by Ted Bell
Now someone had taken his boy. It was the worst possible nightmare, the one thing that kept him awake at night, figuring new ways to protect his son. And he’d failed. But at least he now had hope. Now if, as he prayed, Alexei was still alive, Hawke had a fighting chance to foil his captors—whoever they were, however powerful they might be, and wherever on god’s earth he might find them.
Because, now Hawke had the ultimate weapon in the fight to help get Alexei back. He was in the process of assembling what was perhaps the best hostage rescue team in all of Europe. It was comprised of Hawke, Congreve, and Stokely Jones Jr. Three unstinting warriors who had joined together to take on the worst the world had to offer. And they were still standing, still ready to fight for the weak and the helpless, wherever they might be.
This was the team that had once stormed Balmoral Castle, the royal summer residence of Her Majesty the Queen and the entire Royal Family. All of Britain had been riveted to the telly as the story unfolded. Al-Qaeda were holding the Queen and her family in the basement, threatening to execute them one by one until their demands were met. Their lives hung in the balance until help arrived, just the three of them. Hawke, Congreve, and Jones saved the Queen this time, not god.
And now the stakes, at least for Hawke, were even higher. The life of Hawke’s only child was at risk.
As his plane drew closer, he felt a weight begin lifting from his shoulders. Now that he had managed to grasp thin shreds of hope, Hawke felt he might be able to breathe again. The clouds of fear and doubt that had been obscuring his mind and his heart since the accident began to clear away.
If he was to find his son and get him to safety, he would need his mind back, clear and strong. He would need to hone his innate warrior instincts.
He was now sure of one thing, however. Hawke, Congreve, and Jones, god help them, would now mount a hostage rescue operation like no other in order to bring his boy safely home.
Hawke was out on the tarmac, waiting at the bottom of the aircraft steps. The wind and freezing rain whipped at his navy pea coat. The sight of his gleaming midnight-blue airplane gliding majestically to a halt never failed to move him. Hawke, the former Royal Navy fighter pilot, was on the phone with Artemis Cooper, his captain, as the plane taxied to a halt, going over some recent issues with the aircraft’s avionics systems.
Hawke hoped any repairs necessary would not delay his pilot’s quick turnabout, keep the plane grounded a moment longer than was necessary.
He finally told his chief pilot, “Keep me informed, Artemis. Whatever needs fixing, fix it. And be on standby with the tank topped off. When I need to go, it will be right away. Are we clear?”
“Roger that, sir. Oh, hold on, sir. Chief Inspector coming out soon . . . along with our other passenger.”
“Other passenger, Artemis? What other passenger?”
“It’s a lady, sir. Very pretty, I might add.”
“Lady? He didn’t mention anything to me about anyone else coming. Is it his wife? Hold on, here he is in the doorway now.”
Chief Inspector Ambrose Congreve, who was godfather to his son, stepped out into the cold, blustery weather. Upon seeing Hawke below, he raised his infamous black umbrella in greeting.
This was the famous brolly Hawke had nicknamed Mary Poppins, a steel mesh contraption that, when extended, was entirely bulletproof. It had been designed by some gimcrack genius at Scotland Yard. Mary Poppins had once saved Congreve’s life during the Dragon Lady Affair, an iffy incident involving killer ravens. But that’s a tale for another time.
“Halloo! Halloo!” Congreve shouted above the wind. “Be right down . . . hold on a tick,” he called down to Hawke, pausing to look back inside the aircraft, as if he’d forgotten something or someone.
A moment later, Hawke got a wholly unexpected shock.
Sigrid.
Sigrid Kissl. What the hell was she doing here?
The tall ash-blond Swiss beauty, in her late twenties and wearing a full-length sable, was standing up there beneath the umbrella with Ambrose, smiling down at him and waving as their cabin luggage was being handed down by Hawke’s uniformed air hostesses.
Fräulein Sigrid Kissl. Of all people.
Hawke had met the former Credit Suisse banker in Zurich a couple of years before. He and Congreve had been looking into a case involving the Chinese or the Russians and some gold mysteriously gone missing from the Queen of England’s vast Swiss reserves. Hawke had enlisted a senior banker at Credit Suisse, Sigrid Kissl, to help him ferret out the thieves.
