Hawke: A Novel (4 page)

Under the scalding water, Alexander Hawke was surprised to find himself singing at the top of his lungs.

An old Beatles tune.

“Here Comes the Sun.”

The sun was still brutal as the slender white launch arrived at Staniel Cay. It was precisely three o’clock in the afternoon.

At the helm, a man wearing a crisp white uniform reversed the twin Hamilton whisperjet thrusters, boiling the water at the stern. The long slim vessel slowed instantly, gliding to a stop alongside the dock. The tide was out, but a long ladder hung nearly down to the launch’s portside gunwales.

The launch was all gleaming brass and highly varnished mahogany. There was such spit-and-polish perfection about her that she seemed too pristine for this remote backwater of the Exumas; it was as if some alien, otherworldly craft had landed.

Two crewmen, dressed identically in starched white shirts and shorts, climbed quickly up the ladder onto the dock and secured the bow, stern, and spring lines. One crewman posted himself by the ladder to aid disembarking passengers. The other, who was also discreetly but heavily armed, cast a keen eye over the deserted docks. Satisfied nothing was amiss, he caught the helmsman’s eye and made a slashing motion across his throat.

The helmsman killed the twin engines and, minus their throaty rumble, the sleepy harbor fell silent once more. The only sound, save the cries of the whirling gulls and terns, was the crack of the large English Union Jack, snapping in a smart breeze on its staff at the rear of the launch.

There were only two passengers aboard, both Englishmen. Standing in the stern of the launch, they were chatting amiably, shielding their eyes against the glare of the Caribbean sun. The taller and younger of the two was a man in his late thirties named Alexander Hawke. He stood something over six feet, but was so lean that he seemed taller. He had thick black hair, piercing blue eyes, a long thin nose, and a prominent square chin that gave him an air of resolution and determination.

It had been scarcely more than a month since Hawke had received the early-morning phone call from Washington. Now, on a blistering afternoon in February, the Englishman scanned the tiny marina with an expression of intense curiosity. He then turned to his companion, Ambrose Congreve, smiling.

“This is where they shot the film
Thunderball,”
Hawke said, a somewhat bemused look in his eyes. “Did you know that, Ambrose?”

“What’s that?”

“Sorry. I’d forgotten. You’d never set foot inside a cinema unless it was a John Wayne picture.
Thunderball
was a James Bond film. Sean Connery. My favorite, actually.”

Hawke’s companion was a shortish, rounded man in his late fifties. He had a pair of deceptively sentimental blue eyes set in a baby’s face, a face partially obscured behind a colossal moustache. He heaved a deep sigh and mopped his brow with one of his trademark monogrammed linen handkerchiefs.

“I prefer John Wayne to James Bond simply because the Duke did less talking and more shooting,” Congreve sniffed.

“Yes, but Bond—”

“Excuse me, Alex. But, do you really think we ought to be standing out here in the blazing sun discussing ancient heroes of the cinema? Your two agents are sure to be waiting for you on shore.”

“Giving you a little local color, that’s all, Constable,” Hawke said, smiling.

“Well, I don’t need any local color. What I need is liquid refreshment. Let’s just get this over with, shall we?”

“You
are
a bit cranky, aren’t you? You need a nap is what you need.”

“Oh, rubbish! What I
need
,” Congreve said, “is an enormous fruity rum concoction or vast quantities of very cold beer.”

“You can’t drink, Constable, you’re on duty.”

“I would hardly call meeting with a pair of real estate agents duty.”

“Did I say real estate agents? Ah. I may have misspoken.”

Ambrose just shook his head and said, “You never misspeak, Alex.”

Ambrose Congreve, Hawke’s oldest and closest friend, had, to his parents’ chagrin, begun his career in law enforcement as a bobby on the streets of London. He’d studied Greek and Latin at Cambridge and had thoroughly distinguished himself in modern languages as well. But his true love was reading the tales of his two heroes. The dashing detective, Lord Peter Wimsey. And, of course, that Homeric figure, the incandescent Holmes.

He didn’t want to teach Greek. He wanted a life of derring-do. He didn’t want chalk on his fingers; he wanted to be a copper.

