The Tomb of Eternity

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Lea and Alex shared a concerned glance and looked back at Ryan. The London hacker dropout was starting to look increasingly anxious about things since Alex had mentioned the word athanatoi.

“The immortals?” Lea asked. “That sounds pretty ominous, Ry.”

“Thought you’d be used to all things immortal by now, Lea.”

“Sure, but what’s freaking me out is that it’s plural — how many of these people are we talking about?”

“Who said they were people?” Ryan said, smirking.

“Now you’re just freaking me out!”

“Hey, don’t shoot the messenger!” Ryan said, and pushed his glasses up on the bridge of his nose. A few rooms away the sound of machine gun fire and screams filled the air. He turned toward the noise for a second and then looked back at Lea. “I’m just telling you what athanatoi means, that’s all.”

“But what does the existence of such a group mean?” Alex said, flinching as another explosion went off in a nearby room.

Lea offered an empty sigh. “I’m guessing it means all of this damned mess goes a lot deeper than we thought.”

“I’ll say,” Ryan added. “I thought we ended this when we stopped Zaugg getting the trident, but now it looks like there’s some kind of secret group behind things. I think I just want to go home and get into bed.”

“Just calm down, Ryan,” Lea said. “It might not be as crazy as all that.”

“Only if our luck changes, Lea. I’m starting to wish you’d never called me, back when you wanted my help on that bloody trident mission.”

“Yeah… about that. The trident really is just the beginning of all this,” Alex said with a nervous smile.

Lea fixed her eyes on Alex. “I think you need to start talking, Agent Nightingale.”

Alex nodded and pulled her hair back. Outside in the corridor the sound of gunfire made her jump once again. “I hope Joe’s okay…”

“Joe’ll be just fine,” Lea said flatly. “Start talking — I think you need to start tying some loose ends up.”

“Sure… I’d used my Dad’s passwords to get into some pretty heavy stuff at the Pentagon, and it wasn't long before I started reading some very interesting information — but always very vague. After a few hours I got hold of a list of names — Gottardo Ricci, Anton Reichardt, Felix Hoffmann, Giovanni Mazzarro and Dario Mazzarro.”

Lea and Ryan shared a concerned glance.

“I’m guessing that’s not your Dad’s Christmas card list, right Alex?”

Alex flicked an anxious look at Lea. “You can say that again. All the names on this list were academics involved heavily in the search for the elixir.”

“I don’t recognize the last two names,” Lea replied.

“The Mazzarros? Italian Egyptologists — Giovanni was the father and Dario is the son. Giovanni, the father, disappeared while on a dig in Egypt many years ago, but he’d dedicated his life to finding what he called the white drops.”

Ryan pushed his glasses up his nose and blinked. “A common term used in ancient Egypt to describe what we today would call the elixir, or the water of life.”

“Right,” Alex said. “But like all the others he died before he discovered the truth.”

“And his son?”

“Dario Mazzarro. He took up where his father left off. You have to remember all of these men knew what’s at stake and tried to keep themselves totally under the radar. Their names only wound up on the DoD list because of an extensive hacking and tapping program by the CIA. But I got closer… I impressed Mazzarro with my research and I got to know him. Anyway, this was the research that Vetrov wanted from me, and I’m ashamed to say it, but I just handed it over to him. I gave him Mazzarro’s name.”

“Are you crazy?” Lea said, eyes wide with disbelief. “He was going to feed you alive to crocodiles! If he did that to me I’d do anything to play for time.”

“She’d even sell me out,” Ryan said.

Lea nodded. “I’d especially sell him out.”

“Maybe,” Alex said, sounding unconvinced. “But the CIA trained me better than that.”

“You’re being too hard on yourself,” Ryan said.

“Either way,” Alex said with a deep, sad sigh. “Vetrov now has Mazzarro’s name, so now he’s in grave danger and we have to get to him before the Russians do.” Alex jumped yet again as a grenade went off in an adjoining room. “I can’t explain it all here, in this, but if we get out of here there’s a lot more you need to know.”

Scarlet, Karlsson and Lexi sprinted though the ornate gates and disappeared inside the zoo as fast as they could. It wasn’t easy to outrun a helicopter, but it wasn’t impossible, all you had to do was find a highly populated area and some cover. Unfortunately for Scarlet Sloane, the RPG attack on Budapester Strasse had changed the mood of the people visiting the zoo, and now they were all screaming and scattering for their lives.

They sprinted deep in the zoo and looked for somewhere to escape from the chopper, but the guns in their hands caused yet more mass panic and the fleeing crowds only highlighted their isolation as they ran in the opposite direction.

“This way!” Scarlet shouted. “We need to get out of sight somewhere.”

She pointed at some buildings a few hundred yards down a twisting path lined with monkey cages and lion enclosures.

