One raised his knife, ready to stab the hands washer. Pike quickly ducked and swung around. His wet right fist crashed into the attacker’s belly. As the man’s head jolted down, the bridge of his nose was met by a powerful thrust from the palm of Pike’s left hand. The man collapsed on the floor.
‘You stupid brutes!’ the Tasmanian roared. ‘What’s this about?’
The second man leaped forward. A long-blade swung up from his hip as he yelled, ‘You’re dead, Pike’.
The edge of karate master Pike’s right hand smashed into the attacker’s wrist. Blarney heard a bone crack as the knife clattered to the floor. The same hand edge smashed into the man’s throat. More bones were fractured as Blarney stamped on the knees of the men at his feet.
‘What’s going on?’ he yelled again. Both men, he now saw, were unconscious. He bent down to get their wallets; find out their identities.
Suddenly they looked familiar. They had been standing out there near him and Alex. With them were a third man and a dark-haired woman with a blue scarf over her chin. Those two, he feared, were after Alex.
He ran from the toilet as British Air called from loudspeakers for passengers to board the flight to Melbourne. The woman in the scarf was standing closely behind Alex. Pike saw the glint from perhaps a hypodermic needle in the brunette’s hand. He wordlessly shoved the woman away and took his wife by the arm.
‘Let’s get on board,’ he said calmly. He was pleased Alex had not known she was about to be assaulted, maybe murdered. Nor had she seen him shove off the needle-toting bitch, whose male companion was glaring.
‘I think I’ve dropped my pen,’ Pike said to Alex as he swung around. ‘Keep going, love. I’ll catch up with you.’
Fists clenched, big Blarney strode to the pair. ‘The other two in the toilet are dead,’ he lied. ‘You want to join them in the cemetery?’ The pair looked askance as Blarney enjoyed the lie.
‘Tell me. Tell me now. Who ordered you four to attack us?’ They looked sombrely at one another, then at the floor.
‘If I report the toilet attack to the police,’ he warned, ‘I’ll get you two charged with attempted murder.’ He wanted to smash them.
The two turned away and hurried towards the men’s toilet. Blarney did not want police involvement. If he reported to them there would be no flight home today from this now-perilous city. He and Alex would have to stay in Prague for dangerous weeks to testify in court. He trotted after Alex. They boarded the 747 jet in chilly and fading sunshine.
CHAPTER 4
Alex settled in her window seat beside him. Blarney suddenly and reluctantly decided that he had to add to her angst. He leaned closer to her and said, ‘Darling, I didn’t stay back there to pick up my pen. I’d better let you know that a gang of thugs—hired killers, I reckon—tried to terminate the two of us at the airport.’
Alex stared with her mouth agape as he told her about the dramas in the toilet and behind her in the lounge. As a few tears dropped from her watery eyes, Alex stretched to the right and hugged him. ‘My life,’ she said, ‘you saved it. Thank you. That hypo needle would have poisoned me, all right.’
After a moment’s silence, Blarney held her right hand and said, ‘From my phone call three and a bit hours ago, the only ones who would have known we’d be at the airport then were Harbek and his staff. Harbek would commission those four rats. He sure would want us silenced. So the ones who tried to murder us were Argo thugs.
‘Hell,’ he blurted, ‘I’ve just realised that they might be the rats who killed Jack!’
‘Yes,’ Alex muttered tensely. ‘You’d better tell the police.’
‘I will later,’ Blarney promised. ‘But if I’d collared the two behind you and then called the cops, we’d be stuck in Prague for weeks; giving evidence and risking more murder attempts. ‘That woman and the thuggish-looking bloke with her obviously understood me. Like the two in the lavatory, I reckon they’re Yanks or Brits.
‘To drive them off, and get a bit of revenge, I told the woman and man that the two in the toilet were dead. They sure raced off to the men’s as I followed you to the plane, love.’
Alex found a thin smile. ‘A good one,’ she said quietly. ‘I wouldn’t mind if you’d actually killed the four of them.’
He nervously wondered to himself what poison was nearly injected into Alex. He now wanted to go back and find and collar the four. Doing that could even result in charges being laid against Harbek. He could let Alex fly on alone. But the plane was taking off. He was annoyed that he had not grabbed the drivers licences or passports from the two he had knocked out in the toilet.
Alex’s long pony tail of hair flopped over her right shoulder. Blarney was pleased to see her go to sleep an hour later as the aircraft flew west above clouds over the Indian Ocean.
He grimaced as he remembered Argo chief Harbek’s bragging about how his empire had enriched networkers in Britain, Ireland, France, Germany, Hungary, Poland, Argentina, Mexico and Indonesia. And before then the United States, Canada, Australia and Mexico. The system, Abe had sworn, was infallible.
Dear Jack, a rich American living alone at the hotel, had been a tempting mark for an opportunistic thug. But why such grisly torture? Blarney asked himself again. If Jack was slain to silence him, his papers the killers took would tell them the Australian journalist and his wife were Jack’s confidantes, loaded to report Jack’s evidence to the world’s media. The attackers at the airport, or their bosses, had probably seen the papers. Oh well, he smiled, two of the rats would be crippled for months. But those with Jack’s evidence also had the Pikes’ address in Stanley.
He smilingly re-lived that big jerk of an Argo agent from Budapest elbowing Alex out of the way in their hotel’s lobby a week back as the jerk tried to muscle in on a potential new sucker. Pike had erupted. A left jab, a knee in the Hungarian’s balls and a right cross that flattened his nose. He smiled at the memory of the raw fear on the thug’s face from the floor of the lobby.
Alex had grinned, pointing discreetly at the glowing G. She called his temper The Irish; the half Irish in him. For all its blarney, she had punned, The Irish could land him in big trouble one day.
He looked more like his Tasmanian Aboriginal half, she reckoned. Big brown eyes, strong forehead, big shoulders, curly black hair, skin that looked tanned. At one hundred and ninety-five centimetres, a bit over six feet in the old numbers they preferred. The Abo in him made him gentler, Alex said, but stubborn. She credited the Irish for his gift of the gab. A stingy term, that, for eloquence; he smiled again.
From Melbourne he phoned De Groote and offered to meet him in the top-floor revolving restaurant by Hobart’s harbourside Wrest Point casino hotel.
‘With pleasure, champ,’ the professor said. ‘A team like us can fix this problem over the entree. And I insist on paying the bill, my friend. Must go.’ He hung up.
Pike was surprised he was not asked if he had rung Jerry Bell. Perhaps De Groote knew he had not. Blarney told his bride he would rent a car and be home in Stanley that night.
‘As soon as you’re home,’ Alex murmured lustfully in his ear, ‘to bed.’
One press on De Groote’s cellular phone raised Jerry Bell. ‘He’s seeing me for dinner tonight but he’ll still be angry. The wife’s going to Stanley. I’ll find a way to gag her.’
‘Do