Athens was enjoying a long, heavy rainfall. In the middle of a drought it was a welcome relief and many people walked outside in the rain just to feel it on their bodies. All across the ancient city, children played in the puddles and danced in the downpour. Among this excitement, the ECHO team were standing under the shelter of a bitter orange tree opposite the Theatre of Dionysus.
High above them, the Acropolis was still sealed off and under repair after Kruger’s helicopter assault on the rocky outcrop. Hawke was studying the scaffolding over the south side of the Parthenon when he heard a heavy car pull up on the cobblestone surface of Dionysiou Areopagitou behind them. Turning, he saw Sir Richard Eden and Magnus Lund stepping out of a chauffeur-driven Mercedes limousine.
He nudged Lea’s elbow. “Heads up.”
She watched the two men extend umbrellas and walk into the ancient ruined theatre. It was good to see her old friend back on his feet after the long recovery from the coma and especially nice to see he no longer needed a cane to walk. After her father’s murder, Eden had stepped into his shoes and looked after her when she was growing up. Through a rocky childhood and turbulent teenage years, he’d always been there on the end of a phone. She gave him a kiss on the cheek and smiled. “Good to see you, Rich.”
“It’s good to be back,” he said.
“You’re feeling all right now?” Lexi said.
“Yes, thank you Cairo.”
For a moment they thought he’d made a mistake, but then they saw the look on his face and they all burst into laughter.
“Funny.” Reaper gave a nod of appreciation at the gag.
Ryan frowned. “Hey — I make the jokes around here!”
“Do you?” Scarlet said. “I hadn’t noticed.”
Ryan raised his middle finger. “You’re much more aggressive when you’re starved of sex, Cairo — do you know that?”
“If I’m starved then you’re in the middle of a famine.”
Another peal of laughter, but Scarlet was missing Jack Camacho and Ryan had hit a nerve with his comment. The former CIA man had traveled back to the US after Alex Reeve had contacted them. The president’s daughter had heard rumors about some sort of plot in Washington DC and Eden had decided it would be prudent to send her some back-up.
With laughter still in the air, Eden moved things along and introduced the sombre man beside him. “Magnus Lund here you already know.”
They exchanged a polite nod with the enigmatic Dane. “So let’s move straight to business,” Lund began. “We found your story about the Alexander Codex very interesting indeed and I can only wish you’d had longer with the text before Dirk Kruger stole it. Using what little information you were able to extrapolate from the text before losing it, we know there is a Citadel, some kind of ancient power base used a capital city long before human history as we know it was capable of building such a place.”
“Which is mind blowing stuff,” Eden said. “I think we can all agree on that, and we also know that access to the Citadel’s gateway can only be had with the use of eight golden idols. We have those idols, but the location of the Citadel remains a mystery.”
Lund took over. “That’s what the Codex is for. When time was running out for him on board the Anshar, Wolff sacrificed the idols for the Codex, and this is very telling. He made the snap decision that it was better to know where the Citadel was and to hide its location from us than to have the idols.”
Lexi crossed her arms and looked down at her hand. The steel prosthetic nails were still something alien and unwelcome in her life and she tucked them under her arm to keep them out of view. Everyone knew the torture she had undergone in China, but they still made her self-conscious. “Makes sense. There’s no point having a key to a door if you don’t know where the door is.”
“Right,” Eden said, taking back over. “We have the keys, but only he knows where the door is. I suspect his plan is to locate and the secure the gateway and then divert resources to hunt us down and take back the idols.”
Lea laughed. “Yeah, like that’s going to happen.”
Others joined in, but Lund didn’t share the moment. “Mr Bale, I understand you had a short time to study the Codex before Kruger snatched it in Amphipolis?”
Ryan’s hesitant voice spoke up in the empty theatre. “Yes, but not for long. I really only had a few minutes with it.”
“Tsk, tsk,” Scarlet said. “Why are you on this team again?”
“And how quickly can you translate ancient Greek in faded ink on crumbling papyrus?”
She raised an eyebrow. “As you were.”
He couldn’t resist smirking at her as he shook his head. “As I was saying, the time I had with the Codex was limited, but it wasn’t all a waste of time.”
Reaper rubbed his hands together. “This is where things get interesting.”
“The start of the Codex was a description of the idols and why Alexander wanted them so badly. It details his struggle to find them, and why he took his armies over so much of the ancient world. He was hunting the idols but also a number of rings. The ring I found on Alexander the Great’s finger is one of eight, and the odds are good that those eight rings are integral to locating the Citadel.”
“And we already have the idols to open the gateway,” Lexi said.
“Bloody hell,” Scarlet said. “We get those rings and we’ve nailed the whole thing.”
Hawke scratched his head. “Just one problem though. We need the Codex to locate the seven other rings, and Wolff has the Codex.”
“And that could be anywhere,” Lexi said.
Eden spoke up. “It could be anywhere, but it’s also somewhere, and we know where that specific somewhere is.”
Hawke looked across at Lea. Catching her eye, he returned her smile with a conspiratorial wink.
“Well, where is it?” Scarlet said.
“Meteora, in the monastery.”
Ryan was confused. “You mean the Monastery of the Holy Trinity, as in that amazing old building perched on the massive stack of rock in the Aegean Sea?”
“I do, or at least the former Monastery of the Holy Trinity. For some months Wolff has been in the process of acquiring it from the Orthodox Catholic Church. He closed the deal a few weeks ago and set up his new headquarters there. All our intel points to the Codex being kept in the monastery’s vaults.”
Reaper raised his eyebrows. “Sounds exciting.”
