“Henchman,” Chase spat. “Sure. Means you aren’t to blame. Well, hench this, motherfucker!”
Roy’s head snapped sideways and his cheek erupted in an explosion of pain. He hadn’t seen Chase move. One second Chase had been standing beside the bed, a couple of metres away. The next – wham!
He craned his head back up. The whole of the left side of his face throbbed. He wondered if Chase had fractured a cheekbone. Certainly felt that way. Cracked a molar, too, he thought.
“Stand down,” Stannard said to Chase, glowering at him. “We aren’t hitting Young. We aren’t torturing him. We’re trying to work things out. Get some trust going.”
“That’ll be why I’m tied to his chair,” said Roy. “Trust.”
“Chase’s idea.”
“Damn right,” said Chase.
“I agreed to it because I felt it would be to your benefit,” said Stannard. “If you weren’t under restraint, you might do something foolish like attack us, try to fight your way out of here. That, I can assure you, would not end well for you.”
Roy looked at the strips of towel binding him. “For my own protection.”
“Very much so. Now, you’ve figured out who we are, and I’ve confirmed it. The next step is you telling us a bit more about yourself and the people you work for. Quid pro quo.”
“I already said, back there in the forest, I don’t know who I’m working for. I don’t know who’s handing down the orders and footing the bill.”
“You really have no idea?”
“There are layers of deniability in the kind of work I do, firewalls between the people pulling the trigger and the people wanting the trigger pulled. You have intermediaries who set everything up; sometimes even they don’t know who’s ultimately running the show. That way, if anyone gets hauled in by the authorities, there’ll be gaps in the paper trail.”
“Backsides covered.”
“Yeah. And can I just say that talking is hurting like a son of a bitch? Your friend Chase has a hell of a right hook.”
“Plenty more where that came from,” Chase said, flexing his fingers and balling them into a fist.
“Which one are you, by the way?” Roy said to him. “If Vega was Heracles, you are...?”
“I’m Mister Fuck-You-Up. That’s all you need to know about me.”
“Can’t say I remember that myth.”
“Seriously, guy, you want me to punch you again?”
“Young,” said Stannard, “you’d best not get Chase riled. He’s got a mean streak.”
“We all do,” said Sasha.
“Okay, okay,” said Roy. “But if you’re demigods, that means you’ve got to be ridiculously old.”
“Three and a half thousand years,” said Stannard, “give or take a century.”
“Looking well on it.”
“Good genes.”
“But I thought you lot died. That’s what the stories say. Heracles – it’s been a while since I read a book about him, but wasn’t there some business with poisoned clothes? He put something on and it killed him?”
“A tunic stained with the blood of the centaur Nessus,” said Stannard, “and also with the venom of the Hydra, from the arrow Heracles shot Nessus with. While Nessus lay dying, he convinced Heracles’s then-wife Deianeira his blood was an aphrodisiac. She persuaded Heracles to wear it, thinking it would make him fall back in love with her and stop him chasing after Iole. The envenomed blood burned him, ate his flesh – but didn’t kill him.”
“He limped off to Mount Oita in Trachinia,” said Sasha. “Built himself a funeral pyre, set it alight, but didn’t actually climb onto it. He hid out for weeks while he recovered from the poisoning. By then the word had gone round – he was dead. He used that. A chance to make a new start. Untangle himself from the mess his philandering had got him into.”
“That was a test, wasn’t it, Young?” said Stannard. “Checking to see if we are who we say we are.”
“Kind of,” Roy admitted. “You’re either well-rehearsed in your character stories or you’re the real deal. But I honestly did think you grew old and died, like everyone else. The myths got it wrong?”
“Myths are malleable. Truth can be manipulated, rumours started. That’s what Heracles showed us. He was the first to fake his death, but the rest of us quickly realised we could do the same. Living forever has its plusses, that’s for sure, but it has it drawbacks too, and one of them is mortals noticing that you don’t age, you don’t change, you don’t get infirm as the years go by. Another minus is outliving the mortals you love.”
