The Phoenix

‘When will they tell me more? About this mission?’ she asked, suddenly panicked about the idea of Gabriel leaving. She couldn’t say why exactly, but for all his arrogance and abrasiveness, he was a link to reality, to the outside world and her old life. A way back. Like him or loathe him, Gabriel was Ella’s lifeboat. She didn’t want to have to watch him sail away.

‘You knew about Scooter, about what he’d done,’ Ella reminded him. ‘You told me that you found The Group. That you sought out your revenge. It’s not like that for me. I still don’t know anything about this mission. I don’t know who killed my parents, or why, or where they’re sending me. I mean, obviously there’s a Greek connection or Dix wouldn’t have made me take the Babbel classes, but other than that …’

‘Ella.’ Gabriel rested a hand briefly on her arm. ‘Let it go. Commit to The Group. They’ll tell you more when it’s safe to do so. But they won’t be rushed. My guess is that you won’t be fully briefed till you’re on the plane.’

Ella rolled her eyes. ‘If this turns out to be some wild-goose chase, I’m holding you responsible.’ Opening the passenger door, she jabbed a defeated finger in Gabriel’s direction. Without thinking he reached out and caught it, their hands suddenly entwined.

‘Don’t rely on me, Ella,’ he said gruffly, his voice catching in his throat. ‘Don’t rely on anyone. Only on yourself.’

‘Fine,’ said Ella, her own throat dry and hoarse all of a sudden. She climbed out of the car, straightening the creased skirt of her sundress. ‘I won’t.’

‘Goodbye,’ said Gabriel, starting the engine.

That’s it? ‘Goodbye?’

Ella studied his face, but his expression had switched back to neutral, as unreadable as a Sanskrit tablet.

With a sinking heart, she watched him drive away.

For better or worse, her new life was about to begin.

PART TWO

CHAPTER NINE

‘Mood! Mahmoud!’

The fat policeman, Thalakis, clapped his hairy, sausage-like hands in front of the prisoner’s face. It was stiflingly hot in the cell. Not the dry, desert heat of Libya, where Mahmoud ‘Mood’ Salim grew up in a sleepy village sixty miles from Murzuk. This was the stinking, fetid, heavy heat of Greece, a country Mood had already come to hate with every fiber of his being. The air here smelled of sweat and fish and cheese and lies, of the stinking breath of men like Inspector Thalakis. Not men. Beasts. Animals, devoid of compassion.

‘Speak, man!’ Flecks of spittle flew off the policeman’s swollen lips and landed on the prisoner’s skin. ‘Answer the question,’ Thalakis commanded. ‘Answer, or it will be worse for you!’

Worse for me. In other circumstances, in his old life, Mood would have laughed. How did this ignorant pig of a man imagine that anything could possibly be worse for him than it was now?

‘Who did you pay for your passage? Tell me!’ The sausage fist slammed down on the cheap Formica table. ‘Who brought you here, Mahmoud? Your family …’

It happened before anyone knew what was happening. The prisoner rose up out of his chair with a primal roar, like a monster from the depths of the Aegean, and lunged at Inspector Thalakis, wrapping his powerful, giant’s hands around the fat man’s neck.

‘Don’t you speak of my family!’

The giant hands tightened. Thalakis’s face turned red, then purple, his eyes bulging out of their sockets like grapes about to burst their skin. The two guards present threw themselves at the prisoner, Mood, pulling him back with all their combined strength, but to no avail. It was like trying to pry a barnacle off the keel of a boat with a plastic spoon.

He’s going to kill him!

Thalakis was losing consciousness. In panic, one of the guards pulled out his pistol. Turning it over, he brought it down hard, handle-side, on the back of the prisoner’s skull. There was a loud crack, then blood, then silence. Like a felled tree, Mahmoud Salim slid to the ground. Inspector Thalakis fell forward onto the table, gasping for air like

a dying fish.

The last thing Mood remembered, before the blackness engulfed him, was the cold swell of the final wave. That, and the sound of his six-year-old daughter’s screams as she was swept away …

Mood Salim had been born into a large family of goat herders in Libya’s southwestern Fezzan region. The youngest of six sons, his childhood had been Spartan but happy. There were no toys or televisions or other modern-day luxuries. The Salims lived as countless generations had before them, and about as far removed from the politics of Tripoli and the world beyond as it was possible to be. Mood’s playmates were his brothers and cousins, and the endless Saharan ergs or sand dunes had been his playground. His mother was his teacher, his father his god, and his goats his purpose. He never knew hunger, and would not have considered himself poor, not having experienced any other way of living.

That Libya was gone now, the stuff of storybooks for Mood’s own children. He and his wife Hoda had been blessed with two daughters. Parzheen, the older girl, was black haired and dark eyed and as quick-witted and cunning as a little sprite. Her younger sister Ava was softer, rounder, sweeter, with a laugh that sounded to Mood like water bubbling up from a desert spring.

‘Her laugh is like life, like a gift from heaven,’ he used to say to Hoda, watching the tiny toddler crawl around in their cramped apartment in Tarhuna. Hoda would smile and kiss him. She adored her husband’s romantic streak, the poetry in Mood’s soul that she felt sure must have come from his upbringing out in the desert. Her own childhood had been the polar opposite: educated, middle class, urban, and not particularly happy. Her parents divorced when she was eleven, leaving Hoda and her brother Khalil to fend mostly for themselves.

Everybody commented on how the Salims were a marriage of opposites, a classic case of the old and new Libya colliding, although nobody could question the success of the union. Mood, as broad and strong as an ox, six foot five in his bare feet and tiny, elfin Hoda were utterly devoted to each other and their children. Their modest flat in Tarhuna had positively buzzed with happiness.

Now there was nothing left of it but rubble.