Thunder God

CHAPTER ONE

Joe Hawke woke with a start. In the darkness of his London flat the telephone was ringing, and he scrambled to pick up the call before it rang off.

“Hawke,” was all he said. He squinted at the small clock beside his bed: 01:17.

“This is Eden.” His voice was level and inscrutable.

Hawke felt a surge of uncertainty course through his veins. He had no idea why Sir Richard Eden would be calling him in the middle of the night, but he knew he wasn’t inviting him to a birthday party.

“What’s wrong?”

“It’s Lea,” Eden said firmly. “She’s gone missing.”

Hawke paused a beat to let the words sink in. He was still half asleep, and part of him wondered if all this was nothing more than a terrible dream. Eden was talking about Lea Donovan, his personal security chief, and the woman Hawke had started to fall in love with. He swung his legs out of the bed and switched on the light. The past few weeks had changed his life completely — he’d hunted down a Swiss megalomaniac, ending his insane dreams of world domination, and met Lea, the first woman he’d felt strongly about since the cold-blooded murder of his wife. Now, Eden was telling him she was gone.

“What does missing mean, Richard?”

“We don’t know. She was on assignment for me in the Far East and she’s dropped off the grid. A few days ago I sent her to Hong Kong to look into something that could be a potential problem for me — for us all. She always sticks to protocol, which is to make contact with me every six hours, but contact was broken around ten hours ago.”

“I’m listening.”

Eden continued, calm and measured, but clearly concerned and trying to hide the fact from the former SBS man. “I have a feeling something pretty big is about to kick off, Hawke, and I’m trusting you to sort it for me. I know there are some things you don’t trust about me, and I know you’re aware that I’m not telling you everything, but I’m asking for your help, and in return you’ll get the knowledge you’ve been searching for.”

Hawke listened carefully to what Eden was saying. Since the very beginning he’d known something big was being kept from him, and that Sir Richard Eden was where the mystery began and ended. He also knew the deceit had something to do with not only Scarlet Sloane and Sophie Durand but also Lea Donovan herself — the woman who had broken contact with her boss and was now missing in Hong Kong.

Now Eden was confirming that his intuition had been right all along and that there was more to all of this than he knew. The old English politician was also telling him that he was closer than ever to finding out the truth about it all, but Hawke didn’t need any of that as an incentive — the fact that Lea was missing while on assignment was enough to motivate him.

“Can I take your plane?” Hawke asked.

“No. I sent the plane to Dubai to pick up Scarlet Sloane. I know how well you worked together and I asked her to help you. You’ll have to fly on a commercial airline, and that means waiting until the morning.”

“I’m on it.”

A second after Eden had hung up, Hawke was on his feet.

He got up and paced into the bathroom where he picked up his pre-packed kit bag and brushed his teeth. Light off and back in the bedroom, he tossed the bag on the bed and pulled some clothes off the back of an old chair at the side of his bed.

The agony he’d felt after Liz’s murder had ruined him for years, and left him a broken man. He’d long ago lost count of how many booze-soaked nights it had taken to get over Liz — nights full of tears and insomnia so carefully hidden from the rest of the world, and yet he knew you never really got over something like that, not completely.

Worst of all was the knowledge that her killer was now dead himself, taken out by a Special Forces raid in Thailand. Instead of celebrating his death, Hawke found it had robbed him of the most primal of desires — revenge, and that meant a never-ending cycle of hatred and regret without any closure.

All this had left him scarred and with a greater fear of losing those he loved than he had ever had before Hanoi. Now, faced with the thought of something similar happening to Lea, his fists tightened and he clenched his jaw, totally rejecting even the thought of such a terrible nightmare.

Whatever he felt about Eden and his game of secrets, he knew he was an extremely professional man with serious contacts in the intelligence communities, as well as a highly respected archaeologist and discoverer of ancient treasures. None of this made him inclined to take his word with anything but the gravest seriousness.

Whatever had happened to Lea, he would undo it.

Whoever was responsible, he would punish.

He slammed his door on his way to the cab and told the driver to get to London Heathrow Airport as fast as possible.

It was all kicking off again.