The Sun God

Chapter 4

Chapter 4

A fashionably dressed handsome man in his mid-forties exited St James’ Park Underground station on the morning following Quinn and Jimmy’s escape from the pub fight. He wore an expensive tailored dark grey suit. He carried no briefcase, no umbrella, wore no hat, and walked with a confident pace down Boston Road, where he entered a large office building and took the elevator to the fourth floor. An unmarked door at the end of a long unremarkable corridor led him to a small office where a secretary was engrossed in a file on her desk. The secretary was in her early thirties; her glossy blonde hair was cut short and reminded him somewhat of a boyish pixie. His eyes slowly followed her figure from her neckline, round the curve of her right breast, down to the point where the desk blocked his view. She was beautiful; not in the sense of dashing off to the Bahamas for a fortnight of passion and escape, but in the sense that you could spend a lifetime with her.

She hadn’t noticed he’d entered the office. He always moved quietly, an ability he had developed during several missions shadowing and spying on enemies of the state, or any person they told him to follow, both foreign and domestic. He now moved softly by instinct. He threw his hat toward the coat stand in the corner of the room and the sound of it landing on the peg startled her.

“Why, Alexander Price!” she exclaimed with a smile, flashing perfect white teeth.

He approached her desk, stepped behind it and sat on the corner, displacing a stack of files marked “classified”. He looked into her eyes charmingly.

“Samantha, you look more radiant every time I see you.”

“Save it Price!” she countered. “I’m not one of those dull-witted s*x-kittens you love to hang out with at parties. Do you care to explain why I haven’t heard from you in two months?”

“Oh, Sam. I was caught up in a dangerous mission in New York. You do forgive me, don’t you?” His voice was deep velvet.

Samantha studied his handsome features, short cropped thick hair, slightly silver at the temples, rugged salt and pepper stubble. Only a few lines at the corners of his blue eyes betrayed his age, and yet again, her heart melted for the incorrigible rogue.

“Of course I forgive you. I always do don’t I. This mission didn’t have a name, did she?”

“Really Sam? You know I only have eyes for you, my dear,” he said with a radiant smile.

The intercom buzzed and a crackling voice interrupted them. “Ah, Miss Gold, has agent Price arrived yet?”

Samantha pushed the button and replied, “He’s right here, sir.”

“Well, send him in will you?”

***

Alexander stepped through a leather padded door into the adjoining office. An elder man nearing sixty sat behind an imposing antique desk. He had a stern face and a prominent moustache. He looked up from a document he was signing when Alexander entered.

“Ah Price, good man! Please take a seat.” He indicated the ornate chair in front of the desk.

Alexander sat down while Admiral Sir Hugh Sinclair opened a crocodile-skin cigar case and offered him a fat Cuban cigar; Alexander obliged. He had a high regard for the ageing admiral. Lord Quex they called him, the wickedest man in London. He had a taste for the finer delicacies in life and had always lived life to the fullest, even during the war. For the past ten years, he’d been chief of the Secret Intelligence Service, and Alexander’s direct boss.

While Alexander lit his cigar, Admiral Sinclair asked, “Did you encounter any trouble in New York? The intelligence you sent us was excellent by the way.”

“Nothing I couldn’t handle sir.”

“I hope you managed to squeeze in some leisure time while you were there,” the admiral enquired.

“Indeed I did. I sampled some of that unbound spirit the Yanks are so proud of when I met this stunning brunette at the Cotton Club down in Harlem.”

Sinclair grinned slyly. “I don’t care much for this jazz music, but it does stir up the passions.”

While he tapped the ashes off his cigar, the admiral reached into a drawer, produced a file, took out a photograph and laid it on the desk before Alexander. It showed an elegantly beautiful young woman with high cheekbones and languid flowing auburn locks, definitely Alexander’s type, though admittedly, most women were.

“I like her,” Alexander decided, raising an eyebrow while twisting his cigar between his fingers.

“Quinn Westwood,” Admiral Sinclair explained, “twenty-seven, born and raised in London, daughter of Harvey Westwood.”

“Isn’t he a railroad executive?” Alexander interjected.

“You’re right. He’s an American; built quite a few of the transcontinental lines in the US. He moved to London in 1902 to join the Great Eastern Railway Company. Quinn was born four years later. Her mother was some showgirl Harvey brought with him from New York.”

“So she’s a spoilt rich kid,” Alexander deduced.

“Oh, much to the contrary. Her parents divorced when she was six. The mother gets custody, but Quinn moves into her father’s London apartment when she’s thirteen and this is where it gets interesting. Harvey’s seldom home and generally leaves his daughter free to do as she pleases. She hardly ever attends the private school in which Harvey enrolled her and by the summer of 1919, Harvey stops paying tuition fees altogether. By then Quinn has developed an interest in archaeology and in January 1920, entirely self-taught at that point, she joins an archaeological excavation at Gurob in Egypt as one of many assistants to Reginald Engelbach, a renowned Egyptologist and engineer, or so I’m told. We see her name appear at various excavation projects in Europe and she works her way up in the archaeological world. She manages to get a position working quite closely with Howard Carter, who discovered the tomb of Tutankhamen in 1923.”

