by Rob Jones
The news hit Hawke like a sledgehammer. All those years and Nightingale had never told him her name or anything else about her personal life, and yet her father was the American Secretary of Defense, and a serious contender for President at the next election. For a second he had a hard time believing any of this was really happening. “But she never said anything to me...”
Brooke sighed. “My daughter and I are estranged. She never forgave me for divorcing her mother – Katie. She turned her back on me after that day and never said another word to me. It tears me up. That’s why she uses her mother’s name. I’d do anything to get my baby back, Hawke.”
“I don’t believe in any of this… this is getting mad.” Hawke’s voice trailed to a whisper.
“You’d better believe it,” Brooke snapped, and returned to business. “After you contacted Alex about this Poseidon affair, she started looking into it in her usual extremely competent and determined way.”
“How do you know that?” Lea asked. “I mean, if you were estranged and all?”
Brooke levelled his eyes at Lea. “I had her computers hacked.”
“That is just terrible!” Lea said.
“That’s between me and my daughter, Miss Donovan, and when it comes to my family I’ll thank you to keep your opinions to yourself in future.”
Lea blushed with embarrassment. “I’m sorry…”
“The point is she used her considerable skills, and exploited her relationship to me, to get hold of some information that she should never have seen.”
“That only a handful of people know about, you mean?” Ryan said, recalling the Defense Sectary’s mysterious earlier comment.
Brooke stared him out with the frown from hell and returned to Hawke. “She managed to get the details of a man who will be instrumental in translating the map. His name is Dario Mazzaro. He’s reclusive and writes under the name Mercurio, and now he is in grave danger, just like my little girl. If Vetrov gets this man’s details, he will not only secure the only way to decode the Map of Immortality, but he will no longer have any use for Alex.”
“Why can’t you send some people out to protect Mazzarro?” Ryan asked.
“As I say, he’s a recluse and we have no idea where he is. I’m guessing my daughter knows which is why Vetrov took her.”
“I understand,” Hawke said.
Brooke’s lips tightened and the slightest glint of a tear welled in his eyes. A second later he snapped back into the moment. “Anyway… the fact is she has knowledge she shouldn’t have and this is the reason why Vetrov took her.”
Hawke looked Brooke in the eye. “We shall just have to get her back again then, won’t we?”
Lea frowned. “Excuse me, Mr Brooke, but the way you just talked about the map and the handful of people with this mysterious knowledge…”
“What?”
“There’s more to this than we know, am I right?”
A long silence. Now, Brooke turned his attention on the Irishwoman. “Yes.”
“And what would that be?” Ryan said.
“That would be what only a handful of people know,” Brooke said. “And it’s going to stay that way. All you need to know is that Vetrov has Alex, and is currently arranging to kill Agent Dragonfly, after which he will have not only my daughter and her knowledge of how to get to Mazzarro, but the Map of Immortality. The US Government is not prepared to allow that to happen, so we’re organizing a team to put an end to it.”
“Sounds fun,” Lea said.
“There is nothing fun about any of this, Miss Donovan,” Brooke said, ashen-faced. “Another comment like that and you’re on a one-way trip to an early retirement in Dublin.”
“Sorry…”
Ryan lowered his voice to a whisper and leaned closer to Lea. “You sure do spend a lot of time saying sorry these days.”
“Who’s on the team?” asked Hawke.
“Mack Dempsey, here, a former Green Beret, and two of his best men. Also, I know a former SEAL named Bradley Karlsson is working with your people in Berlin – I presume you’re familiar with him.”
“I wouldn’t go that far,” Hawke said.
Brooke ignored him. “And they will be putting their own people together. Given how much experience you’ve had in this, I want you to work with them. As I say, Karlsson is already in Germany working alongside an agent named Scarlet Sloane.”
“I’d still like to know what it is you’re keeping from us about all this,” Hawke said.
“I bet you would, Mr Hawke, but that’s never going to happen. Just you focus on getting my girl back from that asshole. I want her safe. After that, stop the asshole from getting to the source of eternal life, wherever the hell that is.”
