He knew the bullets were meant for him, but in the chaos they had ripped through his new bride, and left her dying in his arms on the sidewalk. Hawke had vowed revenge, but days after the attack a senior SBS officer had informed him the killer had died in an ambush by the Thai Special Forces in Bangkok, and so he was forever denied the closure of avenging his wife.
“What’s the matter, you don’t like beer?” Lea asked, handing him a bottle.
“Sorry, of course I do.” Hawke took the beer and downed half a bottle in one swig. “I’m going to grab a shower and then we should get something to eat while Rupert here translates the fragment.”
In the restaurant, Hawke bought Lea a steak and fries and they shared a bottle of wine. After she had drunk three glasses, Hawke asked her a question he’d had on his mind since the very beginning.
“Are you and Eden keeping something from me?”
She looked shocked and sat back in her chair. “I’m sorry?”
“Call me insane, but I’m sure there’s more to this whole business than meets the eye, or my eye, anyway.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“It’s like you’re holding something back from me — you and Richard.”
“Don't be silly, Joe.”
Hawke reconsidered. “It just seems like you seem to know more about this than I do. That’s all.”
“I told you, don't be silly.”
He took a sip of wine and put his hand on Lea’s but she pulled it away.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I just thought…”
“Forget it.”
“There’s someone else?”
Lea shook her head.
“You’re still in love with Ryan?” Hawke could hardly believe it was possible.
“Bloody hell, no. It’s nothing, really. Listen, it’s not you, Joe. I’m not ready for anything like this. Something happened to me, all right? Something a long time ago, and it nearly destroyed me. That’s part of the reason things didn’t work out with Ryan.”
“And I was thinking it was because he was an annoying little…”
“Please, Joe I’m trying to be serious here.”
“Forgive me,” he said sincerely.
“For your information, Ryan was actually very different when we were married. He was a very caring guy, you know? And so bright it’s scary — that much stayed the same, of course, but he changed after the divorce and in a way I blame myself for that. I think I wrecked his life when I divorced him. It’s all my fault you see…”
“You don’t have to tell me this.”
“Not now, no. But one day I will. And when I do, you have to promise me you won’t judge me.”
“That’s fair enough.”
“Tell me,” she asked. “Who is this mysterious Nightingale?”
“Just a woman.”
“How long have you known her?”
“I don’t think anyone truly knows her.”
“You know what I mean, Joe.”
“I was in Bosnia during the war — behind the lines, covert ops with a squadron of SAS and some US Delta Force. My squadron was teaching that lot a few things about covert warfare.”
“My God, you really do love yourself…”
“It was a lot of fun for a while. Then I was selected to go dark for a few months and infiltrate a group of Serbian radicals — my cover was being a journalist for an Argentine newspaper — I’m fluent in Spanish — and things were going well until my cover got blown.”
“It happens, I know…”
“We don’t know how it happened, but I lost all comms with my team. Agent Nightingale, who’d been supporting the Delta lads, literally talked me out of their interrogation HQ with a schematic of the building she had pulled up from somewhere. It took an hour, and we talked for a long time — it was her training to keep me calm, not that I needed that, of course, but it brought us together. She saved my life that night. We keep in touch, and that’s it.”
“But you’ve never met her?”
“Nope. All I know is she lives in New York. She’s a very private person and she has the skillset to keep it that way — I don’t even know her name. She makes J.D. Salinger look like an America’s Got Talent contestant.”
Lea laughed. “Well… she sounds mysterious to me.”
“All I know is she left the agency a couple of years ago and that she lives in New York City — that’s it.”
“But you want to know more about her?” she asked. Hawke now wondered why Lea was asking so many questions about her.
“Well, do you?” she repeated.
He shrugged his shoulders and took a sip of the wine.
Back at the hotel, Hawke checked the place over for anything suspicious, and then pulled a miniature vodka from the minibar before crashing on the bed and flicking the television on.
“Any progress with the golden arc, Ryan?” Lea asked.
“Er, so I worked it out, yeah,” he replied.
“You mean Google worked it out,” Hawke said, sitting up again.
Ryan sighed. “Do you want to know or not?”
Hawke smirked. “Hit me.”
“Don’t tempt me, Big Fella.”
“I would pay good money to see you try.” Hawke pulled twenty dollars out of his pocket and waved it in the younger man’s face.
“And I would pay for you both to shut the hell up,” Lea said. “Ryan, what’s the damned translation?”
“It’s cryptic, I'm afraid. It reads Beneath the Highest City, Where The Samian’s Sacred Work Shall Guide.”
“Oh, that is just bloody fantastic,” Hawke said. “More word games.”
“And it gets worse. It seems to me that the way this sentence was phrased and inscribed, it’s only a fragment of the original inscription.”
“How do you mean?”
“I think this fragment is only half of what should be some kind of golden disc — maybe even some kind of technical machinery, so somewhere is the other half, and on that half is the second part of this inscription.”
Hawke took a deep breath and walked to the window. He felt the vodka burning its way through him. He watched the traffic trundling along the street, stopping at red lights and moving off again when they turned green. A light flurry of snow blew down the street and dusted the sidewalks with a fine white powder. “I thought you said the word acropolis was on it?” he asked Ryan, thinking about the translation he had just read out.
“It is, acropolis means highest city.”
“I’ll let you off,” Hawke said, irritated he had let Ryan humiliate him in front of Lea. “Tell me — what did you mean, exactly, when you were talking about out-of-place artifacts?”
Ryan spun around and rubbed his hands together, clearly enjoying the research. Hawke didn’t imagine squatting in an abandoned paint factory, hacking computers for a living was much fun. “Many strange objects have been found that don’t belong — like this which was blown out of the side of a hill with some dynamite. Wait a sec…” He looked at the MacBook again. “Here it is — Meeting Horse Hill in Massachusetts. They discovered a metallic vase in the earth there in 1951.”
Hawke sat forward. “You’re telling me these things are actually real?”
“Some say so. Check this out.” He clicked his way to another page. “This is called the Dorchester Pot, it’s the classic out-of-place artifact.”
“What is it?”
“A sort of bell-shaped, metal vase.” Ryan began to read the information on the screen to Hawke and Lea. “According to this, it was extracted from the Roxbury Conglomerate, a form of puddingstone rock formation nearly six hundred million years old and it was recovered in two pieces, both of which now sit, again according to this, in an alarmed glass museum case in Zaugg’s library. Mainstream academics dismissed the pot finding as a Victorian hoax, but maybe Zaugg knew better.”