Bluey shook his head. ‘Fuck no, mate. I’ve been living here for a bit now; last thing I want to do is get into trouble with the local wallopers. And the girlfriend’d kill me!’
‘Amazed anyone’d have you,’ said Chase.
‘Me too, sometimes! She’s a lovely girl — well, a bit loud, but she keeps me in check. We’re planning to move back to Oz together. Immigration paperwork might be a pain, but she’s got some tricks.’ A knowing smile, then he saw Sullivan’s growing impatience. ‘Anyway, Sully, I brought your gear. The guns’re all forty-sevens; a bit scruffy, but I checked ’em and they’re in decent nick.’
Sullivan nodded. ‘What about radios?’
‘Got you a set of Motorola walkie-talkies and headsets. On the old side, but they work fine. New batteries in all of ’em.’
‘Good. Thanks for this, Bluey. Where is everything?’
‘In my van,’ said the Australian. ‘It’s all boxed up, so you won’t get any stickybeaks freaking out when you unload it. When’re you setting off?’
‘As soon as Thuc arrives with his minibus.’ Sullivan turned to the others. ‘Is everyone ready to move?’
‘Just let me take a piss first and I’m good to go,’ Chase replied.
Sullivan gave him a weary look. ‘Mac warned me that you were like this… Everyone else set?’
The remaining mercenaries confirmed their readiness. ‘Let’s get started,’ said Hoyt.
‘Good luck,’ Lock said to Sullivan. ‘I’ll be waiting to hear from you. Bring my daughter back safely.’
‘We’ll find her,’ the New Zealander replied. He glanced past Lock at the French windows, peering out at the sky over the ocean. ‘Oh, a heads-up,’ he said, turning back to his team. ‘The weather forecast says there’s a tropical storm due to make landfall this evening, with a chance it might become a typhoon by then. Even though we’ll be farther inland, we’re still going to get wet. Hopefully Bluey remembered to pack some rain gear.’
‘Sod this, then,’ Chase said. ‘I’m off back to England!’
That produced muted chuckles in the group, which were cut short when the phone rang. Sullivan answered it. ‘That’s our ride,’ he told them as he hung up.
The men filed out of the room, back into the stifling heat of the Vietnamese day. ‘Here we go, then,’ Chase said to the Belgian. ‘Back into action.’
‘Are you ready for it?’ Castille asked quietly.
‘Yeah,’ Chase replied.
He hoped he was telling the truth.
5
Nina stared at her laptop, even after multiple viewings not quite able to believe what she was witnessing.
Seretse had shown her a still image in New York; this was the full version, footage from a security camera. Because it had been watching a neighbouring building rather than the museum itself, the robbers were almost incidental, tucked away in one corner. Had their van been parked ten feet to the right, it was unlikely that any of their faces would even have been captured in frame.
But one had. And she knew it well.
‘Logan Berkeley,’ she said to herself, shaking her head. ‘What the hell are you doing?’
Eddie, reclining beside her in the airliner’s business-class cabin, raised his head to glare at the screen. ‘Never did like that tosser, even before what he did in Egypt. You should have punched him harder. And whatever Seretse said, he’s not part of the IHA any more. He got fired when he was arrested.’
‘When he was convicted,’ Nina corrected, even as she said it wondering why she was giving her former colleague — and rival — any benefit of the doubt. Dr Logan Berkeley had been in charge of an excavation in Cairo, opening up the long-lost Hall of Records hidden beneath the Great Sphinx of Giza. After Nina beat him to it, on live television to boot, the enraged and humiliated Berkeley had ended up taking a payoff from a cult to locate an even greater prize, the legendary Pyramid of Osiris. It wasn’t until the pyramid was plundered and the cult leader murdered by his own psychotic brother that Berkeley realised he had thrown in his lot with the wrong people, but by then it was too late to repent; according to Seretse, he had only been released from an Egyptian prison a few months earlier.
‘Whatever. He’s still a complete cockwipe. And now he’s involved in robbery and murder.’
‘So it seems,’ said Nina, with a small sigh. ‘I just don’t understand why.’
Eddie smiled sardonically. ‘A year in an Egyptian nick’s probably enough to turn anyone into a nutter.’
‘No, I don’t mean that. I mean, why steal the runestone at all?’ She tabbed to another application, the photograph of the monolith filling her screen. ‘All the text on it’s already been translated by experts, so there’s nothing new that anyone could get from it in person. And except for the inset,’ she indicated the circle of darker stone set into the face of the monolith, ‘there’s nothing unusual about the runestone physically. It’s just a block of granite.’
‘So there could be something special about that thing.’ Eddie also pointed at the inset. ‘There are some markings on it — maybe it’s a map.’
‘Well, hopefully we’ll find out more from Dr Skilfinger.’
‘Ha! We’re meeting a Bond villain?’
‘I’m sure she’s one of the good guys. At least, I hope so!’ They both grinned. ‘She’s the person who found the runestone in the first place, and has been researching it ever since. If anyone knows what it is, she will.’
Eddie leaned over to peer out of the porthole. A snowy, tree-covered landscape slid past below. ‘So, this is Sweden, eh? Never actually been here before.’
‘I’m kind of surprised,’ said Nina. ‘I thought you’d been everywhere.’
‘Norway, Finland and Denmark, yeah, but I somehow missed this one. Still, I think I know everything I need to about it. IKEA, Volvo, high-quality porn, Abba, girls with dragon tattoos.’ Another, more lecherous grin. ‘All I have to do is drink loads of coffee, eat lots of open-faced sandwiches and be blandly heroic, and I’ll get to have no-strings-attached sex with every woman I meet.’
‘You will not,’ Nina told him firmly, then they both laughed. ‘I’m pretty sure there’s more to the country than that, though.’
‘Well, obviously. There’s also meatballs, the Swedish Chef…’
‘Okay,’ she said with a smile as the pilot announced that the plane was making its final approach to Stockholm Arlanda airport, ‘if any Swede asks what you think of their country, it’d probably be a good idea if you just said, “It’s very nice.” Otherwise they might rethink their neutrality policy.’
Ninety minutes later, their United Nations diplomatic visas having seen them whisked through customs, Nina and Eddie arrived at the Swedish National Museum of Antiquities in Stockholm, after a brief detour to a hotel to drop off their luggage. Despite the snow blanketing the countryside, the capital’s streets were impressively clear, traffic moving at a brisk pace. ‘We should hire these guys to plough the streets in Manhattan,’ said Nina.
‘We should get ’em to do the whole of bloody England,’ Eddie countered as he climbed out of the taxi. ‘One flake of snow and the entire country falls apart.’
Nina paid the driver and joined him. The museum was a large, pale beige block abutting a triangular plaza on a broad tree-lined boulevard, banners advertising its current exhibits adorning its facade. Vikings featured prominently upon them. She regarded the bearded warriors. ‘I guess they know what sells…’
They trotted across the chilly plaza to the main entrance, finding a member of staff and asking for Dr Skilfinger. They were expected; the rapid clacking of high heels barely a minute later heralded the arrival of their hostess. ‘Dr Wilde, hello!’ said the tall, slender blonde, her flustered air suggesting that she had hurried from the far side of the museum to meet them. ‘I’m Tova, Tova Skilfinger. It’s a great honour and pleasure to meet you.’ Though she had a strong accent, her English was perfect.