by Rob Jones
Hunter turned and sprinted as the men climbed over the corpse. Two down, four to go, he thought. He burst into the bedroom and found the team exiting through the window just as Amy had suggested. Glass everywhere and the smell of gunfire in the air, he guessed Blanco or Lewis had blasted the window out to make the job easier.
He was wrong. Amy had done it, as he saw when he found her on the balcony with a smoking gun in her hand. She was making sure her team got safely down onto the sidewalk. Blanco was with her, covering the room with a pistol gripped in his hand.
“Over you go, Max.”
He looked at Amy. “Ladies first.”
“Last time I checked, I was the boss. Get your ass over the balcony, soldier.”
This was no time to challenge her authority, and she was right. “Yeah, but I’m a gentleman.”
“A gentleman on my team. Ass. Over. Balcony.”
Blanco fired three shots. “Mag nearly out, boss,” he called out. “I can’t keep them back for much longer.”
Seeing the look on Amy’s face, Hunter reluctantly vaulted over the balcony but was relieved when she climbed down after him. Blanco then heaved himself over the iron balustrade and crashed down on the fountain grass lawn and rolled in a perfect parachute landing fall. Up on his feet and dusting himself off, he grinned. “Feel like I’m eighteen again.”
“Really?” Quinn said.
He shrugged. “Well, maybe thirty-five.”
Muzzles flashed above them as the men reached the balcony. Stray bullets traced all around them, ripping into the grass and spitting up chunks of dirt. Blanco scrambled over the lawn and caught up with the others who were now in the street.
“Both ways blocked!” Amy said.
Hunter scanned the narrow street. Whoever the men were, they had parked SUVs sideways in the center of the street either side of Venizelos’s villa. Looking past one of them into the next street, he saw they had also blown out all of the tires on their Nitro. “They’re good,” he said.
“And we’re dead if we don’t get going!” said Quinn.
“What do we do?” asked Jodie.
“Follow me,” said Hunter. “Once again, the ancient world has the answer.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
A sustained burst of submachine gunfire rattled behind them as they vaulted over the iron fence dividing the road from the Acropolis site and scrambled up the dry, scrubby slope toward the ancient monument. With the road blocked off they had little other choice, and Hunter knew the site was large and offered lots of cover plus several escape routes back down into the city.
“Over here!” he called as they weaved up the tree-lined hill. “If we can get up to the site, we can run across to the Parthenon and use it for cover. From there we should be able to reach the Propylaea…”
“The what?” Jodie said.
“The ancient gateway to the site,” he said. “Once we’re through there we can run down the hill and we’re pretty much back in the city. They’ll never find us there.”
Another peel of automatic gunfire echoed in the night and then more screams for their blood. They never looked back, but clambered up the rocks all the way to the top. The climb was hard, almost impossible in some places, but moving silently in the darkness of the night they soon reached the top. Below them on the road winding around the site, they heard the men shouting to each other as they searched the area below.
Pulling himself up over a crumbling stone wall, Blanco was last up top. “What the hell kind of language is that, Max?”
“I’m not familiar with it,” he said. “Sounds sort of like Hebrew or maybe Arabic.”
“Aramaic, then,” Lewis said, cocking his head in the moonlight to hear the shouting better. “It’s sounds like it could be old Aramaic, but as far as I know, no one has spoken that for centuries.”
“This gets weirder,” Quinn said.
“At least we got away,” said Amy, turning to see the breathtaking sight of the Parthenon. The ancient monument was standing silent sentinel beneath a wild grove of sparkling stars, its white marble columns bathed in the sharp moonlight. “This mission has its compensations.”
“Yeah,” Quinn said. “If you count almost getting your head blown off a compensation!”
On cue, a round traced inches from her head and took a pound of stone off the side of a Doric column. She gasped in terror and dived down behind it for cover.
“You were saying?” Lewis said, crashing down beside her.
