ng man at his feet. He remembered the first time he’d seen Andreas Kouvlaki, far, far away from here. On that day the sun was shining, and Andreas too had shone, radiating authority and confidence, his power and wealth in stark contrast to the poverty and misery and desperation all around him. Like a silver dolphin, swimming through a sea of filth.
How the tables had turned.
‘Please!’ Andreas begged. ‘We can do this together. You need me. Let me help you.’
‘Thank you,’ the assassin said quietly. ‘I will.’
And he had. Reaching into the bag by the side of his bed, he pulled out the night’s two treasures, holding each lovingly.
The first was a memory stick, containing the access codes to his next victim’s estate.
And the second was Andreas Kouvlaki’s right index finger, the biometric ‘key’ to the master bedroom suite, tightly wrapped in a bag of ice.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Ella pressed her forehead against the plastic plane window as they dropped down through the last layer of clouds towards Eleftherios Venizelos, otherwise known as Athens International Airport. Having never left the United States before, she was fascinated by everything she saw. Even from fifteen thousand feet, it was clear that she was entering not just a different country, but a different world.
A sky so bright blue it looked like something from a child’s coloring book shimmered over a patchwork of brown and green fields, crisscrossed with tiny roads, along which were scattered white buildings of various shapes and sizes. Beyond the fields, an aqua sea lapped at a white-sand coast. The plane continued its descent and soon Ella could make out rivers and churches and what might have been an amphitheater, or some sort of ruin? A lone red sailboat headed out into open water. It all seems so peaceful, Ella thought.
Thanks to the briefing that she’d finally been handed at San Francisco Airport, and had read over and over again for the last ten hours straight, she now knew that this strange, colorful place was Attica, the region surrounding Greece’s capital.
She also knew that, somewhere down there, her parents had lost their lives.
Not ‘lost’, Ella corrected herself. William and Rachel Praeger had been robbed of their lives, brutally murdered. Now, at long last, Ella knew who to blame.
Her father William had died first, shot in the head at point-blank range by members of an organized crime gang run by a man named Spyros Petridis. He’d been on assignment in Europe, part of a team attempting to expose a vast money-laundering operation headed by Petridis and involving numerous senior European government officials. According to Ella’s briefing, William was killed somewhere on the Greek mainland. Although his body was never found, The Group had since intercepted multiple communications from within the Petridis empire confirming his murder.
Ella’s mother Rachel had suffered an even more appalling end. Lured to Greece by the Petridises, in search of her husband (in reality already dead), Rachel was kidnapped, taken to a remote beach and drowned in the Aegean by Spyros Petridis himself, while his wife Athena looked on. Personally enraged by the damage that William Praeger had done to his ‘business interests’, he had vowed to wreak a vengeance on The Group that went beyond just William’s murder. Killing William’s wife, and in such a sadistic manner, had been an act of rage and of terror, designed to strike fear into the uppermost echelons of The Group’s anonymous leadership.
Instead, it had the opposite effect. Revolted by the murder of the Praegers, two of its most brave and brilliant young operatives, The Group struck back, successfully assassinating Spyros Petridis and his wife Athena the following year by sabotaging a helicopter in which they were both passengers, causing a fatal crash. Until a few months ago, the world believed that both the Petridises had perished in this ‘accident’. But recent events suggested to The Group, and those in the know, that Athena Petridis might in fact have survived the crash and had been in hiding all this time.
Ella’s mission was to establish whether this was true and – if it was – to find Athena Petridis. Find the woman who had stood by and watched while Ella’s mother was drowned, like a rat. The Group hoped that Ella’s unique abilities to receive and interpret data transmissions, as well as her personal investment in the mission, would help her succeed where traditional operatives had failed. ‘Once located,’ Ella’s briefing asserted bluntly, ‘the target will be destroyed.’
At first Ella was disappointed by the lack of detail about her parents’ deaths. In a seventy-page briefing, less than two pages were devoted to the murders of William and Rachel Praeger. The other sixty-eight pages focused on the Petridis criminal empire, past and present, and what little concrete information The Group had so far on the possible whereabouts of Ella’s target, Athena Petridis.
But as Ella read on, she found herself putting her parents’ murders to one side as she began to comprehend the scale of the Petridis gang’s crimes; if you could even call such a vast and sophisticated organization a ‘gang’. The depths of misery that Spyros Petridis and his henchmen had inflicted over the years was breathtaking, especially for a group that, until today, Ella had never even heard of. Even if only a fraction of the report was accurate, these people had to be right up there with the Mafia and the Triads on the torture-and-killing stakes, and perhaps were even more successful when it came to white-collar crime, amassing eye-watering levels of wealth. As well as vast fortunes made from illegal activities such as prostitution and narcotics, the Petridises had defrauded, embezzled and intimidated their way into countless ‘legitimate’ businesses, from real estate to shipping to mining and investment banking. At the end of their reign of terror, in the years immediately prior to the crash, they’d even expanded into education, investing heavily in private, inner-city schools in the United States. Ironically, this had proved to be one of their most profitable sectors to date, a simple business model that involved luring poor but aspirational white and immigrant families into a lifetime of debt and, effectively, servitude to the Petridis machine.
Even if they hadn’t killed my parents, Ella thought, these people were evil to the bone.
Closing her eyes, she decided to practice Dix’s technique. Allowing the receiver part of her brain to open, she tried to tune in exclusively to the dialogue between air-traffic control and the cockpit. To her delight, she found she could do it easily. Not that the jargon-filled exchange meant much to her. But it was incredible to think that just a few short weeks ago, all she would have heard was an incomprehensible crackle, accompanied by a nausea-inducing headache.
Grudgingly, she admitted that she did have The Group to thank for some things.
With a single, hard bump they were on the ground.
‘Welcome to Athens. We hope you had a pleasant flight.’
‘It’s like, a billion degrees here! And two billion per cent humidity. I’m melting like the Wicked Witch of the West.’
Ella was talking to her friend Bob a few blocks from her hotel, struggling to hold on to her cell phone with clammy, sweat-soaked hands.
‘I mean, I only came out to get a soda, but I seriously need to take all my clothes off and jump in a fountain or something.’
‘Don’t do that,’ said Bob, who both loved and hated the fact that Ella had called him at four in the morning his time, after three weeks of radio silence – from Greece – but was now acting as if they’d just spoken yesterday. Like everything was normal.
‘You didn’t die in the woods, then. That’s good.’ He rubbed his eyes sleepily.
‘What woods?’ asked Ella.