The Age Of Zeus

by James Lovegrove

  "Fair enough. Out with it then."

  "Selfless, you said a moment ago. Public-spirited. For everyone's good."

  "I did say that."

  "Well, forgive me, Mr Landesman," Sam said, "but I've never heard such a crock of shit."

  Landesman's circumflex eyebrows shot up. "I beg your pardon?"

  "The truth is, you've lied to us. You've been lying from the start. We're not fighting the Pantheon for some high-minded notion of freeing the world from the yoke of oppression."

  "No," Landesman said, nodding, "not solely. Revenge is a factor as well. We all know that. It's why I chose you. You have a personal stake in seeing the Olympians brought down. All of you do. So what?"

  "What you haven't told us is that you have a personal stake too."

  "I do?"

  He almost - almost - managed to get the words out smoothly, deadpan, with nothing other than a mildly startled note in them. Almost. But a split second of hesitation betrayed him. Sam caught it, and the look in her eyes told Landesman his bluff had been seen through and could not sensibly be sustained.

  He heaved a great sigh, slumping a little in his chair.

  "Somehow," he said, eventually, "I knew it would be you, Sam. You'd be the one to figure it out, if any of you were going to. In hindsight, perhaps I revealed too much. Gave away too many clues. But that's not to denigrate your achievement. Detective Sergeant Akehurst strikes again."

  "Zeus is your son, isn't he, Mr Landesman?" Sam said. "He's Xander. The son who walked out on you. The son you haven't spoken to in years. All this, the Titan project, Titanomachy II, everything - all it really is is a spat between an estranged father and child. Am I right?"

  "I can see how you might draw that conclusion," Landesman said. "However, you couldn't be more wrong."

  "Then what is the truth, Mr Landesman? Why don't you explain it to me so I can understand?"

  "Very well. As you insist. I shall."

  50. XANDER

  "Where to start? I loved that boy. He was so beautiful as a baby, quite the most exquisite thing I'd ever laid eyes on. Sometimes, when he was asleep, I'd sneak into his nursery and just gaze at him lying there in his crib. Hardly moving, hardly even breathing, it seemed. So relaxed, so deep in the arms of Morpheus that he could almost have been dead. Alexander, my son. I'd never thought of myself as father material, but the moment he arrived I vowed I would look after him to the very best of my abilities, make sure he had the very best life imag-inable, and every night when I looked in on him sleeping I'd renew that vow. You don't have children, Sam."

  "So?"

  "It wasn't an accusation. I know you don't. I know everything about you. You were pregnant once, and you lost the baby, and for that you have my sincerest condolences."

  "Kind of you. Go on."

  "I think you will make an excellent mother, and I think one day, deo volente, you will be one. Let me tell you, the sense of duty that parenthood brings, it's indescribable. The burden of care which it places on you and which you willingly shoulder - you're quite transformed by it. It makes you try to become the kind of person you never thought you could be."

  "Yeah, yeah. Having kids is wonderful, life-changing, et cetera. Everyone knows that."

  "Let's not be snippy."

  "I just don't see the relevance of any of this."

  "I'm trying to show you that I am not a heartless and cruel man, although later on you may get the impression that I am. Please be assured that I never ever intended for Xander to despise me or for me to despise him in return. Of course I didn't. I gave that boy everything I could. Not just in material terms, though he lacked for nothing in that respect. I gave him as much of myself as I could, as much time and attention as I could spare.

  "But it was hard, especially after Arianna died. With his mother gone, a crucial plank of stability was wrenched away from him, and instead of giving him the extra support he could have done with, I threw myself into my work in order to cope with my own loss, or run away from it. Work became my consolation and my displacement activity. I spent less and less time with Xander when I should have been spending more and more. I wasn't consciously neglecting him, I just found that I had to retreat into doing what I knew best, running Daedalus Industries, to save my own sanity.

