by Rob Jones
“Which means they must have already got all they wanted from him,” Hawke said.
“The latest?” Lexi said.
“Vienna has a maze of subterranean tunnels and cellars running underneath it dating from ancient Roman times. They disappeared into them from the crypt and for a while the police thought they’d lost them.”
“What is it with this bloke and tunnels?” Ryan said. “Maybe it’s a Freudian thing?”
Eden flashed him a disapproving look. “According to the Viennese police they connect up with the modern sewer network and he used them to make his way undetected to the train station where he caught a train to Munich.”
“Munich? What’s there?”
Eden sighed heavily before he spoke. “A former associate of mine named Dirk Kruger. Think of him as my nemesis… I do.”
“Dirk Kruger?” Ryan said with a smirk. “Did you just make that name up off the top of your head, Rich?”
“I did not, funnily enough. Dirk and I went to university together and were friends a long time ago – when I went into the army he went into archaeology. He’s no lover of the ancient though and in it purely for the looting. We haven’t spoken for decades. Today it looks like he’s hosting a little soirée for our Mexican friends.”
“How do we know all this?” Lexi asked.
“Mendoza was tracked to a hotel used by Dirk in Munich about two hours ago. The Hotel Sendling. Dirk has a room booked there.”
Eden raised his wrist to check the time. “So here’s the plan. We’re formally engaged by Mexico City to retrieve the idol for Wolff, but I’m sure you’ll all agree with me that Atlantis is the real prize here.”
“The idol and Atlantis are linked anyway, I just know they are,” Ryan said distractedly. “I don’t care what old Wolff says.”
“Well,” Eden said. “We need Mendoza in custody at the very least, and more than that we need that idol. We can analyse it in depth before returning it to Wolff, and we just cannot allow someone like Mendoza to have anything that could lead him to Atlantis.” He lowered his voice and fixed his eyes on them. Lea noticed he looked more anxious than usual. “I’ll warn you now that Dirk Kruger is ruthless, and worse than that he’s lucky. In fact he’s the luckiest bastard I’ve ever known.”
He cut the call just as Reaper steered the Discovery into Vaduz Airport.
“Rich did say Munich, didn’t he?” Scarlet said smiling. “It’s the Oktoberfest right now, isn’t it?”
“Sounds good to me,” Lea said. “I’ve always wanted to go to Munich.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
The South African stared at the Lichtenburg figure on Silvio Mendoza’s creased face with unconcealed fascination. A man like Dirk Kruger had never worried about the views and opinions of others and he wasn’t about to start now. The veins of scar tissue ran up from beneath the cartel boss’s collar and crawled all over the left side of his neck and face like the baby boomslang snakes Kruger had tormented as a child in Cape Town.
Kruger’s heavy South African accent filled the otherwise silent Munich hotel room as he raised a finger full of gold rings and pointed at Mendoza’s face. “How did you get that?”
“Lightning strike,” was all the Mexican said, and Aurora took a step closer to him.
Kruger nodded pensively as he twisted one of the many rings on his gnarled, tanned hand. A man in a snakeskin jacket beside him sniffed hard and jammed his hands in his pockets.
“Why are you here?” Kruger asked.
“I have a business proposal,” Mendoza said in poor English.
Another nod, but this time more suspicious. “My business is antiquities, Silvio. You don’t mind if I call you Silvio, do you?”
Mendoza and Aurora exchanged a glance. “Of course not, Dirk.”
“But you can call me Mr Kruger.”
An awkward moment of silence followed until Kruger laughed. “I’m joking, Silvio. It’s just a joke… as I say – my business is antiquities – and precious stones. In particular I hold a deep fascination for diamonds.”
“That’s what I was told.”
“So people talk about me behind my back – you hear that, Willem?”
The man in the snakeskin jacket nodded dully and cracked his knuckles as Mendoza reached into his bag. In a heartbeat Willem drew a gun and told the Mexicans to freeze.
