could just be coincidence. The main thing as far as you're concerned is that, while you don't annoy him, you get to live. So, if you want my advice, try not to annoy him.'
'OK,' said Sam. 'But no way am I sleeping with him, ever, and if that means I'll be signing my own death warrant, fine.'
Ares nodded, perhaps with a touch of admiration. 'Nobly put. When the time comes, should the Fates decide that I am to be your executioner, I promise I shall do you the honour of making it swift and clean.'
'Thanks for that, much appreciated,' said Sam, and she set off to catch up with Zeus.
63. ARGUS
The final stop on the Olympus tour was a chamber hewn deep in the rock of the mountainside and reminiscent in many ways of the command centre at Bleaney. Here, as there, could be found a plethora of screens and cables. The former provided the only illumination in the room, a wavering bluish glow, while the latter fed, presumably, to the meter-diameter parabolic antenna dish which Sam had spotted outside, nestled between two buildings, an incongruous sliver of modernity amid all the Classicism.
A smell reached Sam's nose as she followed Zeus and Ares into the chamber, a drab, musty odour that put her in mind of a teenage boy's bedroom. It was worse inside the chamber itself, stronger and more noxious. It spoke of unwashed flesh and fungal growth.
The source was — could only be — the corpulent figure who reclined in the centre of the room on a mound of silk cushions. He was near naked, his modesty preserved by a cloth draped across his groin, and his pallid, vein- marbled skin looked like it hadn't seen the sun in ages. It also looked like it hadn't seen soap and water in ages. There were blotches all over it that could have been food stains, encrustations that could have been rashes, a whole host of scummy dried-on marks of indeterminate origin. The covers of the cushions the figure half sat, half lay on were similarly bespattered and besmirched.
What was even more repellent about this bloated monstrosity, though, were the wires protruding from his head. A score of them were plugged into his hairless scalp, sticking out at all angles like rubber-insulated dreadlocks, and around the point at which each wire pierced the skin there was inflammation and scabbing. It reminded Sam of something from an anti-vivisection poster, a laboratory monkey with electrodes implanted in its brain.
He was slumped there with his eyes closed, as though blissfully asleep. However, as Sam drew (reluctantly) closer, she saw that his eyelids were puckered at the join, like pursed lips, and concave, sunken. There were no eyeballs beneath them.
'Argus?' said Zeus softly. 'O Hundred-Eyed One? Can you hear me? Are you with us?'
Argus did not stir, but all round the chamber the screens flickered and changed. They had been displaying websites, live news broadcasts, CCTV footage, webcam images, a range of data input streaming in from across the globe, but now all at once each showed the same thing: a computer-generated peacock, its tailfeathers fanned, and the eye markings on the fan actual human-style eyes, different-coloured, intermittently blinking.
'Greetings to you, O mighty Zeus,' said a warm, mellow voice that came from several directions simultaneously. The words echoed, cascaded, overlapped. 'And to you, Ares. And to you too, Samantha Akehurst, former detective sergeant, resident of Kensal Rise, London.' The voice proceeded to list Sam's driving licence and National Health numbers, gave the name of the high street bank she banked with, and threw in her credit rating for good measure. 'Currently wanted by the London Metropolitan Police for questioning,' it added.
'And my dress size?' Sam asked, trying not to sound unnerved.
A pause. Then: 'You look like an eight to me.'
'Actually I'm a ten.'
'It's always wise to underestimate.'
As the voice said this the man on the cushions, eerily, smiled.
'Argus,' said Zeus, 'Sam is, as you know, a member of the resistance group who were until not so long ago our mortal enemies — in more senses than one.'
'Ah, yes, the Titans,' said Argus. Several of the screens shifted from the peacock image to display stills from the Agonides clip, a blurry security-camera shot of a Titan haring through Manhattan, several newspaper pictures of dead and decaying Olympian monsters, a forensics photo of Sondergaard's skeleton half-buried in the dust of his battlesuit, and Titan-related soundbites from the press conference Zeus and Hercules gave in the shadow of the World Trade Centre and from Zeus and Hera's appearance on Paulita.
'There's more,' he said, and a number of websites popped up on other screens, all of them festooned liberally with his peacock censorship-icon. 'Titan-advocating sites and blogs and homepages. These are the ones I've allowed to continue to exist, the ones where the approval expressed is only moderate. The more ardent ones I have, of course, wrecked beyond repair.'
'Still there are people rooting for you,' said Zeus to Sam, 'in spite of everything.'
The words sent a small chill through her. 'What do you mean, in spite of everything?'
'I mean, with no justification there are some poor misguided souls who still feel that the Titans are going to oust the Pantheon.'
'Aren't we?' said Sam. 'Just because you've taken one of us captive… Ohhh.' Light dawned. Hope fluttered. 'That's it, isn't it? I'm a hostage. You think the Titans won't dare attack again, as long as you're keeping me here. Well, newsflash, Zeus. It won't deter them. They know I'd rather die than have them abandon the mission. Do what you like to me, but the war will go on.'
'You're misreading the situation completely, Sam,' said Zeus. 'You're not a hostage. To hold someone hostage implies that there are those for whom that person's continued survival matters.'
'Which in this instance there are.'
'She just isn't getting it, is she, Zeus?' said Ares, snickering. 'I think you're going to have to give it to her in words of one syllable.'
'Better yet, in pictures. Argus?'
'Yes, Zeus?'
'Bleaney Island, please. Everything you've gathered over the last three days.'
'Your wish is my command.'
The screens stuttered, altered, refreshed. Now there were shots taken from various news helicopters, showing Bleaney from several different angles. Some focused on an expanse of charred, blackened, churned-up ground which Sam was just able to identify as the site of the battle with the Olympians. Others were more distant views of the island, all of them featuring a vast column of smoke that was roiling up from, if Sam's guess was correct, the entrance to the bunker.
Argus turned up the volume on one screen where a microphone-toting reporter from CNN was doing a piece to camera on the landing jetty.
'…and as you can see behind me,' the reporter was saying, 'there's still a huge amount of smoke coming from below ground, and we can only imagine the kind of inferno that's raging down there. This is the closest we're allowed to get to the subterranean complex, a former Second World War listening post which, reports suggest, the Titans were using as their base of operations. It hasn't been confirmed how the Olympians uncovered this fact, but what we do know is that yesterday they came here in force to put paid to the Titan insurgency once and for all. And it would appear, certainly on the available evidence, that they have succeeded…'
Argus cross-faded to footage of another reporter, from the BBC this time, conducting street interviews with residents of the harbour town across the strait from Bleaney.
'…dreadful noise it were,' said an old lady. 'Bangs, crashes, explosions. You could hear it across the water, clear as day. I said to my husband, 'That's on Bleaney,' I said, 'and I bet it's them Olympians. Something's going on there,' I said. You could see this big black stormcloud hanging over the place, and the lightning was coming down like you wouldn't believe, flash, flash, flash, like that, that quick. Never seen the like!'
Cut to a bespectacled middle-class dad wrangling a restless toddler: 'Yes, we've always been a bit suspicious about the goings-on over there. 'Research into cold fusion' we were told — keep still, Harry — but everyone was convinced there was more to it than that. For months people kept saying they'd heard, well, muffled gunfire, and no
