As they worked, Hawke paced the room and waited nervously for word from Lea. Eden had sent her in pursuit of the notorious Russian assassin Kodiak, and now she had been gone a long time — perhaps a little longer than he would have expected — and he was worried. Lea could look after herself in most cases, but he was beginning to realize this Kodiak character was in a different league.
In the other room, Lexi was sleeping on the bed, while Scarlet dealt with the tension in her usual way — stepping out to the balcony and lighting a cigarette. There was nothing any of them could do but wait — wait for Ryan and Alex to crack the code in Mazzarro’s notes and use it to translate the glyphs on the map, and wait for Lea and Karlsson to get in touch and tell them they had secured Mazzarro and were all safe.
Hawke grabbed a beer from the fridge and cracked it open. After downing half of it in a few seconds, he followed Scarlet to the balcony and stood with her while she smoked, looking out over the Grand Canal of Venice, now glittering in the bright Italian sunshine.
“She’ll be all right, Joe,” Scarlet said.
“Eh?”
“Lea — she’ll be fine. She’s pretty tough, you know — almost as hard as me. Plus Brad’s with her. He’s pretty hard as well, and not just when we’re together in…”
“Please don’t finish that sentence, Cairo,” Hawke said, smiling. “But I appreciate the sentiment.”
Scarlet smiled and blew smoke out into the air. Below them, gondolas and tour boats slipped back and forth on the water. A man selling ice creams from a cart called out his prices as Hawke watched a young couple kiss beside a red and white striped mooring pole.
“It’s hard to believe all these people have no idea what’s going on, really,” he said, raising his eyes to the sunny horizon.
“What do you mean?” Scarlet stubbed her cigarette out and went to flick it in the canal, but Hawke grabbed her arm and gave her a look.
“I mean,” he said, pulling the butt from her fingers and putting it in the ashtray on the table, “that they have no idea about the Vetrovs of this world, and what they want to do with it, or these athanatoi or whatever the hell they are.”
“Not scared are you, Joe?” she said, smirking.
Hawke rolled his eyes. “Hardly — I just wonder if sometimes it would be better not to know the truth.”
“Never. It’s up to people like us to know the truth about the world and fight for it.”
Hawke looked at her, his eyes narrowing a little. “You say that like this is just a day job, Cairo.”
“Did I?” She went to light another cigarette but her lighter wouldn’t work. “I didn’t mean it to sound like that.”
“Well, it did. Want to tell me anything?”
“Like what? I think maybe this bloody useless lighter’s out of fuel.”
“Don’t change the subject, Cairo.”
“I don’t need to change subjects, Joe. If I didn’t want to talk about something I’d just fuck off somewhere else. You know that, darling.”
“Yes, I know that, but I’m still asking you why you just talked about how it’s down to people like you to fight like this. What did you mean by that?”
“Nothing at all — you’re imagining it.”
“Like the way I imagined how after you left the SAS you decided to work for MI5, and yet you accidentally never arrived there?”
Scarlet looked at him sharply, cigarette still hanging from her lip. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Come off it, Cairo. I know you never worked for MI5 and I know Sophie Durand never worked for the DGSE. You, and everyone else here has been lying to me from the start and I want answers or I walk.”
She looked at him for a few seconds with the cigarette still hanging off her lower lip. “Yeah — bloody lighter’s packed in. Got a light, Joe?”
Hawke sighed, and fished around in his pockets but found nothing.
“Are you going to talk to me or not?” he said as he searched.
“Just be a darling and get me a light?”
He sighed. “Wait a minute.”
He went inside and pulled the coat he had worn in Russia from his bag and went through the pockets. He found a box of matches and a small slip of paper. He looked at it with confusion for a second and took the matches to Scarlet on the balcony.
“Thanks, darling,” she said, lighting the cigarette. She waved the match until it blew out and then tossed it in the canal. “What’s that you’ve got?”
“I don’t know…” He opened the slip of paper and saw there was a message. It was written in black ink in English and the message read: J. Hawke — Important information about your wife — contact me. Snowcat. At the end of the message was a telephone number.
Scarlet looked up at him. “What is it, Joe?”
He frowned and handed her the piece of paper.
She read it and sighed. “A joke?”
Hawke shook his head. “No, I don’t think so. I want the others to see this.”
He and Scarlet walked back into the hotel room and joined the others where he showed them the note.
“Any idea where it came from?” Eden asked, intrigued.
“No. It wasn’t in my pocket when we left New York, and no one who knows me, or anything about me, knew I was in Russia.” He turned to the others and fixed a serious glance in their direction. “Unless, of course, it’s one of you guys?”
All the heads shook at once. No.
“So when did this…” Scarlet took another look at the note. “This Snowcat have time to put the message in your pocket?”
“When we were at the airport,” Ryan said calmly.
Hawke shot him a glance. “Eh?”
“After customs, we stepped out the front of the airport and that woman collided with you, remember?”
“Sure,” Hawke said. “I remember that.” He scratched the stubble on his jaw and slowly nodded his head. “She was blonde.”
“To be honest, I thought she was a pickpocket,” Ryan said.
Scarlet looked at Ryan. “You thought she was a pickpocket but you never said anything until now?”
Ryan shrugged his shoulders. “That’s pretty much right, yeah. Sorry.”
Hawke stared at the note, at a loss for what to do. His mind was filling with problems again — was Lea safe? Why was Scarlet refusing to tell him the truth? And now, why had a random stranger called Snowcat claimed knowledge about his wife? He knew it could be a trap, but at the same time he knew there could be something in it, and there was no way he could risk throwing away an opportunity to know the truth about his wife’s murder after so long.
“I’ve got to contact this person.”
“Do you think that’s wise?” Eden said.
Hawke turned the paper over in his hand once again, staring at the handwritten note. “I have no choice, Richard. I have to know. I need to know the truth.”
Hawke picked up his cell phone and left the room.
Karlsson rounded the bend and immediately saw they had driven straight into a trap. Ahead of them, Kodiak’s boat was slowing to a stop. Worse, they could hear the sound of a helicopter approaching from behind them, and then half a dozen armed men appeared on either side of the canal, guns raised and aimed at their heads.
“We’ve been led into a trap!” Lea said.
“Dead end,” the American said, crushed. “We have to stop the boat.”
He slowed the boat down as fast as he could and narrowly avoided colliding with Kodiak, who was now standing on the rear deck of his motorboat with a gun jabbing into Mazzarro’s neck.
Lea watched in despair as a Bell 212 now hovered directly above their boat, the powerful downwash lifting water out of the canal and spraying it all over them and splashing it up the sides of the motorboat. They were trapped and it would be fish in a barrel time if they tried to shoot their way out of it.