The Phoenix Page 16

  ‘It’s still not good enough,’ he’d informed her bluntly, on their last phone call before she left Camp Hope for the airport. ‘Work harder.’

  ‘Thanks for that, Obey One,’ Ella took umbrage. ‘That’s super encouraging.’

  ‘In the field, the way you speak is as much part of your cover as anything else,’ he explained, unapologetically. ‘It can be the difference between life and death.’

  ‘Oh yeah? Well if you wanted my Greek to be fluent, maybe you should have trained me for six months, not six minutes,’ snapped Ella. ‘It’s not as if the language is all I have to learn. I’m with Dix four hours a day, plus there’s physical training. You try it!’

  Ella’s orange juice arrived, inexplicably without ice – either the Greeks didn’t feel the humidity or they were suckers for punishment – and Ella sipped it slowly, drinking in the scene around her. Just a few blocks away was a busy road, narrow but choked with honking traffic and roaring with all the usual sounds of city life: babies screaming, merchants yelling, music playing on corners and in open-fronted bars. Yet here, on this tiny square, it was almost eerily quiet. Apart from Ella and a handful of other patrons, the café was empty. The few brave souls who’d ventured out in the heat at all were wisely sticking to the shadows, smoking under trees or porches, or sitting silently on the steps of the tiny church. One woman dressed all in black, who looked so ancient she surely ought to be dead already, muttered over her rosary beads in a corner like a wicked peddler-woman from a fairy tale. Ella tried to imagine being that old, or belonging to this old world with its church bells and rituals and strange mingled scents of incense, coffee, onions, jasmine and sweat. Sitting here, the modern world she’d just left back in America already felt like a dream.

  Then again, most of the last month felt like a dream to Ella, and one from which she was no longer sure she wanted to wake up. She was, she admitted to herself, excited.

  The clock on the church belfry told her it was now three in the afternoon. In three hours, one of The Group’s Greek agents was coming to pick her up from her hotel lobby to take her for a ‘briefing dinner’. Enough time for her to return to her room, shower (again), change, and perhaps read the information Gabriel had given her for the hundredth time. Her limbs ached and she longed for sleep after her journey, but she knew that the moment she closed her eyes, no force on earth could wake her.

  ‘Ella. Ella!’

  The boat was rocking. Waves, huge waves, were crashing over the open deck and threatening to throw her overboard, pulling her exhausted body from side to side.

  ‘Ella, wake up!’

  She sat up in bed, panicked and utterly disorientated. A fat, middle-aged man with the hairiest forearms Ella had ever seen had both his hands clamped on her shoulders. Her face was dripping in water, so cold it had her gasping for breath.

  ‘What … who are you?’ she wheezed at the gorilla, who smiled back at her broadly, revealing two rows of heavily yellowed, cigar smoker’s teeth.

  ‘I am Nikkos. And you are late!’ he beamed. ‘But that’s OK. You are a woman and this is Athens. Hari ka pousas gnorissa.’

  ‘Don’t tell me you’re pleased to meet me! You just threw water in my face!’

  ‘I couldn’t wake you,’ he shrugged apologetically. ‘You were snoring. Like this.’

  Throwing his round head back so it lolled on his neck, Nikkos did an impression of Ella, opening his mouth wide and emitting the most appalling, pig-like grunting noises.

  ‘I’m sure I didn’t sound like that,’ said Ella, drying her face and trying to suppress a smile. There was something warm about him, an instantly endearing quality that made it hard to maintain one’s anger. ‘How did you get into my room?’

  He raised an admonishing finger and made a ‘tsk’ sound with his tongue. ‘Very very easy. You didn’t double-lock. You must take more precautions, OK?’

  Before Ella could say anything he was up and pacing, clapping his pudgy hands like a jovial drill sergeant. ‘Come, come, hurry up, we must be at the restaurant. Very quickly and right now. We have much to discuss.’

  ‘OK,’ said Ella, dropping the towel she still had wrapped around her from the shower and walking stark naked, and apparently quite unconcerned, into the small dressing room. ‘Just let me change. I’ll be one minute.’

  Nikkos blushed to the roots of what was left of his hair as she bent down to pull some clean underwear out of her suitcase. Who was this crazy woman? The boss had warned him Ella Praeger could be ‘eccentric’ but he hadn’t expected this.

