The Tomb of Eternity

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

The Gulfstream touched down into a bright Egyptian morning, and after a short moment in customs, Hawke and the rest of the team emerged from the airport and made their way to the taxi rank. Before checking into their hotel, Eden and the others went straight to the home of the British Ambassador, a personal friend of Sir Richard’s, where he planned on apprising the British Government formally about what was going on.

Hawke, meanwhile, had other business to attend to — the note from Snowcat. He watched his friends drive away in a government SUV while he waited for the next cab to pull up. Moments later, he was driving from the airport in the back of a 1977 Mercedes 280SE and watching the city pass in a blur through the half-cracked window.

The atmosphere here reminded him vaguely of Kabul, only Cairo was much bigger and wealthier. He hadn’t spent long in Kabul — just a couple of hours before flying out to Kamdesh in pursuit of the Taliban top brass. Kamdesh at the time was rumored to be the headquarters of the most senior members of Al-Qaeda, and Hawke’s OP confirmed this. When they called the sighting of the notorious convoy into base they were told in no uncertain terms to hold fire and wait for a unit of US Rangers to come in and claim the prize. By the time the American forces arrived, the convoy had gone.

That was a long time ago, and he still wasn’t sure if he missed it or not. Probably not, all things considered. The SBS had a habit of getting up at two a.m. and lying in frozen ditches for hours on end or diving under enemy corvettes and planting limpet mines on the hull, and Joe Hawke wasn’t getting any younger.

A hot wind blew from the south, and the driver told him it was the khamasin — the desert wind which blew from the southwest, off the Sahara. It was early this year, the driver explained, but Hawke’s mind was elsewhere. He was thinking about the day he met Lea in London, and his new career as a security guard had gone down the pan in royal fashion. After seeing what had almost happened to Alex back at the Moscow dacha, just thinking about Lea being held hostage by Vetrov was enough to drive him insane with rage, but that was an emotion he knew how to suppress. Revenge, after all was a dish best served cold.

He glanced through the windshield and saw some kind of obstacle ahead. According to the driver, a van delivering water to a corner shop had crashed into what he called a toktok — an auto-rickshaw — and knocked it over. They were used all over the poorer parts of Cairo instead of taxis because they were much cheaper, he explained. As they cruised past Hawke saw the toktok passengers climbing out with bleeding heads and an enormous argument erupted between their driver and the man behind the wheel of the van.

Hawke watched with casual interest as they passed by. It was his first trip to Cairo and he had no idea what to expect. He’d heard it was the biggest city in the Middle East, but it was only as the cab wound its way painstakingly through the heavy traffic that he really understood what that truly meant. They fought against an incessant tide of cars, buses and pedestrians ambling all over the streets as they nosed their way toward the address Snowcat had given him.

Progress was too slow for Hawke, but then most things were. He looked over the chaos around him as his driver proudly explained that the word Cairo meant the Place of Combat. He said nothing in response, but wondered just how true that would turn out to be for him — it would all depend on how things went with the Russian woman, he guessed.

They crossed the Nile and drove over Gezira Island before pulling south off of El Tahrir and arriving at the Sheraton. It was a more upmarket area than where they had just driven through — well-dressed people crossed the bridge over the river in the hot sun, talking into cell phones. A group of tourists in white shirts and sun hats gently moved out of the shade of a date palm on the bank of the Nile and stepped down into one of the many cruise boats moored on the west bank.

They pulled up outside the hotel.

“Your destination!” the driver said proudly and presented the building to his passenger with a gentle wave of his palms.

Hawke thanked him and paid. A second later he was staring up at the enormous white twenty-storey tower which loomed above the western bank of the Nile. If all of this was real, and not just a wild goose chase — or worse, a trap — then somewhere in this hotel was a Russian agent named Snowcat, and the final truth about his wife’s brutal murder in Vietnam.

He took a deep breath of the warm air and walked toward the lobby.

The lobby lounge of the Sheraton was a large expanse filled with expensive furniture and the same kind of well-dressed people he’d seen back on the bridge. A man played some light jazz on a grand piano in the corner, his face only partially visible in the low light of the lamp beside him, while the pale marble floors reflected the neon blue of the strip light running around the edge of the room.

Hawke walked toward the bar, brushing against one of the many potted palms which decorated the place as he moved forward. It was busy here, and he ordered a sparkling water. He selected a seat which offered a good view of the room but at the same time allowed easy access to an egress point. It was an old habit he couldn’t shake off, he thought, and besides, you never knew when it might come in handy.

As he waited, his mind turned to Eden and the others. He wondered what information Eden was passing to the British Ambassador and just how high all of this went in HMG. He now knew it went at least as high as the chief of the Pentagon as far as the US Government was concerned, and could hardly believe he was in the middle of it all.

Either way, they would be safely in the Four Seasons by now, hard at work on decoding the hieroglyphics on the map — they might have lost Mazzarro but at least they had his notebooks. With any luck, he could get the information he wanted here in the Sheraton and be back with them as soon as possible. After all, Lea was out there somewhere and he had to get her back. He had accepted a long time ago that getting to the bottom of his wife’s murder was not much more than chasing ghosts, but Lea was alive, and needed him. The fact they didn’t know where she was drove him crazy.

He saw a woman exit the elevators in the lobby. She wore a dark suit and her blonde hair was tied back. She had a slim, oval face, with powerful blue eyes. Could it be the woman who had left him the note outside of Domodedovo Airport in Moscow? He was unsure, especially from this distance, but he thought it could have been her. He’d only seen her for a second — she had left the note in his pocket in a heartbeat and was gone again, into the busy airport crowd.