  "It didn't help that we were winning some huge contracts at the time, churning out mind-bogglingly vast amounts of product. Jolyon will bear me out on this. The company had gone into overdrive, and I couldn't simply leave underlings to deal with it all. That's never been my way. I'm a hands-on kind of employer, as you are well aware by now. I like to roll up my sleeves and get stuck in."

  "It took you a while, though, here. To step up and become Cronus, I mean."

  "I waited, in order to be sure. I had no desire to rush into anything."

  "You wanted us to lay the groundwork first. To field-test the suits and iron out any kinks."

  "Which you did, incomparably well. Shall I get back to my narrative?"

  "Be my guest."

  "Thank you so much. Now, I'm not making excuses for myself. I'm simply relating what happened. I never ignored Xander. I never shut him out. Every minute of free time I had, I devoted to him. But there wasn't a lot of it to devote. When you have manufacturing plants on three continents, a workforce of several thousand depending on you, innumerable suppliers to court and clients to schmooze, it consumes you. It leaves you with very little else.

  "Xander never lacked for company as he was growing up. Our huge house was never empty. An army of staff, mostly female, tended to him day and night. His every minute, when he wasn't at school, was occupied with play, sports coaching, swimming, horse riding, music lessons, extra tuition. You name the extracurricular activity, Xander did it. But he was lucky if he saw me, his dad, for more than a few hours a week. I tried my utmost to be there for bedtime, to read him the stories I loved and I thought he loved, the classical tales of gods, heroes and monsters.

  "But I only made it perhaps every other evening, if that. Visiting politicians from abroad do so like to be taken out to dinner, you know, and it's only polite to make videoconference calls with subcontractors in Asia when it's their daytime and our night. Xander was never alone. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that he was never left alone. The one person he really needed to be with, however, was hardly ever around."

  "I feel sorry for him."

  "You should. I do. Poor lad. My God, I loathed my own parents sometimes. Uptight, restrictive pair of cretins, they were. But I'd still rather have had them there than not. So many times I wished them dead, but equally I knew I would have been devastated to lose them. My mother smothered me, my father was a passive-aggressive bully. And then there was our rabbi, who seemed to be constantly around at our house, like a third parent. A pox on them all, but I wouldn't have done without them, even without Rabbi Rabinowitz, a kindly man in person but wrapped up in his Torah.

  "And Xander had no one like that. No one he could rely on to the point where he was heartily sick of them. He had just me, absentee dad, whose chequebook was always open even if his appointments diary was not. And still he forgave me. Still he loved me. Small children do that. They have that capacity. They will love you boundlessly, unconditionally, whatever your faults and your shortcomings. And if you are good and attentive and you nurture their love, it will last. But if you aren't and you don't... don't..."

  "Take your time."

  "Thank you. This is pure self-pity. That's the only emotion that can still choke me up. I can go on now. Awkward moment over. Is this like one of your criminal interrogations, Sam? Am I like a suspect you need to crack?"

  "I already cracked you, Mr Landesman. This, now, is just paperwork. Tying up the loose ends."

  "Maybe I should ask for my lawyer."

  "Only the guilty ask for their lawyers."

  "Then I should definitely ask for my lawyer! Especially with 'bad cop' over there glowering at me. I hope we're not in for some of that police brutality one hears s
o much about."

  "Just keep going, Mr Landesman."

  "So, Xander continued to be my number one fan until he was about eight or nine, even if often he was adoring me down the phone or during a scant hour or two of together time that I could snatch on a Sunday afternoon."

  "You'd even work on Sunday?"

  "I was a driven man, Sam. Beyond workaholic. My job was me. I was my job. Forbes profiled me once. 'Captain Industrious' they called me in the headline, 'the hands-down most dedicated employer in the business world,' next to a ten-year-old publicity still that was the most up-to-date picture of me they could find. They weren't actually terribly flattering in the article itself, but that was mostly resentment because I kept refusing them an exclusive interview. I hate all that stuff, as you know. Always have, always will.

