by Rob Jones
“Does this mean I get immunity?” Collins said nervously.
“From the US authorities, maybe, but from me, sadly no.”
Without saying another word, Hawke powered his fist into Collins’s face and knocked him out cold. “We have to get to New Orleans in a hurry,” he said.
Kim turned to face him, her hair blowing in the helicopter’s downdraft. “On it.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Joe Hawke ignored the high-performance takeoff of the Learjet 31. His mind was still processing the totally unexpected sight of Scarlet Sloane as she drove across the airport asphalt on a stolen motorbike and skidded to a halt a yard from his legs.
“Only you could lose a President,” she had said as the rubber smoke drifted into the air.
Now, as Vincent, Doyle and a team of SWAT men slept in the small cabin, the two of them and Kim Taylor studied maps of the processing plant. He knew the flight from Washington DC to New Orleans would take less than two hours in the Lear, and that didn’t leave much time to organize a strategy to save Charles Grant and bring Kiefel’s plans to a halt.
After discussing their strategy for the tenth time, he shut his eyes for some important rest before the assault, but struggled to sleep. Instead, he recalled his earlier conversation with Alex Reeve and realized somewhere over Alabama that she had been right, as usual. Thankfully, Scarlet had stayed out of it, but he knew it was time to speak to Lea Donovan.
He had thought about calling her before, but the events of the last few hours had overtaken him. Now he had a few moments he knew what he had to do. He switched on his phone and gave her the call he should have made a long time ago.
Her voice was clipped and distant. “So you remembered my number then?”
Not a good start. She sounded as angry as he’d imagined she might, but he had a right to be angry too.
“Where are you?” he said, trying to chill things down.
“I’m in Ireland.”
“Visiting family?”
“If you call chasing my father’s ghost off a cliff visiting family, then yeah… I’m visiting family.” She sounded as unhappy as he’d ever known her and he regretted more than ever walking out on her back in Luxor.
“I don’t understand,” he said.
“You don’t need to understand.” Her voice grew weaker as the reception faltered. She sounded so far away. She was so far away.
“Don’t be like that, Lea. Do you need any help?”
“I have help, Joe. You’re not the only action-figure in the toy store you know.”
Touché, he thought. Presuming a woman with Lea’s contacts and experience was sitting around waiting for his help was stupid and presumptuous.
“So what’s going on?” he said after another awkward silence.
“An old friend of Dad’s and Rich’s was murdered, so I’m looking into it.”
“You think the murder is connected to your father’s death?”
Her reply was succinct, to say the least. “Yes.”
Another long silence stretched out between them.
“What about you?” she asked at last. The phone line crackled and accentuated the distance between them.
“I’m in America.”
“America?” she sounded shocked. “I thought maybe you went back to London.”
He knew there was no point in delaying the inevitable. “I’ve been staying with Alex at her father’s cabin in Idaho for a few weeks.”
A longer silence.
“Is there something you want to tell me Joe Hawke?”
Uh-oh, both names. “If you mean is there anything going on between me and Alex, then no, there isn’t. She’s just a very old friend of mine. I don’t think of her like that, and she doesn’t think of me like that.”
She changed the subject. “You’re up to your arse in this terror attack, aren’t you?”
“You could say that. I’m calling from a jet. We’re flying to New Orleans to rescue President Grant. I’m surprised ECHO isn’t all over it as a matter of fact.”
“Rich has his reasons.”
“Enigmatic.”
“I could tell you more, but as an outsider you don’t have clearance.”
“Funny, but that’s what Scarlet Sloane just said to me.”
“Scarlet’s there?”
“Yeah – she landed in the US a few moments ago. Eden sent her and Ryan up here as soon as he found out Medusa was involved in all this. He can’t help himself.”
“Listen, Joe… I have to go.”
He nodded, even though she couldn’t see him. It was an instinctive reaction. “Sure.”
“I’ll call.”
Sure, he thought as the line went dead.
*
Lea switched her phone off with a scowl, folded her arms and stared out of the windshield without blinking. Outside the car, the Irish countryside flashed by in a rain-streaked blur and she caught her reflection in the window. She looked like she was about ready to murder someone.
“They’ll hypnotize you, you realize that.”
Lea thought about ignoring him, but she had the crazy idea Mikey O’Sullivan wasn’t the type to be ignored. “What will?”
“The windscreen wipers,” he said, pointing a meaty finger at them as they swished back and forth in the heavy rain. “If you stare at them like that you’re sure to be mesmerized.”
“Is that true, Danny?” Lea said, turning her head slightly to the back.
“You can forget about asking him for back-up – they’re both dead to the world.”
She turned to see the Guinness and whiskey had finally caught up with Danny Devlin, and Kyle too had succumbed to the gentle purr of the Audi Quattro’s classic inline five cylinder engine.
“So I take it that was your boyfriend – is that what they’re called these days? I don’t know anymore.”