“Is this shit actually happening?” Karlsson asked, incredulous.

“Yes it is, darling,” Scarlet said. “What’s the problem?”

“When I signed up I didn’t realize it would end with crazy English women and baboons.”

“But you’re a Seal, Bradley. You should feel at home in a zoo.”

Behind them, the chopper continued its deadly approach, and Kodiak fired at them once again with the assault rifle.

“He really does want this map!” Lexi shouted, as they drew nearer the safety of the buildings.

“What now?” Lexi screamed from the rear. “Those bastards are closing in fast.”

Above her head, Scarlet heard the familiar womp womp womp of the chopper’s rotors as it raced up behind them and prepared to attack again. She scanned the area for somewhere to hide and then she saw her answer.

Poking a little above the birch trees ahead of her was the strange wood and glass roofline of the bird house.

“There!” she shouted. “If we can get inside that building we can buy ourselves some time to think.”

“What? Like the A-Team?” Karlsson said sarcastically.

“Huh?” said Lexi.

“Forget about it, honey…”

They sprinted past a couple of bemused polar bears and entered the bird house just as the chopper reached them. It raised its nose and raced over the top of the giant aviary as it overshot its quarry, now hiding inside the building below.

“What now?” Lexi said with a sigh. “Collect some eggs for lunch?”

Scarlet gave a sarcastic eye roll. “Listen, we had nowhere to run, and they’re not going to waste ammo shooting blindly at us in here because…”

Before she could finish her sentence thousands of bullets drilled through the enormous glass roof of the bird house and sent millions of razor-sharp shards of splintered glass fragments showering over their heads.

“Run!” Scarlet said.

They ran along the twisting path of the bird house, flanked on either side by tall rubber plants and palms, now covered in the smashed crystal remnants of several tons’ worth of reinforced atrium glass. Hundreds of terrified birds squawked and flapped and disappeared up into the sky in a shower of feathers. The icy air from outside rushed into the warm bird house.

Lexi spun around and fired off two or three rapid shots at the chopper but it was useless — a fast moving target obscured by the wood and steel beams of the roof.

“You were saying something about them not firing blindly at us?” Karlsson shouted as they finally reached the safety of the reception area and its solid roof.

Scarlet gave him a look but didn’t rise to the bait. “There! I thought I heard submachine gunfire under the noise of Brad’s whiny voice.”

“From where?” Lexi said.

“Where we came in — down there.”

She was right. Several men were now running toward them down the main room, crunching on the broken glass all over the path, and releasing short bursts of fire from what looked like PP-2000s.

“We’re shit out of luck now,” Karlsson said without emotion.

Lexi glanced at her gun and shook her head. “This isn’t enough.”

Scarlet took a deep breath and shook her head. “We have to get out of here — this is getting a little too real even for me.”

Karlsson looked at her. “Do I need to remind you that there’s a maniac with a machine gun in a chopper out there, and he’s aiming for us.”

“We have no choice,” Scarlet said. “We can’t take out half a dozen goons armed with subs in an enclosed space with these.” She waved her pistol in the American’s face.

He nodded in grim agreement and the three of them sprinted from the reception and into the open air.

“Where now?” Lexi said.

“We could try…”

But before Scarlet could finish, her heart sank as she watched the chopper appear from behind the atrium and descend into the paved entrance outside the bird house.

“Put your weapons down or we will open fire.”

The voice came from the chopper, and was amplified through a megaphone.

Scarlet sighed deeply and reddened with anger. “Do it!” she commanded the others.

They lowered their guns.

“Put the map down and walk away with your hands up.”

“Do it…I’m sorry, but do it,” Scarlet said.

“You’re the boss,” Karlsson said.

Lexi lowered her bag to the ground and they walked backwards with their hands in the air.

The notorious Kodiak stepped out of the chopper and strolled casually to the bag. He looked inside, gave the thumbs up sign to the pilot, and returned to the helicopter. On his way back, he stopped and blew a kiss at Scarlet.

Scarlet’s reply was wordless — the meaning conveyed in her narrowed eyes and clenched jaw.

The six men with submachine guns followed him into the chopper, and she watched with rage as it increased power and began to hover into the air, the mighty downwash of its speeding rotors sending ripples out across the surface of the polar bear enclosure and blowing a little ice cream cart over. Litter from the bins flicked up in the downdraft and blew around like snow. A second later it was high in the sky and turning away.

Then it was out of sight.

“Damn it all!” cursed Scarlet, and lashed out with her boot at the sign directing people to the café. An unusual failure for her, and she wished Kodiak dead for it. She didn’t know if that made her a bad person or not, but that was just fine with her. In her view, anyone with a past like hers was allowed to think whatever they wanted about other people.

