The Age of Zeus

31. THE AGONIDES CLIP

N igel Chisholm was laid to rest at Bleaney. His grave was dug on a windswept slope looking out to sea. His headstone was a cairn which Sam and Mahmoud built painstakingly and to which Landesman and all of the Titans ceremonially added a small rock on top, a way of paying their respects. There was no funeral service as such, just this silent piling-on of rocks followed by a few minutes of sombre reflection. Each Titan was acutely aware that he or she, too, might one day be killed in action. Chisholm's death brought home that fact even more forcefully than Eto'o's had. Each foresaw the possibility of being interred next to him on this very stretch of hillside and of the single burial site soon becoming a cemetery, the number of graves increasing as the number of mourners dwindled. Here, in that six-foot-long rectangle of spaded-over turf, that waist-high stack of small black stones, was irrefutable evidence of the risks they faced and the extreme price they might have to pay. It would be fair to state that the Titans' thoughts were more on themselves, that blustery April morning, than on their fallen comrade. But then, wasn't that often so with funerals? There but for the grace of God go I. Or rather, in this instance, of gods.

Tsang delivered a brief, muted elegy. He said he'd been glad to have Nigel Chisholm as a colleague and as a friend. Then, to round off the proceedings, Sparks led everyone in a prayer. She extemporised much in the manner of the Baptist preachers whose services she regularly attended back in New Orleans, stitching gilded strands of scripture into the plain cloth of more colloquial phrasing. Her loud "ay-men" at the end was echoed by the others with degrees of enthusiasm ranging from sheepish to none at all. Only Ramsay put any real effort into it, almost as if he had something to prove.

Ramsay had been testy and on edge since coming back from Bruges. He wasn't a man who often felt the need to defend anything he did or answer for his actions to anyone but himself. He was anticipating criticism, though, and so was ready to meet even a hint of it with a counterblast of self-justification.

"You'd have fired too," had been his refrain whenever anyone even looked like mentioning Chisholm. "The Lamia was going to get away. Nigel didn't have a hope of surviving. I weighed it up and I made a call and I can live with that call and if I can then so the hell can you."

For Sam the problem was not so much that Ramsay had sent rockets into the canal but that he'd been willing to send them at the Lamia moments earlier, while the monster was still on the bridge, mouth fastened to Chisholm's neck. He had held off from pulling the trigger, but he'd wanted to, and probably would have if she hadn't stopped him.

She'd challenged him on this during the van ride out of Bruges, and Ramsay's answer had been: "Nigel's suit would have protected him. Ain't that right, McCann? A TITAN suit can withstand an indirect hit from a rocket, yeah?"

"Uhh… maybe," McCann had replied, his tone implying But I wouldn't bet on it.

"It would have," Ramsay had said, staring down at his gauntleted hands. "It would."

Will I be like that? Sam had asked herself, looking across at the Chicagoan from the other side of the van's rear cab. Chisholm's body lay between them, rocking with the van's motion, lent a jerky semblance of life by every bump and pothole in the road. Will I be the same as Rick when I come up against Apollo and Artemis? When I'm facing them, will nothing matter except my revenge, not even the safety of others?

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