Who turned out to be both the Chinese and the Russians.
In the end, Sigrid had helped Congreve crack what was a very difficult case. She’d also helped identify the names of the Russian perpetrators and talked Congreve into taking her on as his personal assistant. He had even invited her to take up residence in the gardener’s cottage at Brixden House, his country home in the Cotswolds.
She’d also broken Hawke’s heart.
The two had become romantically involved that first Christmas in Switzerland. Two years ago now. In the early going, as she was settling into the idea of living in the English countryside, turning the little cottage on the vast rolling estate into her home, she and Hawke were inseparable.
And she’d spent countless weekends and overnights at Hawkesmoor, the Hawke family seat, some fifteen miles away from the Congreves. In those happy months, Alexei had bonded with the beautiful woman. The three had become, in Hawke’s mind at least, like a family.
They traveled the world together, spent holiday weekends at Sandy Lane in Barbados, and then one spring weekend in Capri, there came, from out of nowhere, a weepy declaration: “Darling, I love you, but I simply cannot do this anymore. It’s impossible. I’m so sorry.”
Sorry?
And that was the end of it. She was gone from him. She refused to see him or speak to him, and the long sunny weekends she’d spent at Hawkesmoor with him and his son suddenly were no more.
That there had never been anything by way of an explanation—something, anything, he could offer his son by way of comforting him—was to this day a source of deep anger.
She came down the stairs first, her fur coat collar up against the chill rain, her eyes never leaving his. As she neared the bottom, he offered a hand and managed a brief smile. He couldn’t help but notice she was wearing the gold-and-blue Hermès scarf he’d bought her on their last trip to Paris.
She smiled back. “Now, don’t you dare be angry with Ambrose, darling. All my fault. It was a last-minute thing. I talked him into letting me tag along just this morning at breakfast. I’m so sorry about Alexei, Alex, so terribly, terribly sorry . . . and I felt that if I could be of some help to you, you would let me stay on.”
She swept a gloved hand across her brimming eyes. He had read into them that she was truly sorry, not just for his son’s disappearance, but perhaps for the abominable way she had treated him as well.
“Thank you for that.”
“Oh, come on, Alex. Give me a hug, damn it, and tell me you’re glad to see me. I’m your old girl, here to help, you know.”
He hugged her. How could he not, inhaling the ridiculously intoxicating scent wafting up from her generous cleavage. She was, despite his various issues with her, the most spectacular woman he’d ever admitted inside the heavily guarded defenses of his lonely heart.
“Thanks for coming, Sigrid,” he said, mulling the situation over in his mind. If the most cunning detective in Scotland Yard’s modern era thought she could help, perhaps she could help.
“I deeply appreciate your offer, Sigrid. I accept.”
“I knew you’d see things my way, old chap,” Ambrose said, putting a hand on his shoulder. “I think it’s time you and Sigrid buried whatever hatchet is between you once and for all.”
He turned to embrace his old friend.
“God, it’s good to see you, Constable,” he said. “I cannot tell you how much this means to me.”
“Alex, my de
ar, dear boy, don’t be ridiculous! Tell me, how are you bearing up?” Ambrose said, giving him a good squeeze.
“As well as can be expected, I suppose. There’s still been no word, no ransom note or . . . I don’t even know if he’s alive!”
“I know you cannot help but worry night and day, Alex. But I do want you to know that Miss Kissl and I are already chewing on this kidnapping case like dogs on a bone. I’ve not a doubt in the world regarding a happy ending. I hope you’re not cross with me about Sigrid. But truth to tell, she’s been invaluable to me . . . and I just felt that we, at this juncture, needed all the help we could get.”
“Friends?” Hawke said, smiling at Sigrid.
“Friends.” She smiled back.
“All right,” Hawke said. “We’re all standing out here like sentries at Buck House, freezing to death. Let’s get you two to the hotel so you can—”
“We don’t have time, Alex,” Congreve said. “We’ve got a meeting in twenty minutes at the Air-Rescue operations center with your new friend Waldo Pfeffer, the Swiss Air-Rescue chief who had you thrown in jail.”
