Lea said, “I came here to collect some things from a relative of mine who I never even knew existed. Judging from the pictures we found in her box I guess she was a great aunt or something. We also found some other things.”
Lea pulled the canvas bag off her shoulder and opened the top a few inches to reveal the section of the mansucript they had saved and the golden idol. “And yes, before you ask — it’s real gold.”
“Jesus! That thing must be worth a bomb!”
“Keep your voice down,” Hawke said firmly.
“It’s priceless,” Ryan said. “And its value is not in the gold. We don’t know what the deal with these idols is yet, but that’s where the real fireworks are — not a few thousand quid in gold.”
Devlin reached in to touch the idol but Lea pulled the bag shut and shouldered it once more. It felt safe there, on her back — somewhere it would stay safe if she ever had to run for her life. “We also found a manuscript that might help us, but some of it was stolen in a raid in Boston.”
“And we need the whole thing to make sense of it,” Ryan said. “The section we have only has a few references to a god called Arianrhod, which is great as far it goes, but it’s incomplete.”
Devlin took a sip of his beer. “So that means the bastards that took the rest of the thing in the raid need this one, right?”
“Correct,” Ryan said.
“Has this got something to do with your father’s research?” Devlin asked.
Lea was silent for a moment. She wasn’t sure how to answer the question, but then she decided on pure, old-fashioned honesty. “It just has to be connected, Danny. Especially now this whole thing with Maggie has come up.”
“So what’s our next move?” Devlin said.
“We have another idol,” Scarlet said. “But we need to get the manuscript back. Ryan’s convinced it holds more answers to this whole nightmare, and there’s a reason why those guys went to such an effort to get hold of it.”
“And where is this manuscript?”
Lea said, “On the way to meet you, Danny, I talked to a man who works with Richard Eden. His name’s Lund. He told me the men who stole the manuscript and slipped away into the Boston fog eventually ended up in a private airfield north of Salem. They took off in a Citation aimed for Naples.”
“So what are we waiting for?” Devlin said, slurping the last of his pint down. “Let’s get moving! You’ve got wheels, I take it?”
“We do,” Hawke said, “but there’s a problem. We’re in an Explorer — a six seater. Now you’re with us we’re seven.”
“So we get a cab and meet at the airport.” Devlin said.
When the cab arrived, Lea decided to keep Devlin company and ride with him while the rest of the team took the Ford, and they pulled away into the Irish rain on their way to the airport.
She sat in the back and closed her eyes as Devlin and the driver shared the usual smalltalk. In the background, behind their voices, she could hear the wipers beating slowly against the rain. It was nice to be home — to hear the familiar accent and listen to the rain. It never rained enough on Elysium.
She opened her eyes and watched the brake lights of the Explorer in front through the rain as they approached some traffic lights. She saw the lights flick to red but Scarlet piled through all the same. The cab driver tutted and moaned about dangerous driving and pulled up safely behind the line.
“It’s tossers like that who cause pile-ups,” he said with a shake of his head.
Lea made a mental note to pass his views along to the former SAS officer when they were safely on board the Gulfstream.
The lights changed and they pulled over the line, and then it hit them. Hard.
A Range Rover had been parked up on the road to their right and when the lights changed it swerved forward and piled into the cab, crushing the right side and killing the cab driver instantly in a storm of crumpled door panels and shattered safety glass.
Lea screamed.
Devlin turned his head and cradled it in his arms to protect himself from the flying glass. “What the fuck?” the Irishman yelled. “He must be more pissed than I am!”
“It’s not that Danny… we’re under attack!”
Looking ahead, the Explorer and her friends were long gone, and there was no time to call them on her phone: armed men were already piling out of the Range Rover and forcing the cab’s doors open.
Lea struggled to pop her belt open and reached out for her bag. She knew what they wanted — the other section to the manuscript, and now they were going to get Maggie’s idol as well.
One of the men wrenched open Devlin’s door and the Irishman twisted around to get a punch in but his movement was restricted by the dead taxi driver now slumped over the handbrake.
“Shit!” Lea said, freeing herself from the seatbelt at last and trying to shift forward in her seat to help her old friend. “Danny, look out!”
Devlin turned but the other man landed the first blow. He knocked him out with a clean, hard punch, but Lea had no time to feel concern: someone was opening her door and pulling her out of the car.
She fought against it but then her masked assailant pointed the barrel of a gun in her face and hushed her with his finger. “Into the Range Rover. Don’t make me kill you — and bring your bag, please.”
“You son of a bitch!” Lea said. “You killed this cab driver and knocked out my friend!”
The man ignored her and shouted a string of commands in Italian to the other men who were standing around in the rain. Somewhere in the distance she heard the sound of sirens. The Garda were on their way to attend the carnage, but she knew they would be long gone by the time they arrived.
“Why are you doing this?”
The man pulled the hammer back on the pistol and stared at her with the cold, dead eyes of a professional killer. “Because I am paid to do it. Now get into the Range Rover. You have a meeting with a very important man and he doesn’t like to be kept waiting.”
CHAPTER TEN
Hidden from public view in a deep cove on Italy’s Amalfi Coast, the Isola Pacifica sparkled like an emerald in the bright blue water. Here in this paradise anyone with five million dollars could buy their very own private island, but the Isola Pacifica was definitely not on the market. Men like Giancarlo Zito didn’t trade on the open market.
“Did you know,” Zito told the man cowering before him, “that the roman writer Lucius describes how a favorite torture method of those glorious days involved sewing people inside dead donkeys, with only their heads remaining outside the animal? The whole sorry business was dragged into the hot sun and left their until the maggots inside the donkey finally dispatched the victim.”
“Please… Signor Zito!” Stefano Marchesi was panting with fear.
“This pleases me, but of course where am I going to find a donkey on this island?”
“I only took a few grams, signore! I will pay it back in full!”
“Another method involved nothing more than a cauldron and a simple fire. The torturer would drop some rats inside the cauldron, strap the open end of the cauldron to the victim’s stomach and then light a fire at the closed end. As the cauldron got hotter and hotter, the rats were driven by instinct to survive and that meant getting away from the rising heat. Naturally the rats were unable to gnaw and claw their way through the metal cauldron so they dug their way out through the victim’s stomach. His flesh was so much easier to gnaw away and claw through than the metal.”
“I needed the money for my son’s medical treatment, Signor Zito! It was nothing to you! Nothing… just a few thousand euros. You’ll have the money by sunset, I swear, signore.”