Age of Heroes Read online

  “Let’s not get complacent,” said Roy.

  “I never do.” Badenhorst beamed from one side of his broad Boer face to the other. “All I’m saying is, you’re a true asset to the Myrmidons, Roy. I’m glad I chose you. Well done, me.”

  “Yeah, well done, you,” said Roy. “Now, if you don’t mind...” He nodded at the Kindle.

  The Afrikaner finally took the hint. “Sure, sure. You get on with it. Not much of a reader myself. But this jet comes loaded with movies. I think there’s some Jean-Claude Van Damme stuff on there. Bam! Pow!” He mimed punches. “Give me that over a book any time.”

  Shortly, Badenhorst was back in his seat up front, headphones on, watching a film on the 9-inch HD LCD monitor that swung out on an armature beside his seat armrest. Almost everyone else in the cabin was doing much the same. They had a long flight ahead of them, a little over twenty-four hours, not including refuelling stops. Movies helped alleviate the tedium, and the tension. There was also the option of falling asleep. Jeanne, the French Canadian sitting directly across the aisle from Roy, had plumped for that. Immediately after take-off she had reclined her seat, collared herself with a neck pillow, and closed her eyes determinedly.

  She opened them briefly, catching sight of Roy as he looked at her. He gave a cockeyed smile. She nodded, not in an unfriendly way. Then she aimed a glance forward at Badenhorst, grimaced in distaste, and closed her eyes again.

  Roy got it. Smart move. If only he had had the idea.

  He liked Jeanne. Out of the entire squad, she was the one he got along best with; her and the other Englishman, Gavin. The rest weren’t disagreeable by any means, except maybe the German, Hans Schutkeker, who was just a little too full of himself for comfort, and of course Badenhorst himself, who was as aggravating as they come but at least seemed to know it. Gavin Martin and Jeanne... Chevrier? Was that her surname? Something like that. Gavin and her, they had a temperament similar to Roy’s own. They didn’t enjoy what they did – they didn’t get a kick out of it, as some of the others appeared to – they did it because they were good at it and weren’t suited for much else.

  Outcomes facilitators was the official, somewhat euphemistic term for them.

  Myrmidons was the group name Badenhorst had given them.

  Assassins was what they were, if you wanted to get down to the nub of the matter.

  Paid killers.

  Wetworkers.

  Currently flying aboard a luxury private airliner from the scene of their last operation to the scene of their next.

  Roy tried to settle back into Killian’s Rage, but the mood was gone. He could no longer concentrate on the novel. Instead, he stared out of the window at the glittering ocean for a while. Then he hoicked his phone from his pocket, opened the pictures folder and scrolled through.

  There were photos going back years stored in the phone’s memory. Not many; Roy was neither a sentimentalist, nor nor a compulsive recorder of his life, as so many were these days. The images were personal: cherry-picked and cherished.

  Here was him and a handful of his mates from the regiment, on one of their tours of duty, stationed at Camp Bastion. Young men grinning in the blinding sunshine outside their billet. Arms around shoulders. Desert camo fatigues. A couple of chests bare. Fun in one of the lulls between tiptoeing around IEDs and returning enemy sniper fire.

  Here was him and Karen on their wedding day. Josie as bridesmaid, three years old. Mummy and Daddy belatedly tying the knot, both happy, but as far as she was concerned it was her day. Hence the pretty dress, the beribboned bunch of flowers, the tiara in her hair.

  Here was Josie aged thirteen, not long after her first stay in a psychiatric unit. Smudges of grey beneath her eyes. Hair long and lank. Her shirtcuff not quite hiding the bandage around one wrist. Trying to smile. Putting on a brave face for the camera during a family outing at the seaside. Studland Bay in Dorset. Cloudbanks on the horizon. Sand and marram grass.

  Here she was again, sixteen now, looking almost skeletally thin, brittle, in a shot taken just last year. Her and Roy, in the grounds of the clinic in the Swiss Alps. A spread of lawn. Pines. The elegant but rather severe main building behind them. A ridge of white mountaintops in the far background, sawtoothing a blue sky. Neither of them smiling, at least not so as you would notice, despite the encouragement of Benedikt, the orderly taking the photo. Bodies close but not touching. A portrait of the things money could buy, with the things it couldn’t notable by their absence.