  "But back to Xander. Our problems began - or rather, I began to be aware there were problems - when I started getting calls from his prep school headmaster. Xander was in trouble. Fighting other boys. Being disruptive in class. Stealing. He'd take money from the bursar's office. Break in, raid the petty cash tin, then trot off to the local village shop and splurge on sweets. I thought, 'Oh, this is harmless enough, it's a phase, it'll pass,' though I had a few stern talking-to's with him and pointed out to him that if he needed money as he had to do was ask. The Bank of Dad was never shut. Which, of course, was completely missing the point. Xander wasn't stealing because he needed money. He was stealing because he needed attention. My attention. It was the classic cry for help, and I in my stupidity and blinkeredness was completely blithe to it.

  "Then he went to public school, and things just got worse. I sent him to Eton, naturally. What else do you do when you're filthy rich? The most expensive school in the land, where a year's fees set me back, oh, half a day's income, if that. Xander lasted four terms - 'halves,' I should say - before he was, ahem, invited to leave. After that it was a succession of schools - Harrow, Bedales, Charterhouse - working down the list until we were in the second division, and it was a miracle if Xander saw out a full term in any of them.

  "And then even the second-division ones started refusing to take him, which is remarkable in that within the independent system there are usually no conditions of entry other than making sure the parental cheque doesn't bounce! But headmasters were talking to headmasters, and frankly Xander was getting such a bad reputation that nobody wanted him as a pupil. If it wasn't smoking, it was drinking, and if it wasn't drinking it was thieving, and if it wasn't thieving it was disruptive behaviour.

  "One time, he stole a teacher's moped and rode it through the dining hall during lunch. Another time, he set fire to his desk in a history lesson - poured lighter fuel over it, struck a match, and chucked textbooks onto the flames to stoke them. He punched a French teacher who awarded him an F for a dictation - gave the man a lovely oeil au beurre noir - and nearly gassed an entire chemistry class by emptying a vat of sulphuric acid on the floor. Naturally I was able to soothe furrowed brows by offering handsome donations. I daresay there are several new science blocks and music faculties up and down the land that ought to have plaques on them bearing my name. And all the time, I was trying desperately to convince myself that Xander would grow out of it, that he was not a bad boy, beneath it all he was just hurt and misunderstood, he would come good eventually."

  "And we all know how that turned out."

  "Until you have children yourself, Sam, be slow to judge the parenting abilities of others. Xander ended up at an international academy in Geneva. His notoriety, thank heaven, hadn't extended beyond British shores. They took him in, and I braced myself for the inevitable explosion - and it never came. Something about the school, the environment, the Swiss climate, the polyglot peer group, I don't know what, seemed to have a calming influence on him. Maybe it was just being in a different country, putting some distance between him and all he was used to. It gave him perspective. That was what I thought, anyway.

  "Xander knuckled down to his studies. He proved to have a great aptitude for the sciences, and in particular biology. He passed his International Baccalaureate in that subject with flying colours. I allowed myself a sigh of relief, letting out a long-held breath. The worst was over. We had weathered the storm. A place at Oxford beckoned for Xander. His future looked bright, and mine looked, well, certainly a little less vexing. I'd been right, I felt, to give him time, to let him work things out in his own way. My wait-and-see approach had paid off. This, as you might gather, was me justifying my own inaction to myself. I believed Xander cured of what was plaguing him..."

  "Whereas in fact the problem had just gone deeper inside."

  "Exactly! He'd figured out that acting up wasn't going to get him what he craved."

  "Your full attention."

  "Which equated to my love. He wanted me to show him I loved him, and to show it in ways that didn't involve shovelling cash at him, and he'd come to see that misbehaving only got him more of the latter and none of the former, so he adopted a different tactic. He decided to challenge me. I deduced this after the fact. If he couldn't get love from me to fill the void in his life, how about respect instead? He would make himself formidable, my rival, perhaps my better. He would become someone I couldn't fob off with money, someone I simply couldn't ignore. He resolved to excel in a single discipline and use it to compete with me and win. We had argued about many things, Xander and I."

  "All those slamming doors."

