The Curse of Medusa

As they drove toward the Pentagon, Brooke clicked shut his phone and leaned toward the driver. “That was Scott Anderson. He says the President wants us at the White House.”

The driver nodded and swung the wheel to the right.

Things were about to get serious.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Lea watched through the small porthole of the Gulfstream as the plane banked to the right and began its descent. In the glimpses she got through the cloud cover, the coast of Ireland looked beautiful, but seeing it again made her sad. It would always be home… only she’d wished the next time she came here it would be to introduce Joe Hawke to her family.

Her family.

After her father’s death on the Cliffs of Moher things had gotten a little rocky in the Donovan household. Her mother had started drinking and her brothers had signed up to the Garda. Liam, the oldest, was killed in a bank robbery in Dublin, while Finn ended up in the Special Detective Unit, the Irish equivalent of the British Special Branch or the FBI. The decade between their ages turned out to be an unbridgeable gap and they rarely talked. Even now she didn’t even know his address.

Now, below her she watched as the plane crossed over into Irish airspace for the first time as sunset slowly approached. Below her was County Clare, and there, with the wild waves of the North Atlantic smashing against them in their timeless assault, were the very same Cliffs of Moher. Her father’s life had ended in that violent swell below her — the gunmetal gray of the sea spume and the ragged, savage Moher cliffs at Hag’s Head. At four hundred feet high, she knew it had taken her father several seconds before he’d hit the rocks below.

She looked away, disgust and sorrow gnawing at her mind in equal measure. Someone will pay for that, she thought. There was nowhere in the world anyone could hide from her if she found the person who had killed her beloved Dad.

The pilot announced that they would be landing in around twenty-five minutes, and now they were low enough to make out individual houses and roads. Dry stone walls criss-crossed the moss-colored sheep fields beneath the executive jet, and she strained her eyes as she stared at the northern horizon to catch a glimpse of Connemara, the ancestral home of her family.

As her eyes settled on the clouds above Galway Bay, or Loch Lurgan as her old Nanna used to say, her mind drifted to that damned Englishman once again. The arrogant, cocky, selfish, unreasonable, pig-headed, son-of-a-bitch, gobshite who had turned his back on her in the Egyptian desert. She sighed. The only thing she hated more than that man was how much she loved him, and damn him for it, she thought.

With Joe Hawke on her mind, the rest of Ireland slipped past her unnoticed — the smooth, verdant rises of Tipperary, Offaly, Laois and Kildare. Then, as the pilot announced final approach and the plane turned to line up with Dublin Airport, her mind snapped back into business mode. She had only the vaguest recollections of Sean McNamara from her childhood. He was one of her father’s many friends who had come and gone through the years. Why anyone would want to kill him she couldn’t begin to imagine, but she knew in her heart it was linked to her father’s murder.

And she was going to get to the bottom of it even if it killed her.

* * *

President Kimble had asked for some time alone in the Oval Office to consider what had just happened a few moments ago. It seemed like an age ago that the German had approached him with the files and made his business proposal to him. Kiefel had said that his compliance would facilitate a mutually beneficial arrangement, but any other man would have saved the time and called it what was it was — rank blackmail.

But was it so bad? The terms of the ‘arrangement’ were simple enough. Kiefel would use his considerable logistics and muscle to position him in the Oval Office in order that he perform one simple task, and after that he would be free of him forever — free, and the most powerful man in the world. It seemed like a reasonable proposal, and accepting the terms meant those files would go up in flames, and no one would ever need to know about his career-ending extra-curricular business activities.

He ran his hands along the edge of the desk. So this was the seat of power, he thought, looking around the room. As President pro tempore of the senate he had been in here before, naturally, but again it struck him how very different it looked from behind the Resolute Desk. He instantly felt the power at his disposal, but, and unexpectedly so, he was aware of a crushing responsibility bearing down on his shoulders like sacks of lead. All of the world would know everything about him, and every decision he took would go into the history books forever.