Ryan shrugged. “He’s one of Bulgaria’s top mafia bosses and very wealthy with it, although what he wants with the lyre is another question.”
“A question to which we will soon know the answer,” Hawke said. “In the meantime, Ryan, keep researching Kashala and his Blood Crew. We need to know everything we can about them.”
Lexi calmly sipped her water. “Where does this mafia boss spend his time?”
A broad smile appeared on Ryan’s face. “As it happens, he has a lovely place tucked away on the slopes of Vitosha Mountain, just outside Sofia.”
“A lovely place?” Lea asked.
“Well, it’s more of a castle really.”
Lexi set down her water and stretched her arms. “And there was me struggling to find a place for our next vacation.”
Lea studied the world below as the Airbus A320 crossed the border and carried them over the olive groves and fig orchards of southern Bulgaria. A sage-green and straw-colored landscape just like so many other countries in this part of the world stretched out beneath them and seemed to go on forever.
She turned away from the window and stretched out as much as she could in her cramped seat. Orlando Sooke’s ten thousand dollars had been more than enough to book the flight and there were no problems with the fake passports, but everyone on the team acutely felt the loss of the private jet.
Especially one.
“No mini-bar,” Scarlet whined.
Lea rolled her eyes. “We get it, Cairo.”
“And there are other people in this aircraft,” she said with horror. “I mean actual members of the public.”
“Worse things happen at sea,” Ryan said.
“And the seats are horrible.”
“We’re all in the same boat.” Hawke folded his tray up into the seat in front, his long legs crushed into the pitifully mean seat pitch.
“If only it was a boat,” she said. “There’s even a queue for the toilet. This is intolerable.”
Ryan craned his head over the seat behind. “This is your idea of hell, isn’t it, Cairo?”
“It is since your face appeared.” She lifted her arm, grabbed his face and pushed him back into his own seat. “Boy.”
Zeke was easier to please and hadn’t complained once since climbing on board back in Athens. “I think it’s just great. Shoulda seen the time me and my buddies travelled around Mexico. Hell, some of those planes were like crates with wings. Once I shared my ride with some cages of Plymouth Rocks… oh lord, thank God my window was broken.”
Scarlet stared at him, open-mouthed and unsure what to say. “What the hell…”
The Texan turned to her with a bright, toothy grin. “Chickens, sweetheart.”
“It’s like you read my mind!” she said sarcastically.
“Hey.” Zeke was unfazed. “Nothing wrong with some good ole fashioned bantam banter.”
She rolled her eyes, but Lexi laughed. “The great Cairo Sloane outclassed at last.”
“Hardly, darling. Just ask Jackie here.”
But Camacho wasn’t listening. Like Kamala Banks one row ahead of him, he had found Kim Taylor’s murder back in Washington DC hard to handle. He had known her a long time and watching her death at the hands of the sniper had hit him harder than he’d expected.
“Jack?”
He turned and saw Scarlet was waiting for an answer. “Sorry, what?”
“Never mind, darling.”
Lea checked her watch. “We’re almost in Sofia, so this is it guys. We need the cash so we can’t screw up. The mission is simple. We have to find this Dimitrov guy and get the lyre back for Francken, and we have to do it without that son of a bitch sniper taking another one of us out.”
A grim silence followed her words. It sounded simple enough, and the retrieval of the lyre was something they should be able to execute without too much pain, but the sniper was starting to get to them more than any of them cared to admit out loud. With three of their team murdered by him and with no way to tell when the next strike would come or who could be the next victim, they all felt much more on edge than usual.
Worse, their impressive network of contacts stretching from Eden and MI5 in Europe and Alex and her father and the CIA in the US was now gone — ripped away from them when they needed it most. This meant their chances of tracking down the killer were almost zero until he struck again and even then they were painfully dependent on him screwing up and leaving some kind of clue to his identity behind him.
Right now, that was the only way they could get on his trail and track him down, but that would mean another of them losing their life which was just too high a price.
“As the great man said, we just have to keep on buggering on,” Hawke said.
Ryan feigned confusion. “I never said that.”
“Tosser.” Lea hid her smile and turned to Hawke. Lowering her voice, she said, “Tell me about Matt Jagger.”
“Captain Matt Jagger,” Hawke said quietly. “Former Grenadier Guards officer and the man behind Redarrow International.”
Kamala fiddled with her gold necklace. “What’s that?”
“It’s a private military company based just outside of London. They are — or were — in the business of providing top-notch military training to anyone with a big enough wallet, and that’s not all they do. They’re also heavily involved with weapons procurement and they have an extensive network of intel gathering specialists, too.”
“They sound dangerous.”
“They are,” he said flatly. “If there’s an armed conflict in this world, Jagger had a dog in the fight. His mercs have been everywhere — Sierra Leone, Equatorial Guinea, Papua New Guinea, Yemen, Syria — you name it.”
“And yet in less than ten minutes, he and his men were wiped out by King Kashala’s team,” Scarlet said grimly.
Hawke read the look on her face and felt the same way. “Matt was a very experienced man with many years of solid professional soldiering behind him. In the British Army he served in Northern Ireland, Serbia, Afghanistan and Iraq and then he went even further afield as the head of Redarrow. Not many could have bettered him the way this team of mercs did on the Electra.”
“Seems to me,” Kamala said, “that if we screw with this Kashala guy, we’re playing with fire.”
As the landing gear extended beneath the aircraft and they banked to line up with the runway at Sofia Airport, Hawke checked his watch. “I have to disagree.”
“How so?” she asked.
“The second Guy Francken hired ECHO to get the lyre back, it was Dimitrov and Kashala who were playing with fire. Buckle up everyone, it’s going to be a hell of a ride.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Alex Reeve’s head pounded like a carnival drum. When she opened her eyes, the pain of the light hitting them was so harsh she had to fight back the basic instinct to scream. She blinked several times and brought her hand up to her eyes to shield them. At least, she thought a few seconds later, the hood was no longer on her head and her hands were no longer tied.
Her eyesight gradually returned to her. Unfocussed and blurry at first but slowly coming back and building a picture of her world. She knew she had been drugged more than once and she no longer had any idea of what time it was or how long ago she had been arrested by Faulkner’s men.
She looked around. She was in what was clearly a prison cell and she was on her own. The room was small and sparse. Plain cinder block walls on all four sides, painted a dull olive green color that she recognized immediately. It was the one used by the US Marine Corp from basic equipment all the way up to the president’s personal helicopter, Marine One.