Herculean (Cerberus Group Book 1)

by Jeremy Robinson

  I can help.

  I want to.

  He needed her now. Needed her to talk him down.

  Maybe I’m not as strong as you thought, Felice.

  He opened his eyes and looked at Pierce again. “No one here,” he said. “The place is completely deserted. We missed them.”

  Pierce blinked, the shock of almost getting killed starting to fade. Then his eyes went wide and he brought his gun up. The motion was so abrupt that Lazarus did not have time to react before Pierce pulled the trigger. He saw the puffs of smoke leaving the end of the suppressor, and felt waves of pressure buffeting him as bullets creased the air to either side of him, but none of the rounds struck him.

  There was a cry of pain from behind Lazarus, followed by the thump of a body hitting the ground. Then another.

  Pierce lowered his gun.

  Lazarus turned and was surprised to discover a pair of bodies—men, wearing charcoal gray combat fatigues—sprawled out behind him. He had no idea where the duo had been lurking. All he knew for sure was that Pierce had just saved his life.

  One of the guards was definitely dead, a hole drilled neatly between his eyes. The other was still alive and reaching for the pistol that had fallen from his grasp when Pierce’s bullet had punched into his chest. Lazarus strode over and kicked the gun out of the man’s reach.

  Pierce knelt beside the stricken man. “Where is everyone?” he demanded. “Where’s Fiona?”

  The man stared up at him, face twisted in pain, but eyes defiant. Lazarus doubted the man was capable of answering the question, but Pierce was not going to let him slip quietly into the hereafter. He punched the man’s oozing chest wound. “Where is the girl? Is she here?”

  The man shuddered and let out a gasp, and then his eyes rolled back in his head, his body deflating. Pierce, however, did not relent. He kept shouting the question until Lazarus reached out and put a hand on Pierce’s shoulder. “George. He’s gone.”

  Pierce sagged back. “Damn it.”

  “We’ll find her.”

  Pierce climbed to his feet and raised his pistol to a ready firing stance. “I appreciate what you were trying to do back there, but we’re supposed to be doing this together, okay? No more rogue ops.”

  Lazarus nodded. “Roger that.” He stood up and gestured to the bodies. “Good work. I think you’ve officially graduated to badass.”

  Pierce managed a wan smile.

  “Did you see where they came from?” Lazarus continued. “I thought I checked all the rooms.”

  Pierce pointed down the hall. “That way. Maybe there’s a secret door. Something that isn’t included in the blueprint.”

  Lazarus stared down at the dead gunmen again, this time taking note of the ID badges clipped to their belts. He plucked one up. “I think you’re right. This is a proximity key card. Let’s go see what it opens.”

  Pierce took the second key card. “Sounds like a plan.”

  As they approached the end of the hall, a section of wall slid aside. Lazarus and Pierce went through the opening with their guns at the ready, but there was no one to shoot at. The room beyond the secret door was as deserted as the rest of the compound.

  It was not however, empty.

  45

  Gallo had no memory of the tunnel or the small parking garage just off the Via Cossa where it began—or ended, depending on which direction you were going—but things began looking familiar once she reached the other side.

  Coming back was a bittersweet experience. She had left as Kenner’s hostage, cooperating with him only to ensure Fiona’s safety. Now, her former prison was under Herculean Society control and Kenner was the captive.

  But Fiona was missing, and all the battles they had won meant nothing.

  As Pierce walked them through the facility, Gallo realized that she had seen only a small fraction of the place. Aside from an entire floor of guest quarters, several of which were much more accommodating than the room where she had been kept, there were libraries and laboratories, conference rooms, even a movie theater.

  There was an entire lab devoted to genetics research, which prompted Carter to ask Pierce if he had kept the receipt for the SMRT sequencer he’d bought for her. “Because there’s no way I’m going back to that cave.”

  Lazarus flashed a smile at the comment, but said nothing. He was a strange man, and although she had known him for only about a day, Gallo sensed that even Pierce, whose history with the man went back several years, had barely scratched the surface.

