Herculean (Cerberus Group Book 1)

by Jeremy Robinson

Pierce frowned. “I thought she might try something like that. I arranged for Aegis to keep an eye on them. If nothing else works, try to reach them through the Gibraltar office. I know she has her phone. She just tried to call me.”

  “Dr. Pierce, listen to me. I checked with the airlines. Dr. Gallo and Fiona went to Greece—”

  “Damn it,” Pierce muttered.

  Dourado was not finished. “And Dr. Gallo’s vehicle was involved in an accident near the city of Argos.”

  Now at last, Dourado’s apprehension made sense. A chill went through Pierce. “What do you mean, involved?”

  “The police are investigating, but I can find no indication that she was at the crash site or taken to a hospital.”

  Pierce heard himself speaking, asking nonsensical questions, parsing Dourado’s words in a futile attempt to ignore the painfully obvious fact that Gallo and Fiona had been taken.

  Cerberus had them.

  22

  Unknown Location

  Gallo awoke in a groggy panic. Even before the world came into focus, she knew that something was amiss. The feel of a firm mattress beneath her, blurred outlines dimly illuminated, the faint odor of a citrus cleaning solution, the complete absence of any sound but her own breathing. It was all…wrong.

  I was driving. There was a…crash…explosion?

  She could not grasp hold of the last bit, but she knew something bad had happened. The fact that she was in a strange place, a hospital room perhaps, indicated that she was far from where she had been.

  She sat up, an action she immediately regretted as a wave of pain shot through her entire body. Her gut clenched, and she heaved so violently that she rolled off the bed and crashed onto the floor, the impact triggering a second round of full-bodied agony. Bitter bile stung her mouth and nostrils. She retched again, but there was nothing for her stomach to expel. It was not the pain her body was rebelling against, but something else.

  God, I’m hungover.

  Except she knew that was not quite right. This was not the result of alcohol. It was more like the nausea that sometimes followed anesthesia.

  Someone drugged me. After the crash.

  That made a strange sort of sense. If she had sustained serious injuries, perhaps the medical responders had given her a sedative or a strong painkiller. Yet something about that explanation did not quite ring true.

  As the initial surge of pain receded into a dull ache, she took stock of her condition. The discomfort was mostly felt in her extremities and in the muscles of her back. She had taken a beating, but she felt certain her body was intact. No broken bones. No internal injuries.

  She managed to draw a few quick breaths, fought through the urge to vomit again and blinked until her eyes were clear enough to see that she was not in a hospital room.

  The bed she had fallen out of was a simple single mattress without headboard or footboard. The walls were a butterscotch yellow, with no pictures or other decorations—and no windows. There was a single door with no knob and a plain wooden chair beside the bed. She had probably come within an inch of cracking her head on it. Aside from that, the only other thing in the room was a large flat-screen television mounted high on the wall, opposite the bed.

  “Hello?” Her voice was a hoarse croak. “Anybody here?”

  For several seconds, the silence persisted. Then, a faint whine drew her attention to the television screen, which was now displaying the image of a room very much like the one she was in, with one notable difference. Stretched out on the bed was the motionless form of Fiona.

  “Fi!” Gallo managed to shout this time, and strangely, the sleeping figure began to stir.

  “Aunt Gus?”

  Gallo heard the mumbled words as clearly as if Fiona were in the bed next to her, and although she loathed Fiona’s pet name for her, she promised never to disparage it again. “Easy darlin’,” she warned. “Waking up from this is like getting kicked by a mule.”

  Despite the warning, Fiona sat up and then swung her legs around to meet the floor. She was visibly woozy but not to the same extent Gallo had been. “Where are we?”

  “I don’t know yet.” She was tempted to say more, but as the pieces came together in her head, she recognized what this place truly was: a prison. “Just hush now. Take your time waking up.”

  “Your apprehension is unnecessary,” came a voice, high-pitched and asthmatic, much louder than Fiona’s soft murmurings, but it was almost certainly due to electronic amplification. “Let us speak plainly. You are my hostages.”

