Then the woman paused and removed her mask in a gesture of absolute disdain. “Upsalla!” She cried again at the Germans. “Be there!”
Drake would have staggered if he hadn’t already been on his knees. He thought he’d been hit by a bullet, such was the shock. He recognised this so-called Canadian. He knew her well. It was Alicia Myles, a Londoner, who used to be his equal in the SRT.
A secret company within the SAS.
Wells’ earlier comment had unearthed old memories that should stay buried deeper than a politician’s expenses history. You were more than the SAS. Why would you want to forget that?
Because of what we did.
Alicia Myles was one of the best soldiers he’d ever seen. Women had to be better than men in the Special Forces to get even half as far. And Alicia had gone right to the top.
What was she doing mixed up in all this, and sounding like the fanatic he knew she certainly was not? Only one thing motivated Alicia — money.
Could that be why she was working for the Canadians?
Drake started crawling towards the room’s real exit. “So, far from getting us taken off the kill list and unmasking our enemies,” he panted, “we’ve now got more enemies, and achieved nothing except to confuse ourselves even further.”
Kennedy, crawling after him, added, “My life… in a Goddamn nutshell.”
SEVEN
Kennedy’s hotel suite was somewhat nicer than the one Drake and Ben had spent a couple of hours in.
“Thought all you cops were broke,” Drake grumbled, as he checked ingress and egress points.
“We are. But when your vacation time is pretty much non-existent for ten years, then I guess your checking account starts stacking up.”
“That a laptop?” Ben had reached it before the rhetorical question was answered. They had found him lurking near the glass pyramid after meandering their way out of the museum, acting like two more frightened tourists, too scared to remember any details.
“Why aren’t we alerting the French to what we know?” Kennedy asked as Ben opened up the laptop.
“Because they’re French,” Drake said with a laugh, then sobered when no one joined in. He perched on the edge of Kennedy’s bed, watching his friend work. “Sorry. The French won’t know anything. Going through this with them now will slow us down. And I think time is the issue. It’s the Swedes we should contact.”
“Know anyone in the Swedish Secret Service?” Kennedy raised an eyebrow at him.
“No. I have a call in to my old Commander though.”
“When did you quit the SAS?”
“You never quit the SAS.” When Ben looked up he added: “Figuratively.”
“Three heads should be better than two.” Ben stared at Kennedy for a second. “That’s if you’re still in?”
A slight nod. Kennedy’s hair fell over her eyes, and she spent a minute tying it back. “I get that there are nine Pieces of Odin, so my first question is why? Second question is — what are they?”
“We were just figuring that out back at the cafe.” Ben was tapping furiously at the keyboard. “There’s a legend, which Mr Crusty here disproves of, that alleges there’s an actual Tomb of the Gods — literally, a place where all the ancient Gods are buried. And it’s not just a dusty old legend either; a number of academics have debated it, and many papers have been published over the years. Problem is,” said Ben rubbing his eyes, “it’s tough reading. Academics aren’t renowned for their prosaic language.”
“Prosaic?” Kennedy echoed with a smile. “You go to college?”
“He’s the lead singer in a band,” Drake shot back, deadpan.
Kennedy raised an eyebrow. “So you have a Tomb of the Gods that never existed. Okay. So what?”
“If it’s ever desecrated the world will drown in fire… etc… etc.”
“I see. And the Nine Pieces?”
“Well, once assembled at Ragnarok, they point the way to the tomb.”
“Where’s Ragnarok?”
Drake kicked at the carpet. “Another red-herring. It’s not a place. It’s actually a series of events, a great battle, the world cleansed by a flood of fire. Natural disasters. Pretty much — Armageddon.”
Kennedy frowned. “So even the hard-assed Vikings feared the apocalypse.”
Looking down, Drake noticed on the floor a recent but very creased copy of USA Today. It had been folded around the headline — ‘FREED SERIAL KILLER CLAIMS TWO MORE.’
Nasty, but not unusual for the front page of a newspaper. The thing that made him snatch a further look, as if his eyes had been burned, was the picture of Kennedy, in her cop’s uniform, within the body of the text. And the smaller headline beside her photo — Cop Can’t Take It — Goes AWOL.
He linked the headlines to the almost empty bottle of vodka on the dresser, the painkillers on the bedside table, the absence of luggage and tourist maps and souvenirs and an itinerary.
Shit.
Kennedy was saying: “So these Germans and Canadians want to find this non-existent tomb for the glory maybe? For the riches it might bring? And to do this they have to assemble Odin’s Nine Pieces in a place that’s not a place. That right?”
Ben pulled a face. “Well, a song’s not a song ‘til it’s been pressed into vinyl’ — as my dad used to say. In English — we still have a lot of work to do.”
“It’s a stretch.”
“This is more like it.” Ben turned the laptop screen around. “Odin’s Nine Pieces are — Eyes, Wolves, Valkyries, Horse, Shield and Spear.”
Drake counted. “That’s only six, kiddo.”
“Two Eyes. Two Wolves. Two Valkyries. Duh.”
“Which one’s in Upsalla?” Drake winked at Kennedy.
Ben scrolled for a while, then said: “It says here that a Spear was thrust through Odin’s side while he hung fasting on the World Tree, revealing all his many secrets to his Volva — his Seeress. Listen to another quote — ‘near the Temple at Upsalla is a very large tree with widespread branches that are always green both in winter and summer. What kind of tree it is nobody knows, for no others like it have ever been found.’ That’s hundreds of years old. The World Tree is — or was — in Upsalla and is central to Norse mythology. It says nine worlds exist around the World Tree. Yada… yada. Oh, another reference — ‘the sacred tree at Upsalla. Odin used to sojourn there a lot, near an immense ash called Ygdrassil, considered holy by the locals. It’s gone now though.’
He read on: ‘Scandinavian chroniclers have long held Gamla Upsalla to be one of the oldest and most important locations in Nordic history.’
“And this is all out there,” Kennedy said. “Where anyone could find it.”
“Well,” Ben said, “it all needs linking together. Don’t underestimate my powers, Miss, I’m good at what I do.”
Drake nodded in appreciation. “He is, believe me. He’s helped me blag my way through a photographic career for the last six months.”
“You have to piece together lots of different poems and historical Sagas. A Saga is a Viking poem of high adventure. There’s also something called the Poetic Edda, written by descendants of people who knew people, who knew the chroniclers of that time. There’s a lot of information.”
“And we know nothing about the Germans. Not to mention the Canadians. Or why Alicia Myles is—” Drake’s mobile started to ring. “Sorry… yes?”