“His scar?”
“You’ll know it when you see it, believe me.”
“Okay — got it. We’re going in.”
“Wait… I wasn’t going to tell you this in the field but you need to know something. Ben Ridgeley was murdered in the jungle a few hours ago, and so were Alfie Mills and Sasha Harding.”
“Oh my God…” Lea stopped walking and froze to the spot.
“As I say, these are dangerous people. I’m sending you a still from the video Ben sent before his murder. It contains the artefact fragment Wade pulled out of the ruins. In the meantime, watch your backs.”
Lea cut the call and turned to Hawke.
“They killed them all… Ben, Alfie and Sasha — Wade murdered them all.”
“What?” Hawke was stunned.
Maria and Ryan walked over to her. “Is Rich sure?”
Lea nodded. “Yeah — murdered in the jungle…”
“Bastards,” Hawke said, clenching his jaw, but they were interrupted by the SFC chief. After a brief liaison with him it was decided the ECHO team would not be armed and would remain outside the museum, so after a brief liaison between themselves, Hawke and the others decided to go into the north entrance away from the police. Moments later they were skipping up the rain-slick steps and entering the museum.
Now, they were hurrying through the labyrinthine corridors of the British Museum, each leading to yet another exhibition room lined with cases full of the world’s most sought after antiquities. All around them members of the public were being evacuated by museum staff.
“I have a bad feeling about this,” Maria said. “Sun-worshipping cults, weapons of mass destruction, and Ben and the others being murdered…”
“I know how you feel,” Lea said.
It didn’t take long to find their targets, moving quickly along a corridor. There were three of them and they stopped briefly in front of a large poster advertising a special exhibition on the Ming Dynasty somewhere upstairs.
“They don’t look like the sort of people with an interest in Chinese ceramics,” Lea said as the men vanished from sight.
“Don’t be so judgemental,” Hawke said. “The one with the number thirteen tattooed on his face might really enjoy pottery.”
“And check out that scar,” Lea said.
Across the lead man’s face was a strange lattice of scars that criss-crossed up his neck and over his cheek and temple, covering more than half his face.
“I see what Rich meant — that one’s Silvio Mendoza for sure.”
“It’s a Lichtenberg Figure,” Ryan said.
Hawke glanced at him. “A what?”
“A type of scarring sometimes left behind on a person after being struck by lightning. This one is deeper and larger than any of the pictures I’ve ever seen before.”
The men grabbed a man in a suit who was wearing an official name badge and seconds later they had a knife at his throat.
“Looks like they’ve found another way to find the special Aztec Exhibition,” Ryan said, pointing at the terrified man. “Some kind of museum official.”
Lea gave him a look. “Whatever they want, we can’t lose them so let’s get a move on.”
They walked along the corridor, hanging back in the shadows of one of the columns just in time to see a security guard approach the men and confront them. There was a brief exchange, during which the old man showed the guard some kind of pass but when the guard saw the knife he went to make a call on his radio.
Mendoza raised a silenced pistol and shot the guard in the head. They had moved on before he had even hit the floor. A handful of remaining visitors screamed and ran from the area, and somewhere in the distance they all heard the sound of the police barking evacuation orders through megaphones. The official looked over his shoulder at the dead guard with a bleak, ashen face full of terror but they yanked him roughly forward again.
“They mean business all right,” Hawke said. “That’s the fourth person they’ve killed so far, at least.”
Now the men turned left into the North America Gallery. In here, the artefacts were drawn from the indigenous tribes of the whole continent and were startling in their range and quality — smoking pipes, tapestries, carvings, deerskin maps. On any normal day, people would meander around in here among the display cases and appreciate the large paintings on the walls but right now the place had the feel of a mausoleum.
After more twists and turns they stopped in an impressive room dedicated to an exhibition of Mesoamerican culture.
“Looks like their thing is definitely more wigwams than Chinese pots,” Hawke said. “The stuff they’re walking toward is purely Aztec. That makes sense given their activities in Mexico.”
There was another brief altercation between them when the old man haughtily protested that a curator of the museum shouldn’t be treated like this. Mendoza looked him up and down with thinly disguised contempt and slapped him hard across the face. The official fell to the floor and looked up in shock, his cheek now glowing red in the low lighting of the exhibition room.
“Get up!”
“What do you want with me?” The official sounded exasperated. The sound of the police sweeping the museum got louder. “I’ve brought you to where you wanted.”
Mendoza and the two men shared a sly glance and began to chuckle. “Let’s just say I represent a private collector.” He lit a cigarette and flicked the lit match across the room. Blew a thick cloud of pungent smoke out of his nostrils. Yawned and swivelled his eyes to the frightened old man at his side.
“But our acquisition process is very complex, gentlemen.” The silver-haired official looked at the men nervously and took an involuntary step back. “We purchase many of our exhibition items at auction, but much of what you see is held here on long-term loans. Other pieces were donated to us by benevolent people in their wills. While we loan things out to other institutions around the world, we don’t really sell items as such.” It sounded like he wanted to pick up the word sell with a pair of tweezers and drop it in a bin. “Not long ago we had to politely refuse an offer by a king who wanted one of our items. I sincerely doubt your private collector would have greater means or influence than that.”
“You still don’t understand.” Mendoza took a step toward a fragment of a large stone disc which was fastened to the wall by two heavy-duty steel brackets. He put his hands in his pockets before letting out a long, low sigh. “We’re taking this artefact now.”
“No, you cannot!”
“Silence!” As the men pulled the artefact off the wall Mendoza nodded with satisfaction. “Todo lo que necesitamos ahora es el manuscrito… el códice Yoalli Ehécatl.”
Hawke heard the Spanish words as he watched the men unhook the artefact from the wall — it was compact with a diameter of less than three feet, but the intricate carvings were exquisite. It looked like it was once a perfect stone disk, but today half of it was lost to history, with only half remaining.
He studied the artefact with interest as they manhandled it into an old hessian sack. “What are we looking at, mate?”
Ryan pushed his glasses up on the bridge of his nose and lowered his voice to a whisper. “It’s called the Lacandon Sunstone, and it’s similar to the famous Aztec calendar stone in the National Anthropology Museum in Mexico City, but much smaller — plus there’s only half of it. Lea — let me see that picture Rich sent you.”