  The fact that their captor made no attempt to soften the blow did not bode well. In response, Fiona unleashed an almost incoherent torrent of accusations, demands and colorful insults. She abruptly went silent a few seconds later, but Gallo could still see the girl raging at the screen in her own room. The feed had been muted.

  The elderly man spoke again. “Dr. Gallo, I have brought you both here for one reason. I want you to translate a historical document.”

  “Can’t Liam Kenner do that for you?” It was a guess, but Gallo felt certain that the man now addressing her was part of the mysterious Cerberus organization, with which Kenner was aligned.

  “Dr. Kenner is not up to the task. Understand that the terms of his employment are very similar to the terms I am offering you. If you cooperate, you buy freedom and safety for yourself and the girl.”

  The man’s enunciation was clipped, his accent almost certainly Germanic, which made him seem all the more like a cliché villain from a bad spy movie. But there was nothing amusing about the consequences of refusal.

  Gallo took a deep breath and considered her options. It was a very short list.

  I have to protect Fiona.

  “I’ll do it,” she said, making no effort to hide just how pathetic she felt about the surrender. Perhaps if her captor thought she was truly broken, his vigilance would lapse and an opportunity for escape would present itself.

  The disembodied voice did not acknowledge her statement, but a moment later the door swung open. A hulking figure strode into the room. Gallo immediately pegged him as Rohn, the brute who had accompanied Kenner to terrorize Fiona and Pierce in the Labyrinth. He said nothing, merely seized hold of her right biceps, and hauled her to her feet.

  Gallo gasped as pain wracked her body once more. She fought through it and stood on her own. “Let go of me,” she said, defiant. “I said I’d help. You don’t need to manhandle me.”

  Rohn grunted, his grip tightening even more as he dragged her toward the door. Gallo had to struggle to keep up, as they moved down a nondescript hallway. There were several doors on either side, all plain wood and unmarked. Gallo guessed that Fiona was behind one of them, and she wondered if the rest were occupied with other people being held against their will.

  What is this place?

  A blank metal door at the end of the corridor slid back as they approached, revealing a waiting elevator car. Rohn ushered Gallo inside, but took no other action. There were no control buttons to push and nothing to indicate which floor they were on or what direction they would be traveling. The interior door closed, and the car ascended so slowly and smoothly that Gallo had difficulty detecting any motion. The brief ride ended at a hallway indistinguishable from the one they had left. Rohn guided her out. His manner was less brusque, indifferent. Gallo kept pace with him lest he remember his role as her tormentor.

  He delivered her to a windowless room, far larger than her prison cell, though no less spartan in décor. With row after row of lab tables sporting some microscopes, racks of test tubes and other apparatus, it reminded her of a high school science classroom sans students. But the room was not empty. As they entered, a seated figure hunched over a computer monitor turned to greet them. Although she had not seen him in several years, Gallo recognized him immediately.

  “Augustina.” Kenner managed a wan smile and a half-hearted nod, as if embarrassed by the circumstances of the reunion. “They got you, too. I’m so very sorry.”


  The lie caught Gallo off guard, and a flicker of disgust crossed her face before she could rein in her emotions. “Spare me the act, Liam. You don’t have the talent for it. Why am I here?”

  Kenner seemed faintly disappointed by her refusal to embrace his pretense. She imagined he had constructed an elaborate ruse to win her over in spite of what he must have known Pierce had told her. After an awkward pause, he gestured to his computer screen. “I’m attempting to translate this document, but it’s slow-going.”

  Gallo looked past him to study the displayed image, a page of text written in the archaic style of Ancient Greek. She spotted familiar words and names, most notably the subject of the text, the hero Herakles. The dialect was a bit challenging, but the differences from Ancient Greek were comparable to the difference between modern English and the language used by Shakespeare, with a few antiquated words and expressions easily understood in context. She was fairly certain that this was not the Heracleia of Peisander of Rhodes, the seventh century BC poet most often associated with the work, but rather an older version of the tale, one that had perhaps informed Peisander. There was, in fact, something very familiar about the style. If it was not the work of Homer, then it was a near perfect imitation.

