“He gave us all hope,” Ryan said. “He gave me ECHO, and that’s the only family I’ve ever really known.”
Lea barely heard their words. Her eyes were following the path of the IV tube as it snaked toward the hideous cannula in Eden’s bruised hand. Looking at his face — thin now, sunken cheeks and light silver tubble — she saw his eyelids flicker and a moment of hope danced through her mind even though she had seen it so many times before. Soon, he was still once again, as quiet and motionless as the dead.
The heart rate machine beeped gently in the background.
Another bolt of lightning.
Another growl of thunder.
Everything was spinning out of contol and she felt like screaming.
The team had split in Rio with Hawke flying to America to help Alex while Reaper returned to his family in the south of France. Scarlet and Camacho had hooked up and gone to Vegas, and the rest of the team flew to London to be with Eden. Now Lea felt like everything was falling apart. Their home, the secret Caribbean island called Elysium was still nothing more than smouldering ruins since the attack which had almost claimed Eden’s life.
ECHO was without a leader and without a base and now she and Hawke were split up and separated by an ocean. Not for the first time she wondered if it was all worth it, but at the center of her soul was the brutal murder of her father. That was the dynamo that would never stop powering her forward until she had gotten her revenge and laid every last ghost to rest. The only way to do that was with ECHO at her back.
“He’ll be all right, Lea,” Ryan said from the other side of the room.
She looked up and saw he had now moved the unlit cigarette to his lips and it was bouncing around as he spoke.
“I hope so.”
Lexi finished her coffee and tried to change the subject. “Ryan, what did Joe say when you called him about — what was it now?”
“An ancient manuscript belonging to the Welsh triads.”
“Oh, yeah I forgot about that,” Lea said, absent-mindedly. She moved her eyes away from Eden and looked at herself for a moment in the reflection of the hospital window. Then she turned to Ryan. “You asked for money to buy it, right?”
“Yes.”
“So what’s the deal again?”
“It just turned up in a museum in Boston,” Ryan said. “The reason I think we should take an interest is because when I was looking at pictures of it on their website I saw several of the same symbols that we saw on the idol in Mexico. I haven’t told Joe that bit yet.”
“The exact same symbols?” Lexi said.
Ryan nodded. “Right, which is very odd. If you ask me whoever wrote that manuscript had obviously seen the symbols somewhere and copied them down. The question is — where did the scribe see them?”
“Another idol?” Lexi said, her eyes almost sparkling.
“Possibly,” Ryan said. “That’s why I want to see the manuscript more closely. I asked Hawke to buy it from the museum — or at least make an offer. Its market value is well within ECHO’s budget for this sort of thing, right Lea?”
Lea was thinking back to her first mission with Eden when they had stormed a facility in northern Russia and killed a rogue colonel. It seemed like a lifetime ago. Now she was dimly aware that someone was asking her a question, but she had missed all the words. “I’m sorry?”
Ryan sighed and fiddled with the cigarette. “I said we can afford to buy it, yes?”
“Oh, yeah… I think so. Rich normally did the numbers.”
“But what if they tell us to get lost?” Lexi said.
Ryan shrugged his shoulders. “Then I have to fly all the way to Boston to look through an ancient manuscript or ECHO loses the chance to have another important relic — another important part of this puzzle we’re trying to put together.”
“Sounds great to me,” Lexi said. “Anything that helps us get closer to the truth behind this and take out the Oracle gets my vote. What do you think, Lea?”
No response.
Ryan sighed. “I’m going to call Joe back.”
“Lea — did you hear what I just said?”
She flicked her head around. “Sorry, Lex… no — I was miles away.”
As Ryan left the room to make the call, he and Lexi shared a concerned glance, but Lea didn’t see that either. The truth was she had so much on her mind the stress was blotting out most of the surface stuff in her life.
Eden was the main problem.
What no one knew but her was that just this afternoon the doctor heading his care had told her the former Parachute Regiment officer’s condition had worsened slightly, and she should start to make preparations in case the worst happened. Doing what Eden himself would do, she had kept the news to herself because there was no point worrying the others unnecessarily.
Not until the unthinkable happened.
Next was the email she had picked up on her phone the day before. It was from her brother, Finn. He hadn’t talked to her for ten years, maybe more. That was weird enough, but what she had read in it was playing on her mind. A nursing home in Galway Bay had been in touch about a relative of theirs. Someone named Maggie who had died recently.
She didn’t recognize the name.
They had box of things for her and said it was urgent. They couldn’t find her, so they had asked Finn to give her the box. He didn’t want to deal with it. Not interested. If she wanted to sort it out then she had to come to his place in Dublin and get the box. He was away but he would leave a key for her. The email was typical Finn Donovan — short, blunt and not even signed.
The message had been bothering her since she read it. She had plenty of relatives over in Galway Bay and all over that part of the country, but she had never heard of that particular nursing home and as far as she knew she didn’t have any relatives in it. Now, someone at the home had told her a loved one had died and left a box of things for her to see. She wasn’t sure what to make of it. All she knew was it couldn’t have come at a worse time.
It never rains, but it pours.
CHAPTER THREE
Hawke and Kim Taylor were leaving the West Wing and walking out to their car when Ryan called back. He sounded different these days. He hadn’t been the same since the death of Maria Kurikova a few weeks ago. She had been shot by a Russian sniper named Ekel Kvashnin, codename Kamchatka, while Ryan was being kidnapped by an arms dealer named Dirk Kruger. He had been the last to know the terrible truth, when Vincent Reno told him on a mountain track in Colombia.
The young hacker from London had reacted by drinking heavily and making erratic and dangerous decisions. He had started smoking again; cigarettes mostly but also cannabis in any format he could get it. Then he had dropped off the radar for weeks. After his absence, the next time anyone from ECHO heard from him was when he texted a picture of his first tattoo — Машa — on his upper arm. It meant Masha, the abbreviated form of Maria… what he used to call her.
Hawke climbed into the car as he spoke into the phone. “So what’s going on, mate?”
“Definitely something for ECHO.”
With Eden in a coma, these calls were now coming to Hawke. There was another man — a mysterious Dane named Magnus Lund who claimed to be part of a far-reaching consortium that owned the island of Elysium. Lund had assumed authority of the ECHO team after Eden’s injury, but despite his actions on the Lost City mission, none of the team truly trusted him enough to put their lives in his hands, so for now he was being kept as distant as possible.
Hawke was in the car now and as Kim buckled up he put the phone into the hands-free set and switched to speaker phone. “What is it, Ryan?”
“Do you know anything about the Welsh Triads?”
“Chinese drug-smuggling gangs in Cardiff?”