by Tom Harper
Jackson edged his way round to the car's rear, popped open the boot and pulled out a field radio. He struggled under the weight. Bracing it against his chest, he ducked his head round the Packard's tail-light to check for danger. He shuddered. Kirby's corpse lay prone on the ground, bleeding into the gravel.
But there was no time to mourn. There was a movement behind one of the hedges. Grant saw it; he stepped out through the doorway and fired two quick shots, giving Jackson enough time to scuttle up the steps. He staggered under Grant's outstretched arm with the radio and collapsed onto his knees.
'Mind you don't break it,' said Grant. He fired one more shot, then slammed the door shut. 'Tell your headquarters to send a plane to the airstrip. We'll meet them there. Then find a back door and get out of here.' He looked back to Marina. 'You come with me.'
'And where are you going?' Muir looked furious at being ordered about by Grant.
'We're going to find the tablet.'
Grant and Marina left the others and ran up the curving stairs. The sounds faded behind them as they passed the first floor and carried on up. The stairs ended on the next floor in a square landing, with corridors leading away on both sides and a round window looking out over the gardens and driveway below. Grant peered through it. The rain was hard as ever, blotting the grounds into a drab canvas of greens and greys, but he thought he could make out a group of men huddled in the shelter of the retaining wall below the driveway. Something that wasn't lightning flashed and Grant heard a bang that wasn't thunder. He decided not to risk a shot. It was too far for the Webley and he didn't want to risk giving away his position.
'Where did Sourcelles say he kept the tablet?'
Marina's question drew him back to the task at hand. 'The east wing.' He thought for a moment, then pointed to his right. 'That way.' And… something else. 'I think he said to look for the Gorgon. Does that make any sense to you?'
'The Gorgon was a monster, a woman with snakes for hair, tusks for teeth and brass claws instead of hands.'
'Sounds like an ugly bitch.'
'She's a manifestation of everything men fear about women's sexuality. One look from her could turn you to stone,' said Marina, with a look that came close to achieving the same effect.
They moved down the corridor, opening every door they came to. This part of the house didn't seem to be much used — bedrooms with bare mattresses, bathrooms whose tubs were only filled with dust — but it still displayed a trove of artefacts. Most of it was pottery rather than sculpture: vases, amphorae, jugs and bowls with a dizzying variety of shapes. On the curved sides, black-glazed heroes shadow-boxed their miniature battles. More paintings hung on the walls: long portraits framed in heavy gold. Grant scanned them, looking for the Gorgon. None of the women he could see fitted the bill. They reclined in swathes of gauzy cloth, careless of their nudity, looking on while earnest heroes did battle. One of the men was mounted on a winged horse, thrusting his lance into a creature that seemed to be some monstrous hybrid of a lion, a goat and a dragon.
Grant called Marina over. 'Is that it?'
'That's the Chimaera. In the myths, the Gorgons were his aunts.'
'I can see the family resemblance. Did you find anything?'
'No.'
They'd reached the end of the corridor. A full-length portrait, larger than life, covered almost the entire wall, but the woman in it was far from a monster. Her skin was pale as ice, her eyes blue and piercing. She wore a high-peaked helmet and a silver breastplate of scaled armour, while her hands held a spear and an intricately decorated shield. Grant assumed she was Britannia, though he couldn't think why the Frenchman would want her in his house.
'Perhaps there's something on one of the pots,' said Marina. 'I didn't examine all of them. Maybe…'
Shouts in the stairwell cut her short. A moment later footsteps thudded on the stairs. Grant turned back.
'Look at the painting,' said Marina.
'I hate to tell you this, but I don't think that's where our problems are coming from.'
'Look at the painting,' she repeated urgently. She reached for his shoulder and spun him round. 'The shield.'