  They moved on to a computer server room with hardware that almost brought Dourado to tears. “Can you hack your way into this?” Pierce asked her. “And figure out where they went? Where Fiona is?”

  “I am looking forward to trying,” she replied with an eagerness bordering on hunger.

  Pierce let her skip the rest of the tour.

  After they passed through a gallery filled with priceless art and artifacts ranging from Neolithic to neo-classical, Pierce held them back for a moment. “The next room isn’t going to be easy,” he said. “But I think it will explain a lot about who we’re dealing with.”

  With that ominous warning, he led them into a room that was filled with the stuff of nightmares. Gallo immediately realized that she was looking at images from the Holocaust, but it took a little longer to grasp the ghastly intent behind the collection. After that, she stopped looking until Pierce brought them to a trophy case filled with Nazi memorabilia.

  Kenner, who had been unusually quiet up to that point, let out a gasp. He nodded at the photographs in the case. “Oh, God. It’s him. That’s Tyndareus.”

  The outburst prompted Gallo to take a closer look at the pictures and documents in the display. One name stood out. “That’s not possible. He’s dead.”

  “Are you certain?” Pierce locked eyes with Kenner, but Gallo got the sense that he was not at all surprised by the news. “Augustina’s right. Josef Mengele died over thirty years ago. His remains are locked in a safe in Brazil. The DNA was checked against known relatives.”

  Kenner shook his head. “No. That’s Tyndareus. He’s older now, of course, but I’d recognize that…” He looked as if he was about to throw up. “That smile. My God. What have I done? I was helping that monster.”

  “So kidnapping and attempted murder were okay when you weren’t working for a Nazi?” Pierce asked. Kenner feigned disgust for a moment, but Pierce cut him off with a raised hand. “Liam, I just want to know one thing. Where is he now?”

  Kenner shook his head. “I promised him the source. The Well of Monsters. I thought I would find the location in the Amazon city, but there was nothing there.”

  “In the myths, the monsters came from the Underworld,” Gallo said. “That’s where their mother Echidna lived. If there is some kind of…something…that can create monsters, that’s where we’ll find it.”

  Pierce considered this, then lowered his voice as if sharing a secret. “Hercules—the real Hercules—did visit the Underworld. I don’t mean Hell. A real place. We have records of a massive underground network—we’re talking global in scope—that almost certainly corresponds to the Underworld of Greek mythology. There are dozens of entrances though, and probably thousands of miles of connecting passages. It would be virtually impossible to simply stumble onto a specific location.”

  He paused, looked at Kenner again and then at Gallo. “He learned the location of the entrance from the Amazons, right? So the answer has to be on the map.”

  Gallo shot an accusing glance at Kenner, but she knew she shared some of the blame. “Tyndareus must have forced Fiona to translate it for him.”

  “We need to figure out how to read it, too,” Pierce said. “Were there any clues in the Heracleia that might narrow it down?”

  “If it’s still here, I’ll go through it again.”

  “I might be able to help,” Carter said, raising a tentative hand. “Remember how I told you that the DNA of the hybrids might help us narrow down the geographical
location of the parent animals? Well, I haven’t had a chance to sequence that bird I brought back yet, but I can tell you that it looks like a cross between a great egret and a porcupine. Probably a lot of other contributors as well, but those two species account for most of the dominant traits. Now, egrets don’t help us since they’re found on every continent, but the quills are similar to those found on the body of the North American porcupine.”

  “North American?” Pierce said. “Just like the Lion?

  Carter nodded. “I can use the equipment here to verify it, but I’d say the odds are good that these hybrids originated in North America.”

  “That doesn’t exactly narrow it down,” Pierce said.

  Gallo felt as if scales had fallen from her eyes. “I know where it is. In the Heracleia, it says that Herakles found the Underworld ‘in a burning land, with poisonous air, at the center of a lake of fire.’”

