Age of Heroes

by James Lovegrove

  The man of twists and turns gazed out over the wine-dark sea. “You know me too well, Theseus,” he said eventually. “That, in fact, is the reason for the delay in my returning. I took a small detour along the way, to deposit something.”

  “Namely...?”

  “I have made provision in the unlikely event that I die and the even unlikelier event that I forget where I cached the artefacts. I have drawn maps of the locations and written detailed itineraries, describing how and where to reach them. I have even drawn sketches of the landscape surrounding each spot. These instructions cover several sheets of vellum, which I have sealed up in a set of copper cylinders and left with a certain person of our acquaintance.”

  “Who?”

  “I am,” Odysseus said, “a man without a permanent home. So I have entrusted the cylinders to the safekeeping of someone who has several homes, all of them fairly impressive.”

  “Who?” Theseus asked again. He had some inkling which person Odysseus was referring to, but he wanted to hear the name said.

  “You, of all people, are not going to like the answer. But then, why should that matter?”

  A third time, more insistent: “Who?”

  “King Minos.”

  FIFTEEN

  Washington, D.C.

  “LIED TO US. The son of a bitch lied to us. Right to our faces.”

  Theo thumped the steering wheel, inadvertently prompting a hoot from the rental car’s horn.

  They were stuck in traffic, virtually at a standstill. The driver of the car in front leaned out of his window and shouted, “Hey, buddy, nobody’s going anywhere. Gridlock. So just cool it, okay?”

  “Yes, sorry,” Theo replied. “It was a mistake.”

  “Sure, sure,” said the other driver. “Mistake this, asshole,” and he flipped Theo the bird.

  When Chase had finished laughing at his cousin, he said, “Duh. Of course he lied. Odysseus, remember? Guy has the integrity of a roadside crow.”

  “I mean, I suppose it could just have slipped his mind...”

  “Not him. He lied, plain and simple.”

  “I should have called him on it at the time. I sort of knew. I just couldn’t put my finger precisely on what it was he’d said that was bugging me.”

  “Well, we’re going to fix that now, aren’t we?”

  “Damn straight. If this traffic will ever let us get to his house.”

  “Washington ties with Chicago for the honour of having the worst road congestion in America. It’s because no building in the city is allowed to be taller than the width of the street it’s on. That leads to urban sprawl, leads to inadequate road infrastructure, leads to...” Chase nodded at the stationary queue of vehicles ahead.

  “Cameras aren’t on, Chase. You don’t have to travelogue.”

  “Just helping to pass the time.”

  “Well, don’t.”

  Half an hour later, they had made it through Foggy Bottom and into Georgetown. Ten minutes after that, they were outside Harry Gottlieb’s house.

  Theo pressed the entry buzzer button several times, without effect. No one responded, not even a security man.

  “Okay,” he said. “The hard way it is.”

  Chase was poised to leap over the gate, but Theo had other ideas. He grasped two of the bars, planted his feet, and heaved sideways. The gate began to roll, squealing, grinding, shuddering, resisting. Theo gritted his teeth and shoved harder. There were crunching and cracking sounds as piston rams buckled and the hydraulic motor broke. He managed to create a gap a full metre wide before the mechanism was so severely damaged that the gate just stuck firm and not even a demigod’s strength could budge it any further. He let go and dusted off his palms. His hands had dug into the steel of the bars so hard, leaving dents like the moulded grip on a combat knife.

  “Oh, boy, you are not a happy bunny,” said Chase. “How much is that going to cost to repair?”

  “Harry can bill me,” said Theo, stalking off up the driveway.

  He was braced for the protection detail to come barrelling out of the house, guns waving, but this did not happen. As he climbed the steps to the front door, he grew more and more certain that there was no one home. Somehow you could tell from close up when a house was empty, and this one was. The air was too still.

  Hence he didn’t bother with the doorbell, opting instead for a hard, well-placed, jamb-splintering kick.

  He and Chase stood in the grand hallway as the echoes of the door slamming open died away.

  “Hello?” Chase called out. “Anyone? Jehovah’s Witnesses. We’re here to discuss the End Times. We can leave a copy of The Watchtower and come back later if you’re too busy right now.”

