by Rob Jones
Lea searched the antechamber for anything that might indicate a way out as the rigging above their heads slowly worked its way toward them. The grinding sound of the grille as it scraped against the cooled lava was ear-piercing, and with every second the sharpened bronze spikes grew ever-closer to their heads. “Maybe we can use the vines to escape?” she said.
The liana vines covering the spike-frame were now low enough to be dangling over them. The liana was a type of woody vine that thrived in the canopies of the Amazon rainforest and some could grow over three thousand feet long. These ones had grown in through cracks in the roof the chamber.
“Possible,” Ryan said glumly. “It’s where they get rattan for rope and stuff.”
“Well it’s gross,” Lea said, pulling some away from her shoulder.
“Don’t worry about it,” Hawke said, helping to pull the liana away from her.
Another vine slid over her back and she screamed.
“Just calm down,” Hawke said.
“I am being calm, Josiah…”
“If this is your idea of calm I’d hate to see how you react when something serious happens, like burning the toast.”
“Stop being a smartarse and just get the thing off me. It’s… gross.”
“Hey!” Ryan said. “I think I found something – look.”
They joined him by the door they had used on their way into the volcano. He was studying a stone panel in the floor, positioned like a doormat and covered in strange lines.
“What is it, mate?”
“Some kind of Inca puzzle, I think. I’m not sure.” He got down on his knees and blew the dust and dirt out of the cracks in the puzzle stone.
“Time to get sure, Ry,” Lea said casting a panicked glare upwards. “Can’t be more than a couple of minutes till that thing’s turning us all into kebabs.”
“I’m going as fast as I can,” he said. “These are not easy to read. They’re very badly deteriorated for one thing, and the meanings seem to be obscured… almost cryptic.”
“That’s great, Ryan,” Lexi said, joining Lea now and staring up at the descending framework of razor-sharp spikes. “But in about ninety seconds we’re going to be pinned to the dirt like butterflies on a piece of card.”
“I believe,” Ryan said, turning to face her. “That the term you’re searching for is mounting board.”
“Yes, I believe it may be,” Lexi said. “Oh and by the way – why are you looking at me and not the symbols?”
“She has a point, mate.”
Ryan conceded the matter and returned to the symbols. “I’ve been looking at these all wrong. This isn’t a series of degraded symbols at all – this is a depiction of a yupana.”
“And that’s what?”
“It’s basically an Incan abacus.”
“Oh, crap,” Scarlet said. “A maths problem.”
Ryan turned to her, his face more weary now, but the faintest glimmer of the man he used to be still in his eyes. “Thank God I’m here then, eh?”
“Yes,” she said, crossing her arms. “Quite.”
“So let me get on with it, then.”
Lea felt the frustration grow in her heart. They had already lost Professor Balta and Luis, and now things were looking perilous for the rest of the team as well. Not only that, but Ziad Saqqal, Jawad, Rajavi, Corzo and Dirk Kruger were all getting away with the Lost Treasure of the Incas piled into their choppers. If that weren’t bad enough, they also had of the most lethal forms of pneumatic plague ever to strike mankind.
Reaper stared up at the grid, shook his head and let out a long, low sigh. It was low enough for him to reach now, and he grabbed hold of one of the spikes to test its strength. “Definitely bronze,” he said, trying hard to shift it. “And connected very strongly to the grille framework. We’re not snapping these things off.”
“More good news,” Scarlet said.
The grinding sound was louder now as the framework was working its way much closer, and they were all crouching to avoid the spikes pushing down onto their heads and shoulders.
“I’ve got it,” Ryan said. “It’s actually a rather complex mathematics puzzle – much more complex that I would have thought them capable of.”
“Ryan… four inches…”
“He knows all about four inches,” Scarlet said, nudging the young man in the ribs. “Eh, boy?”
Ryan ignored it. “It’s similar to Ribet’s Theorem.”
Lea stared at him. “What now?”
“Three inches…”
“It’s a number theory statement to do with the properties of Galois representations that are associated with modular forms.”
Lexi looked at him. “Ryan, are you having a breakdown?”
“When the epsilon conjecture was finally proven it led the way to Fermat’s Last Theorem being cracked.”
Hawke scratched his head and looked from the spikes to Ryan’s young face. “Mate, when you said it was a maths problem I thought you meant like adding up.”
“Yeah… not so much.”
“Two inches.”
“Ryan definitely knows about all about two inches,” Scarlet said.
Lea sighed. “It didn’t work and wasn’t funny at four inches, so why the hell do you think it would work and be funny two inches later?”
“Give me a break, I’m under pressure!”
On their knees now, the spikes were only inches away from them, and there was nowhere else to run or hide. “Can’t be more than thirty seconds before we’re all skewered,” Lexi said. “Not how I thought I was going to go out.”
“And how did you think you were going to go out?” Hawke asked.
She shrugged. I don’t know… maybe in battle, or in the basement of the Ministry under heavy interrogation. What about you?”
“Me?” Hawke said. “Not the sort of thing I think about.”
“And you?” Lexi asked Scarlet.
