A splash from below - then the doors crashed open. Pirates rushed in, AKs at the ready . . . as Chase plunged into the water, pulling the twine as he fell.
The Browning swung towards the door and roared, eating through the remaining bullets in less than four seconds.
It was more than enough. The storm of lead swept across the dock, the force of the .50-cal at point-blank range literally explosive. The men were practically vaporised, limbs flying, heads exploding like watermelons stuffed with dynamite.
The machine gun ran dry, the last links of the spent ammo belt tinkling to the deck. The sound of chunks of the pirates hitting the ground was considerably wetter.
Chase surfaced, peering over the dock as a headless body slumped to its knees and keeled over in front of him. Bejo popped out of the water, gasping. He was surprised by the sudden lack of a threat. ‘What happened to the pirates, Mr Eddie?’
‘They’re in pieces of eight.’ Bejo was about to climb on to the dock when Chase stopped him. ‘You don’t want to look up there.’ He pointed at the dock’s open end. ‘Swim out that way and wait for me.’
Climbing out, he took in the rest of the scattered, splattered bodies, feeling absolutely no sympathy or remorse - not after what the pirates had done to the people aboard the Pianosa. ‘Amateurs.’
Someone was still alive, though, a quavering voice calling out. Latan. But his anger and arrogance was gone, replaced by shock. When Chase picked up a fallen AK-47, the pirate leader turned and fled.
Chase pursued. Latan was heading for the RIB. Chase went round the other side of the flaming kitchen on to the walkway, running to intercept him at the jetty—
A thick arm lashed out from round the corner of a shack, clotheslining Chase to the floor. The big, scar-faced man scowled down at him.
Chase raised the AK, but the pirate kicked it from his hand, then drove his heel down into the Englishman’s stomach. Chase groaned. The man lifted his foot, about to stamp on his head, but Chase grabbed it and twisted hard to throw him off balance. The pirate staggered back into the shadowed, overgrown gap between the shacks, almost tripping over the tree stump.
Chase heard the whine of a starter motor. Latan had reached the RIB. Clutching his aching stomach, he got up, seeing the dull line of the steel cable he had earlier secured round the stump.
Scarface saw it too, and immediately realised what Chase had done. He shouted a warning, but the RIB’s engine drowned him out. The cable was still slack: he tried to pull the looped end off the stump.
‘No you fucking don’t!’ Chase wheezed, shoulder-barging him. The pirate fell over the stump and landed in the junk behind it. Chase moved to kick him in the head—
The man slashed at his leg with a jagged spike of rusty metal. The tip ripped through his jeans. Chase lurched away as the pirate stabbed again, barely escaping having the six-inch shard plunged into his thigh . . . but catching his heel on a root and falling backwards.
Still clutching the makeshift dagger, the pirate leapt up. The RIB surged away from the jetty. The cable flicked back and forth on the ground beside Chase, hissing metallically.
The pirate dived at him, the spike plunging down at his chest. Chase whipped up both hands to catch the man’s wrist, stopping the bloodied point an inch above his heart. Face contorting, yellowed teeth bared, the pirate pushed harder, his weight forcing the trembling blade lower, lower . . .
Pressing into the skin, piercing it—
Whack!
‘Get off him!’ yelled Bejo, hitting the pirate across his back with a length of rotten wood, knocking him off Chase. The plank snapped in half, the blow only distracting rather than hurting the muscular pirate, but it was enough.
Chase grabbed the whipping cable and looped it round his neck.
Too late, Scarface realised what was about to happen—
The other end of the cable had been firmly fastened to the RIB’s outboard. The retreating boat reached the limit of its length - and jerked to an abrupt stop as the line snapped taut. The loop round the pirate’s neck closed to nothing in an instant, neatly snipping off his head. It thumped off the tree stump, expression frozen in shocked horror. The look on Bejo’s face was almost identical.