  Roy closed the folder. It always hurt to see what he had had and didn’t have any more. The ache of loss was acute.

  But it was salutary too.

  Karen was gone. She was out of his life. She had a new man. Divorcee, like her; decent bloke, by all accounts. Kid of his own. Last Roy had heard, they were planning to get married.

  Good on her.

  Josie was not gone, but she was hanging on by a thread. The clinic in Switzerland, just outside Chur in the east of the country, was doing its utmost to keep her alive and hold at bay the despair that wanted to consume her. The doctors were implementing every therapy in their arsenal, from antidepressants to CBT to transcranial magnetic stimulation. The UK’s National Health Service had failed her, repeatedly. So had a string of private British mental health institutions. The Gesundheitsklinik Rheintal, which had an international reputation and counted Hollywood A-listers and internet billionaires among its clients, was her best and last hope. But its services did not come cheap. Far from it. Josie’s sanity, and her life, were being preserved only at eye-watering expense.

  Roy did not begrudge a penny of the cost. He would gladly have paid double, treble. Anything for his daughter.

  Help kill a few people he didn’t know?

  Anything for his daughter.

  SEVEN

  New York, New York

  THEO MET CHASE off the plane at JFK, two days after they had last spoken on the phone. They shook hands and embraced, and Theo offered to carry Chase’s holdall. Chase shrugged. His cousin was a stickler for courtesy, and Chase was a stickler for not carrying his own luggage if he didn’t have to.

  As they crossed the Departures hall, they had to stop twice so that Chase could deal with people who recognised him. He dutifully chatted with the strangers and then posed for selfies, plastering on the game-for-anything grin that he’d direct at the camera while trekking through mud and worse.

  “That’s how it is for me, cuz,” he said in the cab, en route to Manhattan. “Goes with the territory. Monster Hunter fans. Anywhere in public in America, I get mobbed.”

  “There were two of them. Two separate people. That’s hardly ‘mobbed’.”

  “Jealous much?”

  “No.” Maybe a little. “It does worry me somewhat, though, that you’ve become so famous. One of the aims when you’re someone like us is to try to remain as low-profile as possible, isn’t it?”

  “Says Mr Bestseller List.”

  “Touché. But at least my ugly mug isn’t being beamed into millions of homes every Thursday evening.”

  “Not forgetting the reruns on National Geographic.”

  Theo glanced at the cab driver. The plastic safety partition between them and him afforded some privacy, and anyway the guy seemed to be focused more on negotiating through the heavy, crawling traffic than on his passengers. Every so often he would curse loudly in a thick Ukrainian accent, and at one point Theo heard him say, “Grand Central Parkway? Grand Central Parking Lot, more like.” But his voice was muffled, and if they kept theirs low, he wouldn’t overhear them.

  “Without wishing to get into specifics,” Theo said, “how long do you expect to carry on Monster Hunt-ing?”

  “The execs reckon we can squeeze a couple more seasons out of the format.”

  “And then? Won’t there be demand for some sort of follow-up?”

  “If there is, I’ll just say no. I realise I can’t stay, for want of a better word, a celebrity indefinitely. When I’ve had my fifteen minutes,
I’ll slip into a new identity, in another country, and pretty soon everyone will have forgotten about Chase Chance. I’m going to have my fun while it lasts – and of course, you know, clean up what needs cleaning up” – his dangerous beasts – “but you don’t need to fret. I’m not going to get careless.”

  “I just felt the issue should be raised,” said Theo. “As it happens, I’m planning to start fading into obscurity myself, in the not too-distant-future. Pull the reclusive author schtick.”

  “Pynchon, Salinger.”

  “Yeah. Maybe get myself a house in the woods up in Vermont or Connecticut and communicate with my agent and publisher by email only.”

  “How about Maine? It’s nice there.”

  “Maine? Scary place, according to its best-known resident. Somewhere to avoid if you don’t want to get killed by demonic clowns or eaten by rabid St Bernards.”

