Ryan laughed out loud and confirmed the quotation.
“This is true,” Reaper said.
“All right,” Hawke said. “Enough of the nationalist dick-waving.”
Scarlet and Kim turned on him. “Kinda hard for either of us to do that, wouldn’t you say, Hawke?”
“You know what I mean, ladies. We’re all on the same side here, remember that.”
The riders broke away like a fighter jet display team and came back around the Lexus in three giant arcs.
“They’re coming in again, Joe,” Lea said.
“What are we going to do?” Kim said.
Devlin grinned. “We’re going to lose them.”
“In the middle of the world’s most expansive croquet lawn?” Ryan said.
“Nope,” the Irishman drawled. “In the middle of the world’s biggest maze, right, Mr Reaper?”
“We draw them in, and then we hunt them down,” the Frenchman said.
“You could have told me!” Mack said, and leaped off the Lexus with seconds to spare.
Reaper smashed the massive Lexus through the outer hedge of the maze. The weight and momentum of the heavy-duty SUV was enough to easily rip through the outer wall, but then the next few hedges gave too much resistance and they ground to a halt halfway to the center of the maze.
“Everyone out!” Hawke yelled.
Behind them, the riders were now racing over to the hole in the maze wall as fast as they could go. The sun flashed on their helmets and shotgun barrels as they drew closer.
Mack jogged over to them and laughed. “Not had this much fun in years.”
“Into the maze!” Hawke said.
The maze was billed as the country’s biggest, but no one ever got to enjoy it because it was closed to the general public. The entire thing was nothing more than a monumental folly maintained by the eccentric Horak to entertain his high-powered friends when they visited the house. The only way it could be viewed was by looking on Google Earth, which is what Lea was trying to access right now as they sprinted through the crazy labyrinth.
They turned left and cut down a winding passageway that took them ever deeper into the maze. “I hope this ends better than it did for Jack Nicholson in The Shining,” Ryan said.
“At least it’s not snowing,” Kim said. “But yeah…”
“Maybe,” Hawke said. Like the others, the high summer sun was making him sweat through his shirt as he pounded his way along the path. “If we had snow we could follow their tracks.”
Kim frowned as she loaded her gun. “Or they could follow ours.”
They heard the bikes’ engines a few meters to the right, but there was no way through. The hedge was a meter thick and full of dense thorns. “Maybe we should leave them,” Ryan said. “Just go up to the house.”
To Hawke, this was the worse thing they could do. “No — never let the enemy get behind you. We don’t want them on our tail when we go up to the house. We’ll just end up fighting on two fronts. We’re on these guys now and we don’t stop till we take them down.”
The passageway arrived at a central junction where several other paths came together. “We’re at a vortex,” Ryan said. “This is where the spiral we were following was leading. This damned place must have been created by Daedalus himself!”
“Just what I was thinking,” Scarlet said.
“Piss off, Cairo.”
“By the way, is there going to be any loot coming our way for doing this?” Scarlet asked, totally ignoring Ryan. “I mean, how much is this sword worth on the black market?”
“You and your bank account,” Kim said.
“Hey, I like a bit of OA as much as the next gal,” Scarlet said. “I’m not doing this bollocks for shits and grins, baby.”
“OA?” Ryan said.
“Offensive action,” Mack said.
“Keep it down,” Hawke said. “I hear something.”
“Me too,” said Devlin. The Irishman silently raised his arm and pointed to the hedge right behind him.
Hawke nodded. “They’re backtracking.”
“This way,” Lea said, staring at her phone. “This leads to the center of the maze.”
They walked along another long pathway and then they turned a corner to arrive in the heart of the maze.
“Oh, you have to be kidding me,” Scarlet said.
She had her hands on her hips and now raised an arm to point at the vast array of statues of various Greek and Roman goddesses that populated the center of the maze. “Are these guys trying to tell us something or what?”
Mack frowned. “What’s the big joke?”
“And there’s Poseidon,” Hawke said with a grin. The tall marble statue was in the dead center of the display beside a giant coy pond, and his metal trident shone in he sun. Hawke sprinted over and stood next to it.
“I’m sorry, Joe Hawke,” Lea said. “But if you think this is the right time for a photo then you’re crazier than I thought.”
“No,” Hawke said patiently. “I don’t want a photo of me and old Poseidon here, I want his trident.”
Hawke pulled the trident out of the statue’s grip and weighed it in his hands. “Poor old Zaugg,” he muttered to himself.
“What the buggering fuck are you pissing about with that thing for?” Scarlet said.
Kim gave her a look and rolled her eyes. “Language, dear.”
Scarlet slowly raised her middle finger and waved it in the American’s face. “Bite me.”
“Hey!”
“I know what he wants it for,” Ryan said.
“Moi aussi,” Reaper said.
The bikes were closer now. It sounded like two were to the south and a lone rider was to the north but closer. Hawke carefully tracked the progress of the lone rider and then jogged over to the hedge wall that corresponded closest with the sound of the bike’s raspy engine. He got down on his knees and stared through the base of the hedge and then climbed back up to his feet. “He’s coming along here.”
“I told you he wants to be Indiana Jones,” Devlin said.
Hawke’s response was to hold his nerve and then plunge the trident through the hedge, ramming the end of the metal bar into the bike’s front wheel.
No one saw what happened, by they all heard the desperate whine of the engine as the bike flew through the air and then a deep, metallic crunching sound as it smashed back to earth. Hawke peered through the hedge again and confirmed the rider was dead. “Broken neck,” was all he said.
“Two down and one to go,” Reaper said.
Their celebrations were cut short when they heard the other two bikes turn around and head in their direction again. Worse, a Viking Side-by-Side vehicle filled with armed men was now racing down the slope up at the house and heading toward the maze.
“Looks like we’re surrounded,” Kim said. “What do we do now?”
Mack checked his gun. “Aye, the lassie asks a good question.”
“What we always do,” Lea said. “We fight for survival.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
The first of the riders burst into the center of the maze and opened fire with his shotgun. The round blasted a chunk out of Poseidon’s shoulder and showered Hawke and Lea with a cloud of dust.
“He’s keen as mustard, this bloke,” Hawke said.
Lea rolled her eyes. “He’s a proper arsehole, is what he is.”
“You can say that again,” Mack said.
The rider also knew a thing or two about how to handle a bike, and he deftly spun it around in the grass. Turning it south, he aimed for the cover of a trellis that was connecting some of the Roman statues at the other end of the maze’s heart.