Matheson thought the matter over, but then a wicked smiled grew on his withered face. “I knew you were here, you realize…”
“Sure you did.”
“Not you specifically, of course, but I knew someone was creeping about up here. You tripped a laser alarm in between the pigeonnier and the orchard. It shows up here and in the security room. I knew immediately that something was up — the only problem is I presumed my security was rather better than it’s turned out to be.”
“Life’s full of surprises then,” Hawke said. “Even for a rich, decrepit sack of shit like you. Now, talk to me about Operation Swallowtail.”
Matheson made a long, silent assessment of the armed man standing before him and then spoke up. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Hawke fired the gun and the bullet struck the top of Matheson’s wingchair. A thick wad of cotton batting exploded an inch from the old man’s head. He almost jumped out of his skin, and now Hawke saw fear in his eyes for the first time.
“Operation Swallowtail… or the next one goes through your right eye.”
“Fine — just lower the gun.”
“The gun stays where it is. Start talking.”
Hate and fear fought for dominance in Matheson’s dark, narrow eyes. Hawke could see how much the former Foreign Secretary wanted to hurt him, or worse… but now the boot was on the other foot.
“Swallowtail was not my project.”
“Imagine my surprise.”
“I was ordered to initiate it.”
“By the Prime Minister?”
“Yes, but he was ordered to do it as well.”
“I want a name.”
Matheson’s eyes settled once again on the barrel of the Glock. “The Oracle.”
“The Oracle? Is this some kind of joke?”
“It’s the furthest from a joke you could possibly imagine. I’d tell you to ask Harry Donovan but then he was the cat whose curiosity got him killed.”
“What are you saying — this Oracle was involved in the murder of Lea’s father?”
Matheson shrugged his shoulders.
“I want a name, and a location.”
“Hunting the Oracle is a fool’s errand, Hawke… a one-way journey.”
“I asked for his name.”
“And I swear I don’t know it. No one does.”
Hawke looked in his eyes and saw the fear. He was telling the truth. “Then you’re of no more use to me.”
Sweating profusely, James Matheson held out a trembling hand and pleaded meekly for his life. “Please!”
Hawke wanted to torture him. His mind swam with Liz… her smile in the church as the sun streamed through the stained glass and lit the baby’s breath in her flower crown… the sound of her laugh on the Ha Long Bay cruise…
“You’re a fucking bastard, Matheson, and you’re lucky I’m going to make this fast.”
Hawke considered a T-box strike, but ended things with a Mozambique drill — a double tap into Matheson’s chest and a single shot in the forehead. He was dead in less than a second, but his words still hung in the air, mixing with the gun smoke — one-way journey, the Oracle, no one knows his name… Was the Oracle real? Was he really pulling the strings of world leaders? Who was he? If it was true, it was a chilling revelation that changed everything.
Alone now, Hawke padded over to the bottle of Glenmorangie and calmly unscrewed the metal cap.
For you, Liz.
He raised the whisky to his mouth and drank a long draft as his eyes wandered to the corpse slumped in the wingback beside the fire. Setting the spirit back on the drinks cabinet, he left the same way he’d arrived and was soon no more than a shadow in the night.
CHAPTER ONE
Keeping low in the tropical undergrowth, Ben Ridgeley raised the monocular to his eye. Tracking Morton Wade and his thugs through Mexico’s Lacandon Jungle for the past few days hadn’t been easy, but now things were looking up. Finally he would have something to report to ECHO HQ back on Elysium, and that meant Sir Richard Eden owed him fifty dollars. It might also help with his redemption after letting Lexi Zhang get the better of him that night and knock him out of the selection test with her paintball gun.
A few steps behind him were Alfie Mills and Sasha Harding. They were two former cops from the Met who Eden was thinking about bringing into Elysium, but they had already broken the cardinal rule and gone against the Boss’s word. Eden and Ben had both instructed them to stay in Acapulco, but less than twenty-four hours after he started tracking Wade into the jungle they’d caught him up. Sure, they were trying to impress everyone, but the order was given for a good reason. The jungle was one of the least forgiving environments at the best of times, let alone when you were engaged with an enemy that wanted to kill you. Now they were just slowing him down.
“See anything?” Sasha said.
“Yeah,” Ben replied. “Looks like they’ve finally got what they were looking for.”
He watched the team of hired mercenaries and thugs approach the ruins they had been seeking. As far as he could make out from the accents, cigarettes and tattoos, they were mostly Mexicans, unlike their leader, the American Silicon Valley magnate and tech guru Morton Wade. Like Ridgeley, they were all tired after the trek, but Wade seemed energized by these particular ruins, and ordered his men to investigate. This place wasn’t on any map, but Wade sure seemed excited to be here.
Ben struggled to keep the team in view as they moved deeper into the ruins. Damn it, he thought, and moved cautiously closer. He told Alfie and Sasha to stay put and weaved through the sapodilla and allspice plants until taking cover behind the trunk of a Guanacaste tree. Above, through a canopy of magnolia and mahogany leaves he saw a darkening sky which threatened to soak him to his skin for the third time that day.
All around him the deafening cadence of cicadas and macaws mixed with the eerie calls of the howler monkeys. He thought about what he was missing back in the Caribbean hideaway — a cool drink and a comfortable bed — but he’d gone through worse in the Parachute Regiment, usually following Eden’s orders, and this was an important mission. How the two former cops were holding up was anyone’s guess.
Wade began to bark more commands and some of the men opened an equipment box and pulled out glow-sticks and ropes. “This looks promising,” Ben muttered, and zoomed in on the increased activity with the monocular.
Two of the men were now tearing vines and wild bromeliads from the ruins in order to access some kind of concealed entrance. Some of their colleagues were pacing around in a circle, looking out into the thick rainforest with Colt 9mm SMGs raised and ready for trouble. It looked like they were setting up some kind of perimeter and this told Ben they were planning on staying a while.
Wade leaned into the newly exposed entrance and poked his head inside. After a few short moments of contemplation, he pulled himself back out into the light of day. He was smiling but looked anxious. Singling out the perimeter guards and telling them to stay put, he ordered the other men into the ruins.
Ben’s concern grew as Wade and the chosen men made their way inside the ruins and disappeared into the darkness within. Time passed, and they emerged from the entrance hauling what looked like half a stone disc out into the daylight.
He made his way slowly forward to get a better look, trying not to draw attention to himself, but a dead branch gave way under his boot and the snap echoed around the area like a gunshot.
The men immediately spun around and began to search in his direction. Seconds later Wade ordered his men into the jungle. Ben knew he had to get himself and the others out of there, and began to scramble through the undergrowth. He missed his footing on a loose rock and pitched forward tearing his knee open on a jagged branch. He suppressed the scream but there was no time to check the wound — they were closing in on him every second.