“Oh, no idea. Maybe massaged to death on a tropical beach with a banana daiquiri in each hand.”
Lea rolled her eyes. “Yes, how very you.”
“Thanks, darling.”
“It wasn’t a compliment, and ouch! Blood hell, Ryan – hurry up! These sodding spikes are starting to push into my shoulders!”
“I’m going as fast as I can, Lea.”
“So how about you?” Lexi asked Lea.
“Me? I don’t know. Not as a freaking kebab to be discovered in another two hundred years by another idiot searching for gold plates, that’s for damned sure!”
With seconds to spare, Ryan arranged the tiles and the frame stopped descending. A few seconds later the door opened, but the one behind, blocking the Amazonian warriors, stayed shut.
“Thanks buggery for that,” Scarlet said, rubbing her shoulder. “It was getting rather poky in there.”
“Oh, please…” Lea said.
They raced through the lava tunnel and emerged in the outside of the volcano into the fresh air. They ran through the jumble of stone houses in the outer quarter until they got back to the clearing beyond the town.
Just as they had predicted, there was no sign of Kruger, Saqqal or the chopper outside the volcano. They had cleared out with all of the treasure and the dead bodies of both the rebels were lying around the area where they had taken off.
“Why did he kill his own men?” Ryan asked.
“To make room for the treasure,” Hawke said with disgust, and then sighed as he turned his face toward the trees to the south where he had landed. Smoke was billowing up into the tropical sky. “Looks like they blew up our choppers as well.”
They all turned to face the scene of destruction in the distant jungle and walked slowly along the path they had hiked on their way to the volcano just hours ago. When they reached the clearing they saw Hawke had been right in his guess – both the Bell 47 and the Mi-171 were now just smouldering wreckage, courtesy of Rajavi’s grenade launcher.
Hawke clenched his jaw with anger as he thought about Kruger
and Saqqal laughing as their helicopters exploded, while they were fighting for their lives back in the spike trap. “These bastards are really beginning to get on my nerves,” he said through gritted teeth.
“We’ll get him, don’t worry about that,” Scarlet said coolly. “I always get my man.”
“And everyone else’s,” Lexi said with a sideways glance.
“Oh, that’s rich coming from you,” Scarlet said, fronting up to her.
“And what is that supposed to mean?”
“Pack it in,” Hawke said.
“So what now?” Lea asked.
“Now we wait for Lund to send back up,” Reaper said.
Hawke nodded. “Thank God we told him the coordinates…”
Lea turned to him. “You think we can trust him?”
He shrugged he shoulders. “I hope so, because if we can’t, it’s a twenty day hike in that direction.” He pointed through a cloud of mosquitoes at the jungle beyond the clearing.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
It turned out they could trust Lund, and when they failed to check in with their report from Paititi, he arranged for the Peruvian authorities to send rescue choppers out to get them. They also sent a team of archaeologists from the National Museum of Archaeology, Anthropology and History based in Lima.
After a brief handover the ECHO team were airborne once again and flying back to Cusco where their jet was fuelled and waiting for them. Lund had run the situation through what he called his ‘washing machine’ but come up with very little information about Kruger’s whereabouts. It seemed his arms didn’t have quite the same reach as those of Sir Richard Eden. From Saqqal’s bragging back in the volcano they knew they were returning to Rio de Janeiro, but they needed more than that so their only chance was Alex Reeve and her CIA contacts.
Hawke called her on his cell phone but there was no answer, so he left a voicemail message and settled back into his seat while he waited for a reply. He failed in his attempt to suppress a yawn and then pushed back in the soft leather seat of the private jet. According to the little screen on the partition wall, they were climbing out of twenty-thousand feet and somewhere above the Peruvian-Bolivian border. Their bearing was sixty-seven degrees and the ETA was in just under three and a half hours.
Reaper was once again crashed on the leather couch on the jet’s portside, and Lexi, Scarlet and Ryan were playing poker at the table in the rear of the aircraft. It was fairly subdued, but then they got on the subject of SUVs and when Ryan told Scarlet that Pajero meant wanker in Spanish she burst into uncontrollable laughter for what seemed a lot longer than it probably was.
Lea had brought a coffee and sat beside him, but the coffee was in the little cup-holder, untouched and now she was dozing in her seat. For a moment he watched her, wondering how she had turned out so right when everything had been so against her, and then his phone rang.
“It’s me, Joe.”
“It’s good to hear your voice, Alex,” he said.
“Yours too,” she replied.
“How’s life in Fort Belvoir Community Hospital?”
“Sucks.”
“Thought it might.”
A long pause.
“Dad just left a few minutes ago.”
“And how many people get visited in hospital by the President of the United States?”
“President-elect, if you don’t mind. He’s not the Commander-in-Chief until he’s sworn in on Inauguration Day.”
“I think it’s a bit late for denial, Agent Nightingale.”
“You may have a point,” she said, and he heard a gentle, sad laugh. “And on that…”
He waited but there were no words. “What is it?”
“Dad wants me to stay here in DC now. It’s confirmed.”
“And what do you think?”
“I don’t know. There were some pretty serious-looking faces behind him when he asked me.”