“Take it easy, Silvio,” Kruger croaked. “My associate is under the impression you have something nasty in your bag. If you pull out a gun or knife you’ll be dead a second later. Know that.”
“It’s not a weapon,” Aurora said.
Mendoza pulled out the golden idol and watched Kruger’s eyes sparkle like black diamonds. The South African looter extraordinaire was in his element now and squeezed the arms of his chair as his eyes danced all over the idol. Carthaginian, he thought at once… Tanit… gold. He wanted to study it in greater detail in a big hurry but he knew from his poker days not to show too much interest this early in the game.
“I found it in Mexico,” Mendoza said.
Kruger leaned so far forward in his chair he nearly fell out of it. Now, this looked more than interesting. If he’d found it in Spain or North Africa that would be one thing, but Mexico was an altogether different kettle of galjoens. If an object like this was unearthed somewhere in Mexico then the possibilities could be infinite in their wonder. He beckoned for Mendoza to bring the object closer.
“Give it over.”
Mendoza and Aurora shared a glance but knew they had no choice. It had taken them almost seven hours to get from the tunnels of Leopoldstadt to Kruger’s hotel room and when they arrived the South African had been elsewhere attending to business and made them wait another hour. They were weary, hungry and entirely in the palm of Dirk Kruger’s hand. Mendoza stepped forward and handed it to Joh Van Zyl, and he in turn handed it to his older brother Willem. Neither man spent long looking at the thing, and soon it was in the boss’s hands.
Kruger weighed the idol in his hand. Yes, gold for sure. There were some out there who would spray tungsten because it had such a similar mass and feel to gold, but not this. This was art and he had never seen anything like it, not even in the finest museums. Her face was… almost toxically bewitching, and wait a minute – what the hell were those markings on her back? He wanted to say Egyptian hieroglyphics but that wasn’t quite right. And where on earth did those diamonds come from?
“Where exactly did you find it?”
“In a temple in the south.”
Kruger’s black eyes fixed on the Mexican. “You found this in a Mexican temple?”
Mendoza nodded.
“But this writing is… what is that – Punic script, maybe?”
“Huber spoke for a long time about Carthage and the Phoenician Empire.”
“That’s Franz. How is the old bastard?”
“He’s… fine, I guess,” Mendoza lied.
Kruger looked at him sharply. “What do you mean, ‘you guess’? Franz does a lot of work for me – I hope you treated him with respect.”
“We really only spoke for a few short moments,” Mendoza said quietly.
But Kruger was once again staring at the idol, and the Mexican’s words drifted away into the awkward silence. It was captivating without a doubt, and Kruger was drawn to it like a magnet. He cradled it in his arms and leaned over it as if he were holding a baby. It was enthralling him. “And what did he say in those few short moments?” he said with casual indifference.
“He said you were the man to bring this to, and that perhaps you would be able to translate the symbols. He said it could be an ancient code.”
An ancient code… it might hold water, Kruger thought. Huber was brighter than he was and he knew it, but he had zero experience in the real world and the South African knew that in this life, paper never beat rock, no matter what the game said.
He held the symbols up to the light and after a moment of quiet concentration his eyes suddenly widened. “Willem! Get me a map of the
world.”
Willem Van Zyl, Kruger’s Number One, returned a moment later with an iPad and called up Google Earth. Kruger bit his lip with anticipation as the 3D model of the planet spun around under his finger’s control. He chuckled. “One day the real world will dance to my tune.”
Mendoza and Soto shared a glance while the South Africans huddled around the iPad. Kruger was holding it, while the Van Zyl brothers were peering over his shoulder as their boss navigated the model around to Morocco. “It’s got to be here somewhere.” He watched the landscapes zoom past as he flicked around to the north of Africa.
“Why there?” Van Zyl said.
“This symbol refers to a western kingdom.”
“What’s that?”
“The Western Kingdom is a reference to Morocco, you domkop.”
