“How do we know all this?” Lexi asked.
“Mendoza was tracked to a hotel used by Dirk in Munich about two hours ago. The Hotel Sendling. Dirk has a room booked there.”
Eden raised his wrist to check the time. “So here’s the plan. We’re formally engaged by Mexico City to retrieve the idol for Wolff, but I’m sure you’ll all agree with me that Atlantis is the real prize here.”
“The idol and Atlantis are linked anyway, I just know they are,” Ryan said distractedly. “I don’t care what old Wolff says.”
“Well,” Eden said. “We need Mendoza in custody at the very least, and more than that we need that idol. We can analyse it in depth before returning it to Wolff, and we just cannot allow someone like Mendoza to have anything that could lead him to Atlantis.” He lowered his voice and fixed his eyes on them. Lea noticed he looked more anxious than usual. “I’ll warn you now that Dirk Kruger is ruthless, and worse than that he’s lucky. In fact he’s the luckiest bastard I’ve ever known.”
He cut the call just as Reaper steered the Discovery into Vaduz Airport.
“Rich did say Munich, didn’t he?” Scarlet said smiling. “It’s the Oktoberfest right now, isn’t it?”
“Sounds good to me,” Lea said. “I’ve always wanted to go to Munich.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
The South African stared at the Lichtenburg figure on Silvio Mendoza’s creased face with unconcealed fascination. A man like Dirk Kruger had never worried about the views and opinions of others and he wasn’t about to start now. The veins of scar tissue ran up from beneath the cartel boss’s collar and crawled all over the left side of his neck and face like the baby boomslang snakes Kruger had tormented as a child in Cape Town.
Kruger’s heavy South African accent filled the otherwise silent Munich hotel room as he raised a finger full of gold rings and pointed at Mendoza’s face. “How did you get that?”
“Lightning strike,” was all the Mexican said, and Aurora took a step closer to him.
Kruger nodded pensively as he twisted one of the many rings on his gnarled, tanned hand. A man in a snakeskin jacket beside him sniffed hard and jammed his hands in his pockets.
“Why are you here?” Kruger asked.
“I have a business proposal,” Mendoza said in poor English.
Another nod, but this time more suspicious. “My business is antiquities, Silvio. You don’t mind if I call you Silvio, do you?”
Mendoza and Aurora exchanged a glance. “Of course not, Dirk.”
“But you can call me Mr Kruger.”
An awkward moment of silence followed until Kruger laughed. “I’m joking, Silvio. It’s just a joke… as I say — my business is antiquities — and precious stones. In particular I hold a deep fascination for diamonds.”
“That’s what I was told.”
“So people talk about me behind my back — you hear that, Willem?”
The man in the snakeskin jacket nodded dully and cracked his knuckles as Mendoza reached into his bag. In a heartbeat Willem drew a gun and told the Mexicans to freeze.
“Take it easy, Silvio,” Kruger croaked. “My associate is under the impression you have something nasty in your bag. If you pull out a gun or knife you’ll be dead a second later. Know that.”
“It’s not a weapon,” Aurora said.
Mendoza pulled out the golden idol and watched Kruger’s eyes sparkle like black diamonds. The South African looter extraordinaire was in his element now and squeezed the arms of his chair as his eyes danced all over the idol. Carthaginian, he thought at once… Tanit… gold. He wanted to study it in greater detail in a big hurry but he knew from his poker days not to show too much interest this early in the game.
“I found it in Mexico,” Mendoza said.
Kruger leaned so far forward in his chair he nearly fell out of it. Now, this looked more than interesting. If he’d found it in Spain or North Africa that would be one thing, but Mexico was an altogether different kettle of galjoens. If an object like this was unearthed somewhere in Mexico then the possibilities could be infinite in their wonder. He beckoned for Mendoza to bring the object closer.
“Give it over.”
Mendoza and Aurora shared a glance but knew they had no choice. It had taken them almost seven hours to get from the tunnels of Leopoldstadt to Kruger’s hotel room and when they arrived the South African had been elsewhere attending to business and made them wait another hour. They were weary, hungry and entirely in the palm of Dirk Kruger’s hand. Mendoza stepped forward and handed it to Joh Van Zyl, and he in turn handed it to his older brother Willem. Neither man spent long looking at the thing, and soon it was in the boss’s hands.
Kruger weighed the idol in his hand. Yes, gold for sure. There were some out there who would spray tungsten because it had such a similar mass and feel to gold, but not this. This was art and he had never seen anything like it, not even in the finest museums. Her face was… almost toxically bewitching, and wait a minute — what the hell were those markings on her back? He wanted to say Egyptian hieroglyphics but that wasn’t quite right. And where on earth did those diamonds come from?
“Where exactly did you find it?”
“In a temple in the south.”
Kruger’s black eyes fixed on the Mexican. “You found this in a Mexican temple?”
Mendoza nodded.
“But this writing is… what is that — Punic script, maybe?”
“Huber spoke for a long time about Carthage and the Phoenician Empire.”
“That’s Franz. How is the old bastard?”
“He’s… fine, I guess,” Mendoza lied.
Kruger looked at him sharply. “What do you mean, ‘you guess’? Franz does a lot of work for me — I hope you treated him with respect.”
“We really only spoke for a few short moments,” Mendoza said quietly.
But Kruger was once again staring at the idol, and the Mexican’s words drifted away into the awkward silence. It was captivating without a doubt, and Kruger was drawn to it like a magnet. He cradled it in his arms and leaned over it as if he were holding a baby. It was enthralling him. “And what did he say in those few short moments?” he said with casual indifference.
“He said you were the man to bring this to, and that perhaps you would be able to translate the symbols. He said it could be an ancient code.”
An ancient code… it might hold water, Kruger thought. Huber was brighter than he was and he knew it, but he had zero experience in the real world and the South African knew that in this life, paper never beat rock, no matter what the game said.
He held the symbols up to the light and after a moment of quiet concentration his eyes suddenly widened. “Willem! Get me a map of the world.”
Willem Van Zyl, Kruger’s Number One, returned a moment later with an iPad and called up Google Earth. Kruger bit his lip with anticipation as the 3D model of the planet spun around under his finger’s control. He chuckled. “One day the real world will dance to my tune.”
Mendoza and Soto shared a glance while the South Africans huddled around the iPad. Kruger was holding it, while the Van Zyl brothers were peering over his shoulder as their boss navigated the model around to Morocco. “It’s got to be here somewhere.” He watched the landscapes zoom past as he flicked around to the north of Africa.
“Why there?” Van Zyl said.
“This symbol refers to a western kingdom.”
“What’s that?”
“The Western Kingdom is a reference to Morocco, you domkop.”