The Swords of Babylon

CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT

Drake met Torsten Dahl at the door, patting the big man on the back, and then shook hands with the diminutive-by-comparison professor, Olle Akerman.

“Bit of an adventure?”

Dahl wrinkled his nose. “Nothing special. Just practicing my free running.” As usual, the Swede wasn’t boasting. To him, the Iceland jaunt had been standard fare.

Akerman still looked a little shaken. “I had to run for my life whilst Torsten here was playing ‘boats’ with a couple of thugs. Frightful.”

Drake bolted the door behind them, listening carefully as the triple locking mechanism kicked in. The CIA manned CCTV would also be surveying the surroundings for as far as a mile in every direction, but, not wanting to solely trust the CIA, Hayden had put Mai on patrol as back-up.

The boss of SPEAR pointed Dahl and Akerman to a seat. “We’ve waited for you. Please tell us what you know.” Smiling, the blond-haired agent sat down next to Akerman, the worry lines of the last few months all but gone from her face. Drake thought that Kinimaka was shaping up nicely for her.

Dahl went quickly through the story that Akerman had told him in Iceland. “One of Olle’s colleagues discovered some kind of ancient message in the tomb, written in the language of the gods. Something significant, apparently. This man — Jakob Hult — sold his findings to the kind of ruthless individual we seem to keep on coming up against. They killed Hult and tried to kill us.”

“But they didn’t succeed.” Hayden smiled again.

Dahl shrugged. “There were only three.”

“Whatever this message was, Hult took it away from the tomb,” Akerman told them. “He smashed off part of the rock where it appeared.” The older man looked angry. “Such disrespect for our history.”

“For proof,” Drake said. “He needed proof.”

“Yes,” Dahl carried on. “Well, then my little friend here, he bumped into Russell Cayman. What that crazy bastard was doing at the tomb we don’t know. But Olle escaped and called me. That’s it.”

Hayden sat back. “That’s it? You said this was good information, Dahl.”

The Swede nodded. “Later, as Jakob died, he revealed a few things relating to the translation, particularly the doomsday device. First he said, ‘there shall remain one other way to activate… two failsafes’. And finally he said, ‘three minds, three tombs, three bones. Nine parts. Do you see?’ Just like that.”

Drake feigned alarm. “Just like that?”

Dahl growled at him. “Don’t start.”

Alicia helped herself to a beer. “Alright, Torsty. Well, I guess your trip wasn’t a total washout. It’s certain now — there’s another way to activate that device, and you can be damn sure Cayman’s on to it, as well as whoever’s controlling that fruit bat. But the nine parts were all destroyed.” She stared at Dahl. “Weren’t they?”

“Absolutely. Blown to hell.”

“Well, we don’t know where Cayman is. We don’t know who or where his boss is. We don’t know the rest of the translation,” Hayden said. “I say we stick to the plan and go after the swords.”

Drake stood up. “Ready an’ willing. Let’s thrash this out.”