He turned once again to Ryan. “You think you can make any sense of it, mate?”
Ryan picked up the portrait and studied it for a few seconds before turning it over carefully in his hands. “I don’t know… there’s nothing on the back, and the front offers us no clues at all other than a simple image of a woman sitting on a riverbank beside what looks to me like a peach tree. That’s our obvious starting point.”
“Why is the tree an obvious starting point?” said Lea.
“The peach is an ancient symbol of immortality in Chinese folklore,” Ryan said, repeating to the others what he had already told Sophie. “Seems to me that when Sheng had his men spray the name Lei Gong — the immortal God of Thunder — on the side of the ship carrying the Tesla device, he kind of showed his hand to the world. Whatever he’s up to it’s probably a lot worse than just causing an earthquake somewhere.”
Scarlet blew a cloud of cigarette smoke into the air. “A lot worse than killing millions of innocent people?”
“You can’t mean another fruit-loop like Zaugg?” Lea asked.
“I think so, yes,” Ryan said. “Only much worse.”
A knock at the door.
“Who the hell is that?” Lea said.
Hawke shrugged his shoulders and cautiously checked the spy hole. He laughed loudly and swung open the door. Moments later he and Olivia Hart were hugging in the hall of the plush hotel suite.
“The Return of the Commodore Heroes,” Ryan said.
“Eh?” Hawke said.
“Forget it.”
“You weren’t sent by Richard Eden?” Lea asked, suspicious.
“Of course not!” Hart said. “Hawke called me.”
The senior naval officer settled in and took a long look at the portrait.
“This is all we have to go on,” Hawke said, and then gave her the full briefing on what had happened since their arrival in the Far East.
Ryan cracked open a beer from the minibar. “We now think this Sheng nutcase has bigger ideas than just triggering an earthquake somewhere.”
“Then you’d be right,” Hart said. “After you called me, Joe, I spoke with a contact in the Ministry of Defence. There’s a lot of confusion there at the moment, but they’ve gotten hold of some chatter linking Sheng with Hugo Zaugg — for sure, no speculation this time.”
“Zaugg?” Hawke said, stunned. “What the hell has he got to do with anything? The last time I saw him he was falling to his death from a Swiss cable car.”
Lea shuddered. “And Amen to that.”
“We’re not sure,” Hart said, “but we think maybe Zaugg was either working with Sheng or even for him. Sheng has considerably more wealth and power than even Zaugg had, and he would have been able to finance a much more expansive project in terms of searching for…”
“Searching for the secret to eternal life?” Hawke said.
Hart nodded grimly. “I think so, but that’s all we have so far.”
“It’s all we need,” Scarlet said, rejoining them from the balcony and sliding the door shut.
“What do you mean?” Lexi asked.
“I mean, who cares about the details? We know Sheng Fang is a very unpleasant individual who trafficks vulnerable people around the world and hides it behind his telecom company. We now know he was pulling Zaugg’s strings in search of the vault of Poseidon and the real treasure that was supposed to be inside it — the map.”
“The map!” Ryan said. ‘Exactly! Sheng is looking for the map!”
“And he needs this portrait to find it,” Lea said, staring at the enigmatic little picture. “But the question is — why?”
Hawke thought that was a very good question indeed. He recalled Sir Richard Eden’s debriefing back in Sion when he and the tight-lipped British Foreign Secretary Matheson had told them it was possible Zaugg was working for another agency. Could it be possible that agency was Sheng Fang, one of China’s richest men? It seemed as plausible as any other explanation in this new mad world he had found himself thrown into. “Why, indeed,” he finally said, staring at the voiceless Xi Shi. She stared back at him, coy, prudish almost, sitting there beside her peach tree and the gently flowing river, all those thousands of years ago.
Scarlet gently nodded and scowled at the portrait. “Come on, everyone! We must be able to work this out. There’s five intelligent people in here — six if you count Lexi.”
Lexi gave her a sideways glance but made no reply. The look she gave her was worth a thousand words.
Sophie rubbed her eyes — she too had nothing to offer.
“Give me a minute,” Ryan said, and got his laptop fired up. “Let’s get stuck into some hard research.”
“I love it when the boy talks dirty,” Scarlet said.
Hawke watched Ryan as his fingers tapped furiously on the keyboard. “You have an idea?”
“It’s a long shot, but I remember reading something about Pliny the Elder back in Hoffmann’s research.”
“And how’s that going to help us, Ryan?” Lea said. The frustration in her voice was rising.
“If anyone in here spent their spare time reading grown-up books instead of playing Mission Impossible video games someone might have already worked out what I was talking about, but as it is, you don’t, so you’ll just have to wait while I check something out.”
Hawke kept tight-lipped, not wanting to fall out with Ryan at such a critical time. He didn’t fancy having to beg him to continue with his research. And he happened to like Mission Impossible video games. To Hawke, reading about ancient language noun declensions was the truly suspect pastime, not kicking ass on cool video games, but it was a wide world.
“Ah ha!” Ryan shouted, suddenly energized by something he had read on the laptop screen.
“What is it, Ryan?” Lea asked.
“Pliny the Elder — I knew it all along! It’s been bothering me since I first read a reference Hoffmann had made to him, which to me seemed incongruous in light of the main body of his research.”
Lea sighed with frustration. “Bring it back to the moment, Ryan.”
“Oh, sure. Sorry.” Ryan pushed his glasses up on the bridge of his nose and carried on with his explanation. “Pliny the Elder wrote about hiding secret messages back in the ancient world. Long before digital encryption people still wanted to conceal messages in plain sight — lemon juice is a somewhat hackneyed example of this.”
“Exactly what I’ve always thought,” Lea said, rolling her eyes.
“And what does lemon juice have to do with Sheng Fang stealing a portrait?”
“That is the central question!” Ryan said. “And it is the key to everything.”
“So could we have the key please, boy?” said Scarlet.
“As I said, lemon juice is rather a rudimentary method of concealing a message, and not that great, but there were other, cleverer methods.”
“Like what?” Hawke said. This was why Ryan was on the payroll.
“This is where Pliny the Elder comes in. Way back in the mists of time when Pliny was writing, he wrote about the use of milk of tithymalus.”
“The milk of what?” Lexi said.
“Tithymalus,” Ryan said. “It’s part of the euphorbia genus — a spurge.”
Hawke smiled. “Still not with you, mate.”
“It’s a very diverse genus of plants covering everything from Madagascan cacti to your average Christmas poinsettia.”
Lea glared at her former husband. “Sure, but what’s it got to do with this sodding picture, Ryan?”
“Ah! I thought that would be the next question.” Ryan got up from the laptop and asked Scarlet for one of her cigarettes.
“You’re not finally starting to become fun, are you boy?”
Ryan looked from Scarlet to the cigarette and back to Scarlet. “This? You have to be joking! You take three minutes off your life with every suck.”