Van Zyl nodded but said nothing as his boss hurriedly zoomed in on the African state. He stopped and stared at the idol again, and then his eyes lit up for the second time. “Get me my briefcase!”
Willem Van Zyl fetched the tattered case from beside the desk and handed it to his boss. After a few moments of rustling papers Kruger returned his face to the light. “Roses!”
“Huh?” Willem said.
Kruger pointed aggressively at the symbol. “This means roses, and this means valley. So the next step is obvious.”
“Where?” Van Zyl asked, the confusion spreading over his face once more.
“The Dadès Gorge,” Kruger said, sighing and shaking his head. “Are you really that thick, Willem?”
Van Zyl made no reply, knowing only too well what happened to men who gave Kruger any backchat.
“Look here – this is the place!” He pointed a heavily suntanned finger at a stretch of the Dadès River. “It’s identical.”
“You’re sure?” Aurora asked.
“Yes, I’m bloody sure! The symbols on this idol cannot lie. Whoever carved them into her was making a trail for us to follow all the way to the Dadès Gorge. It’s as clear as day.”
Van Zyl zoomed in on the area on Google Earth and sighed. “It looks like it’s just a desert wilderness.”
Kruger got up in his face. “Not any bloody more, it isn’t – not with this!” He threw the idol into the air and caught it again. “So I’m in… but I’ll need to round up a few old boys first. Can’t go after something like this without a small army, and I happen to know just where to find one.”
*
With their own jet back in Zurich, it was only thanks to Otmar Wolff’s generous offer to let them use his private helicopter that they escaped more of Reaper’s haphazard approach to negotiating busy traffic. On board the chopper, the journey to Munich was short and pleasurable. The Eurocopter EC145 was a nine-seater business helicopter with a luxury interior and gave all of them some idea about Wolff’s success in the international arms business.
“This is the life,” Lexi said as she peered out of the chopper and drank in the view of the mountains below. They stretched out along the eastern horizon and faded into a haze somewhere along the Austrian border.
The Eurocopter crossed the border at Oberstdorf and as they moved further into Bavaria the mountains reduced in size to rolling hills. By the time they passed over Schongau it was mostly flat, agricultural land peppered with crystal clear lakes and sporadic carpets of dark green forestry.
They spoke briefly of Otmar Wolff’s haircut, but more about his ten million dollars, and then his dismissal of their Atlantis ideas. Hawke was undeterred and underlined to the team that despite Wolff’s employment of them to find the idol, Atlantis was their main priority.
“But he was explicit about not wasting our time on a wild goose chase looking for Atlantis,” Lexi said.
“What he doesn’t know can’t hurt him,” Hawke said. “And he might not believe in Atlantis, but it’s pretty obvious to the rest of us that it exists and that it’s linked somehow to Mictlan and the idol. Anyway – here’s our stop.”
The Eurocopter swooped down over the center of Munich and landed in a park west of the Oktoberfest. Thousands of people were milling around the beer tents below enjoying the buzzing folk festival and Hawke looked at the peaceful men, women and children with increasing anxiety as he imagined what could so easily go wrong if Mendoza or Soto started to panic.
As soon as the chopper’s tires were on the neatly trimmed grass of Bavariapark they were climbing out and meeting the head of GSG-9, the German special police. Hawke cast a wary eye over the hubbub around the beer tents as introductions were made and with the tropical paradise of Elysium now on the other side of the world, he warmed his hands as he walked into the temporary police HQ. The others followed behind and moments later they were introduced to Polizeihauptkommissar Holtz and his immediate subordinate Polizeiobermeister Schmidt.
According to their intelligence, Silvio Mendoza and Aurora Soto were still inside the Hotel Sendling at the north end of the beer park. The man the Mexicans were meeting was confirmed as Dirk Kruger, the South African tomb raider with a penchant for diamonds who was known to be extremely unpredictable.
“No evacuation order?” Hawke asked.
