Gates Of Hades lr-3

by Gregg Loomis

  “I thought the generator was off,” he said.

  “Doesn’t run the water,” Adrian explained. “There’s an artesian well up on the hill, feeds water down a pipe by gravity.”

  Maria came in from the kitchen, carrying a platter of sliced bread, sausage, and cheese. She placed it on the table and returned for a pitcher of water.

  “Would you like some?” she asked Eglov.

  He scowled. “Eat sausage that contains meat, steal nourishment from the death of defenseless animals?” He looked slightly ill at the thought. “No.”

  Jason got up slowly and went to the table as Maria continued in the same tone she might have used had their captors been invited houseguests. “You will have some cheese, then? I expect when the police arrive, you will not get a chance to eat again for quite a while.”

  What the hell was she doing, trying to get them killed ahead of time? Jason’s eyes met Adrian’s and then looked away.

  “Police?” Eglov scoffed. “Do not make yourself look foolish!”

  She shrugged. “Your disbelief does not change the facts. We were to meet them here.”

  In one step the Russian was beside her. He gave her face a slap that could be heard across the room. She staggered backward and almost fell. Jason lunged forward, only to be prodded in the chest by one of the other men’s AK-47.

  “Stupid cow!” Eglov snarled. “You think I would believe such a childish trick? The police will arrive only to find your bodies.”

  She wiped a hand across her mouth. “Stupid or not, they are coming.”

  She was staring at Jason.

  He had no idea what she was talking about, but he had to assume she had done something in the kitchen.

  Then it hit him. As a volcanologist, she would be familiar with gases other than the ethylene. He had an idea what was coming.

  He nodded imperceptibly at Adrian. “She’s right, Eglov. The place will be swarming with cops anytime now.”

  Adrian’s expression turned from bewildered to knowing. He gingerly got out of his chair and, back to the empty fireplace, inspected the food selection. Without looking at Jason, he shrugged, then put a finger to his temple. The two gestures meant something akin to, I’m not sure what you mean but I understand, the silent signs that acknowledged that action of some unknown type was at hand.

  There was an explosion in the kitchen, followed by what could have been gunshots.

  “In here!” Maria yelled. “We are here!”

  The two armed men reacted by swiveling around to point their weapons at the anticipated incursion of gun-wielding police. The distraction lasted only a second at most.

  But it was enough.

  Leaning backward, Adrian reached behind his head and brought both hands down with the claymore, the huge two-handed sword that hung over the mantel. So swift was the blow, the light gleaming from the hand-forged steel appeared as a single arc. A fraction of a second too late, the closest man swung his AK-47 to bear, only to have the blade sever his shoulder from his body. Arm and weapon clattered to the floor in a geyser of blood.

  Jason ducked under the barrel of another rifle whipping back toward him, his shoulder throwing the muzzle upward as a burst of shots plowed into the ceiling. There was a downpour of plaster dust. Jason grabbed for the armed man’s gun as the other hand stretched for the gunman’s throat.

  Intentionally or by chance, Jason’s intended victim stumbled or stepped backward out of reach, leaving Jason staring at the leveled mouth of the AK-47 and the gleeful eyes of his victorious opponent.

  Jason fully expected to die.

  Instead, the man seemed to shift his shoulders slightly as his eyeballs rolled upward as though trying to see into the back of his own head. His knees buckled slowly as he sank to the floor and fell facedown. The knife used to slice the sausage protruded from between his shoulder blades. Behind him stood Maria, her blood-soaked hands clasped over her mouth.

  She could not tear her eyes from the man sprawled before her. “Oh, my God, oh, my God,” she whispered.

  Then she spun, took a step, and vomited.

  She shook off Jason’s consoling arms. “Oh, my God,” she repeated, “I’ve killed a man…”

  She bolted for the bedroom. Jason could hear her retching.

  “An’ what aboot him?” Adrian asked, his sword pushed against Eglov’s stomach. “It’d be a pleasure to slice him up like so much pickled herring.”