  ‘I will wait in the car. Outside,’ he called out, belatedly averting his eyes.

  Dinner turned out to be at a bustling taverna right in the center of Athens’ tourist district at the foot of the Acropolis, in the shadow of the famous Parthenon. Although not more than two miles from the hotel, Nikkos drove them on such a circuitous route it took almost forty minutes to get there.

  ‘Are you worried about being followed?’ asked Ella, taking a seat at a corner table and perusing the delicious-looking Greek menu.

  ‘Not worried!’ Nikkos assured her. ‘Worrying is a waste of time. But prepared? Yes, always.’ Lighting up a fat cigar, in clear defiance of the ‘No Smoking’ signs posted on every wall, he flagged down the waiter and immediately started ordering for both of them. Gavros tiganitos, plates of tiny deep-fried fish, slabs of feta cheese smothered in olive oil, tomato and kalamata salad, pan-fried octopus in garlic, and dolmathes, vine leaves stuffed with savory rice and onions. Waving away Ella’s objections, he followed this up with a request for a large bottle of retsina and some bread and olives ‘to begin’.

  ‘Do you usually choose the food for your dinner companions?’ Ella asked, not angry but a little bemused. ‘Because I don’t think I can eat a fraction of that.’

  ‘Not with another man, no, no of course not,’ Nikkos explained hastily. ‘But with a woman, yes. Naturally, the man will choose the food that he pays for. This is the way in Greece.’

  ‘But what if the woman doesn’t like what the man chooses?’

  ‘You don’t like the food?’ He looked hurt.

  ‘I’m sure it will be delicious,’ said Ella. ‘It’s just, well, don’t you think your attitude is rather sexist? I mean, what if the woman pays?’

  Nikkos threw back his head and laughed heartily at this idea. As he did so, an attractive middle-aged woman a few tables away suddenly turned and stared at him.

  ‘Oh dear.’ Nikkos blanched, hastily stubbing out his cigar as the woman made a beeline for their table, and began loudly and dramatically berating him, first in her native Italian and then in Greek. Even without her trusty Babbel tapes, Ella would probably have gotten the gist of the conversation from the woman’s furious expression and wildly gesticulating hands. As it was she distinctly heard the words pseftis (liar), apateonas (cheat) and choiros (pig), were all repeated several times. Nikkos defended himself as best he could from her verbal, and occasionally physical blows, cowering like a berated dog while the waiters arrived bearing plate after plate of the feast he’d just ordered, apparently oblivious to the drama. At last the woman burned herself out and, like a tornado, whirled back to her own table, where she continued to look daggers at her hapless former flame.

  ‘I apologize for that person’s very rude behavior,’ he mumbled to Ella, heaping both their plates with a mountain of food and pouring two brim-full glasses of the ice-cold wine, one of which he drained almost completely in a single fortifying gulp.

  ‘She did seem rather upset,’ Ella observed, spearing a polpi tentatively with her fork.

  ‘She’s Italian,’ Nikkos asserted, as if this explained everything. ‘I speak very good Italian,’ he added boastfully, his natural ebullience already returning, like the tide. ‘I am polyglot.’

  Try as she might, Ella found it impossible to dislike this man. He seemed to her like an unreliable, greedy, generally badly behaved Santa Claus.

  ‘She’s upset because you cheated on her,’ sh
e told him, taking a sip of her own wine.

  ‘No, no,’ Nikkos waved away the accusation with another big slurp of wine. ‘It was a misunderstanding, I assure you.’

  ‘She said you had sex with two other women behind her back,’ said Ella.

  Registering his shocked face, she grinned. ‘I am polyglot, too. Well, almost. I also have sexual relations with a lot of different people,’ she added matter-of-factly.

  Nikkos spluttered, choking and coughing until retsina came out of his nose.

  ‘You are very different to Greek women,’ he told Ella, as soon as he’d regained his breath.

  ‘I’m very different to everyone,’ she shrugged.

  ‘Yes,’ said Nikkos suddenly serious. ‘I know. About your history and your … abilities. Are you using them now?’

  Ella nodded. ‘I’m learning to turn them on and off. I had training at the camp.’

  ‘OK. So right now, can you “hear” anything?’

  ‘Yes.’ She lowered her voice. ‘The man by the door in a red shirt is exchanging texts with his drug dealer. They’re arguing over the price of a gram of cocaine.’

