by Ted Bell
He saw words, phrases lifted from the letter drifting like scattered clouds before his eyes:
disappear . . . a little place by the sea . . . a sacred mission . . .
“Christ!” He sat straight up in bed, switched on the lamp, and reached for his phone. He was never able to memorize phone numbers, but this one he knew by heart.
“Hullo,” came the sleepy voice of his new pilot, Artemis Cooper.
“Artemis, it’s Hawke. Sorry to bother you at this ungodly hour . . .”
“Not a problem, sir. What can I do for you?”
“How’s the fuel in the Blue Streak?”
“Tanks topped off, sir. Always. Where are we going?”
“Africa.”
“Excellent. Which part?”
“Not quite sure yet, Artemis. Need your help. There’s a small village in Morocco, just up the coast from Casablanca. I can’t recall the name precisely . . . started with an A, wouldn’t you know it, like a hundred other Moroccan villages. Alsalla? Something like that. Locate a strip somewhere nearby Marrakech that can accommodate the plane.”
“Absolutely. I’ll find it, sir.”
“Good. Next, call the La Mamounia hotel in Marrakech. Book garden rooms for you, me, and the copilot. Three or four days, something like that. Get the concierge to have a rental car delivered to the hotel for our arrival . . . four-wheel drive, off-road capability . . . I’m going to need your help, Artemis, both of you guys. We need to cover a lot of territory.”
“May I ask what we’re looking for, sir?”
“Yes. We’re looking for a woman. Her name is Sigrid Kissl. She flew with us once, from Zurich to England. Remember? Blond? Beautiful?”
“With all due respect, sir, how could I forget her?”
“Right, Artemis. That’s my problem exactly. How can anyone forget her?”
Chapter Sixty-Seven
La Mamounia, Marrakech
The lobby bar at La Mamounia is called the Churchill Bar for a very good reason. During World War II, the darkly paneled lounge had been the site of many top-secret meetings. This historic spot is where Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill would meet periodically throughout the war. It was here, in this very room, at this very table, probably over a couple of whiskey Rob Roys, that the two giants hammered out options for the deepest military secret on earth, the impending invasion of Normandy.
Today, framed black-and-white portraits of the two heroes are hung with pride on all the walls. Rain-sweet air, wafting in from the gardens, pours through opened French doors, scented with ginger and orange blossoms. This room had borne witness to some of the most historic and momentous secrets in human history. And a memory of secrecy lingered yet, a tribute to the power of the towering human spirit, seen here in its finest hours.
They’d all three checked into their rooms, unpacked, showered, and shaved after the longish flight from England to Africa. The maître d’ had showed them to a prize banquette table in a sunlit corner of the bar, one overlooking abundant gardens where rain dripped off the sour orange trees.
The three Englishmen turned a lot of feminine heads as they strode past the bar to their seats. Hawke, of course, one of those rare chaps who could well be considered beautiful as well as being among the most dangerous of men. Born in the calm eye of a hurricane, Hawke, all dimples and charm, was, as his father had announced at the hour of his arrival, “a boy born with a heart for any fate.”
But also his lordship’s two pilots were both ruggedly handsome fellows in their own right. Formidable men who carried themselves as befit their rank. They were young, recently retired RAF fighter pilots, veterans who’d completed special ops missions in Afghanistan with their counterparts at SAS. A pair of swaggering badasses, as Stoke would call them—cocky, yes, but agreeably cocky.
“What are you drinking, Johnnie-boy?” Hawke asked Johnnie Walker, his blond-maned copilot, after they were seated. At his signal, an elegant Moroccan gentleman in a green felt jacket with shiny brass buttons, hovering nearby, handed them lavish dinner menus and disappeared.
“Iced tea, sir. No sugar, please,” said the un-aptly named Lieutenant Johnnie Walker, RAF ret., a wide white smile appearing on his deeply tanned and handsome face.
“Good. How about you, Artemis?”
“Same thing, please, sir.”
“All right. Now that I’ve got that tiresome obligation out of the way, I can order myself a nice cocktail. Sun’s over the yardarm somewhere in the British Empire I should think. Don’t you gentlemen agree?”