Holtz cast a concerned eye in the direction of the festival and he looked like a troubled man as he addressed them. “The authorities don’t want to alarm anyone without cause.”
“Any more details?” Lexi said.
“Our intel shows they are in the Hotel Sendling. It’s a luxury hotel near the beer festival so we’re keen to make sure the problem is contained, as you can imagine.”
Hawke nodded. “I understand this Kruger is based in Salzburg, so why is here in Munich?”
“Intel is a little sketchy on this but we think he’s meeting a Qatari named Al-Hajri with a view to selling him a quantity of unknown ancient artefacts.”
“And this Qatari – you tracked him into the country?”
Holtz shook his head. “He entered the EU in Hungary and after hiring a car in Budapest he disappeared.”
They exited the HQ and walked closer to the Hotel Sendling. The four-lane Theresienhohe which ran around the western edge of the Theresienwiese fairground was now empty of traffic and they easily crossed it on foot. As the Polizei München cleared the last few cars in a detour and stopped pedestrians from wandering out of the festival and getting too close, Hawke took cover behind the GlaxoSmithKline building and monitored the hotel. Schmidt finished talking on his radio, jogged up to Holtz and saluted.
“We have the back covered,” he said calmly. “He’s still checked in and not due to leave until the morning.”
Holtz nodded. “And Berlin has just issued a no-fly zone over the city so no helicopters to whisk them away either.”
Hawke looked up at the hotel room and readied himself for a fight. “Looks like I finally caught up with you bastards.”
CHAPTER NINE
Aurora Soto was beginning to wish she had stayed in Mexico. Ever since she had arrived in Europe she’d had a very bad feeling about how things were going to turn out, and tonight the company of Dirk Kruger and his weird entourage of treasure hunters wasn’t helping the situation.
She didn’t know what that damned idol was, or what it meant. She was pretty sure Silvio had no idea either, but she didn’t like the way it seemed to captivate whoever held it in their hands… whoever glanced upon it. And she especially didn’t like the way it stared back at people, silent and inscrutable.
She walked across the room and pushed the curtains aside to watch the street for a few moments, and it was then that serendipity introduced her to the next chapter in her life. “We have company,” she said quietly.
Kruger’s head snapped up from the idol and he stared at her, his eyes widening with anger. “What did you say?”
“She said we have company,” Mendoza said, taking a protective step toward Aurora.
The South African leaped from his chair, the idol still gripped in his hands like a weapon. “And who might that be?”
“Looks like our friends from the
jungle,” Aurora said. She and Mendoza exchanged a worried glance.
“What friends?” Kruger said as he padded to the window and looked at the force gathering in the street.
“They’re called the ECHO team,” Mendoza said, recalling the research he’d done on the flight to Austria. “They’re some kind of independent group loosely connected to the British Government but that’s all I could find out about them. The main man’s called Hawke and they had something to do with stopping the kidnap of President Grant.”
“Jesus,” Van Zyl said.
Mendoza continued. “No one knows anything about them – not where they’re based, or what their agenda is. All we know is they’re dangerous – they destroyed Morton Wade’s operation in a matter of hours.”
Kruger turned to face Mendoza his face suddenly all business. “These pricks out here are the people who brought Wade down?”
Mendoza nodded. “With some help from American and Mexican forces, and by the looks of things they’re with some heavily armed police as well.”
“And you led them right to me, you fucking idiot?”
“I…, well, I…”
Aurora wanted to run a knife across Kruger’s throat just to teach him not to speak to Silvio Mendoza like this, but now wasn’t the time. Perhaps that time would come later… perhaps not. She had learned to roll with the punches, but she had a hunch Dirk Kruger might not make it to the final curtain.
She stepped out of her daydream about cutting his throat only to see he was still ranting about ECHO. “You have any idea how many people want to sink their claws into me? You have any idea how many enemies I have made? There are hundreds of men who want Dirk Kruger’s head over their fireplaces and you bring this lot right into my life.”
