The Curse of Medusa

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Joe Hawke ignored the high-performance takeoff of the Learjet 31. His mind was still processing the totally unexpected sight of Scarlet Sloane as she drove across the airport asphalt on a stolen motorbike and skidded to a halt a yard from his legs.

“Only you could lose a President,” she had said as the rubber smoke drifted into the air.

Now, as Vincent, Doyle and a team of SWAT men slept in the small cabin, the two of them and Kim Taylor studied maps of the processing plant. He knew the flight from Washington DC to New Orleans would take less than two hours in the Lear, and that didn’t leave much time to organize a strategy to save Charles Grant and bring Kiefel’s plans to a halt.

After discussing their strategy for the tenth time, he shut his eyes for some important rest before the assault, but struggled to sleep. Instead, he recalled his earlier conversation with Alex Reeve and realized somewhere over Alabama that she had been right, as usual. Thankfully, Scarlet had stayed out of it, but he knew it was time to speak to Lea Donovan.

He had thought about calling her before, but the events of the last few hours had overtaken him. Now he had a few moments he knew what he had to do. He switched on his phone and gave her the call he should have made a long time ago.

Her voice was clipped and distant. “So you remembered my number then?”

Not a good start. She sounded as angry as he’d imagined she might, but he had a right to be angry too.

“Where are you?” he said, trying to chill things down.

“I’m in Ireland.”

“Visiting family?”

“If you call chasing my father’s ghost off a cliff visiting family, then yeah… I’m visiting family.” She sounded as unhappy as he’d ever known her and he regretted more than ever walking out on her back in Luxor.

“I don’t understand,” he said.

“You don’t need to understand.” Her voice grew weaker as the reception faltered. She sounded so far away. She was so far away.

“Don’t be like that, Lea. Do you need any help?”

“I have help, Joe. You’re not the only action-figure in the toy store you know.”

Touché, he thought. Presuming a woman with Lea’s contacts and experience was sitting around waiting for his help was stupid and presumptuous.

“So what’s going on?” he said after another awkward silence.

“An old friend of Dad’s and Rich’s was murdered, so I’m looking into it.”

“You think the murder is connected to your father’s death?”

Her reply was succinct, to say the least. “Yes.”

Another long silence stretched out between them.

“What about you?” she asked at last. The phone line crackled and accentuated the distance between them.

“I’m in America.”

“America?” she sounded shocked. “I thought maybe you went back to London.”

He knew there was no point in delaying the inevitable. “I’ve been staying with Alex at her father’s cabin in Idaho for a few weeks.”

A longer silence.

“Is there something you want to tell me Joe Hawke?”

Uh-oh, both names. “If you mean is there anything going on between me and Alex, then no, there isn’t. She’s just a very old friend of mine. I don’t think of her like that, and she doesn’t think of me like that.”

She changed the subject. “You’re up to your arse in this terror attack, aren’t you?”

“You could say that. I’m calling from a jet. We’re flying to New Orleans to rescue President Grant. I’m surprised ECHO isn’t all over it as a matter of fact.”

“Rich has his reasons.”

“Enigmatic.”

“I could tell you more, but as an outsider you don’t have clearance.”

“Funny, but that’s what Scarlet Sloane just said to me.”

“Scarlet’s there?”

“Yeah — she landed in the US a few moments ago. Eden sent her and Ryan up here as soon as he found out Medusa was involved in all this. He can’t help himself.”

“Listen, Joe… I have to go.”

He nodded, even though she couldn’t see him. It was an instinctive reaction. “Sure.”

“I’ll call.”

Sure, he thought as the line went dead.

Lea switched her phone off with a scowl, folded her arms and stared out of the windshield without blinking. Outside the car, the Irish countryside flashed by in a rain-streaked blur and she caught her reflection in the window. She looked like she was about ready to murder someone.

“They’ll hypnotize you, you realize that.”

Lea thought about ignoring him, but she had the crazy idea Mikey O’Sullivan wasn’t the type to be ignored. “What will?”

“The windscreen wipers,” he said, pointing a meaty finger at them as they swished back and forth in the heavy rain. “If you stare at them like that you’re sure to be mesmerized.”

“Is that true, Danny?” Lea said, turning her head slightly to the back.

“You can forget about asking him for back-up — they’re both dead to the world.”

She turned to see the Guinness and whiskey had finally caught up with Danny Devlin, and Kyle too had succumbed to the gentle purr of the Audi Quattro’s classic inline five cylinder engine.

“So I take it that was your boyfriend — is that what they’re called these days? I don’t know anymore.”

“Oh, there’s lots of words to describe Joe Hawke. I’m not sure if boyfriend is at the top of my list right now, Mikey.”

He smiled. “You know, my daughter isn’t much younger than you. Maeve’s her name. She says I’m not allowed to talk about stuff like this because it’s so embarrassing.”

For some reason she was surprised that Mikey had a daughter. She couldn’t imagine him living anywhere other than among the oil stains and old carburettors of the salvage yard. He seemed to fit in there just right. Imagining him in a house, with a carpet and wallpaper, and a wife and kids was almost impossible. For a while she let his words hang in the air, but then she spoke. It seemed rude not to. “She sounds like a smart girl.”

He was ready with his reply, and said it with the weary pride that constant repetition brings. “That she certainly is — a lot smarter than her old man and that’s for sure.”

The engine rumbled away under the hood as the car ate up the miles and made its way across the country toward the west coast. Mikey’s reference to ‘her old man’ made her think of her father as she closed her eyes. A heartbeat later she was asleep.