Bodie checked for other dangers, saw none. The Hood bounced back fighting, but they had expected that. Cassidy sidestepped his lunge and tripped him, right into Bodie who took him hard with a raised knee. The blow made the man grunt, sent him to his knees, but even then he wasn’t done.
Twisting, rolling, he gained two meters of space. Cassidy pursued; Bodie a step behind. The Hood kicked out, feet like scythes. Cassidy got tangled and went down, but Bodie jumped over them both to land near the man’s head. As the redhead hit the floor, hands breaking her fall, Bodie stepped on the Hood’s neck, firmly but not with a crushing blow. He would never kill if he could knock someone out cold.
The Hood still twisted; Cassidy delivered three debilitating blows, taking the remaining starch out of him. Now Cross and the others arrived, the latter using a belt he’d taken from another guard to tie the Hood’s hands. Working together, the team dragged the Hood back into the office the Illuminati boss had exited, along with the man himself.
Before they could reach even that uncertain safety another two guards rushed them. The house was livening up, the corridors and rat-runs turning as hot and lively as Leicester Square on a Friday night. Cassidy shot one, Cross the other, and the team managed to drag their bodies out of sight.
Bodie shoved the Illuminati boss backward, right into his own desk. “Where is it?” he cried, voice and word measured carefully to see what might spill.
“You’ll never get it!” the man cried. “The journal is secure! Save your skins, save all of us and run!”
Journal?
“What have you done?” Jemma asked.
“Run!” The voice cracked with fear. “There is not time. We have to get clear.”
“Hey, hey.” Bodie clicked his fingers in the man’s face. “Look at me. What’s your name?”
“Voltar,” he said, lips dry.
“I’ll let you go,” Bodie said. “I will. As soon as you tell me what I want to know.”
“The journal, it is lost. It is hidden you can’t have it!” The man was close to raving. Jemma, Gunn and Jeff spread out past him, checking the walls for pictures in the same way that had yielded success so far. No reason to believe this would be any different.
“Then you stay,” Bodie said calmly. “Sit. Sit down.”
He knew it was the last thing the man wanted. His nervous system was set to flight; he knew what was coming.
“Please…”
“Sit.”
Cassidy took out the camera. Cross checked the door and the hallway, nodded with satisfaction.
“There’s a reason they’re not coming,” Voltar suddenly piped up as if seeing another tack. “Do you not see? They’re getting clear.”
“Give me the journal and you can join them.” Bodie waved his gun airily. “And the waypoint.”
“I don’t know any waypoint. We only have minutes.”
Gunn looked around at that, Jeff too. Bodie saw on their faces that they weren’t ready to die. Not this way. Still, he played it cool.
“I’ll count the seconds if you like.” He glared into Voltar’s ice-blue eyes.
The man’s Hood guard started to groan. Cassidy gave him a kick back into unconsciousness. Voltar saw it as the final defeat.
“There is no time,” he said.
“Give me the journal. The waypoint. I’ll make sure you get out of here.”
“They were waiting for you, you know. We knew you were coming. Then they activated the event and everything went to chaos. If they hadn’t ordered the event we’d have taken you quietly. Now, the place is pure bedlam, everyone running and thinking just for themselves, for their own lives and fortunes.” He shook his head. “Why not me?”
Bodie saw Jemma double-take at something on the wall.
“The journal then,” Voltar said. “It is in the safe behind the Da Vinci there. Don’t worry, it is a fake. Combination 905541.”
Cassidy was on it, throwing the painting aside without a glance and jabbing at the keypad. “Better be no nasty surprises in here,” she said. “Or your face is gonna meet my boot. We good?”
Voltar nodded. “There are no surprises.”
Bodie knew some marks that had planted small explosives within their safes, even one lunatic that left a grenade inside, the pin attached to the door. Cassidy unlocked the door and peered inside.
“What we looking for?”
“The black wallet at the back. The journal is inside.”
“What journal?” Bodie said finally. “What is it?”
Jemma beckoned to Gunn, showed him what she had found.
An alarm began to shriek inside the building, leaving nobody in any doubt that they should be running for the hills.
Voltar was regarding Bodie with hatred and horror. “You said you wanted the journal. What do you mean?”
Bodie, spurred on by the alarm and the look on Jemma’s face, shoved his gun up under the soft skin of Voltar’s jaw. “Tell me everything right now, fuckwit, or I swear to God I’m gonna paint the ceiling red.”
Voltar certainly had nothing to lose. “The journal belonged to that damned archaeologist that started all this. He drew the map you people have been chasing and following. The archaeologist called Roland Hunt.”
“He left a journal?” Bodie stared over at Jeff. “We never knew that.”
“The Illuminati of the early nineteen hundreds stopped Hunt in the nick of time. They confiscated his journal after he was captured, escaped and then recaptured. Later, they let him go again but knew nothing of the map.”
Bodie judged the man’s words. “Why would they let him go?”
“The Illuminati are brothers. World shapers and savers. We are not the monsters you seem to think we are.”
“If you believe that, mate, you don’t know a thing about your bosses.”
The alarm wailed. Cassidy brought the black wallet over, briefly showing him the journal inside. He kept his gun lodged under Voltar’s skin and nodded at Cross.
“We good out there?”
“Yeah, all clear.”
Turned back to Voltar. “How long do we have, and what is going to happen?”
“From the start of the alarm? Ten minutes. That leaves us only seven to my count. And the termination event has been activated.”
Bodie refrained from sighing. Cassidy tapped a foot. “Sounds bad.”
“It is. They will bring the building down.”
Jemma ran over, Gunn and Jeff at her back. “The picture on the wall there? When and how did you obtain it?”
The entire building started to shake.
CHAPTER FORTY ONE
“You tell us!” Bodie grabbed Voltar by the neck despite the trembling walls. “Now!”
“Four minutes,” Cassidy said.
“That one?” Voltar struggled to twist his neck around. “With the rolled gilt edge? It is just a charcoal drawing we found among the effects of Roland Hunt. I guess the men of that time found it appropriate, relevant and even properly fitting that it should be displayed so. He is the man that came closest and who they subdued so carefully.”
Bodie eyed him. “And he is the man that will have the last laugh. What is it, Jemma?”
“It is a drawing, I’m sure, of the ancient Olympics. The place they were originally held, with the Statue of Zeus in the background.”
Bodie struggled with it. “I don’t get it. Roland Hunt drew that? Why?”
“Don’t you see? It’s the next waypoint. The final waypoint.”
Bodie couldn’t grasp the irony, the incredible, terrible depth of the Illuminati’s final “fuck you” to the world. “You’re telling me that these wankers, in their supreme arrogance, returned the statue to its original spot in the early 1900s? Oh, you bastards. You absolute—”
“They returned it to the very place the map was found.” Cross shook his head. “So they could feel superior. Kings of the world.”