by Rob Jones
Hawke agreed. “So let’s get on instead of waffling and we might beat them to it.”
*
On board Eden’s Gulfstream, Hawke closed his eyes and tried to focus. Ahead of him lay not only the difficult and dangerous task of rescuing Lea and Karlsson and stopping Vetrov, but the truth behind his wife’s murder.
More than a small part of him seriously thought it was the kind of stone better off left unturned. But a bigger part of him – the better part, the part that motivated him to get out of bed in the morning and do the right thing in life no matter the cost – understood that not knowing the truth wasn’t an option.
Now he had the worst choice of his life – whether to rescue Lea first or meet Snowcat. The Russian had sounded like she might not suffer fools gladly, and had told him if he was late for their meeting she would be gone. His mind was torn in two and he agonized over the decision he had to make. And it was that final torturous decision that plagued him as drifted to sleep.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Airborne
The first thing Lea saw when the bag was removed from her head was the enormous, hairy hands that had taken it off. She blinked in the bright light and tried to focus on where she was. She was staring at the same man she had seen in the Piazza San Marco – the man Richard had named as Kosma Zhuravlev. The smaller one – the bastard from the boat they called Kodiak – was nowhere in sight.
While she was blindfolded she’d been busy trying to get her bearings, so she already knew she was in an aircraft, and a very large one by the sound of the thrust at take-off. Judging by the time it took to reach cruising altitude she presumed she was at around thirty-five thousand feet. She also knew they weren’t going anywhere – the plane was just executing its tenth right-turn since reaching cruising height.
The giant padded over to Karlsson and snatched the bag from his head a moment later. Lea’s eyes widened when she saw the man looming over the American SEAL. Bradley Karlsson was one of the biggest men she had ever met but he looked pretty fragile beside this other guy.
“You get up now,” the man said in a deep, bass growl. “We see boss.”
The man sloppily pulled an old Makarov from his belt, waving them through the door and out into the corridor. He ordered them to a lift. They ascended for a few seconds before a gentle ping alerted them that they were at their destination and the doors opened to reveal a plush lounge.
“Hey,” Karlsson whispered, looking down at the carpet. “Don’t get lost in the pile.”
Lea smiled, but her mind was in no place for jokes. She knew they were being given the scenic route so they got a good idea of just how powerful their host really was. She peered out the windows and saw they were above water.
At the far end of the lounge was another room, which opened onto what looked like a very expensive boardroom. Lea had seen something similar when she’d watched a documentary on Air Force One, only this was much bigger and more luxuriously appointed.
“Wait here,” said the giant, and left the room.
Moments later they were called into a private office. The far wall was lined with tropical fish tanks under-lit by a blue neon light which made the place look like an upmarket strip club. Behind the desk was an enormous tapestry. It was an image of an Egyptian god, but which one, Lea didn’t recognize.
“You know who that is?” she asked.
Karlsson shook his head. “Nope. Went through college on a football scholarship then joined the Navy. You’re asking the wrong guy, honey.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“I’m not. You don’t know who it is either.”
It was beautiful, but there was something sinister about it – something out of place with the modern world.
“Ah – I see you are admiring the greatest god of them all – Osiris!”
The heavy Russian accent left no need for an introduction, but they got one anyway. They turned to see a tall, lean man with greying hair and three long scars running down the right side of his face. Maxim Vetrov.
“Welcome to my little airplane – I hope you like it!”
“Not really, and the service sucks.”
“Don’t be too hard on Kosma,” Vetrov said, his voice dripping with insincerity. “Here he is out of his milieu. He was hired because he can break a man’s neck with his bare hands, not for his interpersonal skills.”
“How very reassuring,” Lea said, staring at his face.
“Oh, this?” Vetrov said, pointing at the three thick scars. “Attacked by a bear when I was a young man hunting in the woods. I’m not bitter. It taught me to respect nature, plus, the bear’s head is on the wall of my Moscow apartment.”
He stared at them both for a long time, but particularly at Lea. “You know, I was just reading about you, Miss Donovan.”
“Interesting?”
“Not until the last chapter.”
“And what’s so fascinating about the last chapter?”
“You die, of course. That time is rapidly approaching.”
“You know nothing about me or my life, weirdo.”
He laughed. “You see, back in the good old days no one ever really left the KGB. Take me for example. I was a leading light at the academy, destined for great things, until perestroika and glasnost put me out of a job. But once a KGB man, always a KGB man, for better or worse – you make friends, you know?”
“It’s hard to imagine you just chilling out with your buddies,” Lea said. “Just you, some cold ones, a crocodile pit and a private, customized airbus.”
“This?” Vetrov waved a casual hand at the aircraft. “This is nothing, just a trinket, bought by the proceeds of my many corporations. The real wealth I have yet to attain…” He narrowed his eyes and fixed them on her. It felt like they were burning a hole in her. He began to laugh quietly, a sort of fiendish, suppressed chuckle. “You know of what I speak, no?”
