The Age Of Zeus

by James Lovegrove

  Rick Ramsay's presence was likewise comforting. If this situation was all some elaborate trap, a snare for the curious and unwary, she didn't think he would hesitate to fight his way out of it. And neither would she.

  Lillicrap ushered them into a cramped, cluttered room that was mostly taken up by a large table. Seated around it were ten men and women, all in various stages of boredom and disaffection. Refreshments - sandwiches, pastries, dips - were heaped on the tabletop, largely untouched. Coffee and tea making facilities perched on a trolley in one corner.

  "Make yourselves at home," Lillicrap said to Sam and Ramsay. "And the rest of you - it won't be much longer now, I promise."

  "No worries," said a sunburned man, in a sardonic Australian drawl. "Tell your boss to take his time. I've got nothing else to do but sit around all day with my thumb up my freckle."

  Lillicrap sniffed and withdrew, leaving Sam and Ramsay as the focus of ten scrutinising gazes. Sam tried a disarming smile, put on more than felt. Ramsay got a result simply by saying, "The coffee in that pot better not be the watered-down piss it looks like." Someone chuckled and the atmosphere lightened a little.

  Sam sat down in the last remaining chair but one, between a sharp-nosed blonde woman and an Asian man. The latter, in almost entirely unaccented English, introduced himself as Fred Tsang. The blonde favoured Sam with nothing more than a reserved nod.

  Ramsay placed a coffee in front of Sam, which she was grateful for even though she hadn't asked for it. He then took the final seat, sipped from his own cup, wrinkled his nose and confirmed aloud that it was indeed watered-down piss.

  "So," he said, having drained the cup anyway, "which one of us gets murdered first?"

  "You, you Yankee bastard," said the Australian cheerily.

  "It's just, I'm getting a whole Agatha Christie vibe from this," Ramsay continued, pointedly disregarding the other man's comment. "Twelve folks gathered in a room together. Cut off from the mainland. Brought here by a complete stranger. Where's Miss Marple when you need her?"

  "Not cut off," said a woman, another American, lighter-skinned than Ramsay, most likely mixed-race. She held up a mobile phone. "Not as long as we've got our cells."

  "Reception?"

  The woman checked. "Oh. Nuh-uh."

  "Didn't think so, underground. Cut off, then. N'awlins?"

  "Just outside. Chalmette. Chicago?"

  "South Side born and raised."

  "Kayla," said the woman. "Kayla Sparks."

  "I'm Rick," said Ramsay. "And the lovely redhead with me is Sam. She's English, so she doesn't talk much."

  "Prefers not to," said Sam.

  "Same difference," said Ramsay. "But seeing as the two of us are the newcomers, and even though the rest of you have been here a whiles and probably already know a bit about one another, would you mind filling us in about yourselves? So we're up to speed? Then we can maybe figure out what the twelve of us have in common, other than being invited here, and try and make sense of this thing. How about that?"

  "Did I miss the voting?" challenged the Australian. "Did you just put yourself in charge, septic?"

  "No, Crocodile Dundee, I haven't put myself in charge of anything. But if you'd like me to...?"

  "No way, mate. Spent thirteen years of my life taking orders. I'm done with it now."

  "I doubt you ever did take orders, not really."

  "Too right!"

  "No, all I was doing was making a straightforward request, not a leadership bid," said Ramsay. "Like I said, to get Sam and me up to speed. Would that be OK?"

  The Australian deliberated. "Can't see the harm."

  "Good. Then let's start with you. Who are you and why have you come all the way from the Lucky Country to this godforsaken spot?"

  3. THE BARRACUDA

  Dez "The Barracuda" Barrington was his name, and the why of it was simple. He was a man with a grudge, a man seeking payback, and that was what the invitation in its ponced-up, wowsery way had promised.

  "Payback for...?"

  "It's not something I like to talk about."

  "I'd say, 'Relax, you're among friends,'" said Ramsay, "except you're not, so I won't. I could save you the trouble of having to reveal all, though, by making an educated guess."

  Barrington spread two beefy pink hands, palms up. "Go ahead, smartarse. Be my guest."

  "The Olympians. Something the Olympians did to you."

