Above their heads an ornate ceiling fan was circulating the sticky air and a pedestal fan was whirring beside a leather wingback. In the far corner behind the desk was a strange stone object around half the size of a bath. Hawke looked at it with uncertainty before raising his eyes again. A view of the sprawling coffee fields lay beyond the windows but Hawke’s interest was much closer to home. He moved toward the desk where Wade had used paperweights and old books to pin down a large map of the jungle.
“Wade’s nowhere in sight but we got the next best thing,” he said.
Lea nodded. “What are we looking at, Joe?”
Hawke frowned and traced his finger along the surface of the map. “If this is the coffee plantation right here, and these are the ruins where Ben and other others were killed, then what the hell is this over here? The mark around this other location is several weeks old. There’s something not right about all of this. ” He pointed to an area in the deep jungle that someone had marked with a roughly drawn circle.
“Congratulations,” said the Texan twang. Hawke and Lea spun around to see Morton Wade in the door. Behind him were Silvio Mendoza and Aurora Soto. “You seem to have found my new temple.”
Scarlet Sloane was in her element. Crouched low now, and with a well-oiled Heckler & Koch MP5 complete with suppressor in her hands, she moved through the jungle like a jaguar, her face hidden behind a thick layer of camo paint. To her right, Reaper looked equally relaxed, but she knew Lexi, Alex and the BDS-CIA team weren’t at home in this environment.
The Mexican rainforest was as harsh as it got, and yet it supported thousands of species of plant and animal life. Ryan had regaled her with the details on the chopper journey. According to him, this was all part of what was named the Mesoamerican Biological Corridor because it facilitated the migration of so much flora and fauna between the two continents of North and South America. Its ecosystem was staggering in the diversity of its many biomes, or at least that’s what the boy had told her. Not only that, but it had also been home to the Olmec, Mayan and Aztec civilizations for countless centuries and all over the area was the evidence in the form of overgrown archaeological sites.
She pressed on, leading her team closer to the battle. A few hundred yards ahead, a break in the tropical undergrowth opened to reveal the flapping canvas shanty huts that made up Wade’s disgusting, fly-blown favela. It was going to be a pleasure smashing up Wade’s empire and freeing these people, not to mention avenging the deaths of the murdered ECHO team and Agent Doyle.
Scarlet Sloane could hardly wait to start, but orders were orders and hers were to wait until precisely midday before launching the assault.
She looked at her watch and sighed. 11:45.
Fifteen minutes to go and not even the chance of a cigarette as she waited.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Hawke lunged toward Wade but was stopped dead in his tracks when Mendoza raised a gun and aimed it at his face. “No, no my friend,” he whispered. “No one gets near Mr Wade. Get back.”
Lea glanced at Hawke as they followed Mendoza’s instructions. “If you’d locked the door behind you when we came in none of this would have happened.”
“Thanks for that.”
“Shut your mouths!” Wade said, turning to Mendoza. “Get some rope.”
Mendoza returned moments later with a length of what looked like a double braid yachting rope. After he finished tying their hands behind their backs Wade ordered them to turn around and sit on a cotton chaise longue on the far wall. Then he turned to Mendoza and Aurora.
“You two can go now.”
“But…”
“I said get out, damn it.”
Mendoza stared at the Texan for a moment with hate smouldering in his eyes before stepping out with Aurora and closing the door behind him.
Wade smiled and casually pulled a cigar from a box on his desk. “Poor Silvio,” he said, noting the look on Hawke’s face. “Just because he was a drug cartel lord he thinks he’s above me in the pecking order.”
“But you’re the Big Boss, right?” Lea said sarcastically.
“Silvio is nothing more than a violent thug, a common peasant who knifed his way to the top. Sadly for him the CIA has taken everything from him. Now he has nothing so he works for me.” He stared at her and narrowed his eyes to slits. “The Big Boss.”
“Are you sure about that, Wade?” Hawke said. “I saw the way he looks at you and to me it seems like he’d like to use your skull as a potpourri bowl.”
Lea nodded. “True story — I saw the look on his face too and he seems like the type… the potpourri thing I mean.”
Wade gave an evaluating glance and nodded his head sagely before walking over to his desk and reclining against it for a moment.
Hawke strained against his bonds as Wade casually lit the cigar and stepped over to the window looking over the yard. He opened it and leaned on the picket rail of his Juliet balcony, blowing a cloud of dark smoke into the furnace outside. Now, reduced to a silhouette by the bright sky beyond the windows, he lingered there for effect and took another calm drag on the cigar.
He turned and after staring at Hawke and Lea for a long time, lifted the cigar box off the table and handed it to the Englishman. “Where are my manners? Won’t you join me — these are Gurkha Black Dragons in their own hand-carved bone chest. They cost over a thousand dollars a piece.”
“Money literally up in smoke,” Lea said in disgust.
“The average Mexican would take two months to earn enough to smoke just one of these. One of my coffee pickers would need three months,” he said with a grin. “Are you sure you won’t join me?”
“Thanks,” Hawke replied, “but I’d rather eat a stir-fried dog turd than share a smoke with a man like you.”
Wade was still for a moment, measuring up his opponent. He snapped the box shut and returned it to the desk. “A delightful image… I’d show you around but it seems you’ve already taken the liberty and done it yourselves.”
Hawke said nothing. He felt the sweat building up on his neck and running down his back. Outside in the heat of the day the desolate cry of a prairie falcon filled the cobalt blue sky. A gust of hot air blew in through the balconette window and washed over the two captives. It felt like someone was pointing a hair dryer in their faces.
“Why did you kill Barton?” Lea asked.
“Barton was a trusted member of the Order, but sadly he lost his nerve at a critical juncture in the operation and decided to run to you. Obviously I couldn’t allow that so I had him neutralized with a tlacalhuazcuahuitl blowgun.”
“A what?” Lea asked.
“An Aztec weapon that fires small wooden darts coated in poison. I felt his betrayal was worthy of the death.”
“What did he mean about the god of the dead, and how you were supposed to worship only the sun?” Lea said.
“You ask a lot of questions for someone with such a pretty little head.” He took a seat in a chair beside the whirring pedestal fan and took another drag on the cigar as the fresh air cooled the sweat on his face. For a long time he was still and silent, rolling the cigar in his fingers, but then he spoke: “I thought that the mark on the map you saw was the location of a temple I’ve been seeking my whole life.”
“But instead it turned out to be a Tesco Metro?”
Wade ignored the comment. “I wanted to find the Missing Temple of Huitzilopochtli for so long that when we finally located the complex you saw on the map I looked no further. It was only weeks later I made the second discovery… the room without windows is a much greater prize that demands a deeper commitment.”