The Curse of Medusa

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

Scarlet appeared on the deck wearing a gas mask and holding the Medusa box. At once she saw Kiefel register what had happened while at the same time half a dozen military helicopters flew over the water and surrounded them.

Kiefel, now trapped like a wounded wolf, was more dangerous than ever. Scarlet watched in horror as he dragged the injured President at gunpoint to the edge of the yacht. The German’s desperate swivel-eyed stare told her he knew what would happen if he could no longer use Grant as a human shield.

“It’s over, Kiefel!” Doyle screamed. “Just let the President walk away and you can live.”

“Get away from me!” The German’s head craned wildly as he strained to monitor the latest military chopper arriving on the scene, shining its powerful Xenon short-arc lamp down on him and tracking him as he moved closer to the edge.

“Give it up, Klaus!” Scarlet shouted, keeping her gun aimed squarely at Kiefel’s throat. She knew from her training that putting a nine mil through his throat was the quickest way to cut the nerve signals from his brain to his trigger finger. “You’re lit up like Christmas — you can’t get away!”

“I said get away from me, you animals… and put that gun down at once or I shoot the President.”

“Fine with me,” Scarlet said. “In fact, why should you have all the fun?”

Without wasting a second she moved her gun to the right and shot President Grant in the shoulder. He spun out of Kiefel’s grip and fell overboard.

Doyle gasped in horror. “What the hell?”

“Save your President, Doyle. He hasn’t got long with that wound.”

Still stunned, Doyle immediately dived in after him while Kiefel turned and fired several shots at him as he disappeared into the black water. Scarlet was sure Grant would be fine. It was a clear through and through shot as they said in the trade, and her aim was good enough to know the bullet had gone on its way without hitting anything important.

Kiefel now held his gun in his outstretched arm. It trembled in his hand.

“That’s a Heckler & Koch USP Compact 45 ACP, Klaus, which means it carries twelve rounds. If I’m not mistaken you fired nine at me and Doyle back there after you reloaded, and three right then at the water. You’re out of bullets, and out of luck.”

“So you’re going to shoot me, is that it?”

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” she said. As she spoke, she dragged the metal box out from behind the forward lifeboat. Above their heads several men were shouting orders through megaphones attached to the circling choppers.

Kiefel recognized the box at once. “Was machen sie? What are you doing with that?”

“Irony can be beautiful, Klaus, and it can be ugly.”

Scarlet opened the outer box, calmly and quietly. “For you, it’s going to be ugly.”

She opened the inner box and had to work hard not to recoil in horror at what she saw looking back up at her.

The severed head of Medusa.

She lifted it from the box and walked toward Kiefel.

Covered in sweat, he stumbled back, pointing his empty gun at the Englishwoman’s heart and clicking uselessly on the trigger. He started to climb over the forward rail with a view to jumping in the water, but it was too late. Now he knew why she was wearing the gas mask and gloves.

She held the head up to him and the breeze did the rest.

Scarlet watched in silence as he gripped at his throat, choking. His eyes bulged like boiled eggs as he strained for more air, and then his body began juddering violently. Right before her eyes, almost as smooth as some kind of CGI, she saw him transition to stone and turn into a statue. He reached out to her, his arms extended in a desperate entreaty for mercy, but none was forthcoming.

In the final second before he was solid stone, she stepped up to him and whispered in his ear. “I’m going to take you home and use you as a towel rack.”

As Kiefel finalized the transition to solid granite, he tipped back and crashed into the river with a tremendous splash. Scarlet was disappointed — she’d been serious about the towel rack idea — but, as they said in the movies, que sera, sera.

Devlin knelt beside Lea and looked her in the face. She was still in shock and hadn’t spoken for several minutes.

“What is it, Lea? Jesus woman, you’ve gone as white as a ghost!”

“It’s… I don’t know. It’s freaking me out is what it’s doing, Danny.”

“I don’t understand.”

