by Rob Jones
“We know you have it, old man. Hand it over and we will let you live.”
The second voice was gravelly but clearer – Dutch, or New Zealand, maybe – but before his mind could think about it any further there was a crash at the door and he felt it judder in the frame. He heard some swearing and then he felt someone kick the lower panel of the door but it held in place.
“Last chance and we do it the hard way,” the gravelly voice said.
Barrera’s mind raced again as he strained to think of a way out. Opposite him on the far wall of the office was the window, but he was on the third floor and there was no fire escape. Nothing beyond that glass except a long drop to the asphalt and a very hard landing.
“Who are you?” he said, stalling for time. “What do you want with me?”
“You know who we are, Barrera – don’t play us for fools. We want the mask from the galleon and we know you have it.”
Before he could reply there was more swearing and then a gunshot. He nearly jumped out of his skin as the bullet tore through the upper panel a few inches from his head and buried itself in his map of Colombia on the wall beside the window.
“Okay… okay – it’s here! Please don’t kill me.”
“Waste a bullet on you?” Skull said.
The door began to open and Skull helped it on its way with a violent kick of his boot. It smacked open so hard it began to wobble shut again requiring a second kick. Barrera walked backwards in fear, clutching a golden mask to his chest as if it would make him bullet proof. He was horrified to see they were wearing masks – a skull, a Frankenstein monster and a ghost, and all carrying guns.
The man in the front took off his skull mask and stared at the ancient artefact, his dark eyes settling on the glittering golden mask in the academic’s shaking hands.
“You!” Barrera said.
“I see you have it,” Skull said.
“It wasn’t easy getting it out of the vaults – please… I’ve done everything you asked of me.”
“This is true,” Skull said snatching the mask from him. “You have done everything I need you to do for me.”
A nervous smile played on Barrera’s trembling lips. “And the settlement?”
“I need you to do one more thing for me, Héctor.”
“Anything!”
Skull gave a grim smile and raised his pistol. “Die.”
“No!”
The shot rang out in the tiny office, and Héctor Barrera staggered backwards into his desk. He turned and tried to hang on to the desk in a bid to stop himself going over, but it was in vain. The searing pain in his chest and the loss of blood pressure forced him down to the cheap vinyl tiles of his office, and then he was on his side, staring up at the world in agony.
He watched the man with the Skull mask step over to him with the gun from his new sideways angle, reaching out with a shaking hand in a desperate last-minute plea for his life, but he received no mercy – only a second bullet.
“There’s your bastard settlement,” the man said, pulling the Skull mask back on, and slammed the door behind him as his life slipped away into darkness.
CHAPTER TWO
Elysium
Joe Hawke turned around to take one last look at the gravestone and shook his head in disbelief. Maria Kurikova was dead, and Ryan Bale was missing presumed dead. Hawke preferred Missing in Action because at least that way it left some hope for his survival, however slim. Far away across the Atlantic Ocean, their leader Sir Richard Eden was lying in a London hospital deep in a coma. His condition had deteriorated badly on board the USS Harry S. Truman and he’d been flown straight to London.
To complete the shattering of their team, Alex Reeve was in Washington DC in a military hospital due to a bullet wound in her shoulder. One of the men from the Black Hawk had not gotten back to the chopper and survived the F18 missile strike. He’d tried to take out Alex with his assault rifle and wounded her, but Kim Taylor had taken him down with a double tap from behind the cover of the black smoke pouring from the chopper’s wreckage.
She’d told him that she was going to have to go back anyway. While she was on the aircraft carrier she had been recalled by her father due to his new position as President-elect of the United States. Having won the election in early November, it was no longer considered safe to have his family drifting around the world due to fears of kidnapping and blackmail.
Alex would recover and get stronger, and he had hopes Richard Eden would do the same, but what was crushing Hawke was Ryan and Maria. He was struggling with the sense of injustice and rage more than he thought was possible for someone with a past as rocky and violent as his. He had watched many good friends die in battle, and even more fall to PTSD or the bottle, but watching a young couple taken away like this had really got to him.
He sighed and stared up at the complex that used to be Elysium Headquarters, but was now no more than a burned-out husk. He could still hardly bring himself to believe what Alex had told them about the Apache attack and the squad of Special Forces men who landed in the Black Hawk on north beach. It all seemed like something from a nightmare. He had no idea how long it would take them to pull the place together, but he knew they had to try. It was their home, and at least some of the lower floors were still intact.
He wandered away from the grave, picked up his kukri knife and resumed sharpening the Nepalese Army weapon, filing the edge of the blade with a butcher’s steel.
Lea walked over and sat down beside him on the small bench a few yards from the freshly dug earth. The Irishwoman kept her eyes closed as the swaying palms above her head broke the sunlight up and cast mottled shadows on her smooth face. “So what now?”
“I’m not giving up on him,” Hawke said. “Not until I know for sure.”