  "Yes. At first, as an adolescent, he would mouth off at me and I would scold him and we would row about that and also about how much or how little freedom he had, how I was trying to restrict him, how much he hated the schools I kept sending him to. Typical teenager stuff, really. All parents go through it. It's expected, de rigueur at a certain age. Adolescents stretch their wings, and their parents teach them the limitations of flight. But once all that was over the arguments turned ideological. Xander found that he didn't like what I did for a living. He thought it morally indefensible. Any number of times, I rehearsed the reasons why I have no problem with the arms trade - dirty job but someone's got to do it, and so forth. I also pointed out that my making weapons put food on our table and clothes on our backs. Would he rather we starve and go naked?

  "But he wasn't having any of that. His riposte was that I was a clever man, I could have made my fortune in any of dozens of industries that didn't lead directly to murder, mayhem and maiming. Why arms? Why did death and devastation have to be my trade? And I would say to him that I personally did not pull the trigger or press the launch button, that was other people's doing. All I did was provide them with the means. It was their choice whether to use it or not."

  "I bet that convinced him."

  "You're right. It didn't. Not one jot. But I doubt any case I'd made would have. Xander had determined that I was in the wrong and that my career, my entire existence, was predicated on death. Worse, that I somehow relished death. That I was pleased to create the things that destroyed. He'd satisfied himself that the matter was that cut and dried, and nothing I said was going to shift him from this entrenched viewpoint. He simply dug himself more deeply into it as time went by.

  "He was doing extraordinarily well at Oxford, flourishing there. His tutors, whom I made a point of being in personal contact with, reported astonishing progress. It seemed to them they had a budding genius on their hands, one of the biology greats, possibly a future Nobel winner. His discipline was terrific. He was attentive in his tutorials, thorough in his practical work, a regular habitué of the lab. In fact their only concern about him was that he seemed a little too devoted to his researches and experimentation, a little too fixated on work. They were worried that he lacked a social life. He was never at the pub or the JCR, he never attended 'ents' events at his college, he didn't do sports, he was the undergraduate least likely to be found parading around with a traffic cone on his head or dressing up in women's clothing as part of some rag week stunt or generally doing any of the oafish student things that so endear 'gow
n' to 'town.' He focused on work, nothing else. It was as if he had something to prove."

  "And he did. To you."

  "Indeed. By his final year at Oxford, Xander was specialising in pure genetics. That was his core interest. His obsession, one might say. He was using the facilities at the biology faculty to pursue various theoretical avenues that he kept his administrators mostly in the dark about. He'd tell them just enough to pique their interest and assuage their curiosity, the things they needed to hear in order to convince them to let him get on with it unmolested and unsupervised. He handled them cunningly. The budding genius got all the solo lab time he wanted and all the supplies and material he required, and not too many questions were asked.

  "Which is why a senior professor had a hell of a shock one night when he walked in on Xander and found him in the process of trying to euthanase a lab rat. Not such a strange occurrence, you might think, only Xander wasn't attempting to put the creature down humanely by gassing it in a carbon dioxide chamber or injecting it with an overdose of barbiturates. He was chasing the thing round the room with a fire extinguisher, doing his best to club it to death with the base of the cylinder, and looking somewhat frantic about this too.

  "Because the rat would not die. The rat took the fiercest blows he would deliver with that fire extinguisher and came up smiling. He was bashing it hard enough to crush every bone in its body, and all he got in return was an indignant squeak and a baring of fangs and a rodent that scurried away ever keener to escape the lab and its would-be executioner.

  "Finally, still unaware of his professor staring incredulously from the doorway, Xander managed to imprison the rat under an upturned plastic sink bowl, which he then had to stand on to keep it in place while the captive rat hurled itself at the bowl's sides, desperately trying to break free. And almost succeeding. It had prodigious strength. It was able to shove the bowl along the floor even with Xander's full weight bearing down on top of it, nearly knocking him off-balance. The sides of the bowl were starting to bulge outwards, such was the force with which the rat rammed against them. It was only a matter of time before it burst through. This was not, the professor correctly intuited, any ordinary laboratory creature."