Devlin peered over her shoulder and gently flicked through the paperwork that had stunned Lea. “What are these words, Lea — Mengloth, Frigg, Eir…?”

“I don’t know — something to do with Norse mythology if I can read Dad’s handwriting properly.”

“Well, he was a doctor.”

She looked at him. “Really, now you make jokes about my Dad?”

“Sorry.”

“Forget it. His handwriting was atrocious, but this here definitely says Norse, and something about runic inscriptions and here is something about the power of healing.”

“So what’s freaking you out?”

“This word here, Danny. This word here is what’s freaking me out.”

She put her finger gently to the page, underlining a single, simple word written in her father’s hand, but legible as it was in large capital letters and underlined three times. She couldn’t bear to look at it, and turned her head away. She stared at the clouds outside the window as Danny followed her hand and read the word.

“Athanatoi.”

A long pause. “I hate that word, Danny.”

“What does it mean?”

“It means trouble, Danny. Real, big trouble.” She wiped a tear away from her eye and took a deep breath. “What the hell was Dad doing?”

Before anyone could answer, a strange voice emanated from the shadows.

“Tu veux une clope, Miss Donovan?”

They scrambled for their guns but it was too late. Before they could defend themselves the man stepped into the light and shouted an order at them to stay where they were. To back up his point, he pointed the barrel of a MAT-49 submachine gun at them. “And if you think you can rush me, then you should know I have a colleague standing just there.”

They turned to see where the first man was pointing, and another man with a MAT-49 stepped through the door.

“We made use of your side door — allow me to introduce myself. You can call me Lefevre, and this is Devos.”

“I don’t give a rat’s arse who you are!” Mikey lunged for the shotgun on the table, grabbing the stock with the tips of his fat fingers but not quite getting hold of it. It slipped from his hand but he never knew it. Lea watched in horror as the two men opened fire on him and filled him full of lead. The bullets tore through his jacket and exploded in his chest and throat, propelling the large Irishman back through the open door and blasting him down on the gravel drive where he landed with a sickening crunch.

“No!” Kyle screamed, reaching for the same shotgun. He was closer and more agile, and managed to grab hold of the barrel and pull it toward him before the two men turned their weapons on him too. They drilled dozens of needless rounds through his body until he resembled a human pin-cushion, collapsing to the floor in a cloud of gun-smoke when the men had finally finished.

“Same happens to you two if you try anything, oui?”

Lea was too stunned to reply, and despite his extensive experience in the military, even Devlin could barely believe his eyes.

“Give me the file, Miss Donovan.”

“How do you know who I am?” Lea said. “Who are you?”

“I know exactly who you are, Irishwoman. You think I do a job tracking down Henry Donovan’s research files and not find out about his daughter? Bringing the notes to my employer will make me a very rich man, but there is a great bonus. I know a man in the Far East named Luk who is going to pay me a small fortune to deliver you to him… Now — get up slowly.”

“Mr Luk?” Lea’s stomach turned with nausea as she recalled his torture chamber back on Dragon Island.

The man pointed the gun at the door and Lea rose slowly from the table.

“We’re going outside,” the man said. He pointed the gun at Devlin. “You, sadly, are staying in here.” Without saying another word he shot Devlin in the darkness. Lea screamed as she watched her former CO collapse to the floor wordlessly.

The other gunman, the one who had not yet spoken, began to pour petrol around the inside of the kitchen and up the outside walls of the cottage. He took a final drag on his cigarette and casually flicked it at the small cottage.

Lea jumped back as the flames raced up the side of her childhood holiday home and began to eat their way inside like a pack of hungry wolves. “You bastards…” she tried to say, but it came out weaker than a whisper and sounded not angry, but pathetic. She tried to run inside to save Danny but the men held her back.

She turned to the man, her heart full of hate and rage. It was then she saw they both had tattoos on their arms — tattoos of a specific kind of burning grenade she had seen somewhere before.

“Bonne nuit, Miss Donovan,” he said.

She felt the butt of a submachine gun smash into the side of her head and then everything went black.