Suddenly the dark space was filled with bright daylight as Deprez smashed open a fire door and staggered out the back of the building. Hawke and Scarlet squinted as their eyes adjusted to the surprise change in light levels, but were soon after their man.
They found themselves in a narrow side street running parallel to the east side of the amusement park. It was a green, leafy space with a few cars parked here and there, and the rain had relented now to the same light drizzle they had experienced when they had arrived at the history museum.
“Where did he go?” Scarlet asked, searching both ends of the street.
“Judging from the blood, I’d say that way.” Hawke pointed at the south end of the street toward the boats moored in Waldemarsviken marina. Splashes of blood were smeared here and there on the concrete leading down toward the water.
They ran to the end of the street and quickly reached the waterline. Following the blood, they realized that Deprez had gone aboard what looked like some kind of tourist paddle boat.
“Quick!” Hawke said. “He’s cut the mooring ropes!”
The boat’s engines started up and it began to move forward in the sound. Hawke and Scarlet jumped from the jetty to the boat’s wooden stern and were welcomed aboard by a burst of gunfire from Deprez’s pistol.
They dived for cover and then returned fire at the wounded man blasting the wheelhouse windows to shards. Deprez dodged the bullets and fired back blindly like a man possessed, but he was caught like a trapped pig and he knew it. Whatever plans he thought he had of escaping off the island on a boat had gone badly wrong and now it was time to pay for the error in judgement.
In a panic now, the Belgian fired a shot through the front window of the wheelhouse and clambered away from his pursuers toward the front of the boat.
Hawke and Scarlet drove him forward with their superior firepower until he had run out of space and had nowhere to run.
“Get back!” he screamed at them, waving his gun.
“Just drop the weapon, Deprez!” Hawke shouted, his gun aimed at the Belgian’s head. “You can’t take us both down before one of us takes you out and you know it.”
“Do as he says,” Scarlet said. “The last time I shot someone on the bow of a boat it was the President of the United States so don’t think I’d think twice about wasting a round on little crap like you.”
Deprez tossed his gun to the ground but pulled a knife and held the blade to the axe handle. “Come any closer and I’ll cut these precious carvings off the handle, then no one finds the tomb!”
Scarlet glanced at Hawke, but the Englishman didn’t bat an eyelid. “Put the axe down, Deprez. I’ll kill you before you can move that blade an inch.”
Deprez called his bluff, and pushed the blade into the handle, but Hawke was true to his word, firing at the man’s chest. He struck him in the heart and sent him staggering backwards with a look of confused terror spreading across his face.
He tottered backwards over the rail at the stem of the bow, his arms flailing wildly in a last vain attempt to save his life, but it was too late.
Scarlet raised her gun and fired at him, striking him dead-center in the forehead and powering him over the boat into the dark water of the sound. He landed with a tremendous splash and began to float away from the shore.
“Where did you learn to shoot a moving target like that, Cairo?” Hawke said, strolling to the starboard side aft lazarette. He picked up a mooring hook and walked back to the bow.
“In a fairground,’ she said with a wink as Hawke pulled the floating axe handle through the water toward the boat. A few yards beyond it, Marcus Deprez’s body bobbed up and down in the wake of a long, glass-roofed sightseeing boat. Some of the people aboard pointed in horror at the corpse and others whipped out their phones to film the scene as Scarlet proudly extended her middle finger at them, accompanied by a polite smile and bow of the head.
Hawke rolled his eyes as he manipulated the hook in the water, dragging the ancient relic closer to the paddle boat. “We’ve got to get back to the others,” he said, finally hefting the ancient axe handle from the water. “Ryan needs to get to work on this thing — presuming he’s all right that is.”
As he finished speaking he looked up to see Deprez’s corpse getting sucked into the blades at the back of the tourist boat. A terrible grinding sound ensued and then the water turned a deep crimson color as it filled with the dead man’s blood.
“That’s for Vincent and Ryan,” Hawke said without emotion, and then turned to leave.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Her mind was now focussed on nothing but the fateful mission ahead of her.
Lexi Zhang slid her hand along the pipe guard railing as she skipped down the steps and made her way to the wheelhouse. From the crow’s nest of the modest trawler, she had studied the silhouette of the small island known to a tiny elite as Elysium, but now they were closing in and it was time to shut down the engines.
Federico had been fishing these waters for most of his life and had nodded casually when she showed him the coordinates. “Isla privada…” he had said with a nonchalant shrug of the shoulders.
“Si,” she had said. “Don’t worry about.” She checked the fisherman’s tired eyes to see if he had understood her broken Castilian. It was all she had, and no matter how many subjunctives she mangled it was better than poor Federico’s English. After deciding his Mandarin was probably even worse, she made another sentence in her Spanish.
“Veinte minutos,” he said in reply with an apologetic smile.
He lit up an ancient-looking pipe and leaned against the rickety navigation panel as he blew the cloud of sweet-smelling tobacco into the hot air. He resumed the story about how he had inherited his father’s gambling debts and not for the first time Lexi wondered if she shouldn’t just shoot him and give him to the sharks, but that wouldn’t be fair she thought. Not on the sharks, at any rate.
She decided to get some fresh air and stepped out onto the deck. Slowly the old boat creaked forward in the water and drew her ever closer to her mission. She wondered if she should check the weapons again, but she’d already done it more times than she could remember. This wasn’t like her, but then this wasn’t like a regular mission.
Now, Lexi swayed softly with the gentle rocking of the boat as it drifted a mile off-shore in the darkness of night. There was a calm stillness to the ocean she had loved since she was a small child and this was about as smooth as things got. Here in what sailors called the intertropical convergence zone the trades could drop away and leave a sailing boat lost at sea for what might be as good as eternity.
She looked up into the sky and noted the full moon. A mistake on her part, but not one that would stop her doing her business tonight. A little way to the moon’s left, Jupiter hung silently in the sky. She stared at the tiny cream disc until the motion of the boat began to make her feel uneasy. It was time to go.
As the engines puttered to silence, Lexi paid Federico the second half of his fee. He took hold of the heavy brown envelope with a sweaty hand and peered inside. Smirking and nodding with satisfaction, he unfastened a small rowing boat at the rear of the trawler and pushed it into the water.
He held its mooring rope tightly in his hands. “This is where we part company,” he said in Spanish.
Lexi understood and climbed into the small boat with her tool bag over her shoulder. A few seconds later she was rowing gently to the high cliffs on the west coast of the island, and Federico started up his engines and steered the boat back to port. Now she was on her own.