“Well…”
“Don’t be coy, Miss Donovan. As I said, I was just reading all about you. Your little trips all over America, Europe and China during which you just happened to be at the right place and the right time whenever the elixir of life was mentioned, you were always there… You were there when Zaugg tried to claim it for himself, and you were there when Sheng tried to take it for himself…but…”
“Just spit it out, Vetrov,” Karlsson said.
“But now,” Vetrov continued, never taking his eyes off Lea and ignoring Karlsson, “but now… this time you are in the wrong place at the wrong time. That is why the last chapter of your story is so interesting, because it is here that you and your friends finally meet your end, and I fulfil my destiny.”
“That remains to be seen,” Karlsson said, louder this time and stepping forward.
Vetrov nodded and gave the former SEAL the most cursory of glances. Kosma stepped forward and gripped the American by the shoulder before dragging him back a few yards.
“We have been tormented by the terrible bounds of mortality since the dawn of our species. For millennia, desperate kings and emperors sought to attain eternal life by any means at their considerable disposal, but all their attempts were in vain – pathetic alchemies that usually ended in their premature deaths… the irony!”
Lea sighed. “Not this again…”
“You heard this before then?” Karlsson said.
“You could say that…”
Vetrov was undeterred. “It was one of these grand failures that led to the theft of the Map of Immortality from Poseidon’s tomb – when the Chinese Emperor Qin failed to achieve eternal life by consuming the lingzhi mushroom in a ridiculous concoction developed by his priests and doctors! After that was the mercury, and then his death – all because he couldn’t translate the map…”
“This is madness, Vetrov!” Lea shouted, the cable ties cutting into her wrists.
“Wrong again. Madness is drinking mercury because you have mistranslated a reference to the ancient Egyptians consuming white drops or liquid gold! That is mad
ness.”
Lea watched a crazed look creep into Vetrov’s eyes as his mind ran away with all the possibilities of harnessing the source of eternal life.
“Can you imagine what it would be like to live forever? The ancients knew the power we are talking about… they knew how to transport their souls to the Elysian Fields – the Sekhet-Aaru, or heavenly paradise fields where the mighty Osiris rules for all eternity.”
“And you’re going to challenge him?”
“Of course not! No one challenges the mighty Osiris, but Osiris rules in the reed fields of paradise, Miss Donovan – not here on earth. This is my kingdom…Imagine the knowledge and power I will accumulate, imagine the strength of my armies. Think about the things I will see in the far future, when you are no more than long-forgotten dust.”
“In your dreams,” Lea said angrily, but she was starting to feel nervous.
“A dream for me, but a nightmare for you – as you will discover when you are sacrificed to the gods… Did you know that if you are to reach Sekhet-Aaru, your soul must weigh exactly the same as the feather from the head-dress of the great Ma’at, the goddess of truth and beauty?”
“Fascinating,” Lea said.
“But no way does she weigh that,” Karlsson drawled. “You should have seen what she had for lunch.”
A look of dark rage crossed Vetrov’s face. “Silence! The deities will not be mocked, and that includes me!”
“Talk about an ego problem.”
Vetrov calmed down and joined his hands as if in prayer. “Do you think, Miss Donovan, that your soul weighs more or less than that feather?”
“I wouldn’t know how much anyone’s soul weighs,” Lea replied in disgust. “You can’t weigh a soul.”
“Not true… the ancient Egyptians found a way. They weighed the hearts of the recently deceased. Perhaps, I will weigh your heart against Ma’at’s ostrich feather to see if your soul can enter the reed fields?”
“This guy is totally crackers,” Karlsson whispered.
Vetrov stared hard at her. “Well, what do you think about that?”
“You’re not there yet, Vetrov.”
“We’ll see about that,” Vetrov said, and turned to Kosma. “Bring me Mazzarro. It’s time for him to share his research with us.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Cairo
The Gulfstream touched down into a bright Egyptian morning, and after a short moment in customs, Hawke and the rest of the team emerged from the airport and made their way to the taxi rank. Before checking into their hotel, Eden and the others went straight to the home of the British Ambassador, a personal friend of Sir Richard’s, where he planned on apprising the British Government formally about what was going on.
Hawke, meanwhile, had other business to attend to – the note from Snowcat. He watched his friends drive away in a government SUV while he waited for the next cab to pull up. Moments later, he was driving from the airport in the back of a 1977 Mercedes 280SE and watching the city pass in a blur through the half-cracked window.
The atmosphere here reminded him vaguely of Kabul, only Cairo was much bigger and wealthier. He hadn’t spent long in Kabul – just a couple of hours before flying out to Kamdesh in pursuit of the Taliban top brass. Kamdesh at the time was rumored to be the headquarters of the most senior members of Al-Qaeda, and Hawke’s OP confirmed this. When they called the sighting of the notorious convoy into base they were told in no uncertain terms to hold fire and wait for a unit of US Rangers to come in and claim the prize. By the time the American forces arrived, the convoy had gone.
That was a long time ago, and he still wasn’t sure if he missed it or not. Probably not, all things considered. The SBS had a habit of getting up at two a.m. and lying in frozen ditches for hours on end or diving under enemy corvettes and planting limpet mines on the hull, and Joe Hawke wasn’t getting any younger.