  “Do what you will,” Eglov sneered. “It cannot be worse than suffering at the hands of Russian police.”

  “Letting him go doesn’t make a lot of sense,” Jason said.

  Eglov was looking at him without fear. “There is a deal to be had here. My organization could use men such as yourselves.”

  Jason snorted. “Swell. I’d be afraid to sleep, afraid I’d wake up with a knife between my shoulders. No, thanks. It isn’t my thing.”

  Eglov’s eyes narrowed, making them appear even more slanted. “You are a fool if you think you can kill me and not pay for it. I command a virtual army of loyal followers.”

  Eglov’s megalomania was becoming tiresome.

  “I say we put th’ man’s disciples to th’ test,” Adrian said, gesturing to the gore-drenched floor. “Bit of a bother explainin’ all this t’ th’ local constabulary if we turn ‘im over to ‘em.”

  “My cause will survive to see the capitalist-industrial complex crumble.”

  Jason literally saw red as a wave of rage surged through his consciousness.

  For Laurin.

  For Paco.

  For three thousand Americans killed on a warm, clear September morning.

  For the victims of all zealots who advanced their causes by killing innocents.

  He nodded slowly. “For once, Eglov, you are not calling the shots.” He ripped off the Russian’s shirt. “We’ll see how long the viper survives without a head.”

  Eglov watched with growing consternation as Jason began tearing the shirt into strips. “So, you will kill me.”

  Jason nodded. “Your lieutenants will have an opportunity to struggle on without you.”

  Eglov abandoned any pretext of unconcern. “What are you doing?”

  Jason gave him a malicious smile. “Things are a little different when you are the one about to die, aren’t they, Eglov? This time you’re not slitting the throat of some unarmed fisherman or lumberjack. Makes you a little uncomfortable, doesn’t it?”

  “You are a fool to pass up the money you could make working for me, even more of a fool to bring the wrath of my followers down upon you.”

  Jason ignored him. Using the strips to bind the Russian hand and foot, Jason slung him over his shoulder. “Open the door for me, will you?”

  Adrian did as he was asked. “But what…?”

  “We’ll send our pal Eglov to meet his much-loved natural world in fitting style.”

  Jason headed for the back of the house.

  Adrian and Eglov guessed what Jason had in mind at about the same time.

  “Surely you’re not…?” Eglov said.

  What false confidence Eglov had left vanished as he began to howl for mercy in English and Russian.

  “Surely you would not kill a fellow human this way!”

  “You’d rather I cut your throat?” Jason said, shifting the burden of the man’s weight. “You’re getting about as much of a chance as you gave your victims. Besides, letting nature’s own creatures take care of you seems… well, appropriate.”

  The pigs grunted in anticipation.

  As Jason returned to the house, the squeals of delight were becoming louder than the anguished screams.

  Maria, pale and haggard, was leaning against the bedroom doorway. “I saw what you did.”

  “Fitting end, I thought,” Jason commented. “By the way, brilliant move, mixing water with the dry ice.”

  “Huh?” Adrian asked.

  Jason explained. “Carbon dioxide, when mixed in confinement with water, forms a ga
s. When the gas has no more room into which to expand, it explodes its confinement-in this case, the water bottles. Like gunshots.”

  “Bonny good!” Adrian applauded. “That little prank saved our lives.”

  Maria shook her head slowly. “Had I known what would happen, I don’t know if I could have done it.” She examined her hands. “I killed someone.”

  “If you hadn’t, we all would have been dead soon,” Jason said.

  “And you…” She was pointing an accusing finger. “I saw what you did. That was… was… inhumane!”

  “Inhumane? Like gassing unarmed workers so they could peacefully be murdered? Like planning to assassinate the president? And what do you think they would have done to you when they tired, of raping you?” Jason asked. “If you hadn’t stabbed that man…”

  She was wringing one hand with the other as though washing them. “Whatever they might have done… I cannot live with killing someone.” She glanced at the door. “I want to leave. Now.”

