She couldn't know, she supposed, until the actual moment arrived.
Ramsay's behaviour in Bruges wasn't, at any rate, of primary importance just then, and even the shock of Chisholm's death took a backseat when it emerged that phone footage had been recorded of the Titans' attack on the Lamia and uploaded onto the internet. The Agonides wannabe in Bruges had filmed everything that had occurred from Sam closing in on the monster to Ramsay lobbing rockets into the canal. Ramsay hadn't had a chance to confiscate his phone, and the teenager had fled the scene while Ramsay and Sam were preoccupied with fishing Chisholm's body out of the canal, and now the clip was all over the Web. It was a worldwide sensation, pinging to and fro across the globe as an email attachment, copies of it cropping up on countless blogs, homepages and networking sites, link leading to link. It proliferated so far, so fast, that by the time Argus became aware of its existence and set about the business of suppressing and erasing, he was too late. The clip was digital ivy, and for every tendril that the Hundred-Eyed One pruned another three sprang up elsewhere. There was hardly a crevice of the internet it didn't take root in, hardly a website that didn't give it a purchase to affix itself to.
The footage itself wasn't much to look at — less than a minute's worth of shaky, murky playback. All the figures in it were fuzzed at the edges, their outlines dissolving into a haze of blocky pixels as they moved. At times the low ambient light rendered the four participants little more than indistinct grey silhouettes. Nonetheless the muzzle flash from Sam's gun and the backblast from Ramsay's rocket launcher were spectacularly bright and dramatic, white rips in the darkness, and, for all the blurriness, it was obvious what was going on. It was obvious, too, that the three military-looking individuals in the clip were not conventional soldiers. The Agonides' own website, where, naturally, the footage first appeared, made this point in the accompanying commentary.
"They have no insignia," someone had written, in excitable and somewhat stilted English. "They belonging to no country. Their battle armour is like nothing anyone has seen before. Who are this people? We donot know. But they are kiiling Olympian monsters and so we salute them and are offering them our every support. GO, STRANGERS! THE WORLD
IS WITH YOU!! FIGHT THE GOOD FIGHT!!!"
"It's an unmitigated disaster," said Lillicrap. He, Landesman and Sam were in the command centre, channel-hopping. The international news networks had picked up on the phone clip and were airing it over and over again for the benefit of, presumably, the last half-dozen people left on the planet who'd failed to catch it online.
"Is it?" said Landesman.
"Isn't it?" came the plaintive reply, Lillicrap no longer sure of his opinions, no longer sure if he even had opinions of any value still.
"I admit that I'd have preferred not to go public quite so soon," said his boss. "A little longer in the shadows would have been no bad thing. But this was inevitably going to happen. The Titans were inevitably going to be spotted and, yes, filmed by somebody. And now that it's happened, we should be thanking our lucky stars that, one, you can't see anyone's face, so we've managed to keep our anonymity from being compromised; and, two, the footage makes it abundantly clear what the Titans are about. Agreed, Sam?"
"It doesn't leave much room for doubt as to who the good guys and the bad guys are," Sam said. "You've got the Lamia biting Nigel's neck. You've got us — well, me — trying to save Nigel. You've got Rick taking no prisoners once the Lamia's in the water. To the average punter we look compassionate but seriously hardcore. I think that sends out the right message. We were fortunate, too, that the Agonides got the footage up first, them being naturally inclined to be sympathetic to our cause. They put the most positive spin on it that we could hope for, and that may well have influenced how others feel about it. First impressions count."
"Although not everyone, it seems, is happy." Landesman toggled the screens to show a broadcast of live proceedings from the House of Commons. "Bartlett's in the middle of making a statement to Parliament. Look at his face. No prizes for guessing what tack he's taking."
"…inexcusable and unforgivable," the prime minister rumbled. The Honourable Members around him nodded and lowed like cattle at milking time. "The Olympians have done nothing to provoke these fiendish, murderous attacks on their prodigies, Mr Speaker, nothing to invite such wilful, premeditated acts of slaughter. Nothing whatsoever."
