Warriors (25 page)

After they were comfortably seated before the roaring hearth, and Pelham had shimmered in with a tray of tea and more coffee, they quickly got down to chases.

“There’s been a murder at Cambridge,” Halter said, turning his strong brown eyes on Congreve, who registered mild shock at the words.

“Murder at Cambridge? Really? Anyone I know?” Ambrose said, leaning forward, his keen interest in this matter already fully engaged. He had close, long-standing ties to the university. He’d taken his doctorate in languages there many years ago, but still had colleagues and close friends among the faculties at the various colleges.

“The victim has not yet been identified, I’m afraid,” Halter said. “However, a professor at King’s has simultaneously gone missing.”

“Which one?” Congreve asked the two men. “The man at King’s, I mean.”

“A Dr. Watanabe. Know him?” Hawke asked.

He saw Congreve’s face fall.

“Know him? I do, indeed. A lifelong friend and mentor. Watanabe’s a brilliant chap. Good man, too. Watanabe-san, we called him then. Japanese by birth, but raised in China by his Chinese mother after the death of his father. Proud of his heritage, of course, but never drank from Beijing’s Communist Kool-Aid pitcher. And he was a perpetual thorn in the side of those at Cambridge who had imbibed.”

Halter laughed. “Good Lord, Alex, he’s already picked up the scent!”

“Our own master Sherlockian,” Hawke said.

“Has the local constabulary gotten anywhere with this?” Congreve asked. “You say there’s been no positive identification.”

“Afraid not,” Halter said. “Nor is there likely to be one soon. The victim was tortured and then mutilated postmortem. Fingertips and facial features removed. Also, the teeth, I’m afraid. Nasty business.”

“Good God,” Congreve said. “Doesn’t sound like the Cambridge I knew, does it.”

“It isn’t,” Halter said. “Believe me. The place is a political tinderbox.”

“Tell him what’s going on, Stef,” Hawke said.

“You’re familiar, no doubt, with the Te-Wu, Chief Inspector?”

“I am indeed. Assassins. Chinese secret police. Societies, sworn brotherhoods, whatever, first to recognize the PRC and first to fly the Communist Party flag. Very active in the States and here in Britain to some extent. There was certainly some Te-Wu activity at Cambridge back in the day. Nasty lot. Capable of anything.”

“Still is, perhaps still are, capable,” Halter said, lighting a Russian unfiltered cigarette. He looked at Congreve as if deciding how much to reveal.

HALTER, CONGREVE WELL KNEW, WAS
sitting on not a few secrets of his own. He was the longest-serving MI6 mole inside the Kremlin, in the living history of the Secret Service. Dr. Stefan Halter, Hawke’s go-to in events dealing with the West in general and the United Kingdom in particular. The idea that he was still alive after all these years was a never-ending source of amazement to both Hawke, Congreve, and everyone with a need to know at MI6.

The man was a magician, a fact he’d proved once saving Hawke’s life on an island in the Stockholm archipelago some years back.

“A resurgent Te-Wu gang at Cambridge? Really?” Congreve said, getting his pipe going. “I suppose that’s a viable path of investigation. But I thought we’d rid ourselves of that curse upon society decades ago.”

At that precise moment, Pelham slipped in and announced that luncheon was served.

“Didn’t we all, Chief Inspector?” Halter said, shifting his gaze toward the window. “Didn’t we all? Do either of you know a man at Cambridge by the name of Sir Lucian Hobdale? I seem to recall that you both do, although I can’t for the life of me recall why.”

“He helped us identify and run down that rogue Iranian scientist, remember?” Hawke said. “The mad inventor of Perseus, the Singularity machine.”

“Mmm,” Halter said, but his eyes were far away. “I was thinking Hobdale might help us identify the corpse . . .”

The wintry day outside was pressing against the cold glass. And the snow was still coming down, much harder.

C
H A P T E R
  3 1

H
awke never slept very well in an empty bed, and currently he had the problem of sleeplessness to cope with. He couldn’t turn his brain off. It was always thus, he thought, whenever the possibility of a new case or mission would spring full-blown into existence.

Having said good night to little Alexei and his guardian, Scotland Yard’s detective sergeant Nell Spooner, Hawke had wearily climbed into bed and fallen asleep. It had been a long day at Cambridge and he’d arrived home late, expecting Nell’s welcoming arms in his bed.

