The island rose up before her, its craggy tropical cliffs looming higher than she’d expected — but this was the last place anyone would attempt an insertion on Elysium and so that was the plan.
When she was fifty feet from the shore she used one of the oars to test the depth of the water and it was just as she expected — knee high and an inviting twenty degrees. She retracted the oars and secured them in the rowlocks before pulling her bag of tricks from beneath the sternsheets and shouldering it. Then, she stepped into the ocean and walked silently to the shore in the moonlight, dragging the boat behind her with the mooring rope.
After securing the boat to a lonely coconut palm in the breaker zone, she took a deep breath and tilted her head back to survey the cliffs towering above her. Then she pulled on a pair of crag gloves and began to ascend the sharp, vertical rocks. Also as she had expected, this was the sort of classic volcanic cliff that was so common to this part of the world, and especially on a former volcanic island such as Elysium.
She struggled onwards and upwards, the heavy weight of the weapons in her bag pulling on her back all the way. She used a heel hook to get some pressure on a hold, and then a few yards from the top she gripped what she thought was a secure arête, but then it broke loose and she swung wildly to her left. She hung on for her life with one hand as the treacherous piece of cliff tumbled the few hundred feet to the beach below and smashed into the moonlit surf.
Lexi strained to keep her grip as she swung her right hand up and grabbed hold of another small ridge. She balanced her bodyweight and used a move known to climbers as a gaston where she pushed her thumb down into a crag and forced her elbow out in order to push herself upwards just enough to reach a more secure hold. She sighed with relief. She was too high to bail out now, she thought, and kept on going.
Finally she crawled onto the top of the cliff and took a second to get her breath back. Looking behind her, she was able to make out the faint silhouette of Federico’s boat as he steamed toward the horizon. Ahead of her Elysium stretched out, majestic and tranquil. From one of the highest points on the island she was able to survey everything. She put a night-vision monocular to her eye and began to study the facts.
Directly below her, on the eastern slopes of her conquered mountain, she saw what looked like the western perimeter of the ECHO complex. Standard fare, she thought without emotion — it looked like a razorwire fence, clearly electrified by the solar-powered chargers and insulators she could see — and by the looks of the photodetectors and mirrors she thought she could spy a laser tripwire alarm just inside the perimeter fence as well. She expected nothing less.
I wonder, she contemplated with interest, exactly what Richard Eden keeps hidden away in this place?
She made her way down the slope, weaving in and out of the tropical undergrowth. In places it was so thick she was forced to hack her way clear with a machete. At times like this, she thought, was it all worth it? What was it that drove her onward through the night like this, so far from her family and the comfort of home? Ah yes, she thought… I remember now.
But she wasn’t here to reminisce. She brought her attention back to the mission. This was about settling old scores and righting old wrongs. Ever since Joe Hawke had run into her life again back in Hong Kong she knew this day was inevitable. It was just the way things were with her and sometimes she felt like she couldn’t stop herself even if she wanted to.
At the bottom of the mountain she stopped again and refocussed. Her mind was buzzing with a mix of adrenalin and dopamine as she went through her mission plan once again — it was always like this… When the hunt was getting hot and the victims’ end drawing closer, only this time there were so many differences. This time there could be no going back, and she knew it. For a second, she felt her heart waver — was she really going to go through with this?
Yes, she said, newly determined and pushing all doubt from her mind. She was a highly trained assassin and this mission was a cakewalk, not to mention the new life she would have after it. Her mission objective was sitting down there somewhere in a secret, luxury compound in this paradise, and it was time to reintroduce them all to the Dragonfly.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Hawke stared suspiciously out of the window of the hotel and across the harbor to the north. After retrieving the axe handle from the newly dispatched Marcus Deprez they had booked into the Hilton Hotel Stockholm Slussen on Guldgränd on the north shore of the island of Södermalm.
Known to Stockholmares simply as “Söder”, it was one of the busiest districts in the whole of Scandinavia. Once a slum, now a gentrified, bohemian quarter full of expensive, minimalist coffee shops and dense traffic, all Hawke knew about the place was that they weren’t safe here.
Deprez was out of the game, having retired permanently from being a bastard back on the south coast of Djurgården, but Álvaro Sala and his chief goon, the hit man from Brussels Leon Smets were still out there somewhere, and now they would be wasting no time searching for the axe handle. It was their only way to reach Thor’s tomb and he was sure a man like Sala wouldn’t give up until he was dead.
Even worse news was Vincent Reno. When the paramedics had arrived he’d been in a bad way and they’d rushed him to Södersjukhuset, a large hospital not far from the museum where he had been shot by Deprez. According to the latest reports he hadn’t regained consciousness on the way to the hospital and was now undergoing an emergency life-saving operation.
According to the paramedics, Ryan had been much luckier than Vincent and the bullet had just missed his humerus. The speeding lead projectile had instead torn through his bicep. It was painful, but some Alvedons and a lot of bandages had reduced the burning sensation and there would be no permanent damage.
“Are you okay, Joe?” Lea asked.
Hawke nodded sullenly.
“What happened to Deprez?” she asked.
“He’s definitely not playing any more,” Hawke said.
“He seemed pretty cut up about it, actually,” Scarlet said, lighting a cigarette. She blew a cloud of smoke out of the window and shook her head in confusion. “Is it obligatory to have a bicycle and a beard in this town, or what?”
“Eh?” Hawke looked up, distracted.
“Nothing, and can we get a sodding balcony next time so I can smoke without setting the buggering alarms off?”
“Yeah, let me make a note,” Lea said. “Because that’s the most important thing we have to think about at the moment.”
“All right, we need to focus,” said Hawke, turning to face the others. He stopped when he saw Scarlet at the drinks cabinet and rolled his eyes. “Really, at this time of the day?”
A gentle clink of ice cubes and a sip of the vodka followed before her response. “I’m on Caribbean time, darling.”
“It is a little early,” Victoria said, a look of serious concern on her face as she glanced at her watch.
Scarlet stared at the woman until she looked away and then took another sip.
“Why is it that you can always find a time-zone to justify it?” Ryan said.
She winked and lit a cigarette. “What can I say? It improves my aim.”
Victoria frowned. “Perhaps a coffee would be more appropriate?”
Scarlet raised an eyebrow but made no reply, restricting her response to another drag on the cigarette before leaning out the window and blowing a second cloud of the hot, blue smoke into the air.
Ryan watched her for a moment and shook his head with a sigh. “You must be responsible for more carbon monoxide pollution than Shanghai.”