  “Maria,” Jason reasoned, “give it a few days. We can-”

  “No!” she almost shouted. “There is no more ‘we.’ Because of you, I killed another human being. I watched you literally feed a man to pigs to be eaten alive. No, Jason, I cannot be around someone whose business is violence.”

  “But-”

  She was unconscious of the washing motions, Lady Macbeth. “I love you, Jason, but I cannot live with what you do. The sooner I start trying to forget you, the sooner I will.”

  It was then that Jason realized that, quite possibly, he, too, was in love. The thought surprised him. After Laurin, he hadn’t thought he was capable of it.

  “Look, Maria, I don’t have to keep doing this. I can…”

  She shook her head. “No, Jason. I can never forget the things you have done, even though I suppose you had to do them. I will find some quiet college-professor type, get married, and have a dozen or so children. I could not live with a man who killed for a living.”

  “A college professor like Eno Calligini?” Jason asked bitterly.

  “Perhaps similar to him. They seem all similar. It is none of your concern.” She turned to Adrian. “Would you take me to the nearest place I can get a bus to the airport?”

  Adrian looked at Jason.

  “Go ahead,” Jason said dully. “I can’t make her stay.”

  Maria followed Adrian out the door, then reappeared. Crossing the room with quick steps, she threw her arms around Jason and kissed him. “Do you understand, Jason? I cannot live with what you do or what your duty requires. Even if you quit, you would resent me as the cause.” Then she was gone.

  Epilogue

  Ischia Ponte, Islade Ischia

  A year later

  Jason stood on the second-floor loggia of his villa as the triumphant clamor of Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” boomed from carefully placed speakers. He was concentrating on a group of buildings sloping up a hill a half a mile away. Brush in hand, he squinted as he tried again to catch in acrylic the exact hue the sun tinted the gray-white stone Cathedral of the Assnta, a golden sheen that seemed to radiate from within the stone of its craggy heights itself. The electric blue of the sea beyond looked more painted than real. Transferring these colors to canvas was a Sisyphean task; they changed by the minute. The challenge, though, was one too beautiful for any artist to decline, and his previous efforts had sold well in the artists’ market in town.

  His new house was an Italianate walled compound situated on a small hill. White with a red tile roof, it possessed little other than size to distinguish it from other island homes nestled among the rugged terrain. He loved the way the sun recolored its stucco every hour with a glow he had no hope of reproducing with mere earthly equipment.

  He put down his brush and inspected the canvas in front of him.

  Beyond the piazza enclosed by his own walls, he could see the sole approach to the tiny village of Ischia Ponte, a causeway dating back to 1438, joining it to the volcanic island of Ischia. The Argonese Spanish also built a castle, a monastery, and the cathedral, all protected by a shoreline too steep to harbor ships or land a hostile army. Subsequently, the island became a favorite of Bourbon royalty and, today, of landscape painters and tourists avoiding the more popular attractions of Europe by seeking the main island’s black sand beaches or tumultuous terrain.

  Jason had all but convinced himself his choice of residences was based on the single means of ingress and egress rather than the island’s proximity to Naples, where he knew a certain volcanologist spent a great deal of her time.

  He had moved there immediately after a week of debriefing by Mama and the various American intelligence agencies, all of whom owed him a debt they could never admit. Failure to timely access the Breath of the Earth project could have resulted not only in assassination of the president, but political recriminations that would have sent any number of department heads into early and obscure retirement.

  In addition to the fee paid him by Narcom, he had asked only that the State Department do what was necessary to ensure that he was no longer wanted by the British Colonial or Italian authorities.

  In the first instance, the British Colonial office was all too happy to forget the matter. After all, their Caribbean possessions were one of the world’s vacation spots. Even the rumor of violence would frighten the tourists who were the islands’ main source of income.

