“Unfortunately we lost the map, and now Vetrov has it.” He fixed his eyes on Alex. “Miss Reeve, I know you tried to explain things back in Moscow when you were under fire, but now you’re safe you need to tell me the whole story about why Vetrov ordered Kodiak to take you, and don’t even try saying it’s because your father is the Secretary of Defense.”
“No, it’s not that… and there’s a lot I couldn’t tell you back in Moscow…” Her words drifted away into the heavy anticipation of the room. She looked at the faces of the others, now staring at her expectantly.
These were the people she’d heard so much talk about, and now she was sharing a Venetian hotel room with them — Sir Richard Eden MP, Lea Donovan, Ryan Bale and the notorious Chinese assassin — all of whom she’d got to know thanks to Hawke’s inimitable descriptions. They were all here, including Brad Karlsson, and Cairo Sloane, whom she’d heard more about than all the others combined, and of course, there was Joe Hawke himself. He seemed taller than she’d imagined him, and somehow more thoughtful and deliberate in his movements that she thought he would be.
“We need to know, Alex!” Lea said.
“Of course… I’m sorry,” Alex replied, shocked out of her daydream by Lea’s voice. “Like I tried to tell Lea and Ryan back in Moscow, the reason Maxim Vetrov ordered my kidnapping is because of my research.”
“Your research?” Eden said.
She nodded sadly. “About this damned map, and the elixir of life. I’m so sorry.”
Alex rubbed her eyes. She looked stressed — she felt stressed. It had felt like forever since Kodiak had taken her from the apartment and drugged her. The nightmare of the Moscow Dacha and the crocodile enclosure was behind her now, but it had really left its mark on her.
“It all started when Joe texted me about Poseidon and asked me to run checks on you guys…”
Lea’s eyes widened. “He what?”
“Oh, come on, Lea,” Eden said calmly. “You can’t expect a man with Hawke’s background to work with someone without running at least a cursory check on their backgrounds.”
Lea pursed her lips. “I suppose…”
“We did the same to him, after all.”
Hawke smiled but made no reply.
“Anyway,” Alex continued, “after that he had me researching all kinds of stuff about the ancient Greek gods — Poseidon, the trident — you name it. The thing is I started to get into it and I sort of went my own way.”
Eden was inscrutable. “Go on.”
“As you know, I have extensive contacts in American intelligence…”
Ryan chuckled bitterly. “Isn’t that what they call an oxymoron?”
“No,” Lea said. “But you’re what they call an assy moron. Please continue, Alex.”
Alex glanced at them all, unsure what passed for banter, and what was insult. “I’m good at what I do — I had to be after the shooting in Bogotá,” she looked down at her legs. “I have time on my hands, so I devoted all that time to researching this damned map.”
“And what did all this devotion reveal to you?” asked Eden.
“First, I wouldn’t have been able to do any of my work without all the research Hawke already did.”
“You mean me, but carry on.” Ryan said.
“Sorry… I mean all of you — yes.”
“Well, it’s more me than all of us, but do continue.”
Lea rolled her eyes. “Ignore it.”
“Look… there’s still so much I don’t know, but the research led me from ancient Greece back to ancient Egypt.”
“Egypt?” Eden said.
Alex nodded. “Sure. I was expecting that anyway, but it was a great moment when it was confirmed. You see, it all started when Sheng Fang had that Lotus creature kill Felix Hoffman on the Paris Métro. That was when I started digging around for real. We knew he had worked under the direction of Anton Reichardt, so I started asking more questions about Reichardt himself.”
“I like where this is going,” Ryan said.
“Anton Reichardt was an eminent scholar in his own right, but not without controversy. Back when he was starting out on all this immortality stuff, there were accusations of plagiarism made against him by an amateur Italian Egyptologist by the name of Professor Giovanni Mazzarro.”
Eden looked at her, carefully following her every word. “Amateur?”
Alex nodded keenly. She was enjoying the conversation after so long spent on her own. “Amateur, sure. In fact Mazzarro was a curator at the Ca d’Oro.”
“The where?” Lea asked.
“The House of Gold,” Ryan said from the background. “It’s a six-hundred year-old palace on the Grand Canal. Its real name is Palazzo Santa Sofia.”
Alex gave him an admiring glance. “I’m impressed. Hawke said you knew a lot.”
Ryan turned and beamed with pride. “He said I knew a lot?”
“Well… not in so many words, but that was the drift.”
“I think I might have said something along the lines of big-headed twat,” Hawke said loudly.
“Gotcha.”
Eden frowned and returned to the point. “What kind of accusations were made against Reichardt, exactly?”
“That Reichardt had not only copied his ideas in an intellectual capacity, but had tried to steal some of Mazzarro’s actual, physical research.”
“Now that’s what I call an accusation!” Ryan said. “I told you nerds could get nasty.”
Lea rolled her eyes again. “What research did he steal?”
“Tried to steal, according to Mazzarro — but he didn’t get his hands on it. That stayed under lock and key for the rest of Mazzarro’s, and Reichardt’s life. But here’s the interesting thing — Mazzarro had a son who inherited not only his father’s obsession with ancient hieroglyphics, but also his research and notes.”
As she spoke, she couldn’t help but smile a little when she saw the expressions on the others’ faces.
“Shut your mouth, Ryan,” Scarlet said, “You look like you’re catching flies for fuck’s sake.”
“Sorry, but…tell us more!”
Alex grew more serious again. “What Mazzarro had put together was a vast collection of very ancient hieroglyphics — older than ancient Egypt, older even than Sumeria — and started working on a way to decode them — just to try and make sense of them, I guess. I’d never seen anything like them before, and neither had anyone else in the world if my Google searches were anything to go by.”
Ryan leaned in closer. “This is better than sex!”
“It is the way you try and do it,” Lea said, giving him a playful nudge with her elbow.
Alex laughed, but Eden was unmoved by the gag. “You made records of all these, naturally?”
“Of course, and more than that, I began to translate them. I started to create a sort of deciphering matrix, but I just didn’t have enough to go on without speaking with Dario Mazzarro, and it was around then I contacted him and we started working together.”
“And how did that go?” Eden asked.
“Awkward at first, but when he got to trust me it was good. I really needed his work, and his father’s work, to make any progress, so it was essential he agreed to help me, and in return I was able to offer my computer skills and contacts. Anyway, it was shortly after that when that Russian asshole kicked my door in and dragged me to Moscow, so that was where my research ended — and without Mazzarro I’m not sure how much progress I can make.”
“You’ve done well to get this far,” Eden said.
“Maybe,” Alex replied. “All I know is what I’ve already told you — that the glyphs on the map are older than any other hieroglyphics on the planet, and that Mazzarro is the only man who can really crack them.”