The Sword of Fire

by Rob Jones

  Beside her stood Ryan Bale, a man changed forever by the cold-blooded murder of his girlfriend, Maria Kurikova. He respected the same grim silence as his former wife as he placed an unlit cigarette in his hand and collapsed into a chair beside the bed. In Ryan she saw a different man now – harder, colder and maybe even a little reckless.

  The door opened and Lexi Zhang walked in. She was holding three coffees and after handing them around she sat at the foot of the bed and shared the tense atmosphere with her three friends. After a sip of her drink, she finally broke the silence.

  “Any change?”

  Several seconds passed before Lea replied. “Nothing.”

  The EKG machine measuring their boss’s heart rate sounded a low alarm they had all heard before. A nurse scuttled in and made a few adjustments. She checked the ventilator and the IV drip, smiled at them and left again.

  Lea sighed. “How the hell did this happen?”

  “The fucking Oracle is how it happened,” Ryan said.

  “And don’t think for a second that he won’t pay for it with his life,” said Lexi.

  The anger on her face was met with the sound of a fresh wave of rain lashing on the window and a burst of lightning. For a second or two, Lea saw the London skyline illuminated in stark black and white and then a deep roar of thunder echoed over the city and made the hospital shake.

  “That’s easy to say,” she said, “but all I care about right now is getting Rich back.”

  “That’s what we all want,” Lexi said. “I’d be nothing without him. He gave me hope and I owe him everything.”

  “He gave us all hope,” Ryan said. “He gave me ECHO, and that’s the only family I’ve ever really known.”

  Lea barely heard their words. Her eyes were following the path of the IV tube as it snaked toward the hideous cannula in Eden’s bruised hand. Looking at his face – thin now, sunken cheeks and light silver tubble – she saw his eyelids flicker and a moment of hope danced through her mind even though she had seen it so many times before. Soon, he was still once again, as quiet and motionless as the dead.

  The heart rate machine beeped gently in the background.

  Another bolt of lightning.

  Another growl of thunder.

  Everything was spinning out of contol and she felt like screaming.

  The team had split in Rio with Hawke flying to America to help Alex while Reaper returned to his family in the south of France. Scarlet and Camacho had hooked up and gone to Vegas, and the rest of the team flew to London to be with Eden. Now Lea felt like everything was falling apart. Their home, the secret Caribbean island called Elysium was still nothing more than smouldering ruins since the attack which had almost claimed Eden’s life.

  ECHO was without a leader and without a base and now she and Hawke were split up and separated by an ocean. Not for the first time she wondered if it was all worth it, but at the center of her soul was the brutal murder of her father. That was the dynamo that would never stop powering her forward until she had gotten her revenge and laid every last ghost to rest. The only way to do that was with ECHO at her back.

  “He’ll be all right, Lea,” Ryan said from the other side of the room.

  She looked up and saw he had now moved the unlit cigarette to his lips and it was bouncing around as he spoke.

  “I hope so.”

  Lexi finished her coffee and tried to change the subject. “Ryan, what did Joe say when you called him about – what was it now?”

  “An ancient manuscript belonging to the Welsh triads.”

  “Oh, yeah I forgot about that,” Lea said, absent-mindedly. She moved her eyes away from Eden and looked at herself for a moment in the reflection of the hospital window. Then she turned to Ryan. “You asked for money to buy it, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “So what’s the deal again?”

  “It just turned up in a museum in Boston,” Ryan said. “The reason I think we should take an interest is because when I was looking at pictures of it on their website I saw several of the same symbols that we saw on the idol in Mexico. I haven’t told Joe that bit yet.”

  “The exact same symbols?” Lexi said.

  Ryan nodded. “Right, which is very odd. If you ask me whoever wrote that manuscript had obviously seen the symbols somewhere and copied them down. The question is – where did the scribe see them?”

  “Another idol?” Lexi said, her eyes almost sparkling.