  The word Olympians sent a frisson round the table, bringing a stiffening of backs, a compressing of lips. Sam felt herself bristle along with everyone else. Couldn't help it. She couldn't hear the Olympians mentioned, couldn't read about them in a newspaper, couldn't catch a glimpse of them on television, without her whole body starting to tense up, often to the point of trembling. For her it was as much of an instinctive reaction as dread of a shark or revulsion at a snake. She was not alone in that - certainly not in this room.

  "You knew already," said Barrington, both a question and an accusation.

  "How?"

  "I don't know, maybe you're the bloke that brought us all here. You act like you are."

  "I'm as much in the dark as any of you," Ramsay said. "Just trying to fumble my way towards the light. The Olympians hurt someone you care about. Maybe did worse than hurt. Correct?"

  Barrington crumpled and gave a sullen nod. "Malc. My brother. Older brother. Only member of my family worth a tinker's fart. Couldn't have been my vicious bastard of a father who got killed, could it? Couldn't have been my drunk of a mother or my slag of a sister who'll drop her grundies for every root rat that comes sniffing round. Had to be Malcolm. The only person in the world I've ever had any respect for."

  "I'm sorry for your loss."

  "Me bloody too, mate."

  "Was it... intentional?"

  "Nah, Malc just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Hercules was having one his hissy fits, storming through downtown Sydney flinging cars around and punching holes in buildings. His latest bumboy had given him the elbow, that's what I heard; ended their affair, so off Herc the Jerk goes, taking it out on property like he does, the great arse. Malc was working on the third floor of an office block on George Street, fixing a water cooler for a legal firm. A fucking Toyota ute came flying through the window. Killed him stone dead."

  Barrington's face had gone a deeper, fiercer shade of red. His voice was a balled fist.

  "'Act of god,' the police report said. 'Act of bastard' more like. Still, four lawyers died too, so it wasn't a complete disaster."

  Around the table there were looks of sympathy, and of empathy. Sam could feel it as strongly as Barrington did: the rage, the pain, the sense of injustice and impotence. Ramsay was a clever man, just as she'd thought. He'd immediately guessed the common denominator that tied all twelve of them together. Although, if her hunch was correct, it wasn't the only common denominator.

  "You lost somebody too, eh?" Barrington said to Ramsay. "That's it, isn't it? That's how you knew."

  "My son. Ethan. He was seven years old. He would have turned twelve next month." Ramsay's tone was matter-of-fact, and Sam wondered how hard he'd worked to be able to keep it that way while talking about this subject. "Not a day goes by that I don't think of him, wondering how he'd look now, things he'd say, what he'd be interested in. He was a great kid, handsome like his daddy, biggest brownest eyes you ever saw... and one afternoon he was at school, it was recess, he was out in the yard messing around with his pals, swapping baseball cards, talking 'bout comics, whatever, doing boy stuff - and the monster got him."

  "Monster?" said Fred Tsang. "Which one?"

  "The Lamia. Goddamn bloodsucking, child-murdering bitch. Ethan's elementary school was right on the shore of Lake Michigan. Lamia came out of the lake, went into the schoolyard, grabbed a kid, one kid only - mine - and picked him up and drained the life out of him, right there in front of the whole class. Threw his empty body back down like it was a Coke can and was gone, back into the water before anybody could so m
uch as move."

  "I lost a child too," said a man in his early forties with salt-and-pepper hair. A product of the English boarding school system by the look and sound of him. Imprinted with the classics, corners knocked off him on the rugby pitch, licked into shape by the headmaster's cane. "A daughter. My wife along with her. We were on holiday. Crete. Poseidon and Zeus were having a blazing row, somewhere down the coast from us. One of their spats, you know how those two are - Poseidon feeling unappreciated, his old complaint about when the gods were dividing up the earthly regions all he got was the sea and none of the land, kicking up a fuss about that and Zeus having to read the riot act, bring him back into line. Poseidon went off in a huff. Decided to end the argument with a tidal wave. I was taking a nap in the hotel at the time, blissfully unaware of what was happening just a few miles to the west. Debs - my wife - she and Megan were down on the beach. Beautiful hot day. Then suddenly this noise, this enormous roar of water. By the time I'd got to the balcony to look out, the beach was gone. Just... swept away. Sucked out to sea, leaving bare rock behind. The sand all gone, and everyone on it as well. It's Chisholm, by the way. Nigel Chisholm. I used to be a pilot. Still am, technically, though I haven't flown a plane in years."

