Age of Heroes (44 page)

THIRTY-EIGHT

Kardionisi

“T
HEO
S
TANNARD MUST
still be on the island,” Jeanne said. “He can’t have gone far.”

“Yes, but where is he?” Roy said.

“More to the point,” said Schutkeker, “why is he not where he was supposed to be?”

“Maybe she lied,” Roy said, eyeing Hélène Arlington.

“At gunpoint?” said Laffoon. “This woman? Nah.”

“Or maybe,” said Schutkeker, “Stannard knew we were coming. Maybe someone warned him.”

“I recommend you don’t take that thought any further, Schutkeker.”

“Ha! Have I touched a nerve? Hit the hammer on the head maybe?”

“Nail,” said Laffoon. “It’s nail on the head, not hammer, you dumb Kraut. But I have to admit it looks kinda iffy, Roy. Say you and him
are
friends now. You’d drop him a line beforehand, wouldn’t you? Tell him the shit is about to hit the fan.”

“Theo came by boat,” Hélène offered. “It could be he’s trying to get to the jetty, to escape.”

Laffoon wagged a finger at her approvingly. “Now, her ladyship here has got her head screwed on. A smoking hot babe, and smart with it.” The Louisianan appeared utterly smitten with Hélène, like a schoolboy mooning over the class beauty. She could do no wrong in his eyes.

“If he’s gone that way,” Roy said, “he’ll run into Serge and Dragomir. We’d have heard from them, if they’d seen him.”

“Sure, ’less Stannard saw them first. How about we call in and find out how they’re doing?” Laffoon tapped the side of his helmet. “Hey, Serge, Dragomir. Travis. How’s things with you? ...Serge? Dragomir? Guys, do you copy? Are you reading me?”

He looked at Schutkeker, then at Roy.

“There’s your answer. Serge and Dragomir are no longer with us. Meaning Roy’s new BFF Stannard is making for his boat. We’d better hustle. Everyone! Haul ass back the way we came.”

It seemed that Travis Laffoon has usurped command of the team right from under Roy’s nose. The other Myrmidons barely even questioned the fact that he was giving the orders now. They understood that Roy had fallen from grace, and responded to Laffoon’s decisiveness.

The exceptions were Gavin and Jeanne. As everyone else broke into a run, the two of them looked to Roy for a prompt. He mimed resignation.

“What are you waiting for?” Laffoon snapped at them. “Move! You too, Roy.”

Schutkeker seized Hélène by the arm, and Roy, Gavin and Jeanne fell in step behind him.

Events were spiralling out of control. Roy wasn’t sure how he was going to bring them back on track, or even if he could.

A
S THE
M
YRMIDONS
trekked back across the island at a fast lick, Roy considered his options.

He could break away, make a bid for freedom. But then the others would hunt for him, egged on by Laffoon and Schutkeker. He was on a tiny island. There weren’t that many places to hide. He doubted he could reach the jetty and take one of the Zodiacs without getting caught.

Alternatively he could try to take down Laffoon and Schutkeker, reassert his authority that way. With Gavin and Jeanne backing him up, he might just manage it.

But hovering over all of his decision-making was the thought of Josie. Roy remembered Badenhorst in the taxi, thumb just millimetres away from pressing Send. A single text message from the Afrikaner could shatter his life forever. If Josie died, Roy would be destroyed. In return, he would annihilate Badenhorst and everything he ever cared about, assuming there
was
anything he cared about. But after that orgy of retaliation, what then? There would be no future worth speaking of. How could you go on if your only child was dead? Roy had asked himself this question several times when Josie was self-harming and making suicide attempts, and the only answer he could come up with was: you couldn’t.

He was stymied. Nothing he could do now would not have dire repercussions for her. Badenhorst could crush him like a bug.

Halfway to the elevator, something odd happened.

Roy, Gavin and Jeanne had been straggling along at the tail end of the column of Myrmidons.

Then, all at once, two more Myrmidons appeared behind them.

