Then she heard the door open and a man walked in. Since being trapped in her new world of darkness behind the sack, she had learned to tell the difference in the sound of the footsteps. This was the footfall of the giant, and it was confirmed a second later when she heard his heavy breathing and felt his broad hands on her as he lifted her, still sitting in the chair, and carried her from the room.
The Gulfstream V cruised smoothly forty-thousand feet above the Norwegian Sea. On board, Lea and Ryan sat opposite each other and played poker, while Dempsey and his men sat up front and talked among themselves.
Hawke laid himself down on the long leather couch and painfully walked himself through the deaths of Hart and Durand for the thousandth time. Then, when that hell was over, he tortured himself some more over the kidnapping of Nightingale, a woman whose name he now knew was Alexandra Reeve, the estranged daughter of no less than the head of the Pentagon. All of this was starting to feel way above his pay grade and he wanted answers more than ever.
Lea’s contagious laugh shook him from his thoughts and he glanced over to see her pulling a pile of dollar bills to her side of the little conference table. Ryan sighed and folded his hand, and then turned in the leather swivel chair to look out of the porthole at the ocean far below. Somewhere ahead he would soon see the Kjølen Mountains of Trøndelag on the western horizon.
Inwardly, Hawke was still finding it hard to deal with his responsibility for the deaths of Olivia Hart and Sophie Durand, and seeing Ryan as a mere shadow of his former self made things a thousand times worse. The smart-mouth kid-genius was gone — replaced by a sad, bitter cynic. Hawke had seen it happen before, but that didn’t make it any easier to handle. Despite himself, he broke into a smile when he watched Lea take the money and crack some jokes — she was trying to make Ryan laugh, but his face was stone.
It had been no more than hours since the Chinese criminal kingpin Sheng Fang had fallen to his death in the hidden tomb of the Emperor Qin. Hawke could still see his terrified face as he plunged through the flames and crashed into the dirt beside a river of burning oil. Now, that was all tied up, except for Mr Luk… but they weren’t out of the woods yet — a new monster had risen and was threatening to seize the elixir for himself. He had to be stopped.
Lea got a text, and she swivelled in the chair to face the front. Either side of the aircrew cabin were two large television screens, and the Irishwoman activated them with a flick of the remote. A second later the lean, sharp face of Sir Richard Eden appeared on the screens. Dempsey and the other American soldiers turned to look.
“Lea, how are you?”
“All good, Richard.”
“Hawke?”
Hawke paused before replying, and rubbed the stubble on his chin. “Well…”
“Excellent, I want you all to listen carefully. I’ve had intelligence that the Russian hit man known as Kodiak, the man we now know killed Sorokin and attempted to kill Dragonfly, is on the trail of our people in Berlin. Presumably he has orders to kill them and retrieve the map.”
“We know…”
“You’re aware of this information?” Eden asked.
“Yes, you could say that,” Hawke replied. “We just got a briefing by Jack Brooke about the guy behind all this — his name is Maxim Vetrov.”
“Jack Brooke — you mean the Defense Secretary?”
Hawke nodded. “The very same. Agent Nightingale is his daughter.”
Eden was stunned. Hawke saw for the first time that Sir Richard Eden’s intelligence network obviously didn’t extend quite as far as he would have liked.
“Well, I’ll be buggered,” Eden said. “Didn’t see that one coming.”
“Neither did we, Rich,” Lea said. “But Jack Brooke knows all about us — and that includes you, too.”
“I see…” Eden was silent for a few seconds but quickly regained his composure and returned to the matter at hand. “All right, then we know for sure Nightingale’s kidnapping and the attempted murder of Dragonfly are connected — the link being Maxim Vetrov. He’s obviously our man so get after him.”
“We’re already on our way,” Hawke said.
Eden ended the call and Hawke gathered everyone for a briefing on the assault on Vetrov’s dacha. Now wasn’t the time for half-measures, and for the first time in a long time, he couldn’t wait until the shooting started. It was payback time, and he had a big score to settle with Maxim Vetrov.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Alex Reeve knew there was no point in struggling as the giant Russian plucked her out of her chair, took the sack from her head and heaved her over his shoulder. In broken English he had explained what would happen to her if she made a fuss, and her sense of self-preservation told her it was better to live to fight another day.
A few moments later Kosma kicked open a door and walked her into an enormous atrium. It was dim considering the size of the glass roof — but then she saw it was covered in fresh snowfall and that explained the lack of light. There was something else about the place that was wrong — an odd smell of salt which reminded her of the ocean. Somewhere to her left she heard a strange growling sound.
Kosma lowered her to the ground and placed her awkwardly on another chair. Now, she was sitting behind a high metal fence, beyond which was a large area of dark water with some kind of artificial island in the center of it. Above the enclosure was a substantial black metal rigging with a series of chain hoists attached to it.
“Good day, Miss Reeve.”
She looked over the water to see the man who had spoken with her earlier. He was walking casually toward her. She could tell by the sound of his voice that this was the man who had been laughing. “Allow me to introduce myself more formally. I am Maxim Vetrov, and this is my assistant, Kosma Zhuravlev, an old associate of mine.”
“You bastard! How dare you do this to me?”
“How do I dare, you ask? I dare to do so many things that the common man would shy away from. But before we talk, I must introduce you to my darlings.”
After a brief moment of confusion, Alex looked with horror as Vetrov gestured toward the water, and saw for the first time what he meant by darlings — crocodiles — and lots of them. She could hardly bring herself to believe what her darkest fears were already beginning to see.
She watched one of the crocodiles crawl through the vegetation on the artificial island and slide effortlessly into the murky water. Another behind it, lost somewhere behind the plants made a deep, gurgling sound. She noticed floating on the surface what looked like a blood-stained shirt, now torn to rags, and her mind started to put together what she was now seeing with what she had heard a few moments ago.
“Now, Miss Reeve — or is it Miss Brooke? We have business to discuss, and I do hope you can be accommodating or…” he glanced at the enclosure.
Alex followed his eyes and saw the exoskeleton of another monstrous crocodile as it joined the other one and slipped beneath the slimy water a few yards from her. She flinched as a wave of disgust and terror crawled over her body. Now, at last, she knew her fate.
“What do you want, Vetrov?”
“You know what I want,” he replied. As he spoke, he snapped his fingers and Kosma began to fix her chair to the load chain of a hoist. She followed the chain up from her chair to where it was attached to the rigging, which she now saw spanned the entire length of the enclosure, high above the water. Her first thoughts were that it was some kind of structure built with the maintenance of the enclosure in mind, but then she realized its purpose was for an altogether bleaker reason.