Age of Heroes Page 6

  Past the Williamsburg Bridge, he found himself on his own for a stretch, nothing but him, the river and the rhythmic plod of his Saucony Triumphs on the asphalt. The sun was rising to his left, Eos surrendering her brief daily reign, giving way to her brother Helios – or so people would have said, back in ancient times, before science stuck up its hand and gave all the answers. The poets’ “rosy-fingered Dawn” was now just dispersal of light through atmospheric particles. Eos’s siblings Helios and Selene were just the sun and the moon, planetary bodies. Astronomy and physics had toppled the divine, replacing deity with cold hard fact.

  You couldn’t blame the gods for going into self-imposed exile. The world had taken away their mystique, their mystery. What did that leave them?

  A shout from the park snagged Theo’s attention, halting him in his tracks.

  It had sounded very much like a cry of distress.

  He listened. There it came again. From the other side of the park’s amphitheatre. A woman. In trouble.

  Theo didn’t hesitate. He sprinted in the direction the cry had come from, skirting round the amphitheatre – although to call this concrete pit, with its shallow-raked semicircle of bleachers, an “amphitheatre” was an insult to the grand arenas of Ancient Greece, with their elaborate skené backdrops and remarkable acoustics.

  A third cry.

  The woman, whoever she was, sounded outraged. Indignant. But fearful too.

  And there she was. Dressed, like Theo, in Lycra fitness gear. A candy-pink MP3 player strapped to her arm.

  Fighting with a man who was also dressed for running.

  Theo accelerated. He couldn’t help himself.

  The man had just yanked the earbuds from the woman’s ears. He was bellowing at her. Theo couldn’t make out the words clearly. The phrase “goddamn bitch” kept recurring, though, and the man’s face was purpled, contorted with fury.

  A mugging. The man was trying to steal the MP3 player. The woman punched him a couple of times, to little effect. He was a determined thief. It was worth maybe twenty or thirty bucks, but he was willing to take a thumping to possess it.

  Theo hit the mugger in the midriff, taking him down like a linebacker tackling a quarterback. The man hadn’t even seen him coming. Within seconds Theo had him lying face down, a knee in his spine, one of his wrists twisted up between his shoulderblades. He was pinned.

  “What the fuck!?” the man bellowed. “What the hell are you doing? Are you fucking insane? Get off of me!”

  “Shut up or I will break your arm,” Theo said. A lie. He wouldn’t break it. Dislocate it, maybe.

  “You can’t do this,” the man protested. “This is aggravated battery. I will fucking sue. I will sue you so motherfucking hard, even your grandchildren will belong to me.”

  “Yeah, get off of him, you bastard,” the woman chimed in. “Who the hell do you think you are? Goddamn Batman?”

  Theo blinked up at her, perplexed. She was taking the man’s side? The guy had just attempted to rob her and Theo had come to the rescue. Shouldn’t she be thanking her saviour, rather than lambasting him?

  “Honey,” said the man, face still squashed to the grass, voice muffled. “Take out your phone. Get a pic of this guy. Call the cops.”

  “I don’t have my phone, babe.”

  “Well, mine’s in my fanny pack. Get it out.”

  “Wait. Wait.” Theo let go of the man’s wrist and stood up. It was becoming apparent to him that he had made a serious error. “You two know each other?”

  “Know each other?” the woman snapped. “He’s my husband!”

  “But... I saw him grabbing your MP3 player off you. You were hitting him.”

  “We were having a row, dumbass.”

  “What?”

  “A row. As in arguing. As in what married people do. Drew accused me of not listening...”

  “Because you weren’t,” said Drew, picking himself up and brushing himself down. “I was trying to tell you about how I’m going to put in a bid for a partnership in the firm, and you had your goddamn earbuds in, and you were just ‘uh-huh’ and ‘yeah’ like always.”

  “I was listening!”

  “You weren’t, Pam. And you know how it drives me nuts, especially when it’s important stuff I’m telling you, stuff that affects our future.”

  “While we’re out jogging isn’t the best time to be telling me important stuff. I listen to music when I exercise. Why can’t you respect that?”

  “Why can’t you respect me?” Drew retorted hotly. “Don’t I matter?”