“So you keep slipping out of one life and into another,” said Roy. “Like a snake shedding its skin.”
“In a nutshell.”
Roy started to shake his head disbelievingly, then stopped with a wince. Chase’s punch had wrenched muscles in his neck.
“Part of me’s going, ‘This is insane, Roy,’” he said. “‘You’re still unconscious. You’re dreaming all this bollocks.’ But I’m not; you exist. I’m looking right at you. You, Stannard, you’re Theo Stannard the author, but you’re also... Let me guess. Theseus?”
Stannard sat back. “Not bad.”
“I heard you say you were close to Heracles. Theseus and Heracles went on adventures together, didn’t they? They were pals. And the name was a clue. Now, Sasha over there, she’s a trickier proposition. She mentioned there was no love lost between her and Heracles. That might make her one of his female conquests, one of the many exes he left in his wake, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say she’s Queen Hippolyta of the Amazons.”
Sasha’s face remained impassive, but her eyebrows arched ever so slightly, which Roy took to mean he had scored a hit.
“As for you...” He looked at Chase. “You I haven’t the foggiest about. I do know that you’re someone reasonably famous today. I’ve seen your face on the telly. I think it was on a trailer for a show. You present a programme on one of the satellite channels somewhere high up the listings, the ones that most people don’t watch. But I’m still drawing a blank.”
“You don’t need to know who I am,” said Chase. “You only need to know that I’m this close” – he held up thumb and forefinger, their tips a centimetre apart – “to ripping your head clean off.”
“We killed your friend,” said Roy. “I get it. For what it’s worth, I’m sorry.”
“Not just Salvador,” said Stannard. “You so-called Myrmidons have killed four others. Four that we know about. Could be more.”
“Just four.”
“So your ‘sorry’ doesn’t make a damn bit of difference,” said Chase. “You wouldn’t even be saying it if you weren’t stuck in that chair pleading for your life.”
“I’m not pleading for my life,” said Roy. “Have you heard me do that? Even once?”
“Well, you should be.”
“I’m with Stannard. Theo. Can I call you Theo?”
“Maybe.”
“Like Theo, I want this to be over. Not this nice chitchat; the whole thing. The Myrmidons, the killings. I’ve taken on a job that I’ve realised is a shitty one. And I speak as someone who’s done his fair share of shitty jobs. Even by my standards, this one sucks. Massacring immortals – it’s immoral.”
“A conscience,” said Stannard. “Rare in someone in the wetwork business.”
“We don’t call it that. Not these days.”
“Wetwork’s what you do, though. Your trade.”
“I’m an outcomes facilitator.”
“Dress it up in a fancy name,” said Chase, “it’s still killing people.”
“Euphemisms serve a purpose.”
“Sure they do. In your case they make you feel better about murdering for money.”
Roy nodded, acknowledging the point. “But now have a chance of ending this before it goes any further. I’m willing to co-operate with you, Theo. The other two as well, if they’ll let me. We put our heads together, and maybe we can figure out who’s pulling the strings, an
d what we can do to stop them.”
“Theo,” said Chase, “you’re not actually considering this, are you, cuz? Tell me you’re not.”
“I’m keeping an open mind.”
“How can we trust this man?” said Sasha. “He’s in fear of his life. He’d say anything right now.”
“We can trust him,” Stannard said, “because he surrendered to me.”
“But what if that was just a ruse?”
“We can also trust him,” Stannard continued, “because his employers have a hold over him. They’re blackmailing him.”
“So he said.”
“I don’t think he’s making it up. What is it, Roy, that they’re blackmailing you with? You never got round to telling me.”
Roy swallowed hard. “My daughter. They have my daughter.”
Stannard looked at him evenly. “They’ve kidnapped her? They’re threatening her?”
“Exactly that.” Roy’s voice had gone husky. “If I don’t play ball, she’s... Well, you can guess what happens.”
“You can’t bring yourself to say it.”