Hunter moved behind the shaft of the immense column as more rounds chipped at the architrave above his head. Marble splinters rained down as he reloaded his weapon and returned fire at the approaching men. Another barrage of bullets smacked into the ancient stonework he was using for cover and beside him Blanco and Lewis scrambled in opposite directions. They were fanning out to make a stronger defensive line.
The tattooed men tucked themselves down behind the wall running to the north of the Parthenon and unleashed another sustained fusillade of automatic gunfire.
“They’re good!” Hunter yelled.
“And brave,” said Blanco.
“And persistent,” said Jodie. “Very persistent.”
Amy smacked a new mag into the grip of her pistol. “And ruthless.”
“But nobody’s perfect,” Lewis said. “One of them has broken cover.”
The former marine fired on the man in the darkness. His controlled bursts drove the man back to his original position but it was too late. As he vaulted over the wall, Lewis’s last few rounds drilled into his back and blasted out of his chest in a savage display of accurate shooting.
“Whoa!” Quinn said. “Wish I had not seen that.”
As the man tumbled forward, his boots caught on the top of the wall and forced him to pivot over into the stony ground on the other side. The sound of his dead body crunching to a bloody stop on the far side of the wall was drowned out by his associates screaming for revenge.
“How far to the gatehouse, Max?” Amy asked.
“Unless we take these guys out – too far.”
“They’re breaking ranks again!” Blanco called out.
“Give up your search, Agent Fox!” one of the men shouted. “Give it up, or you will surely die. You have no idea of the terrible, awesome power you are meddling with! If you find what you seek your soul will be crushed!”
Blanco looked at Quinn. “Is he talking about the IRS?”
It raised a nervous smile. “I know what you’re doing, Sal.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Trying to calm me down with humor.”
“Is it working?”
“Not really.”
Another wave of gunshots. Hunter looked around the side of the column’s bullet-chipped shaft and saw the remaining men break cover and run screaming toward the Parthenon. They had reloaded their weapons and the assault was serious. One of the men was holding two submachine guns – one in each hand – and Hunter guessed the second belonged to the man Lewis had shot dead moments earlier. Their faces were contorted with rage as they ran toward them, muzzles flashing in the moonlight.
“Are they crazy?” Amy asked.
“Questions about mental health later,” Hunter said. “For now, shoot!”
The HARPA team opened fire on the men and tore them to pieces. Quinn was the only one without a gun. Sitting on the ground behind a column, her legs were hiked up and she was burying her face down in her knees as the battle raged around her. When the firing stopped, she pulled her head up out of the darkness and looked at Amy with fear in her eyes.
“It’s over?”
“Yes and no,” Amy said. “One of them got away.”
“And the others?”
“Well and truly ventilated,” Hunter said.
Quinn winced. “Can’t you just say dead?”
“Sorry.”
They holstered their weapons and Amy shouldered Venizelos’s canvas bag containing the statue. Wandering over to the dead men, Blanco and Lewis ch
ecked pulses while Jodie and Quinn scanned the area for any further sign of trouble.
Nothing, Quinn thought. That noise over by the gatehouse was an owl. She saw it fly away into the night. They were safe.
“C’mon,” Amy said. “We need to get out of here and report this to the authorities.”
“Are you mad?” Hunter said.
“No,” she said. “And you mean crazy. Mad is angry.”
“Not where I’m from, and you must be mad if you want to go to the police! They’ll take us into custody and give Neverov and the Wolves the opportunity they need to get back out in front of us!”
“We’re going to inform the authorities about what happened here, Max,” she said, firmer this time. “But I’m taking on board your point. We’ll go to the US Embassy and do it from there. We can’t just leave these dead men up here for someone else to find. Kids come up here with their parents, Max. Use your head.”
Behind Amy’s back, Jodie gave Max a smug look. “Yeah, Hunter. Use your head.”
In the shimmering moonlight, they turned away from the carnage and made their way toward the ancient gatehouse at the western edge of the Acropolis.