  “Possibly,” Ryan said. “That’s why I want to see the manuscript more closely. I asked Hawke to buy it from the museum – or at least make an offer. Its market value is well within ECHO’s budget for this sort of thing, right Lea?”

  Lea was thinking back to her first mission with Eden when they had stormed a facility in northern Russia and killed a rogue colonel. It seemed like a lifetime ago. Now she was dimly aware that someone was asking her a question, but she had missed all the words. “I’m sorry?”

  Ryan sighed and fiddled with the cigarette. “I said we can afford to buy it, yes?”

  “Oh, yeah... I think so. Rich normally did the numbers.”

  “But what if they tell us to get lost?” Lexi said.

  Ryan shrugged his shoulders. “Then I have to fly all the way to Boston to look through an ancient manuscript or ECHO loses the chance to have another important relic – another important part of this puzzle we’re trying to put together.”

  “Sounds great to me,” Lexi said. “Anything that helps us get closer to the truth behind this and take out the Oracle gets my vote. What do you think, Lea?”

  No response.

  Ryan sighed. “I’m going to call Joe back.”

  “Lea – did you hear what I just said?”

  She flicked her head around. “Sorry, Lex... no – I was miles away.”

  As Ryan left the room to make the call, he and Lexi shared a concerned glance, but Lea didn’t see that either. The truth was she had so much on her mind the stress was blotting out most of the surface stuff in her life.

  Eden was the main problem.

  What no one knew but her was that just this afternoon the doctor heading his care had told her the former Parachute Regiment officer’s condition had worsened slightly, and she should start to make preparations in case the worst happened. Doing what Eden himself would do, she had kept the news to herself because there was no point worrying the others unnecessarily.

  Not until the unthinkable happened.

  Next was the email she had picked up on her phone the day before. It was from her brother, Finn. He hadn’t talked to her for ten years, maybe more. That was weird enough, but what she had read in it was playing on her mind. A nursing home in Galway Bay had been in touch about a relative of theirs. Someone named Maggie who had died recently.

  She didn’t recognize the name.

  They had box of things for her and said it was urgent. They couldn’t find her, so they had asked Finn to give her the box. He didn’t want to deal with it. Not interested. If she wanted to sort it out then she had to come to his place in Dublin and get the box. He was away but he would leave a key for her. The email was typical Finn Donovan – short, blunt and not even signed.

  The message had been bothering her since she read it. She had plenty of relatives over in Galway Bay and all over that part of the country, but she had never heard of that particular nursing home and as far as she knew she didn’t have any relatives in it. Now, someone at the home had told her a loved one had died and left a box of things for her to see. She wasn’t sure what to make of it. All she knew was it couldn’t have come at a worse time.

  It never rains, but it pours.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Hawke and Kim Taylor were leaving the West Wing and walking out to their car when Ryan called back. He sounded different these days. He hadn’t been the same since the death of Maria Kurikova a few weeks ago. She had been shot by a Russian sniper named Ekel Kvashnin, codename Kamchatka, while Ryan was being kidnapped by an arms dealer named Dirk
Kruger. He had been the last to know the terrible truth, when Vincent Reno told him on a mountain track in Colombia.

  The young hacker from London had reacted by drinking heavily and making erratic and dangerous decisions. He had started smoking again; cigarettes mostly but also cannabis in any format he could get it. Then he had dropped off the radar for weeks. After his absence, the next time anyone from ECHO heard from him was when he texted a picture of his first tattoo – Машa – on his upper arm. It meant Masha, the abbreviated form of Maria… what he used to call her.

  Hawke climbed into the car as he spoke into the phone. “So what’s going on, mate?”

  “Definitely something for ECHO.”

  With Eden in a coma, these calls were now coming to Hawke. There was another man – a mysterious Dane named Magnus Lund who claimed to be part of a far-reaching consortium that owned the island of Elysium. Lund had assumed authority of the ECHO team after Eden’s injury, but despite his actions on the Lost City mission, none of the team truly trusted him enough to put their lives in his hands, so for now he was being kept as distant as possible.

