by Rob Jones
With Hawke in the lead, gun raised and ready to fire, they moved down the stairs and drew closer to their target. This part of the horror experience was designed to look like some kind of abandoned asylum, with white tiled walls smeared in blood. Most of it was the fake, theatrical kind, but Hawke realized halfway down the steps that some of it was real and had been left by the wounded Deprez as he’d limped down the steps.
In the basement of the house now, they were surrounded by more scenes of horror and the noise of the screams and moans over the sound system seemed louder now. It would have unsettled most people, but Hawke and Scarlet weren’t most people so they pushed on undeterred.
Suddenly the dark space was filled with bright daylight as Deprez smashed open a fire door and staggered out the back of the building. Hawke and Scarlet squinted as their eyes adjusted to the surprise change in light levels, but were soon after their man.
They found themselves in a narrow side street running parallel to the east side of the amusement park. It was a green, leafy space with a few cars parked here and there, and the rain had relented now to the same light drizzle they had experienced when they had arrived at the history museum.
“Where did he go?” Scarlet asked, searching both ends of the street.
“Judging from the blood, I’d say that way.” Hawke pointed at the south end of the street toward the boats moored in Waldemarsviken marina. Splashes of blood were smeared here and there on the concrete leading down toward the water.
They ran to the end of the street and quickly reached the waterline. Following the blood, they realized that Deprez had gone aboard what looked like some kind of tourist paddle boat.
“Quick!” Hawke said. “He’s cut the mooring ropes!”
The boat’s engines started up and it began to move forward in the sound. Hawke and Scarlet jumped from the jetty to the boat’s wooden stern and were welcomed aboard by a burst of gunfire from Deprez’s pistol.
They dived for cover and then returned fire at the wounded man blasting the wheelhouse windows to shards. Deprez dodged the bullets and fired back blindly like a man possessed, but he was caught like a trapped pig and he knew it. Whatever plans he thought he had of escaping off the island on a boat had gone badly wrong and now it was time to pay for the error in judgement.
In a panic now, the Belgian fired a shot through the front window of the wheelhouse and clambered away from his pursuers toward the front of the boat.
Hawke and Scarlet drove him forward with their superior firepower until he had run out of space and had nowhere to run.
“Get back!” he screamed at them, waving his gun.
“Just drop the weapon, Deprez!” Hawke shouted, his gun aimed at the Belgian’s head. “You can’t take us both down before one of us takes you out and you know it.”
“Do as he says,” Scarlet said. “The last time I shot someone on the bow of a boat it was the President of the United States so don’t think I’d think twice about wasting a round on little crap like you.”
Deprez tossed his gun to the ground but pulled a knife and held the blade to the axe handle. “Come any closer and I’ll cut these precious carvings off the handle, then no one finds the tomb!”
Scarlet glanced at Hawke, but the Englishman didn’t bat an eyelid. “Put the axe down, Deprez. I’ll kill you before you can move that blade an inch.”
Deprez called his bluff, and pushed the blade into the handle, but Hawke was true to his word, firing at the man’s chest. He struck him in the heart and sent him staggering backwards with a look of confused terror spreading across his face.
He tottered backwards over the rail at the stem of the bow, his arms flailing wildly in a last vain attempt to save his life, but it was too late.
Scarlet raised her gun and fired at him, striking him dead-center in the forehead and powering him over the boat into the dark water of the sound. He landed with a tremendous splash and began to float away from the shore.
“Where did you learn to shoot a moving target like that, Cairo?” Hawke said, strolling to the starboard side aft lazarette. He picked up a mooring hook and walked back to the bow.
“In a fairground,’ she said with a wink as Hawke pulled the floating axe handle through the water toward the boat. A few yards beyond it, Marcus Deprez’s body bobbed up and down in the wake of a long, glass-roofed sightseeing boat. Some of the people aboard pointed in horror at the corpse and others whipped out their phones to film the scene as Scarlet proudly extended her middle finger at them, accompanied by a polite smile and bow of the head.
