The Curse of Medusa

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.”