Both men nodded and Hawke signaled to the barman to render much-needed assistance.
A waiter was summoned and Hawke gave the jolly little fellow in the bright red fez their order. Forgoing iced tea, he ordered his cocktail of choice, a Dark ’n’ Stormy made with muddled lime, ginger beer, and Gosling’s Black Seal 151. The best rum, Hawke believed, and Bermuda rum, of course.
“Question, sir,” Johnnie Walker said. “If I may?”
“Fire at will,” Hawke replied.
“That expression you used, sir. ‘The sun is over the yardarm somewhere.’ I’ve always wondered at that, sir. Could you please explain it?”
“Certainly. It’s an old Royal Navy expression. Used by ships’ officers on station in the far-flung corners of the once mighty British empire. Traditionally, a sailor never took a drink until the sun was over the yardarm. The senior officer who is saying the phrase means, if it’s time for a drink in Singapore, it’s jolly well time for a drink in the West Indies. Because, somewhere in the British Empire, the sun is most definitely over the yardarm of some Royal Navy vessel. Good for one, good for all.”
“In what way, sir? Don’t mean to be dense.”
“The yardarm was one of the horizontal spars high up the stick on the old square-riggers. If the sun dips below the yardarm, that means it’s past noon. Time for a gin and bitters, you see. Or in my case, a tot of rum.”
“Ah, yes. Officers still allowed to drink on board, are they, sir?”
“Only in one instance, Johnnie. Upon returning to home port from extended combat duty abroad. The U.S. Navy has the same standard. Now, let’s get down to cases. You’ve brought along your side arms, I trust?”
“Sir, just to remind you,” Artemis said, “we are both well-armed at all times.”
“Of course. One of the reasons I hired you, Artemis,” Hawke said with a wry smile. “A chap never knows when a couple of extra guns might come in handy.”
“Speaking of which, sir,” Artemis said, pulling a map from the inside pocket of his khaki jacket, “I’ve brought along the map I’ve been using to plot out our route tomorrow morning . . . coastal towns with names that begin with A and are possible locations are circled in red crayon.”
“Very low-tech, skipper,” Johnnie Walker said. “A paper map? I like it.”
“Yes, I’m old school. Okay, look here, sir, you see this is the nearest A town. Just about an hour out. What time shall we get started in the morning? First light?”
“Dawn. It could be a long day. You chaps should keep your eyes open out on the highway and open roads. Our Muscovite friend Vladimir has already come after the chief inspector and me once down in Italy. And just last week he sent two unsavory Cuban fellows to the Florida Keys in an assassination attempt, thwarted, thank god, by Stokely Jones Jr. Vlad is gearing up for something big and he doesn’t want me or my associates putting their noses where they don’t belong. If you see something, say something.”
“Yes, sir,” Artemis said. “Saw a chappie in the lobby when we were checking in that I didn’t particularly like the looks of, Commander. He was sitting in the red silk armchair chatting up the concierge.”
“Did you see his skin?” Johnnie Walker said. “His face looked like lacquered walnut meat.”
Hawke looked at the two pilots. “Chechen, by the looks of him. Short and swarthy, forty-something, with pomaded black hair? Yeah. I made him, too. Anyway, caution is called for, gents. As my dear friend
Ambrose Congreve would have it, ‘The game is afoot . . .’”
“Aye aye, sir,” Johnnie Walker said, “it is indeed.”
Eventually they moved on to an early dinner outside beneath the orange trees. Hawke gave them a highly edited version of the story of Sigrid’s disappearance here in Morocco. He purposefully left out his oft-recurring suspicions about her complicity in the matter. That she had perhaps murdered her torturer and extortionist out of sheer desperation. He knew people who had killed for less, much less.
By midnight, all three men had been sound asleep for three hours.
They drove into the center of the first A town shortly after dawn broke the sky wide open. A thick drizzle from the sky, like a curtain’s sudden sweeping. A cold front sweeping in on the coast had brought thunderstorms and lightning, and sheets of rain made driving extraordinarily difficult. And dangerous. Visibility had been at a minimum most of the way to their destination. Hawke could not remember enduring a storm with such ferocity.