Ryan laughed. “Easy to say, but where the hell do we start?”
Another stony glance from Brooke. “A few hours ago I had a briefing from the CIA on the whereabouts of my daughter. We re-tasked a satellite watching the Baltic States and used it to track Vetrov’s snatch squad. After landing in Domodedovo Airport in Moscow they flew out of the city in a private helicopter belonging to Vetrov.”
“These egomaniacs sure do love their helicopters…” Lea whispered.
“It landed a short while later in the grounds of a private residence to the west of Moscow in a village called Barvikha. It’s where much of the Russian elite own their second homes. Now we know that’s where they’re holding Alex, I want you on it right away. You’ll have all the clearance you need, and there’s a jet at your disposal waiting at La Guardia.”
“We have our own transport,” Lea said. “Our boss sent a plane over. It arrived in New York an hour ago.”
“I see, then there’s nothing stopping you.”
Hawke nodded. He was already putting together a strategy for what was looking like his most complicated mission yet.
“One thing still bothers me,” he said. “Why wasn’t this all done when she was first kidnapped? I flew here as soon as I got her message but, you could have acted on this hours ago.”
“As a matter of fact, we only just found out three hours ago. As I said, my daughter and I are estranged, Mr Hawke, but she’s very close to her mother, whom she speaks with every day. They share a great deal. When Katie called Alex earlier today and there was no reply she grew fearful and contacted me. You’ll understand now you’ve see the wheelchair – Alex has the mind of a genius, but she is physically frail and vulnerable, especially in a place like Manhattan, not to mention whatever hellhole Vetrov is keeping her in.”
Brooke stopped to light a cigarette and blew the smoke out hard. He stared at the ceiling for a few seconds. Then he looked back down and saw Lea was watching the tiny burning embers, and she began to cough. “Excuse me, Miss Donovan,” he said, raising his cigarette hand. “Bad habit I picked up in the Delta Force before I went into politics.”
“Please, I understand. This must be very stressful for you.”
“You could say that.” He drifted for a second then fixed his eyes on Hawke. “Anyway, Katie asked me to look into it so I sent Dempsey and the others around to her apartment about three hours ago. That was when we found the place all smashed up and I feared the worst. If you had a daughter you’d know how I felt. I pulled every string at my disposal and had the satellite surveillance footage checked until we found who’d taken her.”
“We’ll get her back,” Hawke said, and raised his wrists. “Probably a bit easier with these off, though.”
Brooke waved at Dempsey and the BDS man walked forward with the keys to unlock the three of them.
They waited for the Pentagon chief’s lead, but for a few seconds there was nothing but silence. Then he sighed and closed his eyes. “I’ve been a terrible father, Hawke. When my daughter was kidnapped the first person who sprang to her mind was you, and not her father. You don’t think that kills me? I want a chance to put all these years of hurt and pain behind us. You got that?”
Hawke looked at Brooke’s anguished face. He got it.
Moscow
Maxim Vetrov watched dreamily through the window of his luxury dacha as the snow fell in heavy sheets over the countryside. He contemplated with something approximating pride that this was the landscape that destroyed Hitler’s Panzer Armies. Behind him he heard the familiar deep, belly-growl of Osiris, or was it Anubis? Vetrov had trouble telling the difference sometimes, but after a short period of weighing up the probability he settled on Osiris. Osiris, after all, hadn’t been fed for a very long time.
He turned his back on the blizzard tearing through the pine forests of Barvikha, and cast a warm smile on the crocodiles as they lay on the artificial island in the center of the enormous enclosure. There were six in all, and all named after an ancient Egyptian deity. His favorite was the young female, Sekhmet, the goddess of fire and vengeance. He watched with pride as Anubis slid down from the island and disappeared into the salty brine with nothing left behind him other than a faint trail of bubbles, and then he was gone from the world again.
“Crocodylus porosus is a miracle of nature, Kosma.” As he spoke, the giant Kosma was dragging a young man into the room. He hurled him on the floor a few yards from Vetrov and took a step back, keeping an evaluating eye on the surface of the water.