  They performed a rapid search of the downstairs. Theo was in no doubt that his forced entry had triggered some kind of silent alarm. In ten minutes, fifteen at most, the cops would arrive.

  Gottlieb was gone; that much was obvious. And he hadn’t left long ago. In the kitchen there were the remains of breakfast. He hadn’t tidied away the dishes, and the coffee percolator jug was half full and still faintly warm. They had missed him by half an hour at most. Damn traffic.

  Upstairs, in the master bedroom, the doors of the walk-in closet stood ajar and a couple of the drawers in the dresser hung open. Gottlieb had packed his bags. He wasn’t merely out for the day, then.

  “Theo?”

  That was Chase, calling up from below.

  Theo joined him in Gottlieb’s study. A flatscreen monitor sat atop a venerable cherrywood desk – a desk that rivalled the Resolute desk in the Oval Office for enormity and ornateness. The monitor was connected to a Dell Precision tower, and stuck on the keyboard in front of it was a yellow Post-it note. On the small square of paper someone – Gottlieb – had drawn an arrow pointing to the return key and written the words “Press me”. Beneath he had added, “(This is not a trick)”.

  “It’s a trick,” said Chase. “We hit the key and, I don’t know, maybe a bomb goes off and we get blown to kingdom come.”

  The same thought had crossed Theo’s mind. That Gottlieb had fled Washington in such a hurry because he was guilty; that he was the one slaying other demigods, for reasons best known to him. With Theo and Chase sniffing around, he had begun to feel the heat and got out of Dodge.

  And what better way to prevent them pursuing him than wire up his house with a bomb? The explosion might conceivably not kill them, but it would at the very least put them out of action for a while – long enough for Gottlieb to hightail it to the middle of nowhere and for his trail to go stone cold.

  Then again, Gottlieb could have arranged for a bomb to go off the moment anyone opened the front door. A much simpler and more dependable method than inviting them to push a button and be the authors of their own destruction.

  By the same token, Gottlieb might be counting on them thinking just that. Telling them to hit the return key was so obviously a ploy that it must not be a ploy, which meant it must be a ploy.

  This, after all, was the man who convinced the Cyclops Polyphemus his name was Outis – ‘Nobody’ – and then put his eye out, so that when the giant screamed for help from the Cyclopes in neighbouring caves, and they asked him who had hurt him, he replied, ‘Nobody,’ and they decided he didn’t need help.

  Theo hesitated, unsure what to do. Time was ticking. He didn’t fancy a run-in with the authorities; too awkward. Should he and Chase cut their losses, ignore the Post-it message, and just go? That seemed the most sensible option.

  But what if the message was genuine? What would pressing the return key do? Was there something on the computer Gottlieb wished them to see?

  “Oh, fuck it.”

  Theo, bracing himself for the worst, jabbed down with a forefinger.

  The flatscreen monitor sparked into life.

  Two lines of text appeared against a blue background, with an empty box in between.

  Input my son’s name.

  Otherwise the hard drive will erase itself in
30 seconds.

  As they watched, the 30 changed to a 29.

  “His son’s name,” said Chase. “Does he not know the first thing about choosing an unguessable password? That’s Computer Studies 101. Never use a relative’s name.”

  “As far as anyone who knows Harry Gottlieb is concerned, he doesn’t have a son,” said Theo. “This is meant for us, to make sure we are who we hopes we are.”

  “Okay, but which son? Odysseus had a bunch of kids, like the rest of us. He didn’t exactly keep it in his pants. He got Circe pregnant three times and played hide the salami with Calypso on Ogygia. After Penelope, there was Queen Callidice of Thesprotia, Princess Euippe of Dodona...”

  “Only one of his sons really mattered to him. The one who went searching for him when he didn’t return home, and who helped him get his wife back after he did.”

  The countdown had reached 3 seconds. Theo leaned in and typed the word TELEMACHUS.

  The screen blanked, then a media player window popped up and a video clip began to run.

  Harry Gottlieb’s face gazed out at them. He was seated at this very desk.