“OK, so she’s some learned stuffy historian,” Alexander concluded

Sinclair drew from his cigar and continued, “It would seem so at first sight, however, there are indications of several valuable items being misplaced at the Tutankhamen excavations. No-one noticed anything in 1923, as these items were never recorded in any register. However, later investigations of artefacts, papyrus scrolls and tomb walls indicated items which should have been present at the site but weren’t. There were no traces of the tomb having been disturbed since it was sealed upon the pharaoh’s death and to this day they have not found any explanation why some of the missing artefacts weren’t present. We have encountered rumours of such items appearing in private collections though.”

“You think she took them?” Alexander asked, already more interested, the more Quinn’s background unfolded.

“If she did, she’s very good at covering her tracks. We have looked at other archaeological digs where Quinn was present; we’ve even looked at several thefts of valuable artefacts spanning the last ten years. There is always a connection to Quinn somehow, but never anything conclusive.”

“Still, if you have a file on her, I assume there is enough information to form a theory. What do you think of her, Admiral?” Alexander asked.

Admiral Sinclair leaned back in his chair. “She’s a tomb raider, a thief and a con artist, clear and simple. She uses her knowledge of history and archaeology to hunt down the greatest prizes she can find and sells them to private collectors all over the world. In my opinion, this woman has little to no respect for history, nor the field of archaeology. We’ve even found accounts of violent confrontations, shootouts, bar fights, vandalism, etc where a woman matching her description was involved. We assume its Quinn, because these accounts more often than not include mention of a Scotsman, we believe to be her partner.”

“A partner? Boyfriend perhaps?” Alexander interjected.

The admiral reached into his desk and pulled out a second, much thinner file. He explained “James Duncan, born in Glasgow, son of a locomotive builder. We assume there is some connexion with Harvey Westwood through the railroad company, but we know nothing about how he met Quinn. We do know they were both employed on the Tutankhamun dig in the Valley of the Kings. As far as we know these two aren’t romantically involved. Partners in crime perhaps; or she could be employing him.”

Alexander picked up the file, opened it and looked at the photograph of a very young wiry youth with dark chestnut hair wearing ragged loose trouser and a dust-covered stained white shirt. The photograph was taken in the desert and the young Scotsman was lounging against a giant wind-worn sandstone block, while a team of dark-skinned workers were hauling something from a pit in the sand. Someone had circled the Scotsman with a pen on the photograph, though Alexander could not see how the white youth could be any more distinct among the native labourers.

“That was taken at the Tutankhamun site. This is them hauling up the golden shrine they found in the treasury room, not as famous as the photograph of them bringing up the solid gold sarcophagus,” Sinclair clarified.

Alexander read the caption underneath the photograph. “Yes, it says here that the shrine contains four jars with the pharaoh’s intestines; charming fellows, these Egyptians!”

“I’m afraid that’s pretty much all the information we have on James Duncan,” Sinclair admitted.

“So why are we interested in these two?” Alexander wanted to know.

“Yesterday agents Travis and Gordon, posing as representatives of the British Museum approached Quinn and hired her to retrieve a valuable artefact under the pretext of it being the centrepiece of an upcoming Mayan exhibition. She was warned that other, less scrupulous parties, may be hunting down this artefact, but our identity nor our real purpose were disclosed.”

“Why are we interested in historical artefacts anyway? That isn’t exactly our field of expertise is it?” Alexander enquired.

Sinclair answered curtly, “That need not concern you at the moment. It is not mission-critical. What Quinn doesn’t know and won’t be prepared for, are trained agents coming after this item. We expect the Germans to send one agent at least. Furthermore, she’ll need to get this item out of Guatemala, which hardly has a friendly foreign policy at the moment. I need you to keep her safe, Alexander, and you will need to ensure that she retrieves this artefact.”

Alexander took a moment to think this through.

“I’ll need to get close to her, maybe not at first, but definitely when she’s found the artefact because that is when they will most likely come after her. Also, I’ll at least need to know what this item looks like, so I can identify it when I see it.”

Admiral Sinclair reached into his desk drawer again and pulled out a book on ancient Mayan culture. He leafed through it to a marked page and laid the book before Alexander.

“This drawing is one of many representations of the Maya Sun God. The artefact we’re looking for is a statuette. We don’t know exactly what it looks like, but it will certainly resemble this figure. We assume it will be solid gold, probably inlaid with gems.”

The drawing showed a diminutive figure with a ridiculously large jewelled headdress with lines radiating outward, which Alexander assumed represented sunbeams.

Sinclair continued, “As for approaching Quinn; use your discretion. Make sure you have a very good cover story if you do decide to make contact because don’t forget both Quinn and James are practised con-artists. You ship out from Liverpool tomorrow. You’ll be travelling on the Reina del Pacifico headed for British Honduras.”

Alexander puffed on his cigar and said, “Ah, nothing like an ocean voyage to clear out the lungs.”