“The largest reptile alive in the entire world, the saltwater crocodile is truly the greatest predator on earth.” He stopped talking for a moment to study his own reflection in the window with a mix of weariness and hope. It was true he was going gray, and the lines around his eyes were deepening every day, but unlike other men, Vetrov knew he wasn’t going to grow any older. He knew, for a fact, that not only would he not grow old, but that he would never die.
Which was more than he could say for the young man now cowering opposite him.
He gave himself one last narcissistic glance and turned to face Kosma, whose seven-foot frame was towering over him. His number two was nervously explaining about the fiascos in China and Berlin.
“And you lost them?” Vetrov drawled, and then sipped a glass of chilled mineral water. His eyes crawled to the sweating man on the floor.
Kosma nodded unhappily. “At Xian. Two of my men let her get away with Sorokin.”
“But he is dead now?”
“Yes. Ekel killed him in a cab outside Tegel in Berlin, but the woman got away with the map.”
Vetrov sniffed sharply and walked away from his chair. Ekel Kvashnin was the very best in the business. He was not a man to mess with, but failing to kill the Chinese woman and secure the map was sloppy. His next failure would be his last, no matter what his reputation.
Once again, he watched the snow falling across the bleak landscape in thick white waves. “So Ekel killed Sorokin, but the little Dragonfly still flutters…” He made a casual, rising gesture with his hand to mimic a butterfly.
“Not for long. Ekel is tailing her to a bank somewhere in Berlin where she has stored the map. When she retrieves it he will kill her and take the map.”
“And our American friend upstairs is still refusing to give up Mercurio?”
Kosma nodded in a businesslike manner.
Vetrov looked up at the giant man standing before him and considered his options. He wandered casually over to a large plastic box positioned by the fence surrounding the enclosure as Kosma dragged the man by the scruff of his neck closer to the water. “We call them hyper-carnivores because most of their diet is pure meat, but they are so much more than that. They are beautiful apex predators, to be respected, to be feared. Wouldn’t you agree, Anatoly?”
The young man crawled up to his knees and clasped his hands in a show of desperate supplication. “Please, Mr Vetrov, sir.” He broke down and began to cry without shame. “Please… I have children…”
Vetrov ignored his pleas. “In Ancient Egyptian bestiary, the crocodile was respected totally, for the entire economy was based on the Nile – the crocodile’s territory. They wrote poetry about them, they worshipped them.” He paused and raised his chin to look into the enclosure. “I wonder if Sebak will play today?”
“Mr Vetrov… please, I beg you…”
“Sebak was the crocodile god…” Vetrov opened the plastic box and the room was instantly filled with the sound and smell of chickens. “My darlings deserve a starter before the main course, naturally.”
Vetrov pulled a chicken from the box and without a second thought tossed it live over the enclosure fence. It squawked and flapped but before it hit the water a male crocodile fired through the surface like a ballistic missile and snapped its wide jaws with a thunder-crack. The chicken was gone, the only remnants a small cloud of white feathers drifting through the air like snowflakes.
Vetrov gave an evaluating nod. “Ah! Anubis is faster today.”
Anatoly turned white and began to tremble. Kosma took another step back.
“These beautiful specimens are from the Northern Territory of Australia, and they are the most formidable crocodiles on earth. They have the most powerful bite of any creature on the planet and can crush a buffalo’s skull as if it were paper, as you will discover for yourself as soon as you tell me why you passed my research to Yevgeny Sorokin.”
“I… I never…”
“Shhh,” Vetrov gently stroked Anatoly’s head. “Please, don’t tell lies, Tolya. You, a humble research assistant from Volgograd, were entrusted with the greatest research secrets the world has ever known. I offered you more money than your family has accumulated in five centuries, and yet you pass critical information to my rival – who is now dead, by the way. I want to know why.”
