“Go to hell!”
He turned to Smets. “Kill them all now, starting with Hawke.”
Smets raised his gun and aimed it at Hawke’s head. He pulled back the hammer and slowed his breathing.
Time seemed to stand still.
Then he swivelled and aimed the gun at Sala, firing several shots into the Andorran recluse’s heart.
Sala’s eyes widened in terror as he registered the betrayal and everyone jumped with shock as the shot echoed loudly in the cavernous space. Sala gasped and doubled over, clutching at his chest where the bullets had torn inside him.
Lea screamed and took a step back as Sala fell to his knees, blood bubbling up his digestive tract and pouring from his mouth. She thought he had a vaguely vampiric quality as the blood trickled over his teeth and ran down his chin, but then he fell forward and landed with a dry thud in the dust.
“That’s you over and done with, old man,” Smets said.
“I wouldn’t be so sure about that,” Hawke said, staring at Sala’s dying body with widening eyes.
Just as they had seen in the Ethiopian Highlands when Maxim Vetrov had met his maker, something very unnatural was now happening to Álvaro Sala. His corpse began to jolt as if being flooded with electricity, and his skin was turning the color of putty and beginning to fall off in strange, dry peels. He strained his head upward in search of the apple, and spying it on the floor ahead of him started to crawl toward it, but as he moved, parts of his skin began to peel away and fall off onto the floor.
Smets took a step forward and kicked the apple out of his reach.
Victoria Hamilton-Talbot staggered back in disgust, yet unable to take her eyes away from the terrible scene unfolding before her. “What the hell is this?” she asked her voice barely more than a whisper. “What the hell is going on?”
“We don’t know,” Hawke said, still eyeing the gun in Smets’s hand. “We saw something similar in Ethiopia. It’s got something to do with their lifespan.”
“Their lifespan?” she asked. “What do you mean?”
Then, with what little he had of his strength, Sala pulled a black box from his pocket. It was a small remote control device with an inch-long aerial on the top and one modest silver button.
“Bloody hell!” Hawke shouted. “He’s going to blow the place up!”
“I think not,” Smets said calmly. “At least not yet.”
The Andorran tried to take his revenge and used what was left of his exposed thumb bone to push down the small button but the Belgian hit man darted forward and kicked the device from his rapidly decomposing hand. A terrifying, hollow howl croaked from his deteriorating body as he watched Smets pick up the device, but then he died, and what was left of his face collapsed in the dirt.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
“He’s dead!” Ryan said.
“Yes,” Scarlet said coolly. “How very inconsiderate of the old bastard.”
“Did he activate it?” Lea asked.
Hawke shook his head. “No — it didn’t send a signal and it would be on a timer anyway. There’s no other way for them to clear the place out and then blow it without getting to safety first — am I right, Leon?”
“Shut it, Anglais.”
Ryan sighed. “I’ll take that as a yes — that was a close one then!”
Hawke gave him a condescending glance. “Yes, except for the simple fact that… ”
Scarlet finished his sentence. “That now we know the place is rigged with explosives and we don’t know how many there are, or where they are, or when Monsieur Smets here intends on detonating them.”
“Exactly,” Hawke said.
The veins in Sala’s neck were now tearing out through his rotting skin, but there was no more blood. Now, nothing but a strange black dust poured from them as the deterioration of his dead body accelerated. Even Smets was now stunned into silence by the spectacle.
“It’s like some kind of macabre time-lapse,” Ryan said in amazement.
“He’s right,” Hawke said. “We’re seeing death, but speeded up.”
Now, Sala’s intestines were spilling out from his skeleton and tumbling onto the floor, all dry and turning to a kind of powder.
“Whatever the hell it is,” Scarlet said, “it should have a bloody 18 Certificate on it. I’ll never be able to eat Pad Thai again.”
Ryan pushed his glasses up on the bridge of his nose and moved cautiously forward. “We’re watching some kind of organic decomposition, but on super fast-forward.”
Lea raised her hand to her mouth. “Oh God, is that his heart?”
A desiccated heart dropped from the safety of Sala’s ribcage and hit the dust with a little thump, and seconds later the remains of his skeleton crumbled to powder and began to blow away in a breeze blowing from the depths of the cavern.
“It’s like what we saw with Vetrov but with one critical difference,” Ryan muttered. “Vetrov died when he took the elixir, but when Sala got shot he tried to reach the apple — to take more elixir to stop himself from dying. What’s the difference?”
“Search me,” Hawke said flatly. “But we’ve got to find out.”
“What the hell did I just see?” Victoria asked.
“You saw what happens to an immortal when he dies,” Hawke said flatly.
“He needed the apples,” Smets said. “Without them he couldn’t have lived to wage his war.” He turned to Victoria and threw her one of his pistols. “Here, ma chérie… take this.”
Victoria deftly caught the gun in one hand and pointed it at Hawke, aiming the muzzle squarely at his chest.
“Bloody hell, I didn’t see that one coming!” Hawke said.
Smets walked slowly toward Victoria, a malevolent smirk on his face. They held each other and kissed much to the disgust of the ECHO team.
Then Victoria Hamilton-Talbot spoke. “All of you — stay where you are and raise your hands!”
“Victoria?” Lea asked.
“Drop your weapons — now!”
Lea took her Glock from the holster and lowered it gently to the floor. Across the hall she watched Hawke and Scarlet follow suit. Ryan, who was unarmed, simply raised his arms into the air.
“Fuck me!” Ryan said. “So all that stuff back in Florida about searching for a Tesla Coil was all just blarney?”
Victoria winked at him. “Got it in one, babe.” She waved the gun menacingly at them. “The prize was always Valhalla and its gold and weapons. Nothing less.”
“What about Nate?” he asked.
“Nate and I had been searching for Valhalla together for years but I needed more knowledge than he could give me. I knew the only way Dickie would ever send the famous ECHO team to assist me was if something terribly serious had befallen me, so Leon and I cooked up the plan to shoot him in Canada. It worked a dream.”
“But you had the flash drive!” Lea said.
“Yes but we knew we would need an insurance policy if we were unable to decode it — and what better insurance policy than having the ECHO team do our work for us.”
“But what about the answer-phone message — the death threat?”
“Leon, of course…”
Leon Smets gave a proud nod of his head and a theatrical bow full of mockery. “All theater, mes amis.”
Lea stared with anxious uncertainty as the Englishwoman covered everyone with her gun in a slow, casual sweep before training it once again on Hawke. For the first time, Lea saw the truth in Victoria’s eyes and that truth looked like hate and avarice.
“I’m sure,” Victoria said quietly, “that you know what’s coming next.”