The owner of this rather eccentric dwelling is Lord Alexander Hawke. Hawke won’t tolerate your use of his title and has never used it himself. The only one who is allowed to do so is his ancient friend and household retainer, Pelham Grenville, a man whom he has known since birth and is, with the exception of his young son, Alexei, the closest approximation to family he can claim.
Hawke was now a man in his early thirties, a noticeable man, well north of six feet with broad shoulders, a narrow waist, and a heroic head of unruly jet black hair. A thick black comma of hair fell across his forehead despite his best efforts to keep it in check.
His glacial blue eyes (a female friend had once decided they looked like “pools of frozen rain”) were startling. His eyes had a flashing range, from merriment and charm to profound earnestness. Cross him, and he could fire a searing flash of blue across an entire room. Hawke had a high, clear brow, and a straight, imperious nose above a well-sculpted mouth with just a hint of cruelty at the corners of a smile.
His job (senior counterintelligence officer at Britain’s MI6) demanded that he stay fit. Though he had a weakness for Mr. Gosling’s local rum and Morland’s custom blend cigarettes, he watched his diet and followed his old Royal Navy fitness regime religiously. He also swam six miles a day in open ocean. Every day.
Attractive, yes, but it was his “What the hell?” grin — a look so freighted with charm that no woman, and even few men could resist — that made him the man he was:
A hale fellow well met, whom men wanted to stand a drink; and whom women much preferred horizontal.
Hawke had been dozing out on the coquina shell terrace that fanned out from doors and windows flung open to the sea on a blue day like this. He had nothing on for today, just supper with his dear friends, the former Chief Inspector of Scotland Yard, Ambrose Congreve, and his fiancée, Lady Diana Mars, at their Bermuda home, Shadowlands, at seven that evening.
“Sorry to disturb you, m’lord,” Pelham Grenville said, having shimmered across the sunlit terrace unseen.
“Then don’t,” Hawke said, deliberately keeping his eyes closed against the fierce sun.
Pelham was the octogenarian valet who’d been in service to the Hawke family in England for decades. When Hawke was but seven years old, he had witnessed his parents’ tragic murder by modern day drug pirates aboard their yacht in the Caribbean. Pelham and Chief Inspector Ambrose Congreve had immediately stepped in to raise the devastated child. No one who’d survived that lengthy process would claim that it was easy, but the three men had all remained the closest of friends ever after. Inseparable and insufferable, as they liked to think of themselves these days.
“I think you might wish to take this call, sir,” Pelham said.
“Really? Why?”
“It’s your friend the Director, m’lord.”
“I have many friends who are directors, Pelham. Which one?”
“CIA, sir, he says it’s rather important.”
“You’re joking. Brick Kelly?”
“On the line as we speak, sir.”
“Thank you, please tell him I shall be right there.”
Hawke had met CIA Director Kelly in an Iraqi prison. Kelly was a U.S. Army spec ops colonel back then, a man who’d been caught red-handed trying to assassinate a Sunni warlord in his mountain village. And Hawke’s Royal Navy fighter plane had been shot down over the desert only a few miles from the Iraqi prison. Their treatment was less than five-star; it was no mints on the pillow operation. The guards were inhuman, sadistic, and merciless.
One night, Kelly had been dragged away from their cell. He had looked so broken and weak that Hawke decided he’d not survive another day of malnutrition and torture.
That very night, Hawke planned and managed to effect an escape, killing most of the guards and destroying half the prison in the doing of it. He carried Brick Kelly on his shoulders out into the burning desert. It was four long days before they were rescued by friendlies, both men delirious with hunger, sunstroke, and dehydration. It’s the kind of defining experience that brings men of a certain caliber together for the balance of their lives.
He and Brick had been thick as thieves ever since.
Hawke went inside and over to the antique black Bakelite phone sitting atop the far end of the monkey bar. He picked up the receiver.
“Hullo?” he said. By force of habit, he was always noncommittal when answering a phone call.
“Hawke?”
“Brick?”
“It’s a secure line, Alex, no worries. I know you’re laying low for a while. Well deserved R&R. I called your house number in London to get this one. Sorry to even bother you but something’s happened I felt you should know about.”
“Trouble?”
“No, not exactly. Sadness is more like it. Alex, your old friend Cameron Hooker died this past weekend.”
“Hook died? Was he sick? He never said a word.”
“No. It was an accident.”
“Ah, hell, Brick. Damn it. What happened?”
“He went for a sail on Sunday morning. Up at his house in Maine. Did it every Sunday of his life apparently. When he wasn’t back home by noon, and his wife couldn’t reach his cell, Gillian called the sheriff. They found the boat run aground on a small island near Stonington. Hook was aboard, in the stern, dead.”
“Heart attack? Stroke?”
“His head was bashed in.”
“Foul play?”
“No. He was alone, apparently. At least he was when he left the dock, according to a young fellow hired on for the summer.”
“What happened?”
“I don’t know much about sailing, Alex. As you well know. Apparently, he attempted some kind of accidental tack in heavy wind and the big wooden boom swung round and hit him in the head.”
“A gybe.”
“Right, that’s the word the boy used. It was blowing pretty good, I suppose. Certainly enough force for something that heavy to kill him. But…”
“But what?”
“I hate to even bring this up, Alex. But in the last six weeks a number of other high-level Agency guys of his era have died. Lou Gagosian, Taylor Greene, Max Cohen, and Nicola Peruggia.”
“Suspicious deaths? Any of them?”
“No. Not on the surface, anyway. No evidence of foul play at all. It’s just the sheer number and timing that’s troublesome. And the high number may just be coincidence.”
“Or, maybe not.”
“Something like that, yeah.”
“Want me to look into it?”
“No. Not yet, anyway. All these poor widows and families are in mourning still. And I don’t really have any degree of certainty about my suspicions, just my usual extrasensory paranoia.”
“But.”
“Yeah. But.”
“Look here. Hook was a good friend of mine, Brick. If someone killed him, I damn well want to find out who.”
“I’m sure you do. I’ll tell you what. Let’s give it a month or so. See what happens. Anything suspicious crops up, we go full bore. Okay with you?”
“Sure. You know best. When’s the funeral? Where?”
“Up at Hook’s place, Cranberry Farm, in Maine. Family cemetery on the property. The service is next Friday afternoon at two. North Haven Island. Out in Penobscot Bay east of Camden. If you’re going to fly up from Bermuda, there’s a private airstrip at the old Tom Watson place.”
“I’ve used it a few times, but thanks.”
“That’s right, I forgot, you’ve been out there before. Okay. I’ll see you there, then. Sorry, Alex. I know you two guys were close.”
“I’m sorry, too, Brick. Last of the old breed. He was a very, very good guy. See you there.”
CHAPTER 4