Alex fought hard to control the tears. “What the hell are you talking about, Vetrov?”
“No, I have said enough…”
He spoke in Russian to Kosma who punched some numbers on a keypad. A second later she heard the whine of hydraulics and felt a jerk as the chair began to lower toward the water. At first she thought she was imagining it — it was so slow it was almost imperceptible.
“It’s on automatic now,” Vetrov said, smiling. “A facility I installed to increase my pleasure because this way it takes my enemies so long to reach the hungry jaws of my darlings. I asked Kosma to set it to the slowest setting, so you have plenty of time to suffer — in your case, two or three hours. Now you will forgive me but I must also turn into a nightingale and fly to Venice, but for you, the struggle is almost over. Do svidaniya.”
“You bastard! You bastard…” she began to sob as the chains lowered her torturously slowly toward the crazed crocodiles a few yards below.
CHAPTER NINE
Lea awoke to see a blanket of clouds stretching out above the Baltic Sea and on the horizon a faint gray-green line that was the northern coast of Estonia. She wondered how so much misery and terror could exist in a world so beautiful. She thought about why anyone would even want to live forever — what made life so precious was its transience, she thought, and then when she realized that sounded like something Ryan might say she smiled. Maybe she listened to him more than she thought.
Snapping out of her daydream, she rubbed her eyes and checked the screens on the aircrew partition at the front of the private jet. They were now at thirty-six thousand feet and had been in the air for a little over seven hours. They would be in Moscow in less than sixty minutes.
She turned to see Hawke was still asleep on the couch and watched him for a moment — the way his broad chest heaved up when he breathed, the shape of the muscles on his arms, and yet… when he was asleep like this there was a strange kind of vulnerability about him that made her love him even more. She worried that one day his luck might run out, that one of these days he was going to get himself killed.
“You want a drink?”
She looked up to see Ryan standing to her left holding a large tumbler of whisky in each hand.
“Um…” Lea checked her watch. “Sure, why not?”
“In that case there’s a bottle in the cabinet at the back. These are both for me.”
Lea thought about telling him not to be such a dick, but then she remembered why he was behaving like one and cut him some slack. Less than forty-eight hours ago Ryan Bale had watched one of the Lotus’s men brutally kill his girlfriend. The fact she was trying to save his life at the same time made everything he was feeling ten times worse.
“I think maybe I’ll leave it for now anyway,” she said.
Ryan coughed and took a long drink from the tumbler, seeing off at least three fingers of the Scotch. “Suit yourself.”
“What are the Americans doing?” she asked, peering over her seat.
“The Yanks are asleep,” Ryan said flatly.
“Ryan…”
“Listen, don’t even go there, all right?”
“Go where?”
“You know where. That little speech you were about to give me. You know — the one where you tell me it’s not my fault and I’ll get over it in time and bla bla bla.”
“Well, it’s not your fault, and you will.”
Ryan didn’t reply, but instead drank the rest of tumbler number one.
Lea watched him with concern. “Seriously, you can’t get loaded right now, Ryan. I need you — Hawke needs you. Hell, someone’s life is riding on this.”
“Don’t tell me what to do.”
Lea decided to leave it and instead got ready for the landing. The aircraft had begun to descend and Dempsey and his men were awake and checking they were ready for the mission in Moscow. Hawke woke up and smiled at her, and then started his own preparations. He had his war face on.
She watched silently as the jet touched down at Domodedovo and taxied gently to the gate, and moments later they were going through customs. They quickly found themselves emerging into the freezing cold Moscow air and a crowd of people outside the airport. Hawke blew into his hands and smiled at the string of curses emanating from Lea’s lips.
“Cold, Lea?”
“You could say that! It’s cold enough to freeze the nuts off a brass monkey.”
“Never deployed to the Arctic then?”
“Nope.”
As she replied to him, a woman collided with Hawke and moved inside the airport without apologizing.
“Welcome to Russia…” Dempsey said.
Hawke ignored Dempsey’s comment and turned to Ryan. “What about you — cold?”
Ryan shrugged his shoulders and pushed his hands into his pockets before turning to Lea. “And I think you mean it could freeze the nuts on a brass monkey.”
“Don’t tell me what I mean! I meant off so I said off.”
“But that doesn’t make sense,” Ryan said. “The point is that it’s so cold that it would freeze the balls currently on any given brass monkey.”
“What? No! I’m saying it’s so cold it could freeze its damned balls right off, you eejit.”
Hawke opened his mouth to throw in his contribution, when Lea gave him one of her patented warning looks, a look which in this case was cold enough to freeze the balls either on or off him, depending on your preference. He shut his mouth without saying a word and they made their way to the car park.
Behind them, Dempsey, and his two men Dave Phillips and Frank Zimmerman tried to make themselves look like ordinary tourists instead of a trio of former Green Berets on a covert operation deep inside Russian territory.
As Jack Brooke had promised, there was a black Audi Q7 SUV waiting for them in the car park, and Dempsey used the remote to blip open the doors. Without a second glance he opened the rear hatch and nodded appreciatively as he inspected what Hawke could see was a mini-arsenal of weapons. Apparently, being the American Defense Secretary opened doors shut to the rest of the world.
The Audi pulled away and Hawke watched the sad Soviet-era concrete and glass architecture of Domodedovo recede into the distance as they headed toward the Moscow Oblast.
A short drive later they were pulling up outside the perimeter fence of Vetrov’s dacha and Hawke couldn’t wait to start shooting. It was time for the fight-back from hell.
Scarlet watched Lexi closely as she filled out the paperwork and accessed the safety deposit box in the Berliner Bank. The Chinese assassin opened the box and Scarlet and Karlsson got their first view of the notorious map.
“I was disappointed when I saw that portrait back in Shanghai,” Scarlet said. “But this is even more boring. I can hardly believe all the trouble there’s been over it.”
Karlsson agreed, and nodded his head. “I was expecting a treasure map, not… this.”
Lexi smirked. “That’s just what I thought. I also expected…well — a map, so you can imagine my disappointment when I first saw it.”
“Just as well you couldn’t read it, eh?” Scarlet said. “Or you’d be halfway to the elixir and we’d be twiddling our thumbs in London.”
“That’s not fair!” Lexi said. “I told you, they forced me to hand over the map.”
“Save it for someone who gives a damn, darling,” Scarlet said, as she studied the map. She was looking at a small document made from some kind of papyrus. It was covered in what looked a little like Egyptian hieroglyphics and other strange symbols which she thought could denote some kind of territorial position, but deciphering squiggles wasn’t her thing. That was what the boy was for.