  "My husband," said the blonde woman next to Sam. Her accent was Teutonic, with that slight American lilt typical of Europeans who'd learned English via Hollywood. "Dietrich. Army officer. Killed six and a half years ago during my country's final, stupid show of defiance against the Olympians."

  "The Munich Massacre," said Ramsay.

  "So," she confirmed. "Nine thousand of our troops and almost as many civilians were slaughtered that day, all so that our Chancellor could pretend he had a dick bigger than my little finger. Dietrich was just one of the nine thousand. A small fraction of the total. A tiny, insignificant statistic. But he was my husband. My soulmate. My name is Kerstin, if you must know. Kerstin Harryhausen."

  "You what?" exclaimed Ramsay. "You're shitting me."

  "No. No shitting," said Harryhausen. "Why, is it an amusing name?"

  "No, it's just, well, ironic."

  "Kerstin is ironic?"

  "Harryhausen. You mean you haven't heard of...?" He stopped. "Oh. I get it. You're messing with my head, aren't you?"

  "I am messing with your head, Mr Ramsay," the German said, deadpan. "Of course I know the Harryhausen you speak of. The great stop-motion animator, hmm? You aren't the first to remark on it, and you surely won't be the last."

  "I apologise for being so unoriginal. Moving on..." Ramsay turned to Kayla Sparks. "How about you, Miz Sparks? What's your story?"

  "Grandmother," she said. "Aunt. Uncle." She fingered a tiny gold crucifix that hung on a chain around her neck. "The Hydra got them, few years back."

  "And you?" Ramsay said to Fred Tsang.

  "My family, most of my relatives, my friends - more or less everyone I ever knew."

  "Hong Kong, yeah?"

  Tsang nodded. "The Obliteration. Back near the start, when the Olympians were just beginning to exert their influence. I was out of the province on a trip to mainland China, escorting a Beijing man home, a bank robber who'd skipped bail. I should mention I was a senior inspector with the HK Police Tactical Unit. The Olympians, as you know, decided to make an example of a city, to demonstrate just what they were capable of, to show they were not to be trifled with. Hong Kong was the city they chose. And Hong Kong..."

  "...is no more."

  "Precisely, Mr Ramsay. Hong Kong is no more. All those houses, those skyscrapers, several million people, just so much rubble and dust. I'm one of the last few Hongkongers left."

  Tsang's face appeared placid but there was no mistaking the bitter anguish in his eyes.

  "I'm still kept awake at night," he said. "By guilt, mostly. I find myself wishing I had been there when it happened and had died with everyone else. To a certain extent I did die. A part of me has not been alive ever since."

  A pang swelled to fill Sam's chest. Tsang had articulated something she herself had long been feeling.

  "I myself did not lose any relative," said a sombre-faced man with a receding hairline. He sounded, to Sam's ears, Scandinavian. "I lost men. By which I mean troops I was responsible for. Anders Søndergaard. I was a tank commander with the Danish Jydske Dragonregiment - the Jutland Dragoon Regiment. My squadron was wiped out during the Battle of Sjælland, as were so many others. My own tank, a Leopard Two, was destroyed by Ares himself, with three good crewmen inside. How I survived - it was a miracle - although a miracle that left me hospitalised for six months. I still bear the marks."

  He rolled up one shirtsleeve to show an arm sheathed in warped, waxy skin from wrist to elbow - scar tissue from second-degree burns.

  "And believe me, that's not the worst of it," he added, re-buttoning his cuff. "To say I hate the Olympians would be an understatement. I despise them."

  The admissions continued. A Cameroonian by the name of Soleil Eto'o - moon-face, tight short cornrows, her skin so black it had a bluish tinge - had watched her parents burn to death in her home village, victims of a reprisal attack by the Olympians during their efforts to stamp out the resistance movement in that country. Soleil had immediately joined the resistance herself and ever since had been helping to conduct a guerrilla campaign against the Olympians all across Africa.

  A Muslim woman from Manchester, Zaina Mahmoud, had lost her two brothers while they were on hajj to Mecca. Several Olympians had laid into the crowd of pilgrims circling round the Kaaba, simply in order to prove that there were no deities worth worshipping but them. The irony was, neither Hamid nor Aasif, her brothers, was particularly devout. They'd just fancied making the trip and seeing what all the fuss was about.