“Lovely,” Hawke said. “I look forward to seeing see his face when I walk through his door once more. See how is jaw is healing.”
Chapter Eighteen
Zurich
Uncle Joe had been a very busy boy.
He found his shiny new Mercedes 450 GLC right where he’d parked it, under a foot of fresh snow on Torsten Strasse, about a block from Scheherazade, the Zurich restaurant where he’d just lunched with Heinrich Rosenstiel, the Swiss banker—Putin’s buttoned-up Swiss banker, to be more precise about it. Buttoned up so tight he might pop any minute, Joe thought, as he swept the snow from the windshield, pondering the Swiss mentality. No sense of humor, these guys. Zilch, nada.
But if you were a billionaire recluse like the currently semi-dead president of Russia, you weren’t looking for some kind of Pal Joey, right? Buttoned up was a plus with these financial types.
Herr Heinrich Rosenstiel was very, very discreet. Joe had dealt with him before, back in his salad days as Putin’s henchman at the Kremlin. Back then, Heinie was just another of the countless grey men he’d dealt with in Switzerland, nothing more than a glorified bagman, moving vast amounts of money and gold and art around the planet for Vladimir Putin. Joe, the middleman, had worked directly with the guy. He’d made countless trips to Zurich to ensure there were no snafus or fuck-ups of any kind.
Joe once took Heinie to his favorite bar, try to loosen him up a little. Joe ordered two ketel martinis, straight up. Heinie was ordering a third while Joe was finishing his first. “I didn’t know you like to drink, Heinie.”
“Only on special occasions,” Heinie said, polishing off his third see-thru.
“Like what?” Joe asked.
“Only when I’m alone or with somebody.”
The cat was actually funny! Who knew?
Heinie, mainly because of his Russian connections, was now a big shot at Banque Pictet. But luckily for Joe, Rosenstiel still knew what side his bread was buttered on. He knew Joe and the late president had been tight, thick as thieves, like thistight. Knew better than to ask Joe any questions or probe into any areas better left unprobed.
Questions like why the hell Joe Stalingrad, a man who had been infamously banned from the Kremlin, now had access to all of the late president’s accounts? Yeah, that was a biggie, but Heinie was smart enough to keep those troubling thoughts to himself.
So when Joe provided working account numbers and the correct access codes and transactional summaries, and had said he wanted a hundred and fifty million in cash and gold bars ready to be shipped to an as-yet-unspecified location on an as-yet-to-be-determined date, it was “No problem, sir.”
Joe had been hard at it on Putin’s behalf for some weeks now. Working on the complex infrastructure, the underpinnings of what would one day become Vladimir Putin’s military stronghold in exile. Secrecy made everything exponentially more difficult, but Joe was no one if not someone accustomed to keeping secrets.
Why, under Joe’s aegis, entire Chinese squatter villages deep in the Siberian border forests had disappeared. Send a signal to all the inhabitants of northern China that crossing the Russian border to steal Russian timber was a very bad idea. And Ukrainian fighter squadrons had flown off the radar, never to be seen again. Into the “Crimea Triangle,” he and Putin used to joke after pulling another fast one on the world.
Joey himself was sitting atop a very large secret at this very moment. Today was the day he would finally have an audience with Dr. Gerhardt Steinhauser himself, the notorious Sorcerer. He was actually going to see this incredible “mountain house” that the boss was so excited about. Gaining entry, the boss had told Joe, was a bit iffy. “There are two entrances to the complex inside the mountain,” Putin had told him. “Built by Swiss engineers secretly working for the Nazis near the end of World War II. One of the entrances is near the bottom of Lake Zurich. A hundred yards offshore, and about fifty feet below the surface. The other is a giant secret door at fifteen thousand feet, camouflaged by faux granite boulders.”
Unless you were willing to scale something called the Murder Wall, a mirror-smooth face at fifteen thousand feet, your only other option was the hidden underwater entrance below the surface of Lake Zurich. The one Hawke had believed closed, apparently, was not.
