‘Trekking around a desert while pregnant? Boy, I can’t wait.’
‘You won’t have to wait long. We’ll be leaving tonight.’ Cross opened the bag. ‘But first I wanted you to see this.’
He donned white gloves, then carefully lifted out an object cocooned in bubble wrap. One end had been pulled open, revealing a hint of what was inside. ‘The third angel — the eagle,’ he said, showing it to her.
Nina couldn’t help but feel a thrill at the sight. However dangerous it might be, the angel was still an incredible find. But the feeling passed almost immediately at the thought of how Cross intended to misuse it — for devastation, not discovery. ‘Is it intact?’ she asked. ‘After everything it went through, you were damn lucky it didn’t get broken in Berlin.’
‘You can blame your husband for that,’ said Dalton.
‘If it had broken, it would have been God’s will,’ Cross said as he started to peel away the wrapping. ‘It doesn’t matter where the angels are released, just that they are.’
‘Although some locations are better than others, obviously.’ The ex-president seemed to be enjoying some private joke.
Cross paid no attention, fixated on freeing the statue. ‘Here,’ he said with reverence as the last wrapping came away. ‘At last.’
Dalton came to see for himself. ‘Three down, one to go.’ He turned to Nina. ‘What do you think, Dr Wilde?’
Nina didn’t answer, her attention fixed on the statue. Something was wrong, she realised. Compared to the second angel, it was different — the way it caught the light, the tint of the ceramic, the arrangement of the metal wings surrounding the body…
Cross caught her confusion. ‘What are—’ he began, before looking sharply back at the relic. He ran his gloved fingertips over its surface, then turned it to examine the inscribed text, almost squinting as he tried to make out details.
‘What’s the matter?’ Dalton demanded.
‘It’s… it’s not real,’ whispered Cross. He gave Nina a frenzied glare, as if it were her fault. ‘It’s a fake! Look at the lettering! It’s stepped — like a low-resolution copy!’ He tugged off one glove to scratch the statue with his fingernail. Tiny flecks of the surface broke away.
Nina almost laughed. ‘I think you’ve been scammed. Or scanned, rather. Eddie must have put the real angel into that laser scanner at the museum and 3D-printed an exact copy. It’s nice work, though. Somebody’s even gilded the wings to make them look like real metal.’
‘But… but why?’ asked Dalton. ‘He must have known we’d realise it was fake, so he couldn’t have exchanged it for you.’
‘He wasn’t going to exchange it,’ said Cross. He turned the statue upside down, examining its base. A small length of metal was set into the flat surface — something that had not been present on the angel taken from Rome. ‘It’s an antenna!’ Fury filled his voice. ‘It’s a tracker, a GPS beacon. He wanted Simeon to take it from him. Now he knows where we are!’
He raised the statue as if about to smash it on the marble floor, then forced back his anger, regarding the replica for a moment before lowering it again. ‘We need to move up our schedule,’ he said more quietly, calculating.
‘Wait — where’s the real angel?’ said Dalton.
‘Chase must still have it, or has gotten someone to bring it to Antigua for him. He needs it to get his wife back.’ Cross looked at Nina. ‘He’ll be coming here. But we’ll be ready for him.’
Eddie zoomed in on the map on his phone to a small island off Antigua’s eastern coast. ‘That’s where they are — where Nina is.’ He had bought the GPS tracker and its phone app from a spy shop in Berlin that morning, getting the bruised but otherwise unharmed Derrick to conceal it inside the replica. ‘You know it?’
Tom nodded. ‘Elliot Island. Never landed there, though — it’s private property. You get too close, and the residents turn up and wave you away. Not a big deal; its beaches aren’t great, so it’s not a prime tourist spot.’
‘Know anything about the people who own it?’
‘Some religious commune, I think. There’s a church. Apart from that…’ He shrugged.
‘I need to get out there, without them seeing me. It won’t take ’em long to realise that wasn’t the real statue — oh, and there we go.’ The tracker’s dot vanished, a message popping up to announce that the signal had been lost. ‘Still, it told me what I needed.’
‘When you say you need to get out there,’ said Tom warily, ‘I’m assuming you want me to take you?’
Eddie smiled. ‘That’d be helpful, yeah.’
‘I told you, they’ll see us coming. The Flirty’s not exactly a stealth boat.’
‘That’s why it’s perfect. How quick can it get out there?’
‘At full pelt? An hour and a half, maybe.’ He looked through a porthole at a call from the dock. ‘Who’s this?’
‘That’s for me,’ said Eddie. He went out on to the deck to find Maureen Rothschild at the bottom of the gangway. ‘Hi, Prof! You made it, then.’
‘Yes, I did,’ she replied, with a distinct lack of enthusiasm. ‘I waited in the plane for ten minutes before going through customs, as you asked, and by that time, a jumbo jet full of tourists had arrived! I had to wait in line behind three hundred people. And when I finally got out, it took an age to find a cab. Why couldn’t I have come with you?’
‘Trust me, you wouldn’t have wanted to be in my taxi,’ he told her, marching down the walkway to pick up her travel case. ‘I had a reception committee. And they weren’t there to give me cocktails in a hollowed-out pineapple.’
Rothschild’s eyes went wide. ‘You were ambushed? Are you all right?’
‘I didn’t know you cared.’ He ascended the gangway.
‘I’m displaying simple human decency, Mr Chase,’ she replied tartly as she followed. ‘Something in which you apparently still need lessons. What about the statue? Did they take it?’
‘Yeah, just like I’d hoped. So now I know where they are.’ He helped her on to the yacht. ‘You’ve got the real one?’
Rothschild huffed. ‘No, I left it on the plane. Of course I brought it!’
‘Sarcastic, snappy… you’re more like Nina than either of you’d want to admit.’ Eddie put down the case. ‘Tom, this is Maureen Rothschild. Prof, this is Tom Harkaway, an old mate of mine.’
‘Nice to meet you,’ said Tom, extending his hand.
She shook it dubiously, eyeing a pouting pin-up girl painted on a bulkhead beside the vessel’s name. ‘Thank you. This is a… nice boat.’
He chuckled. ‘It’s seen a fair few parties.’
‘Speaking of which,’ said Eddie, ‘how fast can you drum up some passengers? A party boat without partiers’ll look a bit suspicious.’
Tom pointed beyond the houses along the harbour’s western edge. ‘There are two big resort hotels just over there, the Tranquility Bay and the Jolly Beach. It shouldn’t be too hard to find some people who want a cruise.’ He paused. ‘You want me to give them a free cruise, don’t you?’
‘Quickest way to fill up the boat, innit?’
‘And who’s going to pay for all this?’
‘There’s a bloke at the United Nations called Oswald Seretse…’