Molly came over and made as if to sit next to him, but he pulled her onto his lap. It was like his rational mind had been totally clouded by her presence. He should be thinking about trekking out of Athens on foot, by night. Every moment he was here with her, he lost time they needed for their escape. But this temple and Molly had cast a spell so deep that he couldn’t bring himself to move. Not when she was so close. Not when she was nestled so perfectly in his arms. In a temple.
“We haven’t offended anyone by…I don’t know…” he started.
“Desecrating the temple?” she asked, with a smile in her voice.
“Yes. I didn’t think about it until now.” He said. He had enough black marks in his book, he didn’t want to add eternal hellfire. Although, no shit, it had been totally worth it.
“No. There are so few worshippers of the ancient gods now. They do exist, but not in vast numbers. Besides which, Hephaestus was the husband of Aphrodite, so I suspect he wouldn’t be too shocked.”
He loved that she talked about the gods as if they were real, but he guessed it was her work. Why wouldn’t it be real to her?
“I’m sure if anyone knew I’d been sitting on that rock, they’d bar me from the country, but I totally justified it in my head because I was naked. No buttons, zippers, or anything else that could damage or scratch it.” She paused. “Yeah, I’m not sure they would care about that. I’d still be banned.”
He smiled in the darkness. “Totally worth it though, right?”
“Totally.”
There was silence as he stroked her back, her skin like silk beneath his hand. “Do you believe in the ancient Greek gods?” he asked.
He felt her shrug under his arm. “Who am I to dismiss a religion that hundreds of thousands of people bought into? I’ve seen evidence of so many different religions all over the world, and they’re not that different. Just people finding meaning in nature, creating rules for themselves that benefit society. They believed in their gods so strongly that they spent generations creating temples to worship them. The temple we visited...God, was it yesterday? The day before? It feels like a week ago. The temple to Olympian Zeus? Took six hundred years to build. That’s got to indicate a fairly firm belief system. I respect all religions.”
“So if I told you I was a Jedi?”
“I would tell you that all the empirical evidence points to it being a solid belief system.” He felt her shake with laughter against him. “But would I have to convert in order to marry you?”
He wanted to laugh, but he stayed silent. Make her squirm. “Um, yeah, err, about that.”
She pulled herself up. “Oh God, I was joking. It was a joke. I was just… oh God.” She buried her face in her hands.
He let her off, and laughed.
“Were you messing with me?” she squealed, hitting his stomach with her tiny fists. He grabbed them and pulled her back to him.
“Maybe.” He said, enjoying the feeling of normality.
“You’re awful.” She wriggled against him, as if she were trying to find the most comfortable spot.
“Yes I am.” He leaned back and tried to relax. But all he could think about was the time they were wasting there. Time they should have been fleeing the city. The truth was, he didn’t see an easy way out of this mess. He always had a plan. Always. The military had drilled into him all the possible responses to any situation he could find himself in. And his SERE training would have served him well in this urban setting. Being able to navigate based on the direction TV satellite dishes were pointing, moving in concentric circles, avoiding straight streets, knowing the obvious place to go to for a fast extraction.
But none of his training had accounted for him being a private citizen, being caught up in Molly’s blowback espionage, and being hunted by virtually every security force in the city. Even possibly the US government, given he just busted the nose of a diplomat.
But even though every thinking brain cell was yelling at him to leave, every breathing cell of his body was telling him to stay right here, with this woman in his arms. It was a fight that kept him awake, even when he felt Molly drift off.
A boom echoed across the city, and the last remnants of the sound rolled into the temple, bringing David to his senses. He woke Molly up and shifted her to the ground so he could get up.
“What—” She rubbed her eyes. “How long was I asleep?”
“Not more than an hour. Did you hear that?” He tried to see the city from their vantage point in the temple, but couldn’t. “That was an explosion. Not fireworks or anything.” He looked out from between the pillars but could see nothing. “Where can I go to get a better view of the city?”
“Basically the highest point at this end of Athens is where we came from—the Acropolis.
“We’ve got to go. That sounded big. Like level-a-building big.” Or worse. He motioned to the way they had entered.
“Shouldn’t we stay here? This has got to be the safest place, don’t you think?” she said, looking around the interior as if he’d asked her to abandon her home.
“Physically maybe,” he conceded. “But also we have no alibi for…whatever just happened. And we’re already wanted by…well, probably everyone by now. The police, the Russians, the US embassy, FBI…” Not to mention his boss. He wondered if he even had a boss now. He was totally off the books here, and it didn’t feel good to him. Mal would be totally in his element here, but David, after the last year, was not.
“That never occurred to me. Maybe we should have stayed in a hotel.” She bit her lip as he hurried her out.
“I don’t think so,” he said remembering the fully armored and weaponized police who had stormed the hotel. “This was the best option out of the two.” But he really wasn’t that sure anymore if he was making any right decisions for any of the right reasons. What kind of operative let a civilian decide where they would stay the night?
He led them back the way they’d come a couple of short hours earlier, back across the agora and over the brick pillar. Then he followed the path up the Acropolis. The gates to the Parthenon—the famous temple everyone associated with Greece—were locked. Nothing he couldn’t scale if he wanted too, but opposite the gate was an unguarded hill. He started to climb.
“Good idea. The Areopagus,” Molly said.
He turned back to take her hand. “The what?”
“This is where Saint Paul preached to the ancient Greeks, started their conversion to Christianity. You can also see a whole chunk of the city from there.”
Even before they got close to the top he could see a huge plume of smoke pushing into the night sky. An orange glow told him that whatever had blown was still on fire. He could see the Temple of Olympian Zeus from where they were, and he was able to figure out where the explosion had been. As they got higher, faint sirens floated on the air. Constant and worrying.
“Where is that?” Molly asked.
“It looks to be in the vicinity of the embassies, close to the hotel we were in.” He was wondering how many people were likely to have been hurt. If it was an embassy, hopefully none, since it was nighttime. If it was the hotel, or any of the other hotels that were packed with G20 attendees, the casualty rate would be catastrophic.
“Listen, do you mind if I…” Molly began.
David couldn’t take his eyes off the scene laid out in front of him. In terms of national embarrassment, this took the cake. Having such huge security issues a few weeks before the presidents and prime ministers arrived was the worst thing a struggling country could experience, not to mention the first time in G20 history that there’d been such threats.
“Mind if you what?” he asked, still wondering what sort of device it had been and what kind of carnage it had wrought.