Herculean (Cerberus Group Book 1)

by Jeremy Robinson

  The passing scenery reminded Fiona of the Mt. Hood National Forest, near where she had grown up. It was not just the natural landscape, but also the towns, which had a sort of faux rustic charm. Window dressing for the tourists.

  They passed beneath the stone arch at the North Entrance as dawn was lightening the sky, and continued into the park on the Grand Loop Road. Not long thereafter, Fiona noticed a change in the scenery. She did not need a map to see that they were entering geyser country.

  Vents of steam erupting from the earth. Pools of boiling acidic water. Bubbling cauldrons of mud. Exactly the sort of place to find a doorway into Hell, she thought.

  About half an hour later, the convoy pulled to the side of the road. “What’s going on?” Fiona asked. She did not get a direct answer. Instead, the goons got out and told her to follow.

  When the door opened, she got a whiff of sulfur that made her eyes water. The next thing she noticed was the heat. The thin, high-altitude air felt cool when she breathed in, yet the pavement underfoot radiated heat like a parking lot in the dead of summer, so much so that she dared not stand still for too long.

  The Cerberus men walked her to the van in the lead, where Tyndareus was riding. The front row of passenger seats had been removed to accommodate his wheelchair, which was anchored to the floor with nylon tie-downs.

  “This is as close to our destination as the road will take us,” he told her. “My men will move out on foot, looking for the signs that you promised we would find.”

  “I don’t know if I would use the word promised.”

  “What should they be looking for?” Tyndareus asked, ignoring the comment.

  “Phaistos symbols, like on the map.”

  “Where?”

  She shrugged. “Carved on rocks. Like petroglyphs.”

  Tyndareus turned to his nearest associate. “You heard her. Begin the search. Instruct the men to send photographs of anything they discover.”

  “Am I going to have to go out there?” Fiona asked.

  “I would prefer you remain here with me,” Tyndareus replied. “That way, you can verify anything my men discover.”

  “Whatever.” Though she was somewhat relieved by the fact that she would not have to venture out into the alien landscape, hanging out with Tyndareus was not much better. But as she watched the Cerberus men—all but the two who had been assigned to watch over her—move out across the blasted terrain, she realized that she might never get a better chance to escape. All she would have to do was ditch Nurse Wretched and the two goons, and flag down a passing car. It would be that easy.

  Except she knew that it wouldn’t. And there were other considerations as well. Tyndareus had made it clear that Gallo would pay dearly for any display of resistance.

  He’s going to kill us both, she thought. Even if he gets what he wants.

  She knew it was true, just as she knew that Gallo would never want her to cooperate with Tyndareus just to buy her a brief reprieve. Being part of the Herculean Society meant being willing to sacrifice everything to preserve those ancient secrets, to keep them out of the wrong hands. Fiona had already given Tyndareus too much, brought him too close. She couldn’t wait any longer.

  One by one, the searchers disappeared into the roiling convection waves or dropped behind terrain features that eclipsed them from her view. She settled back into her chair, biding her time, counting the cars that passed by. Traffic was light, but she suspected that it would increase as the day progressed. Tyndareus might be willing to kill a lone Good Samaritan stopping to help a running girl, but she doubted he would do so in front of dozens of witnesses. He had not evaded capture for more than seventy years by being reckless.

  A silver sedan passed the parked vehicles a few minutes later, slowing as if the driver was curious.

  Too soon, she thought. But she could not afford to pass up an opportunity.

  Without moving, she calculated the distance to the door, rehearsing the sequence of moves that would be required to unlock it, open it and hit the ground running. The guards would make a grab for her. She would have to be ready for that. Fiona shifted in her chair, stretching casually, as she readied herself.

  On your mark…

  The sedan stopped and pulled off the road, right in front of them.

  Get set…

  The door opened and the driver got out. It was Rohn.

  As the big man strode along the roadside to the van, Fiona slumped back, her enthusiasm extinguished. She had come within a heartbeat of making a fatal mistake, one that would not only get her killed, but also…

  She sat up again. “Where’s Aunt Gus?”