“I never even heard of Sorokin, Mr Vetrov, sir, please…”
“There are many ways to be killed by a crocodile, Tolya. If you are in the water, without a ripple on the surface, the next thing you know your head is crushed in its jaws. You wouldn’t even see it coming. Less than a second and your skull is crushed and he is propelling you deep beneath the waves...” Vetrov waved his hand forward to simulate the path of a crocodile.
Antoly’s reply was drowned in tears.
“And that is the good way, the fast way. Another way is Kosma here hangs you over the water from the rigging above the enclosure. That way my darlings will leap from the water and snap at your legs, each trying to make the kill. Now, how and why did you pass the information to Sorokin?”
“I swear, I never…”
Now bored with the game, Vetrov sighed deeply and snapped his fingers to bring matters to a close. Kosma moved reluctantly forward and took hold of Dr Anatoly Ivanov by the scruff of his neck and lifted the sobbing, broken man as if he were a simple cloth doll.
“One more chance, Tolya, and then you die.”
“I do not know anyone called Sorokin!”
With a casual nod of his head, Vetrov gave Kosma the signal. The giant man raised the screaming man effortlessly above his head like he might lift a twenty kilo barbell and hurled him into the water beyond the fence.
For a second, or maybe two, the professor of Egyptian hieroglyphics tried to swim for the shore, driven by the most primal of instincts, but even he knew it was pointless. In the blink of an eye the enormous jaws seized him, and as the yellow teeth of Anubis sunk into his flesh, he disappeared beneath the foam and froth, now turned a startling crimson by his own blood.
“The girl knows more, I know it…” Vetrov murmured.
In the enclosure, a ferocious battle was unfolding. Water splashed all over the paving and occasionally a man’s screams could be heard. Then a few short seconds later, Anubis dragged the still, silent Egyptologist into the brine and there was silence.
Vetrov chuckled and applauded as the water grew still again.
“Shall I get her?” Kosma was replying to his boss, but his eyes were firmly fixed on the horrendous scene that had unfolded in the enclosure.
Vetrov nodded his head and replied calmly. “Yes.”
*
Still tied to the chair with the bag over her head, Alex Reeve strained to hear
if anyone else was in the room with her. She thought she was alone, and her mind turned to escape. From somewhere below her, she heard the sound of splashing and the most terrified screams of a man she had ever heard in her life. After a moment of silence there followed the sound of a man laughing, and then applause. She strained at the duct tape holding her to the chair but it was no good. She wasn’t going anywhere.
Then she heard the door open and a man walked in. Since being trapped in her new world of darkness behind the sack, she had learned to tell the difference in the sound of the footsteps. This was the footfall of the giant, and it was confirmed a second later when she heard his heavy breathing and felt his broad hands on her as he lifted her, still sitting in the chair, and carried her from the room.
*
The Gulfstream V cruised smoothly forty-thousand feet above the Norwegian Sea. On board, Lea and Ryan sat opposite each other and played poker, while Dempsey and his men sat up front and talked among themselves.
Hawke laid himself down on the long leather couch and painfully walked himself through the deaths of Hart and Durand for the thousandth time. Then, when that hell was over, he tortured himself some more over the kidnapping of Nightingale, a woman whose name he now knew was Alexandra Reeve, the estranged daughter of no less than the head of the Pentagon. All of this was starting to feel way above his pay grade and he wanted answers more than ever.
Lea’s contagious laugh shook him from his thoughts and he glanced over to see her pulling a pile of dollar bills to her side of the little conference table. Ryan sighed and folded his hand, and then turned in the leather swivel chair to look out of the porthole at the ocean far below. Somewhere ahead he would soon see the Kjølen Mountains of Trøndelag on the western horizon.
Inwardly, Hawke was still finding it hard to deal with his responsibility for the deaths of Olivia Hart and Sophie Durand, and seeing Ryan as a mere shadow of his former self made things a thousand times worse. The smart-mouth kid-genius was gone – replaced by a sad, bitter cynic. Hawke had seen it happen before, but that didn’t make it any easier to handle. Despite himself, he broke into a smile when he watched Lea take the money and crack some jokes – she was trying to make Ryan laugh, but his face was stone.