“Let’s start this, then,” he said, steeling himself for another fight. He turned to Lea, lowered his voice and quietly gestured to Ryan over at the cab. “You really think he’s up to it?”
She nodded. “I think so. I think he got a lot of it out of his heart last night — I’ve never seen Ryan drink an entire bottle of Scotch like that before. I know he must be totally crushed inside, but he seems to be projecting his anger outwards.”
“Is that a good thing?”
“I don’t know…”
“Sounds unpredictable to me, but…”
“But we both know we’re going to need him.”
Hawke nodded. “Exactly.”
“And…”
Hawke flicked his eyes to Lea. “What?”
“He says he won’t stop until he’s killed everyone in Sheng’s team.”
“They’re already all dead — apart from Luk, of course, and a few lackeys.”
Lea shuddered when Hawke mentioned Luk. The last time she had seen him he was fleeing for his worthless life from the burning tomb of the Emperor Qin, and the time before that she was chained down to a boatshed bench while Luk sharpened a cut-throat razor. Now, he was out there somewhere, anywhere. She couldn’t bear to think about it.
“Don’t remind me about that weirdo, please. I’m just saying I think he’s alright but we can’t rule out him doing something crazy — dropping off the grid and going it alone, or something like that. He wouldn’t last five minutes, Joe.”
“We’re not going to let that happen, all right? But now we have to focus.”
Hawke pulled up his collar and walked toward the apartment building. It was time to stop asking questions and start finding answers.
CHAPTER TWO
Dragonfly lit the cigarette and held the smoke deep down inside. She sighed, and with the gentle exhalation the hot smoke flowed smoothly out of her body and into the cold Berlin sky. All was fair in love and war, or so they said, and yet… She shook the thought from her mind and watched the traffic below her hotel room.
Yes, she had betrayed Joe Hawke. She knew that. It was part of the game. She had taken the map from Sheng Fang, prising it from his dead hands — but she had no choice. Sorokin had contacted her just hours before. He had sent her a simple message explaining that he knew her darkest secret, and would reveal it to Hawke and everyone else she knew if she didn’t comply. The information was safe, he had said. He’d been very reassuring. Kill me and it will be released to the world. Get me the map or they find out, he had told her. One false move and they find out, he had said. It didn’t look like he was kidding around.
She knew she would get her revenge on Sorokin — no one threatened her and got away with it, but she also knew she had to play along — play for time — do as the Russian told her until the moment for revenge presented itself. As it turned out that happened sooner than she thought when an unknown hit-man took Sorokin out of the game on the taxi rank outside the airport in Berlin. As far as the old Chinese proverb went, the hen had flown, but the egg was not necessarily broken.
But it would be if Joe Hawke ever got his hands on that information about her.
As for who else knew what Sorokin had discovered about her past, she could never know. That was the life she led, but at least it was one less fire to put out. She knew she would have to find out if Sorokin was telling the truth about the information being hidden away somewhere, but there was no time for that now.
She also knew there was much more damage to undo — Hawke and the others would take some persuading that she had not deliberately betrayed them, especially considering that she could never tell them the truth about why she had done so — she would have to get creative on that score and cook something up for them. More lies… and then there was this damned map… She had to do something with it before Sorokin’s killers came calling a second time.
She gazed down into the city. An absent-minded flick of the cigarette knocked a cloud of ash over the balcony. She watched it drift through the air, its aimless trajectory reminding her sadly of her own bitter past. Even here, so far away from her life in China, that dark, repressed history had a way of rising up and almost choking her. If only she could go back in time, she thought…
Now, just because she didn’t want them to, her mind filled with memories of the past. The day she left home to join the Ministry, her training, how the State took her under its wing and showed her everything. Her first kill — it was a shooting in Pyongyang and she still had nightmares about it… The first time she met Joe Hawke in Zambia — she was there to investigate corruption. Someone was diverting Chinese state development funds into a private account in the Caribbean when he should have been increasing productivity in the Chambishi copper mine. She had persuaded him to return the money before placing him on early retirement. Or that’s what the government told his family, anyway. The reality was somewhat different.
Hawke was there as part of a joint SBS-SAS team protecting a British trade envoy and his team in the country who were there to talk about investment opportunities. There had been a terror threat made against the envoy and Hawke and his squadron travelled alongside the officials in civvies, posing as administrators.
They had met in a restaurant in Lusaka, each pretending to be someone they were not, but each had the skills and experience to know the other was lying. It wasn’t long before they had each other’s true story and a few bottles of Mosi lager on the side. They had spent three nights with each other, totally against the rules, but neither seemed to care. The mission had ended badly for the British, but a success for the Chinese, and she was given a special commendation when she got home.
Now, if Hawke refused to believe her she would have to add yet another betrayal to the ash-heap of her memories. But maybe she could fix it. Just maybe.
She stood motionless and considered her position. She was alone in a German hotel room with the Map of Immortality — the object of the most insane desire in history. Sorokin had taken them there to meet with a man who promised to translate the map. Probably just a charlatan, she thought, and rolled it out on the bed. She took a long look at the thing that had caused so much trouble and death. She felt like using it as an ashtray.
It was, sadly, unintelligible. She was angry with herself for being so naïve — she had pretty much expected it to be a map of some kind of territory with something approximating a big red cross on it to show where the hidden treasure was. Instead she was confronted with an illegible, messy scrawl — some kind of code — that reminded her of Egyptian hieroglyphics. Whatever it was, it meant nothing to her, and it wasn’t the sort of thing you could Google, either. She had no chance of finding the elixir without the others’ help, and she knew it.
The problem was she had no idea how Hawke and the others were going to react when she got back in touch with them, and whether they’d believe her story about Sorokin and the blackmail. She decided on a story about her parents being held hostage by the Russian, and she could show them the images of her ‘parents’ at gunpoint — such things could be faked easily enough. She knew it and they knew it, too. They would just have to take her word for it.
Another problem was just who the hell had tried to kill her at Tegel Airport, and taken Sorokin out of the game at the same time. Was she the primary target, or Sorokin? She had no idea, but she knew that no one got away with trying to kill the Dragonfly, not even for possession of the oldest treasure map on earth. Whoever it was had better start thinking about updating their last will and testament.