The Curse of Medusa

Grant watched as Kiefel took his pistol and tapped it against the young woman’s head. It made a soul-draining plink plink plink sound. It sounded exactly like he was tapping the metal gun against a piece of granite.

Where a woman had once lived, there now stood a statue.

Kiefel ran a hand across the statue’s face, lingering on its smooth marble-like cheek. “Don’t you think she is so much more beautiful now? The ancient Greeks dismissed the love of statues as a psychological defect — agalmatophilia, they called it — but they were wrong, and so we are wrong today as well. Now, rendered in perfectly smooth stone, this woman’s beauty has increased tenfold!”

“What the hell have you done?” Grant said, mumbling his words in fear.

“I have reawakened an ancient force, Mr Grant. An ancient weapon — the original Doomsday weapon… and it’s mine! Soon your whole country will be no more than a theme park full of statues for my personal amusement.”

“God save us!” Grant said.

Kiefel spun around and stared at him through the mask. “And which god would that be, Mr Grant? Zeus? Apollo perhaps? Perseus?” As he said this last word his voice broke into laughter, and he walked the head back over to the box, gently lowering it inside and closing the lid tightly. He did the same to the steel lid and then removed his mask.

“Angelika, it is time for you to start your work with Medusa.” He turned and pointed a gloved finger at some of his men. “Pick up this box and follow Angelika to the lab.”

Grant shook his head in total disbelief at what his eyes and ears were telling him.

“What are you doing now?” he asked desperately.

“This is for me to know and you to find out, Mr Grant.”

“You really are a madman, Klaus.”

“Repeating the accusation over and over will not make it so, Charlie!” he snapped. “Could a madman orchestrate the decapitation of the entire United States Top Brass and put his own man in the Oval Office?”

Grant breathed harder as he took off his mask. He was starting to feel hot and sick. Partridge also removed his mask, following the President’s lead.

“You mean..?”

“Ah — the penny drops! Yes, Teddy Kimble is in my pocket — is that the expression you Americans use?”

“I can’t believe it!”

“A President and Vice President are too high up the tree to reach, and in fact so is your Speaker, but Kimble was easier to get to. That is why he is now in the Oval Office.”

“My God, you killed two good men and kidnapped me just to put Kimble in the Oval Office?”

“Daring, aren’t I?”

Grant struggled to understand why any of this was happening. There had to be something real at the bottom of it all. This had to be about more than just the lust for power.

“What is this insanity about, Kiefel — money? Power?”

Kiefel stared at him with ice cold eyes for a long moment without speaking. “You disappoint me, Mr Grant, but then Americans have a habit of doing that. Another habit of yours is reducing everything to those two things you just mentioned — money and power.”

“Well if not that then what, damn it?!”

Kiefel paused again, he looked like he was mulling something over. Then, his facial expression turned darker than ever before. “Kiefel is my mother’s maiden name, Mr Grant. Perhaps if I told you my real name — Kallweit — your memory will begin to work?”

A look of realization suddenly dawned on Charles Grant’s face. “Wait a minute — your mother was Elfriede Kallweit?”

“Ah ha!” Kiefel exclaimed, his voice laced with bitterness. “Give this man a Cuban cigar — he has it!”

“That’s what this is all about — your mother?”

“Your country executed my mother on trumped-up espionage charges in 1955. She was a good woman — a good East German, and loyal to the Soviet Union. You killed her. For this, Mr President, you and your nation will pay a terrible price.”

“That’s what this is all about — revenge? You murdered your way to me to avenge the death of your mother over sixty years ago?”

Kiefel glared at him. “You say death as if she had fallen over while picnicking, Mr President. My mother was shocked to death in Old Sparky — isn’t that the quaint little expression you use to describe the electric chair? It took four shocks to kill her, Mr Grant. By the time they had finished, smoke poured from her head like a chimney.”

“Elfriede Kallweit was notorious a Soviet spy! The scandal rocked the nation.”

“My mother was innocent! The Americans needed a scapegoat and my mother was in the wrong place at the wrong time. For this, she was savagely killed by your so-called criminal justice system.”

Grant stared at the man, unsure whether to feel pity or rage. “You can’t seriously be suggesting the entire American people deserve to be punished because your traitor mother leaked defense secrets to the Soviets?”