  “Ah, there you are,” he said. “Congratulations, both on plucking up the nerve to hit the key and on answering my password poser correctly. I imagine the one caused you no small consternation, whereas the other, I trust, presented no difficulty.” His eyes sparkled with evident delight.

  “Arrogant jerk,” said Chase.

  “You do realise he can’t hear you?” said Theo.

  As if to disprove that, Gottlieb then said, “Yes, Chase, I am whatever you just called me. I don’t apologise for my character. I don’t apologise for anything I do. Regret and self-recrimination are unproductive. They serve no purpose.

  “You are watching this video,” he went on, “because I have absented myself from my house. I am, in fact, absenting myself from Washington and from civilised society altogether, for the foreseeable future. I am going, as they say, ‘off the grid’. Don’t come looking for me. You will not find me.”

  He offered a smile that seemed equal parts smirk and sneer.

  “‘Why?’ is the question that is plaguing your brains. Or perhaps not. Perhaps you’ve formed an opinion about me, and believe you already know my reasons for absconding. I’m talking to you, Theo, rather than your sidekick.”

  “Sidekick!” Chase exclaimed.

  Theo shushed him.

  “You are likely to have assumed,” Gottlieb was saying, “that it is I who have been masterminding, even perpetrating, lethal attacks on our fellow demigods. This video message will do nothing to quash that suspicion. Quite the reverse; it must look as though I am running scared.”

  He paused, bending closer to the camera.

  “Let me tell you that I am. I am running scared. But not from you and the Monster Hunter, Theo. From you two I have nothing to fear, so long as you understand that you have nothing to fear from me.”

  “I think I should be the judge of that,” Theo muttered.

  “You do realise he can’t hear you?” said Chase.

  Gottlieb said, “It so happens that some of the drone sorties I organised bore fruit sooner than anticipated. During the small hours of this morning, I was phoned by Langley. It was no imposition; I tend not to sleep much, or well. Brain too busy.

  “At each of the three sites where CIA Unmanned Aerial Vehicles had so far carried out reconnaissance, I was told, there were clear indicators of recent human activity. To wit: tyre tracks, heaps of excavation spoil, and the detritus left behind by campsites.

  “For the record, the sites in question are in the Taklamakan Desert; on Socotra Island; and amid the gorges of Motuo, a county in the Nyingtri Prefecture, which lies in that part of Tibet that China has claimed for its own and which I can assure you was fiendishly hard to get to when I made my way there the first time.

  “Now, had it been just one of these locations that had been disturbed, I might not have worried too much. It could have been happenstance – archaeologists rooting around for relics, palaeontologists dredging up fossils. Even two of the sites might not have been cause for concern. Explorers are getting everywhere these days. But all three? And let’s not forget these were just the first three sites surveilled by drone.

  “Clearly all twelve hiding places had been visited. Meaning, of course, that the divine artefacts are now out in the world.

  “Given the deaths you informed me about, I must conclude that we are under attack. We are the subjects of a concerted, systematic genocide.”

  “Shit,” Chase breathed, while Theo only nodded. He felt chilled, but vindicated.

  “And so I have taken what I consider to be the only sensible course of action,” Gottlieb said. “Like the hunted fox, I am going to ground. It may not surprise you to learn that I had plans in place for just such an eventuality as this. It was always a possibility that the artefacts might come back into play. Long ago I prepared myself a refuge, in case of emergency – a safe place, well away from civilisation. I am departing in just a moment. My protection detail has been dismissed, as has my domestic staff. A town car is coming to spirit me to the heliport, and from there I head for parts unknown, at least as far as you’re concerned.

  “It’s going to be hard to leave my Washington life behind. I’ve grown accustomed to it. I imagine that quitting my position as Presidential advisor so abruptly, without warning, will prevent me from resuming it once the danger is past. So be it. The balance of geopolitical power is shifting anyway. Perhaps it’s time I looked east, or possibly south.