He sipped the water and watched her as she walked from the elevators to the bar and ordered herself a drink — plain water with ice and lemon. Maybe it was her after all, but she could still be anyone, he thought. The place was heaving with business people from all over the world, all keen to exploit a basket-case government in crisis and get a piece of the sixth biggest oil reserves in Africa. For all he knew she was an OPEC executive flying in from their headquarters in Vienna.

But then he looked a little closer and his suspicions grew. He watched closely as she talked to the barman for a few moments. She held up her hands to convey to the barman something to do with the number six, and then they laughed and he pointed to the seats by the piano. Then, she started to walk toward him and by the time she was halfway to his table he knew this was no oil executive from Austria.

She sat a few seats away to his right and smiled at him before retrieving a cell phone from her bag and flicking the screen with her thumb.

Hawke cleared his throat and pushed back into his chair. “You must be Snowcat, then?”

The woman looked up at him sharply. For a second she looked startled, but then she smiled and relaxed a little. “Yes, but how did you know?”

“Easy. First, you counted something on your fingers.”

She looked confused. “Yes — I was telling him my room number, sixty-six.”

“And you used your little finger for the six, instead of your thumb, which told me you were Russian.”

She opened her mouth slightly in surprise. “I never even thought…”

“Forget about it,” he continued. “If you’re going to worry about something giving you away then you should spend some more time on how you walk.”

“On how I walk?”

“I can tell from the way you walked over here you have a small firearm in your right-hand pocket — am I right?”

“Well…” she looked a little embarrassed now. She nodded her head. “Yes, yes I do — but how did you know?”

“Simple — your right stride is shorter than your left, and your right arm is swinging less than your left arm. Both of these things tell me you have a weapon in the right-hand pocket of your trousers.”

She looked confused. “My what?’

Hawke rolled his eyes. “Pants.”

“Oh… then yes. If you mean pants then say pants.”

“No, I meant trousers so I said trousers. Pants are what go under your trousers… Anyway, my guess is you’re carrying something super compact like a Beretta Pico or maybe a Sig P238.”

She smiled and looked in his eyes. “Well there, Mr Hawke, you are wrong.” She flicked her eyes over the room to ensure they were alone and then pulled the weapon from her pocket for a second before sliding it back again.

“Ah — of course — the Makarov. Should have known better — Russian.”

“Reliable, accurate and lethal.”

Hawke nodded. “It’s an excellent pistol, I agree.”

Snowcat’s smiled faded. “I was talking about me, Englishman.”

Hawke made no reply, but stayed alert as she rose from her seat and wandered closer to him. She sat beside him, so close he could smell her perfume — foreign, exotic.

“Why did you ask me to meet you here in Cairo?” she asked.

“Because I’m working here,” he said flatly.

“You mean you’re tailing Maxim Vetrov, perhaps?” she said with a half smile.

Hawke thought about lying, but saw no point. “Yes. You know him?”

She nodded. “Of course. He is known to my government — he is a very powerful and dangerous man, and before you ask, yes I do know all about the Map of Immortality.”

For a moment he was stunned and not sure how to respond. This woman had honey-trap written all over her in bright, flashing neon, and he knew he had to be careful about what he told her, on the other hand, no one was supposed to know about a map which had remained buried in a lost tomb in Greece for the last few thousand years.

Now he was confronted with a choice — be straight with her or be guarded. If she knew anything about his wife’s murder he couldn’t risk her walking, so he went with being straight.

“You know about the map?”

“Of course. We have Maxim Vetrov under more surveillance than an airport and we’ve known about his search for the map for a long time. We’ve also been watching you since you decided to turn Geneva into a rally track.”

Hawke cracked a smile and nodded in admiration. “I should have known.”

“Don’t be too hard on yourself — you are a soldier, not a spy.”

“Where is Vetrov now — do you know?”

She shook her head. “We don’t know. He took off from Venice some time ago and is flying south, we think. We presume he is heading to Egypt.”

“Have you heard of Dario Mazzarro?” Hawke asked her.

She shook her head, and Hawke smiled. For once he had more information.

“He’s the only man in the world who can translate the map properly, and Vetrov snatched him from Venice before taking off. If that weren’t bad enough, he took two of my people hostage, an American CIA man named Karlsson and a woman named Lea Donovan who means a great deal to me.”

“I see… I will need to report this to my superiors and…”

Without any warning, half a dozen men burst through the revolving doors of the hotel lobby and opened fire with submachine guns. The bullets smashed into marble, wood and glass, and in seconds had turned a peaceful, relaxed place into a horrifying scene of bloody carnage where people screamed and ran through the dust and chaos for their lives.

Hawke and Snowcat immediately thought the same thing — a terrorist attack — but this changed when the men made an obvious move toward their table and fired on them personally.

They dived for cover behind the leather couch they’d been sitting on and Snowcat extracted the Makarov and took aim over the top of the cushions using a rubber plant for cover. She took out two of the men in a second, causing Hawke to raise an eyebrow of appreciation.

They turned to each other and at the same time said: “They must have followed you!”

“Hey, they never followed me!” Snowcat said. “This is an outrageous slur on a Russian agent…”

“Well don’t look at me!” Hawke said in reply. “I didn’t let anyone follow me here, either!”

“Oh, fine,” Snowcat said. “Then we agree that the fairies brought them here, no?”

Hawke rolled his eyes.

“However they got here,” he said firmly, “it’s time we got out of here, agreed?”

Snowcat nodded and after firing a few more warning shots in the direction of the armed men, they slipped out through the door at the rear of the lobby. They searched for a way out, and after running along a utility corridor lined with elevator shafts they burst through a fire escape and emerged into a bright Cairo day.

“Which way now?” Hawke asked.

“Follow me,” Snowcat said, pocketing the Makarov.

Behind them, the sound of enemy gunfire drew closer.