Hawke rolled his eyes as he manipulated the hook in the water, dragging the ancient relic closer to the paddle boat. “We’ve got to get back to the others,” he said, finally hefting the ancient axe handle from the water. “Ryan needs to get to work on this thing – presuming he’s all right that is.”
As he finished speaking he looked up to see Deprez’s corpse getting sucked into the blades at the back of the tourist boat. A terrible grinding sound ensued and then the water turned a deep crimson color as it filled with the dead man’s blood.
“That’s for Vincent and Ryan,” Hawke said without emotion, and then turned to leave.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Elysium
Her mind was now focussed on nothing but the fateful mission ahead of her.
Lexi Zhang slid her hand along the pipe guard railing as she skipped down the steps and made her way to the wheelhouse. From the crow’s nest of the modest trawler, she had studied the silhouette of the small island known to a tiny elite as Elysium, but now they were closing in and it was time to shut down the engines.
Federico had been fishing these waters for most of his life and had nodded casually when she showed him the coordinates. “Isla privada…” he had said with a nonchalant shrug of the shoulders.
“Si,” she had said. “Don’t worry about.” She checked the fisherman’s tired eyes to see if he had understood her broken Castilian. It was all she had, and no matter how many subjunctives she mangled it was better than poor Federico’s English. After deciding his Mandarin was probably even worse, she made another sentence in her Spanish.
“Veinte minutos,” he said in reply with an apologetic smile.
He lit up an ancient-looking pipe and leaned against the rickety navigation panel as he blew the cloud of sweet-smelling tobacco into the hot air. He resumed the story about how he had inherited his father’s gambling debts and not for the first time Lexi wondered if she shouldn’t just shoot him and give him to the sharks, but that wouldn’t be fair she thought. Not on the sharks, at any rate.
She decided to get some fresh air and stepped out onto the deck. Slowly the old boat creaked forward in the water and drew her ever closer to her mission. She wondered if she should check the weapons again, but she’d already done it more times than she could remember. This wasn’t like her, but then this wasn’t like a regular mission.
Now, Lexi swayed softly with the gentle rocking of the boat as it drifted a mile off-shore in the darkness of night. There was a calm stillness to the ocean she had loved since she was a small child and this was about as smooth as things got. Here in what sailors called the intertropical convergence zone the trades could drop away and leave a sailing boat lost at sea for what might be as good as eternity.
She looked up into the sky and noted the full moon. A mistake on her part, but not one that would stop her doing her business tonight. A little way to the moon’s left, Jupiter hung silently in the sky. She stared at the tiny cream disc until the motion of the boat began to make her feel uneasy. It was time to go.
As the engines puttered to silence, Lexi paid Federico the second half of his fee. He took hold of the heavy brown envelope with a sweaty hand and peered inside. Smirking and nodding with satisfaction, he unfastened a small rowing boat at the rear of the trawler and pushed it into the water.
He held its mooring rope tightly in his hands. “This is where we part company,” he said in Spanish.
Lexi understood and climbed into the small boat with her tool bag over her shoulder. A few seconds later she was rowing gently to the high cliffs on the west coast of the island, and Federico started up his engines and steered the boat back to port. Now she was on her own.
The island rose up before her, its craggy tropical cliffs looming higher than she’d expected – but this was the last place anyone would attempt an insertion on Elysium and so that was the plan.
When she was fifty feet from the shore she used one of the oars to test the depth of the water and it was just as she expected – knee high and an inviting twenty degrees. She retracted the oars and secured them in the rowlocks before pulling her bag of tricks from beneath the sternsheets and shouldering it. Then, she stepped into the ocean and walked silently to the shore in the moonlight, dragging the boat behind her with the mooring rope.