  The Italians, understandably thorny when it came to activity by a foreign power on their soil, simply did not acknowledge that any such exercise had taken place at all. No one was certain exactly what had inspired Inspectore

  Santi Guiellmo, capo, le Informazioni e la Sicurezza Democratica, to lead men into a shaft closed since antiquity. As was his custom, he had confided in no one. The old archeological site was far too unstable to risk any effort at retrieving the bodies. A simple Mass for the dead was said at the mouth of the hole and the matter officially forgotten.

  Although the depth of the sea surrounding Ischia precluded scuba diving, the fishing from Jason’s small skiff was successful enough. Dorado and other fish were plentiful, and what he didn’t catch was available in the open-air market in Ischia Porto, the island’s main town and ferry port. Pangloss seemed relieved that there were no crabs lying on the trays of ice, but the claws of the large prawns gave him pause.

  Even with a dog, painful memories lingered.

  Otherwise, Pangloss loved the people, color, and, above all, the smells of the market. Jason got the impression the dog would have preferred a car to having to keep his balance between the front wheel and Jason’s feet on the floorboard of the Vespa, though.

  Daily help was inexpensive and provided a form of company, once the old woman realized the dog was far more friendly than fierce. Her extended family basically adopted Jason, including him in an endless procession of weddings, saints’ days, birthdays, and one funeral, all occasions for appropriate gifts to grandchildren, nieces, nephews, cousins, and others of whose relationship he was uncertain. The affiliation also provided him with numerous eyes and ears. Should someone come looking for him, he would know before they found him.

  He took Italian lessons twice weekly.

  At night he cooked, read, drank wine, or watched bad Italian soaps or, worse, American sitcoms on the rabbit-eared set the previous owners had correctly appraised as not worth taking with them.

  Almost by accident one evening, he found the dogeared magazine Adrian had given him, the one containing the condensed version of Eno Calligini’s book. Only then did Jason remember he had not finished the misadventures of Severenus Tactus, the one facet of the Breath of the Earth operation still incomplete.

  A glass of wine at his elbow, he had begun to read.

  JOURNAL OF SEVERENUS TACTUS

  Two days I remained in Agrippa’s household. I began to despair that he would ever have restored to me what I had lost, for he rarely left the house, instead conferring for hours with men, many of whom I recogniz
ed as among the most powerful in Rome.

  Late in the afternoon of the second day, I heard his guest depart and set out to speak with my host. I found him at the counting table ^1 of his treasure house. ^2

  He looked up as I entered and smiled with a greeting.

  I was about to inquire as to what had been done when I saw a small gold stature of Dionysus ^3 on a chest. The same figure had adorned the little temple at which my mother, unlike my father, had worshiped all and many deities. Like most of the household treasures, it had disappeared shortly before my father’s death. Without thought, I reached out to examine it.

  Agrippa moved with greater celerity than his age would suggest, clasping my wrist in an iron grip.

  “That statue belongs to my family,” I protested.

  He shook his head. “There are legions like it. You are mistaken.”

  I lunged and knocked the litlle figure upon the floor. On its bottom was my family’s mark. ^4

  He did not release my wrist but said, “Your father owed much before he died.”

  As though delivered by the gods, the words of my father’s shade from Hades only two days past came back to me: In the hand of the servant of the god. Not servants, not gods.

  A single servant.

  A single god.

  Augustus, the emperor, was a god.

  Agrippa was his most devoted servant.

  In the two years before he died, my father had hoped to do business with the imperial household, to have intercourse with government. It was an ambition never voiced before, nor hoped for.

  But, I surmised, it had been one for which he paid dearly.

  “You,” I said. “You took my father’s money on a promise to return commerce from the emperor and state. You used your high office to induce him to believe you could do such things.”

  Agrippa finally released my wrist. “As Augustus’s confidant I could. Your father was foolish enough to believe I would. Who told you?”

  “My father’s spirit,” I answered. “And to him you will answer.”

  Agrippa laughed. “I answer to no one but Caesar. But I shall have a response to the priests who revealed my business to you.”