“If you’re referring to the boring stuff, then yes… I think we could have a future. He’s nowhere near as annoying as you.”
“I’m so pleased for you,” he said. “Still thinking about quitting?”
“If I had half a chance to think about it, I might,” she said, lighting a cigarette. She blew the smoke out. Hawke coughed and opened the window an inch.
“You don’t mind?” she said, already on her third drag.
“No, just thinking about the drag on the chopper.”
“Problem is,” she said, totally ignoring the point, “I never seem to get that chance. We finish a mission, go back to the island, have a shower and then there’s another sodding crisis.”
“I’m starting to understand that little feature of ECHO life. It’s like being trapped in a revolving door.”
“Exactly, darling. Poor Jack doesn’t understand.” She turned to face Hawke again. “He asked me to quit ECHO, did you know that?”
“Really?”
“Yeah. Says we’re too old to be fighting bad guys and that we should put our heads together and find somewhere nice to retire.”
“And what did you say?”
She flicked the half-smoked cigarette out the window. “I said he’s a cheeky shit and I’m not that old.”
“About the retirement thing.”
“Ah — well… I didn’t know what to say.”
With the bright Peruvian sunshine beaming into the cockpit, she folded her arms, yawned and closed her eyes. “Wake me when we get there.”
“You got it.”
“That’s presuming Ryan knows where the sodding place is, of course.”
Yes, Hawke thought… that’s presuming Ryan knows where the sodding place is.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Tiger kept his songbirds in little bamboo cages. The cages hung from a Chinese plum tree in the corner of his garden. Some preferred teak cages, but this was too showy for Tiger. Tiger liked to keep things simple. A bird does not sing because it has an answer, he thought, but because it has a song.
He cocked his head almost robotically as he cooed at a Sichuan Bush Warbler and tapped his forefinger on the bamboo bars. He sighed and sat back on his bench, surveying his garden. It was a modest affair in Beijing’s Shunyi District. Here in the northeast quarters he was happy enough in his little villa and the pollution was much lower than further in the city. That was important to him, and especially important to his songbirds.
Over his wall he heard some people arguing about prices in the flower market. This was all normal enough and rarely disrupted his contemplation as he sat in his beloved Chinese garden. It was here where he did his most precious thinking, among the bamboo, plums and pear trees. Last year he had planted a pomegranate tree but it had failed to shoot. Another crease to iron out, but now he had a job to do.
Zhang Xiaoli was a problem, but perhaps Zhou Yang was thinking more of his reputation than any security risks. He had worked with Xiaoli several times and he found it hard to imagine her spilling Chinese state secrets to Westerners. Half of him thought it was more likely she had infiltrated them with a view to gathering intel and then returning to the fold. Yes, that sounded like something she might do. She had the devil in her somewhere, he knew that. Spying on new friends and flying back to the nest like a good little songbird would not be beneath the Dragonfly.
But orders were orders, and Zhou had been very clear. She was to be hunted down and killed, and all of her new friends must share the same fate. He sighed and closed his eyes. Rat would be easy to recruit. He was called Rat for a reason and wouldn’t turn down the chance to kill. Pig would also not represent too many problems. Thanks to some pretty chunky mahjong gambling debts he would be grateful for the extra cash. Then there was Monkey. He wondered not only if he could find Monkey, but if it was a good idea in the first place. Monkey was highly unpredictable and difficult to manage. But he was also the very best at what he did.
“Daddy!”
He turned to see the little girl. She was growing so fast, now just a couple of months past her fifth birthday.
“Darling, how are you?”
“Fine,” she said.
“And how was school today?”
“Boring.”
Behind her in the kitchen he saw his wife. She was unpacking a grocery bag of vegetables but stopped to smile at him. She didn’t know what he did. She thought he worked in the payroll department at the Ministry. It was better that way.
His daughter skipped back up the garden path and disappeared inside the house.
He nodded his head at some long-vanished thought and returned his attention to the songbirds as he started to plan Agent Dragonfly’s assassination.
Orders were orders.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Hiding deep in the jungles of Madre de Dios, seventy-five miles northeast of Machu Picchu, the vague outline of a ruined city slowly made itself visible to the team as their choppers began to descend. A casual observer might have seen nothing but a jumble of odd shapes and dismissed it as natural, like the Pyramids of Paratoari, but Hawke knew different. Among the tangled vines, orchids and rubber trees far below was the Lost City of the Incas.
“Told you I remembered,” Ryan said.
“Take a look at it,” Hawke said through the comms. “It’s built around an extinct volcano.”
“So it is,” said Lexi. “At least we hope it’s extinct.” She stared down at the amazing sight of Paititi and almost couldn’t believe her own eyes as she looked at the ruins and roads of the Lost City. Only in a jungle nearly twice the size of India could such a place go undiscovered for so long.
“Do volcanoes still erupt around here?” Scarlet asked.
They heard Ryan laugh over the comms. “This is Peru. Yes.”
As Hawke piloted the helicopter slowly toward what he silently hoped would be their final destination, his mind was on more than the volcano. Somewhere down there, Dirk Kruger and his thugs were hard at work on their mission to loot the famous lost treasure, and the ECHO team was badly depleted and in the middle of nowhere with zero support should things go wrong. Factoring in Ziad Saqqal and his circus of biowarfare nutcases only amped things up to an even more insane degree.
He had lost too many good friends in this struggle, and the thought of failing any more members of the team weighed heavily on his mind. He flared the Bell’s nose and slowed to a hover as he searched for somewhere to land among the rainforest-covered ruins.
He lowered the collective, reducing power to the engine and brought the chopper slowly down into the jungle landscape, landing in a small clearing just a few hundred meters from the eastern slopes of the volcano. In this terrifyingly vast landscape he had given up trying to see any sign of Saqqal or Kruger but suddenly a bright flash in the trees to his north startled him. He looked again and saw the sun reflecting off the South African’s helicopter. Two rebels were standing around it and smoking, presumably under orders to stay and guard the chopper.
“You owe me a hundred sols, Cairo,” he said smugly through the comms.
She looked at him and furrowed her brow. “How so?”
With one hand on the cyclic and the other on the collective, Hawke jutted his chin in the direction where he had seen the flash. “Over there, to the north — Kruger’s parked his air-crane up.”
She peered through her mirrored aviator shades before lifting them up for a second look. “Oh, bugger it. I was certain the stupid twat was going to get lost.”
“Aren’t you forgetting something” Hawke said.
“What?”