After securing the boat to a lonely coconut palm in the breaker zone, she took a deep breath and tilted her head back to survey the cliffs towering above her. Then she pulled on a pair of crag gloves and began to ascend the sharp, vertical rocks. Also as she had expected, this was the sort of classic volcanic cliff that was so common to this part of the world, and especially on a former volcanic island such as Elysium.
She struggled onwards and upwards, the heavy weight of the weapons in her bag pulling on her back all the way. She used a heel hook to get some pressure on a hold, and then a few yards from the top she gripped what she thought was a secure arête, but then it broke loose and she swung wildly to her left. She hung on for her life with one hand as the treacherous piece of cliff tumbled the few hundred feet to the beach below and smashed into the moonlit surf.
Lexi strained to keep her grip as she swung her right hand up and grabbed hold of another small ridge. She balanced her bodyweight and used a move known to climbers as a gaston where she pushed her thumb down into a crag and forced her elbow out in order to push herself upwards just enough to reach a more secure hold. She sighed with relief. She was too high to bail out now, she thought, and kept on going.
Finally she crawled onto the top of the cliff and took a second to get her breath back. Looking behind her, she was able to make out the faint silhouette of Federico’s boat as he steamed toward the horizon. Ahead of her Elysium stretched out, majestic and tranquil. From one of the highest points on the island she was able to survey everything. She put a night-vision monocular to her eye and began to study the facts.
Directly below her, on the eastern slopes of her conquered mountain, she saw what looked like the western perimeter of the ECHO complex. Standard fare, she thought without emotion – it looked like a razorwire fence, clearly electrified by the solar-powered chargers and insulators she could see – and by the looks of the photodetectors and mirrors she thought she could spy a laser tripwire alarm just inside the perimeter fence as well. She expected nothing less.
I wonder, she contemplated with interest, exactly what Richard Eden keeps hidden away in this place?
She made her way down the slope, weaving in and out of the tropical undergrowth. In places it was so thick she was forced to hack her way clear with a machete. At times like this, she thought, was it all worth it? What was it that drove her onward through the night like this, so far from her family and the comfort of home? Ah yes, she thought… I remember now.
But she wasn’t here to reminisce. She brought her attention back to the mission. This was about settling old scores and righting old wrongs. Ever since Joe Hawke had run into her life again back in Hong Kong she knew this day was inevitable. It was just the way things were with her and sometimes she felt like she couldn’t stop herself even if she wanted to.
At the bottom of the mountain she stopped again and refocussed. Her mind was buzzing with a mix of adrenalin and dopamine as she went through her mission plan once again – it was always like this… When the hunt was getting hot and the victims’ end drawing closer, only this time there were so many differences. This time there could be no going back, and she knew it. For a second, she felt her heart waver – was she really going to go through with this?
Yes, she said, newly determined and pushing all doubt from her mind. She was a highly trained assassin and this mission was a cakewalk, not to mention the new life she would have after it. Her mission objective was sitting down there somewhere in a secret, luxury compound in this paradise, and it was time to reintroduce them all to the Dragonfly.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Hawke stared suspiciously out of the window of the hotel and across the harbor to the north. After retrieving the axe handle from the newly dispatched Marcus Deprez they had booked into the Hilton Hotel Stockholm Slussen on Guldgränd on the north shore of the island of Södermalm.
Known to Stockholmares simply as “Söder”, it was one of the busiest districts in the whole of Scandinavia. Once a slum, now a gentrified, bohemian quarter full of expensive, minimalist coffee shops and dense traffic, all Hawke knew about the place was that they weren’t safe here.
Deprez was out of the game, having retired permanently from being a bastard back on the south coast of Djurgården, but Álvaro Sala and his chief goon, the hit man from Brussels Leon Smets were still out there somewhere, and now they would be wasting no time searching for the axe handle. It was their only way to reach Thor’s tomb and he was sure a man like Sala wouldn’t give up until he was dead.