  “In a secure place,” Tyndareus said, without looking at her. “Safe, as long as you continue to behave.”

  The door opened and Rohn climbed in, taking a seat alongside Fiona. She shied away, as if his mere proximity was revolting to her, but he remained indifferent to her. Tyndareus did not overtly acknowledge Rohn’s presence, nor did Rohn seem to expect any greeting.

  Only now did Fiona see the cuts on his face and hands, swollen flesh, exposed sutures stained with antiseptic, crusted with dried blood and oozing fluid. He looked like he’d gone toe-to-toe with a weed whacker and lost.

  Did Aunt Gus do that? If so, good for her. No wonder Tyndareus is pissed.

  As the initial shock of Rohn’s arrival wore off, she resumed plotting her escape. It would be harder with the big man right beside her, but she would have to find a way. If she did not make her move soon…

  The electronic trilling of a cell phone broke her train of thought.

  “Ah, good,” Tyndareus said. “We’ve found something.”

  Damn.

  The old man stared at the phone for several seconds, his eyes widening with undisguised excitement as he studied the image. “It would seem that we have found one of your road signs. I don’t believe it will need any translation however.”

  He turned the phone, showing her the displayed image, a lump of sandstone jutting above the flat brown earth with a single glyph etched into its surface. Though the passage of time and centuries of wind and rain had worn away at it, the sign remained legible.

  A circle crossed by two vertical lines. The sign of the Herculean Society.

  She tore her gaze away from the image. “You know what that means, don’t you? The Society was already here. You won’t find anything.”

  “Is that what it means? I think it is meant as a warning. ‘Keep out. No Trespassing.’” Tyndareus chuckled. “It is a warning I have no intention of heeding. I think we should see for ourselves what the Herculean Society has been protecting. Vigor, keep an eye on the child. Do not underestimate her. She is quite remarkable.”

  Rohn grunted in assent, and then he took her wrist in his hand. She tried to pull free, but his grip was as unyielding as an iron manacle. He got out, dragging her with him, but was careful to keep her behind the van, shielded from the view of any passing cars. The other Cerberus men got out as well, and then proceeded to lift Tyndareus, wheelchair and all, out of the van.

  “You’re going, too?” she said, making no real effort to hide her contempt. “I don’t think the trails around here are ADA approved. Or are you going to be carried the whole way like Yoda?”

  Tyndareus returned a cryptic smile, then he tapped the joystick control and began rolling along the gravel shoulder until he reached the truck’s rear end. Rohn followed, pulling Fiona along. The other men had already rushed ahead to deploy the hydraulic liftgate and open the rollup door. Fiona did a double-take when she saw what was inside.

  A familiar gray figure—man-shaped, but not a man—stood in the center of the cargo bay like a guardian statue.

  It was the exosuit.

  Tyndareus chuckled again. “It won’t be a problem.”

  47

  The men moved across the landscape like pawns on a chessboard, guided by an invisible hand. That’s probably exactly how Tyndareus sees them, Pierce thought. Disposable soldiers, sacrificed
without a second thought. Why would anyone want to work for a guy like that?

  “Cintia, can you get a head count? How many are we dealing with?”

  “Eighteen,” Lazarus said. “One of them might be Fiona.”

  “Yes, eighteen,” Dourado said, her tone faintly irritated. “Fortunately, I can do a lot better than just counting.”

  A moment later, Pierce saw what she meant. The image displayed on the LCD computer screen zoomed in on one of them, close enough for Pierce to distinguish the gun—Lazarus identified it as an AR15—slung across the man’s back. A yellow rectangle appeared, superimposed on the man, and then the perspective pulled back momentarily to acquire another target in the same fashion.

  “Keep going,” Pierce said. “Tag them all.”

  He looked away from the screen and let his eyes drift across the strange landscape of the Norris Basin geothermal area of Yellowstone National Park. The terrain was an assault on the senses. Thin, high-altitude mountain air that could make people feel giddy. The sky was wide and open, no shelter from the sun. Then there was the pervasive stench of sulfur. The worst part was the intense heat rising up from the ground, which could burn right through the shoe soles if someone stood in one place too long. Norris Basin was one of the hottest spots in the park, the temperature often high enough to liquefy the asphalt on the roads.