“That was too close for comfort,” Lewis said.
“I don’t know about comfort,” said Jodie. “But it was too damn close for me.”
Blanco laughed. “Me too, Jo.”
“Who the hell were those guys?” Quinn said.
“People who wanted us dead in a hurry,” said Hunter. “And who weren’t in any way bothered about destroying the only clue we have – the statue.”
“Which is odd,” said Lewis. “I thought that, too. They murdered the only man who could have translated the statue and then opened fire on us when we were holding it. Whoever they were, they don’t seem interested in finding John’s missing codex.”
On their way, they stopped beside the corpse of one of the dead men. Staring down at his silent face, white in the moonlight, Amy felt a shiver run up her spine.
“And what is this tattoo they all have?” she asked, leaning in a little closer. “Anyone recognize it?”
Jodie shrugged. “Looks a bit like some of the tattoos I saw on gang members back in California, but different.”
Blanco frowned, “A gang?”
“A cult, more like,” Lewis said.
“Quinn?” Amy asked.
“Search me,” she said. “I left my computer in the Nitro.”
Hunter mulled the question over as he studied the dead man’s tattoo. “I think they have something to do with the Byzantine Empire.”
“You mean the Byzantine Empire that dissolved nearly six hundred years ago?” said Lewis.
Hunter said, “I know it sounds insane, but yes. The double-headed eagle was one of the symbols of the Eastern Roman Empire.”
“Eastern Roman Empire?” Jodie asked.
“Byzantine,” he said. “Same thing as Byzantine. In the ancient Byzantine culture, the most important aristocratic families each had a specific symbol that represented them, a bit like the use of coats of arms and heraldry in Western culture. They were usually a mix of double-headed eagles, Byzantine crosses or monograms, often intertwined with one another. Ciphers were also common, but none of them were exactly like the tattoos on these men.”
“Not at all?” Amy asked.
He shook his head. “The double-headed eagles common to the Byzantine era are similar but not as simple or stylized as these tattoos. Plus, I’m not aware the ancient symbols had this same strange writing associated with them.”
“It looks like Hebrew to me,” Blanco said.
“It’s not Hebrew,” Lewis said. “It’s Biblical Aramaic. I just can’t understand why they’d be tattooed with a language no one has spoken for thousands of years.”
A long silence as his words sunk in.
Leading the team away from the dead man and toward the gatehouse, Amy said, “You think they’re the Creed?”
“I don’t think so,” Lewis said. “There was no sign of Byzantine symbolism or Aramaic in the reports from the search of their headquarters in Germany.”
“And they weren’t dressed like any of the Creed we ran into on the Atlantis mission,” said Blanco. “I hate to say it, but I think this is another outfit – not the Russians or the Creed.”
“Oh my God,” Amy said. “This just gets better and better.”
“Freeze!”
She spun around and saw several men dressed in black combat fatigues, riot helmets and gas masks. They moved out of the shadows of the Propylaea with submachine guns in their hands and grenades hanging off their belts. Heart beating hard in her chest, she saw a badge on the arm of the man leading them toward her team. It read EKAM. She knew this was the Greek acronym for their Special Suppressive Antiterrorist Unit, and by the way they moved she knew they meant business.
“Hands in the air!”
Amy felt the tension in her neck and shoulder ratchet up to a level she had never felt before and knew she had to give up. Ordering her team to drop their weapons and do as the men were telling them, she raised her hands in the air. The game was up.
One of them was in front of her now. He removed his mask and took some handcuffs off his belt. “What is your name?”
“I’m Special Agent Fox with the American FBI. This is my team and we’re here to…”
“You’re under arrest for the murders of Kostas Venizelos, Giuseppe Gallo and all these other men you have shot and killed here tonight!”