‘You okay?’ Chase asked as he kicked the decapitated corpse away and stood. Bejo nodded wordlessly, mouth hanging open as Chase retrieved his AK and looked out to sea. The RIB’s engine was still running, but the boat was drifting at the end of the cable, the propeller shaft broken. In the light of the burning hut, he could see that the sudden stop had caused Latan to slam head first into the boat’s steering wheel . . . then bounce back into his seat, leaving most of his face behind. He wouldn’t be giving warnings to anybody.
‘Mr Eddie,’ said Bejo in a strained voice. Chase turned - to find a gun pointing at his chest. The transsexual prostitute stood before him, shakily clutching a revolver in her uninjured hand. From the anguished rage on her face, her relationship with Latan had been more than merely that of hooker and client.
‘Oh, bugger,’ muttered Chase. Being gunned down by a ladyboy wasn’t even remotely how he’d pictured himself going out. ‘Okay, sorry about your boyfriend,’ he said, stalling, ‘but he was kind of a bad guy. Nice, er, lass like you could do a lot better . . .’
She spat something in Malay, thrusting the gun at his face. ‘Pretty lady is very angry with you,’ said Bejo, raising his hands.
‘Yeah, I got the gist.’ She thumbed back the hammer. ‘All right, so you’re a bit upset,’ Chase continued, getting worried, ‘but shooting me won’t make you feel any better. Trust me, I’ve shot plenty of people, and—’ His eyes flicked to something behind her, and he raised his eyebrows in surprise. ‘Bloody hell, it’s Latan! Latan’s alive!’
It was a feeble gambit that would never have worked on anyone with training - but the young transsexual half turned to look, hope clear in her eyes. Chase could have simply whipped up his AK and shot her, but instead chose the less fatal option of kicking her in the groin. She crumpled to the ground and curled into a foetal position, moaning. Bejo winced. ‘Not very nice thing to do, even to angry lady.’
Chase pulled the revolver from her hand and tossed it into the sea. ‘If she really was a lady, that wouldn’t have hurt so much.’
As Bejo worked out what he meant and regarded the fallen figure with surprise, Chase surveyed the village. The blaze had spread to the other shacks, including Latan’s - which meant that not only had the money gone up in smoke, but so too had any clues there might have been amongst the pirate’s belongings. There was nothing more to be found here.
He made sure there was a boat the two prostitutes could use to get off the island, and then he and Bejo returned to their craft. As he’d hoped, the two remaining lookouts had decided that not investigating the gunfire and burning buildings on the shore would be their best bet for a long and healthy life, leaving the way clear.
As Bejo guided the boat back out to sea, Chase wondered once more why the tablet Nina had found had caused so much death. With Latan gone, he had lost one lead - but at least now he knew the identity of his paymaster, Vogler, and the organisation for which he worked.
But what was the Covenant of Genesis?
8
New York City
Despite having slept as much as she could during the long flight, Nina’s internal clock was still twelve hours out of synch when the UN jet landed, her body telling her it was evening while her native city was only just getting started for the day.
And it promised to be a long one.
Picked up by a driver and taken to the United Nations headquarters, she wondered what was in store. The expedition to the Java Sea had received the full backing of the IHA, and therefore the UN itself, and there was no possible way the pirate attack could have been predicted . . . but the fact remained that she had been in charge of an operation on which numerous people had died. Somebody would be held accountable, and in all probability it would be Nina herself.
What would happen next? She wasn’t sure. Despite having been a part of the IHA since its founding almost three years earlier, this would be her first time at the focal point of an investigation. She had faced senior officials before, but they had been debriefings following operations with a successful conclusion: not the least of which was saving New York, and the UN itself, from nuclear destruction.
This time, though, the conclusion had been anything but successful.
She took an elevator up through the glass and steel slab of the Secretariat Building to the IHA’s offices, her gloom weighing more heavily upon her with each passing floor. The moment she stepped out of the lift, it became clear the feeling was justified.
‘What’s going on?’ she asked as she hurried through the security doors into the IHA’s reception area, seeing the staff milling about in mixed states of confusion or anger.
‘Dr Wilde!’ said Lola Gianetti, leaving the reception desk to meet her. ‘Oh, thank God you’re back. I heard what happened - we all did. It’s terrible!’