  “Okay, okay, I see,” said Theo, in a placatory tone. “There’s been a misunderstanding. I’m sorry. The way it looked – I thought you were mugging her.”

  Drew rounded on him. “Do I look like a mugger to you? Seriously?”

  “No. No, you don’t.”

  “No, he’s an attorney,” said Pam. “A prosecutor. With Canterbury, Barnes and Bohm, on Lexington.”

  Evidently Theo was supposed to have heard of them.

  “So when I said I’m going to sue your ass,” said Drew, “I meant it. I’m going to take you for every cent you’ve got. Look at these abrasions on my leg. My shoulder hurts. I got bruising.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “I may have whiplash.”

  “I can only apologise.”

  “Thought you’d play vigilante, huh? Go all Bernie Goetz on me? Well, you just stuck your nose in the wrong people’s business. I’m no street thug. I’m an honest citizen.”

  Theo couldn’t resist. “Well, a lawyer.”

  “Oh, yeah. Ha-ha. Laugh it up. You won’t find it so funny when you get summonsed and have to – Hey. Hey!”

  Theo had felt an overwhelming urge to punch Drew in the face. But that would only have made a bad situation worse, so he had opted for the wiser alternative. While Drew was still pontificating, he had turned and run.

  Drew, with an irate yell, gave chase. Pam followed. They were both toned, fit individuals, and might well have caught up with Theo had he been a mere human being. As it was, he was faster than either of them. Faster by far. He poured on speed, leaving them lagging in his wake. Soon they were out of sight, and all Drew could do was roar further threats of legal action at him, while Pam lobbed some fairly creative insults his way. They continued to do so until Theo was beyond earshot, and probably kept it up for several minutes after.

  A CHAGRINED THEO traipsed from the elevator to his apartment. He showered, trying not to think what an ass he had just made of himself. Of course the man hadn’t been mugging the woman. Of course they’d been a husband and wife having a marital spat. In hindsight, it was obvious. How many muggers went out in running gear? How many muggers robbed their victims without brandishing some sort of weapon?

  Theo had seen, not what was there, but what he had wanted to see. He had wanted to catch someone in the commission of a crime. He had wanted to weigh in, fists flying, and dish out justice.

  Old habits died hard.

  Especially when you’d considered yourself a crimefighter for the best part of three millennia. When that had been your raison d’être ever since the road trip from Troezen to Athens, during which you dealt with a half-dozen wrongdoers and made the route safe for travellers again. When you’d dedicated yourself to becoming a champion of the downtrodden and oppressed, and followed that calling down through the centuries, in various forms and guises, mostly with success.

  As he got dressed, Theo debated whether Drew and Pam might have recognised him. He was fairly famous, after all. His novels sold in respectable quantities and he had appeared on network television once or twice, promoting them. They might track him down and press charges. That would be awkward and embarrassing. Not to mention, even if the case was settled out of court, costly.

  Then again, if Drew and Pam had recognised him, they’d have said something, surely. Luckily for Theo, authors, even popular ones, were more or less anonymous. Their faces didn’t get plastered across the covers of celebrity magazines. They were
n’t profiled on the E! channel. Drew would never find him. In a city this big and populous, the chances of them bumping into each other again were minute. That said, Theo resolved to steer clear of the East River Park for the foreseeable future, just to be on the safe side.

  Perhaps he shouldn’t have run away. Perhaps he should have stayed put and faced the music.

  No. Life was complicated enough as it was. No need to complicate it any further.

  He was in the mood for work again, at any rate. The clash in the park had invigorated him. His concerns about Aeneas were relegated to a back burner. It was time to sit down at his desk and get some serious plot brainstorming done.