  As disconcerting as the environment was, it was the enormity of the task set before him that was truly staggering. He wondered if Alexander had felt this way before setting out on his Labors.

  Pierce, Gallo, Lazarus and Carter—Kenner, too, though as far as Pierce was concerned, he didn’t count—had left Rome shortly after determining Tyndareus’s likely destination. Dourado remained behind in Rome, ensconced in the computer room of the Cerberus Headquarters beneath Castel Sant’Angelo, under the protection of Aegis operatives brought in by Pierce. When Pierce had asked her if she was ready to go back into the field, the resulting look of horror had prompted him to laugh it off. “Just kidding. I’ll let you get back to your new toys.”

  It had taken her about an hour to crack the security on the mainframe, at which point she had informed Pierce that they ‘powned Cerberus.’ Maybe Dourado’s grasp of English was not quite as firm as she believed, but her statement was more than just trash talk. The secret base and everything in it, as well as the not inconsiderable assets stashed in tax shelters and banks around the world, were spoils of war, transferred to the Society with a keystroke. Just as ancient Herakles had subdued but not killed the three-headed hellhound guarding the gates of the Underworld, the Herculean Society had captured the modern Cerberus largely intact. The entity was theirs now, to do with as they pleased.

  But it was a hollow victory. Fiona was still a captive and Tyndareus was closing in on his goal—Echinda, the Well of Monsters.

  Even before she succeeded in taking over the Cerberus computer, Dourado was able to confirm their deductions about Yellowstone by tracing the movements of the Cerberus Learjet. It had departed from Belem shortly before their own rescue helicopter had arrived, presumably carrying Rohn and anyone else from his team that might have survived the expedition to the Amazon city. The jet had not returned to Rome as expected, but rather had made a short hop to São Paulo for a layover, before heading north again, hopscotching across two continents but headed for Billings, Montana, the closest major airport to Yellowstone.

  Dourado then identified a chartered flight from Rome to the same airport, and several vehicle rentals, all of which traced to Cerberus fronts. All of the vehicles were equipped with GPS locators, which she promptly hacked and tracked to a spot in the park at the edge of the Norris Basin geothermal area, just a few miles north of Old Faithful, where they had been sitting idle ever since. Unfortunately, the data could not reveal anything about the passengers, particularly whether Fiona was with them.

  Upon their arrival, Dourado had guided Pierce and the others right to the vehicles, but just like Cerberus Headquarters, the vans appeared to have been abandoned. Tyndareus and his men had set out on foot to explore the alien-looking landscape. But Dourado had anticipated that possibility.

  There had been a package waiting for them when they arrived in Billings. In addition to the computer and Bluetooth-enabled smartphones, all of which were networked through an accompanying high-speed satellite data modem, Dourado had supplied them with a DJI Phantom 3 quad-copter camera drone. With a line-of-sight range of just over a mile and a 1080p digital video camera, the little remote aircraft gave them a bird’s eye view that extended several miles in all directions. Dourado talked Pierce through the process of slaving the drone controller to the computer, and then took over, flying the Phantom from the other side of the world. It took only a few minutes for her to spot the large group of hikers, about two miles southwest of the parked cars. They were moving slowly as they blazed a trail through a part of Yellowstone that was not only off-limits but generally hostile to living creatures.

  “Stop!” Pierce said as something on the screen caught his eye. “Cintia, go back. Rewind a couple of frames, or whatever it is you do.”

  “What did you see?” Gallo asked, looking over his shoulder.

  The perspective zoomed out to a wide-angle shot, and Pierce now saw a little yellow box displayed above each vaguely human figure. Forget chess, Pierce decided. This is more like watching Monday Night Football. “Number eleven,” he said. “What is that?”

  “I set this up to be completely interactive,” Dourado said. “The computer has a touch screen. You can just tap on whatever—”

  “Cintia, please. Just do it.”

