“Funny, but that’s what Scarlet Sloane just said to me.”
“Scarlet’s there?”
“Yeah — she landed in the US a few moments ago. Eden sent her and Ryan up here as soon as he found out Medusa was involved in all this. He can’t help himself.”
“Listen, Joe… I have to go.”
He nodded, even though she couldn’t see him. It was an instinctive reaction. “Sure.”
“I’ll call.”
Sure, he thought as the line went dead.
Lea switched her phone off with a scowl, folded her arms and stared out of the windshield without blinking. Outside the car, the Irish countryside flashed by in a rain-streaked blur and she caught her reflection in the window. She looked like she was about ready to murder someone.
“They’ll hypnotize you, you realize that.”
Lea thought about ignoring him, but she had the crazy idea Mikey O’Sullivan wasn’t the type to be ignored. “What will?”
“The windscreen wipers,” he said, pointing a meaty finger at them as they swished back and forth in the heavy rain. “If you stare at them like that you’re sure to be mesmerized.”
“Is that true, Danny?” Lea said, turning her head slightly to the back.
“You can forget about asking him for back-up — they’re both dead to the world.”
She turned to see the Guinness and whiskey had finally caught up with Danny Devlin, and Kyle too had succumbed to the gentle purr of the Audi Quattro’s classic inline five cylinder engine.
“So I take it that was your boyfriend — is that what they’re called these days? I don’t know anymore.”
“Oh, there’s lots of words to describe Joe Hawke. I’m not sure if boyfriend is at the top of my list right now, Mikey.”
He smiled. “You know, my daughter isn’t much younger than you. Maeve’s her name. She says I’m not allowed to talk about stuff like this because it’s so embarrassing.”
For some reason she was surprised that Mikey had a daughter. She couldn’t imagine him living anywhere other than among the oil stains and old carburettors of the salvage yard. He seemed to fit in there just right. Imagining him in a house, with a carpet and wallpaper, and a wife and kids was almost impossible. For a while she let his words hang in the air, but then she spoke. It seemed rude not to. “She sounds like a smart girl.”
He was ready with his reply, and said it with the weary pride that constant repetition brings. “That she certainly is — a lot smarter than her old man and that’s for sure.”
The engine rumbled away under the hood as the car ate up the miles and made its way across the country toward the west coast. Mikey’s reference to ‘her old man’ made her think of her father as she closed her eyes. A heartbeat later she was asleep.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
“This report is freaking me out,” Ryan said, passing it to Alex. “Read the bottom of page two.” She took the report, delivered a few moments ago by one of her father’s senior personal assistants. On the front page of the dossier the words TOP SECRET CODEWORD were stamped in bright red letters.
Alex scanned the page. “Oh my God… this is what Dad was telling me about and it’s just… terrible. It says here that the three men were discovered at a US listening base in northern Norway and that they resembled statues.”
“Your dad knew about this?”
“No, not my dad… the US Secretary of Defense knew about it.” She sighed. “There’s a big difference — just ask my mom.”
“Alex, I have a funny feeling that all this stuff links together. I wonder just how much your Dad knows…”
“I don’t know. Even if I were closer to him I’d never ask. He’d only ever tell me what he wants.”
Ryan shook his head in disbelief and whistled. “It says there that in the attempt to work out what happened five other men were turned to stone. It says that they had it assayed but that despite numerous tests on the statues, they could never prove exactly what kind of stone it was, but it resembled a type of granite with flecks of gold in it.”
They both stared at a series of black and white six-by-fours, taken when the men were discovered back in 1968. The twisted, agonized faces of the men looked just like the one they had seen on the face of Dirk Partridge in Kiefel’s horror show — but here there were three blocks of human-shaped stone standing in the Arctic snow, dead and still.
“I think we’re putting the dots together. We know we’re dealing with the Medusa myth…”
“But it’s not just a myth now.”
“Right. We know it was found in the Arctic ice nearly fifty years ago, brought back to the US and placed in top secret storage in Archive 7. Somehow, our man Kiefel found out about it and wanted to use it against America, but…”
“But he knew it required no less than an Executive Order to have it released and that without that he could never get it out of a place like Archive 7.”
“So there was only one option — put his puppet in the Oval Office and have him release the weapon by Executive Order.”
“Which means we can’t trust Kimble.”
“Right.”
“Right… but where the hell do we go now? I’m struggling to believe this is really happening…. it’s like black magic or something.”
Ryan frowned. “No, it’s not that, there’s no such thing.”
“I’m not so sure anymore, Ryan, and if we can’t work out how this thing is turning people to stone we don’t have a chance of stopping it. You heard him — he’s going to kill President Grant with it — and what if he weaponizes it and disperses it all over the US?”
“We’re not going to let that happen, Alex.”
“That’s easy to say, but what if this thing really is some kind of curse? We can’t fight that with bullets and laptops.”
Ryan sighed and tapped his fingers on the desk for a moment. She saw he was going into one of his daydreams.
“Ryan, please tell me you’re on this and not thinking about blasting some giggle weed or something.”
He turned sharply and fixed his eyes on her. “Is that what you think I’m thinking about?”
“Sorry… all this talk of curses is just freaking me out.”
“Luckily for you, and the people of America I might add, Ryan Bale is thinking about neither giggle weed nor curses.”
“And what is Ryan the Great thinking about?”
He smiled broadly and put his hands behind his head. “Aside from the elephant in the room, you mean?”
“The elephant being why the severed head of a Greek Gorgon was found in ice tens of thousands of years old well north of the Arctic Circle?”
Ryan nodded. “Yes, aside from that elephant… I’m thinking nanoparticles.”
Alex smiled as she pushed her hair back behind her ears. “I knew you were going to say that!”
“How?”
“Because that’s what I was thinking and you’re always five seconds behind me.”
“You’re almost as amusing as Scarlet,” Ryan said with a sarcastic smile. “Last I heard you thought it was a curse.”
“All right, I give in. You win.” As she spoke, Ryan was busy tapping away on his laptop.
“I usually do…”
“You are so arrogant. I had no idea.”
Ryan ignored her. “While you were prattling on just then, I just found this — it’s a fascinating peer-reviewed article regarding the biodiversity of gold nanoparticles and ions…”
“Biodiversity?”
Ryan scanned the document. “Sure. They use silver nanoparticles all the time in manufacturing all kinds of things from cosmetics to socks because when they’re oxidized they become toxic to bacteria and it helps to stop germs from spreading.”