“Joe…”
He looked at the graves again: Olivia Hart, Sophie Durand, Bradley Karlsson, Ben, Alfie, Sasha and now Maria. The list grew longer. Their sacrifices were all marked here in the center of Elysium, their secret base, shaded by the palms. It was the one area that got away totally unscathed from the vicious assault on the island. He tried to fight it, but the thought of Ryan’s grave now manifested in his mind, right there beside the others. No… not until I know for sure,” he whispered.
He looked out to sea and saw Cairo Sloane speeding across the waves on her windsurfing board. A bright flash of scarlet against the dazzling turquoise ocean. This place didn’t feel like paradise anymore.
Lea saw his eyes as they tracked Scarlet across the water. “Nothing seems to affect her, not in the way it does the rest of us.”
“Cairo Sloane is in a different category,” he said almost automatically, and then with more feeling: “I wouldn’t have been able to get to that bastard Matheson without Maria. She was the one who shone the light on all that for me. I owe her so much, and now she’s gone.”
Lea raised a hand and laid it gently on his arm. “It’s not your fault, Joe.”
“If not mine, then whose?” he said, raising his voice more than he meant. “I was the one leading the operation. I put her in that place. She was following my orders when she was killed. This is just Sophie and Olivia all over again.”
“We’re not kids, Joe. We all know the risks. Maria was a very experienced FSB agent. You can’t take that away from her. When you say it’s all your fault you’re just saying she wasn’t capable of making her own decisions.”
Hawke said nothing, but moved her arm away and rose to his feet. She was right, of course. Maria Kurikova wasn’t a child. She was a highly competent agent for the Russian security services and a respected member of the ECHO team. She lived the way she wanted, and she died doing something she loved, but none of that made it any easier on Hawke and his tortured mind.
The mind that was now racing with the terrible events of the Seastead and his failure to kill the mysterious Oracle. Knowing Dirk Kruger and Dragan Korać were both dead brought almost no comfort at all considering the price their deaths had cost th
e team. Not even Reaper taking Kamchatka out or Maria sending Luk to such a miserable and violent death could bring any sense of fairness or balance to the world given the terrible loss they had suffered with the deaths of Ryan and Maria.
Maria. Since the now-notorious Seastead battle he had felt hollowed out, struck by her death like never before. He didn’t want to ask himself why he’d reacted in this way, that maybe he’d felt something more for her than mere friendship. He knew he loved Lea, so maybe it was just that he was drifting too far from his Special Forces days and could no longer deal with death in the way they’d trained him to all those years ago. But on top of Liz, it just felt like someone was twisting the knife. He couldn’t bring himself to think about what might happen if Lea ever got hurt.
Hawke loved Lea. At least he thought he did. It was a complicated business. At least it had become a complicate business since the death of Maria Kurikova. And then there was Alex Reeve. He was no fool. He knew the way the American felt about him, or at least he thought he did. When it came to successfully receiving signals from women, he liked to think he was the best among men, but the truth was he had no more idea than any other man and he knew it. Still, when they had been together in Idaho in her father’s mountain cabin he had been certain she was trying to be more than friends.
He was silent for a long time. When he spoke, it was through gritted teeth. “Otmar Wolff is a dead man walking.”
“If we ever see him again,” Lea said with a sigh.
“You can count on that,” he said. “I don’t care how long it takes. Wolff will pay for all of this.”
Lexi Zhang emerged from the headquarters building and called Lea over. Someone wanted to speak with her on the phone. As she got up to leave she kissed Hawke on the cheek before walking away.
He watched her step inside the shade of the wrecked building and tried to use the silence to get some perspective but then Scarlet walked up the beach toward him. Her hair was slicked back with the ocean and the saltwater was running off her wetsuit. She stepped across the hot sand and smiled at him.
“Are you sure you’re not putting on weight?” she asked, but he could tell from the tone it was a half-hearted attempt to lighten the mood. “Just looks a little doughy down there.”
“I just keep thinking about all the ways I could have done things differently and then they would still be alive and maybe even Rich would be okay.”
“Blaming yourself for Ryan and Maria is stupid,” she said quietly. “But blaming yourself for the attack on this island is downright idiotic. What the hell could you have done differently to stop it? We don’t even know who did it.”
“We know they were Americans.”
“Alex thinks they might have been American, Joe. A big difference.”
“It’s something to go on.”
“If you say so.”
He paused a moment, watching the surf crash on the beach. “How’s Camacho these days?”
“If you must know we’re getting along.”
“Is the great Cairo Sloane finally settling down?”
“I wouldn’t go that far, darling. Let’s just say I can see a future for myself that doesn’t involve…”
“Boozing, smoking and fighting?”
“I was going to say a future that doesn’t involve being lonely, if you must know.”
“I’m pleased for you, Cairo. You know I am.”
“And what about the great Josiah Hawke?” she asked mischievously.
“What do you mean?”
“Are we looking at a Mrs Lea Hawke one day?”
Her words made him pause for a moment. He had never heard Lea described like that before – with his own name. He had never put the names together in his own mind before and it sounded strange. It brought back memories of his first wife and their wedding day.
“Well, if you must know, I was…”
He stopped talking when the sun flashed on the door to reveal Lea and Lexi as they emerged from the ruined compound. Reaper was a step behind. They both watched them step outside and walk over to the garden.