  “Ah, you couldn’t stand the competition, that’s all,” said Chase. “Couldn’t live there knowing you’d always be the other guy, the Man Who Wouldn’t Be King.”

  “That was quite witty. For you.”

  “Thanks. I’m pretty pleased with it myself. Of course, you have a bad track record with kings.”

  Theo smirked. “What’s he called now? Evander Arlington?”

  “Yeah,” said Chase. “Evander Arlington. Don’t suppose you’ve seen the old bastard lately? He’s got a place in Midtown, not that far from yours. Super deluxe penthouse. He ever invite you over?”

  “Not much chance of that.”

  “Still hasn’t forgiven you, huh? Guy can sure hold a grudge.”

  “I eloped with his daughter and then ditched her. Not to mention what I did to his, ahem, stepson. You bet he holds a grudge.”

  They chatted inconsequentially for the rest of the journey. Only once they were at Theo’s apartment could they drop their guard and speak freely.

  “So. Anthony Peregrine. Aeneas. Here’s the deal.” Chase fetched out a few pages of computer printout. “I requested a pathologist’s report from the coroner in Ushuaia. He couldn’t see a reason for one. To him, it was just an accident. Anthony Peregrine went solo-skiing, there was an avalanche, he got caught by it, end of story.”

  “He a skier?”

  “Anthony? Some of his travel pieces have been about alpine resorts and chalets and black runs and the rest, so yeah, I’d say so. Anyway, I kicked up a fuss. Made noises about getting the US ambassador involved. Played the arrogant-American-abroad card. Got my way in the end.”

  Theo handed him a cup of freshly brewed coffee. Chase clinked it against Theo’s own cup, said “Cheers,” and took a grateful sip. The overnight flight from Tierra del Fuego had been long and bumpy, and he hadn’t slept much.

  “This here is a copy of the report,” he went on. “How’s your Spanish?”

  “Poor to non-existent.”

  “Well, I lived in Spain for a stretch and became fluent, but that was six hundred years ago and the lingo’s changed a lot since then. Still, I can just about make sense of what’s written here, except for the really technical bits, and... Well, there’s something that doesn’t quite add up.”

  Theo frowned. “Go on.”

  “Mostly Aeneas’s injuries are consistent with getting crushed by several thousand tons of snow sliding downhill at a couple of hundred miles an hour. Contusions. Lacerations. Bone fractures. It was what’s known as a slab avalanche, one that contains huge chunks of hardened snow. That’s way worse than a powder avalanche, the other kind. It’s like getting hit by a wave of boulders. However...”

  Chase pointed to a section of text.

  “There were a number of wounds on the body that Dr Dominguez, the pathologist, noted as ‘anómalo’.”

  “Abnormal. Anomalous.”

  “Correct. Some deep gouges that he assumes were caused by loose tree branches travelling at high velocity and perforating the flesh. Except, he couldn’t find any traces of wood in them. No splinters, no tiny fragments, as you might expect there would be. Large ragged holes that were clean inside.”

  “As if they weren’t caused naturally at all. As if they were made using a knife?”

  “Dr Dominguez wouldn’t commit himself that far. He was keen for it to be an accidental death.”

  “Why?”

  “Why? Because ski tourism is big business in that part of Argentina. An avalanche kills a lone skier, that’s bad news, sure, but it won’t deter visitors. Avalanches are one of the risks you take, especially if you go way off-piste on your own, like Anthony apparently did. They’re acceptable. What wouldn’t be acceptable is someone getting murdered on the slopes. That would get holidaymakers rushing to cancel their bookings.”

  “You think someone in authority leaned on him?”

  “Not necessarily. I think Dr Dominguez knows how things work and was hedging his bets. Didn’t want to be the boy who cried wolf. The perforation injuries were suspicious, but not enough to warrant taking it any further. Hence, tentatively, judiciously, anómalo.”

  “The fact remains,” said Theo, “that however badly Anthony – Aeneas – got hurt by the avalanche, he wouldn’t have died. He’d have been hospitalised for months and had a long road to recovery, and his doctors would be amazed that he healed so well. It would be a minor medical miracle, but eventually he would pull through and be as good as new again.”

  “The advantages of having a dash of divine ichor running through your veins.”

