“What?”
“You broke his cheekbone and you nearly broke his thumb, damn it!”
“You mean you want me to stop going easy on him?”
“Are you trying to be funny?”
“Only ever so slightly.”
“Well, you’re not making me laugh, got it?”
“Come on, Kim. He’s our only chance.”
“He’s in federal custody, Hawke. You can’t beat information out of prisoners.”
Hawke shook his head in disbelief. “And this from the people who brought us water-boarding!”
“I’m sorry?”
“Forget it… listen — I hate to burst your bubble but that guy isn’t going to dump on the sort of man who kidnaps the American President without a certain amount of incentive, if you catch my drift.”
“You’re not hitting him again, Hawke — if you do I’ll have you arrested.”
Hawke was silent for a few moments. “Fine — but let me handle it, all right?”
“No more broken bones, okay?”
“Spoilsport.”
Hawke padded back over to Collins.
“We know you’re involved in the plot to kidnap the President,” he said. “Right now you’re in so much shit you’d probably be better off if I just shot you.”
Nick Collins tried to laugh, but Hawke brought a rapid end to his amusement with a hefty kick in the ribs.
Kim Taylor sighed and rubbed her forehead. “What did I just say?”
Hawke ignored her. “You’re going to tell us all we need to know about the plot — not only where the President is, but what Kiefel’s interest in ancient Greek archaeology is.” He waved his gun in Collins’s face. “I want to know what was stored at the warehouse as well, where it is now and what the hell Dixieland has got to do with anything.”
Collins was now beginning to look nervous. Hawke didn’t think he looked like the kind of guy to be involved with an operation like this and thought maybe he was beginning to have serious regrets. He was probably thinking he’d got away with it, but now this.
Collins breathed out a long sigh of relief. Maybe he was glad it was over. “I don’t know much, but I’ll tell you everything I know, I swear.”
“Start talking.”
“I was approached a few weeks ago about hiring out some space in the warehouse. We’re not exactly over-run with business and maybe I didn’t ask as many questions as I should have.”
“We need more than that,” Kim said, holstering her gun and moving closer to the man.
“What’s going down is big. Bigger than anything you could imagine.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Hawke said. “Heard it all before, mate.”
“It’s true, I swear it!”
“Save you’re swearing for the courthouse,” Kim said.
“What was in the warehouse?”
“We stored drones at the warehouse. Helicopter drones.”
“The ones in the attack?” Kim asked.
Collins nodded.
“How many drones?” Hawke asked.
“Four.”
“But we only destroyed two over DC,” Kim said.
Hawke pushed his gun into Collins’s neck. “Where are the other two?”
“Kiefel’s heavies took them down to New Orleans ages ago. They have a location there they’re using as some kind of laboratory.”
“And where is this mysterious location?”
“All I know is the guy who delivered the flatbed to the warehouse mentioned something about driving down to an abandoned processing plant in an industrial part of the city somewhere… St. Tammany Parish, I think.”
Kim spun around and started to speak into her earpiece.
“You’ve been most helpful,” Hawke said.
“Does this mean I get immunity?” Collins said nervously.
“From the US authorities, maybe, but from me, sadly no.”
Without saying another word, Hawke powered his fist into Collins’s face and knocked him out cold. “We have to get to New Orleans in a hurry,” he said.
Kim turned to face him, her hair blowing in the helicopter’s downdraft. “On it.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Joe Hawke ignored the high-performance takeoff of the Learjet 31. His mind was still processing the totally unexpected sight of Scarlet Sloane as she drove across the airport asphalt on a stolen motorbike and skidded to a halt a yard from his legs.
“Only you could lose a President,” she had said as the rubber smoke drifted into the air.
Now, as Vincent, Doyle and a team of SWAT men slept in the small cabin, the two of them and Kim Taylor studied maps of the processing plant. He knew the flight from Washington DC to New Orleans would take less than two hours in the Lear, and that didn’t leave much time to organize a strategy to save Charles Grant and bring Kiefel’s plans to a halt.
After discussing their strategy for the tenth time, he shut his eyes for some important rest before the assault, but struggled to sleep. Instead, he recalled his earlier conversation with Alex Reeve and realized somewhere over Alabama that she had been right, as usual. Thankfully, Scarlet had stayed out of it, but he knew it was time to speak to Lea Donovan.
He had thought about calling her before, but the events of the last few hours had overtaken him. Now he had a few moments he knew what he had to do. He switched on his phone and gave her the call he should have made a long time ago.
Her voice was clipped and distant. “So you remembered my number then?”
Not a good start. She sounded as angry as he’d imagined she might, but he had a right to be angry too.
“Where are you?” he said, trying to chill things down.
“I’m in Ireland.”
“Visiting family?”
“If you call chasing my father’s ghost off a cliff visiting family, then yeah… I’m visiting family.” She sounded as unhappy as he’d ever known her and he regretted more than ever walking out on her back in Luxor.
“I don’t understand,” he said.
“You don’t need to understand.” Her voice grew weaker as the reception faltered. She sounded so far away. She was so far away.
“Don’t be like that, Lea. Do you need any help?”
“I have help, Joe. You’re not the only action-figure in the toy store you know.”
Touché, he thought. Presuming a woman with Lea’s contacts and experience was sitting around waiting for his help was stupid and presumptuous.
“So what’s going on?” he said after another awkward silence.
“An old friend of Dad’s and Rich’s was murdered, so I’m looking into it.”
“You think the murder is connected to your father’s death?”
Her reply was succinct, to say the least. “Yes.”
Another long silence stretched out between them.
“What about you?” she asked at last. The phone line crackled and accentuated the distance between them.
“I’m in America.”
“America?” she sounded shocked. “I thought maybe you went back to London.”
He knew there was no point in delaying the inevitable. “I’ve been staying with Alex at her father’s cabin in Idaho for a few weeks.”
A longer silence.
“Is there something you want to tell me Joe Hawke?”
Uh-oh, both names. “If you mean is there anything going on between me and Alex, then no, there isn’t. She’s just a very old friend of mine. I don’t think of her like that, and she doesn’t think of me like that.”
She changed the subject. “You’re up to your arse in this terror attack, aren’t you?”
“You could say that. I’m calling from a jet. We’re flying to New Orleans to rescue President Grant. I’m surprised ECHO isn’t all over it as a matter of fact.”
“Rich has his reasons.”
“Enigmatic.”
“I could tell you more, but as an outsider you don’t have clearance.”