  Hawke was in the car now and as Kim buckled up he put the phone into the hands-free set and switched to speaker phone. “What is it, Ryan?”

  “Do you know anything about the Welsh Triads?”

  “Chinese drug-smuggling gangs in Cardiff?”

  Ryan gave a heavy sigh. “Please Lord, let that be a joke.”

  “It was a joke,” Kim said. “I think.”

  “Of course it was a joke,” Hawke said with a sideways glance at Kim. “Go on, mate.”

  “The Welsh Triads are a collection of medieval manuscripts which are centred on everything being brought together in groups of three – a very holy number in ancient Celtic tradition.”

  “Go on.”

  “Famous texts include the White Book of Rhydderch and the Red Book of Hergest, but there are others. They were stored all over Wales for hundreds of years but today most of them are in the National Library in Cardiff. The manuscripts of the Welsh Triads are almost certainly just the tip of the iceberg, and most scholars agree that there are probably countless missing texts out there.”

  “Why are you telling me this, Ryan? Do you want ECHO to pay for you to go on holiday to Wales?”

  “Like I said earlier when you were chilling out in the Oval Office, I’m telling you because one of them has just turned up and I think it could be critical to our mission.”

  Hawke glanced at Kim and smiled. “Tell me more.”

  “So this manuscript could be the parent text to both the White Book and Red Book and it’s just surfaced in Boston, Massachusetts courtesy of a private collector dying in his sleep and leaving it to the State in his will. It’s now in the possession of the Boston Metropolitan Museum, and they have pictures of it on their website. They’re calling it the Gold Book or the Book of Gold. It’s very exciting.”

  “Sounds like it,” Hawke said with an eye roll.

  “But that’s not even the best bit.”

  “Spit it out, Ryan,” Kim said.

  “You remember the strange symbols all over the idol we found in Mexico?”

  “Sure.”

  “Well, they’re all over this manuscript as well.”

  Hawke and Kim shared a glance. The symbols they had found in Mexico were very similar to those they had seen on the Valhalla idol, and they had been struggling to understand their connection ever since. How ancient relics from places as far away from one another as Lapland and Mexico could share the same symbols had mystified the entire team, including Ryan and Alex.

  “Are you absolutely sure about this, mate?” he asked.

  “It’s me, Joe; of course I’m absolutely sure. The problem is, the picture on the museum’s website is only giving me a partial image of the symbols and by the looks of the way they taper off the edge of the page I’m guessing there are more that are totally out of sight. That’s why I have to get my hands on the actual manuscript. I could fly to Boston or you could pick it up on your way back to London.”

  London. Hawke’s hometown. A place he loved to visit. A place he loved to avoid. Today he was due to fly back and meet Lea. They were supposed to talk to the doctors about Sir Richard Eden, and he guessed that meant his condition was slipping.

  “Where are you, Ryan? The latest picture on your Facebook page is of you in Paris.”

  A long pause. Hawke knew Ryan was still trying to come to terms with his loss and presumed he’d been on a colossal bender in the City of Light.

  “I’m in London now, at the hospital.”

  “Any change?”

  “None.”

  Kim gave Hawke a look of consolation.

  Hawke changed the subject. “How much are we paying for it?”

  “That’s up to you now, Joe.”

  “For now,” Hawke corrected him. “What does Lea say?”

  “She says just buy it. She’s drifting a bit. She needs you – we all do. You’re the acting head of ECHO as far as the rest of us are concerned. This is important, Joe. We all know in our blood that the idols are central to all this, and now a thousand year-old Welsh manuscript turns up with almost identical symbols on it to the Mexican and Valhalla idols. I have to get a closer look inside it if I’m going to see all of its secrets.”