“Could you?”
Chase grunted and flapped his hands in exasperation. “Really? That’s it? He says someone’s got his daughter, and we’re expected to roll over and give him our bellies to rub?”
“Look at him,” Stannard said. “No one can fake the way he looks right now. That anger, that depth of hatred. He’s not lying.”
Sasha unfolded her arms and pushed herself away from the windowsill, moving to Stannard’s side so that she had a clearer view of Roy. “Daughter, you say?”
“Josie,” said Roy. “Fifteen. No, just turned sixteen. My only child.”
“They would use a sixteen-year-old girl as leverage? They would be that callous? That cruel?”
“Apparently they would.”
“Then they have made an enemy of you.”
“Something of an understatement.”
“And my enemy’s enemy...”
“I’m not your friend,” said Roy. “Don’t want to be. But if I agree to help you stop the killing, and you agree to help me get Josie back before they can harm her, that’s a kind of contract, at least. Quid pro quo. Eh, Theo? What do you say?”
Stannard deliberated a while.
A long while.
Roy knew his life hung in the balance. Chase was itching to kill him. Sasha had been inclined that way too, but Josie’s plight seemed to have swayed her. Stannard had the casting vote. The group clearly had no leader per se, but Stannard was the canniest of the three and the other two seemed to defer to him when it came to strategy. And judgement calls.
Roy’s fate – perhaps Josie’s too – rested in his hands.
TWENTY-NINE
Central Krasnoyarsk
THEO MADE HIS decision. He hoped he wouldn’t regret it, but he didn’t think he would.
He undid the knots on the strips of towel. Young rubbed his wrists and articulated his fingers to restore circulation.
“Thanks,” the Englishman said.
“You’re welcome.”
“So, what now?”
“Now, you tell us everything. Everything we need to know. How many there are of you, what weapons you’ve got, how you’re getting about. Anything else that might be helpful.”
“Okay.”
Young began reeling off facts. The Myrmidons were down to eleven now, Vega having reduced their complement by one shortly before he died. They were all ex-military, a range of nationalities, high-end paid assassins. They had been recruited by a South African, Holger Badenhorst, who’d offered them more money than anyone could rightly refuse. Badenhorst was the linchpin of the operation, receiving commands from above. He seemed aware that the Myrmidons’ targets were demigods, but how much more he knew, Young wasn’t sure. Best guess, the Afrikaner had no idea whom they were working for. Someone with cash to burn, no doubt about it, and a serious grudge against demigods. Aside from that, who could say?
“Badenhorst’s also the man behind Josie’s kidnapping,” Young said. “That’s on his initiative. For which reason, I get to kill him once I have her back safe and sound. I’m going to make the cunt suffer.”
Sasha shot him a look. “You should know that I don’t care to hear that word used in that way.”
“Make the prick suffer. How’s that?”
“Better.”
“Do you know who the next target is?” Theo asked.
“No,” said Young. “We work on a case-by-case basis. We don’t find out who’s next on the list until after we’re done with the previous mission. Sometimes it seems like the choices are made on the fly.”
“How so?”
“Well, for instance, coming here to Russia, that was a last-minute thing. We’d been heading in the opposite direction ’til Badenhorst got a call and we changed course.”
“Short notice?”
“Very. Only last night, in fact.”
Theo pondered this. “And it was Salvador Vega you were after? Just him?”
“Just him,” said Young. “No one told us there’d be any more of you than that.”
“Odd, because Russia wasn’t Salvador’s stamping ground. He’d been in Mexico for the past – how long, Chase?”
“Couple of decades,” Chase said. He looked more than a little disgruntled that Young had been freed. Theo would have some ego-massaging to do once he was finished with Young.
“Yet you came to find him here.”
Young shrugged. “Our employer evidently has up-to-date intelligence. He’s tracking you somehow.”
Theo thought of Harry Gottlieb. A man who could commandeer the resources of the CIA would have had no trouble pinpointing Salvador’s whereabouts, or the whereabouts of any of the other demigods. There were few places they could go that he could not find them.
