The Phoenix

Extending his arm, Makis patted him on the shoulder in an almost avuncular manner, all trace of his earlier anger gone. What a bizarre man he was!

‘The only thanks I want is success,’ he told Mood. ‘Do not fail again, Salim.’

Now it was Mood’s turn to smile.

‘I won’t.’

Pressing the gun against Makis Alexiadis’s temple, he pulled the trigger.

The shot was silent. Even the explosion of Makis’s skull as blood and brain tissue splattered out over the white sand was no louder than a

dropped watermelon splitting open on the ground. The soft lapping of the waves and the cawing of the gulls overhead easily drowned out the sound.

Laying the gun on the sand, Mood stripped off, waded into the surf and washed the blood from his hands, face and torso as best he could. Then he returned, pulled the clean clothes from his backpack and put them on, laying his blood-stained shirt and shorts over what was left of Makis’s head. Retrieving the gun and his packet of forged papers and money, he walked calmly to the far end of the cove.

The speedboat was exactly where Athena had said it would be, tethered beneath the roots of a cypress tree at the edge of the shore. Athena was his commander now. His mistress. His purpose. With his family gone, he’d had no reason to live – until Athena saved him. Her voice, her words … it was impossible to explain. But there had been magic in them, some healing power that had stopped him from hurting her back at the convent. That had transfigured him. He couldn’t define it, or rationalize it, but nor could he deny its truth. He could hear her voice now in his head like an angel’s, guiding him:

‘I lost a child too. My only son. I died that day. But I was reborn. God brought you to me, Mahmoud. He brought you to me for a reason. We are bound together in loss. We are one. Our pain is our power.’

He had listened, entranced, while Athena told him the truth about Makis Alexiadis. How it was he, and not she, who had profited from the evil migrant trade; he whose greed and avarice and ruthlessness had led directly to Hoda and the girls’ deaths.

‘He had my husband killed too,’ Athena told Mood. ‘And did this to my face.’ Lifting her veil, she had shown Mood her appalling scars, the melted ruin of her once beautiful face. ‘I was a sinner back then myself. But I’ve repented. I’ve changed. And so can you, Mahmoud. But first you must avenge the ones you lost. Just as I am.’

Climbing inside the boat, Mood started the outboard motor.

I’ve done what you asked, my Athena. I’ve done God’s will. The beast is dead.

With a feeling of deep peace, he sped off into the limitless blue.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Athena sat up in her four-poster bed, leaning back against two cloud-soft goose-down pillows, and turned up the volume on her TV remote. The converted water mill Peter had rented for her recuperation in rural Burgundy was about as remote as one could get in France, but he’d made sure Athena had access to the British news as well as CNN.

‘And here we have the first glimpse of the suspect as he attends the initial hearing, in a case that has once again reopened the bitter debate about asylum seekers all across Europe,’ the BBC reporter was saying in his clipped, public school accent.

Athena watched as Mahmoud Salim, looking enormous and dark and menacing, if a little confused, emerged from a German police van in handcuffs. She’d allowed two days, enough time for Salim to reach Berlin, before alerting the German authorities to his true identity, as well as to his involvement in the brutal slaying of ‘respected businessman’ Makis Alexiadis on Mykonos, a murder still dominating the Greek news more than a week later.

Part of her felt sorry for Salim. His grief had blinded him and made him pathetically trusting. Even now, according to Dierk Kimmel, the German lawyer Athena had hired to ‘defend’ him, Mood still believed that she was on his side. That together they’d been part of an underground resistance determined to destroy Makis Alexiadis and put an end to the evil trade in migrants for ever.

‘He keeps asking when you’re coming to see him,’ said Dierk. ‘I’m not sure he’s entirely mentally well.’

Are any of us? wondered Athena. Her qualms over having exploited the grief-addled Salim were tempered by the fact that she knew Mood would be perfectly indifferent to spending the remaining years of his life in a German jail, or a Greek one for that matter, if the new president’s extradition request were honored. Salim might be confused, but he wasn’t suffering. He was beyond suffering. Like me. And he had certainly done the world, as well as Athena, a service, by murdering that treacherous snake Makis Alexiadis. May he rot in hell.

‘Now, what’s all this?’

Mary, the fearsomely efficient English nurse that Peter Hambrecht had hired to tend to Athena while she recovered from her extensive facial surgeries, bustled into the room and looked disapprovingly at the television.

‘I’ll take that, if you don’t mind, madam.’ She held out her chubby hand for the remote, which Athena meekly handed over. ‘You still have thirty more minutes of rest time before your stretches. Rest means rest.’

‘I know. I’m sorry. I needed a distraction.’

‘Tsk,’ said Mary dismissively. ‘Stuff and nonsense. Everything will be fine, you’ll see.’

Athena liked Mary with her starched uniforms and her pocket watch and the military precision with which she performed all her duties. Every morning, at seven o’clock sharp, the curtains were drawn back and Athena was helped to wash and perform her limited toilette before breakfast in bed at 7.30. ‘None of this French nonsense. Bacon, eggs and fried bread. You need to build up your strength.’ There were scheduled times for rest, for movement, for pain medication, for everything. Athena found the routine comforting, a reminder of life in the convent. At times she still missed the rhythmic peace of the Sacred Heart. But at other times she felt the thrill of being out, of being free and back in the driver’s seat of Spyros’s empire. My empire now.

She’d outsmarted Makis, just as she’d outsmarted so many enemies before him. But with her would-be rival gone, it was more important than ever for her to take back the reins of the business herself. There was so much to do.

‘I suppose you won’t get back to sleep now,’ Mary grumbled, helping Athena to sit up while she re-plumped her pillows. ‘Shall we take a look at how things are healing, then?’