying it. He’s enjoying killing me.

Without making any conscious movement, her jerking arms found their way to her pocket. She felt the syringe against her fingers, just as everything around her was starting to turn black. Flailing out wildly, she plunged it into his forearm and pushed.

Outside on Wimpole Street, Ella calmly crossed the road at the zebra crossing and walked round the corner onto Mansfield Street, where she took the first in a long line of waiting black cabs.

‘Hampstead Heath, please,’ she told the driver, simply because it was the first destination to pop into her head. Only once they’d passed the Langham Hotel did she allow herself to exhale,

reaching up and touching the ring of livid bruises around her neck from where the man’s fingers had tried to choke her.

They would have found his body by now, slumped behind the laundry cart.

So Ella had killed today after all.

Later, up on the heath, she would text Gabriel. For now she was content to lean back in the cab and enjoy the luxury of her own breath coming in and out, in and out.

I’m alive. I survived.

Perhaps this stuff really was her destiny …

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Mahmood Salim jumped off the side of the fishing sloop into warm, waist-deep water and waded slowly towards the shore, his backpack slung over his broad shoulders.

It felt strange being back in the Greek islands. Strange and unnerving, as if some dark force, some unnamed fates kept demanding his return, pulling him in like a magnet to the place where his darling girls had left this earth. Of course, this was Mykonos, not Lesbos. And this time Salim was not a helpless North African migrant, but a legitimate French citizen enjoying his vacation, complete with all the requisite forged paperwork and fifteen thousand euros in cash and traveler’s checks, should he need them.

Another man – a man who still had something to lose – would doubtless have been frightened at the task that lay ahead. But Mood Salim was past fear, just as he was past pain, or joy or despair. All emotions were dead in him, as dead as his beloved Hoda and their children. What was left was his giant’s body, battle-scarred but mighty. And that body was a machine, programmed for one thing and one thing only: revenge.

His work had begun as soon as he’d broken out of the detention center, a surprisingly simple matter of physically incapacitating two semi-drunk night watchmen and convincing a naïve American charity worker to give him a ride to the mainland.

Killing the Kouvlaki brothers had been surprisingly easy. Perhaps too easy. Armed with Andreas’s memory stick and his frozen index finger in a zip-lock baggie, Mahmoud had arrived in Athens soon afterwards, ready to dispose of Makis Alexiadis at his townhouse and finish the job.