The Lost City

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

On the flight from Lima to Cusco, Hawke felt jumpy and tired. There was still no word about Eden’s condition back in London and every time he closed his eyes he saw Maria, the young Russian woman savagely cut down in her prime.

He tried to bring himself back on message by swearing for the hundredth time that he would bury Kruger’s bones if it was the last thing he ever did, but every time reality crawled up from the pit of his despair and clawed at his conscience until he felt bad all over again. At least Ryan was here, alive and well. But he had changed, and this time Hawke knew it was forever.

He looked over at Lea but turned away and shut his eyes before she noticed. He couldn’t tell what she was thinking anymore, and it felt like she was drifting away. Or maybe he was the one drifting. He didn’t know. It was obvious everyone was feeling the pressure of the losses of the Atlantis mission. Reaper was sleeping on the couch in the center of the small jet and Luis was reading through the professor’s files opposite him, but Lexi and Scarlet were sitting at the table in the rear of the jet and arguing. They’d been grumbling for a while, but now their voices were rising in volume.

“Hey!” Lea shouted, keeping her head facing forward. “Trying to get some sleep up here!”

“Come down here then and I’ll slap you to sleep,” Scarlet said.

“Hey — what are you chewing?” Ryan asked Scarlet.

“Acullico. Want some, boy?”

He nodded and she passed him some. He put it in his mouth and started to chew. “What the hell is this stuff?”

“Coca,” she said flatly. “Grabbed me some back in Lima.”

“Bloody hell!” Ryan said. “You could have told me.”

“You should know not to accept strange things from strange people by now, Ry,” Lea said.

“Spit it out if you don’t like it,” Scarlet said.

Ryan closed his eyes and carried on chewing. “No, you’re all right.”

“Get some rest, everyone,” Hawke said. Thankfully they listened to him and quietened down. He was losing focus and the squabbling of his team as they slowly unwound wasn’t helping him get things back together one little bit. Any thoughts he’d vaguely circled about quitting ECHO were destroyed the second Eden went into the coma.

How could he walk away from his friends and leave them without a leader? But the truth was he wasn't sure he could lead them, at least not back on the island. His skills were all in the field. He had no idea of how Eden funded ECHO, or who or what the Consortium was. He looked around the cabin and realized he didn’t even know how Eden paid for jet fuel.

The fact Eden took care of the strategic level while he focussed on tactics in the field was why it all worked so well, not to mention Ryan’s brilliant polymath mind that was so adept at finding patterns in the chaos. The truth was the team had been smashed but he still had to pick up the pieces and try and move forward.

He used the new peace to focus on the mission again. The Lost Inca Gold was probably the greatest missing hoard in the world. No other treasure was so infamous and so cloaked in mystery and the lust for wealth and power. People had been searching for it for hundreds and hundreds of years, and dozens of expeditions had been commissioned into the jungles of Peru, Bolivia and Brazil just in the last century. While these things excited him, they also highlighted just how unrealistic it was that they were going to have any more luck than all the previous failures.

At least they had decoded the cryptic inscription and symbols on the Mask of Inti. This alone meant they had a better chance than most of the treasure hunters who had gone before. He thought about Professor Balta now in Kruger’s hands, and what they might have done to him to make him spill the beans on the location. He prayed Balta was still alive and decided to try and get some sleep before they touched down at Cusco Airport. From there he would be piloting a hired chopper into the foothills of the Andes.

Lexi Zhang was dreaming. She was sitting in the back room of her parents’ home and watching her mother grind ink. She had just finished washing the tea inkstick and was now ready to grind the inkstone. First she poured some water into the grindstone and then unwrapped the block of tea ink and began to grind it into the water.

How many times she had watched this didn’t matter, because in this dream it was happening now, and she was just a child. She watched as the black tea-stained pigment pushed out into the water, slowly getting thicker as her mother pushed the stick around the small green Duan inkstone.

The sunlight illuminated dust motes as they danced around her mother’s face but she was concentrating too much on the ink’s consistency to notice any distraction. Outside in the yard she heard the gentle call of a hawfinch as it hopped around their neighbor’s pear tree. She loved that tree. It reminded her of morning walks around Xiangshui Lake.

When the ink was ready, her mother selected a soft calligraphy brush and began to write the poem on the paper.

It was so peaceful, she thought.

What happened to my life?

Her mother began to fade, and she was suddenly aware of her surroundings on board the Gulfstream. The gentle grinding of the inkstone and the hawfinch’s song now replaced by the hum of the air-conditioning and the white noise roar of the air outside as the plane cut through it at a thousand kilometres per hour. She wanted to go back to sleep, but she yawned and stretched her arms over her head instead. Real life never went away just because you wanted it to, and somewhere down there Dirk Kruger had to be stopped.