  With his Classical background, Kenner ought to have been able to read the document as easily as a Sunday newspaper.

  Another lie? She wondered whether to challenge him openly, but decided against it. Rohn lurked in a corner of the room, and there were probably other eyes watching as well.

  “Mr. Tyndareus is not a patient man,” Kenner continued. “I imagine that’s why he decided to bring you in.”

  “Tyndareus?”

  Kenner made a sweeping gesture. “Our host.”

  Gallo thought about the wheezy, disembodied voice that had greeted her. In Greek mythology, Tyndareus was a king of the Spartans. He was also the stepfather to Helen of Troy, as well as to the demigod Pollux. The name was too distinct to be a coincidence.

  “And what exactly is it that Mr. Tyndareus wants? I mean aside from the translation of a three thousand year old poem.”

  Kenner frowned. “I suppose there’s no point in being coy about it.” He crossed his arms as if preparing to give a lecture. “Mr. Tyndareus is a believer, and what he believes is that there is more than a shred of truth in the myths and legends of the ancient world. He approached me several years ago, not long after George discovered the Argo manifest, and he commissioned me to find the underlying truth about those myths. Specifically, the stories about Herakles.”

  “That hardly constitutes a rationale for kidnapping,” Gallo retorted.

  “If his motives were academic, that would be true. However, his reasons for wanting to know are purely self-serving. He is quite advanced in years. He wishes to find the means to delay or perhaps even avert his own death.”

  “Well, who wouldn’t want that?” Gallo tried to fill her voice with disdain.

  Kenner’s eyes narrowed. “We both know that’s not as preposterous as it sounds, Augustina. I’ve seen the proof with my own eyes. I know that you and George have as well.”

  There was no point in challenging the assertion. “There’s one thing that I still don’t understand. Why did you take Queen Hipployte’s girdle?”

  Kenner’s smile was all the proof she needed that his claim of being an unwilling conscript in Tyndareus’s plan was pure fiction. “Let me show you.”

  He clicked the computer mouse to minimize the window with the page from the Heracleia, and brought up a photo of the belt. Gallo immediately saw that Fiona’s description had been spot on. The black leather had been elaborately tooled, with a rectangular border adorned with strange figures and a large central illustration that looked familiar. “Is it a map?”

  “Not just any map.” Kenner traced his finger along the squiggly line at the right of the image, which bowed outward in the middle before looping back and angling away in a south-easterly direction. “Don’t you recognize that?”

  Gallo consulted her mental map of the Mediterranean region. The bulge might have been intended as a primitive rendering of the Turkish peninsula, but the continuous landform depicted on the other half of the map looked nothing at all like the Greek Isles. She shrugged.

  Kenner’s finger moved up and tapped what looked like the narrow mouth of a large fjord. “This is the Strait of Gibraltar, if that helps.”

  The hint opened Gallo’s eyes. What she had taken to be a small inlet was actually the entire Mediterranean Sea. The bulge below was the northern half of Africa and the opposing landform was the coast of the Americas.

  It was a map of the Atlantic rim, made almost 2,500 years before Columbus.

  “Are you familiar with the Piri Reis map?” Kenner asked.

  The name rang a bell, but Gallo shook her head.

  “In 1513, a Turkish admiral named Piri Reis drew a map of the world, which included an astonishingly accurate depiction of an ice-free Antarctica—three hundred years before the continent was even discovered and long before satellites gave us a look beneath the ice—along with a detailed map of the entire coastline of the Americas. He claimed to have been informed by ancient charts dating back to at least 400 BC, which had survived the destruction of the Library at Alexandria and had been handed down through various institutions of the Muslim world.” He tapped the screen again. “This is a nearly perfect match to the Piri Reis map.”

