Sidney Sheldon Untitled Book 2

Athena covered her ears with her hands. ‘No, no, no. Stop saying that. You’re confused. You’ll change your mind, you’ll see. When we’re married.’

Peter laughed. ‘It’s not my mind that needs to change, Athena!’

But there was no stopping her. There was never any stopping Athena. They married the year they both turned twenty and moved to a minuscule apartment in London, where Peter had won a place at the Royal College of Music.

‘You’re happy, aren’t you?’ Athena would demand, every morning, as he pored over sheet music in their tiny kitchenette.

Peter had to admit that he was, blissfully happy. The bullies were gone, he was playing his beloved music twenty-four hours a day, and he got to come home to his best friend, the most magical, gregarious, and most alive person he knew. Giving up sex with men seemed like a small price to pay.

He was even happier when, a few months later, Athena fell pregnant with their first child, a boy.

‘We’ll call him Apollo,’ she gushed, ‘after the god of music and beauty.’

And beautiful he had been, so impossibly beautiful, for the twenty short minutes of his life.

CHD the doctors said. Congenital Heart Disease. ‘He didn’t suffer,’ they told Athena. ‘Not at all.’

But three hearts broke that day, and Athena suffered enough for all of them. Later, Peter came to realize that the girl he had known all his life had died along with their son. That the Athena who came after was not the same as the one who had been before. Weeks of mute shock gave way to months of deep depression. Desperate to help, Peter tried everything: dragging Athena out to dinner and the park, taking her to doctors and therapists and hypnotists. He still remembered how delighted he was when Athena looked up at him one night, after another silent, miserable supper, and suggested that she take a trip back home to Greece.

‘There’s a place on Mykonos, my mother told me about it. It’s in a tiny village, between Kalafatis and Elia. They do “rest cures” and programs to help people through grief. It’s not cheap …’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Peter assured her. ‘Go. You must go. I’ll find the money, don’t worry about that.’

It was the first proactive thought Athena had had since Apollo’s death, and Peter grabbed at it with both hands like a drowning man. He couldn’t have known that that would be it. The end.

It was on that trip to Mykonos that Athena met Spyros Petridis. Or rather, it was there, at her lowest ebb, that she fell under his evil spell. She wrote to Peter twice, strange, formal letters that sounded nothing like her, explaining that she had met someone and fallen in love and that she wasn’t coming back. Peter was gay and she needed more than a platonic relationship. The marriage would never have survived long-term.

Only in the very last line she wrote did Peter hear what sounded like Athena’s true, authentic voice. ‘Every time I see your face, I see his,’ she wrote. ‘It’s more pain than I can bear.’

And so he’d let her go. That was thirty years ago now, and Peter Hambrecht had had other, great loves in his life, not to mention a wildly successful career. But he’d never forgotten Athena. Over the years, as her fame, and her husband’s infamy, grew, Peter had watched Athena on television like a child watching a cartoon character. Or rather, characters, plural. The gracious socialite and hostess. The saintly goodwill ambassador. The untouchable beauty, People magazine’s ‘sexiest woman alive’. None of these was the real Athena.

Rumors swirled about Spyros Petridis’s criminal dealings, his murder squads and his drug gangs and his people-smugglers. But nothing was ever proven. Athena’s dazzling light, her aura of goodness, her magic, seemed to blind people to the dark underbelly of her husband’s world.

Peter suspected the rumors were true. But he never blamed Athena, not then, not now. However she might have changed, he knew his Athena could never, ever be responsible for the death or suffering of a child. Even if she were alive, there was no way on earth that she would be connected to what happened to that poor little Libyan boy. No way.

But she wasn’t alive.

She was dead, burned alive alongside her monstrous husband.

May God rest her soul.

East Hampton, NY

‘Goddamn it!’

Mark Redmayne shielded his eyes from the sun as he watched his golf ball veer wildly to the left of the eleventh hole before landing with an audible plop in the depths of the lake. He stiffened. Damn. A brilliant but ruthless businessman, Redmayne was in his early fifties, although he had the physique of a much younger man. Coupled with his stiff, soldier-like bearing, it helped preserve the aura of barely repressed violence that hung around him constantly, intimidating rivals and friends alike. Mark Redmayne was not a man one wanted to cross.