Hawke nodded gently in the dim light of the Gulfstream, even though she was over three thousand miles away and couldn’t see him. To his right, a sleeping Lea turned on her side and rested her head on his shoulder.
“So am I going to get a tour of the White House or not?” he said. He knew by her tone she had already made up her mind about DC.
“Sure. Well, everyone except Scarlet. No way is she getting through vetting.”
He laughed, and almost woke Lea. “You might have a point there. She’s not exactly Oval Office material. She spent half of today chewing coca leaves.”
“Huh?”
“Long story – listen do you have the information I need?”
“Sure – according to the port authority there’s a Navetta moored in the Rio docks and it’s registered to Kruger Mining Corps. It’s been in the port for over a week so I’m guessing he had his men sail it from Cape Town to Rio in advance with a view to bringing the treasure home after he’d discovered it.”
“He’s a cocky little bastard then, isn’t he?”
“So it would appear.”
“And what about Saqqal?”
“Apart form his Hezbollah stuff there’s nothing on him that could help us here at all. They’re travelling together, if that’s any use, but other than that I got nothing.”
“Great.”
“But Dad greased some wheels in the US Embassy in Brasilia so I think the Brazilians are sorting some back-up for you.”
“All right – thanks, Alex. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”
She paused before replying. “Sure.”
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“All right… Joe, listen…”
He was interrupted by Lea. “I have to go, Alex.”
He cut the call as Lea approached. She had her phone in her hand too and was ending a call. “That was the American ambassador in Brasília. Alex worked her magic with her father I guess because he just told me he’s spoken with the Minister of Justice and they’ve sanctioned the use of a BOPE squad in response to the threat posed by Saqqal.”
“BOPE?” Lexi asked.
“Batalhão de Operações Policiais Especias,” Scarlet replied without hesitation. She looked at them. “What?”
“You speak Portuguese?” Hawke asked.
“Oh, God no,” she replied. “Only a couple of phrases.”
“I bet,” Lea said. “Don’t tell me – are there many sailors here? and I’ve never seen this gun before in all my life.”
“I’m going to ignore that slur,” she replied coolly. “BOPE are a counter-terrorism force, sort of a Brazilian SWAT. They’ll be less use than an SAS squad but more use than an SBS one.”
“Piss off.”
“With pleasure.”
“They’re meeting us at the docks, anyway,” Lea said.
“What about Alex?”
“She’s staying in DC for the foreseeable future,” Hawke said with a sigh.
“Lazy cow’s just trying to get out of rebuilding Elysium,” Scarlet said.
*
Ziad Saqqal pushed back into the jet’s leather seat and closed his eyes as his mind raked over the last few hours of his life. The lethal monster currently squirming around in Jawad’s carry case would bring devastation to the United States and any other country he desired, but first he knew he had to test it – and before he crossed the ocean and went to Africa. He had the perfect place in mind.
“Just make sure it’s nowhere near me,” Kruger said with a grim look at the case.
Saqqal agreed it would be a bad thing to anywhere near it when it was released. Jawad had patiently explained with the quiet blandness of the expert that sixty percent of Londoners were killed by the Black Death in the six months from the autumn of 1348 into the start of 1349. It was total devastation, and without a single sword unsheathed the population of whole nations was decimated. Thanks to old research, most people believed the plague was transmitted from person to person by filthy fleas or rats, when the truth was far darker.
Millions of people dying a slow, agonizing death from shock and respiratory failure would be more than enough revenge for him, and the people of Rio de Janeiro would be the first to sample the delights locked away in Dr Jawad’s sweaty grasp. The NBC suits were all they needed to ensure their survival when the horror unfolded, and then they would flee the country on Kruger’s boat.
“Just make sure your boat is ready,” Saqqal said. “Something tells me Rio de Janeiro isn’t going to be a very pleasant place for the next few years.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Rio de Janeiro
Scarlet Sloane knew she had it in her heart to care when she saw the sun setting over Guanabara Bay on the final approach to Rio. She had been here before, but not for many years, and it wasn’t business either. Instead, she had met with an old lover and spent some time reliving the old days. It was a turbocharged week fuelled by cachaça and Derby cigarettes. They’d got wasted and lost a lot of money gambling illegally on jogo de bucho, but it was a week to remember. She smiled at the memory because times like those were the only thing that kept her sane.
Now, their jet descended over the bay and landed on the small island of Galeão where the city’s main international airport was located. She watched without emotion as the plane trundled to the apron and the pilot activated the airstair. Moments later the humid Brazilian air was flooding into the air-conditioned cabin and she was in yet another country but with no time to enjoy it.
Kruger had barely more than an hour’s lead on them but his plane was slower and they had almost caught up with him. With luck he would still be at the airport, and the same went for the Syrian madmen with the Utopia bioweapon. She looked outside and saw the day was nearly over. The twilight in Rio vanished fast, but that would be to their advantage. If Kruger was occupied loading the Lost Treasure onto a truck to take to his boat he would be distracted enough, but whatever guard he’d set up would be easier to approach and attack under cover of night.