But it wasn’t the visibility in front of them that bothered Hawke, who was behind the wheel of the Toyota Land Cruiser. It was the lack of visibility in his rearview mirrors. There could be a car tailing him a hundred or so yards back there and he’d never know it.
With some difficulty, they located the entrance to the town’s little public beach, parked, donned their ponchos, and made their way down to the sea. Rollers were breaking high on the sand, and the wind was whipping up rooster tails all along the incoming parade of waves storming ashore.
“Small white house with a red peaked roof, right on the sea . . . that’s what we’re looking for,” Hawke said, using his right hand as a shield in an attempt to keep the rain from stinging his eyes. He and Artemis had taken the lead, with Johnnie covering their rear flank.
“Not much luck with single houses here, mostly just these small tourist hotels,” Hawke said.
“Yes,” the pilot replied, shouting to be heard above the thunder. “Where the hell is Johnnie?”
They both turned at the sound of muffled voices back there somewhere, sources of which made invisible by the grey fog of rain swirling around them.
“I got a white house!” he and Artemis heard Johnnie cry. “Peaked roof, maybe red, can’t tell from down here. Going up to higher ground to get a look at it . . . You guys go on ahead, I’ll catch up.”
And then, maybe less than a minute later, shots rang out in the fog.
“Good god, go see if you can find him, Artemis,” Hawke said. “You go that way along the shorebreak, I’ll go up along the dunes . . .”
Chapter Sixty-Eight
Coast of Morroco
“Johnnie! Johnnie!” Artemis shouted, racing off into the dense fog. He sprinted in the direction the shots had come from. More shots rang out, one, two more, and then there came the awful screams and cries of a horribly wounded man . . .
Hawke raced across the dunes, taking a different tack than the one Artemis had chosen, hoping to come up behind whoever was doing the shooting.
“Artemis, where are you?” Hawke cried, almost tripping over a piece of driftwood he hadn’t seen until too late. “Any sight of Johnnie?”
“Keep coming this way, sir!” he heard Artemis cry out. “I’m moving along the seawall now, looking for—oh, god! Oh, Jesus Christ, no . . . ah, fuck!”
Hawke could just make him out a little now, kneeling on the sand beside Johnnie, who was on his back.
“Look what they did to him, sir. Look what they did to my friend . . .”
“Call an ambulance, Artemis. Call the Marrakech police . . .”
Artemis whipped out his mobile and made the calls.
Hawke dropped to his knees and felt for the boy’s pulse, trying not to gag at the sight of his young copilot. Hawke had seen horrific battlefield injuries in his day, but he’d never seen butchery as savage or as frenzied as this, nothing remotely close.
“Did you catch sight of whoever did this, Artemis?” Hawke asked.
“No. But there was a boxy grey sedan idling up there on the road along the seawall. I heard a door slam just as I saw Johnnie sprawled on the ground. I looked up. I could only make out the silhouette of someone behind the wheel.
“A heavyset man, not tall. But the passenger, yes. He was tall and slim, wearing boots and some kind of western hat, black, with the brim pulled low over his eyes. Then the car raced away, disappeared into the fog.”
“Think, Artemis. Could the driver have been the Chechen we all saw in the lobby yesterday?”
“Could well have been, sir.”
The tall man had apparently used a knife. The shots fired in the mist had all been from Johnnie’s 9mm side arm, still clenched in his cold, dead fingers.
A brutal blade had ripped him open from his sternum to his waist, then hacked at him until his torso was unrecognizable. Hawke looked at the corpse the killer or killers had left behind and knew instantly that, whoever they were, they were sending him a signal. Then he tore his eyes away from the gore and looked up at the house looming above them atop the seawall.
It was white, just as Johnnie had said right before he died.
And it had a peaked red roof.
Was this even remotely possible? Finding the house at the first village? Of course it was.
After the rain, now, briefly, sun.