Scarlet lit a cigarette. “You can tell me later darling.”
“That was weird,” said Lea, sitting back down beside Hawke.
“What was weird?” Scarlet said, blowing a cloud of smoke into a mosquito and sending it into a rapid u-turn.
“The phone call I just had. It was someone named Magnus Lund.”
“Shit,” Scarlet said. “That is weird.”
Lea rolled her eyes and sighed. “If you’ll let me finish, then I can properly explain the weirdness. Mr Lund was calling me from on board a jet over the Atlantic.”
“Not even vaguely weird yet,” Scarlet said, dragging on her cigarette and pulling her hat down over her face to block the sun.
“He’s on board a flight from Copenhagen to Miami, where he wants us to meet with him about something he described as urgent.”
“Do we even know who this bloke is?” Hawke said.
“We do,” Lea said with a broad smile, “because he just told me. Apparently, now Rich is in hospital, Magnus Lund is the leader of the Consortium that owns this island.”
CHAPTER THREE
Miami
“I thought this place was supposed to be sunny?” Hawke said as he opened up the umbrella he’d bought in the airport. People were bustling all around them as they made their way along Brickell Avenue until they reached the address Lund had given them.
They crossed the lobby and took the elevator to the top floor. When the doors slid silently open they revealed a hardwood corridor bereft of decoration. They stepped out of the elevator and walked toward the only door, and Lea tapped gently on the panelled wood.
“Enter.”
They walked into a large light-filled space and took in the opulence. It was postmodern in style, and expensively decorated with abstract art and sculpture, and on the floor was an enormous ushak rug. Behind the desk, a man in a sober suit but no neck tie flipped his laptop screen down and looked up at them. His face was lean and he wore a pair of frameless glasses.
“Good day – please take a seat.”
They exchanged a glance and did as he asked, each taking a comfortable leather seat opposite his big desk.
“I’m Magnus Lund. Would you like coffee?” he asked.
“Not for me,” Scarlet said, peering around the room for a drinks cabinet.
“I don’t mind if I do,” said Hawke, trying to get the measure of the man.
Lea smiled at him. “I’d love one, thanks.”
Lund spoke in Danish into the intercom on his desk and then returned his attention to the five ECHO members sitting opposite him.
“Out with it then,” Hawke said.
Lund stared back at him, expressionless. “Out with what?”
“Who are you?” Lea said.
“I already told you, my name is Lund.”
“Yeah, we got that part,” Hawke said. “I meant, who are the Eden Consortium?”
“Of course you did,” Lund said, smiling. “The Eden Consortium was established by Sir Richard to provide funding to run the fun and games you have down in the Caribbean.”
“Fun and games?” Hawke said. “We’ve lost some good people.”
“My apologies – a poor choice of words on my part. I mean to say only that we are a small group of international backers with a similar worldview. After the attack on the island and the hospitalization of Sir Richard we convened at once and I have asked you here to express our sympathies.”
“That’s very kind of you,” Hawke said sarcastically. “But what’s the real reason we’re here?”
Lund gave Hawke a thoughtful look and leaned forward closer to the desk. He rested his elbows on the desktop and then steepled his fingers. “I see you are an astute observer of human nature so let me get right down to it. Sir Richard is in a coma, but that doesn’t mean we’re off the job. A few hours ago a museum in Colombia was raided by three masked men.”
“Sounds
like trouble,” Scarlet said, lighting a cigarette before the sentence had even left her mouth.
“Yes, but what sort of trouble?” Reaper asked.
Lund leaned back into his chair, his face draining of what little color it had. “You might recall a galleon that the Colombians discovered off their coast last year?”
Hawke nodded. “The San José?”
Lund nodded.
“I remember that,” Scarlet said. “They just brought a shit load of treasure up out of it and carted it off to a museum in Cartagena.”
“Gripping stuff,” Hawke said.
“But where’s the trouble?” said Lea.
“As I said, the museum just got raided by a group of highly professional men.”
Hawke sat up in his chair and looked at him sharply. “Treasure hunters?”
“They weren’t looking for ice creams, Joe,” Scarlet said with a sigh.
“We don’t know who they were,” Lund said coolly.
“You know, I’m not sure if I can bring myself to give a shit about any of this,” Lea said in response. “Not any more.”
Lund looked at her sharply but it was Hawke who answered. “We owe it to Maria, Ryan and Rich to give a shit,” he said firmly. “And that’s exactly what we’re going to do. What I want to know now is – who raided that museum and why?”
Reaper shifted in his chair and gave a grunt of dissatisfaction. “And what did they take?”
“That’s easy,” Lund said. “It’s not public knowledge but I have my contacts. They stole only one item.”
This captured everyone’s attention, even Scarlet’s, and now they were all fixing their eyes on the sombre Dane.
“Only one item?” Hawke said.
“What was it?” asked Lexi.
“Something that was discovered in the hoard in the wreckage of the San José – a small golden mask.”
“Curiouser and curiouser,” Lea said.