‘I know, I know. But what’s all this?’ People were congregating outside the secure server room, one man repeatedly banging on the door.
‘The server’s gone down,’ Lola told her. ‘People have lost everything. ’
‘So why don’t they use the backups?’
‘No, I mean, they’ve lost everything,’ Lola clarified ominously, leading Nina through the throng. ‘Jerry and Al are in there trying to fix it.’
‘Wait, they’re both in?’ That definitely meant something bad had happened; the IHA’s lead computer technicians normally worked different shifts.
‘Yeah, Al’s been there all night, and he called Jerry in at about five a.m. Come on, coming through, move it!’
People peppered Nina with questions as she reached the door. ‘Whoa, okay, hold it!’ she said, raising her hands. ‘I only just got here, and I probably know less about what’s going on than you do. Everybody go back to your offices, have a coffee or whatever, and as soon as I know what’s happening I’ll let you know. Whatever it is, it’s not going to be solved by standing in reception re-enacting the storming of the Bastille.’
‘Nina, I’ve lost the entire Egyptian database!’ protested the door-banger, a historian called Logan Berkeley. ‘That’s over half a terabyte of material, and they’re saying it’s completely gone!’
‘It’s not completely gone,’ Nina insisted. ‘Even if we lose the servers, and even if we lose the backup servers, we’ve still got the off-site backups.’
‘Yes, but I’ve still lost—’
‘A day’s work, at most. It’s a pain in the ass, I know, but it’s not the end of the world, okay?’ She swiped her ID card over the door’s electronic lock.
Berkeley tried to follow her in. ‘I still need to ask them how long—’
Nina stopped in the doorway. ‘Hey, hey!’ she snapped. ‘This is a secure area - authorised personnel only. Go on, get your ass back outside. Shoo, shoo!’ Berkeley reluctantly retreated.
She closed the door and slumped against it, taking a deep breath. ‘Okay, guys. What’s the bad news?’
The server room was a windowless space lined with rack-mounted computers and hard drives, forming a miniature maze round the central workstations. Jerry Wojciechowski, an overweight middle-aged bearded man resembling a geek Santa, and Al Little, younger, thin almost to the point of emaciation and fuelled entirely by energy drinks, were working furiously at their computers. Al, even darker bags under his eyes than usual, looked up at her. ‘We got burned, Nina. Some fucker hit us with a virus.’
She knew from the mere fact that he’d sworn in front of her that the situation was dire; normally, he only blurted out the first half-syllable before gulping it back and apologising. ‘What’ve we lost?’
‘Everything,’ said Jerry. ‘Literally. It was a worm - it scrubbed all the drives down to the bare metal.’
‘And it nuked the backup RAIDs as well,’ Al added. ‘Even some of the desktops in the office.’
‘How the hell did it do that?’ asked Nina. ‘I thought all this was impossible to hack!’
‘So did we,’ Jerry told her mournfully. ‘We upgraded everything after that breach two years ago to beyond military grade. We’re running the same operating system as the NSA. It’s totally secure. In theory.’
‘Except,’ said Al, ‘that this fucking thing came straight in without tripping a single warning. The only way it could do that is if whoever sent it had access codes for the entire system.’ He let out an angry snort. ‘We’ve lost absolutely everything since the last tape backup for off-site storage. And that was two days ago.’
‘So, when you say everything . . . that includes emails and files uploaded to the shared server?’
Jerry nodded at her, and a sickening realisation struck Nina. The IHA’s very existence was built on secrets: her discovery of Atlantis three years before had, to her horror, given a madman the key to creating a genetically engineered plague . . . which he had very nearly unleashed upon the world. To a certain extent, the IHA’s mandate of finding and protecting other ancient wonders was a cover for a darker mission: to ensure that they didn’t fall into the wrong hands.
