That was all, a handful of sentences couched in Zeus's usual orotund tones, delivered to camera with blazing eyes and furrowed brow. If the king of the Pantheon suspected foul play in connection with the Cyclops's demise, it showed in neither his face nor his words. Landesman, certainly, was convinced the Olympians were ignorant of the truth behind the apparent misfortune.
"We pulled it off," he had said, with quiet vindication. "I'd've preferred to have done it without losing anyone, but still — we pulled it off."
Sparks, watching Sam's face, noted scepticism there. Sam was trying hard to hide it but couldn't quite manage to.
"You ain't a believer," she said. "That's OK. Can't all of us be believers, though the Lord'd like it that way. He lets some folk think they can do without faith, 'til they realise they can't. It's all part of His plan, sister. All part of His plan. You'll get there in the end."
"Maybe," Sam said. "It's possible, I suppose."
"You're a good person, no doubt about it. There's some among our number who's not deserving of His grace and mercy, but you ain't one of them. Your heart is true, and you're doing the Lord's work, whether you realise it or not. We all are."
"We are?"
"Sure we are!" Sparks said, wide-eyed, as though it was the most obvious thing in the world. "Them Olympians go around calling themselves gods. That is an offence in His eyes. No one can call themself that but Him. So somebody taking those guys out, knocking 'em off their perch? That's His work all right. And now through His infinite wisdom He's given me the chance to slay the evil beast that took my Nanna and my Aunt Celeste and my Uncle Hubert. An eye for an eye. I bless Him for that, and I bless His agent on earth Mr Landesman too, and I relish the thought of being the one to rid the world of that thing."
Sam couldn't not ask. "Some among us who don't deserve God's grace and mercy? Anyone specifically?"
"I won't name names," Sparks said in low, conspir-atorial tones, "but… you know." She cast a glance over her shoulder, towards the rear of the cabin.
Sam immediately looked at Barrington, who had contrived to remain asleep despite the bout of turbulence.
"Dez is a bit rough round the edges, I grant you," she said, dropping her voice to match the other woman's. "Not the most enlightened of human beings. And his sense of humour is, let's say, an acquired taste. But basically he's sound."
"Oh no, not him," Sparks said, now whispering. "Her. The sinner."
Sam transferred her gaze to Hamel, who was staring out of a porthole, still in thrall to her music.
"Oh," she said.
"'If there is a man who lies with a male as those who lie with a woman, both of them have committed a detestable act; they shall surely be put to death. Their bloodguiltness is upon them.' Leviticus. Applies to the ladies as well." Sparks mimed a shudder. "She's an abomination. Makes my skin crawl just being in the same room as her."
"She's — she's a good person too."
"That's as may be, but she has chosen a lifestyle that is sick and unclean and will damn her soul to hell for all eternity."
"But she's one of us, doing God's work with us. Surely that, well, redeems her?"
"Afraid not." Sparks's dark eyes were as hard as coal. "'Less she renounces her deviant ways, whatever deeds she's done in life won't save her from His judgement. Oh, don't worry. I can tell what you're thinking. I'll work alongside her, I'll be her comrade-in-arms, I'll have her back, you needn't have any doubts on that score. Just don't ask me to be her friend, OK?"
"OK." Sam looked back at Hamel, who caught her eye briefly then returned her attention to the view outside. Sam wondered whether the Canadian had overheard anything Sparks had just said. Likely not. The music was still hissing in Hamel's earbuds, and Sparks had done her best to be discreet. All the same, it was conceivable that the odd word might have leaked through, enough to enlighten Hamel as to her fellow Titan's true feelings about her. Perhaps she knew anyway. Neither woman much cared for the other. There'd been mutual antipathy there almost from the start. Maybe Hamel had sensed Sparks's disapproval and divined the reason behind it without having to be told.
Sam shunted it to the back of her mind. It wasn't a problem — wouldn't be as long as it didn't interfere with the op.
"Commencing our descent now," co-pilot Greene announced. "We should be landing in — "
The rest was drowned out by a fart from Barrington that was so raucous and percussive he startled himself awake with it.
"Strewth!" he cried, sitting up and glancing worriedly out of a porthole. "Was that a bird strike? Are we about to crash?"
"We," said Sam, with a pained expression, fanning her face, "should be so lucky."
19. THE EVERGLADES
K nee-deep in swamp and spatterdock lilies, they moved in a staggered line, weapons at the ready. The air wasn't much less foetid and soupy than the water they were wading through. Warbling birdcalls echoed through the tree canopy overhead. Flying insects whined about their faces and stung the few portions of exposed skin available. Spanish moss dangled from the boughs of overhanging oaks and mangroves, brushing their helmets like dry, insubstantial fingers. Forest-pattern camouflage turned each Titan into walking vegetation, human-shaped embodiments of their surroundings. They trod like ghosts, dark dazzle green through dark dazzle green, and the Everglades spread around them, mile upon mile upon mile of it, steaming and overgrown and silty, neither earth nor sea but the worst possible merging of the two elements: unsolid, humid, a vast rotting floorboard of a place.
This had been the home of the Hydra for going on four years now. Originally the monster had been deployed by the Olympians in southern Texas as part of their strategy for dealing with an armed insurrection that was going on there, in and around Houston. Once that was successfully quelled, and the ringleaders treated to a public execution, the Olympians had left the Hydra behind, a kind of memento, a token to remind those rednecks not to get too uppity again, and also something for them to focus on so that further rebellion would be far from their thoughts. A large, multi-headed reptilian creature roaming the countryside, attacking ranches and homesteads and killing cattle and even the odd human was, after all, quite a demand on people's attention, and quite a drain on the state's appetite for violent confrontation.
Soon, however, the Hydra had decided it found the arid Texan climate uncongenial and it had gravitated east towards the Mississippi Delta, a habitat moister and muddier and much more to the monster's liking. For a time it had wallowed contentedly in the New Orleans region, prowling the bayous and lurking in the levees. It was during that period that Kayla Sparks's relatives had had the bad luck to run into it late one night while driving home from dinner at a seafood restaurant in Port Sulphur. Their bellies full of crawfish soup and soft-shell crab, they'd run into the Hydra on a lonely northbound stretch of Highway 23. Or actually, not run into. Sparks's Uncle Hubert had swerved his Ford Taurus off the road in order to avoid a head-on collision with the monster, and the car had ploughed nose-first down a steep bank into a gully.
Had Hubert, his wife and her mother died instantly in the crash, that would have been a mercy. But seatbelts and airbags preserved all three of them from fatal injury and reserved all three of them for a far worse fate. The Hydra descended the bank to the wrecked vehicle and proceeded to devour the dazed occupants more or less simultaneously, reaching in through the smashed-out windows with separate heads, hauling the family members out and tearing them apart. Louisiana PD had pieced the sequence of events together from the available evidence: skidmarks, Hydra spoor — oh, and the appalling bloody carnage of human remains that surrounded the Taurus for several yards in every direction.