But it might be more straightforward than that. Gottlieb had, after all, sent Sasha to join Theo’s group. Was she reporting back to him? Spying for him, right under their noses? It made a horrible kind of sense. The Myrmidons had gone looking for Salvador in the Stolby Nature Reserve. They had known his exact location. How? Because Sasha Grace had told Gottlieb that was where he would be.
She caught Theo looking at her, and he flicked his gaze back to Young. He had begun to believe that Gottlieb was on their side. All at once he was revising that opinion and dusting off his theory that Gottlieb was behind the killings. The former Odysseus had the contacts and the resources to wage a campaign like this. The question was, why? What did he get out of it? Perhaps it was the sheer sadistic pleasure of snuffing out demigods’ lives. He didn’t count himself as one of their kind, after all. I am not, by the strictest definition, a demigod, he had said to Theo and Chase. Was this his way of proving himself? Showing them that, while he didn’t have the same physical capabilities as the rest of them, he could still beat them? That his labyrinthine intellect gave him the edge?
“Well,” Theo said to Young, “if your employer is determined to wipe demigods out, including the three of us, then our best tactic is to make it easy for him. We present him with an irresistible target, and get him to commit everything he’s got. Then turn that to our advantage and mount a last stand.”
“Sounds risky,” said Chase. “As in suicide risky.”
“Not if we have an ally in the enemy camp,” Theo said with a nod at Young. “Someone in a position to blunt the Myrmidons’ attack.”
“I’d have to tread carefully,” Young said. “If Badenhorst got wind that I was working for the other side, one call is all it’d take. One call to whoever he’s got holding Josie.”
“I realise what’s at stake for you. I’ve no wish to jeopardise your daughter’s life. But if you can aid us surreptitiously, without it looking like that’s what you’re doing...”
“I can damn well try.”
“Then all we have to do is figure out how to set the agenda – how to make it seem as though we’re still prey when we’re actually predator. I have some ideas
in that direction, but I’m open to suggestions. Chase? You’re a hunter. I’d welcome your input here if you have any.”
Before Chase could answer, a phone double-beeped: Sasha’s. She took it out and squinted at the screen.
“Text,” she said. “From Hélène Arlington. Finally she’s got back to me.”
“What does it say?” Theo asked.
“She’s okay with setting up a meeting for us with her husband. They’re in Greece at the moment and expect to be there for the next few days. She wants to know what our business with him is.”
Theo thought fast. Even if he was inclining back towards Gottlieb as the culprit, that didn’t mean Evander Arlington was off the hook. It would still be worthwhile confronting him in person.
“Tell her it’s important.”
“That’s all?”
“Why else would I be bothering? It’s not as if I’m Arlington’s favourite person in the world. Or he mine, for that matter.”
“You want me to put that?”
“No. Say this. If he doesn’t know what it’s about, then he should be told, and if he does know, then we’re presenting him with an opportunity he’d be foolish to turn down.”
Sasha’s thumbs tapped away.
“That should pique his interest,” Theo said. “The acid test will be how he responds. If he refuses to see us, odds are it’s because he knows we’re on to him and he’s scared to face us.”
“Or he’s just being his usual snotty self,” said Chase.
“There is that, but I figure, if he’s innocent, his arrogance won’t let him give us the brush-off. He’ll want to know why we – me in particular – are importuning him like this. High-and-mighty Evander Arlington couldn’t pass up the chance to have Theseus, Perseus and Hippolyta come before him like petitioners at court.”
“Perseus,” Young muttered, looking at Chase.
“And if he’s guilty,” Theo continued, “if he’s our guy and he does consent to a meeting, he’ll be expecting us to beg for mercy. Which he can choose to grant, or not. Either way, he gets to feel all smug and lordly.”
“Or alternatively he can set a nice little trap for us,” said Chase. “We can waltz in, and the Myrmidons will be waiting.”
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