  Jake Killian 5 – working title – was going to be the wildest, most out-there Jake Killian novel yet, or so Theo had promised his publisher. His philanthropist adventurer character had so far faced drug lords, corrupt local politicians, environmental polluters and far-right extremists, and emerged victorious each time. Killian was a reluctant sort of do-gooder. He never sought out trouble, it just came his way. All he wanted was to be allowed to travel the world disbursing the millions he had accrued as a black-market arms dealer. He was trying to make amends for the untold suffering he had caused by selling munitions to unsavoury militias and dictatorships. His conversion to the side of the angels followed an incident in Syria when he had witnessed a religious-fundamentalist terrorist open fire on a crowd in a city square with an unlicensed automatic rifle of just the sort that he, Killian, traded in. The tally of victims stood at 34, schoolchildren among them, and the masked gunman, riding pillion on a scooter, had got away without ever being caught and held to account. The attack had been Killian’s Damascus moment (literally, in this case), and he had thereafter employed his knowledge of weapons and the combat skills he had acquired during a stint in the US Marine Corps to stand up on behalf of people who had fallen foul of hostile forces and could not fight back for themselves. If he stumbled across a wrong, he did whatever was required to right it. As the strapline on the cover of every Jake Killian novel said, “When Killian comes to town, the bad guys better run.”

  This time round, Theo planned for Killian to take on international people traffickers. The setting would be Eastern Europe, for the most part. Research would entail reading books about the region, delving into websites, and maybe visiting a couple of locations, plus talking to journalists with first-hand knowledge of the subject matter.

  The first task, though, was to lock down the basic plot structure. The narrative needed to open with Killian encountering some situation that would put him at odds with the villains and provide an imperative for him to roll up his sleeves and get stuck in. That was how the other books kicked off. So, what if Killian was visiting a foundation he had set up for the rehabilitation of child prostitutes in, say, Romania, Lithuania, somewhere like that? And what if a bunch of armed goons stormed the premises in order to kidnap a young girl who had recently been rescued from the clutches of their boss, a sinister Russian oligarch? Outnumbered and outgunned, Killian would be unable to prevent the goons from taking the girl, but there was your plot catalyst, your inciting incident, right there. The rest of the novel would detail his efforts to retrieve her and bring down the oligarch and his private army.

  Bingo.

  Theo began composing an outline, transferring his ideas up onto the screen, feeling his way from one scene to the next, identifying where the chapter breaks should go in order to maximise suspense, establishing a couple of subplots that would weave around the linear main plot like the serpents, adding depth and texture ...

  He had been at it for over an hour when his phone rang.

  Chase Chance.

  HE COULDN’T IGNORE the call, much though he’d have liked to. He was in the throes of creativity. He was reluctant to break the flow. But...

  “Chase.”

  “Theo.”

  “What’s the word?”

  “Not good.” Chase sounded sombre. From someone normally so upbeat, this did not bode well.

  “How not good?”

  “It’s him,” Chase said. “It’s Aeneas all right. Pious Aeneas.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “I got to see the body. I viewed it in the morgue. Pretended I was a relative – not actually a lie, really. Took some doing. A bit of browbeating, a bit of bribing. But I did it. And...”

  “Categorically, unconditionally, you’re telling me you have just seen the body of Aeneas?”

  “Less than an hour ago. Fuck me, Theo, it was him and he’s dead.”

  “Killed-in-an-avalanche dead?”

  “Crushed. Mangled. A hell of a mess. Face only just about recognisable.”

  “So it might not be him,” Theo said. “Might be a lookalike. I mean, this is standard procedure, isn’t it? Or rather, was. Find a stand-in, a substitute, a corpse that resembles you. Dress it in your clothing. Put your personal effects on the body. Voilà. Before fingerprinting, before DNA testing, that’s how we did it.”

  “It was him, Theo,” Chase insisted. “I’d know if it wasn’t. We can tell, can’t we? We recognise our own kind. It goes beyond the visual. What I was just looking at in the morgue of the Hospital Gobernador Ernesto M. Campos in Ushuaia was, so help me, a dead demigod.”

  SIX

  Airspace above the Coral Sea, South Pacific

  ROY YOUNG WAS reading a Jake Killian novel on his Kindle Paperwhite as the Embraer Legacy 650 large-cabin jet banked on its ascent from Vanuatu’s Bauerfield International Airport, turning northward.

  It wasn’t a great book, in his opinion. Decent enough story, but the prose lacked finesse. Plenty of narrative oomph, but the author, Theo Stannard, could have crafted his sentences a little better. They were punchy, terse, too much in thrall to Chandler and Hammett, without their masterful, jazzy sense of rhythm. The style seemed intended to bludgeon readers into submission, rather than caress and cajole them along.