The man roughly spun her around and wrenched her hands behind her back. As he slapped on the cuffs and tightened them, pinching her skin, she felt the mission slowly slip away from her. It was all over now. The HARPA team had failed to secure the final Living Being statue and would probably be facing either jail or deportation. Colonel Neverov would find whatever John of Patmos’s mysterious Revelation relic was and use it for his own ends and there was nothing any of them could do about it.
The police officer wheeled her away from the site and toward one of the police vehicles. She was aware that the rest of her team were also in cuffs and being led away. “Whatever you think you’re doing here in Greece,” the man snapped, “is now over.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
The Acropolis Police Station was situated just to the south of the famous landmark. Nestled in the cramped, busy back streets of the Koykaki district, it was a plain, functional building built of concrete which hid its inhabitants from the world behind tinted glass.
Hidden down in the basement was Interview Room 3F and tonight, their host was Captain Yanis Papademos of the Athens police force. He was a big man with a thick black moustache and bushy eyebrows. Suspicious, searching eyes were framed by an otherwise friendly face and when he sat down he let out a long sigh of relief.
Blanco felt his pain but the rigors of old age went straight over Jodie’s head.
“Can’t you take these damned cuffs off?” she said. “We’ve been in here forever and as much as I love this man I don’t want to be cuffed to him for the rest of my life.”
Blanco pretended to choke back the tears. “I can’t say that doesn’t hurt, Jo…”
“Sorry, but no,” Papademos said, businesslike and without emotion. “Standard policy during interviews. You’re lucky you’re still altogether. You will be split up momentarily.”
“But how can we take tea like this?” Hunter said, raising his cuffed hand in the air and pulling up Quinn’s hand as well.
Papademos was unimpressed. “You are under arrest for the brutal murders of Kostas Venizelos of the National Archaeological Museum, the Marquis Giuseppe Gallo, an Italian aristocrat based in Rome, and at least six other as yet unidentified men, Dr Hunter. Do you think this is a time for levity?”
“I find it makes my load lighter.”
“You murdered these men in cold blood!”
Amy sighed and rolled her eyes. “We did no such thing and you know it.”
“I know nothing,” Papademos said sharply. “Yo
u were found at the scene of the murders with armed weapons!”
“No court would convict us for any of these deaths! The men we shot at the Acropolis were trying to kill us – it was self-defense! And they’re the ones who killed Kostas.”
Papademos shook his head. “Nevertheless, I think the court will look dimly on your case.”
“All the time you keep us in here, the real killers are on the loose,” Hunter said. “Is that what you want?”
Papademos waved a dismissive hand. “I have heard it all before. I want to know why you killed them. Let’s start with Mr Venizelos. Was it to silence him for some reason, or simply a bungled robbery? It will make a difference to your sentencing.”
Amy sighed wearily. “For the last time, if you contact the US Embassy here in Athens they will confirm our identity.”
“So you have told me, but even if they do, this does not make you innocent of the murders of these men. Not even FBI agents are allowed to kill people in Greece and get away with it.”
“Look,” Amy said. “We were going to tell the authorities about what happened.”
“Yes,” Papademos said with a heavy dose of sarcasm. “Of course you were.”
“It’s true!” she said.
“You are in enough trouble without adding to it with these pathetic lies. Save yourself the effort, Agent Fox.”
Papademos sighed and shook his head. He looked tired but not particularly disappointed. A life spent interviewing criminals with strong incentives to lie must have left him permanently cynical, Hunter thought.
The police captain glanced at his watch and turned to a guard. After speaking in rapid, hushed Greek, the guard snapped to attention and Papademos left the small room, slamming the door behind him.
“Well that was rude,” Quinn said. “He never even gave so much as a cheerio.”
Hunter watched the guard. He was young – maybe mid-twenties – and looked like he was serious about his career in the Hellenic Police. At least he had a career, he thought glumly. After tonight, he guessed HARPA was about to come to an ignominious end and there was little chance of Juliette Bonnaire hiring him back into UNESCO. He knew her better than almost anyone and not even a sustained and sincere schedule of begging would move her if she did not want to be moved.