The Sword of Fire

CHAPTER TWO

Lea Donovan looked down at the man in the hospital bed and clenched her jaw with anger. She had known Richard Eden since she was a child. He had been there when her father was killed and helped her navigate through some rocky teenage years. Now, he needed her help more than ever but she could do nothing except wait and pray and then wait some more.

Beside her stood Ryan Bale, a man changed forever by the cold-blooded murder of his girlfriend, Maria Kurikova. He respected the same grim silence as his former wife as he placed an unlit cigarette in his hand and collapsed into a chair beside the bed. In Ryan she saw a different man now — harder, colder and maybe even a little reckless.

The door opened and Lexi Zhang walked in. She was holding three coffees and after handing them around she sat at the foot of the bed and shared the tense atmosphere with her three friends. After a sip of her drink, she finally broke the silence.

“Any change?”

Several seconds passed before Lea replied. “Nothing.”

The EKG machine measuring their boss’s heart rate sounded a low alarm they had all heard before. A nurse scuttled in and made a few adjustments. She checked the ventilator and the IV drip, smiled at them and left again.

Lea sighed. “How the hell did this happen?”

“The fucking Oracle is how it happened,” Ryan said.

“And don’t think for a second that he won’t pay for it with his life,” said Lexi.

The anger on her face was met with the sound of a fresh wave of rain lashing on the window and a burst of lightning. For a second or two, Lea saw the London skyline illuminated in stark black and white and then a deep roar of thunder echoed over the city and made the hospital shake.

“That’s easy to say,” she said, “but all I care about right now is getting Rich back.”

“That’s what we all want,” Lexi said. “I’d be nothing without him. He gave me hope and I owe him everything.”

“He gave us all hope,” Ryan said. “He gave me ECHO, and that’s the only family I’ve ever really known.”

Lea barely heard their words. Her eyes were following the path of the IV tube as it snaked toward the hideous cannula in Eden’s bruised hand. Looking at his face — thin now, sunken cheeks and light silver tubble — she saw his eyelids flicker and a moment of hope danced through her mind even though she had seen it so many times before. Soon, he was still once again, as quiet and motionless as the dead.

The heart rate machine beeped gently in the background.

Another bolt of lightning.

Another growl of thunder.

Everything was spinning out of contol and she felt like screaming.

The team had split in Rio with Hawke flying to America to help Alex while Reaper returned to his family in the south of France. Scarlet and Camacho had hooked up and gone to Vegas, and the rest of the team flew to London to be with Eden. Now Lea felt like everything was falling apart. Their home, the secret Caribbean island called Elysium was still nothing more than smouldering ruins since the attack which had almost claimed Eden’s life.

ECHO was without a leader and without a base and now she and Hawke were split up and separated by an ocean. Not for the first time she wondered if it was all worth it, but at the center of her soul was the brutal murder of her father. That was the dynamo that would never stop powering her forward until she had gotten her revenge and laid every last ghost to rest. The only way to do that was with ECHO at her back.

“He’ll be all right, Lea,” Ryan said from the other side of the room.

She looked up and saw he had now moved the unlit cigarette to his lips and it was bouncing around as he spoke.

“I hope so.”

Lexi finished her coffee and tried to change the subject. “Ryan, what did Joe say when you called him about — what was it now?”

“An ancient manuscript belonging to the Welsh triads.”

“Oh, yeah I forgot about that,” Lea said, absent-mindedly. She moved her eyes away from Eden and looked at herself for a moment in the reflection of the hospital window. Then she turned to Ryan. “You asked for money to buy it, right?”

“Yes.”

“So what’s the deal again?”

“It just turned up in a museum in Boston,” Ryan said. “The reason I think we should take an interest is because when I was looking at pictures of it on their website I saw several of the same symbols that we saw on the idol in Mexico. I haven’t told Joe that bit yet.”

“The exact same symbols?” Lexi said.

Ryan nodded. “Right, which is very odd. If you ask me whoever wrote that manuscript had obviously seen the symbols somewhere and copied them down. The question is — where did the scribe see them?”

“Another idol?” Lexi said, her eyes almost sparkling.

“Possibly,” Ryan said. “That’s why I want to see the manuscript more closely. I asked Hawke to buy it from the museum — or at least make an offer. Its market value is well within ECHO’s budget for this sort of thing, right Lea?”

Lea was thinking back to her first mission with Eden when they had stormed a facility in northern Russia and killed a rogue colonel. It seemed like a lifetime ago. Now she was dimly aware that someone was asking her a question, but she had missed all the words. “I’m sorry?”

Ryan sighed and fiddled with the cigarette. “I said we can afford to buy it, yes?”

“Oh, yeah… I think so. Rich normally did the numbers.”

“But what if they tell us to get lost?” Lexi said.

Ryan shrugged his shoulders. “Then I have to fly all the way to Boston to look through an ancient manuscript or ECHO loses the chance to have another important relic — another important part of this puzzle we’re trying to put together.”

“Sounds great to me,” Lexi said. “Anything that helps us get closer to the truth behind this and take out the Oracle gets my vote. What do you think, Lea?”

No response.

Ryan sighed. “I’m going to call Joe back.”

“Lea — did you hear what I just said?”

She flicked her head around. “Sorry, Lex… no — I was miles away.”

As Ryan left the room to make the call, he and Lexi shared a concerned glance, but Lea didn’t see that either. The truth was she had so much on her mind the stress was blotting out most of the surface stuff in her life.

Eden was the main problem.

What no one knew but her was that just this afternoon the doctor heading his care had told her the former Parachute Regiment officer’s condition had worsened slightly, and she should start to make preparations in case the worst happened. Doing what Eden himself would do, she had kept the news to herself because there was no point worrying the others unnecessarily.

Not until the unthinkable happened.

Next was the email she had picked up on her phone the day before. It was from her brother, Finn. He hadn’t talked to her for ten years, maybe more. That was weird enough, but what she had read in it was playing on her mind. A nursing home in Galway Bay had been in touch about a relative of theirs. Someone named Maggie who had died recently.

She didn’t recognize the name.

They had box of things for her and said it was urgent. They couldn’t find her, so they had asked Finn to give her the box. He didn’t want to deal with it. Not interested. If she wanted to sort it out then she had to come to his place in Dublin and get the box. He was away but he would leave a key for her. The email was typical Finn Donovan — short, blunt and not even signed.

The message had been bothering her since she read it. She had plenty of relatives over in Galway Bay and all over that part of the country, but she had never heard of that particular nursing home and as far as she knew she didn’t have any relatives in it. Now, someone at the home had told her a loved one had died and left a box of things for her to see. She wasn’t sure what to make of it. All she knew was it couldn’t have come at a worse time.

It never rains, but it pours.