Early on in his new career, he’d shown a preternatural aptitude for investigation. His almost eerie ability to link seemingly trivial details helped him solve one famous case after another. He’d eventually risen to chief of New Scotland Yard’s Criminal Investigation Department. Unofficially retired from the CID now, he still maintained close ties with the Special Branch at the Yard. Still, he detested the nickname “Constable,” which is why Hawke enjoyed using it so frequently.

“My sole reason for accompanying you on this afternoon’s excursion,” Inspector Congreve said, “is that I envision a chilled adult beverage awaiting me in some disreputable saloon. I might even order the one thing your great hero did manage to get right—a properly shaken martini.”

“If you had any sense, Ambrose, you’d stop drinking so much and stop smoking that damnable pipe. Wasn’t a six-shooter got the Duke carted up Boot Hill, you know. It was a herd of unfiltered Camels.”

Congreve heaved an audible sigh and removed the old tweed cap from his head. He ran his fingers through his sparse thatch of chestnut brown hair.

Bloody hell, he thought, here was one mystery solved anyway. The precise latitude and longitudinal location where the phrase “Mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun” had originated. He’d been absolutely barmy to go along with Hawke’s scheme. It was hot as Hades in these godforsaken islands. The obvious notion of removing his woolen bow tie or mismatched tweed jacket and waistcoat never occurred to Congreve.

Notoriously indifferent to his own wardrobe, Ambrose seldom noticed whether his suit trousers and jackets matched and his socks were frequently opposing colors. Wearing clothes appropriate for the season or the weather would simply never occur to him. Ian Baker-Soames, his tailor at Anderson & Sheppard, Savile Row, London, had long ago resigned himself to Congreve’s sartorial eccentricities.

Rara avis,
the tailors whispered whenever Ambrose Congreve strode through the hallowed portals of A&S. If he had acquired the reputation of a rare bird, he was blissfully unaware of that distinction.

Hawke was still willfully ignoring his mutterings and pleas, going on and on with his geology lecture.

“That little atoll over there,” Hawke said, continuing despite his audience’s cool reaction. “It’s called Thunderball because of a small blowhole at the top. Bloody thing bellows like thundering gods when the sea blows in hard out of the west.”

“Most exciting, I’m sure,” Congreve said with a yawn.

“Isn’t it?”

“Quite.”

“Hullo, Tommy!” Hawke said suddenly, calling up to the young blond crewman standing guard on the dock. “You might take a quick stroll down the dock and see if our new friends have arrived. Won’t be hard to spot. Bad suits, bad haircuts, and bad neckties. Anything odd catches your eye, give me a quick call on the walkie-talkie.”

“Aye, sir!” Tommy Quick said, and took off down the docks at a run.

“You see, Ambrose,” Hawke said, continuing his dissertation, “Thunderball is completely hollow inside. The sea surges inside, forces the air out the top. Boom! Hear it for miles around, apparently.”

“A true geologic wonder. You’ll forgive me if I don’t hurl my cap into the air and prance about on the tips of my toes?”

“Yes,” Hawke said, too caught up in his enthusiasm to acknowledge the sarcasm. “I swam inside the thing early this morning. Certain aspects of its geology should make it an ideal spot for negotiating with a pair of arms dealers. You’ve got your bathing trunks with you, I assume? We’re going to take these bloody Russians on a little undersea adventure.”

“Arms dealers? Russians?
You plainly led me to believe we were meeting some real estate agents.”

“Did I say that? Last-minute change of plans, I’m afraid,” Hawke said, scrambling up the ladder. “It’s cloak-and-dagger time again, old boy. Come along, Ambrose, the Russians are coming!”

Congreve was busy contemplating the shadowy movements of an especially large shark. He leaned over the rail and watched the fish patrolling the clear waters directly beneath the stern of the launch. Going for a
swim
? Is that what Hawke had said? Congreve considered all forms of athletic endeavor save golf to be sheer barbarism. He heaved what could only be called a wistful sigh. His idea of heaven was puttering and putting around his beloved Sunningdale links just outside London. There, at least, the fiercest creatures one was likely to encounter were surly caddies with apocalyptic hangovers or the odd dyspeptic chipmunk.

