With Lexi and Devlin giving him cover fire, he crouch-walked across the sunken living room and hit the stairs. Seconds later he was sprinting down a long central corridor until he found a door which he thought was in approximately the right place. Opening it, he found an empty bathroom with moonlight glinting on the polished silver taps of the bath, so he moved on down the corridor. Lea was up here somewhere and it was up to him to rescue her.
With the sound of gunfire and yelling below him, Hawke sprinted to the next room along the corridor and booted the door open to find Lea Donovan standing in the moonlight beside another man. With his back to the window he was little more than a silhuoette to Hawke, but the Englishman could see clearly enough that he was holding a gun to her throat.
“Joe!” Lea cried out. “Behind you!”
Hawke spun around to see another man stepping out from behind the door. With the moonlight shining directly in his face he was able to recognize him at once as one of the men he had fought back in Boston.
“Drop the weapon,” Moonlight Man said, calmly lifting a pistol into view. The silvery light shone dully on the weapon’s muzzle as he grinned at Hawke. “I’ll ask you only one more time, and then I’ll…”
Hawke fired his gun at the man before he’d finished the sentence. The round tore through the man’s eye and sprayed a misty cloud of blood and brain matter on the wall behind him.
The former commando turned and fired at the man holding Lea before the first man hit the floor. The back of the second man’s neck blasted away into pieces and he slumped to the floorboards with a look of terrified realization etched on his now-dead face.
Lea screamed. The sheer speed with which Hawke had despatched the two men holding her at gunpoint had shocked even her. She had expected a wisecrack, an insult and then for her lover to throw down his gun. Instead she got a bloodbath, dealt out in less than two seconds. With the gun still smoking, Hawke crossed the room and held her by her shoulders.
“Are you all right?” he said. He noticed the shooting downstairs had stopped.
“Sure… I…” she glanced down at the dead man at her feet. “I’m glad you’re here.”
“Where’s Zito?” Hawke asked, straight to business.
“I’m not sure. He was in here but when you attacked the villa he ran out and started barking orders at his men.”
Lexi and Devlin ran into the room. The Irishman approached Lea and smiled warmly. “Are ya alright, girl?”
“I’m fine, Danny. Joe… handled it.”
Devlin looked down at the two dead men, and sniffed. “So I can see.”
Hawke kissed Lea but then locked his eyes on her. “What about the manuscript and idol?”
“The idol’s already gone,” she said. “Some guys turned up a few hours ago and took it. Zito told me that finding it on me was an unexpected pleasure. All he was hired to find was the manuscript.”
“But the men that took the idol,” Lexi said. “They didn’t take the manuscript?”
Lea shook her head. “Nope. Zito said that’s being delivered to someone else.”
“So where’s Zito got the manuscript?” Hawke asked.
“How should I know?” Lea said, hands on hips. “He didn’t invite me here for a tour of the place, you know!”
“Fantastic,” Hawke said. “You’re on the island for bugger knows how many hours and you haven’t found out where Zito’s safe is.”
“Give her a break,” Devlin said.
Hawke and Lea turned to Devlin and spoke at the same time: “Keep out of it!”
“I was just…”
“I’d keep out of it if I were you,” Lexi said.
“So now we’ve got to track the safe down,” Hawke said.
“It’s not in the damned safe,” Lea said, squeezing her eyes shut as she struggled to remember something. “Wait a minute — he mentioned something about reading it in his observatory. It means nothing to him, anyway — he was hired to take it by someone else, like I said.”
“Who by?”
She shrugged her shoulders. “He wouldn’t let that particular cat out of the bag. He said I’d find out tomorrow.”
“Too bad neither you nor the manuscript are going to be in his possession tomorrow then, isn’t it?” Hawke said. “We need to get out of here and in a hurry, but we need the manuscript first. Danny — can you arrange some transport while we go to the observatory?”
Devlin chuckled. “Leave it to me, Joe.”
They watched Devlin vanish into the darkness of the corridor and then Hawke turned to Lea. “So, which way to this observatory?”
“I think it’s at the far end of the corridor outside this room,” Lea said.
They checked the corridor was clear and then made their way hurriedly toward the observatory.
“It’s definitely down here, right?” Lexi said.
“I already said that I think so,” Lea said, “but only from overhearing snatches of their conversation.”
They made their way down the final stretch of the corridor and turned a corner to find themselves faced with large double doors. Osservatorio was written on one of them in polished gold letters.
“Bingo!” Lexi said.
They entered and found a large, low-lit room with the largest telescope any of them had ever seen in the center of it. It was mounted on a turntable and pointing toward a retracting roof.
“So this is what old Zito spends his time on when he’s not giving people the cement shoes?” Lexi said, mesmerised by the enormous telescope.
“There!” Lea shouted. “That’s it — on the chair next to the telescope.”
Hawke jogged over to the chair and snatched up the manuscript. “All right — we’re set. Let’s just hope we can get out of here as easily as we got in.”
“So what’s the plan, Joe Hawke?” Lea asked.
Hawke stuffed the manuscript into his shirt and winked at her. “Just like usual — we wing it.”
They left the room and jogged down the stairs toward the lower part of the villa. “So this winging it…” Lexi said. “Is that an SBS thing?”
“If you mean improvising, then yes,” Hawke said with a grin.
They were near the smashed patio doors now, and heard raised voices from a room on the other side of the house. “That’s Zito,” Lea said.
“Sounds pretty pissed off to me,” Lexi said with a chuckle.
“Time for us to go,” Hawke said. “And pray your Commandant has got us some of those bikes we saw earlier.”
Lea gave him an odd look. “Former Commandant, Joe.”
Outside in the hot night, it wasn’t long before Zito’s men located them and opened fire, but they ran from the lethal fusillade with everything they had. Hawke navigated them across the lawns and into the shrubs which formed the border between the villa and the small forest, and they scanned the trees for Devlin.
“Over here, you silly bastards!”
Looking deeper into the trees they saw Danny Devlin half obscured behind a trunk of a large stone pine. He was waving them over and they ran to him in the relative safety of the small forest.
“I got two of the bikes.” Devlin straddled one of them and started it up. “Back to the Aurora, and quick as you like!”
Lexi was giving them cover now, firing at Zito’s men as they tried to cross the lawn and reach the forest. Above them they heard the sound of rotor blades whirring and then a Robinson R44 helicopter rose over the villa. After swooping over the forest it turned hard to port and made for the coast.
“Looks like Zito’s out of here,” Lea said.
“He must have got what he wanted from the manuscript,” said Hawke.
Lexi frowned. “So someone’s given his strings a tug.”