“A genius solution,” Devlin said.
Lea reached inside the shattered window and flicked open the lock. “And so stealthy, too.”
Inside now, they began the search. Mikey and Kyle took downstairs while Lea and Devlin searched the bedrooms upstairs. Luckily, her mother had removed most of their belongings over the years, so the ghost-count was lower than Lea had feared, but there were still occasional items that transported her back in time — the rocking chair by the window, the smell of some leftover linen in the airing cupboard… the pencil marks on the back of the door where her father had measured her height when she was growing up.
She felt a flood of relief that whoever had killed McNamara hadn’t known about the cottage or they would have destroyed this place as well. She thanked God her mother had bought it in her maiden name before the marriage.
After clambering down from the loft hatch, Devlin announced the whole place had been searched from top to bottom, and when Mikey and Kyle emerged through the bedroom door, they concurred.
“Wait a minute!” Lea said. “There’s somewhere we haven’t tried yet — when I was a kid, me and my brothers used to play hide and seek here. I used to hide in a secret place I thought only I knew about. They never found me when I hid there, but Dad must have known about it.”
“Where is it?”
“Downstairs in the kitchen — there’s a hatch in the larder floor leading to a small cellar where they used to store meat in the old days when it got too hot.”
They hurried downstairs and Lea opened the hatch with bated breath… this was the moment that her entire journey hinged on. If it wasn’t in here then it was lost forever.
“Is it there, Lea?” Devlin asked, trying to look over her shoulder.
Lea smiled, then her eyes filled with tears. “I think so, Danny… I hope so.”
She picked it up and blew a heavy layer of dust from the box-file. “Oh my God… this must be it.”
She stared at the file for what seemed like forever, her eyes wide with anxiety. She pulled it from the small compartment and walked it out into the candle light of the main kitchen.
Devlin moved closer. “What’s the problem?”
“I… I’m scared of what I might find in here, that’s all.”
“Do you want Uncle Mikey to look first?”
She looked up, startled by O’Sullivan’s booming voice so close. He too was standing almost beside her, and Kyle a foot to his right. It seemed everyone was more than a little curious about the contents of Dr Harry Donovan’s enigmatic box-file.
Lea tried to smile, but it wouldn’t come. “No… this is something I have to do. Maybe this is where my whole life has been pointing.”
Lea walked to the table and took another moment simply to stare at the old, dusty box-file before her. She knew the last person to have touched it would have been her father, and that alone made her sad before she even opened it to see what he had been researching — what he had looked into that had cost him his life — what had caused some bastard to take her father away from her when she was so young.
“Jeez, would ya just open the thing already!”
“Can it, Mikey,” Devlin said, his voice suddenly all business. “She’ll open it when she’s ready. In the meantime, now we’ve found the fucking thing maybe you and Lurch over there could go outside and keep an eye out. It’s not like we had an easy time getting here. Whoever tried to take us out back in Dublin might not give up as easily as you two jokers.”
Mikey took the hint and he and Kyle picked up the shotguns and went outside the cottage where they stood either side of the door.
Devlin put a hand on her shoulder. “In your own time, Lea. They can wait. We can all wait.”
“I hope that’s a fatherly hand, Danny, and nothing else.”
He smiled, and removed the hand. “It’s a reassuring hand, Lea. That’s all.”
Lea managed an insincere smile and opened the box-file.
Then she gasped so loudly she almost made Kyle Byrne jump out of his skin.
Mikey looked at Kyle and suppressed a chuckle. He leaned his head into the kitchen and lowered his voice. “What the hell is it, woman?”
Lea was silent for a few moments. When she spoke, her voice was trembling.
“It’s worse than I could have imagined.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Vincent Reno watched with admiration as Kim Taylor fought her way closer to the luxury pool house. It was a hard slog through half a dozen men paid handsomely by Kiefel to defend the drone.
In response, the French mercenary fired a non-stop barrage of rounds into the defensive positions held by Kiefel’s men and kept them pinned down, but he was also being kept busy by Angelika Schwartz and her impressive determination to blow his head off.
Vincent saw a chance to hit the drone and he started to fire. Pauling saw what was happening and ran for cover, leaving the canister behind. A second later Vincent hit the drone and it exploded all over the rear yard, sending a fireball into the night sky.
Then, using the cover of a row of California palms, he sprinted in the shadows until he was across the south lawn and finally joined Kim at the pool house. It didn’t take too long for a very dangerous and angry Angelika Schwartz to snatch the canister and join Pauling. A second later she had picked off another two of Kim’s men with startling ease and accuracy before ordering Pauling in broken English to retreat to the back room of the pool house.
She shoved the Australian through the door and walked backwards, firing lethal shots as she went, pausing only to tear some cloth off her shirt and stuff it into Pauling’s vodka bottle. She lit the end of the cloth with the burning cigarette in her mouth and tossed the bottle at the entrance of the pool house. It struck the arched doorway and smashed, spreading vodka all over the walls and pool chairs. Instantly the burning cloth ignited the spirit and moments later the front of the pool house was ablaze.
“Move forward!” Kim shouted, unperturbed by the flames. “They’re on the back foot.”
Vincent was the first inside, covering his face from the heat of the fire with the back of his arm. He moved forward, gun raised while Kim and her remaining men were just a pace behind. Somewhere in here, he thought, Klaus Kiefel’s West Coast operation was about to come to an abrupt end.
They reached the changing room — a large, expansive affair of polished teak floorboards and fluffy white towels hanging over the backs of wooden pool chairs. Vincent caught a fast movement in the corner of his eye and turned his head to see Angelika blasting the lock out of an external door at the rear of the pool house. She fired two or three shots at them blindly before the two of them exited the pool house and slammed the door.
Then they heard another isolated shot.
Vincent and Kim were there a second later, and while the Frenchman tried to open the door, the American agent used her palm mic to order more of her men to the rear of the building to cut them off.
“Is anyone reading this?”
“What’s the problem?” Vincent asked.
“No response. I think all my men are down. What’s the problem with you?”
“Damned door is stuck,” the Frenchman said. He tried to shoulder it open but it didn’t move an inch.
“They must have pushed something up against it,” Kim said.
Vincent frowned. “Step aside.”
When Kim was safely out of the way the former Foreign Legion man fired a long burst of bullets into the top panel of the door until it was reduced to matchwood. He then smashed out what was left with the butt of the gun and peered through the hole to see the problem.