A hot wind blew from the south, and the driver told him it was the khamasin – the desert wind which blew from the southwest, off the Sahara. It was early this year, the driver explained, but Hawke’s mind was elsewhere. He was thinking about the day he met Lea in London, and his new career as a security guard had gone down the pan in royal fashion. After seeing what had almost happened to Alex back at the Moscow dacha, just thinking about Lea being held hostage by Vetrov was enough to drive him insane with rage, but that was an emotion he knew how to suppress. Revenge, after all was a dish best served cold.
He glanced through the windshield and saw some kind of obstacle ahead. According to the driver, a van delivering water to a corner shop had crashed into what he called a toktok – an auto-rickshaw – and knocked it over. They were used all over the poorer parts of Cairo instead of taxis because they were much cheaper, he explained. As they cruised past Hawke saw the toktok passengers climbing out with bleeding heads and an enormous argument erupted between their driver and the man behind the wheel of the van.
Hawke watched with casual interest as they passed by. It was his first trip to Cairo and he had no idea what to expect. He’d heard it was the biggest city in the Middle East, but it was only as the cab wound its way painstakingly through the heavy traffic that he really understood what that truly meant. They fought against an incessant tide of cars, buses and pedestrians ambling all over the streets as they nosed their way toward the address Snowcat had given him.
Progress was too slow for Hawke, but then most things were. He looked over the chaos around him as his driver proudly explained that the word Cairo meant the Place of Combat. He said nothing in response, but wondered just how true that would turn out to be for him – it would all depend on how things went with the Russian woman, he guessed.
They crossed the Nile and drove over Gezira Island before pulling south off of El Tahrir and arriving at the Sheraton. It was a more upmarket area than where they had just driven through – well-dressed people crossed the bridge over the river in the hot sun, talking into cell phones. A group of tourists in white shirts and sun hats gently moved out of the shade of a date palm on the bank of the Nile and stepped down into one of the many cruise boats moored on the west bank.
They pulled up outside the hotel.
“Your destination!” the driver said proudly and presented the building to his passenger with a gentle wave of his palms.
Hawke thanked him and paid. A second later he was staring up at the enormous white twenty-storey tower which loomed above the western bank of the Nile. If all of this was real, and not just a wild goose chase – or worse, a trap – then somewhere in this hotel was a Russian agent named Snowcat, and the final truth about his wife’s brutal murder in Vietnam.
He took a deep breath of the warm air and walked toward the lobby.
The lobby lounge of the Sheraton was a large expanse filled with expensive furniture and the same kind of well-dressed people he’d seen back on the bridge. A man played some light jazz on a grand piano in the corner, his face only partially visible in the low light of the lamp beside him, while the pale marble floors reflected the neon blue of the strip light running around the edge of the room.
Hawke walked toward the bar, brushing against one of the many potted palms which decorated the place as he moved forward. It was busy here, and he ordered a sparkling water. He selected a seat which offered a good view of the room but at the same time allowed easy access to an egress point. It was an old habit he couldn’t shake off, he thought, and besides, you never knew when it might come in handy.
As he waited, his mind turned to Eden and the others. He wondered what information Eden was passing to the British Ambassador and just how high all of this went in HMG. He now knew it went at least as high as the chief of the Pentagon as far as the US Government was concerned, and could hardly believe he was in the middle of it all.
Either way, they would be safely in the Four Seasons by now, hard at work on decoding the hieroglyphics on the map – they might have lost Mazzarro but at least they had his notebooks. With any luck, he could get the informa
tion he wanted here in the Sheraton and be back with them as soon as possible. After all, Lea was out there somewhere and he had to get her back. He had accepted a long time ago that getting to the bottom of his wife’s murder was not much more than chasing ghosts, but Lea was alive, and needed him. The fact they didn’t know where she was drove him crazy.
He saw a woman exit the elevators in the lobby. She wore a dark suit and her blonde hair was tied back. She had a slim, oval face, with powerful blue eyes. Could it be the woman who had left him the note outside of Domodedovo Airport in Moscow? He was unsure, especially from this distance, but he thought it could have been her. He’d only seen her for a second – she had left the note in his pocket in a heartbeat and was gone again, into the busy airport crowd.
He sipped the water and watched her as she walked from the elevators to the bar and ordered herself a drink – plain water with ice and lemon. Maybe it was her after all, but she could still be anyone, he thought. The place was heaving with business people from all over the world, all keen to exploit a basket-case government in crisis and get a piece of the sixth biggest oil reserves in Africa. For all he knew she was an OPEC executive flying in from their headquarters in Vienna.
But then he looked a little closer and his suspicions grew. He watched closely as she talked to the barman for a few moments. She held up her hands to convey to the barman something to do with the number six, and then they laughed and he pointed to the seats by the piano. Then, she started to walk toward him and by the time she was halfway to his table he knew this was no oil executive from Austria.
She sat a few seats away to his right and smiled at him before retrieving a cell phone from her bag and flicking the screen with her thumb.
Hawke cleared his throat and pushed back into his chair. “You must be Snowcat, then?”
The woman looked up at him sharply. For a second she looked startled, but then she smiled and relaxed a little. “Yes, but how did you know?”
