On the road behind the burning wreck of their truck, Sala’s crew were moving out. They watched, stranded and helpless as the three black vehicles snaked their way toward the main road with their special cargo of Thor’s mysterious scroll and Ryan Bale.
Things had looked better for the ECHO team.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
It didn’t take Lexi Zhang long to clear the electric fence. Anticipating such a security device she pulled out a simple rubber mat from her bag and draped it over the top rung of the electrified razorwire. Totally avoiding the nine thousand volt shock she slipped effortlessly over the top and, leaving the mat in place for a potential egress, she sprinted toward her target.
As she approached some of the outbuildings, her mind turned to the specifics of the operation she was about to execute. She supposed this place would be impossible to infiltrate if the full compliment of security were here, but she knew that was not the case.
The intel she had gathered after her meeting with Arocha had cost a lot of money, but reliable stuff always came at a premium. Her source, a Cuban double-agent-turned-car salesman named Raoul, had told her that most of the ECHO team had left the island. He didn’t know to where or why. He said only that they had boarded a private jet and flown north.
According to Raoul, there were sometimes as many ten or twelve people on the small island, but tonight that number was reduced to three or four. He couldn’t be sure — no one could. Elysium was as private as it got and information like his was expensive for a reason.
Lexi had paid Raoul handsomely for his information and given the matter a great deal of thought. Who were the four? Eden, certainly, and she presumed the American woman whose father was currently rumored to be considering a run for the American Presidency — Alex Reeve. But who were the other two? She had no way of knowing, but a part of her hoped neither of them was Hawke. Ryan Bale on the other hand… not only would that be easy, but so much fun.
Through the outer-perimeter now, she set off an unseen alarm and the whole place lit up like the Trafalgar Square Christmas tree. A shrill, ear-piercing klaxon blared out across the island and informed the world and his wife that Elysium had an intruder. She cursed herself for being so stupid but had no time to dwell on it.
A door in the western end of the complex slammed open and a man began to fire at her. She didn’t recognize him, but knew she had to get out of here at once. She sprinted across the wide lawn and dived into a bank of flowering Jamaican Firebirds. The man screamed after her and fired twice more before using his free hand to manually redirect the searchlight into the edge of the garden.
“I know you’re in there!” he shouted.
He sounded English, she thought. She wondered if maybe it was another old friend of Hawke’s from back in the day. On further reflection it was a distinct possibility, but now the man was moving closer, using the low garden wall as cover. She had no time for ponderous reflections about Hawke’s old Commando friends.
With her weapons bag dragging behind her, she crawled through the dirt on her elbows and knees until she reached the other side of the shrubs. Now she was looking at another wide lawn lit an eerie bluish white by the full moon almost directly overhead.
She heard the man fumbling around as he ran into the bushes right behind her. He certainly was fearless — she had to give him that. She considered returning fire, but there was no way she could get a clear shot at him in all this undergrowth so she scratched the idea and decided to make a break for it across the lawn. This way she would be a little closer to the main complex and her ultimate target — Sir Richard Eden himself.
“You can run but you can’t hide!” the man shouted. “This is a very small island!”
She pounded across the lawn just as the man broke through the first embankment of shrubs. He wasted no time in firing at her and she heard the shot as it flew past her and tore through the foliage of a mature Arabian jasmine.
“I’ll give Eden one thing…” she said to herself as she pushed her way through the bushes. “He certainly knows how to grow a garden.”
Another shot whistled past her head and this time she heard the man laughing behind her. “This is too easy! You’re not even going to fire back?”
You’ll know it when I do, she whispered to herself, and emerged from the final bank of jasmine and bougainvillea. She took half a second to get her bearings and realized she had been chased off course more than she thought and was now further back from the complex and somewhere to its southwest.
Keeping an eye on the man as she moved back around to the complex was hard. He was obviously well-trained and she could see why Eden had hired him. But she was better. For one thing, he had allowed her to occupy the higher ground, and that was a rookie mistake he would pay for with his life.
She moved stealthily through the heavy jungle on the southern perimeter of the compound. As she descended back down to sea level she gave up her advantage over the man, but she also got closer to her target — it was a simple trade off that she had no choice but to make.
Now, she was just a few yards from the southern wall of one of the outbuildings. A cursory glance at the architecture showed her that it was all but impossible to free-climb, but that was why she had brought her bag of tricks. Yes, it had slowed her down when she was being chased by the guard, but its contents were critical to the success of the mission. It was another one of those trade-offs.
Aware that she no longer knew the location of the guard, she unzipped the bag fast and silently. She pulled out a five meter length of kernmantle climbing rope which she had already connected to a small grappling hook. After a quick glance to her left and right she deftly threw the rope over the wall.
She tugged on the rope to ensure the hook was properly snagged under the ledge of the concrete coping, and then she began her ascent. She knew this was as exposed as she was going to get — halfway up a white-painted wall in the moonlight — and wanted this section of the mission over as fast as possible.
She heard a noise and flicked her eyes up to see what she had dreaded. It was the man and he was standing on the top of the wall with a gun in his hand.
“I heard the hook,” was all he said, and then he raised his gun.
She saw the amused grin on his face, lit ghostly white by the pale light of the moon, and knew she had only a second to react.
“The name’s Ben, by the way,” the man said. “I’d say pleased to meet you but there’s no point as now you have to die.”
Lexi Zhang thought differently. In a heartbeat she whipped her gun from her shoulder and fired at the man. It was devastatingly fast.
He looked down and ran his hands over his stomach, a look of disbelief growing on his lean, strong face.
“I’m Lexi, by the way,” she said coolly. “I’d say pleased to meet you but there’s no point as now you’re dead.”
The man slumped to his knees and fell back against an air-conditioning duct, but Lexi was already gone, sprinting along the rest of the wall before leaping over a small courtyard and landing like a cat on the ridge cap of a gable roof. She walked carefully down a steep roof valley until she was at the gutter and then she hung over the side and lowered herself gently past the fascia and into the inner courtyard of the compound.
One down, she thought… but how many more to go until she was face to face with Sir Richard Eden?
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE