“Your Zippo is required again, Cairo.”
Scarlet fired her lighter up and joined Hawke at the front.
“Thanks.”
“Don’t mention it. We have to get out of here, darlings and it’s this way! I see light!”
Scarlet led the way in the gloom using only her lighter for illumination, and they made their way along the carved rock tunnel until reaching another small cavern, only this time it was the real thing. Ahead of them they saw the unmistakable sight of moonlight in a narrow fissure in the rock face outside. Hawke estimated they were halfway between Sala’s morbidly theatrical snake pit and freedom.
“I think we’re almost there,” he said.
But then they turned the corner and a terrible vision of torture and suffering met their eyes.
“What the hell is that?” Scarlet said, horrified.
Vincent recoiled in shock.
Hawke looked at the far wall in the cavern and saw what had once been a man was now strung up on the slimy rock face. They moved slowly over to him and by the light of Scarlet’s Zippo they were able now to see something that horrified all of them. It was obviously a human skeleton, but pieces of flesh were hanging from parts of the frame here and there, and what looked like a desiccated heart was snagged on the bottom of a badly deteriorated rib cage. In a hideous kind of grim mockery, there were still two shoes on its feet and above its head was a strange apparatus involving a bowl and a burned out candle was in a lantern on a nearby table.
“That’s not nice at all,” Lea said, covering her mouth.
Vincent made the sign of the cross. “Mon dieu…”
Hawke leaned in closer, the terrifying decayed corpse flickering in the warm glow of the lighter flame. “You know what I’m thinking?”
“That at least he died with his boots on?” Scarlet said.
Hawke gave her a look. “No, funnily enough I was not thinking that.”
“Then do enlighten us.”
Lea spoke next, her voice trembling in the damp cave. “I think I know what you’re thinking, Joe.”
“Oh, someone just tell me!” Scarlet said.
Lea spoke next. “That what’s left of this guy has more than a passing resemblance to what old Maxim Vetrov ended up looking like.”
Hawke nodded grimly.
That is exactly what he was thinking.
“And what do we make of that?” Scarlet said. “That we’re looking at the corpse of someone who tried to take the elixir?”
Hawke shook his head. “I’m not sure of anything anymore. All I know is we need to get the other half of this axe before Álvaro Sala gets his grubby hands on it. If this is how he treats people now, just imagine what he’ll do when he gets hold of whatever power’s lurking in Thor’s tomb. His hammer alone could have unimaginable powers.”
And with that sobering thought, they made their way out onto the mountainside and called the chopper up from El Serrat.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
After clearing customs at Bromma Stockholm Airport the ECHO team, plus Vincent and Victoria jumped into a hired Toyota Hilux and drove east to the city as fast as they could. It was a little before morning rush hour and Hawke was surprised by the easy flow of the traffic as they left Kungsholmen and crossed the bridge by the famous Town Hall on their way into central Stockholm.
Joe Hawke slowed the Hilux and looked suspiciously along the Centralbron which snaked away to the south. It divided the main island of Gamla stan, or Old Town, and the small ‘Knights’ Islet’ known to locals as Riddarholmen. He knew there was little chance of finding Sala in a city of this size, but there was a good chance he was somewhere in the vicinity of the history museum.
They passed the Sheraton on Tegelbacken and spent a tense few moments at some red lights opposite the Aftonbladet tabloid newspaper building. The view to their right overlooked the harbor, and was framed by the famous Riddarholm Church, the burial place of the Swedish monarchs.
Beyond that the impressive prospect of Södermalm stretched up into the gray Scandinavian sky. Closer to their truck, a young woman opened up a small café on the ground floor of the Aftonbladet building and set out some chairs and tables, promising another day of cinnamon buns and fika to an unsuspecting citizenry. It was a beautiful scene, but after letting Sala and the repulsive Smets slip through their fingers back in Andorra, Hawke was more on-edge than usual.
The lights turned green and he rolled the Hilux gently forward in the traffic until he was a few yards from the rear fender of a metropolitan bus trundling east on Fredsgatan. The bus stopped outside a department store and Hawke overtook it and emerged from the side street into Gustav Adolfs torg, a smart public square named after Gustav II, the 17th king who established Sweden as a major European power after winning the Thirty Years War. Hawke glanced momentarily at the statue of the old king, high on his horse and pointing his sword imperiously at the kungliga, or Royal Palace at the other end of the Norrbro bridge.
“Hope all this still standing when we fly out,” Scarlet mused.
They drove around the square’s roundabout, passing the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Royal Opera building before making their way along Strömgatan and passing into Östermalm. This was Stockholm’s answer to London’s Mayfair or New York’s SoHo, and boasted the most expensive property prices in the whole of Sweden. It was also where the Swedish History Museum was located, and after parking up in a side street to the south of the museum, Hawke and the others emerged into the Stockholm summer drizzle and crossed the street.
They headed toward the entrance, a modest affair beneath a sign which read HISTORISKA MUSEET when they heard the sound of a single gunshot and then a woman’s desperate scream.
Hawke looked at the others. “We’re too late!”
Scarlet unceremoniously yanked a gun from her jacket. “So let’s get in there, Tonto!”
They slipped through the entrance and quickly worked out the scream had come from the Viking History section. No one was surprised about that, and they ran there as fast as they could in stark contrast to the hundreds of members of the public who were running for the exits.
A security alarm began to trill loudly down all of the corridors and outside Hawke heard the faint and familiar sound of police sirens. “Things are about to get lively here — we have to hurry.”
They ran up a flight of stairs and along another short corridor before reaching the Viking History section, but when they got there what they saw chilled them. A man in a museum uniform was lying dead on the floor and another man was holding a terrified woman in a similar uniform hostage with a knife at her throat. Marcus Deprez and Dasha Vetrov were standing behind him. Hawke could still see the gash on his temple where he had struck him with the shoe back in Andorra.
“Where’s your organ grinder?” Hawke asked, noticing no sign of either Sala or Smets.
“No closer,” Deprez said. “Or my man here will tear open her throat.”
Victoria took a step back and gasped in horror, but Ryan put his hand on her shoulder to calm her. “Take it easy — it’s just a bluff.”
Dasha blew a large purple bubble. It popped in her mouth and then she spat the wad of gum on the polished tiled floor before sliding a fresh piece in her mouth. She spoke in rapid Russian.
“She says,” Deprez drawled, “that you killed her brother and she will torture you to death for it.”
Hawke didn’t reply, but carefully weighed the situation up. Deprez was standing next to a display of Viking weapons, specifically a large stainless steel and glass case holding axe handles.
“Tell her it’s a date,” Hawke said.
Deprez said nothing but pulled a gun from his pocket and put the butt of the weapon through the top of the case. He smashed the glass into hundreds of razor-sharp shards. “You let me leave with this or we’ll kill her.”