“Joe!”
He was startled back in reality. It was Scarlet. “Earth calling Joe!”
“Sorry, I was lost in the past for a second.”
“Well, snap out of it and help me look for something that can help us out here, would you?”
He smiled, and began to go through Demetriou’s filing cabinet, taking less than ten seconds to tip it backwards and pop open the lock via the little hole on the base. Inside were hundreds of files all written in Greek. Hawke couldn’t read a word of it. French and Spanish yes, German maybe, but Greek, no.
“This is no good,” he said. “We’re not getting anywhere. For all we know Zaugg’s already got what he wants and Demetriou’s dead.”
“We have no choice,” Scarlet said sharply. “We have to keep looking. We can’t risk another innocent death.”
Another innocent death, Hawke thought.
The day after their wedding they flew to Hanoi. Their honeymoon was supposed to be four weeks long, taking in the Imperial City in Vietnam, Angkor Wat in Cambodia and the Grand Palace in Thailand before spending a week on a beach on Ko Samui. It was going to be the start of their lives together.
They had only been in Hanoi one day when it happened.
Liz stepped inside the bar to buy two bottles of beer and returned with one in each hand, smiling. She set them down and took a picture of Hawke. He picked up the camera and took one of the two of them together. The original selfie.
And then they arrived.
Two people on a moped. A driver and an assassin, both wearing helmets.
They turned the corner, no different to any of the other few dozen mopeds flying around, but as they drove past the bar they slowed for a second. The assassin on the back pulled what looked to Hawke like an old Chinese PLA CF05 submachine gun from a satchel slung over the shoulder and fired very deliberately in the direction of Hawke and Liz.
They were fish in a barrel, but his reaction was lightning. He tipped up the metal table to use as a shield, sending beer bottles and peanuts flying into the air as bullets sprayed up the wall behind them, smashing all the windows and blasting holes out of the flimsy door. People screamed and ran for their lives.
And then he saw Liz, on the pavement, blood running through her t-shirt, streaming from her mouth. It was as fast and simple as that to take someone’s life, he thought.
Hawke gently shook his head at the memory — his way of trying to rub it out. He had learned to suppress the bad memories that haunt people’s lives as a young man. He had joined the marines as a way of getting out into the world and proving himself, of getting away from his mess of a life. But he knew in his heart that you never got rid of a memory like that of Liz dying in his arms. That was here to stay, a permanent ghost.
At first he had tried to console himself with the idea of savage revenge, of tracking down the scumbag that had tried to kill him and instead murdered his wife, but then even that tiny shred of hope was broken when his former CO, Commander Olivia Hart, had told him the hitman was Alfredo Lazaro, a Cuban mercenary hired by an unknown agency to take Hawke out of the game permanently.
Hart claimed to have been given the intel directly by the Secretary of Defence himself. She also told him Lazaro had been killed a few days later in a strip club in the Patpong district of Bangkok in a raid orchestrated by Thai Special Forces. That was the last anyone ever talked about it and his old life went up in smoke.
“For God’s sake what is the matter with you?”
Scarlet again. This time her face suggested he should definitely stop daydreaming about the past.
“Sorry. What have you found?” he asked.
“There’s someone coming,” she whispered. She gently closed the door and stepped back into the office. “He’ll be here in just a few seconds.”
“Who is it?”
“Funnily enough, Joe, it's Zeus himself, and he wants to know why you’re such an arse.”
Hawke opened his mouth to reply, but closed it a second later when the door opened.
“What is going on in here?”
A short, dark-haired man with a thick moustache was standing in the door. He looked at them for a short moment and then spoke again: “Who are you people, and why are you in my office?”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
“You’re Professor Yannis Demetriou?” Hawke asked.
“Of course, and this is my office. Now I ask again — who are you and why are you here?”
Hawke and Scarlet shared a quick glance before returning their eyes to Demetriou. He looked pretty upset that they had broken in to his personal space and were going through his files. Hawke guessed he wouldn’t exactly be over the moon about Ryan trawling through his home computer back at his apartment.
“We thought you’d been kidnapped,” Scarlet said.
“Kidnapped?” snapped Demetriou. “What are you talking about? There was an emergency at my sister’s house. What is going on here?!”
“I think we need to start again,” Hawke said.
They explained everything they knew about the vault of Poseidon, Hugo Zaugg and even their encounters with Kaspar Vetsch back in New York and Geneva. Eventually, Demetriou calmed down, and asked a member of the museum staff to bring them coffee.
“It’s good finally to meet someone who doesn’t think we’re crazy,” said Scarlet.
Demetriou smiled. “Poseidon’s tomb — or as the ancient writers often called it, the Vault of Poseidon — is a crazy concept in most people’s eyes, but not in mine. I have always had an open mind, and never stopped believing in the existence of the tomb.”
“I still can’t get my head around the fact that Poseidon was real,” Hawke said. “I thought he was a god.”
“But the two terms are not mutually exclusive,” Demetriou replied. “How do we know what god is? How do we know he has not walked among us? This is what Christians teach, after all, so why is is not possible to extend such a thought to the ancient gods?”
“It still sounds like a load of tripe to me,” Scarlet said. “I’m just here to shoot people.”
“No! Our modern Western minds are programmed to see polytheism as an antiquated concept, but the principle is the same. There is no reason why Poseidon, Thor, Mars or any of the other gods could not have been real and walked the earth! Today in Greece we even have the phenomenon of dodekatheism, an attempt to revive the worship of these ancient gods!”
“But gods are immortal,” Hawke said flatly, still finding it hard to accept he was really having this conversation. “And if they are immortal, then why are they not alive today?”
“This depends on your understanding of immortality. It could refer simply to the memory of them living on forever, as history shows has happened. Or, it could mean they are immortal in the spirit world. Others would argue that immortality does not mean one cannot be killed, merely that one would live forever if left unharmed.”
“And what do you think, professor?”
“For all I know, they could still be alive!”
Hawke laughed. “You can't be serious.”
“Why not? They could be walking among us now, out there, on the street. Thousands of years old — maybe millions of years old, endlessly wise, omniscient, omnipotent, and, of course, immortal!”
“And if they were, then their powers would be limitless.”
“But gods know how to wield their powers, Mr Hawke. The same cannot be said for most men.” Demetriou stopped and shook his head in wonder once again. “This is all too good to be true. I have spent much of my life trying to find it, but never got anywhere as close as this. It shames me. Are you saying you actually have some kind of real, concrete evidence of the tomb, at last?”