"Did he just say 'fiendish'?" said Sam.
"It's 'prodigies' I'm having difficulty with," said Landesman. "I daresay someone on his speechwriting team was handed a thesaurus and charged with finding the most euphemistic synonym for 'monster.'"
"These people, whoever they may be," Bartlett continued, "may think of themselves as agitators. Liberators. Freedom fighters. But let me tell you this." He thumped the despatch box with a statesmanlike fist. "They do not fight for my freedom, nor for the freedom of the Great British public."
This elicited plenty of "Hear! Hear!" — ing from his cabinet and backbenchers, and from across the floor as well.
"Great British public," Landesman echoed. "Words that always get a cheer in the Commons, regardless of what's actually being said. It's a political Pavlovian bell, and my, how it makes the dogs salivate!"
"No," said Bartlett, "what they are, Mr Speaker, what they so abundantly and incontrovertibly are, are terrorists."
Landesman heaved a theatrical sigh. "And there it is. The T-word. I knew it was coming. Didn't I say, Jolyon? Didn't I predict it?"
"You did, Mr Landesman."
"The minute we emerged into the limelight, some political stooge or other would get up on his hind legs and call us terrorists. I knew it would happen. And I'd have laid good money on it being Capitulating Catesby, too. We should have had a wager, Jolyon."
"I would have been foolish to take on that wager, sir, knowing I would surely lose. Rashly dispensing money is not something I'm too fond of."
"Yes, yes, no need to remind me. King of the purse strings. Master of the budget. We all know how diligent you are at your job."
"Or try to be. When I get the chance."
"It wasn't a complai- Oh, now hold on. What's this?" Landesman flipped to a different channel, an inset picture expanding to fill the entire screen. It was an American local news affiliate, and the words "Live From New York" were emblazoned across the top. Reasonably steady handheld camerawork showed a brawny, thickset figure staggering along a Manhattan street. The time was approaching noon, EST, and the person onscreen looked horribly drunk. He pinballed from lamppost to shopfront to parked car.
Which would have been unremarkable, perhaps, were it not for the fact that the figure was clad in a loincloth and a lion-skin cloak and that each time he collided with something it bent or broke. Behind him he had left a trail of damage — shattered plate-glass windows, tilted streetlights, splintered tree trunks, deeply dented car wings. Burglar alarms were whooping. Car alarms were wailing. Manhattanites could be seen peering out from office windows above or looking nervously on from the opposite side of the road.
"Hercules," Sam said, and sure enough, it was the ultra-strong Olympian, and the only conclusion to be drawn from his behaviour was that he'd just come from enjoying ample hospitality at some downtown bar, probably one of his favourite Chelsea or Greenwich Village hangouts.
A reporter, off-camera, was providing a breathless, blow-by-blow commentary.
"So, yeah, Hercules has been on the rampage for maybe half an hour now," he said, "and we have these amazing scenes of carnage that we're sending you, I mean look at him, he's out of control, totally blotto, got to be, and you can probably hear him, the guy's shouting, through it's impossible to make out what he's actually saying, it's all just kind of a incoherent howl, but — holy cow! Did you see that?" To the cameraman: "Did you get that, Chuck? Hercules just, just, he just walked into a mailbox, and he seemed to hurt himself, stub his toe maybe, and so he just kicked the thing, kicked it clean across the street, and now it's, well, it's embedded I guess is the word, embedded in the side of that building over there, jeez, that was some kick, dude should think of trying out for the NFL, 'cause that mailbox is well and truly stuck in the wall of that building, like a dart in a dartboard, and now — whoa! Somebody's SUV is taking a pasting. Zoom in on that, Chuck. Got it? Herc is really not pleased with that car, he's real ticked off with it, maybe he doesn't like four-by-fours, you know, gas guzzlers, maybe there's some kind of eco thing going on here…"