‘Go!’
The vehicle turned and accelerated away with the squeal of tires to vanish into the traffic flow seething past the crashed truck. Ethan turned and picked up his discarded pistol as he grabbed Lucy and pulled her out of sight behind the wreckage of the delivery truck.
‘What the hell are you doing?’ Lucy demanded.
‘We don’t know who they are,’ Ethan replied as he peered around the edge of the damaged truck at the amassed vehicles.
‘Mr Warner,’ another American voice called, ‘it’s time to hand yourself over to the authorities before this gets out of hand.’
‘I’m not going anywhere until you tell me who you are!’ Ethan yelled back.
‘We’re running out of time,’ called the voice again. ‘If we don’t leave immediately we will all be under arrest, and I don’t believe that the DIA would want to have to dig you out of trouble overseas once again!’
Ethan frowned in surprise and cautiously stepped out, the pistol still held firmly in his grip as from around the side of the truck walked an old man in sharp suit, the dark blue fabric seeming almost black in the German night. The man walked with his hands in his pockets as casually as though he were taking an evening stroll, and he offered Ethan a laconic smile as though he had seen the destruction that surrounded Ethan all before: which he had, many times.
‘Jarvis,’ Ethan grasped, ‘I don’t believe it.’
‘Ethan,’ Jarvis acknowledged him as he looked at the scene around them of crashed vehicles, bullet holes and traffic chaos. ‘Nice to see you’re still a dab hand at working under the radar, keeping yourself to yourself so to speak.’
‘What the hell are you doing here?’
‘Shall we leave?’ Jarvis asked casually. ‘I’d hate to have to deal with the paperwork required to clear up the mess you’ve made here, and I can explain everything on the way.’
XXVIII
‘Where’s Lopez?’
Ethan was sat next to Lucy in the back of one of the SUVs that was being driven by a government agent. Opposite them sat Doug Jarvis, his hands folded calmly in his lap and an appraising look on his face.
‘We’re following the Russian vehicle now but maintaining a safe distance,’ Jarvis assured him. ‘I suspect that they’ll want to avoid any further confrontations with us and will not harm Lopez once they have what they want. I take it that she has the quipu?’
‘She stole it,’ Lucy Morgan confirmed with a barely concealed disgust. ‘That artefact belongs in a museum.’
‘She had your best interests at heart, and what she did to defuse the situation was incredibly brave,’ Jarvis replied. ‘I’m sure the quipu will be recovered in due course.’
Ethan shook his head in disbelief, barely able to comprehend how in the space of a few days he had gone from being so far away from the Defence Intelligence Agency and the unfathomable workings of Doug Jarvis’s command, to being sat in a government vehicle with him as though the intervening years simply had not occurred.
‘Why are you in Berlin?’ Ethan demanded. ‘How the hell did you even know we were searching for that quipu?’
Jarvis kept the serene smile on his face and offered Ethan a shrug. ‘It’s my business to know what’s going on, Ethan. You of all people should know that.’
‘You’re retired,’ Ethan reminded him. ‘Dammit, you’re old enough to remember the Civil War, you shouldn’t be running around in the cold like this.’
Jarvis chuckled with what appeared to be genuine humor, although he could never be quite sure whether anything about Jarvis was as it appeared.
‘I didn’t choose to be here,’ Jarvis admitted. ‘And I’m not working for the DIA.’
‘Who are you working for?’
Again, the smile and the shrug. ‘Let’s just say that those who occupy the heady heights of the intelligence community have been trying to unravel the corruption that has plagued many of the departments and agencies over the last twenty years or more. When they got to your business in Israel of a few years ago, they realized that they simply didn’t have enough information to act upon so they called me to fill in the gaps. I have to say, it’s been quite invigorating after a couple of years’ in retirement.’
Ethan leaned back in the seat and rubbed his hands down his face. ‘What’s your skin in the game?’
‘Honestly Ethan, I don’t have any. My job is to figure out, on behalf of those heady powers, what the hell is going on now. Those responsible for overseeing the activities of the intelligence community have figured out that they are not being told everything they should be and they have a real compulsion to get to the bottom of what’s happening here. My job is to help them do that. My first port of call was Lucy Morgan, and I followed her to you. As ever, it was simply a matter of following the trail of destruction that you left behind.’
Ethan felt as though he had gone into a time warp and emerged two years previously. ‘I never cause a trail of destruction — it’s everybody else who keeps shooting at me.’
‘Keeps happening though, doesn’t it,’ Jarvis observed with a wry smile.
‘Do you know why I’m here?’ Lucy Morgan asked.
‘Yes I do,’ Jarvis acknowledged with a nod as the smile slid away from his face, ‘a truly noble cause with which I will assist with all the power that I can draw upon. I’m not here to hinder your mission, Lucy. My job is to try to ensure that you succeed, because with your success will come mine.’
‘So you do have skin in the game,’ Ethan observed.
‘I like to maintain a reputation of doing a thorough job,’ Jarvis explained.
The SUV slowed and pulled over to the side of the road, and through the tinted windows Ethan could just about make out Lopez standing waiting for them. Jarvis leaned over and opened the door, and Lopez climbed in and slammed the door shut. Her gaze swept the interior of the SUV and settled upon Jarvis.
‘You,’ she uttered.
‘Me,’ Jarvis smiled back.
Lopez turned to look Ethan. ‘May I borrow your gun?’
‘He’s here to help,’ Ethan replied.
‘He’s here to help himself. Please, let me put him out of his misery and me out of mine.’
‘A pleasure to see you again as always, Nicola,’ Jarvis said to her. ‘Believe me, I was quite happy spending my days gardening, not dodging bullets chasing you and Ethan halfway across the globe on yet another merry chase.’
‘Obviously not happy enough, or you wouldn’t be here. What is it this time? Fancied another promotion?’
‘I’m here to get you out of Berlin,’ Jarvis replied. ‘I have a jet waiting at Schipol airport and it can take you anywhere you need to go.’
‘Excellent,’ Lopez replied with a smile. ‘We’ll get aboard and you can stay here, agreed?’
‘Why did they let you go?’ Lucy asked.
‘They knew they’d never get out of the country if they didn’t,’ Lopez replied. ‘The authorities would be alerted by Jarvis and his people, and they’d be in a cell within an hour of showing up at the airport.’
‘Precisely,’ Jarvis agreed. ‘Volkov and his people want to maintain a low profile. Hard to do when they’re chasing Ethan here.’
Ethan turned to Lucy. ‘Did you manage to learn enough from the quipu to figure out where we need to go?’
Lucy shook her head. ‘It was too complex, too much information for me to absorb in one go. It would have needed an expert to decipher in that amount of time. We’re not going to get ahead of the Russians now, they’ll have the time to decipher the quipu and figure out where it is we need to go next.’