“Oh, there’s lots of words to describe Joe Hawke. I’m not sure if boyfriend is at the top of my list right now, Mikey.”
He smiled. “You know, my daughter isn’t much younger than you. Maeve’s her name. She says I’m not allowed to talk about stuff like this because it’s so embarrassing.”
For some reason she was surprised that Mikey had a daughter. She couldn’t imagine him living anywhere other than among the oil stains and old carburettors of the salvage yard. He seemed to fit in there just right. Imagining him in a house, with a carpet and wallpaper, and a wife and kids was almost impossible. For a while she let his words hang in the air, but then she spoke. It seemed rude not to. “She sounds like a smart girl.”
He was ready with his reply, and said it with the weary pride that constant repetition brings. “That she certainly is – a lot smarter than her old man and that’s for sure.”
The engine rumbled away under the hood as the car ate up the miles and made its way across the country toward the west coast. Mikey’s reference to ‘her old man’ made her think of her father as she closed her eyes. A heartbeat later she was asleep.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
“This report is freaking me out,” Ryan said, passing it to Alex. “Read the bottom of page two.” She took the report, delivered a few moments ago by one of her father’s senior personal assistants. On the front page of the dossier the words TOP SECRET CODEWORD were stamped in bright red letters.
Alex scanned the page. “Oh my God… this is what Dad was telling me about and it’s just… terrible. It says here that the three men were discovered at a US listening base in northern Norway and that they resembled statues.”
“Your dad knew about this?”
“No, not my dad… the US Secretary of Defense knew about it.” She sighed. “There’s a big difference – just ask my mom.”
“Alex, I have a funny feeling that all this stuff links together. I wonder just how much your Dad knows…”
“I don’t know. Even if I were closer to him I’d never ask. He’d only ever tell me what he wants.”
Ryan shook his head in disbelief and
whistled. “It says there that in the attempt to work out what happened five other men were turned to stone. It says that they had it assayed but that despite numerous tests on the statues, they could never prove exactly what kind of stone it was, but it resembled a type of granite with flecks of gold in it.”
They both stared at a series of black and white six-by-fours, taken when the men were discovered back in 1968. The twisted, agonized faces of the men looked just like the one they had seen on the face of Dirk Partridge in Kiefel’s horror show – but here there were three blocks of human-shaped stone standing in the Arctic snow, dead and still.
“I think we’re putting the dots together. We know we’re dealing with the Medusa myth…”
“But it’s not just a myth now.”
“Right. We know it was found in the Arctic ice nearly fifty years ago, brought back to the US and placed in top secret storage in Archive 7. Somehow, our man Kiefel found out about it and wanted to use it against America, but…”
“But he knew it required no less than an Executive Order to have it released and that without that he could never get it out of a place like Archive 7.”
“So there was only one option – put his puppet in the Oval Office and have him release the weapon by Executive Order.”
“Which means we can’t trust Kimble.”
“Right.”
“Right… but where the hell do we go now? I’m struggling to believe this is really happening…. it’s like black magic or something.”
Ryan frowned. “No, it’s not that, there’s no such thing.”
“I’m not so sure anymore, Ryan, and if we can’t work out how this thing is turning people to stone we don’t have a chance of stopping it. You heard him – he’s going to kill President Grant with it – and what if he weaponizes it and disperses it all over the US?”
“We’re not going to let that happen, Alex.”
“That’s easy to say, but what if this thing really is some kind of curse? We can’t fight that with bullets and laptops.”
Ryan sighed and tapped his fingers on the desk for a moment. She saw he was going into one of his daydreams.
“Ryan, please tell me you’re on this and not thinking about blasting some giggle weed or something.”
He turned sharply and fixed his eyes on her. “Is that what you think I’m thinking about?”
“Sorry… all this talk of curses is just freaking me out.”
“Luckily for you, and the people of America I might add, Ryan Bale is thinking about neither giggle weed nor curses.”
“And what is Ryan the Great thinking about?”
He smiled broadly and put his hands behind his head. “Aside from the elephant in the room, you mean?”
“The elephant being why the severed head of a Greek Gorgon was found in ice tens of thousands of years old well north of the Arctic Circle?”
Ryan nodded. “Yes, aside from that elephant… I’m thinking nanoparticles.”
Alex smiled as she pushed her hair back behind her ears. “I knew you were going to say that!”
“How?”
“Because that’s what I was thinking and you’re always five seconds behind me.”
“You’re almost as amusing as Scarlet,” Ryan said with a sarcastic smile. “Last I heard you thought it was a curse.”
“All right, I give in. You win.” As she spoke, Ryan was busy tapping away on his laptop.
“I usually do…”
“You are so arrogant. I had no idea.”
Ryan ignored her. “While you were prattling on just then, I just found this – it’s a fascinating peer-reviewed article regarding the biodiversity of gold nanoparticles and ions...”
“Biodiversity?”
Ryan scanned the document. “Sure. They use silver nanoparticles all the time in manufacturing all kinds of things from cosmetics to socks because when they’re oxidized they become toxic to bacteria and it helps to stop germs from spreading.”
