The Orpheus Legacy

CHAPTER SIX

Three hours later the team were sitting around in their hotel rooms waiting for Ryan to get off the laptop. Lea took the time to have the hotel launder her clothes and then she took a shower to freshen up. Others followed her lead, all the while Ryan sat hunched over his battered computer, typing, hacking, mining data.

Hawke stretched out on one of the beds and listened to the team as they bantered the hours away. They sounded upbeat and optimistic as usual, but he knew they were feeling the pressure of having their money supply cut off and being on the Most Wanted list. They’d get through it, but only if he kept them positive about the future.

With the sun sinking behind the hills of Athens, he rolled over, switched on the small lamp and swung his legs over the edge of the bed. “How are we going, mate?”

“Good.” Ryan lifted a can of coke to his lips, shook it and realized it was empty. Putting it back down with a curse, he spun around in his chair and faced the team’s expectant faces. He knew that during much of their missions the former soldiers and Special Ops people among them usually carried him, but it was times like this when his new family needed him more than he needed them. He felt the weight of that responsibility on his shoulders and took it seriously.

“So what have you got then?” Scarlet asked. “Apart from an annoying personality, that is?”

“At least I have a personality.”

“Aww,” Lexi said. “They love each other really.”

Lea smiled at the exchange. “Give us the lowdown, Ry.”

“Hendrik Block is indeed a mercenary and this is what he looks like.” He enlarged one of the countless windows on his laptop so they could see the merc’s face. “As you can see, he is just as Markides described, with bright blue eyes and a severe burn on the right side of his face.”

“Woah,” Lexi said. “House fire, maybe?”

“Or in battle,” Zeke said. “I saw some very bad burns in Iraq. You wouldn’t believe what can happen inside a tank if it sets on fire.”

“Neither,” Ryan said. “After trawling through some pretty unsavoury forums I can tell you that Mr Block received the burns during a torture session in Hong Kong. He was working as a merc there, protecting a heroin smuggling operation when he was captured by a rival drugs kingpin named Qishan. Turns out Mr Qishan wanted to know the names and HQ of Block’s merc team, but after several hours with a blow torch and a pair of pliers, he still didn’t know.”

“He never squealed?” Zeke said. “Wow.”

“His team rescued him but Qishan got away. The rest is history.”

Silence fell over the room as they looked at Block’s ravaged face. Ryan broke the silence and continued his briefing. “Block now works in a team run by a man known to the Underworld as King Kashala. Real name is Joseph Kashala.”

Hawke’s eyes widened. “Wait, I’m sure I’ve heard of that name.”

“Who is he?” Lea asked.

“He’s a former Congolese Army general and part of the March 23 Movement.”

Kamala looked at Hawke. “Which is what?”

“The Congolese Revolutionary Army,” he said. “Let’s just say these guys don’t play games.”

“Right,” Ryan said. “From what I can tell here, he’s about as ruthless as it gets. He just started up his own mercenary company called Kashala International and the rest of the team include a number of Belgian and Congolese mercs, including Nkulu Mukendi, Nzanga Chumbu, Alexis Demotte and Olivier Crombez. They’re known informally as the Blood Crew.”

Reaper, who was standing on the balcony and smoking, now turned his head sharply to face Ryan. Brow furrowed, he said, “Did you say Olivier Crombez?”

“There’s nothing wrong with your French,” Ryan said. “Oui.”

“Why, Reap?” Camacho asked.

“I know Crombez. We worked together in several African countries many years ago. He was a good friend.”

A long silence followed, broken by Scarlet. “Awkward.”

“Pas du tout,” the Frenchman said casually. “We both know how this world works. You are my new team, ma famille… he is now the enemy. There is no question of my loyalty.”

Hawke sensed the atmosphere change. Despite Francken’s words, things really were starting to get personal. Not only had he known Matt Jagger as a friend, but now Reaper knew one of the mercs responsible for his death. He decided to move things along and change the subject. “Who hired this King Kashala, mate?”

Ryan said, “He was hired to steal the lyre by a man named Sergei Dimitrov.”

“Not another Russian?” Scarlet said with a sigh.

“No,” Nikolai said. “This is not a Russian surname. This is a Bulgarian surname.”

“He’s right,” Ryan said.

“And anyway,” Nikolai growled. “What is wrong with Russians? I am Russian!”

“Nothing, Kolya.” Scarlet said with a wink and smile. “Nothing at all.”

Lea asked, “What else do we know about this Dimitrov?”

Ryan shrugged. “He’s one of Bulgaria’s top mafia bosses and very wealthy with it, although what he wants with the lyre is another question.”

“A question to which we will soon know the answer,” Hawke said. “In the meantime, Ryan, keep researching Kashala and his Blood Crew. We need to know everything we can about them.”

Lexi calmly sipped her water. “Where does this mafia boss spend his time?”

A broad smile appeared on Ryan’s face. “As it happens, he has a lovely place tucked away on the slopes of Vitosha Mountain, just outside Sofia.”

“A lovely place?” Lea asked.

“Well, it’s more of a castle really.”