  “So, if not the avalanche, something else killed him.”

  “Looks that way. What, though?”

  “That’s the honking big question. How easy is it to kill a demigod?”

  “Total physical destruction can do it,” said Chase. “Dardanus, the guy who founded Troy – he was one of Zeus’s – he was living in Herculaneum when Vesuvius blew up, several miles closer than Pompeii. The pyroclastic flow cooked him to a crisp. There’s no coming back from that. Autolykos of Phokis was at Nagasaki on August 9th 1945. Wrong place, wrong time.”

  “Keryx was a viscount in France in the late eighteenth century during the Reign of Terror,” said Theo. “I tried to save him.”

  “Oh yeah, your Scarlet Pimpernel routine. Don’t tell me.” Chase mimed a guillotine blade chopping through his neck and made a squishy slicing sound in the back of his throat.

  “Regrettably, yes. I was locked up in the Bastille myself when they took him away in the tumbril to the Place de la Révolution. I did stage a breakout, but too late.”

  “Couldn’t he have tried to escape himself?”

  “I think Keryx had been playing the part of the louche aristocrat for so long, he’d gotten soft. You should have seen him as the Vicomte de wherever-it-was. All lace handkerchiefs and beauty spots and full-bottom wigs. A regular at Louis XVI’s banquets at Versailles, mincing around with the other nobles. Probably had forgotten he had the edge on his jailers and the sans-culottes. He could have struggled free of them if he’d wanted.”

  “Guess he didn’t want it enough.”

  “Guess not. Even then, I might have brought him back from the dead if I’d been able to find head and body and reunite them, but the revolutionaries were in the habit of carting off the corpses of the guillotined to a tannery, rendering them down and turning the skins into leather.”

  “Niiice. At any rate, Anthony Peregrine’s corpse was all in one piece.”

  “There’s only one thing we know of that’s capable of killing a demigod as though he or she were human,” said Theo. “One thing that’s guaranteed to give a fatal wound.”

  “One? You mean twelve.”

  “But all twelve are safely stowed away. Put beyond use. It must be something else.”

  “You don’t think maybe it’s just extreme old age?” Chase said. “I was mulling this over on the plane. What if, after three millennia plus, our bodies are finally wearing out? Nothing lasts forever. Even immortality, surely, has got to come to an end sometime.” He rolled up one shirtsleeve to expose bandaging. “Somet
hing took a big bite out of me the other day.”

  “What was it?”

  “Chupacabra. Long story. And of course I’ll get better. Of course the wound will mend and there won’t be a trace of it left, not even a scar. But what if, for once, that doesn’t happen? What if there turns out to be a limit to our recuperative powers? Could it be that we’re coming to the end of the ride? That the god half of us is exhausted, tapped out, and all that’s left is the mortal?”

  Theo shook his head.

  “Are you shaking your head because you don’t believe it?” said Chase. “Or because you don’t want to believe it?”

  “Neither. As of right now, I don’t have enough information to decide either way. I’m just... pondering.”

  “Well, ponder this, cousin Theseus. The time of the gods is long past. Our fathers and mothers and all the rest of them, they retired to Olympus, pulled up the drawbridge, and nobody’s seen them or heard a peep from them since. Perhaps now, three thousand years on, the time of their offspring is also past. Perhaps now, finally, it’s our turn.”

  CHASE TOOK A long swig of coffee, studying Theo, seeing his words sink in.

  “‘Theseus,’” said Theo eventually.

  “What?”

  “It’s just... It’s been a while since you called me by that name. Since anyone did.”

  “Yeah, I know it’s not protocol. Always use the alias. But, hey, we’re alone, just the two of us, just family. And it kind of seemed appropriate, you know? In keeping with the whole portentous vibe I was going for.”

  “Theseus. Perseus. When I say the names out loud, I don’t really think of them as being us, not anymore,” said Theo. “First and foremost I think of them as the myths. The ones people have written books about and made movies about. The ones people use as metaphors – consider to have been metaphors. Theseus who killed the Minotaur. Perseus who killed the Gorgon Medusa. Not genuine living beings but archetypes. I almost forget that we were real.”