The footsteps were getting louder — at least two pairs, Grant reckoned. They paused on the landing below and Grant heard muffled voices conferring. Reluctantly, he looked where Marina was pointing. The shield was almost head-high, so close that for a second all he could see were the individual flecks of grey and white paint. Then he saw it. In the centre of the shield, embossed in the metal but seemingly with a life of its own, a suffocating face pressed out of the metal. Vipers sprouted from her head and curved tusks hung in her mouth like daggers. But it was her expression that was most terrible, drawn into a snarl of infinite, implacable hatred. Even in paint, Grant felt his bones stiffen just looking at it.
'The woman in the painting is Athena. When Perseus killed the Gorgon Medusa, he cut off her head and brought it to the goddess who set it in her shield. That's the Gorgon.'
Grant grabbed the ornate frame and ripped the picture away. A hairline crack traced the outline of a door in the smooth wall behind, and a small hole invited the key.
'Hurry,' said Marina. One of the men following seemed to have peeled off to clear the first floor; the other had kept on climbing. Grant could hear his footsteps turning as he reached the half-landing directly below their floor. 'Give me your gun.'
Grant handed Marina the Webley, then took Sourcelles's key from his pocket and slotted it into the hole. The mechanism moved smoothly. He heard a latch click and pushed against the door.
A low squeal echoed down the corridor as the hinges creaked. For a moment Grant froze, wondering if he'd been heard. Then he decided it was too late for that. He put his shoulder to the door and gave an almighty heave. It swung in with a shriek of protest. That ended any lingering hope that they hadn't been heard — but the door was open.
'Come on,' shouted Grant. Pulling Marina after him, he dived through the doorway, just as a storm of bullets blasted apart the corridor. His enemy was sheltering behind the corner to the stairwell; he had reached his gun round and was firing blindly. Pots and vases exploded in clouds of red clay dust, and the painted heroes' armour was lacerated with holes. Together, Grant and Marina heaved the door shut, just in time to hear the first bullets hammering into it. It shuddered under the impact, but none came through. Grant locked it behind them. Only then did he turn to see where it had brought them.
Grant's first impression was that it felt like a chapel; Marina, more accurately, saw it was like the inside of a miniature temple. Corinthian columns ran along both sides of the high, narrow room, topped by low-relief friezes that she suspected weren't reproductions. At the far end, under the pitched roof, Sourcelles seemed to have installed the entire pediment of a classical temple, complete with a marble tableau of the gods. Tall glass-fronted cabinets were recessed in bays between the columns — the lower halves filled with drawers, the upper parts open shelves groaning under the weight of the sculpture, pottery and figurines they held. Some were so high that a wooden ladder had been left in the corner to reach them. There were no windows, but the entire pitched ceiling was made of glass, like a greenhouse or an orangery.
'This doesn't look like much.' Grant peered at the artefacts on display. Compared with the finely decorated pottery in the hallway, or the lifelike marble heads downstairs, it looked more like child's work. The figures in the sculpted stone plaques showed no character or variation; the pots were painted with thick, unglazed bands of colour.
Marina picked up a figurine — a familiar shape, a goddess with outflung arms, though without the detail of the one they had found in the cave on Crete. 'This is the most valuable part of Sourcelles's collection. Everything in this room — apart from the friezes — dates from before the first Greek dark age.'
She pulled out one of the wide, thin drawers. Laid out on a deep blue velvet cloth were six clay tablets, each about the size of a postcard and all etched with the tiny scratches
of Linear B. She stroked a finger over one, feeling the inscribed figures like whorls of skin. The noise in the corridor outside had stopped; the only sound in the room was the patter of rain on the glass ceiling. Even that sounded softer, as though the rain was easing up — but perhaps it just seemed that way after the gunfire.
'They've probably gone to get reinforcements.' Grant began rifling through the drawers, working his way down the bays on one side of the room. Marina did the same, though more slowly and methodically, on the other. Not all of them held tablets. Some were filled with figurines, or stone plaques or brooches; some pieces were intact, others only in fragments.
'Here.' Marina lifted a piece out of the drawer in front of her and turned it over. Even though she had known what to expect, she still gasped. There was the painting, the same style as the drawing that had led them to the cave on Crete. The lines were faint with age, but she thought she could see the outlines of a boat, the zigzag patterning of waves, and bull horns.