  “You may, naturally, choose to disbelieve everything I have just said. I cannot have helped my case by being somewhat economical with the truth last night. I presume that you, Theo, have not forgotten about the copper cylinders and the instructions contained therein, although it’s such a long time since we spoke about them. I would have made mention of them had it not been for Chase’s presence. What passed between the two of us, that day at Piraeus, was meant to stay between the two of us, and I am very much in favour of keeping information compartmentalised. Still, I am aware that my caginess might be looked upon as deceit. Please believe me when I say it wasn’t intentional.

  “You’ll recall that it was King Minos to whom I gave the cylinders for safekeeping at Knossos. Minos, or as he is nowadays known, Evander Arlington. A very rich man. I mean, we are all rich, aren’t we? You can’t have lived as long as we have and failed to accumulate a healthy balance of savings. Compound interest is an immortal’s best friend. But Evander Arlington is in another league altogether. Possibly the richest person on the planet. Richer than even Croesus could have dreamed of being, and he was the greediest, most acquisitive bastard I’ve ever had to deal with.

  “Does Arlington still have the cylinders in his possession? That I do not know. He and I have seldom communicated. He is even more of a recluse than I am.

  “But if he still has them, and knows he has them, and has chosen to unstopper them...

  “Well, Theo, Chase, I leave that with you.

  “Perhaps we shall meet again. Perhaps not.

  “In the meantime... Good luck.”

  The clip ended, freezing on Gottlieb’s face and its look of what might even have been sincere concern.

  Then the screen went blank again, and from the computer tower came a sudden frenzy of activity: a stuttering whir, a sudden blast from the cooling fan. Now the hard drive was erasing itself.

  Outside the house, a police cruiser pulled up. Theo spotted it from the study window. The two officers inside looked at the partway-open gate, then one of them got on the radio. A minute later, both of them clambered out of the car, unclipping the poppers on their sidearm holsters.

  By then, Theo and Chase were already skedaddling out of the house via the French windows in the lounge. They raced across the lawn, hurdled the back wall, and were soon lost from sight in the parkland beyond.

  SIXTEEN

  Xagar District, Somalia

  “MAKE NO MISTAKE,
this is going to be the hardest one yet,” Badenhorst had warned. “The man is no pushover. Don’t underestimate him. He will not go quietly. He will fight back. Don’t fuck it up or he will fuck you up.”

  So far, however, Roy had seen neither hide nor hair of Daniel ‘Iron Dan’ Munro, the Myrmidons’ next target. It was two days since the bus had dropped them off at the counterinsurgency-force training camp and Badenhorst had waved them goodbye, and in all that time the man in charge of things, Munro, had been notable by his absence. Roy expected at least to see him in the commissary tent, or else bump into him wandering through the compound. Munro was around; everyone said so. But he seemed never to leave the rickety trailer home which sat parked at the northern end of the camp. He hadn’t come out to supervise the orientation of the new arrivals, or greeted them with a speech of welcome. He hadn’t been there for the first day’s backpack hike into the bush, or this morning’s live-fire exercise. He appeared content to let his second-in-command, Lieutenant Alain Dupont, formerly of the French Foreign Legion, run the show. His presence seemed more rumour than fact.

  The inhabitants of the camp, Myrmidons aside, were a mix of Somali soldiers and private security contractors – mercenaries – from a range of nations. The ratio of locals to foreigners was four to one, and altogether they totalled in the low hundreds, battalion size. Ostensibly the non-Somalis were there to mentor and tutor the indigenes, preparing them to combat the Islamist extremists who were taking over increasing swathes of the region. Funding for this operation came jointly from the government in Mogadishu and a consortium of businessman backers in the United Arab Emirates who rightly equated a rise in terrorism in Somalia with an increase in pirate attacks on cargo ships passing around the Horn of Africa.

  In fact, of course, the non-Somalis were there to engage the enemy just as much as the Somalis and lend some developed-world heft. And the Myrmidons blended in easily among them. They all had military backgrounds. They all had service records that could be, and had been, checked out by the politicians and businesspeople sponsoring the camp. They all, in short, fit the profile of mercenaries, and no one they met had questioned their bona fides even once. They were treated as though they belonged. The more the merrier, seemed to be the philosophy. Come join the fun.