  The novel was absorbing, at least, and Killian was a compelling wish-fulfilment protagonist. A man with a dark past, trying to bring light. Roy needed distraction, and Killian’s Rage, the third in the series, was providing it.

  As the jet levelled out, Roy heard a seatbelt being unbuckled. From the front of the cabin, Holger Badenhorst headed aft to the toilet. “Got to drop the kids off at the pool,” he announced to everyone and no one. He emerged several minutes later, wafting a hand in front of his nose. “Phew! What a klankie! I’d leave it a while if I were you. Damn islander food. Plays havoc with the guts.”

  Roy guessed, from the way he had said it, a momentary hesitation, that Badenhorst had substituted “islander” for a crude racial epithet. The Afrikaner was not what you would call politically correct, but he was making an effort to be, in deference to the sensibilities of the multicultural team he had assembled.

  As he made his way back up the aisle between the dual rows of plush seats, Badenhorst shared a word or two with his employees. “How’s it today? You okay? Travis, great work. Sean. We got him, nè? Pulled it off nice and smooth. Hey, Serge. You’ll get a go soon enough, don’t worry. Onward and upward, eh?”

  Finally he came to Roy. He laid an arm on Roy’s headrest and leaned in.

  “What you doing there? Reading, huh?”

  “Yeah.”

  A fellow Englander might have picked up on Roy’s tone, and left him alone. Badenhorst was not English, and something of a stranger to subtlety.

  “What is it? Novel?”

  “Yeah. Sort of a crime story. Action-adventure.”

  “Who by?”

  “Bloke called Theo Stannard. Heard of him?”

  Badenhorst gave him a complicated look he couldn’t quite fathom. “Ha! Interesting. Why’d you choose that one?”

  “I like thrillers, and his stuff kept coming up on my Amazon recommendations. Some algorithm obviously decided he was my thing, so I thought I’d give him a shot.”

  “And...?”

  “I don’t feel qualified to comment yet. I haven’t got
very far in, you see.”

  Again, the brisk summation carried a subtext: I’m really not interested in talking to you.

  “Well now,” said Badenhorst, oblivious. “Listen. I just wanted to say, you’ve been doing great so far.” The Afrikaner raised his voice so that everyone in the cabin, all fourteen of them, could hear. “You all have. You’re earning your paycheques, and no mistake. But you, Roy...” He dropped the volume back down to conversational level. “Hiding the axe in the reef beforehand – stroke of genius, my friend. I wish I’d thought of it myself. That stupid kont Merrison would never have seen it coming.”

  “Don’t call him a kont,” said Roy. “If that means what I think it means.”

  “Ach, why do you care what I call him? He wasn’t a person to you. Just a job.”

  “Still. Have some respect.”

  “Whatever.” Badenhorst flapped a hand. “I’m complimenting you. Take the praise. You played your socks off yesterday, just like you did in Argentina. Ja, Argentina. That was a hell of a thing, that was. Perfectly sprung trap. Target One thought you were his chommie. Trusted you. Went along all meek and mild. Lamb to the slaughter. Didn’t suspect a thing. And the idea of the avalanche...”

  “It seemed logical. He was a skier.”

  “Ideal. Plant charges, blow up a snowbank, leave the body at the bottom of the slope to get buried... Too bad that a search-and-rescue team decided to comb the area and found him, but, hey. That’s the breaks. We dug the bullets out of him, no alarm bells.”

  “Maybe not straight away.”

  “Not ever. And on the off-chance that there are, and our targets get wind of what we’re up to, it won’t make any difference. We’ve got what it takes to bring them down, each and every one of them.” Badenhorst jerked his head in the direction of the cargo hold, where eleven steel flightcases were stored, along with boxes of armaments, uniforms and other matériel. None of these items was listed on the flight manifest; nor were the names of anyone on the jet. Bauerfield International was a medium security airport, and no customs or immigration checks were performed on private aircraft landing or taking off from there. This was true of every airport the team had used and would be using. As long as they avoided the major international hubs, they could slip in and out of sovereign nations with the kind of impunity reserved for diplomats and monarchs.