“I should bloody well say so!” Ryan said. “That’s where they filmed the final sequence of For Your Eyes Only!”
Scarlet rolled her eyes. “How many times, Ryan. You’re not James Bond.”
Ryan’s shoulders visibly sloped. “I know, dammit.”
Lund seemed to relax. “Getting the location of Wolff’s new HQ wasn’t easy. It cost the life of a good man in the Greek National Intelligence Service, but it gave us a serious break. As far as we know, Wolff and the rest of his cult are under the impression Meteora has not been compromised. This gives us a real opportunity for a surprise raid, and the sooner we do it the better. We can only surmise, but my best guess is when he deciphers the Codex and has the information he needs about the other rings, he’ll move out and probably for good.”
Hawke found Lund’s optimism troubling. Given how hard the mission had been to this point, he saw no reason why the Oracle wouldn’t fight harder than ever to protect the Codex, and after translating it they could expect a savage assault aimed at retrieving the idols.
Hawke started to ask Lund a question, but his phone rang. The Dane took the call and wandered around the outside of the theatre with his umbrella.
“Where are the idols right now?” he asked Eden.
“All eight of them are in the secret gold vaults of the Bank of England,” Eden told him. “And that’s where they’re staying until we have the other rings and know where the Citadel is. Then they’ll be transported under heavy military guard to the location of the gateway. After that, it’s anyone’s guess what’s on the cards.”
Hawke looked around the theatre at his friends. After the devastating death of Danny Devlin in Miami Beach they were more dedicated than ever to taking the Oracle out of action and discovering the Citadel.
“When do we start?” Lea asked.
Lund walked back over to them and slid the phone back into his suit pocket. “That was Nikos Katrivanos, the Greek Minister of the Interior,” he said. “And he says you have permission to fly to Meteora and make an assault on the monastery.”
“Thank fuck for that,” Hawke said. “We never do anything unless we get permission first.”
Eden gave him a wry smile. “All right, thank you.”
Lund missed the sarcasm. “And he added that it would be ever so nice if you could try and minimize the damage to the building itself, please. It was built in 1475 and he doesn’t want a repeat of the Parthenon if that’s okay with you.”
They all turned and looked up at the scaffolding on the ancient temple perched above high them.
“What?” Lea said. “Us?”
“Yes,” he said with emphasis. “You.”
“Okay, let’s make this happen,” Hawke said. “It’s high-time we took Wolff out of the equation for good.”
“There’s something else,” Eden said. “Something you all need to know about Danny’s death.”
The silence that followed his words echoed the deep sadness they all felt about their old friend’s brutal murder.
“What do we need to know?” Lea said.
Eden seemed hesitant. “He was killed with a marked bullet, one that literally had his name on it. We’ve run tests on the round and I can say it was a .408 bottlenecked cartridge, solid bullet with a non-lead core. Copper nickel alloy round. The conclusion of the ballistics report is that it was fired on a CheyTac M200 Intervention.”
“Holy shit,” Lea said. “That’s pretty much the most powerful sniper rifle in the world.”
“You’re saying this is some kind of vendetta?” Hawke asked.
Eden’s answer was now without hesitation. “In my view his death was a professional hit carried out by an extremely skilled sniper, probably ex-military. As for who ordered it, the best guess has to be the Oracle, but all bets are now off. Worse, there was a threat implying that the rest of us are also in danger.”
“We’re all targets?” Lea said, shocked.
“Looks that way.”
“So there’s a psycho sniper out there with the world’s most lethal rifle and a hit list full of our names?” Ryan said. “You always think it’s going to happen to someone else.”
Lea rolled her eyes. “This is serious, Ry.”
“Lea’s right,” Hawke said. “Until we find the killer, literally none of us is safe. The shooter could be anywhere.”
“We’re in the open now,” Scarlet said, glancing around the area.
“We can’t spend our lives hiding in a basement,” Lexi said. “We have to find the bastard and take him out, but not before finding out who hired him.”
By the time they all heard the crack of the shot, Magnus Lund had already been struck and knocked to the ground. As blood spilled out of the dead man’s head, the team scattered to anywhere they saw cover, shocked to the core at the timing of the murder.
Hawke studied the way Lund had fallen and twisted his head around to the top of the theatre. “Over there,” he called out. “No sign of the shooter but that’s where the round was fired. I’m going up.”
“Are you insane?” Lea said.
“He won’t fire twice,” he said. “Now it’s about escape and evasion until the next time.”
Hawke scrambled up the stone terraces of the theatre, stumbling here and there as he made his way up to the top. He heard the sound of a Vespa two-stroke receding into the distance, and by the time he crested the rise at the top of the theatre and reached the base of the Acropolis it was in time to see nothing but a trail of dust twisting up from an empty road leading back down into the city.
He cursed and kicked at a pile of gravel out into the road. With a sense of mounting fury, he padded back down to the rest of his team and gave them the bad news while Lea called an ambulance. They knew it was too late, but there was nothing else they could do.
“I can’t believe it!” Lexi said. “I can’t believe they killed Magnus.”
Once again shattered by the violence of another sniper’s round, the team rapidly pulled themselves together as the sound of sirens approached from the south.
“How fast can we get to this monastery?” Hawke asked.
“As fast as a chopper can fly,” Eden replied.
Scarlet flicked her cigarette butt to the ground and crushed it under her heel. “And where do we rendezvous?”
“I’ve got a little boat in the Med,” Eden said.
“Then let’s get on with it — not just for Danny, but for Magnus because at this rate there might not be any of us left to fight anyone pretty soon.”