Read The Tomb of the Gods (Matt Drake 4) Online
Authors: David Leadbeater
The Tomb of the Gods (Matt Drake 4)
Table of Contents
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
THE TOMB OF THE GODS
(Matt Drake #4)
by
David Leadbeater
Copyright © 2013 by David Leadbeater
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher/author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.
All characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
For invaluable help on this action-packed journey I’d like to take a few minutes to thank some fantastic people:
First and foremost, my wife Erica, for her absolute understanding and unflinching support.
My parents for their enthusiasm, encouragement and help.
Amy Eye of The Eyes for Editing – for her top class editing work and for putting up with all of my many urgent requests.
Martha Bourke – author of The Jaguar Sun series – for a wealth of invaluable information that helped to get me started on this ever-winding road.
Andy Brown – of ClickedTwice Design – for designing the awesome covers.
And to every single person who has bought a Matt Drake adventure and loved it – the journey has only just begun!
I would also like to acknowledge the classic poem – The Charge of the Light Brigade, by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, which inspired the climatic scene of this series.
Other books by David Leadbeater
The Bones of Odin (Matt Drake #1)
The Blood King Conspiracy (Matt Drake #2)
The Gates of Hell (Matt Drake 3)
Chosen
(The Chosen Few Trilogy 1)
Walking with Ghosts (A short story)
Connect with David on Twitter - @dleadbeater2011
Visit David’s website –
www.davidleadbeaternovels.com
Follow David’s blog -
http://davidleadbeaternovels.blogspot.co.uk/
All helpful, genuine comments are welcome. I would love to hear from you.
PART 1
What makes a hero. . .
CHAPTER ONE
Beyond the tiny airplane window, a bruised sky reflected the state of his soul.
He cast his gaze around the cabin. Pretty stewardesses in red skirts and white blouses dished out microwaved food and offered passengers drinks. The aromatic smells of cooked meats and vegetables drifted through the air. Couples and their kids chatted animatedly, but not as much as they had a week or two ago. This was the plane’s return journey. The one taking them all back home.
To London.
Drake moved his head slightly back toward the window. His face betrayed nothing, but his mind flicked over recent events faster than it could assimilate the data. After a few minutes, he closed his eyes, letting out a sigh of frustration. He needed to slow down. He needed to take stock. A twelve-hour plane ride should give him time to do that.
Two days had passed since the Blood King’s defeat beneath Diamond Head. Since then, Drake and his friends had been flown to the CIA’s office in Los Angeles for a full debriefing and then promptly been ushered into a meeting with Jonathan Gates, the US Secretary of Defense. There, Gates told them the shadowy operative Russell Cayman, the man who had taken over Torsten Dahl’s archaeological exploration of the first tomb of the gods in Iceland, had invited all of them—including Gates himself—to an explanatory discussion in a neutral building in L.A. At this meeting, he told Gates, he would reveal his reason for usurping Dahl and furnish them with some details of the group he worked for.
The Swede, Dahl, was already en route, flying in from Iceland.
At first suspicious, they’d all been won over when Cayman agreed that the Secretary of Defense and his entourage of bodyguards could accompany them, no questions asked.
Hayden was optimistic. “Maybe Cayman isn’t such a bad guy after all,” she had said. They were all working on the location of the third tomb of the gods, but the map was beyond ancient, slightly eroded, and in need of translation. She thought that a full-disclosure chat with Cayman would further their joint goals faster than a hundred academics.
Drake was torn between wanting to meet Cayman, the man they were sure was tied to Wells somewhere down the line and thus tied to Alyson’s murder, and the need to travel quickly to Wells’s flat in London to search for something only he might find.
A clue as to what the hell Wells had been involved in. And why.
Wells, at heart, had been an SAS officer and a patriot. Drake had always known that. Beyond everything, Wells put his country first.
For him to know about Alyson’s death and not tell me
…
What would make a man like Wells do that?
Cayman might know. But the flat in London—
that’s
where the real evidence should lie. So Drake, along with Mai and Alicia, settled on a journey to London that they hoped led to the clues to a real answer. Drake asked Ben to accompany him, and the young man had deliberated hard, but elected to stay close to his girlfriend. Ben had been fighting for her for some months now and wasn’t about to let her drift away. Karin stayed with her brother, her elation at beating the Blood King and the seven-layered trap system before uncovering a second tomb of the gods, had been badly tempered when her new friend Komodo had been immediately sent back to his Delta base, destination unknown.
Drake drifted back to the present and checked his watch. In three hours, they would land at Heathrow. Wells’s flat was on the outskirts of Mayfair, just off Park Lane and Piccadilly. An easy tube journey from Heathrow. Once they landed, Drake, Mai and Alicia were prepared to hit the ground running. Mai’s infractions with her bosses at the agency had been forgiven—the Japanese had seen the importance of finding the third Tomb of the Gods and the hinted-at doomsday weapon it may contain. She’d been given full reign to deal with the situation however she saw fit. Agents were at her disposal. Alicia remained part of Drake’s unofficial team, a team that had been evolving since they had first met Jonathan Gates back in Washington DC, Drake had realized.
A stewardess leaned over him. He refused the snack. His eyes lingered on the shots: the whisky, the vodka, the quick cure. Very slowly, he shook his head. When the stewardess pressed the sale, mistaking raw need for playfulness, he closed his eyes and waited until she went away.
Behind his eyes, those eternally sad eyes, he saw them both how he liked to remember them. Beautiful and brimming with life and love and happiness. Alyson had always been like that. With Kennedy, the contentment had just started to shine through when. . .
...when. . .
I miss you both so much.
He had moved on. To a degree, anyway. To drink their memories away was to sully them. To forget the happy times they shared was to waste them. And an ex-SAS soldier was stronger than that. Deep inside him was a core of pure steel.
He hardened himself now. There was a promise of tough work ahead. Not only for him, but for Hayden back in L.A. She would be meeting Cayman soon, and then the shit might really hit the fan. He considered giving Ben a call on the Sat-phone, trading a joke or two about his band who had hit the limelight at last (without him), and maybe firing off a few old Dinorock quotes. But then, Alicia caught his eye from across the aisle.
“Fucksake, Drake,” she whispered. “Stop shutting us out. We’re here to bloody help you.”
“The least you could do,” Drake said. “Considering. . .”
“Considering what? The only thing I consider is the size of—”
“Considering. . .
that you two lied to me for seven years.”
“I hadn’t
seen
you for seven years. I went rogue, remember? And I only heard about it a couple of years ago, Drake. Just like Mai. I guess we both thought it had gone way past the time to tell you.”
“So you made the choice for me.”
“We didn’t know anything! Well, nothing beyond the fact that Alyson didn’t die in an accident and that Wells had knowledge of it.”