Lea sighed.
Maria turned to suppress a smile and pretended to watch an imaginary bird flying outside the giant window wall.
Wolff surprised them all by pulling a solid silver pocket watch out of his jacket. “Time we toasted to your success, I think!”
Everyone helped themselves with the exception of Ryan who had now moved on to the Venus de Milo. “You know, I’m certain this is a fake.”
Wolff took a step closer and squinted at the stonework. “Nonsense! I bought it directly from the Louvre!”
“No, I’m sure I’m right — this looks like deliberate distressing here, and here.”
“I see,” Wolff said, his words heavy with scepticism. “You expect me to believe this statue is a fake?”
“Pretty much,” Ryan said without looking up from the smooth curve of her upper thigh.
“And he’s never really wrong,” Lea said.
Scarlet rolled her eyes. “True, but bloody annoying.”
“But you’ll be pleased to know,” Ryan said, standing up to face Wolff, “that your Tanit is without a doubt the original and a wonderful depiction of a goddess of Atlantis.”
“What did you say?” Wolff said, suppressing a chuckle.
“He said Atlantis, darling.”
Wolff shook his head and took a step back. “Is this some kind of a joke?”
“No joke,” Lea said. “Ryan doesn’t joke about things like this.”
“It’s true,” Scarlet said. “The only funny thing about Ryan is the length of his…”
“Yes, thank you, Scarlet,” Hawke said.
Ryan gave Scarlet a sideways glance but didn’t rise to the bait. Instead he turned his attention to Wolff who was now looking surprised.
“You mean to tell me you seriously believe in Atlantis?”
“Well…”
“I have studied ancient cultures for decades!” Wolff said. “Atlantis is a myth, and not substantiated in the least beyond a few short words from Plato. A myth! That is the opinion of every academic and curator who has ever studied the subject. The mere suggestion is absolutely ridiculous and makes me question your credibility. Atlantis is nothing more than a legend!”
“Maybe, maybe not,” Camacho said. “But we can’t take any risks. I’m sure you would have said Mictlan was a myth but now we know it’s real.”
“I want the idol, Mr Hawke, not some ludicrous search for Atlantis. Is that clear?”
“Clear as crystal,” Lea said, but Hawke could see she was biting her tongue.
“Good,” Wolff said, and called Brunhart to the room. They exchanged a few words and then he turned to face the ECHO team and Brunhart locked the attaché case back up. Wolff slid it off the table and handed it to Lea. “Here is your five million dollars. The other five will be transferred when you retrieve the idol.”
Driving back to Vaduz Airport, Lea called in to report their meeting with Wolff to Eden. After a brief conversation they decided to Skype and moments later she was watching Eden, Alex and recently-arrived Kim Taylor in the Elysium Briefing Room.
“Any luck?” he asked.
“Not much — we’re still in Liechtenstein.”
“And how was Herr Wolff?”
“He should be called Big Hair Wolff,” Ryan said. “Talk about a mullet.”
“It wasn’t a mullet,” Lea said, rolling her eyes. “He gave us plenty of toys to play with in the hunt for Mendoza but he’s not sold on the idea of Atlantis. He was very clear about that when he handed us the five mil in cash.”
“As we thought,” Eden said “And I’ve got something else you all need to know.”
He leaned forward in his seat and picked up the remote from the glass-topped table. “It’s about the idol.” As he spoke, he selected some more files on the plasma screen and closed the electronic shutters, plunging the room into darkness.
“Ooh, cosy!” Scarlet said.
“Don’t tell me — Silvio Mendoza?” Lexi said.
“The very same,” Eden said with a heavy sigh. “As you know, after he fled into the jungle I put the word out among my MI5 contacts — gave them a description and some of his more recent mugshots given to me by Enrique Valles in Mexico. They poked around a bit…”
“Translation,” Scarlet said. “Did more hacking than a Canadian lumberjack…”
Eden gave her a look. “They looked into it for me and handed it to Six who in turn pushed it out to some of their global assets. An hour ago Europol contacted MI5 with a positive match.”
Eden tapped some information into his iPad and Mendoza’s face was projected on the plasma screen behind his head.
“Urgh,” Scarlet said. “I had no idea how much of a bastard he looks until you blew his face up like that.”
“I’d like to blow his face up, all right,” Lea said.
“Yes, quite,” Eden said, changing the image. “The picture you see here is one of Silvio Mendoza and Aurora Soto exiting Vienna International Airport a few hours ago.”
“Vienna?” Hawke said. “What the hell are they doing there?”
“We know he took the idol from the temple complex in Mexico,” Ryan said. “Maybe he’s trying to find out more about it from one of the museums. There are dozens of them there.”
“Or maybe he fancied a trip on the Wiener Riesenrad,” Scarlet said, her voice heavy with sarcasm, referring to the famous Ferris wheel in the Prater amusement park.
“He didn’t want any ride on a fairground ride,” Eden said flatly “And if you listened to the briefing you’d know why.”
He put a third and final image of Mendoza up on the screen. This was a grainy black and white still from some CCTV footage showing the Mexican drug lord. “They caught the train from the airport and arrived in Vienna shortly afterwards. This is our man walking along the western platform of the Vienna Praterstern train station in Leopoldstadt. After this they were tracked west on CCTV across a bridge spanning a tributary of the Danube.”
“And then?”
“They visited a Professor Franz Huber, formerly of the Vienna Museum of Ethnology, who just happens to be…”
“A world-famous expert on Aztec artefacts?” Maria said.
“A dead expert to be more precise,” Eden said with a sigh. “We don’t know exactly what happened inside Professor Huber’s apartment, but when he tried to leave the apartment block the Vienna police were already surrounding the building. They had followed him there using the same information I am now telling you. Mendoza reverted to form and used Huber as a human shield until he was safely out of sight. After a shootout they managed to get away. They found Huber’s body in a church less than an hour ago. Either Mendoza or Soto had stabbed him through the ribcage in what the local police have described as a frenzied attack.”
“Which means they must have already got all they wanted from him,” Hawke said.
“The latest?” Lexi said.
“Vienna has a maze of subterranean tunnels and cellars running underneath it dating from ancient Roman times. They disappeared into them from the crypt and for a while the police thought they’d lost them.”
“What is it with this bloke and tunnels?” Ryan said. “Maybe it’s a Freudian thing?”
Eden flashed him a disapproving look. “According to the Viennese police they connect up with the modern sewer network and he used them to make his way undetected to the train station where he caught a train to Munich.”
“Munich? What’s there?”
Eden sighed heavily before he spoke. “A former associate of mine named Dirk Kruger. Think of him as my nemesis… I do.”
“Dirk Kruger?” Ryan said with a smirk. “Did you just make that name up off the top of your head, Rich?”
“I did not, funnily enough. Dirk and I went to university together and were friends a long time ago — when I went into the army he went into archaeology. He’s no lover of the ancient though and in it purely for the looting. We haven’t spoken for decades. Today it looks like he’s hosting a little soirée for our Mexican friends.”