Lexi set down her water and stretched her arms. “And there was me struggling to find a place for our next vacation.”

Lea studied the world below as the Airbus A320 crossed the border and carried them over the olive groves and fig orchards of southern Bulgaria. A sage-green and straw-colored landscape just like so many other countries in this part of the world stretched out beneath them and seemed to go on forever.

She turned away from the window and stretched out as much as she could in her cramped seat. Orlando Sooke’s ten thousand dollars had been more than enough to book the flight and there were no problems with the fake passports, but everyone on the team acutely felt the loss of the private jet.

Especially one.

“No mini-bar,” Scarlet whined.

Lea rolled her eyes. “We get it, Cairo.”

“And there are other people in this aircraft,” she said with horror. “I mean actual members of the public.”

“Worse things happen at sea,” Ryan said.

“And the seats are horrible.”

“We’re all in the same boat.” Hawke folded his tray up into the seat in front, his long legs crushed into the pitifully mean seat pitch.

“If only it was a boat,” she said. “There’s even a queue for the toilet. This is intolerable.”

Ryan craned his head over the seat behind. “This is your idea of hell, isn’t it, Cairo?”

“It is since your face appeared.” She lifted her arm, grabbed his face and pushed him back into his own seat. “Boy.”

Zeke was easier to please and hadn’t complained once since climbing on board back in Athens. “I think it’s just great. Shoulda seen the time me and my buddies travelled around Mexico. Hell, some of those planes were like crates with wings. Once I shared my ride with some cages of Plymouth Rocks… oh lord, thank God my window was broken.”

Scarlet stared at him, open-mouthed and unsure what to say. “What the hell…”

The Texan turned to her with a bright, toothy grin. “Chickens, sweetheart.”

“It’s like you read my mind!” she said sarcastically.

“Hey.” Zeke was unfazed. “Nothing wrong with some good ole fashioned bantam banter.”

She rolled her eyes, but Lexi laughed. “The great Cairo Sloane outclassed at last.”

“Hardly, darling. Just ask Jackie here.”

But Camacho wasn’t listening. Like Kamala Banks one row ahead of him, he had found Kim Taylor’s murder back in Washington DC hard to handle. He had known her a long time and watching her death at the hands of the sniper had hit him harder than he’d expected.

“Jack?”

He turned and saw Scarlet was waiting for an answer. “Sorry, what?”

“Never mind, darling.”

Lea checked her watch. “We’re almost in Sofia, so this is it guys. We need the cash so we can’t screw up. The mission is simple. We have to find this Dimitrov guy and get the lyre back for Francken, and we have to do it without that son of a bitch sniper taking another one of us out.”

A grim silence followed her words. It sounded simple enough, and the retrieval of the lyre was something they should be able to execute without too much pain, but the sniper was starting to get to them more than any of them cared to admit out loud. With three of their team murdered by him and with no way to tell when the next strike would come or who could be the next victim, they all felt much more on edge than usual.

Worse, their impressive network of contacts stretching from Eden and MI5 in Europe and Alex and her father and the CIA in the US was now gone — ripped away from them when they needed it most. This meant their chances of tracking down the killer were almost zero until he struck again and even then they were painfully dependent on him screwing up and leaving some kind of clue to his identity behind him.

Right now, that was the only way they could get on his trail and track him down, but that would mean another of them losing their life which was just too high a price.

“As the great man said, we just have to keep on buggering on,” Hawke said.

Ryan feigned confusion. “I never said that.”

“Tosser.” Lea hid her smile and turned to Hawke. Lowering her voice, she said, “Tell me about Matt Jagger.”

“Captain Matt Jagger,” Hawke said quietly. “Former Grenadier Guards officer and the man behind Redarrow International.”

Kamala fiddled with her gold necklace. “What’s that?”

“It’s a private military company based just outside of London. They are — or were — in the business of providing top-notch military training to anyone with a big enough wallet, and that’s not all they do. They’re also heavily involved with weapons procurement and they have an extensive network of intel gathering specialists, too.”

“They sound dangerous.”

“They are,” he said flatly. “If there’s an armed conflict in this world, Jagger had a dog in the fight. His mercs have been everywhere — Sierra Leone, Equatorial Guinea, Papua New Guinea, Yemen, Syria — you name it.”

“And yet in less than ten minutes, he and his men were wiped out by King Kashala’s team,” Scarlet said grimly.

Hawke read the look on her face and felt the same way. “Matt was a very experienced man with many years of solid professional soldiering behind him. In the British Army he served in Northern Ireland, Serbia, Afghanistan and Iraq and then he went even further afield as the head of Redarrow. Not many could have bettered him the way this team of mercs did on the Electra.”

“Seems to me,” Kamala said, “that if we screw with this Kashala guy, we’re playing with fire.”

As the landing gear extended beneath the aircraft and they banked to line up with the runway at Sofia Airport, Hawke checked his watch. “I have to disagree.”

“How so?” she asked.

“The second Guy Francken hired ECHO to get the lyre back, it was Dimitrov and Kashala who were playing with fire. Buckle up everyone, it’s going to be a hell of a ride.”