  A handsome, tough-looking Québécoise, Thérèse Hamel, had had a dear friend taken from her, the Olympians' fault of course. She didn't divulge details, but by that point didn't need to. The tales of tragedy were becoming banal; the bereavements, by accumulation, almost routine.

  Of the twelve, only two remained who hadn't told their stories yet. One was Sam. The other was a pale-complexioned, ferrety-faced man who had so far shown very little in the way of emotion. He had an air about him that Sam recognised: enclosed and self-contained, as if he were someone who had learned to keep his mouth shut and his innermost thoughts private, someone who knew the value of silence. In her former life - back when she had had a life - she'd met countless people like this. Everything about him said to her that he had not walked the straight and narrow and had more than likely served a stretch or two at Her Majesty's pleasure.

  Ramsay now addressed him. "And you, sir?"

  The man glanced up, seemingly surprised, as though he'd been paying attention to none of the preceding conversation. "Me?"

  "Yeah, you," said Ramsay. "How do fit in with us?"

  "To be honest, I don't. 'Cause unlike you lot, I've got nothing to blub and whinge about. It was my missus they got. Ex-missus, sort of. We were separated. Separating. And I'll tell you what, they did me a favour and all. That fucking cow - she got what she deserved, and the world's better off without her."

  That brought a pause to the proceedings. Eyebrows were raised. Awkward glances were exchanged across the table.

  Barrington broke the silence. "I'll say this for you, mate. You speak your mind, and for a Pom that's as rare as washing. You have a name?"

  "Darren."

  "Darren...?"

  "Darren'll do for now."

  "Well, Darren'll Do For Now, put her there." Barrington held out a hand.

  The other man just stared at it.

  "Or don't," said Barrington, withdrawing. "See if I care."

  "Eleven down, one to go," said Ramsay. "Sam. You're up."

  Sam shot him a pleading look.

  "Come on," he chided. "It's not so hard. You've just heard everyone. We've all been there - with the possible exception of Darren. Bring it out. Share."

  "I don't -"

  Sam was saved by the sound of th
e door opening. All heads turned as a man entered the room. He was slim, dapper, silver-haired, none too tall, with sharply pointed eyebrows and a trim goatee. He wore a tailored charcoal-grey suit, and overall had the sleek, distinguished look of somebody who possessed a great deal of money and was in no way ashamed of the fact. Wealth fitted him much like the suit, lightly and neatly.

  "I do apologise for keeping you," said the man, who could only be the instigator of the invitations, the reason they were all there. "Some last-minute details that demanded my attention. I trust you've taken the opportunity to get to know one another. My name is Regis Landesman. You're wondering who I am, why I've asked you to come to this place, and what I have to offer you. In truth, what really counts is what you have to offer me. I will show you what I mean in a moment or so. But first, if you'll indulge me, I have a few words to say."

  4. REGIS LANDESMAN

  "Doubtless," said Regis Landesman, "none of you will have heard of me. That's the way I prefer it. Unlike many who have achieved a comparable level of worldly success, I shun the limelight. I have never had any interest in publicising myself. I refuse to espouse charitable causes the way others of my kind do so as to make themselves seem philanthropic or caring - a time-consuming and hypocritical exercise, if you ask me.

  "I have for the majority of my fifty-odd years on this planet been a pure businessman, a capitalist of the old school, interested solely in profit, driven by the bottom line, motivated by the margin. I make no bones about it. It has served me well. I have amassed a fortune, some might say several fortunes, through a trade that most would consider abhorrent. My line of work is not for those troubled by an excess of conscience. Plainly put, I am an arms manufacturer. My company, Daedalus Industries, has supplied everything from bullets to jet fighters, landmines to armoured personnel carriers, to any country prepared to pay for them, meaning of course every country.

  "Fully one tenth of the world's existing stockpile of munitions and ordnance originated in a Daedalus-subsidiary factory. You can regard me as a merchant of death, a creator of misery, a mass murderer even. I've been called all of those things in my time, and worse. Doesn't bother me in the slightest. Somebody has to make weapons. If I didn't do it, someone else would. To me, it's that straightforward."