The Lost Throne

“We’re looking for the man in this picture. I’d appreciate if you could take a look.”

Apollo grabbed the photo, expecting it to be another missing tourist. Instead, the suspect in the photo was one of the soldiers that had accompanied him to Meteora.

This was not good. And very unexpected.

Apollo didn’t show surprise-he was too disciplined for that-but his mind started racing. How did the police have a photo from the monastery? What other evidence did they possess? Normally, he didn’t give much thought to the outside world, but on the eve of such an important mission, he knew he couldn’t afford any type of police interference.

He had to stop their inquiry before the cops had a chance to return to Sparti.

“Yes,” he said in fluent Greek. “I know the man. He is a troublemaker in our village. What has he done now?”

The response surprised Pappas. He was expecting to be stonewalled at every turn.

“I’m afraid I can’t say. Our investigation is still pending.”

Apollo nodded in understanding. “How can I help you?”

“Can you show us where he lives?”

“I can do better than that. I can bring him to you.”

Before Pappas could argue, Apollo called out to a few of his men who were lingering in the background, watching the proceedings unfold. When he spoke, his orders were in rapid Laconian. The language sounded similar to Greek, but there were enough differences that Pappas and the other officers weren’t sure what was being said, which made them uneasy.

Pappas immediately asked, “What did you say to them?”

“I said go get the troublemaker and bring him here.”

Pappas frowned. He knew more had been said. “Does the troublemaker have a name?”

“Of course. But you will need to ask him yourself. The code of my village prevents me from revealing his name. We have a code of silence.”

“What about your name? Are you allowed to tell me that?”

He nodded. “My name is Apollo. And yours?”

“George.”

“George,” he said with a smirk. “Such a simple name. One without significance.”

Pappas shrugged off the insult. “We can’t all be named after gods.”

Apollo nodded. Most people didn’t deserve to be named after gods, as he had been.

“Tell me, George, what’s the worst pain you have ever felt in your life?”

“Excuse me?”

“Before you arrived, my friends and I were discussing the worst pain we have ever felt. I was wondering what your answer might be.”

Pappas glanced back at Manos and Constantinou, who were keeping a close eye on the perimeter. Because of the rocky terrain and the nearby trees, it was impossible to tell if anyone was out there. Just to be safe, the two officers unsnapped the straps that held their guns in their holsters. But not Pappas. He was being closely watched by Apollo, and he didn’t want to do anything that might be interpreted as aggressive behavior.

“That’s an awfully strange question. One that might be misconstrued as a threat.”

“A threat? That was not a threat,” he said with a laugh. “But this is a threat.” He moved one step closer. “We have you severely outnumbered. Lay down your weapons or you will have a new answer to my question about pain.”

The color instantly drained from Pappas’s face. There was no way he was going to surrender his weapon- especially since the odds were currently three against one. Still, there was something about Apollo’s words that resonated with truth. Pappas knew it wasn’t a bluff. He realized the man standing across from him was fully capable of making good on his threat.

Pappas said, “If I pull my gun, you’ll be the first to die.”

Apollo glared at him and gave him a one-word retort: “If.”

Before Pappas could react, Apollo slipped a small knife from the folds of his tunic and lunged forward. With a wicked slash, he sliced through the veins and tendons of Pappas’s right forearm, rendering his gun hand obsolete. Blood gushed from the open wound, spurting high into the air and splashing onto the dusty ground.

It reminded Apollo of the eight monks he had killed at Meteora.

Manos and Constantinou were stunned by the quick attack. They reached for their guns a second too late, as two Spartans crept up from behind. Each soldier carried a sword, and each sword hit its mark. The blade that struck Manos was raked across his back. The resulting wound started at his left scapula and ended at his right hip. Every muscle in between was severed, as were some of his ribs. He slumped to the dirt, gurgling, while his lungs filled with fluid.

Death was imminent.

But Constantinou wasn’t as lucky. The Spartan’s sword struck him flush above the elbow. A moment later, most of his arm fell to the ground beside him while he screamed out in agony. His fingers twitched for a few extra seconds like a spider that had been poisoned and was slowly waiting to die. He stared at it, disbelieving, unwilling to accept that his hand was no longer a part of him. As he stared, blood poured from the chunk of meat that hung below his shoulder.

“Bind his wound,” Apollo ordered. Then he pointed to Pappas. “Same with his.”

The Spartans disarmed the cops and tended to their wounds, making sure they didn’t die. At least not yet. Opportunities like this were rare, and Apollo wanted to take full advantage-just as he had done with the missing tourists he had found camping near the village.

The best way to teach the boys was to give them a taste of blood.

They would butcher the cops, piece by piece, until everyone had a turn.

Like a lion teaching his young.

45

Jones lingered near the train platform, purposely standing still while he pretended to be confused. He turned around, pondered the blue sign above him, and then grimaced in frustration.

It was a beautiful job of acting, one that accomplished several things.

First of all, it stopped Kozlov in his tracks. There was no way the Russian was going to walk toward the blue line if Jones was still pondering the green. There was too great a risk of being spotted in the narrow hallway that connected the two platforms, or of being recognized later if Kozlov was forced to turn around and follow Jones back toward the other trains.

Secondly, it allowed Jones to glance down the corridor to see if Kozlov was still there. And he was. But the Russian played it smoothly, strolling over to a vending machine where he bought a copy of the local newspaper. Then he leaned against the wall and pretended to read the headlines while dozens of people poured off the escalators in front of him.

Finally, and most important, Jones’s acting bought him the extra time that he needed. The truth was that Jones did not want to take the train that had just pulled into the station. It had arrived too soon. For his plan to work, he needed to miss this train and catch the next one, which would be arriving in roughly five minutes.

That was the only way that everything would be in place.

So Jones kept acting like a tourist. He scratched his head in confusion, asked a few people if they spoke English, and listened to the train as it pulled out behind him. Once it was gone, he slipped into the blue station, where he waited to spring his trap.

As far as Kozlov was concerned, there was no reason to hurry. He knew Jones couldn’t go very far. This wasn’t like the subway system in New York City, where vagrants were able to sneak into the tunnels for warmth or drugs. The local Metro had been built during the Cold War and had been designed to double as a bomb shelter capable of saving thousands of lives.

With that in mind, Saint Petersburg took its security very seriously. Heavy blast doors protected the exits. Tunnels were monitored via closed-circuit television. Photography was banned throughout the subway-in order to