“So why did you reach out to me? Why are you here, exactly?”
“I’m giving you an opportunity to get the American back so you can fulfil your contract with the traffickers,” she said.
“Not worth our time,” Linus said in a flat, cold tone. “I’ve lost interest in it.”
The aristocrat licked her lips and he could see she was thinking something over in her mind.
Linus drummed his fingertips on the arm of his chair. “Come on, Your Ladyship — out with it.”
“They have something in their possession.”
“What?”
“Something of enormous value and importance. Something I thought was mine, but Mason double-crossed me and now he has it. If we take it back from them we will each retire as multi-millionaires.”
Linus sat up in his chair and paid closer attention to the woman. Her astonishing beauty had been obvious as soon as she entered the room, but now he saw something else — the same kind of cold, calculating cunning he saw when he looked in the mirror. It was there, behind her cornflower blue eyes, sparkling like a wicked kind of black magic. “Don’t stop.”
“We were hired by a very public institution to retrieve a stolen asset. They always approach the Raiders first because of their reputation. In this case, the asset had been stolen in a robbery of military precision and they were in trouble. Big trouble. If the theft ever went public there would be hell to pay with insurers and a million other problems. Mason’s brief was simple: retrieve the asset and return it to its rightful owner.”
“Only you cooked up another sort of plan?” he said, a smile creeping over his thin lips.
Kat looked almost offended. “I decided it was time Mason and I went our separate ways, and I knew I would need money to fund the lifestyle I wanted to live.”
“So you made the decision to rip off your friends and steal the asset?”
“It wasn’t like that.”
“Don’t be so concerned, Lady Addington — I like what I’m hearing. You sound like my sort of woman.” A murmur of approval rippled over the small group. “You see here in SPIDER we all like to think of ourselves as a little like pirates. It sounds corny, I realize, but we’re really all out for ourselves. There’s not a lot of your ‘all for one and one for all’ bullshit here.”
“But we have each other’s backs,” Iveta said. “Don’t confuse the two things. We are a team, a solid unit, but we all know when we’re done we fly away into different sunsets and never see each other again.”
“I understand,” Kat said.
“A different arrangement from what you’re used to, no doubt,” Kyle said, finally looking up from his knife. He slid it in the sheath hanging from his belt and walked over to her. “There’s no marshmallows over the fire in this crew. We’re business. In and out. No respect for the law of any land.”
Linus smiled. He was enjoying this recruitment more than when he hooked Molly Cruise. “But you knew that already, right?”
“I guess so.”
“And if you’re here to betray us to these Raiders,” Bjorn growled. “I’ll kill you with my own hands, but not before you’ve seen me kill everyone you ever loved.”
“There is that, yes,” Linus said. “If you’re here to infiltrate us and try and compromise any of our missions, you will die, certainly.”
Linus could see Kat was confused; she was clearly struggling with many emotions. Switching crews was not an easy thing to do. Everyone had their own working culture and rules, their own dreams and nightmares. “So maybe we have a deal?” he said at last. “We work together to track down Mason and his crew, we get this mysterious asset and split it evenly, and we get to kill the Raiders for screwing up our Albanian contract.”
The English woman nodded. “We have a deal, Colonel Finn.”
“Call me Linus, please.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Kiya’s cell phone rang. With Tekin at the wheel of the stolen BMW, she looked down and saw the Lion had responded to her request to identify the man she had fought with at the British Museum — the man who had snatched the codex from Dariush and driven him to take his own life. She would never forgive him for humiliating her in front of the Lion like this, and she would kill him for what he did to her loyal Raven.
In the soft, blue glow of the instrument panel, she stared down at the new message on her phone and a scowl etched itself on her face.
So, his name was Jedediah Mason.
Now that was an old name, a biblical name.
According to the Lion, he was a soldier once, and now ran a highly respected asset extraction company based in London. The others around him were the rest of his team. Between them they had a lot of experience, mostly in the military. Their skills included martial arts, urban climbing, mentalism, computer hacking, forgery — you name it. Quite the crew, and for some reason they were now looking for the Nectanebo codex. What would a man like Mason want with that?
“He’s working for someone else,” she muttered.
Tekin turned to face her. “What?”
She paused before replying. The only sound was the noise of the tires as the car cruised along the M40 on its way to Oxford. Tekin accelerated the car as they pushed through the chalk cutting known as the Stokenchurch Gap.
She sighed, and tapped a long, black fingernail on the screen of the smart phone. “I said his name’s Mason, and he’s working for someone else.”
“Whoever he’s working for, he’s dead,” Tekin said casually. “What difference does it make?”
Kiya tutted. “You will not make Bride with that attitude, Tekin. When you want to kill a snake you cut off the head. I want to know who he is working for, and the Lion is asking questions too — difficult questions. He wants to know why these people are pursuing the codex. He wants to know why we have not yet obtained the codex. He says the Persian is growing impatient with our lack of progress.”
“The Persian?” Tekin said nervously.
Kiya nodded. “We are being watched carefully by those at the top.”
“They are always watching,” Tekin said. “Probably right now, through these very CCTV cameras.”
Kiya glanced up at one of the cameras on the side of the motorway. Rumors like this could spread like wildfire in the Hidden Hand, but no one really knew if there was any substance to them or not and testing it would be taking that wildfire and playing recklessly with it. The Hidden Hand rewarded honesty and diligent obedience with lavish gratitude, but its punishments for failure and betrayal were too terrible to be contemplated.
“If they’re watching, then that’s all the more reason not to fail, Tekin.”
“And you’re sure about this professor?”
She managed an absent-minded nod. “He’s the definitive authority on Napoleon and he has a professional relationship with Starling. That’s where they’re going.”
“And they haven’t gotten to him yet?”
“Not yet. Their plane was delayed at London City. They’ll be landing in half an hour.”
“I hope you’re right, for both our sakes.”
“I’m right,” she said. “I feel it in my heart.”
“What you feel, I feel,” he said. “What you think, I think.”
She gave him a sharp look. “What’s your point?”
“I sense you are feeling doubt about the mission.”
“You know only what my head knows, Tekin. You cannot know my heart.” She closed her eyes, and saw the desert moonrise. “Just get us to Oxford Airport before they land.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
After the trip down memory lane, no one spoke for a while. The first to break the silence was Zara.