One moment they weren’t there. Next, they were. They had just kind of slipped into place.

He wondered if Laffoon had sent back a couple of people from the front to keep an eye on him. He might have missed the order. The pair could have taken a roundabout route, stepping into shadow, then out again to fall in line at the rear.

He saw that one was carrying a hammer, the other a club.

The two artefacts that Serge and Dragomir had been carrying.

Then he caught sight of their faces in the glow of a pathside lamp.

He turned his head to look forward once more.

He said nothing, but there had been a nod of acknowledgement from Theo Stannard and a steely, determined look from Sasha Grace.

Roy jogged on, braced for action.

A
BEND IN
the path. They were now perhaps half a minute away from the elevator. Roy had no idea when Stannard and Sasha were going to make their move or what form it would take. He knew, however, that they had to hurry. It was only a matter of time before someone else noticed that the Myrmidons were somehow magically back to a complement of eleven.

He grasped the haft of the battle-axe behind his back. He did it in an obvious way, so that the two demigods would see.

Then, surreptitiously, he pointed a finger at Gavin, and at Jeanne. He smoothed the air horizontally.

He hoped the message was obvious:
these two are okay, don’t hurt them
.

It was all he could do.

At that moment, Hélène Arlington happened to glance round. Her gaze rested briefly on Roy before straying past him to the two Myrmidons beyond. She said to Schutkeker, “It seems we’ve picked up some hangers-on. You might want to watch out.”

Schutkeker wheeled, saw Stannard and Sasha.

Letting go of Hélène, he went for his gun.

The night erupted into conflict.

THIRTY-NINE

Kardionisi

A
S SOON AS
Theo and Sasha heard the Myrmidons approaching, they sought cover. The cypress maze was near to hand, and they dashed to its entrance and took refuge just inside.

Peering out, they saw the Myrmidons quick-marching past, with Hélène Arlington in their midst, being dragged along by one of them.

“Shit,” Theo said. “They’ve taken her hostage.”

“What for?”

“Leverage, I guess. They think they can use her to smoke us out.”

“‘Show yourselves or the simpering bimbo gets it.’ Maybe we should call their bluff. See how that pans out.”

“You really don’t like her, do you?”

“Men are fools, but the woman who encourages them in their foolishness is worse. Why pander to male fantasies in order to control them? It may seem like domination, but it’s just another form of subservience.”

“Okay, but we’ve still got to rescue her,” Theo said. “That’s a given, right?”

“If you insist.”

“Are you ready to take on nine Myrmidons?”

“As a warm-up before we deal with Evander Arlington and Ioannis? Yes.”

Theo felt the Myrmidons were more of a threat than she gave them credit for. Each was a professional killer, bearing an artefact that could kill them...

“Then let’s do this before common sense kicks in.”

He padded out from the maze, Sasha beside him. They merged with the column behind the rearmost Myrmidon. Roy Young.

A few paces further on, Young looked over his shoulder.

Their eyes met.

Young turned back round. Theo saw his spine stiffen, his shoulders straighten.

When Young grasped the haft of Ares’s battle-axe, that clinched it. He was ready. Theo read the hand signals he made. If he interpreted right, the two Myrmidons immediately ahead of Young were friendly. Young had said at Stolby that there were a couple of members of the team who he felt could be persuaded to turn against their paymaster; must be these two.

Theo established that Sasha had got Young’s message too. When he looked back round, his gaze locked with Hélène’s.

He was about to offer her some covert sign of reassurance, but too late. She addressed the Myrmidon gripping her arm. She told him that she thought Theo and Sasha were impostors.

Theo was dumbfounded. Hélène had looked straight at him. The Myrmidon helmet did not hide his face. She had recognised him. He had seen it in her expression.

And then she had warned her captor about him and Sasha.

And now the man – big, slab-faced, pug-nosed – was drawing his sidearm.

Theo overcame his shock. Fear kicked in, a jolt of adrenaline banishing everything except the need to fight, to win, to survive.