Normally, except when they had quarreled, Nell shared his bed. But on this night she’d chosen to sleep alone. Her room was on the same floor as his but situated at the distant end of the hallway, right next door to the nursery. She’d been wearing an odd expression when she’d kissed him good night. Something was bothering her. He’d asked if she was all right and she’d brushed it off, rising on tiptoes to peck his cheek before vanishing, a rustle of silk gliding into the darkness of the long corridor.

It was raining, and he listened to the rain and to the rain turning to ice and to the thunder. Rain always sounded like darkness somehow, darkness and night storms—and, perhaps, youth, he supposed, since it always struck him as a pleasant sound. He’d always preferred bad weather to good, the moody and electric drama of a looming cold front; he liked imagining the abiding solace of a strong roof over his head, hatches battened down, anchor to leeward, his better angels keeping the black dogs at bay.

Imagining because the black dogs were always out there, always snarling at the door. No matter how fast you ran, how far, their red eyes gleaming in the pitch-black night.

Usually the sound of a storm had the power to distract him and he’d sleep again. Not tonight. No, on this wintry night nothing at all worked, and at 3:00
A
.
M
. he rolled over in bed and switched on the bedside lamp. He picked up the book he was reading, plumped up his pillows, and settled in, soon lost in the story.

A wave of happiness settled over him. A good book on a stormy night, the drafty silence of the big house, the soft glow of dying embers in the hearth, shadows climbing the walls around him. He was reading a slim volume Ambrose had bought for him when they stopped in a bookstore in Cambridge. On Chesil Beach. It was the tale of a doomed marriage, of lost hope and dashed dreams. It wasn’t the stuff of his favorite author, P.G. Wodehouse, plainly—no
Right Ho, Jeeves!
or
Pigs Have Wings
tonight—but the author wrote beautifully and Hawke found himself growing sleepy again.

He must have drifted off because now everything was quiet again, the storm having moved out over the Evesham Valley. Only the dim sound of a farm dog barking somewhere in the distance. He had that overwhelmingly pleasant sensation of the full weight of his body upon the bed, heavy and somnolent. He didn’t want to open his eyes yet; he wanted to feel the steady rise of consciousness leaving the dream state and pushing up through the grey clouds of—

Then he heard, very close to him, a footstep and a cough.

He felt that terrible hardening of the flesh that always accompanied the absolute surety that you were being watched. Footsteps in the fog . . .

“Daddy! Wake up! It’s snowing!”

“Is it, darling?” he mumbled sleepily. He rolled over and saw that precious face hovering in the grey light filling the high-ceilinged room.

Alexei laughed.

And in that fleeting moment Hawke thought:
we’re all going to be all right here. . .

“It is, it is, Papa!” Alexei cried. “Come to the window and see. Treasure Mountain is all covered with snow. We can go sledding, Spooner says so. Isn’t that exciting?”

“Yes, it certainly is snowing, all right,” he said, gazing toward his windows.

Hawke sat up in bed and reached down to lift the boy up onto his wide four-poster bed. Alexei was dressed in his bright red snowsuit and was wearing a matching woolen cap and mittens. The intensity of the love Hawke felt threatened to overpower his ability to speak.

“Have you had your breakfast yet, son?”

“Oh, yes. Spooner and I have been up for hours, Papa. I’ve been waiting and waiting to wake you up.”

“And you say that our very own Treasure Mountain is covered with snow?”

“Yes!”

“Hmm. That presents yet another mystery. Do you know where pirates go in the snow, Alexei?”

“No . . . but . . . to their rooms?”

Hawke smiled at this.

“Maybe. As good a guess as any. But, Alexei, you do know that if we do see a pirate, no matter how big or how fearsome that blackguard looks, we are going right up to him and demand to know if they’ve buried any more secret treasure on that mountain lately.”

“Oh, Papa,” Alexei said, his shining eyes conveying his shivering pleasure in the direction his morning was taking. Pirates. Snow. Sled. Treasure. He wanted to put his arms round his father’s neck and squeeze so tight . . .

Since October Hawke had been reading
Treasure Island
to Alexei before bedtime in the nursery, a new chapter every night. Like all boys, his son was captivated by the story, and even insisted that his favorite, meaning terrifying, passages about Long John Silver and his dastardly crew be read over and over again.