“I did not know that.”
“You surprise me...”
“Hey – when it comes to hacking I could kick your ass down one side of the street and back up the other.”
“You know, I can’t see that happening... but I can begin to see what all this is about.”
Alex suppressed a scream of frustration. “Please explain to me just what the hell all this means!”
“No problemo. I remember reading a few years back about how some scientists had discovered that a certain type of bacteria can actually change ions into solid gold.”
“You mean like alchemy or something?”
Ryan smiled. “That’s how they would have described it five hundred years ago, but today we know better. This has nothing to do with the prima materia, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“Say Philosopher’s Stone if you mean Philosopher’s Stone.”
He smiled at her. “Sure... but the principle is similar though – we’re talking about the transition of matter from one state to another.”
A roll of the eyes. “Explain.”
“This is all about bacteria.”
“Explain better than that.”
“The scientists discovered a bacteria called delftia acidovorans which have a self-defense mechanism when they come into contact with gold.”
“Why?”
“Because they form on gold deposits but exposure to gold ions kills them, so it does its thing and releases a chemical which basically turns the gold ions into gold nanoparticles when the gold ions are dissolved in H2O...”
“Say water if you mean water.”
“Sure... because when gold ions are dissolved in water they become toxic, and their toxicity poses a danger to the bacteria which is already in the water. For this reason the bacteria releases a protein which protects them, but it also has the side-effect of turning soluble gold ions into actual solid gold.”
“I don’t understand the difference.”
“The difference is that ionic gold is soluble in water but metallic gold – the stuff your rings are made from – is not. This bacteria transforms gold ions into regular gold.”
“And a gold ion is..?”
“A gold ion is a single atom of gold that is lacking three electrons. There are other experiments going on in this field – one used a different bacteria called cupriavidus metallidurans to create pure 24-carat gold from gold chloride, a toxic chemical.”
“Sounds like something King Midas would have loved.”
“Funny you should mention that because on my researches I was reading all about how...” he paused. “Forget it – I digress. The fact is this just has to be about some kind of airborne bacteria that is getting transferred from the severed head into the victims and transforming their very molecular structure to a different state.”
“I’m starting to get a headache.”
“Look, we don’t need a chemistry lesson to stop Kiefel, at least not yet. All we need to know right now is this must have something to do with the bacteria, or something very like it. If that bacteria can release a protein to defend itself from toxic attack, it’s not out of the question that something similar is going on now.”
“So you definitely think something similar might be going on with Medusa?”
Ryan nodded vehemently. “Definitely. If there is some kind of ancient bacteria on there, it could be capable of triggering some kind of reaction at the molecular level and somehow transforming the ions in the human body into a solid state.”
“So it would look like someone was turned to stone?”
“Got it in one – and take a look at this.”
“What is it?”
“While you were talking I tracked this down.”
“You flatter me.”
Ryan looked at her, confused for a second. “I was listening at the same time...”
“Sure – show me what you have.”
“It’s a paper on a laboratory experiment in England a few years back all about how bacteria can turn flesh
to stone.”
“I think I preferred it when we talking about gold and Midas.”
“Yes, but these people are turning to stone not gold. I said the process was similar.”
“I was at high school a while back now, Ryan, but isn’t that what fossils are?”
“Sort of, yeah. The process of mineralization you’re describing takes millions and millions of years, but the experiment at the English lab took place over just a few weeks.”
He directed her attention to the paper and she scanned through it. “This is fascinating – I had no idea. So they kept shrimps in isolation under special conditions in seawater and they turned to stone?”
“Yeah – thanks to the way the bacteria interacted with the process. The shrimps’ soft tissue was turned into calcium phosphate. If Kiefel really does have the head of Medusa – severed by Perseus all those millennia ago – then it’s possible it contains some kind of unknown bacteria.”
“Capable of something similar to the shrimp experiment?”
“Indeed, only whatever the hell it is, its capacity to ossify is obviously considerably more powerful.”
“So you think this is what the entire Medusa myth might have been based on?”
Ryan shrugged and cracked open another Pepsi. “Sure, why not? You didn’t think it was hocus pocus or anything did you?”
Now Alex shrugged. “Ryan, since Poseidon I’ve learned anything is possible.”
He smiled and gave a short laugh. “I hear you.”
“And Ryan?”
“Yeah?”
“Please never refer to yourself in the third person in my presence ever again. It’s weird.”
Ryan smiled and gave a casual one-finger salute. “Gotcha.”
“Thanks – we have to tell Hawke straight away.”
“Agreed – I’m on it.”
“And another thing…” Suddenly Alex winced in pain and doubled over in her chair, holding her thighs.
“What’s the matter?” Ryan asked, rushing forward and holding her shoulders.
“Nothing…” She sounded in pain. “It’s nothing at all…”
“It doesn’t sound like nothing, Alex. What’s going on?”