He had a standing foursome at Sunningdale, every Saturday morning, rain or shine. Been teeing it up for nearly a quarter of a century. To Ambrose’s great chagrin, he was the only member of his foursome never to have achieved a hole in one. It had become a lifelong obsession. He was hellbent on doing it one day, and—

“That’s a nurse shark, Ambrose,” Hawke shouted from above, interrupting his reverie. “Stop staring at him, you’ll scare the poor bastard to death.”

Congreve looked up and saw Hawke standing next to Quick at the top of the ladder. Hawke said, “Come along, will you? According to Tommy, we’ve still got a few minutes to stroll the docks before the Russkies arrive.”

Congreve grunted something and started wheezing his way up the ladder. He joined Hawke on the dock, pausing to catch his breath.

It was a pretty little cove, really. Four houses perched on stilts just beyond the docks, each one painted a more brilliant pastel shade than its neighbor. Brightly colored fishing boats bobbed on their moorings in waters too many shades of blue to count. Rather fetching, to be honest.

One rainy afternoon in January, about a month earlier, there’d been a long liquid lunch at White’s, Hawke’s club in London. It was there Hawke had first broached the notion of this little Caribbean cruise. Congreve was ambivalent at first.

“I don’t know. How long a voyage do you envision?” he asked. “As Holmes put it so well, ‘My prolonged absence tends to generate too much unhealthy excitement amongst the criminal classes.’”

But Hawke wouldn’t take no for an answer and finally got Congreve to agree. After all, it meant an escape from the cold drizzle of midwinter London. Not to mention his tiny Special Branch office in Westminster. A few weeks of “sun, sightseeing, and a bit of shopping” was how the jaunt had been ladled up, and Congreve signed on.

Shopping
?

Congreve had hardly been able to imagine what Hawke would want to buy in these godforsaken Bahamian backwaters. An island or two, perhaps? Of course, that was long before he’d learned Hawke was meeting not with real estate agents, but with arms dealers. Congreve looked at Hawke, who’d suddenly stopped dead in his tracks and gone stone silent.

“I’ve been in this harbor before, you know, Ambrose,” Hawke said, his eyes going somewhere else, getting very hard for a moment. “A long time ago. I was just a boy, of course. Barely seven years old. I really can’t remember much else, though.”

“Is that why you chose these particular islands for the meeting?”

“I don’t know,” Hawke said. “It’s odd. It was this mission that brought me here. Obviously. Still, I do feel drawn to the place. I’ve been having these peculiar dreams about these islands that—” He paused and looked away, unwilling or unable to continue.

“At any rate,” he finally said, “I’ve brought along a map. Had it since childhood. A map of a treasure that might be buried somewhere in this neck of the Caribbean. But, to be perfectly honest, I’m not sure it’s the map that’s making me feel—feel like I’m on the verge of something here, Ambrose.”

“Yes?”

“I have no idea what it is,” Hawke said, looking at his friend with helpless eyes. “I just know somehow the map may be a part of the thing.”

“Shrouded in mystery
is the term, I believe,” Congreve said, looking closely at his friend.

“Hmm. Yes,” Alex replied, staring at some imaginary point on the horizon. “Shrouded.”

Then he shrugged off whatever feelings he was having and said, “Anyway, it’s as good a place to meet these dodgy bastards as any other, I suppose.”

Constable Congreve put his hand on his friend’s shoulder and squeezed. He had been expecting this moment. Dreading it, actually.

Like many people, Ambrose knew the awful story of the murder of Hawke’s parents. Not from Hawke, certainly, who, in all these years, had never acknowledged the murders to a soul. Hawke had, Ambrose was sure, completely erased the tragedy from his conscious mind. At the very least, the horrific memories were submerged so deeply in his subconscious, Ambrose wondered if they’d ever resurface.

But in a large leather satchel Ambrose carried everywhere were certain CID files. Files whose existence was known only to Constable Congreve. A cold case for decades, the Hawke murders remained an unsolved double homicide that, without Congreve’s determination and commitment, would be moldering away somewhere in the Yard. In the dimly lit cemetery where they kept all the dead files buried.