“Just cool it, honey,” Karlsson said. “This isn’t over yet. Not by a long-shot.” He tried to put his hand around her shoulder but she pushed it away.

“But they have the map, Brad!”

“But they don’t know how to decipher it,” Lexi said.

“And you can shut up!” Scarlet snarled, still burned by her loss of the map and the thought of having to report her failure to Eden. “It’s all your damned fault in the first place!”

“Hey, I told you they were going to kill my parents…”

“Yeah, whatever,” Scarlet snapped.

She walked away, her head in her hands and her mind racing as problems and solutions fought in her mind. She didn’t like losing and Lexi’s parents being threatened with death brought back other raw memories. It had been a long time since Scarlet had watched those men gun her own parents down and kill them. She was no more than a child, and that was her introduction to the world around her.

Even now, she would wake in the night screaming, her dreams turned to nightmares once again as the agonized faces of her innocent parents rose up in her mind without warning. Her father had hidden her in their wardrobe and she had cowered there. She had done nothing to protect them or save their lives, and now she had failed again.

For this, Kodiak would pay the ultimate price.

“Listen, we have to regroup,” Scarlet said at last, pulling herself together again. “We need to get our heads around this.”

“We’ll sort it out,” Karlsson said reassuringly.

Scarlet scowled. “They have the fucking map and we don’t. That’s all I know.”

“That’s not strictly true,” Lexi said, smiling.

“What do you mean?”

She pulled her phone from her pocket. “You think I’d have that map in my possession for all that time without taking a picture of it?

Alex and the others looked up startled as the door to the library smashed open and the man with the black mask stomped into the room. He tore off the mask and kicked the door shut behind him, shouldering a submachine gun as he moved into the room.

“Hi Alex, great to meet you. I’m Joe, by the way.”

“Yeah, I got that…” she smiled for a second, not knowing what to think about a man she had spent years thinking about and now meeting him for the first time amidst such chaos and danger.

“Where are the others?” Ryan asked.

“Massive reinforcements out of nowhere, mate. No way can we fight them and me and Dempsey got cut off in the brawl. We’re going to meet outside and try and take out Vetrov’s chopper before he can get away.”

Before Ryan could reply the library door was shredded by a savage burst of machine gun fire until a hole the size of a beach ball was in the top panel. A second later a grenade flew through the hole and landed in the center of the library.

Hawke snatched Alex up and screamed at the others to dive for cover. The grenade exploded and sprayed its lethal, twisted cast-iron shrapnel around the room in a burning fireball which set fire to the drapes and bookshelves.

Hawke was dazed, but staggered up and crawled over to Alex.

“Are you all right?”

She nodded, but was also too dazed to answer.

Hawke strained to see through the smoke. “Lea! Ryan!”

Back in the hall he heard the hideous chatter of machine guns as Vetrov’s reinforcements closed in on them. Hawke knew their orders would be to terminate him and the others without mercy and he had only seconds to execute a safe retreat.

He fired the shotgun at the window and blasted the stained-glass out of the frame and over the snow outside where it fell like diamonds. Then, he hoisted Alex over his shoulder in a fireman’s lift and staggered over to the window, clambering through and laying Alex on the soft, cool snow.

Without a second thought, he climbed back through the window into the black smoke and began the search for the others. The smoke stung his eyes and for a second he was disorientated until the sound of Vetrov’s assault on the library helped him get his bearings back.

In the hot darkness he saw Ryan dragging Lea along the floor. Ryan was coughing heavily and looked like he was about to go over.

Hawke ran to him.

“Get to the window and get out!” he screamed.

“I’m not leaving Lea!” Ryan shouted back, grabbing the top of a chair for support.

“I’ll get her — just get out of here — now!”

Hawke watched Ryan flee from the burning room and then he lifted Lea over his shoulder in another fireman’s lift. The two of them went through the window into the icy cold air.

Above them half the complex was now on fire. Hawke looked down at Lea and Alex, and saw that Alex was coughing her way back to life. Then, another grenade landed with a soft thump on the snow beside Lea.

This time, Hawke had time to react and snatched up the grenade. Ryan watched in horror as the former SBS man simply held the grenade in his hands.

“What the hell are you doing?” Ryan asked, taking a step away from Hawke.

“Lie down over Lea, Ryan. She’s unconscious and can’t protect herself.”

“What?”

“Wait… three, four, five…”

Ryan did as he was told and Hawke threw the grenade back into the library. He launched himself over Alex and a second later a colossal explosion ripped through the library. After some savage screams from inside there was silence except for the sound of the flames.

“That takes care of those wankers,” Hawke said, rubbing the soot from his face. “How’s Lea?”

Ryan looked down at Lea and back up at Hawke. “I think… she’s stopped breathing, Joe.”