Syros Island

Syros Island becomes the setting for Zachary Solomon’s attempted reinvention after he escapes prison with a vast fortune. Under the name Andros Dareios, he builds a life of wealth, physical transformation, and cultivated leisure on the island, but the apparent paradise cannot keep his past at bay: a program about Freemasonry rekindles a memory of the pyramid his father had mentioned and draws him back toward the Solomons.

Setting and Settlement

After arranging Zachary Solomon’s supposed death and escaping with the fortune transferred from his account, Inmate 37 begins anew in the Greek Islands. He chooses the name Andros Dareios and settles on Syros Island, buying a sprawling villa in Possidonia, an exclusive community associated with wealth, culture, and attention to physical fitness. The island offers a sharp contrast to the Turkish prison he has left behind: he adopts sailing, exercise, reading, and the pleasures of his new surroundings in place of his former life.

Reinvention on the Island

Andros’s new identity is not only a change of name and residence. Inspired by the people around him and by his reading of Homer’s Odyssey, he begins working out and pursues an increasingly extreme physical transformation with steroids, black-market growth hormones, and long hours of weight lifting. His changed appearance and breathy voice, together with his wealth and guarded past, help him cultivate an enigmatic public persona. The transformation brings attention and admiration, but it does not provide lasting satisfaction.

As the years pass, the pleasures that had defined his island life lose their force. Food, books, sexual adventures, and even the views from his villa cease to hold their earlier appeal. Though he has made a home in what first seemed like paradise and fashioned himself into the person he wanted to become, he feels as empty as he had in prison. Syros thus marks both the height of his self-invention and the failure of that reinvention to give him a durable sense of purpose.

The Pyramid and the Return

The change in Andros’s direction begins during a night of television channel surfing at his villa. A program about Freemasonry recounts legends concerning a mysterious stone pyramid whose encrypted inscription supposedly leads to lost wisdom and power. The account recalls what Zachary had heard from his father about a pyramid. After the program ends, Andros goes onto the balcony and remembers more; he begins to consider that the story may be true and that his former identity still has something to offer.

Three weeks later, having carefully planned his timing, he leaves Syros and returns to the Solomons’ Potomac estate. His journey makes the island’s narrative significance clear: it is not merely a refuge after prison, but the place where wealth and self-fashioning give way to renewed pursuit of the family secret. The memory stirred on Syros leads directly to his armed entry into the estate, where he finds Peter Solomon and Katherine Solomon together.