  The longer Gallo looked at it, the more obvious it became. She could distinguish the triangular protrusion that was the coast of Brazil, the recessed outline of the Caribbean Sea, even the dangling phallic shape of Florida, reaching out toward but not quite touching the Yucatan peninsula. The map also showed mountain ranges and inland basins in relief, but aside from a few cryptic lines occupying the open ocean between the continents—it might have been letters in some unknown language, or something else entirely—there were no labels on the map itself.

  She glanced at the outer edges again and realized that the figures shown there were a stylized version of Minoan Linear A, almost identical to the figures carved on the Phaistos Disc.

  Fiona would know how to read that, she thought, and then she almost started visibly as she realized what the other inscription was.

  The Mother Tongue.

  She doubted Kenner had any idea what those mysterious lines signified. She suspected that without a working knowledge of that all-but-extinct language, the map and all its revelations were essentially worthless. The Mother Tongue would keep the secrets of the map far more effectively than the Herculean Society ever could.

  Suddenly, she didn’t feel quite as bad about bargaining her assistance for Fiona’s safety. The important thing now was to keep Kenner and Tyndareus from realizing that the young woman might be the only person alive who could understand what the map said.

  The Minoan writing on the border would be a bit of a challenge for Gallo, since her specialty was the Classical Greek period. It was also something of an anachronism. She knew enough about the proto-history of the Greeks to know that the Minoans, despite being a sea-faring people, had never ventured beyond the Pillars of Hercules.

  But Alexander did, she thought.

  She turned back to Kenner. “That’s all very interesting, but it doesn’t answer my question.”

  “Come now, Augustina. Surely you see the significance of this. Herakles’s quest to retrieve Queen Hippolyte’s belt was really about obtaining this map. A map of the entire globe. This opens up a world of new possibilities. Herakles’s journeys could have taken him anywhere. With this map and the complete account of his Labors, we will be able to pinpoint the exact locations of the places he visited.”

  Gallo thought about what she and Fiona had been attempting in Greece. They had been acting on the same assumptions as ancient historians who used their incomplete knowledge of the world to identify the places where the ancient hero had performed his deeds. As much as she hated to admit it, Kenner was on the right track.

  “I
take it you are interested in finding a specific destination?”

  The direct question took some of the wind out of Kenner’s sails. He pursed his lips as if trying to formulate an answer that would dovetail with his pretense of being a fellow hostage.

  Gallo pressed her advantage. “You told George that you were looking for a way to make your own chimeras. That’s what you’re after, right?”

  Kenner let out his breath in a sigh. “Those myths are evidence that the ancients knew how to recombine and engineer the DNA of living creatures, something that we are only just beginning to understand now. Herakles found a source, a mutagen that could make differentiated cells behave like stem cells. A genetic blank slate just waiting to be filled in. I intend to find it as well.”

  “Why? So that you can make monsters, too?” She could tell by his wounded expression that she had gotten the last part wrong. “No, that’s not it. You think you can find the secret of immortality. A fountain of youth for your creaky old taskmaster.”

  Behind her, Rohn cleared his throat, a none-too-subtle warning that she was being too defiant.

  “Would that be such a terrible thing?” Kenner replied. “I’m going to find it, with or without your help. I would prefer the former.”

  Gallo nodded slowly. Kenner had at last revealed the truth. He did not need her to help translate the Heracleia after all. This was personal. He was trying to use the situation to win her over. In his own twisted way, he still harbored the love he had once professed all those years ago.

  She wondered what the mysterious Mr. Tyndareus would do when he figured out that he had been duped into playing cupid. Whatever the outcome for Kenner, it would certainly not be as bad as the fate that awaited her and Fiona.

  “As would I,” she said. “Let’s get to it then.”

  23

  Monrovia, Liberia

  Uncertainty about the fate of Gallo and Fiona robbed Pierce of any sense of triumph at surviving the carnivorous vines.