Grant ran over, took the briefest glance, then looked up. 'Let's get out of here.'
The room suddenly seemed to pulsate as a volley of bullets struck the outside of the door, flat and muted like mallet blows. Whatever it was made of, the door seemed strong enough to absorb it — for the moment.
'They're back,' said Grant.
'How do we get out now?'
Grant pulled out the Webley. 'Cover your eyes.'
'What?'
'Look down.' Without further warning, Grant raised the Webley like a starter's pistol and fired three shots into the roof. He held Marina against his chest, protecting her with his body as a crystal rain of glass and water splashed over them. When the shattering of glass subsided, he looked up. Rain poured through a jagged hole in the greenhouse roof.
Grant took the wooden ladder from the corner and moved it under the hole. It swayed alarmingly as he climbed past the display shelves, higher and higher. But not high enough. Even as high as he could go, he was still left about three feet short.
The whole room seemed to shift a few inches as a massive explosion shook the house. Artefacts rattled on their shelves and a few more loose shards of glass came free of the roof and fell to the floor. Grant was pitched around like a rope end; Marina threw herself on to the ladder and hung on, desperately trying to weight it down. Behind her, the door had almost been punched off its hinges.
'They're trying to blow it open,' she shouted up.
'I know.' Grant looked around in desperation. On the shelf in the wall beside him he saw a withered metal blade that might once have been a sword. He took it, reached up and hammered it against the jagged edge of the hole he had made. 'Watch your head,' he shouted, as more glass cascaded down. Rain was still falling through the hole, running down into his eyes. The blade was slippery in his hands and his shirt was slicked against his skin. But he managed to hack away most of the glass from the lead window frame.
'Hold on tight.' He put down the sword, let go of the ladder with his hands and braced himself against the wall. With two quick steps he bounded up the last two rungs, swayed for a moment at the top like an acrobat on a tightrope, then lunged for the roof. His fingers closed round the frame — and almost let go at once. There was still glass embedded in the lead. It dug into his hands, drawing blood and a gasp of agony. Grant gritted his teeth. It was like dragging himself over a serrated knife edge. But there was no way down. And the banging behind the door was getting louder. He hauled himself up, over the edge, and collapsed in a wet mess of blood and water on the roof.
There was no time to recover. He looked back down into the room. Marina was standing at the foot of the ladder looking very small and worried.
'Get up here,' he called through the rain. Behind her, a black snout had squeezed through the gap between the bowed-in door and its frame. The gun fired, but the angle was too narrow and the bullet struck one of the display cabinets instead. Something priceless and ancient shattered into dust and fragments.
Marina scampered up the swaying ladder, the tablet tucked into her belt. Grant pulled off his own belt and laid it over the broken window frame, letting the leather take the bite of the glass. He leaned out as far as he dared.
The house trembled again and this time Grant saw the yellow flames of the explosion licking round the battered door, then blasting it in. Marina jumped; the ladder tottered, swayed, then toppled over and crashed down on a stone sarcophagus in the middle of the room. Grant's hands closed round Marina's wrists. His hands were torn and bloody; for a moment he felt a stabbing pain and the horrible, heart-stopping sensation of her sliding through his fingers. Then she dug her nails into his forearm and he tightened his grip. She stopped falling and began to rise, flopping over the ridge of the roof just as the first of their enemies burst through the blown-out door below. He was still looking around, wondering where they'd gone, when Grant put two bullets into the top of his skull.
'Should improve the odds.' Grant reloaded the Webley. Together, he and Marina ran to the back edge of the roof and looked down. The grounds behind the house were less mannered than the front garden: an open apron of lawn that ended abruptly in the front ranks of the surrounding pine forest. There, three sodden figures huddled in the trees.
'You first, this time.' Grant found a drainpipe and almost pushed Marina over the edge in his hurry. As soon as she touched the ground he was after her, sliding down the slick metal pipe, trying to ignore the burning in his hands. Anyone watching from the windows would have had a clear shot at them, but that was a risk he had to take. They ran across the grass, their feet sinking into the soft turf, and threw themselves into the cover of the trees.
