‘Nice to see you haven’t forgotten how to show a girl a good time.’
Ethan helped Lucy to her feet. The scientist, dazed and shivering, looked up at him. ‘Remind me why I asked you to join me out here?’
Ethan wrapped one arm around her and squinted up into the rain.
‘We’d better keep moving. Those soldiers won’t have missed that explosion.’
Together, Ethan, Lucy and Lopez turned and began the long walk toward the distant lights of Siem Reap.
XXII
Aaron Devlin ducked his head to look out of the Bombadier Challenger 300’s oval windows as the aircraft taxied in towards the airport terminals, and fought off waves of exhaustion that washed over him. All was blackness outside, twinkling lights marking the terminals and taxiways and the city beyond. Behind distant mountains the first pale tint of dawn was touching the horizon, and despite sleeping for much of the journey Aaron felt lethargic as he heard the engines whine down and he unbuckled himself from his seat.
A cabin attendant unlocked the aircraft’s boarding doors, the door folding down to present a series of steps that led up into the aircraft. Aaron had not even got out of his seat when two men boarded the aircraft and walked towards him.
‘Well?’ Aaron demanded.
Both men were dressed in combat fatigues and bore the insignia of the CIA’s paramilitary Specialist Tactics Squadron. The senior of the two, Lieutenant Greg Veer, a shaven-headed veteran of the US Military, handed Aaron a slim folder of transparent plastic within which was contained a map.
Aaron took the map and looked at it. Two lines were drawn from two separate locations, one in the South China Sea and the other in Cambodia. They intersected at a location on South America’s western coast.
‘Lucy Morgan?’
‘The target invaded capture,’ Lieutenant Veer replied.
‘What of the man with her, Ethan Warner?’
‘Also in the wind, and there was somebody else there too. A woman whom we have not yet identified.’
Aaron looked at the map, evidently recovered from Lucy Morgan by the STS team. The soldiers had intercepted Morgan in Cambodia, north of Angkor Wat, and that explained the line drawn from that location towards South America. The other line, drawn from Yonaguni Island, was clearly related to the work done in Cambodia. The problem was that Aaron had no idea what the lines represented: it could be some kind of directions, but he had no intention of flying halfway across the globe without being sure that there was something waiting for him at his destination.
‘You had eight men, you were chasing two unarmed civilians, and yet they evaded capture and are still at large?’
‘Like I said, they had help,’ Veer growled. ‘The third unidentified woman was armed, not to mention the fact that she had allied herself to large number of armed villagers. We lost two men during the firefight, with a third injured.’
‘And then you lost a helicopter and the three crew aboard,’ Aaron noted as he recalled the report he had read on the flight out.
‘We did not witness the loss of the helicopter,’ Veer snapped, clearly irritated at Aaron’s accusation. ‘But yes, the individuals escaped and we have no idea where they have gone. Judging by the map, it would appear that South America is the next target.’
Aaron glanced at the map for a moment and then tossed it onto the seat he had occupied for the past twelve hours.
‘We cannot be sure of that. What were they doing when you found them?’
‘They had climbed up some kind of temple in the jungle,’ Veer replied without interest. ‘We don’t know what they were doing up there, but we do know that the unidentified woman intercepted them and took the map. I then took the map from her, but it may be that Lucy Morgan had further information on her person that we did not recover.’
‘A temple,’ Aaron murmured thoughtfully. ‘Send the team back out to the temple and scour every inch of it. I want to know what Lucy Morgan knows, then we can figure out what she intends to do next.’
‘What about South America?’ Veer asked. ‘If they are headed there then they have a good head start. I recommend we prepare a team to be on standby in case they show up somewhere out there.’
Aaron nodded. ‘Do it.’
The two soldiers turned away and marched from the jet as Aaron turned and picked up another folder, one that he had been reading on the long journey across the Pacific. He opened the file and flicked to a series of photographs taken several years ago by the DIA. One of them was of a Latino woman, long dark hair and exotic eyes staring out with a barely concealed contempt for the camera.
‘Nicola Lopez,’ Aaron murmured. ‘What are you up to?’
Aaron reached for his cell phone and held it in his hand for a moment as he turned the pages of the file and observed a series of images taken at Yonaguni airport. Shot through a long-range lens, the images showed an elderly man exiting a private jet and boarding a glossy black limousine before being whisked away toward the airport exits. The details identified the man as Yuri Polkov, a Russian black-market dealer who had made his money stealing antiquities and fossils for sale on the black market to collectors and, in some cases, less scrupulous museums.
Aaron knew that Polkov was considered to be a violent criminal. He had built an impressive fortune through acquiring and selling stolen artefacts and then had that fortune laundered through various legitimate businesses located around the globe, many of them involved in the legitimate trade of fossils and rare antiquities. The Russian was known to the FBI, but nobody had ever made any attempt to arrest him simply because his crimes were committed in countries that had no direct relationship with the United States. The US government knew that the antiquities that Polkov acquired were not his by right and that fact alone effectively made him a modern day grave robber, but with many of the items he and others acquired ending up in American museums, nobody had felt it worthwhile pursuing such a powerful man.
Now, Aaron had that reason. He dialled a number and waited for the line to connect, determined to get ahead of Lucy Morgan and secure the artefacts she sought before she ever laid eyes on them.
‘It’s not my fault!’
Arnie was enshrouded in a deep cloud of irritability as he sat at the controls of the Catalina, his wife alongside him as the aircraft descended toward the vast, deep blue waters of the Mediterranean. The engines clattered outside as the aircraft bobbed up and down on the rapidly warming thermals rising up from the ocean below.
‘They have resources,’ Ethan replied, ‘and they can track flight plans. As soon as they figure out where we’ve gone they’ll be on to us.’
‘And if we hadn’t filed a flight plan we would have been shot down by the Egyptian Air Force, not to mention the military of various other countries we’ve had to fly over,’ Arnie snapped back. ‘I don’t give a damn if you’re being followed or not, my main concern is not being arrested or getting into an argument with a heat-seeking missile!’
Ethan scowled as the Catalina bounced violently on a gust of wind and he thumped his head on the cockpit ceiling. He turned and walked out of the cockpit down into the Catalina’s fuselage, grabbing hand holds wherever he could to steady himself, and saw Lucy packing her gear while studying the images she had taken in Cambodia.
‘Okay, you want to tell me why the hell we’re heading for Cairo?’
‘Because I think I may know the answer to what these images mean,’ Lucy replied as she fastened her rucksack and threw it onto her shoulders.