Transport across the lake to the air lock was via a trip in a two-man sub from the western side of the lake to the eastern side. Putin had supplied the phone number of Horst Becker, a man in Zurich who worked as a sub jockey for the Sorcerer. And he had given Joe a code phrase, “I’m a friend of Johann’s,” to which the reply from Horst would be “What kind of dogs does Johann like?” The correct answer from Joe was “Johann doesn’t like dogs.”
He climbed into his new car, took a big gulp of that deliciously exhilarating new-car smell, fastened his seat belt, and cranked it up. The resulting vroom-vroom was not exactly up to Vette vroom standards, but what the hell. He wasn’t exactly living in a shitty one-bedroom walk-up on Melrose Avenue in L.A. anymore, now was he?
No. He was back in the Big Show now, no doubt about that. And if he played his cards exactly right, he’d be a zillionaire when this was all over.
Horst had told him the pick-up would occur at a pier in the tiny village of Riga, about an hour’s drive north along the lake. Meet him at midnight, to be exact. So Joe had a late supper in the hotel dining room at Baur au Lac and called for the Mercedes at ten thirty. The roads were extremely icy, and after a few skids going into corners carrying too much speed, he slowed way down. He didn’t want to end up in the icy lake prematurely.
He was excited about the trip across the lake in the two-man sub. It wouldn’t be his first rodeo, either. Putin had a sub and he’d taken Joe down more than once when he’d been aboard the presidential yacht, Tsar. His favorite dive? Two years ago. The time off the coast of France when he and the president had discovered a sunken Nazi freighter, a massive thing sitting upright on the bottom. Putin had brought him along for the ride for a reason. To stage a demonstration of his new secret explosive Feuerwasser.
“I like it,” Joe said. “I’m on it. Boom!”
He saw the sign for Riga and exited the highway. The little picture postcard town on the lake was dark and deserted. A pale moon hung high above a lit church steeple in the blackness above the mountains. He glanced at the dashboard clock: 11:46 p.m. He was a little early, but that was all right. When you’re doing any kind of business in the midnight hour, it was always prudent to arrive a little early.
He climbed out of the Mercedes, locked it, and walked out to the end of the pier, where a dim red light glowed. It was below freezing, but he had his mainstay bearskin coat and the sable hat Putin had given him and it was enough. There was a bench. He sat down to wait, lit a cigarette, and thought about how dramatic a life could be if you had the appetite for it.
And, indeed, he’d known few men hungrier than he.
His lust for life was insatiable.
Chapter Nineteen
Zurich
“Well, well, well,” Hawke said, staring at the loathsome Air Rescue chief. “If it isn’t the Great Waldo Pfeffer!”
“Ah, good morning, Chief Inspector, Miss Kissl, and uh . . . and yes, you too, Commander Hawke,” the Swiss Air-Rescue chief of staff said as soon as they were all seated. He’d had obvious trouble getting Hawke’s name to pass his bruised and broken jaw and rubbery red lips. His attempted smile hid an obviously imperious demeanor. He was “Germanic Swiss official with a penchant for schnapps” personified.
“What can I do for you this morning?” he asked, never meeting Hawke’s eyes and speaking only to Congreve. “I understand you have some questions?”
Hawke crossed his long legs, smiled, and said, “Yeah, I’ve got a question. How’s your jaw, Waldo?”
Congreve, never one to miss a beat, jumped in, “We deeply appreciate your taking time out of your busy schedule, Chief. We shan’t be long.”
“Good, good, I am a busy man,” the chief said, glaring at Hawke as he reflexively rubbed his sore jaw. The two men stared at each other until Sigrid mercifully interrupted the awkward silence.
“Good morning, Chief. I’m Police Constable Sigrid Kissl, Scotland Yard. I work for Chief Inspector Congreve. We are here on official business, conducting an Interpol criminal investigation with which you are required by international law to cooperate. I am speaking of the recent disappearance of Commander Hawke’s seven-year-old son, Alexei Hawke. Do I make myself clear?”
“Ah, yes,” Pfeffer said, “the unfortunate gondola affair.”
“Unfortunate, did you say?” Hawke said, his icy blue eyes firing white-hot bolts of anger at the man. There was nothing in the books to say he couldn’t break this bastard’s jaw twice.
“Ah, I mean to say tragic, Commander. Yes, tragic. But still and all, I’m not sure how I can help you.”