But as the events leading to the death of Hector Amoros had proved, the wrong hands could at first appear to be the right ones. The IHA’s search for Excalibur, the sword of King Arthur, had supposedly been undertaken so that Jack Mitchell, an agent of the US government’s defence research agency DARPA, could stop the blade’s unique properties from being used to create a new weapon that drew on the power of the very earth - but Mitchell had gone rogue, wanting that power for himself. He had been in charge of a black project so secret that neither DARPA nor the Pentagon knew of its existence, even as it threatened to plunge the world into war.
But if whoever sent the virus to wipe her pictures of the mysterious artefacts - and she was certain that that was the true objective, all the other destruction of data merely to cover the fact - was able to bypass the IHA’s security . . . that meant they knew the IHA’s true purpose. Knowledge supposed to be restricted to the highest levels of power.
Whatever was going on was bigger than she had thought. Bigger than she had feared.
She rushed out into reception—
To find herself face to face with an old enemy.
Not one who had ever tried to kill her, admittedly. But Nina still felt the brief, involuntary chill of unexpectedly encountering an adversary, long-forgotten loathing rushing back full-force. ‘Professor Rothschild,’ she began, before remembering that outside academia the hard-faced old woman no longer had any power over her. ‘Maureen,’ she said instead, informality used as a weapon to deny her status. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘Nina,’ said Rothschild coldly, doing the same. The dislike was mutual. ‘May I speak with you?’
Nina saw Lola hovering behind Rothschild’s shoulder, worriedly mouthing something, but she couldn’t tell what. ‘I’m kinda busy right now, Maureen,’ she said, wanting to get rid of her as quickly, and dismissively, as possible. ‘Whatever it is, it’ll have to wait. Lola can book you an appointment, but I wouldn’t expect anything earlier than next week. I’ve got a lot of IHA business to take care of.’ She turned and strode away to her office.
‘Handling IHA business is no longer your concern, Nina,’ Rothschild said.
There was a note almost of gloating in her voice that brought Nina to a stop. ‘Excuse me?’
‘Ah, Dr Wilde,’ Lola said apologetically, hurriedly rounding Rothschild and presenting a sheet of paper to Nina. ‘I meant to tell you when you got here, but there was so much else going on. Sorry.’
Nina quickly read the text, an official UN statement. ‘What?’ she barked. Sensing an impending explosion, Lola retreated to her desk.
‘As you see,’ said Rothschild, now with nothing but gloating in her voice, ‘the UN has just confirmed my appointment as the new Director of the IHA. I won’t officially be taking up the post until t
he day after tomorrow, but I wanted to get things moving in the right direction. Which I’ve already seen is something that is badly needed. The agency has lacked a clearly defined vision and strong leadership since the death of Admiral Amoros - I’m here to put it back on the proper course.’
‘Oh, you are, huh?’ said Nina, angrily crunching the paper into a ball. ‘I’m sure all your years of attacking any theory that’s even slightly outside the historical orthodoxy makes you the perfect choice to run the IHA.’
Rothschild glanced at the entrance to one of the conference rooms. ‘Perhaps we should continue this discussion in private?’ she suggested condescendingly.
‘I’m fine right here,’ Nina snapped. ‘And how did you get appointed in the first place? You weren’t on the shortlist. You weren’t even on the longlist - and if you had been, I would have crossed you off it!’
‘Making decisions based on petty personal vendettas is precisely the kind of negative quality the IHA can do without in its senior staff,’ Rothschild replied. ‘And since you ask, I was quite surprised to be approached. But when the Senate recommends you to the UN, it would be foolish not to take the opportunity.’
‘The Senate?’ said Nina, stunned. ‘But that’s insane! Why would they do that?’
Rothschild’s lips tightened. ‘Perhaps because they were as tired as everyone else of the appointment process being deliberately dragged out so that the Interim Director could pursue her pet projects with the minimum of oversight?’ Nina was so outraged by the accusation that she couldn’t even form a response before the older woman spoke again. ‘One of my first priorities will be a full review of all IHA projects that are not directly related to the agency’s global security mandate. Anything that fails to meet strict cost-effectiveness criteria, or is based on shoddy mythological theory, will be terminated immediately.’