“Is the cup right? The spill?” King asked.
“It’s fine,” Alexander knelt to the floor and gently placed his hands over the blank slate where the corpse’s face should have been. He began chanting under his breath. The floor rumbled beneath their feet. King turned to Acca to reassure her if she was worried, but the woman watched without fear. He guessed the touch was enough to convince her of everything.
King looked back to Alexander, as the man stood and stepped away from the false corpse.
The face looked exactly like Acca’s now — if it had been aged by twenty years, and had most of the vitality sucked from it. There was a black necrotic spot on the cheek, and the eyes were closed, but the corpse could not be mistaken for anyone else.
There was just one problem.
“Alexander — the clothes.”
The corpse was naked.
“Of course.” He turned to Acca. “We will need your robe. And your sandals.”
King was about to turn away to give the woman privacy, but she simply slipped out of the dress, and stepped out of her sandals, completely unashamed of her nudity. She picked up the robe with one hand and tossed one sandal to King. The other she handed to Alexander. Then she slipped the dress over the corpse’s head. King and Alexander fixed the sandals on the body’s feet and helped to roll the body over so Acca could pull the dress down to where it would be. Finally, she pulled a bronze bracelet off her wrist and placed it on the wrist of the body.
“The bracelet…I remember it now. I hadn’t seen it before.”
“I bought it at the market after I left you tonight,” she said. “I liked it.”
Alexander stood and rushed to a long cabinet against one wall. The cabinet was made of wood, and had several shelves built into it, like a cross between an armoire and a Chinese herbalist’s chest of drawers. He opened a drawer and pulled out a folded piece of burgundy cloth — one of his own robes. He handed it to Acca, and she quickly wrapped the fabric about her body, folding and twisting it until it covered all but her shoulders.
“We need to go,” King said.
Just then they heard a loud clanking in the stairwell beyond the doorway from which Acca had appeared.
“He’s back,” she whispered.
“Run,” Alexander said.
FORTY-NINE
Queen’s fingers went slack. Her weapon fell to the ground.
Her jaw hung open, and a single phrase got lodged in her mind.
Not. Fucking. Possible.
To say that the immense statue rising from the sea was gigantic would have been an insult to it. She had been to Liberty Island once in New York. She had learned that the Statue of Liberty stood 151 feet tall — just over 300 feet with its concrete and granite pedestal. This thing was probably close to 300 feet on its own. The spires on its crown made the resemblance uncanny. This monstrosity could have been Liberty’s father. It wore a long cape of bronze with a greenish patina, and while the cape was stiff, and did not move like cloth, it did move. The rest of the statue was nude except for a small loin-cloth. The muscles of the bare chest were flat and chiseled — a bit un-lifelike, if she thought about it. The pecs were too square, the abs too circular. The sculptors had envisioned a perfect warrior, but the dimensions were off just slightly. The overall effect was compounded by the inclusion of sea growths of coral and large swatches of seaweed, draped over the joints.
Through her disbelief and shock, she recognized it for what it was.
The Colossus of Rhodes.
But how? I thought it had been dismantled years after it fell. And how the hell did it get here, all the way across the Med?
Bishop, ever the man of few words, simply leaned down, picked up her dusty MP-5 and handed it back to her.
Queen took her weapon and forced her mind back to the moment at hand. “Kill Ridley and Seth. That’s priority number one. We get them, and that fucker topples.”
“What I was thinking,” Bishop said. He started running for Ridley’s position on the shore, as the immense statue took another step out of the sea, and onto land.
Queen raced after him.
They were already within an effective range of Ridley’s group, but she held off until she closed to within seventy-five feet. She raised her weapon, and while still running at the group of men on the shore, she started firing a spray of bullets at a rate of 800 rounds a minute.
Bishop took cover behind one of the standing columns of the Baths. He joined her in laying into the enemy.
Queen took up position behind a block of stone at the end of a wall and kept firing.
One of the men in black was hit in the arm, but then both men quickly returned fire with their AK-47s.
The world’s most recognizable assault rifle had a much longer effective range than the MP-5 submachine guns, but they were all within range of each other now, so it made little difference.
Seth and Ridley had leapt for cover. To Queen’s satisfaction, the humongous statue had stopped walking once it reached the shore. Ridley needs to concentrate to control it. Hard to do that with bullets flying all around.
She smirked, but she knew the reprieve wouldn’t last long.
“Queen, you read?” Deep Blue was in her ear. “What the hell am I seeing on satellite?”
“That would be the Colossus of Rhodes, golem-style. We really need that support. Now.”
“They’re forty minutes out.”
“This will be over in forty minutes! This thing is 300 feet tall. And it looks pissed. We’re trying to keep Ridley and his twin under fire. If they can’t concentrate, they can’t use the language to work the statue. But that won’t last long. Especially if they have reinforcements on the ground already.”
“They do. I’m seeing close to a battalion of men coming your way.”
“Then you better tell them to hurry. That or bring body bags. Lots of them.”
Queen switched channels, and called for Knight. No reply. She tried Rook.
“Where you at, ma puce? You better have some fuckin’ good news for me.”
Rook’s voice came through with a lot of background hiss, like he was in a wind tunnel. “Would it help if I said ‘I can see my house from here?’”
Queen raised her hand to shield her eyes from the glare of the morning sun as she looked up, up, up, to the top of the statue’s immense head. She could only just make out movement all the way up there. He actually looked like a flea at that height.
“Sweet holy Moses,” she said.
FIFTY
Darius Ridley whipped his foot back and delivered another whopping kick to the tiny slant-eyed bastard’s stomach, a huge grin spreading across his face. His plan had gone completely to hell, but he was still having the time of his life.
Somehow, and he couldn’t figure out how it had happened, Richard’s lackey clones had co-opted his mercenary force, and turned at least some of them against him. It should have been simple. Wait until the doubles and the Chess Team were inside, then swoop in covering all the exits and kill everybody. But the Chess Team, had put up a fight, and his team was sloppy. Stepped all over each other. The facility had jammed their communications — although that should have worked to their advantage, preventing the Chess Team from coordinating their response to the unexpected attack. His men shouldn’t have needed the coms — they knew what to do and how to do it.
Still, things had gone pear-shaped. As soon as he heard that their communications gear wasn’t working underground, he had held back. After the first explosion, when he began getting reports back to him by runner that they were encountering heavy close quarters resistance, he had retreated to the safety of the loading dock vehicle tunnel. The enemy had dug in from the gallery and the security suite on Sub Level 3. Even though his men should have been able to flank the bastards from the north stairwell, they were suddenly encountering resistance on all levels of the facility — and his reinforcements never came. That was when he had left his men behind and run up the ramp to the parking garage, looking for his men at the fountain entrance.