He accelerated to a full sprint. Past Young, past the other two Myrmidons, full tilt at the man with the gun. Dionysius’s club aloft and humming in his fist, singing a song of wild abandonment, of high revels and low morals, of boundaries exceeded.

He struck before the man could loose off a shot, bringing the club down on the wrist holding the gun. He smashed every bone in the wrist. The Myrmidon shrieked in sudden agony, and the gun fell with a clatter. His hand hung limp from his forearm like a bird’s broken wing.

The club swung again, a blow to the shoulder. More bones shattering, the sound of flattened meat. Another shriek.

A third blow cracked the man’s helmet. His head snapped sideways and he crumpled to the path. Blood gushed from his nostrils, giving him a dark crimson moustache.

Affixed to his back by Velcro ties was a bident. It gave off a sombre gleam redolent of caverns and misery.

Hades’s.

A superior weapon to the club. Theo wrested it off the Myrmidon’s body – unconscious? dead? He didn’t care which. He hefted the bident in one hand, stowing the club in his belt with the other.

Sasha was running past him, her sights set on the next Myrmidon along.

Theo whirled round to Hélène.

“What the hell is with you?” he snapped. “You saw my face, you saw Sasha’s. And you
outed
us?”

“A new Trojan War, Theo,” she replied.

“A new – ?”

“Stannard!”

Roy Young lurched past Theo to intercept a Myrmidon running at him, trident levelled at Theo’s midsection. Young diverted the trident with a swipe of his battle-axe. The weapons clanged against each other.

The trident holder rounded on Young. “Showing your true colours at last, huh, Roy?” he said in an accent from somewhere south of the Mason-Dixon. “I knew all along you were a slippery son of a bitch. Guess Stannard musta turned you, back there in Russia. Offered you even more money not to kill him.”

“You have no fucking idea, Travis,” said Young. “Money is the last thing this is about.”

“Could be I don’t give a flying fart what this is about. Could be I see myself getting a nice fat bonus if I run you through with this here pig-sticker.”

The Myrmidon called Travis rammed the trident – seething with Poseidon’s numen – at Young. Young deflected with the battle-axe. The two of them swung, thrust and parried.

Sasha was engaged with another of the Myrmidons, this one wielding a scythe. He was deft with it; the long, curved blade flashed in criss-cross patterns, keeping Sasha at bay, giving her no opportunity to land a blow with Hephaestus’s hammer.

Theo spotted yet another Myrmidon drawing a bead on Sasha with a bow and arrow. He yelled out a warning, and Sasha ducked. The arrow zinged past her head with centimetres to spare.

The two Myrmidons who were Young’s allies started shooting at their own team. The gun reports were as loud as thunder. The other Myrmidons scattered. Some returned fire.

“You?” said Theo to Hélène.
A new Trojan War
. It could mean only one thing. “
You
instigated all this?”

“Theseus, my love, my
first
love,” she replied, tenderly. “Aren’t you thrilled? Isn’t it exciting? Doesn’t it get your blood pumping? It does mine.”

Theo tightened his grip on Hades’s bident. Its twin points shone darkly.

“You wouldn’t,” Hélène said.

“You have no idea what I would do.”

“Your sense of fair play is too strong.”

“After seeing Heracles die – cut down like a dog – my sense of fair play isn’t what it was.”

“Would you really destroy this?” Hélène indicated herself with a sweep of her hand: her face, her figure, her exquisiteness. “The body you once worshipped and adored? Desecrate it with that thing? I think not.”

There was an abrupt scream close by, to Theo’s left.

He saw one of Young’s two allies – the man, not the woman – hurtling through the air as though thrown. He could not make out who or what had struck him.

The man landed with a
crunch
against an abstract bronze statue. He rose awkwardly, crookedly to his feet.

The woman cried out, “Gavin!”

Gavin had lost his gun but he was armed with a sickle, which he drew from his belt. Theo could feel Hermes’s numen emanating from the weapon, an aura of swiftness and sharpness.