The Vault of Poseidon

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

The National Archaeological Museum in Athens is acknowledged as keeping one of the greatest collections of antiquities in the world, and is located in the center of the ancient city in the busy Exarcheia district.

A polished expansive floor of white marble tiles stretched away from Hawke and Scarlet as they stood in the main entrance and stared into the vast museum, every wing filled with relics and artifacts carefully divided into special collections for the public to enjoy.

They made their way behind the guide along a quiet corridor lined with offices of various members of staff until they reached the one belonging to Yannis Demetriou.

“Please, wait a moment,” the staff member said. “I’ll call the professor and tell him you’re here.”

They knew the professor wasn't there. They had already called both the university and the museum earlier and been told he was nowhere to be found. They were told it was most unlike him to be absent without explanation. They feared the worst, and quickly got into his office where they started work.

The small office was a temporary affair he was using while on sabbatical at the museum, and on his desk, among the clutter and piles of old journals was a single red rose in a glass vase. It needed some more water, Hawke thought.

It took him back to the day he had met Liz. He was standing on a platform at Paddington Station waiting for a train to take him back to his base on the coast, and she had walked up to him holding a single red rose.

“Are you Quentin?” she had asked.

“Sorry, no. My name’s Joe.”

“Ah…” she looked embarrassed.

“But I’ve always thought I could pull off the name Quentin if I tried.”

She laughed. “You look like a Quentin. That’s why I walked up to you and not that guy.” She gestured subtly to an old man in a greasy raincoat standing a few yards away.

“Whose name is obviously Marmaduke.”

Another laugh.

They talked for a few moments, and then they shared a coffee. Hawke learned her name was Elizabeth Compton, and that she worked as a translator in the Ministry of Defence. He learned her best friend had set her up on a blind date with a colleague named Quentin.

And she learned he was in the navy where he worked as a regular sailor. He couldn’t tell her the truth, not until he knew her much better. It was part of the job. He knew they would get married as soon as he realized they had both missed their trains.

“Joe!”

He was startled back in reality. It was Scarlet. “Earth calling Joe!”

“Sorry, I was lost in the past for a second.”

“Well, snap out of it and help me look for something that can help us out here, would you?”

He smiled, and began to go through Demetriou’s filing cabinet, taking less than ten seconds to tip it backwards and pop open the lock via the little hole on the base. Inside were hundreds of files all written in Greek. Hawke couldn’t read a word of it. French and Spanish yes, German maybe, but Greek, no.

“This is no good,” he said. “We’re not getting anywhere. For all we know Zaugg’s already got what he wants and Demetriou’s dead.”

“We have no choice,” Scarlet said sharply. “We have to keep looking. We can’t risk another innocent death.”

Another innocent death, Hawke thought.

The day after their wedding they flew to Hanoi. Their honeymoon was supposed to be four weeks long, taking in the Imperial City in Vietnam, Angkor Wat in Cambodia and the Grand Palace in Thailand before spending a week on a beach on Ko Samui. It was going to be the start of their lives together.

They had only been in Hanoi one day when it happened.

Liz stepped inside the bar to buy two bottles of beer and returned with one in each hand, smiling. She set them down and took a picture of Hawke. He picked up the camera and took one of the two of them together. The original selfie.

And then they arrived.

Two people on a moped. A driver and an assassin, both wearing helmets.

They turned the corner, no different to any of the other few dozen mopeds flying around, but as they drove past the bar they slowed for a second. The assassin on the back pulled what looked to Hawke like an old Chinese PLA CF05 submachine gun from a satchel slung over the shoulder and fired very deliberately in the direction of Hawke and Liz.

They were fish in a barrel, but his reaction was lightning. He tipped up the metal table to use as a shield, sending beer bottles and peanuts flying into the air as bullets sprayed up the wall behind them, smashing all the windows and blasting holes out of the flimsy door. People screamed and ran for their lives.

And then he saw Liz, on the pavement, blood running through her t-shirt, streaming from her mouth. It was as fast and simple as that to take someone’s life, he thought.

Hawke gently shook his head at the memory — his way of trying to rub it out. He had learned to suppress the bad memories that haunt people’s lives as a young man. He had joined the marines as a way of getting out into the world and proving himself, of getting away from his mess of a life. But he knew in his heart that you never got rid of a memory like that of Liz dying in his arms. That was here to stay, a permanent ghost.

At first he had tried to console himself with the idea of savage revenge, of tracking down the scumbag that had tried to kill him and instead murdered his wife, but then even that tiny shred of hope was broken when his former CO, Commander Olivia Hart, had told him the hitman was Alfredo Lazaro, a Cuban mercenary hired by an unknown agency to take Hawke out of the game permanently.

Hart claimed to have been given the intel directly by the Secretary of Defence himself. She also told him Lazaro had been killed a few days later in a strip club in the Patpong district of Bangkok in a raid orchestrated by Thai Special Forces. That was the last anyone ever talked about it and his old life went up in smoke.

“For God’s sake what is the matter with you?”

Scarlet again. This time her face suggested he should definitely stop daydreaming about the past.

“Sorry. What have you found?” he asked.

“There’s someone coming,” she whispered. She gently closed the door and stepped back into the office. “He’ll be here in just a few seconds.”

“Who is it?”

“Funnily enough, Joe, it's Zeus himself, and he wants to know why you’re such an arse.”

Hawke opened his mouth to reply, but closed it a second later when the door opened.

“What is going on in here?”

A short, dark-haired man with a thick moustache was standing in the door. He looked at them for a short moment and then spoke again: “Who are you people, and why are you in my office?”