Pirates had appeared on the little boy’s horizon and his world was a far better place for it.

ONE MORNING, HAWKE HAD RISEN
at dawn. He’d found the old wooden lockbox he’d had hidden away in his closet since childhood, the one where he’d kept the priceless treasures of youth: a crow feather, a clear marble, the shriveled rose he’d worn in his lapel the day of his parents’ funeral, a skate key, a lock of his mother’s hair, many old coins he’d collected, some of them even gold, tickets to a country fair, a faded black-and-white snapshot of his mom and dad aboard their ill-fated yawl,
Seahawke
.

That morning, Hawke, holding a candle, had added a few new gold and silver coins from his collection inside the battered box, then tucked it under his arm and made his way through the darkness outside, through the parterre and up the long incline beyond, a narrow mown field that rose to the river’s edge. There was a stand of birch near the end with a pathway leading into the woods. The narrow dirt path led to the sizable hill of earth then and ever after officially known as Treasure Mountain by his family.

He climbed to the summit and looked around for a location suitable to his purposes.

He carefully paced off the chosen spot by triangulating three trees twenty paces distant. There he drove the sharp end of a broken branch into the hard ground and began to dig.
Not too deep,
he reminded himself. Alexei’s patience with his little shovel was limited.

Returning to his library, he’d scrawled a map of the buried treasure in charcoal and left it that night under Alexei’s pillow. A heavy black X marked the spot. Later that morning, the sun high, the two of them had climbed the hill. It had been a clear blue winter’s day and Alexei had returned home in the evening clutching the little box that had once belonged to his father, pledging never, ever to lose it. He’d fallen asleep counting his treasure and dreaming of pirates digging in the moonlight on the hilltop he could see from the nursery window.

C
H A P T E R
  3 2

N
ow Hawke sat beside Nell on that very same hilltop, holding hands on the wooden garden bench as Alexei went speeding down the slope again and again, crying out gleefully for the love of speed and the sheer beauty of this bright shining morning, knowing that the two people he loved most were watching over him.

“I remember that feeling, Nell,” Hawke said. “Sledding, I mean. Speed, for a boy, maybe for a girl, too, is so powerfully felt at that age. It’s one of my earliest memories of— What’s the matter, Nell? Why are you crying?”

“Oh, Alex. I am just so very, very sad.”

“You are? Please tell me why, darling. I don’t want you to be sad. Ever.”

“I am sad . . . I’m sad because all this . . . all this is over. And it’s been the very best time of my life, Alex. I will always love you and . . . Alexei, too. More than I can ever say. But—but—”

She put her head on his shoulder and clung to him, sobbing, tears streaming down her pink cheeks.

He put his arm around her, pulling her closer, dreaded what might be coming, shocked, of course, but somehow not surprised.

“Nell, please don’t do this. This is your home. We are your family. If you, if there is something, anything, that I can do to make it more—”

“Just let me cry, okay? Let me get it all out. You know how I am.”

“I’m sorry. Are you cold?”

“No, I’m fine.”

Hawke was silent, his eyes on Alexei trudging up the hill pulling his bright blue sled behind him. The boy’s face was glowing with excitement and joy, and at that moment Hawke feared for him. Nell was leaving. It would break his own heart. But, even worse, it would break the boy’s heart. She had been a mother to him, a wise, strong, and caring mother. She had saved Alexei’s life, twice, and she was always there, making sure he was safe from harm, especially when his father was away on business . . .

Nell squeezed Hawke’s hand and pulled away, creating a space between them on the bench. Creating a space in his heart.

Hawke looked at her, tried to smile, and handed her one of the white linen handkerchiefs he always carried in the breast pocket of his jacket. When she had wiped away her glistening tears, she turned to him.

“I never wanted it to end,” she said.

“I still don’t. I’m in love with you.”

“Oh, God, darling! If only there were any other way. If I could change the world, I would do it. I would! I promise you this is the hardest thing I’ve ever done. You came into my life and it all made sense finally. You . . . and Alexei . . . were . . . are . . . everything to me. The family I never had. The man I didn’t think existed. The child I’d dreamed of. It was so . . . perfect.”