Van Zyl nodded but said nothing as his boss hurriedly zoomed in on the African state. He stopped and stared at the idol again, and then his eyes lit up for the second time. “Get me my briefcase!”
Willem Van Zyl fetched the tattered case from beside the desk and handed it to his boss. After a few moments of rustling papers Kruger returned his face to the light. “Roses!”
“Huh?” Willem said.
Kruger pointed aggressively at the symbol. “This means roses, and this means valley. So the next step is obvious.”
“Where?” Van Zyl asked, the confusion spreading over his face once more.
“The Dadès Gorge,” Kruger said, sighing and shaking his head. “Are you really that thick, Willem?”
Van Zyl made no reply, knowing only too well what happened to men who gave Kruger any backchat.
“Look here — this is the place!” He pointed a heavily suntanned finger at a stretch of the Dadès River. “It’s identical.”
“You’re sure?” Aurora asked.
“Yes, I’m bloody sure! The symbols on this idol cannot lie. Whoever carved them into her was making a trail for us to follow all the way to the Dadès Gorge. It’s as clear as day.”
Van Zyl zoomed in on the area on Google Earth and sighed. “It looks like it’s just a desert wilderness.”
Kruger got up in his face. “Not any bloody more, it isn’t — not with this!” He threw the idol into the air and caught it again. “So I’m in… but I’ll need to round up a few old boys first. Can’t go after something like this without a small army, and I happen to know just where to find one.”
With their own jet back in Zurich, it was only thanks to Otmar Wolff’s generous offer to let them use his private helicopter that they escaped more of Reaper’s haphazard approach to negotiating busy traffic. On board the chopper, the journey to Munich was short and pleasurable. The Eurocopter EC145 was a nine-seater business helicopter with a luxury interior and gave all of them some idea about Wolff’s success in the international arms business.
“This is the life,” Lexi said as she peered out of the chopper and drank in the view of the mountains below. They stretched out along the eastern horizon and faded into a haze somewhere along the Austrian border.
The Eurocopter crossed the border at Oberstdorf and as they moved further into Bavaria the mountains reduced in size to rolling hills. By the time they passed over Schongau it was mostly flat, agricultural land peppered with crystal clear lakes and sporadic carpets of dark green forestry.
They spoke briefly of Otmar Wolff’s haircut, but more about his ten million dollars, and then his dismissal of their Atlantis ideas. Hawke was undeterred and underlined to the team that despite Wolff’s employment of them to find the idol, Atlantis was their main priority.
“But he was explicit about not wasting our time on a wild goose chase looking for Atlantis,” Lexi said.
“What he doesn’t know can’t hurt him,” Hawke said. “And he might not believe in Atlantis, but it’s pretty obvious to the rest of us that it exists and that it’s linked somehow to Mictlan and the idol. Anyway — here’s our stop.”
The Eurocopter swooped down over the center of Munich and landed in a park west of the Oktoberfest. Thousands of people were milling around the beer tents below enjoying the buzzing folk festival and Hawke looked at the peaceful men, women and children with increasing anxiety as he imagined what could so easily go wrong if Mendoza or Soto started to panic.
As soon as the chopper’s tires were on the neatly trimmed grass of Bavariapark they were climbing out and meeting the head of GSG-9, the German special police. Hawke cast a wary eye over the hubbub around the beer tents as introductions were made and with the tropical paradise of Elysium now on the other side of the world, he warmed his hands as he walked into the temporary police HQ. The others followed behind and moments later they were introduced to Polizeihauptkommissar Holtz and his immediate subordinate Polizeiobermeister Schmidt.
According to their intelligence, Silvio Mendoza and Aurora Soto were still inside the Hotel Sendling at the north end of the beer park. The man the Mexicans were meeting was confirmed as Dirk Kruger, the South African tomb raider with a penchant for diamonds who was known to be extremely unpredictable.
“No evacuation order?” Hawke asked.
Holtz cast a concerned eye in the direction of the festival and he looked like a troubled man as he addressed them. “The authorities don’t want to alarm anyone without cause.”
“Any more details?” Lexi said.
“Our intel shows they are in the Hotel Sendling. It’s a luxury hotel near the beer festival so we’re keen to make sure the problem is contained, as you can imagine.”
Hawke nodded. “I understand this Kruger is based in Salzburg, so why is here in Munich?”
“Intel is a little sketchy on this but we think he’s meeting a Qatari named Al-Hajri with a view to selling him a quantity of unknown ancient artefacts.”
“And this Qatari — you tracked him into the country?”
Holtz shook his head. “He entered the EU in Hungary and after hiring a car in Budapest he disappeared.”
They exited the HQ and walked closer to the Hotel Sendling. The four-lane Theresienhohe which ran around the western edge of the Theresienwiese fairground was now empty of traffic and they easily crossed it on foot. As the Polizei München cleared the last few cars in a detour and stopped pedestrians from wandering out of the festival and getting too close, Hawke took cover behind the GlaxoSmithKline building and monitored the hotel. Schmidt finished talking on his radio, jogged up to Holtz and saluted.
“We have the back covered,” he said calmly. “He’s still checked in and not due to leave until the morning.”
Holtz nodded. “And Berlin has just issued a no-fly zone over the city so no helicopters to whisk them away either.”
Hawke looked up at the hotel room and readied himself for a fight. “Looks like I finally caught up with you bastards.”
CHAPTER NINE
Aurora Soto was beginning to wish she had stayed in Mexico. Ever since she had arrived in Europe she’d had a very bad feeling about how things were going to turn out, and tonight the company of Dirk Kruger and his weird entourage of treasure hunters wasn’t helping the situation.
She didn’t know what that damned idol was, or what it meant. She was pretty sure Silvio had no idea either, but she didn’t like the way it seemed to captivate whoever held it in their hands… whoever glanced upon it. And she especially didn’t like the way it stared back at people, silent and inscrutable.
She walked across the room and pushed the curtains aside to watch the street for a few moments, and it was then that serendipity introduced her to the next chapter in her life. “We have company,” she said quietly.
Kruger’s head snapped up from the idol and he stared at her, his eyes widening with anger. “What did you say?”
“She said we have company,” Mendoza said, taking a protective step toward Aurora.
The South African leaped from his chair, the idol still gripped in his hands like a weapon. “And who might that be?”
“Looks like our friends from the jungle,” Aurora said. She and Mendoza exchanged a worried glance.
“What friends?” Kruger said as he padded to the window and looked at the force gathering in the street.
“They’re called the ECHO team,” Mendoza said, recalling the research he’d done on the flight to Austria. “They’re some kind of independent group loosely connected to the British Government but that’s all I could find out about them. The main man’s called Hawke and they had something to do with stopping the kidnap of President Grant.”