Was Raine in league with this man?
It was possible. Raine had been similarly discredited and had been on the run for three years. But, much as he hated to admit it to himself, it didn’t quite fit. Langley was right. Raine had been denied access to all communication equipment. And other than his presence in both Venezuela and here, there was nothing else to link them together. Additionally, if Raine was earning the big bucks of Willis’ operation, then why had he been shunting supplies to and from a godforsaken mountain top in the middle of the jungle?
Of course, discovering that the soldiers who had attacked both the expedition in Venezuela and the mission here were mercenaries only opened an even bigger kettle of fish. Mercs didn’t work for themselves. Someone was paying them. But who? Someone else who was after the mask. It couldn’t be the Chinese as their own team had clashed with the mercenaries. The Brits maybe? Or the Russians?
He glanced at Nadia who stood by the water’s edge, peering worriedly into its inky depths but Langley’s voice cut into his thoughts, laced with its own concern.
“Any sign of Raine yet?” he asked. Gibbs also peered down into the water where the hovering helicopter circled, its bright light searching for the traitor who had not been seen since he’d dived into it.
“Negative,” was his curt reply.
There was a pause, and then: “Keep me informed.”
West cut the com link between the two men then followed his superior’s gaze. “He must be dead.”
Gibbs didn’t take his eyes from the water as he shook his head. “Nah,” he said. “That son of a bitch ain’t dead.”
Raine found Mrs Marley, of all places, up on the roof of the Hand of Freedom Building. He knew that time was against him. Sooner or later, Gibbs would work out where he was. He was a good soldier, Raine knew, but he wouldn’t get the information they needed out of the old woman.
After watching the enemy plane fly off with King and Sid, he had swam to shore and made his way back to the battered museum. The emergency services hadn’t arrived yet and, with the book gone, the building was no longer of any interest to Gibbs and his men.
He approached the obese woman from behind, moving silently across the rooftop, skirting the ruins of air ducts and ventilation shafts. Still ten yards from her, though, she surprised him by addressing him without so much as turning around.
“You know, Mister Attorney,” she said, her heavily accented voice deep and husky. It held a sombre element to it that Raine hadn’t noticed before. “In the great earthquake of 1692, a church was swallowed by the sea.” She paused, staring off into the distance. The pitch black sky was softening in the east to a moody indigo and, her giant body silhouetted against it, Mrs Marley took on an almost ethereal presence. “They say that sometimes,” she continued, “you can hear the bell tolling from beneath the waves.”
Then she turned to face him and if she was surprised by the gun which he levelled at her chest, she did not show it.
“Can you hear the bell, Mister Raine?” she asked him pointedly.
Despite himself, Raine found himself straining to listen into the darkness. All he could hear, other than the gentle breaking of the surf, was the distant whine of emergency sirens.
“It is the toll of history,” she whispered before he could reply. Then she glanced at the gun in his hand before fixing on his eyes. “You’re here to torture me, then?” It wasn’t so much a question as it was a statement.
“The men that attacked you,” Raine said, his voice steady, flat. “They took the Kernewek Diary… and two of my friends.” His haunting blue eyes bored into Marley’s own. “You know where they’re going.”
“I know no such thing, young mon.”
“You’re lying.”
“It seems you are an adept at that yourself.”
Raine hesitated for a second, considering how much to tell her. “The secret that the book protects,” he said. “It could be used to kill hundreds of thousands of people. We’re here, under the authority and command of the United Nations, to stop them.” He studied her, trying to read her, but her face remained impassive. “You had the book, the diary, all your life. You must have read it. You must know its secrets.”
She laughed bitterly and shook her head. “I know nothing.”
“Do you really want the blood of innocent people on your hands?” Raine demanded. The old woman seemed to snap, his words striking something within her. Her face twisted angrily.
“Get out of my house!”
“Not until I have what I need to find my friends.” He made a display of unlatching the safety of his gun. “I’ve explained myself. I’ve asked you for your help.” His eyes darkened. “I won’t ask again.”
“And what will you do?” she snarled. “Shoot an unarmed old lady?”
Raine’s icy eyes never left hers. His tone was flat and even. Honest. “I’ve done a lot worse.”
Mrs Marley studied his handsome, chiselled face and noticed that he did not waver in his resolve. But neither would she. She responded by hacking up a glob of mucus and spitting it in his direction. “You won’t do it!”
A moment later, Raine pulled the trigger.
High in the sky above the Caribbean, Benjamin King was jolted awake by a powerful hand which slapped him around the face. He just about stumbled out of the seat to which he had been tied but the restraints held him in place.
He was disorientated. Flashes of memory assaulted him, as though he was waking from a bad dream. One moment he was in Lagos, General Abuku’s gun searing into the flesh of his forehead, branding him. Then he was at the Wassu Stone Circle with his father, hearing the tales of Kha’um and the Bouda. He remembered running through the hellish realms of Xibalba, dodging razor-sharp balls and lunging caiman. And then he was back in the Hand of Freedom building, falling from a great height, an agonising pain in his chest. Then nothing but random visions of men in black, of racing through cobbled streets, things exploding all around, people screaming—
His head swam, his brain thundered with the most incredible headache he had ever experienced and for a moment he thought he was going to vomit all over the deck of the Catalina Flying Boat.
He took several deep breaths, gathering his senses, and glanced at his surroundings.
The hold of the decommissioned airplane had been gutted out of its original furnishings and redesigned with state-of-the-art military equipment. It looked more like an Apple Store than an airplane.
Three black motorbikes were stashed by the aft section, in a hold designed for five, just within the closed rear cargo door, while arranged in a methodical manner, strung in combat webbing in the rear hold, was a small arsenal of some of the meanest looking weapons the archaeologist had ever seen.
The main cabin, where he was held, had been kitted out to look like a scene from a science fiction movie, the bulkheads adorned with flat, touch-screen, high durability computer monitors, microscopes and all manner of other equipment, some of which he recognised, others which were utterly alien. It was like a flying laboratory. No, he realized a second later: a flying war room. From here, it looked to him like his captors could organise a military operation anywhere in the world.
“Wakey, wakey,” a voice broke into his thoughts, redirecting his attention to the not unhandsome face of a man in black combat clothing. In his younger years, King suspected he would have attracted the attention of many women with the hard lines of his face and jaw bone and his grey eyes which held an intensity not dissimilar to Nathan Raine’s. But this man was older, the grey stumble of his leathery skin, lacerated by too many wounds, merged seamlessly into his equally grey buzz-cut. He had the twang of an accent, Australian perhaps, but it was faded, mellowed by years away from home. He also had the bearing of a soldier. Not the mindless ‘yes-sir, no-sir’ automatons he had seen wandering the halls of Fort Leavenworth days earlier. This man held himself with the same confidence he had seen in each of Gibbs’ men. He was Special Forces. Australian SAS, perhaps.