  “That’s pretty typical imagery for the Land of the Dead,” Pierce countered.

  Gallo shook her head. “That was where he found the entrance. Before he went into the Underworld. Ancient historians tried to pinpoint its location from the stories. The Greeks believed it was in a cave at Cape Matapan, but that doesn’t fit the physical description. A much better candidate is Mount Chimaera in Lycia—modern-day Turkey—because it’s a very geologically active location with burning methane pockets that erupt from the ground. But those were just educated guesses based on their limited knowledge of the world. They didn’t know the Americas even existed.

  “There’s a place in North America that matches that description. It’s one of the most geologically active places in the world. The Yellowstone caldera.”

  “Yellowstone,” Pierce echoed. His tone was more thoughtful than disbelieving.

  “Of course,” Kenner exclaimed. “It’s a perfect fit.”

  Gallo shot him a withering look. “No one asked you.

  Kenner ignored her. “But that’s still a lot of ground to cover.”

  Pierce looked up. “No, it isn’t.” He turned to Gallo, a hungry gleam in his eyes. “We’re not looking for the entrance to the Underworld. Tyndareus is, and he’s the one who’s got his work cut out for him. We’re looking for Fiona, and now we know where she is, assuming that she reached the same conclusion you did.

  “He’s got her. We’re going to get her back.” He looked around the gathering, as if daring anyone to question his decision. No one did. His gaze settled on the SS uniform in the display. “We’re done here.”

  46

  Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming, USA

  For as long as she could remember, Yellowstone National Park had been one of those places that Fiona knew she would have to visit someday. If she had been a little older, she might have called it a ‘bucket list’ item.

  Guess I’ll get to cross it off before I die, she thought.

  Her knowledge of the park was piecemeal. She knew about the grizzly bears that roamed the forest, and knew that you weren’t supposed to feed them. She knew about the geysers, especially Old Faithful, which spewed superheated steam on a schedule you could set your watch by, though she also recalled hearing that it wasn’t as ‘faithful’ as it once had been. She knew that scientists were worried about a super-volcano underneath the park, a gigantic underground bubble of magma, which in addition to boiling the water for the geysers, was also going to erupt any day and bury half the United States in ash—or maybe it wouldn’t happen for a hundred thousand years. All of these things were interesting to her, but there were a lot of places in the world that she wanted to visit, and she knew she would get there eventually. Yellowstone was practically in her back yard, after all.

  But this was not how she wanted to see it.

  When she had identified a particular set of Phaistos symbols on the map’s border, which combined to form the phrase ‘the land of the god ruling the dead,’ and crossed at a point near the center of the ancient depiction of North America, she did not immediately grasp that the spot fell within the boundaries of the world’s first national park. Midwestern geography had never been her strong suit.

  But Tyndareus had known exactly where it was without needing to consult a more current map. “Yes. That is the place. We shall leave immediately.”

  Within the hour, the old man, along with his entire staff, including Nurse Wretched, had loaded up and headed out. Fiona had been blindfolded for the drive, so she had no idea where they had left from. When the blindfold was removed, she found herself in the passenger cabin of a medium-sized jet. It was larger than the Herculean Society’s Gulfstream, with rows of seats like a regular commercial airliner, but she and the Cerberus team were the only passengers. Tyndareus had evidently chartered a plane to take them to their destination, which explained how they had been able to avoid airport security and nagging questions about the identity of a blindfolded hostage.

  The flight was long, but the food was significantly better than the fare she had been fed so far, and the regularity with which it was served helped her mark the passage of time. Shortly after the fifth meal—somewhere between ten and fifteen hours after leaving the Cerberus facility, if her estimation was correct—she was brought to Tyndareus.

  “We will be landing in a few hours,” he said, his manner as offhand as his age and its associated afflictions would allow. “Then we will drive to the coordinates you supplied. Unfortunately, the map is of such a scale that the target area is more than a hundred square miles. Hardly an ideal situation, wouldn’t you agree?”

