No response.
Bill pulled out a tin box and blew a thick layer of dust off the lid. “What you want is in here, and may God forgive me for what I have done today.” The look of disgust he gave Nate Derby was worth a thousand words.
He opened the box and in a second pulled an old Smith & Wesson on the men. He aimed it at the man with the tattoo and fired.
Nothing happened.
Bill looked down at the jammed gun with horror on his face.
They all laughed, and Grenade Tattoo knocked the weapon from his hand. It landed with a loud smack on the floorboards.
“Now, we do it my way,” Grenade Tattoo said, and struck Bill in the face with the butt of his submachine gun.
The old man staggered backwards, knocking over one of the cases and sending old fishing hooks all over the floor.
“No, wait!” Derby shouted. “We agreed no one would get harmed.”
“Shut up!” The woman shouted. She blew a large purple bubblegum bubble and it popped all over her lips.
Bill spat out a wad of blood as he staggered back to his feet. “All right… all right. What you are looking for is in there.” He pointed a shaking hand to a grille on the wall which was used to pull warm return-air from the small room and send it back to the furnace downstairs. His long-planned feint had failed to save what he had protected for most of his life.
Grenade Tattoo ordered the woman forward. She scowled at Smith as she walked past him, raised her machine pistol and blasted the grille and a good chunk of the plasterboard surrounding it to oblivion.
“Get it, old man,” Grenade Tattoo commanded. “Any more tricks and you’re dead.”
Bill Smith put his hand in the hole and pulled out a small leather bag which he handed to the woman. She snatched it from his trembling hand and passed it back to Grenade Tattoo.
He opened it at once and whistled in awe. Several long moments passed as the man with the grenade tattoo stared at the tiny beads now in his hand, barely able to believe what he was seeing — or more accurately what he wasn’t seeing. Instead of seeing his palm, he was looking at the floorboards of the museum directly beneath it. It looked like he had a hole in his hand. He smiled and shook his head gently in wonder as he tried to make sense of what his eyes were telling him.
Smith wheezed as his asthma began to worsen. “If you’re on the trail of the Invisible One, it will lead only to your painful deaths.”
Grenade Tattoo ignored him and continued to stare at the strange beads, utterly fixated. Without looking at Bill Smith, he raised his machine pistol and fired a burst of bullets into him, tearing his chest apart and smashing him back into the shredded plasterboard behind him. He slumped slowly to the floor stone cold dead, leaving a trail of his blood smeared down the wall behind him as he went.
Derby staggered back in horror, unable to believe what his eyes had just seen. “What the hell did you do that for?”
“For the same reason I’m going to do this.” He raised his pistol and aimed it at Derby’s heart.
“What are you doing? Wait, please… don’t shoot! We agreed…”
Grenade Tattoo fired twice and Derby crumpled to the floor beside Bill Smith.
“All right, we’re out of here,” he said.
The woman put her boot on Bill’s blood-soaked chest to tighten one of the straps and then picked up her gun. She blew another cherry-flavored bubble and giggled. “Back to the chopper!” she screamed.
Both of them left the museum, their boots crunching on the broken glass and Mi’kmaq artefacts as they went. Outside, the rotors began to whir faster as the pilot powered up ready for takeoff.
A storm was blowing in off the Atlantic as they climbed inside the chopper, and a heavy rainfall began just as they lifted off the ground and spun the airborne machine around. Seconds later the mighty helicopter was blowing the old clapboard museum into matchwood with liberal use of the M230 Chain Gun mounted on its chin turret.
Moments later the building was ablaze, and the helicopter disappeared up into the thick gray clouds, gone forever.
CHAPTER ONE
“Afraid you’ll lose?” Joe Hawke said, revving the Yamaha WaveRunner jet ski and giving Lea Donovan the smuggest of all possible smiles. He shaded his eyes from the tropical Caribbean sun with his hand and watched as a look of amused indifference crossed the Irishwoman’s slim, tanned face.
Lea ignored the comment and studied the curve of the bay. “So, first one around the island wins, yeah?”
Hawke slipped on his shades and nodded confidently. “That’s what we agreed. If you want to back out then just say so.”
Lea revved her Kawasaki Jet Ski in response. “You’ve got to be joking, Josiah. Playtime’s over, baby.”
The use of his full name was met with raucous laughter from Ryan Bale and Maria Kurikova. They were sitting on the pier a few yards behind the jet skis. Hawke smirked at them, pleased his name could bring so much amusement to the group. It didn’t bother him in the least. Over the last few days he had settled easily into a playful sort of life on Elysium — hiking, swimming, diving and his favorite — playing around on jet skis.
“So are we going for it or not?” asked Lea.
Without saying another word Hawke raced away, taking care to cover Ryan and Maria in a heavy spray of sea water from the discharge nozzle at the back of the WaveRunner.
“Hey — no fair, you cheat!” Lea called out, and immediately raced after him. She was parallel within seconds.
“Frightened I’m going to win?” he shouted over his shoulder to her.
“Not a bit of it,” she called back, her voice barely audible over the roar of the 1.8 litre engine. She turned the throttle and the fuel-injected 4-stroke responded straight away, pulling her through the warm ocean effortlessly.
“We’ll see about that,” Hawke said with a grin, and took off once again in another burst of sea spray.
He raced across the bay to the northeast of the island, cutting across the shallow water in a diagonal path and heading out to where a low cliff jutted into the sea. Thousands of years of hydraulic action had eroded a beautiful archway into this part of the cliff, which as he accelerated toward it, Hawke noted with excitement was about the same size as a jet ski. In another thousand years it would collapse leaving a stack separated from the headland and towering up out of the sea, but today it made a perfect tunnel to zoom through. He raced toward it.
It was just after midday now and the air was hot and humid. To his right he was aware of the looming presence of the island — the tropical canopies stretching over the twin mountains and the sparkling glass and steel structure that formed ECHO headquarters. Behind him he heard the roar of Lea’s Kawasaki as she closed in on him, determined to beat him around the island and win the race.
He ducked his head as he powered the WaveRunner through the hole in the cliff and steered hard to the right. The hot wind buffeted him as he turned south and accelerated the machine to its maximum of just under seventy miles per hour.
Glancing behind him, he was impressed to see Lea had taken the same shortcut through the erosion hole. He watched as she steered the Jet Ski to the right and leaned over to expedite its turn in the warm water. He knew how much she wanted to win and show him that he wasn’t just going to waltz down here to the island and show everyone how everything was done. He knew that she considered winning to be a serious business — almost as serious as losing, he thought.
He was now reaching the end of the southwest tip of the island and turning north for the final part of the race. Ahead was the home-straight, where a slightly intoxicated Ryan Bale had promised to wave in the winner of the race.