He was playing like an amateur today. Technically, of course, he was an amateur, but only because he didn’t have time to play golf professionally, not because he wasn’t good enough. Running a Fortune 500 company turned out to be a tiresomely full-time gig. And then of course there was Mark Redmayne’s other job. His duty. His calling. That was even more demanding. Especially on days like today.

He’d come to the golf course this afternoon to try to detach. It wasn’t working. His conversation of a few hours ago with Gabriel, one of The Group’s very best operatives, continued to haunt him.

‘It’s her, sir,’ Gabriel informed him bluntly over the telephone. ‘She’s alive and she wants us to know it.’

‘She’s not alive. She’s dead,’ Mark Redmayne said, as if by saying the words forcefully enough, he could make it so. ‘We killed her.’

Pinching the bridge of his nose to try to shut off the headache hammering wildly inside his skull, he gazed out of his office window. Below him, Manhattan lay spread out like a dream, a glorious kingdom he had conquered. Mark Redmayne hadn’t founded his company, but under his leadership he had grown it from the modest printing business his father had left him into a global multi-billion-dollar empire. It was incredible the effect a tragic childhood could have on one’s ambition, one’s determination to succeed at all costs. Business success, however, meant nothing to Mark Redmayne compared to this. The Group, and the work they did under Mark’s leadership – that was reality. That was what mattered.

‘We killed them both,’ he muttered, as much to himself as to his operative on the other end of the line.

‘Maybe not,’ said Gabriel.

‘“Maybe?” … Don’t you give me “maybe not”!’Redmayne exploded. ‘I was there, OK? I watched that chopper go down.’

Most of The Group’s agents were terrified of the boss’s temper, and with good reason. Mark Redmayne wasn’t known for his compassion; his retribution, once invoked, was ruthless. But Gabriel was one of the few people immune to his outbursts. Nothing could sway him from the facts.

‘Athena Petridis’s DNA was never found, sir.’

A muscle on the side of Mark Redmayne’s jaw began to twitch.

‘Because her remains were destroyed in the fire.’

‘But her husband’s weren’t?’ Gabriel challenged. ‘They were in the cockpit together, side by side. If his bones didn’t burn, why should hers?’

‘I don’t know,’ Redmayne admitted grudgingly. ‘I just know that they did. This discussion is over.’

He hung up, which was childish, but he didn’t have the strength or the patience to listen to any more of the agent’s doubts. Largely because they were his doubts too. As soon as he saw the picture, the dead child with his branded foot, he knew. Athena Petridis, that bitch, that witch, that untouchable monster of a woman … was alive.

Mark Redmayne had hated the Petridises for a very long time. There was a special place in his psyche for people who hurt children. The terrible secret of his own childhood – the single, awful event that had made him who he was and led him to The Group in the first place – had fanned the flames of his loathing into a raging, crazed, homicidal inferno which no force on earth could ever put out.

But what if somehow – impossibly – Athena Petridis had survived the crash that had killed her husband? And she was out there right now, laughing at them, laughing at him, for having the audacity to think he’d won. For twelve years, she’d played dead, lulling The Group, and the world, into a false sense of security. But now, with this sick, cruel message, this violation of an innocent child – L – she was back.

‘I’ll fetch you new balls, sir.’ Mark Redmayne’s caddy looked nervously at his employer. Mr Redmayne was not used to losing, and had a reputation for taking his frustrations out on the closest underling to hand. This time, however, to the caddy’s relief, he seemed oddly calm.

‘No need, Henry. There’s nothing wrong with my old balls. I just need to remember I have them.’

‘Sir?’

‘And then I need to start playing a bit better.’

Back in his Bombardier Challenger Learjet after the round, Mark Redmayne made the call he’d been putting off since this morning.

‘Let’s say you’re right.’

‘Sir.’ Gabriel waited.

‘Let’s say she’s alive.’

‘She is alive, sir.’