  There was an irritated “humph” from the speaker, then the shot zoomed in on Pierce’s selection. At a casual glance, it looked like a man, but a closer look revealed something else.

  “What the hell is that?”

  “It looks like RoboCop,” Dourado said, with just a trace of awe.

  Pierce turned to Kenner. “Liam, do you know what that is?”

  Kenner shook his head, but Dourado jumped in with the answer. “It’s Talos.”

  Pierce wondered if he had heard her correctly. In Greek mythology, Talos was a giant living statue, made of bronze and powered by ichor, the magical blood of the gods. He had seen too much to dismiss the possibility that the myth might have some foundation in reality. Had Tyndareus located an ancient automaton—perhaps one of Alexander’s early experimental creations—and restored it to working order?

  “The name is an acronym for Tactical Light Operator Suit,” Lazarus said. “It’s an armored, powered exoskeleton designed for use by the U.S. military. I thought they were still on the drawing board.”

  “It is like Iron Man’s armor,” Dourado added. “There’s a whole section of the Cerberus mainframe dedicated to it. They stole the specs from Lockheed Martin. It uses a FORTIS load-bearing wearable exoskeleton, but the exterior shell is made of hollow titanium panels, filled with Kevlar fibers suspended in a non-Newtonian shearing fluid.”

  Pierce understood about half of what she said. “Fine. They’ve got a TALOS suit. Good to know. Any sign of Fiona?”

  The camera view pulled back, and Dourado resumed the process of scanning and tagging each member of Tyndareus’s group. The display tightened on a pair of walking figures that appeared to be holding hands, and Pierce felt his heart skip a beat as he recognized not only Fiona’s dark hair and slim build, but also the man who held onto her wrist.

  “Rohn.” He spat the name out like a mouthful of bile.

  “And the man in the suit must be Tyndareus,” Kenner said in a flat voice. Pierce regarded their prisoner for a moment, then turned to Lazarus who was staring at the computer screen, which had reverted back to a wide-angle view. “Any tactical suggestions?”

  There was a long delay before the answer. “We have to get her away from the main group.” Another pause. “We’ll need a diversion, something to divide their forces. I’ll take care of that. A hit and run attack on their rear should draw some of
them off. The rest of you can then move in and get Fiona out.”

  “We would also be dividing our forces,” Pierce said. “You’re the only one with any hostage rescue experience. I’ll provide the diversion. You lead the rescue.” As much as Pierce wanted to lead the charge, real leadership came from identifying your team’s various skill sets and using them for the best possible outcome. Personal feelings just got in the way. He’d learned that from Fiona’s father, though he doubted the man thought Pierce would ever have to put the lesson to use to save his daughter.

  Before Lazarus could reply, Kenner spoke up. “There’s a better way.”

  Pierce regarded him with open suspicion. Although the man had been nothing but cooperative since his capture, even more so since learning Tyndareus’s true identity, Pierce was a long way from trusting Kenner. He had considered leaving the paleopharmacologist in Rome, but he didn’t want to make him Dourado’s responsibility. “Let’s hear it.”

  Kenner looked at Gallo for a moment, as if hoping to elicit her support, then turned to Pierce. “Let me go to them. I can tell Tyndareus that I escaped from you in Brazil. Or better yet, I’ll say you’re dead. Then, as soon as I get the chance, I’ll tell the girl…” He winced and glanced nervously at Lazarus. “Ah, Fiona. I’ll tell Fiona to run.”

  Pierce did not know how to react. It was a good plan, maybe better than Lazarus’s desperate diversion, but it would require trusting Kenner, and that was something Pierce was not ready to do. Before he could articulate a response, Gallo spoke up. “It won’t work. Fiona would never trust you.”

  Thank you, Augustina.

  Then she added. “I’ll go with you.”

  “What?”

  Gallo pushed ahead, ignoring Pierce’s outburst. “We’ll pretend that you captured me before escaping from the sinkhole. You can say that we figured out the Yellowstone connection together. We might even be able to convince him that you turned me.”

  Pierce managed a tight smile. “Augustina, may I speak with you privately?”