  Nikkos’s eyes widened. ‘Really? You hear that? Or see it?’

  ‘Neither exactly,’ said Ella. ‘It’s hard to explain. But I’m aware of it. Thousands of electronic signals are flowing through my brain day and night. I’m learning to tune in and out as I please. Also to detect different frequencies and radio waves. Like the Greek police outside.’

  ‘There are police outside?’ Nikkos spun around.

  ‘Yes,’ said Ella unconcerned. ‘The ones who followed us. They’re surveilling you, but they don’t seem to know who I am. It’s a good thing you never worry,’ she teased him, tongue in cheek.

  Nikkos put down his knife and fork and gazed at Ella in awe.

  ‘That is very impressive. I understand now why they sent you and I pray you can help us. Succeed where others have failed.’

  Ella leaned forward eagerly. ‘They said you would brief me on stage one of the mission. Tonight? Now?’

  ‘Mmm hmm,’ said Nikkos, tearing off a hunk of warm bread and dipping it pensively into a bowl of hummus. ‘Sit back,’ he told Ella quietly, without looking up from his plate. ‘Relax. Keep eating and drinking. We are having a normal, boring conversation over dinner, hm? Nothing for anyone to be interested in.’

  Ella did as he asked, adjusting her body language and returning her attention to the delicious pile of fried anchovies that Nikkos had scooped onto her plate.

  ‘I understand you already know the name and background of your target?’ Nikkos began.

  ‘Mm hm,’ said Ella.

  ‘Good. So this will be a two-part operation,’ Nikkos went on. ‘Phase one will be intelligence gathering. As you know, we have received recent reports suggesting that she, Athena Petridis, may be alive.’

  ‘The brand on the drowned boy.’ Ella shuddered.

  ‘Yes, there’s that,’ said Nikkos. ‘And other, older rumors from the US about a badly injured woman being carried from the wreckage. But remember,’ he pronounced it Chhhreememberr, rolling every ‘r’ to within an inch of its life. ‘The crash site was incredibly remote. The likelihood of anyone being close enough to see what happened, never mind to help and rescue one of the passengers, must be very small and tiny.’

  ‘You’re saying you don’t believe those reports?’ Ella sounded surprised enough to earn a warning look from Nikkos. Stay calm. Don’t attract people’s attention. This is a boring dinner conversation, remember?

  Ella got the message and lowered her voice.

  ‘You don’t think Athena survived?’

  ‘Probably not,’ he said after a pause.

  Ella was shocked. Nikkos’s skepticism about Athena Petridis’s survival was in sharp contrast to the confidence of the rest of The Group. The way it had been put to Ella, establishing the fact that Athena was still alive was almost a formality at this point. The brand on the dead boy’s heel proved it. The real purpose of Ella’s mission was to locate her, so that a hit squad could move in and do the rest.

  ‘That she survived the helicopter crash at all would be a miracle,’ Nikkos explained, refilling both their glasses and ordering a second bottle. ‘But the idea that not only did she survive the impact, but that someone saw her, pulled her from those flames, carried her maybe fifty kilometers to the nearest town, and then somehow kept it a secret, for long enough to smuggle her across the world? To me, this sounds like a fable. Like a Greek myth, hm?’ he chuckled, pleased with his own analogy.

  Ella sipped her wine in silent contemplation.

  ‘You know my parents were working to bring the Petridises to justice. When I was still a small child. It was their last mission.’

  ‘Yes. I know.’ Nikkos looked down at the tablecloth, uncomfortable suddenly.

  ‘Did you know them?’ Ella asked. ‘They would have been older than you, but not by that much. And if they both came to Greece, perhaps you met?’

  ‘I never met your father. But I knew your mother,’ Nikkos admitted, clearing his throat. ‘Not well, but … our paths crossed.’

  ‘What was she like?’

  Nikkos looked away. ‘She was a remarkable lady.’

  ‘Remarkable in what way?’

  Ella leaned towards him again, wide-eyed and eager for more, for any details he could spare her, like a starved dog hoping for dropped crumbs from its master’s table. But Nikkos seemed uncharacteristically reticent.

  ‘Many different ways. She was passionate. She was kind. Highly intelligent, of course.’

  ‘Well, am I like her? Do you see similarities?’

  It was a child’s question, innocently asked, and it sent a pang, that felt an awful lot like guilt, through Nikkos’s heart.

