The Phoenix

This time’s Mak’s answer was instant. His voice was resolute and his tone harder than Ella had ever heard it, every shred of his legendary warmth gone, squeezed out like pips from a crushed lemon.

‘Nothing. I’ll take care of it.’

‘Be careful, Makis. It would be safer – cleaner – if you kept some distance. Let my people handle this. It’s what we do.’

‘I said I’ll take care of it!’ Makis snapped. ‘We’ll talk again in the morning. When it’s done.’

The line went dead.

For a moment, Ella froze, paralyzed with panic.

‘I’ll take care of it.’

‘When it’s done.’

He’s talking about me. About killing me. He wants to do it himself.

She thought back to all the horror stories she’d read about Spyros Petridis and the ways in which he disposed of his enemies. Torture. Strangulation. Burying alive. Drowning.

Like my mother.

Mak had been Spyros’s enforcer back then, the servant, learning his tradecraft at his master’s feet. Now, he had enforcers of his own to do his dirty work, men like Cameron McKinley and his ‘people’. They’d almost certainly killed Nikkos. ‘It’s what we do.’ But this was different. This was personal. ‘Persephone’ had betrayed Makis Alexiadis, made a fool of him. He must mete out her punishment himself, look her in the eyes as he hurt her, terrorized her, extinguished her life with his own bare hands …

Ella sat bolt upright, shaken suddenly from her trance. If she wanted to live she must act, and act now. But what could she do? No one knew where she was. She was unarmed, alone, and with no hope of rescue. The Argo was clearly visible up ahead of them, vast and impressive, looming like a great white death star from which there could be no escape. In less than two minutes they would reach it.

I’m as good as dead.

The boss was shouting. Screaming, in fact.

Gabriel held the phone away from his ears. He’d landed back in the States yesterday, exhausted and emotionally drained by the grim circumstances of Nikkos Anastas’s murder and having to break the news to Ella. Everything in Greece was unraveling faster than ball of yarn tossed from a clifftop, and Gabriel couldn’t shake the sinking feeling that worse was yet to come.

Checking into a cheap hotel near JFK, he’d taken a pill and slept solidly for fourteen hours. When he woke, it was to Mark Redmayne’s borderline hysteria.

‘She’s gone!’ he bellowed, as if shattering Gabriel’s eardrums was going to solve the problem. ‘Ella’s gone. She gave the new handler the slip in Athens and she never showed up for her flight.’

‘Shit,’ muttered Gabriel.

‘You lost her!’ Redmayne roared. ‘How the hell could you have lost her?’

‘Sir?’

‘You told me you’d convinced her the mission was aborted!’ Redmayne boomed. ‘That she was coming back here. You said it was sorted.’

‘I thought it was.’ Gabriel rubbed his eyes blearily. If Ella hadn’t caught her flight to New York, there was only one place she was headed.

Redmayne was still incandescent, expletives firing off his tongue like bullets from a machine-gun, as if indiscriminate anger was going to help the situation. Not for the first time, Gabriel wondered how this man had ever risen to become head of The Group.

‘Be quiet,’ he said eventually and with characteristic bluntness, his need to think overriding everything else. ‘We need to find her and get her out of there.’

‘Do you think I don’t know that?’ Redmayne’s decibel levels were reaching dangerous proportions. ‘The question is, where the hell is she?’

‘She’s with Makis Alexiadis,’ Gabriel answered instantly. ‘We need to track down his yacht.’

Mak watched from the upper deck as the tender approached. He first made it out from almost a mile away, a mere speck of light flying over the tops of the waves like a skimming pebble. Inside him, he felt the monster start to grow.

It was a feeling he used to know well, but one that he rarely experienced nowadays. The excitement, quasi-sexual, of exerting the ultimate dominance over another human being. Since rising to such dizzy heights of power, the physical rush of killing was something he largely delegated to others. He hadn’t missed it. In fact, it had been a relief to take a step back, to be able to conduct the operations of the Petridis empire as if it were any other business. These days, in middle age, Mak had the luxury of indulging in reflection, and introspection. If he’d never met Spyros, if his life had taken a different, more prosaic turn, might he never have killed at all? He did not, after all, consider himself innately violent, or criminal, or cruel. It was more that, like a kitten watching its mother hunt mice, he had learned those skills – learned to trap, to terrorize, to kill, to devour – and he had also learned to develop the emotions that went with them. He wasn’t a monster. But he did have a monster inside him. Over the years, his evil, abhorrent feelings had become entwined with all his other regulated emotions, so that he could no longer fully separate the normal from the abnormal, the acceptable from the psychotic.

Waiting for Persephone to arrive – he would always think of her as Persephone, right to the end – he felt both sickened and aroused. Angry and excited. Longing, yet full of a hatred so poisonous it threatened to burn through his skin like lava spewing through the cracked earth.