Even worse news was Vincent Reno. When the paramedics had arrived he’d been in a bad way and they’d rushed him to Södersjukhuset, a large hospital not far from the museum where he had been shot by Deprez. According to the latest reports he hadn’t regained consciousness on the way to the hospital and was now undergoing an emergency life-saving operation.
According to the paramedics, Ryan had been much luckier than Vincent and the bullet had just missed his humerus. The speeding lead projectile had instead torn through his bicep. It was painful, but some Alvedons and a lot of bandages had reduced the burning sensation and there would be no permanent damage.
“Are you okay, Joe?” Lea asked.
Hawke nodded sullenly.
“What happened to Deprez?” she asked.
“He’s definitely not playing any more,” Hawke said.
“He seemed pretty cut up about it, actually,” Scarlet said, lighting a cigarette. She blew a cloud of smoke out of the window and shook her head in confusion. “Is it obligatory to have a bicycle and a beard in this town, or what?”
“Eh?” Hawke looked up, distracted.
“Nothing, and can we get a sodding balcony next time so I can smoke without setting the buggering alarms off?”
“Yeah, let me make a note,” Lea said. “Because that’s the most important thing we have to think about at the moment.”
“All right, we need to focus,” said Hawke, turning to face the others. He stopped when he saw Scarlet at the drinks cabinet and rolled his eyes. “Really, at this time of the day?”
A gentle clink of ice cubes and a sip of the vodka followed before her response. “I’m on Caribbean time, darling.”
“It is a little early,” Victoria said, a look of serious concern on her face as she glanced at her watch.
Scarlet stared at the woman until she looked away and then took another sip.
“Why is it that you can always find a time-zone to justify it?” Ryan said.
She winked and lit a cigarette. “What can I say? It improves my aim.”
Victoria frowned. “Perhaps a coffee would be more appropriate?”
Scarlet raised an eyebrow but made no reply, restricting her response to another drag on the cigarette before leaning out the window and blowing a second cloud of the hot, blue smoke into the air.
Ryan watched her for a moment and shook his head with a sigh. “You must be responsible for more carbon monoxide pollution than Shanghai.”
“Are you trying to be funny, boy? It’s just that if you are could you signal it in advance so I know when to laugh.”
“I’m surprised you
’re not personally named in the Kyoto Protocol.”
“All right, let’s get on,” Hawke said, cracking a much-needed Åbro from the fridge.
“I thought it was too early?” Scarlet said.
“I just went to Caribbean time,” he said with a scowl, and then joined Ryan and Victoria at the desk.
As soon as they had checked into the room Ryan had joined the two halves of Baldr’s axe handle together and began his research into the strange markings. Now, the reformed dropout was doing what he did best, hammering information into a laptop, slowed only by the bandage on his wounded arm.
“What’s the latest?” Hawke asked.
Ryan sighed. “If you place the two halves of the split axe together then what looks like almost meaningless scratches in the wood suddenly becomes a pretty obvious inscription. The glyphs created by joining the fragments are clearly the same strange ancient symbols Dr Donovan had in his research files.”
“And have you worked out what any of it means?” Hawke asked.
“It’s hard to say. Even using the deciphering matrix in Gunnar’s notes and working on what he already translated back in Iceland, it’s far from clear. From what I can make out, it seems to resemble a line from Old Norse poetry. That was always written in Runic inscriptions and was an important way the culture passed stories of their gods to the next generation.”
“Go on.”
“We know much of that old poetry was big on alliteration, and we can see evidence of this here on the axe handle because the same symbols recur at the beginnings of some of the words.”
Lea stared at the carved symbols. “And you can use that to make sense of all this?”
“Yes and no. Old Norse poetry is broken into two categories – the Eddaic and the Skaldic.”
“What makes them different?” Hawke asked.
“The former were always anonymous and rather simple – a bit like Scarlet here – while the latter had an identified author and were generally more complex in their meter. The oldest example of Skaldic can be found on the Karlevi Runestone, a very famous runestone on the island of Öland off the coast of Småland in the south of Sweden.”