After the ambulance had removed Johnnie’s mutilated body and the local constabulary’s detectives had finished their exhaustive crime-scene investigative interviews and the collection of forensic evidence, Hawke and Artemis repaired to a small café on the shady square just opposite the little white house.
The front door was a shade of blue Hawke was pretty sure was called robin’s egg. Could Sigrid be somewhere behind that door? His mind raced ahead. One way or another, he would soon find out.
They ordered coffee and soup and the chicken tagine, as it was nearly lunchtime. Alone with their thoughts, the two men ate in silence. Artemis was plainly grieving the heartbreaking loss of Johnnie Walker, but Hawke saw fury battling heartbreak in those clear blue eyes of his.
Hawke kept his eyes on the house across the square, convincing himself that at any minute Sigrid herself might step through that blue door over there and emerge into the dappled sunshine.
“The driver was the same meaty chap from the lobby yesterday,” Hawke finally said to Artemis. “I can still see him.”
Hawke knew his pilot was surely having the same thoughts he himself was having: who might have killed his friend and comrade-in-arms?
“Most likely the same bloke, sir. Followed us, do you think?”
“Easy enough for him to follow us all the way from the car park at La Mamounia without being spotted. Not in that downpour.”
“Let’s have a chat with that concierge when we get back to the hotel and—”
The blue door cracked open about a foot and then stopped.
“Artemis, the blue door,” Hawke suddenly said, gripping the pilot’s forearm and half coming up out of his chair. “Opening.”
And then it opened wide. A child, a little blond girl of no more than five or six, stepped outside into the spotty sun, a large white cat in her arms. She bent over and carefully placed the cat on the stone flags. Something, a voice from inside the door, made her turn around.
Then Hawke saw a woman appear. She with the red-gold hair, burnished by the sun, appearing in the doorway. She bent down and swooped both the little girl and her cat into her sunburnt arms. She looked around carefully and then crossed the street to the shady side.
There she entered a baker’s shop, child and cat still in her arms.
“It’s her, isn’t it, sir?” Artemis asked. “Sigrid Kissl.”
“Yes, it is indeed,” Hawke said, his Arctic blue eyes transfixed, his mind spinning. God, he thought, did she now have a child he didn’t know about? A whole secret life here in this tiny village? A husband? Did she—
Minutes later, she emerged from the baker’s shop. She carried only two baguettes i
n a paper sack. The child and her cat remained inside the shop. Pausing in the baker’s doorway, pinning up her hair, she looked both ways before crossing the busy street.
She fished a key from her handbag, unlocked the blue door, and slipped inside.
Chapter Sixty-Nine
“Wait here,” Hawke said to Artemis after downing what was left of his cold coffee. “Keep an eye out for the grey sedan. Just in case the Chechen and the cowboy should decide it’s a good idea to return to the scene of the crime. It happens a good deal more than you’d think.”
“Good idea, sir. Take your time over there. I know how much this means to you.”
“Thanks. You see anything out here in the square I need to know about, my mobile will be on. I’m sorry about Johnnie, Artemis. I liked him a lot, too. But, you know, I can be an avenging angel when I set my mind to it.”
“Thank you, sir. I’ll keep that in mind,” Artemis said, smiling as Hawke got up and left the table. The pilot watched his lordship cross the street and rap on the blue door.
A moment later, the door opened.
“Oh!” the woman said, taking a step back. “Oh, my god. It can’t be. Alex . . . how did you—”
“I found this . . .” he said, pulling the pale blue envelope from inside his breast pocket. “Up in your bedroom at Brixden House Gardener’s Cottage.”
“Oh? Oh . . . Yes. I . . . I guess I never intended to mail it. But in my heart, I always prayed that you might be curious about my rooms at the Gardener’s Cottage . . . that you might even find my unsent letter. Might try to find me and—”
“I’ve read it a hundred times. I had to come! Had to see if I could find you. I didn’t care how long it took. I only knew I had to see you again . . .” He paused to look back across the street at Artemis, still sitting quietly at the café, sipping his coffee and reading the newspaper.
“May I come inside?”
“Oh, god. Of course! Please come in. Something’s going on here, Alex. I heard shots near the house. There were police all over the beach and—”