  Fiona shrugged. “It’s the best I could do with what you gave me.”

  “Mmmm. Yes.” He tented his fingers in front of his face. “I’ve just heard from Mr. Rohn. As you predicted, the Amazon yielded nothing of substance, though we did find evidence to support both your interpretation of the map and Dr. Kenner’s underlying premise.” He paused a beat, then added, “He also reported to me that Dr. Gallo made an ill-advised attempt to escape.”

  The news caught Fiona off-guard. She almost said, ‘Good for her,’ but Tyndareus had also used the word attempt. “Is she okay?”

  A faint smile curled the old man’s lips. “She took a foolish risk with your life, child. I was quite clear about the consequences of such an action. Now, she’s put me in a rather awkward position. You have become far more valuable to me as a resource than as a hostage, yet I cannot let this rebellion go unpunished. I am a man of my word.”

  “Bullshit!”

  Tyndareus flinched under the verbal assault. Out of the corner of her eye, Fiona saw the goons moving to defend their boss, but she was done playing nice. “Aunt Gus only cooperated with you because you threatened to hurt me, and then as soon as she was gone, you used me as a lab rat. You planned to kill us both right from the start, so don’t even talk to me about keeping your word.”

  Tyndareus’s weird blue eyes flashed dangerously. “You will not pay the price for her mistakes, child, but be assured, she will most certainly pay for yours, so choose your words with greater care.”

  The threat stopped Fiona’s rising ire cold. She bit back another retort. “Fine. I’m sorry.”

  “Do you need a demonstration? Shall I have Mr. Rohn bring us one of her hands? I will let you choose which. Left or right?”

  “I said, I’m sorry,” Fiona replied through clenched teeth. She was pretty sure that the old man was just trying to make a point, but what if he was serious? “I’ll help you.”

  The silence that followed quickly grew uncomfortable, prompting Fiona to raise her eyes to him once more.

  “I trust you understand how vital it is that you cooperate with me,” he said. “For your own safety and Dr. Gallo’s.” He watched her for a moment, a lopsided smile making a brief appearance. “The map coordinates you gave us are not precise enough. I need to know if there is any other information on the map that can narrow our search parameters. Perhaps something that you have been intentionally withholding from me.”

  Fiona felt a chill shoot through her ve
ins. He knows about the Mother Tongue. But how? Did Aunt Gus let something slip? Did that animal Rohn torture her? Or is Tyndareus bluffing again?

  Two can play that game.

  “The writing on that map is a form of Linear A, the language of the Minoan culture, which lived almost four thousand years ago.” Her voice was terse, as if weary of explaining herself. “If you think I’m holding back, go hire somebody else to read it. Oh, that’s right. Nobody knows how to read it. Half of what I did was guesswork. The other half was luck.”

  She took a breath, held it a moment then went on in a more conciliatory tone. “I do know this. The ancient Minoans used language as a way of protecting their secrets from the unworthy. They left signs in the Labyrinth as a test. If you could read the signs, you could find your way out. If not, you’d wander around forever. They probably left similar signs pointing the way to the Underworld.”

  “You think we’ll find these signs once we get there?”

  She nodded. “Actual, literal road markers that only someone who reads Linear A would recognize.”

  This seemed to satisfy Tyndareus. He made a shooing motion, signaling that the audience was at an end.

  That had been eight hours ago. Their flight had arrived in Montana in the middle of the night. She identified the state by the license plates on the convoy of vehicles waiting for them on the tarmac. She was ushered into one, along with two of the Cerberus goons. She didn’t recognize the driver, a big guy with a shaved head and what she assumed were prison tattoos on his neck. He looked like a biker or a recruit from the local Aryan Nations chapter. There were two vans and a larger Ryder truck, each with a pair of White Power dudes, which brought the total size of the Cerberus contingent to fourteen, not counting Tyndareus and Nurse Wretched. The latter pair rode in a different vehicle.

  It was only when she saw road signs with the mileage to the park that Fiona finally realized where they were going.