“I don’t believe in any of this… this is getting mad.” Hawke’s voice trailed to a whisper.
“You’d better believe it,” Brooke snapped, and returned to business. “After you contacted Alex about this Poseidon affair, she started looking into it in her usual extremely competent and determined way.”
“How do you know that?” Lea asked. “I mean, if you were estranged and all?”
Brooke levelled his eyes at Lea. “I had her computers hacked.”
“That is just terrible!” Lea said.
“That’s between me and my daughter, Miss Donovan, and when it comes to my family I’ll thank you to keep your opinions to yourself in future.”
Lea blushed with embarrassment. “I’m sorry…”
“The point is she used her considerable skills, and exploited her relationship to me, to get hold of some information that she should never have seen.”
“That only a handful of people know about, you mean?” Ryan said, recalling the Defense Sectary’s mysterious earlier comment.
Brooke stared him out with the frown from hell and returned to Hawke. “She managed to get the details of a man who will be instrumental in translating the map. His name is Dario Mazzaro. He’s reclusive and writes under the name Mercurio, and now he is in grave danger, just like my little girl. If Vetrov gets this man’s details, he will not only secure the only way to decode the Map of Immortality, but he will no longer have any use for Alex.”
“Why can’t you send some people out to protect Mazzarro?” Ryan asked.
“As I say, he’s a recluse and we have no idea where he is. I’m guessing my daughter knows which is why Vetrov took her.”
“I understand,” Hawke said.
Brooke’s lips tightened and the slightest glint of a tear welled in his eyes. A second later he snapped back into the moment. “Anyway… the fact is she has knowledge she shouldn’t have and this is the reason why Vetrov took her.”
Hawke looked Brooke in the eye. “We shall just have to get her back again then, won’t we?”
Lea frowned. “Excuse me, Mr Brooke, but the way you just talked about the map and the handful of people with this mysterious knowledge…”
“What?”
“There’s more to this than we know, am I right?”
A long silence. Now, Brooke turned his attention on the Irishwoman. “Yes.”
“And what would that be?” Ryan said.
“That would be what only a handful of people know,” Brooke said. “And it’s going to stay that way. All you need to know is that Vetrov has Alex, and is currently arranging to kill Agent Dragonfly, after which he will have not only my daughter and her knowledge of how to get to Mazzarro, but the Map of Immortality. The US Government is not prepared to allow that to happen, so we’re organizing a team to put an end to it.”
“Sounds fun,” Lea said.
“There is nothing fun about any of this, Miss Donovan,” Brooke said, ashen-faced. “Another comment like that and you’re on a one-way trip to an early retirement in Dublin.”
“Sorry…”
Ryan lowered his voice to a whisper and leaned closer to Lea. “You sure do spend a lot of time saying sorry these days.”
“Who’s on the team?” asked Hawke.
“Mack Dempsey, here, a former Green Beret, and two of his best men. Also, I know a former SEAL named Bradley Karlsson is working with your people in Berlin — I presume you’re familiar with him.”
“I wouldn’t go that far,” Hawke said.
Brooke ignored him. “And they will be putting their own people together. Given how much experience you’ve had in this, I want you to work with them. As I say, Karlsson is already in Germany working alongside an agent named Scarlet Sloane.”
“I’d still like to know what it is you’re keeping from us about all this,” Hawke said.
“I bet you would, Mr Hawke, but that’s never going to happen. Just you focus on getting my girl back from that asshole. I want her safe. After that, stop the asshole from getting to the source of eternal life, wherever the hell that is.”
Ryan laughed. “Easy to say, but where the hell do we start?”
Another stony glance from Brooke. “A few hours ago I had a briefing from the CIA on the whereabouts of my daughter. We re-tasked a satellite watching the Baltic States and used it to track Vetrov’s snatch squad. After landing in Domodedovo Airport in Moscow they flew out of the city in a private helicopter belonging to Vetrov.”
“These egomaniacs sure do love their helicopters…” Lea whispered.
“It landed a short while later in the grounds of a private residence to the west of Moscow in a village called Barvikha. It’s where much of the Russian elite own their second homes. Now we know that’s where they’re holding Alex, I want you on it right away. You’ll have all the clearance you need, and there’s a jet at your disposal waiting at La Guardia.”
“We have our own transport,” Lea said. “Our boss sent a plane over. It arrived in New York an hour ago.”
“I see, then there’s nothing stopping you.”
Hawke nodded. He was already putting together a strategy for what was looking like his most complicated mission yet.
“One thing still bothers me,” he said. “Why wasn’t this all done when she was first kidnapped? I flew here as soon as I got her message but, you could have acted on this hours ago.”
“As a matter of fact, we only just found out three hours ago. As I said, my daughter and I are estranged, Mr Hawke, but she’s very close to her mother, whom she speaks with every day. They share a great deal. When Katie called Alex earlier today and there was no reply she grew fearful and contacted me. You’ll understand now you’ve see the wheelchair — Alex has the mind of a genius, but she is physically frail and vulnerable, especially in a place like Manhattan, not to mention whatever hellhole Vetrov is keeping her in.”
Brooke stopped to light a cigarette and blew the smoke out hard. He stared at the ceiling for a few seconds. Then he looked back down and saw Lea was watching the tiny burning embers, and she began to cough. “Excuse me, Miss Donovan,” he said, raising his cigarette hand. “Bad habit I picked up in the Delta Force before I went into politics.”
“Please, I understand. This must be very stressful for you.”
“You could say that.” He drifted for a second then fixed his eyes on Hawke. “Anyway, Katie asked me to look into it so I sent Dempsey and the others around to her apartment about three hours ago. That was when we found the place all smashed up and I feared the worst. If you had a daughter you’d know how I felt. I pulled every string at my disposal and had the satellite surveillance footage checked until we found who’d taken her.”
“We’ll get her back,” Hawke said, and raised his wrists. “Probably a bit easier with these off, though.”
Brooke waved at Dempsey and the BDS man walked forward with the keys to unlock the three of them.
They waited for the Pentagon chief’s lead, but for a few seconds there was nothing but silence. Then he sighed and closed his eyes. “I’ve been a terrible father, Hawke. When my daughter was kidnapped the first person who sprang to her mind was you, and not her father. You don’t think that kills me? I want a chance to put all these years of hurt and pain behind us. You got that?”
Hawke looked at Brooke’s anguished face. He got it.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Maxim Vetrov watched dreamily through the window of his luxury dacha as the snow fell in heavy sheets over the countryside. He contemplated with something approximating pride that this was the landscape that destroyed Hitler’s Panzer Armies. Behind him he heard the familiar deep, belly-growl of Osiris, or was it Anubis? Vetrov had trouble telling the difference sometimes, but after a short period of weighing up the probability he settled on Osiris. Osiris, after all, hadn’t been fed for a very long time.