  ‘I don’t know yet if you are like her,’ he said quietly. ‘I hope you are. You’re going to need your mother’s courage in the weeks ahead, Ella. That much I know.’

  The second bottle of wine arrived and Nikkos ignored Ella’s protests, refilling her glass to the brim.

  ‘Your purpose here, as you know, is as an intelligence-gathering tool. Hopefully your abilities are going to give us the edge on that score. Through you, we hope to find out whether Athena Petridis really is alive, or whether the mark on the boy was some sort of cruel hoax. A stunt, designed to make us and others believe that she is still out there.’

  ‘But why …?’

  Nikkos reached out his hand and placed it over hers. ‘Too many questions,’ he told her, not unkindly. ‘To stay safe and be successful you must concentrate on the job at hand. For now that means forgetting about Athena and focusing only on this man.’

  Reaching into his jacket pocket, he pulled out a crumpled piece of newspaper and passed it to Ella. It was taken from the society pages of Eleftherotypia, and it showed a glamorous group in white tie standing in front of the presidential mansion in central Athens. In the center of the group was a handsome, barrel-chested, dark-haired man, who clearly projected his dominance over the others with unspoken yet undeniable signals in his body language, expression and stance.

  ‘Makis Alexiadis,’ Nikkos said casually. ‘They call him Big Mak. Very famous in Greece.’

  ‘Who is he?’ asked Ella.

  ‘That depends who you ask. Some say he’s a successful businessman. Others call him a playboy. This Greek word here,’ he pointed to the photo’s caption, ‘I think you would say in English “influencer”. It means politicians court him. Ordinary people watch him, on social media and on the television, and they copy his ways. His style.’

  ‘And what do you say about him?’

  Nikkos scooped the last of the feta greedily onto his plate.

  ‘I say,’ he took a leisurely bite, ‘he is a killer. He is a sadist. He is …’ He muttered something in Greek, searching for the right English word. ‘… a blight on this earth. Like a cancer.’ Dropping his voice to a whisper, he leaned forward and continued, stroking Ella’s hair as if he were murm
uring sweet nothings into her ear. ‘For many years, OK, Makis was Spyros Petridis’s number two. Since the crash, he has been number one, the gang’s de-facto leader. Later tonight you will receive an anonymous package at your hotel with more details about him and his operations. But for now I can tell you that one of his “businesses” is kidnapping young children, mostly from the Middle East, and selling them to wealthy Western clients.’

  ‘Selling them?’

  Nikkos nodded.

  ‘For sex?’

  ‘Sometimes.’

  Pressing her napkin to her mouth, Ella fought back her feelings of nausea.

  ‘In the last three years we – The Group – have successfully targeted several of his “clients”,’ said Nikkos, taking his knife and slicing it purposefully through a tomato to indicate exactly what form this ‘targeting’ had taken.

  ‘But not him?’

  ‘No.’ Nikkos made a face, as if this fact were a particularly bitter source of personal regret. ‘Not him. Unfortunate to say, but if Athena is alive, then Makis Alexiadis is our closest remaining link to her. He may even have been in contact with her. We don’t know. But we believe that whoever put that mark on the drowned child’s heel was sending a signal to Makis as much as to us, or anybody else. A warning.’

  ‘What sort of warning?’ asked Ella. ‘What does the mark mean? The “L”?’

  ‘It was the sign Spyros Petridis used to signify his dominance over others. His power. Some believed that the “L” was for Lagonissi, Spyros’s birthplace. Perhaps it was.’

  ‘But?’ Ella prompted. ‘It sounds as if there’s a “but”.’

  Nikkos looked uncomfortable. He should never have opened up this particular can of worms.

  ‘But “L” wasn’t the only ancient Greek letter used by the Petridises on their enemies or their subordinates during their heyday. From time to time there would be an alpha or an omega or a pi. We would find the signs on corpses, or sometimes even branded into living people who’d crossed them in some way. Restaurant owners, businesses who refused to pay them protection money. Even a famous Hollywood producer, a guy named Larry Gaster, reportedly had an “L” burned into his foot, as punishment for “flirting” with Athena. Before Spyros’s marriage to Athena, the “L” was definitely his mark. So maybe it did mean Lagonissi back then. But in later years, that changed. If “L” was for Lagonissi, what was the significance of “O” and “A” and “P”?’