  Hawke sighed. “In that case, we’d better get our arses up to Boston.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Boston

  After stopping in Manhattan for coffee and switching seats, Kim Taylor was at the wheel as they entered Boston. This meant a measured and slow journey over the bridge and into North End before finally driving into the Seaport District.

  “Take note, Limey,” she said with a feigned scowl. “This is where we kicked your asses.”

  “Why, oh why, would you abuse helpless donkeys?”

  “Not funny, but seriously – this is where we beat you once and for good.”

  “Not really.”

  “How’d you figure that out?”

  “The way I see it,” he said trying to suppress a grin, “you weren’t technically independent until 1776, so those guys throwing tea into the harbor in 1774...”

  “16 December 1773.”

  “Exactly – they were technically British.”

  “You can’t be serious!”

  “Afraid so – technically we were beaten by ourselves, so in a weird sort of way the British won the War of Independence and then decided to become American afterwards.”

  Kim shifted a little in her seat and cleared her throat to speak as she slapped his shoulder. “You know, talk like that might technically be treason.”

  Hawke laughed for the first time since they had started their journey.

  As they finally reached the Boston Metropolitan Museum the sky had darkened and was threatening a heavy downpour. Not unusual for Boston at this time of year, and Kim had dressed for it back in DC. Now, she snuggled down into her scarf as they crossed the road and walked up the steps to the main entrance.

  The museum was large and popular, but it was midweek and the place was relatively quiet. They walked to the front desk where a woman with short blonde hair met them with a smile and a brief introduction. “I’m Melissa Miller,” she began. “I’m the Curator of the Celtic Studies section. I gather you’re interested in seeing the new medieval Welsh manuscript?”

  “That’s right,” Kim said.

  Melissa stopped for a moment and cocked her head a little, staring at Kim. “Have we met?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “You look sort of familiar,” the woman said.

  Kim sighed inwardly. As part of his personal security detail, she had been photographed with the President on countless occasions, and just a few hours ago she had been standing behind him when he gave a short press conference on the peace talks with Korea that he was trying to get off the ground. The last thing on Earth that she wanted to do was tell this woman she had probably seen her last at the inauguration of th
e US President – when she had stood a few feet behind him and seven million people were tuned into every second of it on their TVs and iPads.

  “She was a child actress,” Hawke said in a flash.

  “Ah!” A look or recognition appeared on the curator’s face. “That must be it.”

  “Thanks, Joe,” Kim said quietly.

  “She mostly did toilet roll commercials,” he said.

  “Oh...”

  Kim spoke through gritted teeth. “I said thanks, Joe.”

  “And who could forget that one about the drain cleaner?”

  Kim elbowed him hard in the ribs and Hawke stifled a grunt of pain, but Melissa Miller had already turned and was on her way toward a long corridor.

  “If you’ll just follow me,” she said over her shoulder, “the item you wish to see is right along here.”

  “I thought it was on display?” Kim said.

  “No, not yet. We’re very grateful to the previous owner’s estate for making it available to us – but at a price.” She said this last word with a weary sigh.

  “And who was the previous owner?” Hawke said.

  “I’m not at liberty to divulge information about our donors or their estates.”

  Hawke and Kim exchanged a glance – that was them told.

  Melissa opened a door leading to the archives and after shuffling down a short series of steps they reached a locked room. The curator deftly turned the key in the lock and then opened the door. They were met with the smell of musty books. “It’s right here in this case.”

  She opened the case and revealed what Hawke and Kim had both expected – a worn-out, battered-looking old manuscript with a hefty leather cover, crumbling at the edges. On its front cover was a bevelled Celtic triptych, scuffed and worn and showing its incredible age.

  The former commando stared at the manuscript and was massively unimpressed. It wasn’t much bigger than a hardback and appeared to be in three parts, held together with twine. “That’s it?”

  “But of course,” Melissa said. “Why do you ask?”

  “Looks like a manky old pile of newspaper.”