'Glad you made it.' Muir was crouched behind a tree trunk, his pistol poised to return any fire from the house. 'Christ. You look bloody terrible.'
'Did you find the tablet?' said Jackson from behind a rock.
Marina pulled out the damp tablet from her waistband and handed it to Reed. The professor's hands, white and bloated in the rain, trembled as he took it.
'Did you manage to raise your headquarters on the radio?'
Jackson nodded. 'They have no fucking idea about this airstrip of yours, but they're sending a Dakota where you said. That's the good news. Bad news is they say the Reds are all over this mountain like a rash. They're not sure we'll get through. The other bad news is that they're running an aerial offensive against the Commies this afternoon. The guy at HQ said he'd try to call off the bombers…' He shrugged. 'But I brought you this.' Jackson passed Grant the Sten gun. 'Only the one clip, so don't go crazy with it. Unless you have to.'
Grant holstered the Webley and took the sub-machine gun. 'I'll stay here while you get away.'
'No,' said Jackson firmly. 'You're the only one who knows where this goddamn airfield is. We'll go together.'
'Then let's go.'
Twenty-three
They set off. It was slow going: the forest was thick and tangled, the ground soft. Marina, in particular, struggled with her high-heeled shoes. Eventually, she took them off, removed her stockings and walked barefoot on the carpet of pine needles. All of them were tensed, listening out for any sign they were being followed. The rain had stopped, though they hardly knew it with the steady drip of water from the trees.
'At least with Sourcelles dead, we don't have to worry about him telling the Russkis what he knows.' Jackson pushed past a low-hanging branch. It snapped back, showering Reed with a spray of water drops. Grant, ahead of Jackson, looked back in disgust. 'What? Don't look at me like some Boy Scout. You've played the game. It's not just what you know; it's what they don't know.'
'I never thought killing civilians was the best way to achieve that.'
'No? What about those Yid commandos you were busy selling guns to?' He raised an eyebrow. 'Muir told me all about your dirty little past. You know what they did at the King David Hotel? Ninety-one dead. Do you think they give a damn about civilians?'
'They're fighting a war.'
'So are we.' Jac
kson looked as though he might have gone on at length. But Grant was no longer paying attention. He stopped and stared at the sky, his head tilted, listening for something. A moment later Jackson heard it too. The thrum of aircraft engines, high overhead.
'Is that ours? Could it've got here already?'
Grant shook his head grimly. 'That's not a Dakota.'
'You sure?'
Grant didn't bother to answer. He'd lost count of the times he'd spent crouched in foxholes or behind boulders, straining his ears for the sound that would spell relief. 'I think we can assume your man didn't manage to call off the bombers.'
'Shit.'
A crack that had nothing to do with wood shattered the stillness of the forest. Grant spun round. The trees were as thick and dark as ever — he could barely tell the way they'd come. But someone was out there.
'Was there supposed to be a ground assault as well?'
Jackson looked as alarmed as the rest of them. 'No.'
'Then they're after us.'
'What do we do?'
'We run. And hope the bombs don't get us.'
* * *
Reed had never known the sheer physical terror of being a fugitive in hostile country. His war had been fought with paper and pencil in the huts at Bletchley Park. It hadn't been easy: some nights, when the U-boat packs were hunting, the pressure had been immense, too much for some men. But for Reed the stillness of the codes had always been a place of calm, the one corner of the war where battle was decided rationally. The torrent of numbers they battled every day could frustrate, baffle and deceive — but there was a fundamental order behind them, however well the Enigma machines tried to chew it up. And, like the ancient Greeks, Reed had never feared the rational.
But this — this was chaos. This was all the animal forces the Greeks had tried to consign to myth: the harpies, furies, gorgons and bacchantes that had haunted their imaginations let loose. Reed felt he was in a dream, clutching the tablet like a talisman. If he dropped it, he was sure, the chasing pack would be on him in an instant. And so he ran.
