The Age Of Zeus (41 page)

Then, having insulted his hostess, although Paulita's desperate grin tried to convey that her skin was thick enough to take it, Zeus found a camera, gazed deep into the lens, and said, "Above all, not
you
. I am not scared of
you
. I know who you are now, and I will tell you this. '
Mai phunai ton hapanta nika logon
.'"

On the next news bulletin on the same channel, an Associate Professor of Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies at Harvard was consulted. He claimed he could identify the quotation. It was Sophocles,
Oedipus At Colonus
, a line from the antistrophe to one of the later Chorus interludes, and it translated as "Not to be born is, past all prizing, best" - although, the distinguished academic added somewhat archly, Zeus's pronunciation of Ancient Greek left something to be desired.

The significance of the quotation was much debated in newspaper columns and on TV and radio discussion programmes. It was generally agreed that Zeus had simply been threatening his opponents.
When I'm finished with you
, he'd been implying,
you'll wish you'd never been born
. No deeper interpretation of it was needed than that, or could be divined.

Meanwhile, the great vox pop that was the internet spoke. From habit, it spoke guardedly. Argus was the ever-present ear at the door, the ever-present eye at the keyhole, and a careless comment, a blog entry or chatroom post that was overtly anti-Pantheonic, might lead to unwelcome consequences. Argus could smash a website to pieces, reducing it to a shambles of corrupted code with one of his unstoppable, sledgehammer viruses. He could crash servers and wipe hard drives. And a persistent offender could expect something much worse - a knock at the front door, a personal visit from an Olympian for a terrifying "polite word."

Still, there were ways to state your true feelings that didn't automatically alert the Hundred-Eyed One, or at the worst would result in the relatively mild rebuke of him blocking out the offending comment with his icon - a peacock in full tailfeather display - accompanied by a pro forma warning:
I am watching
. For instance, a set of nicknames had been devised for the Olympians that were so banal as to be unobtrusive. Zeus was "Jerry," Hera was "Jane," Ares "Joe," Apollo "Jack," Artemis "Jill," and so on, meaning that those in the know could write about them in a derogatory or defamatory fashion without fear of censure. Argus had not cottoned on to that particular ruse, the J-Series Cipher.

Nor did he seem to be in on any of the Olympian-uncomplimentary acronyms that were doing the rounds, such as WADWAH (Weak As Dionysus With A Hangover, usually used in reference to a bad joke or a movie that failed to meet up to expectations), MHB (My Hercules's Bitch, a favourite among online gamers, as in "I'm going to beat you at this level and make you MHB"), and LLH (Lame Like Hephaestus, something shoddy or inadequate being compared to that Olympian's physical disability).

Other acronyms were less humorous, less widespread, and more specific in their aim. They were the online equivalent of a Freemasons' handshake, a method of sounding out whether an e-correspondent was a fellow traveller on the path of anti-Pantheonism. These included DODO (Dump Olympians, Destroy Olympus) and GMA! (Gods My Ass/Arse!). Slip one of them into the "conversation" and pretty soon you would know whether you were in sympathetic company or not. The Agonides resorted to them frequently, and Argus remained ignorant of their meaning.

On the internet a broad consensus was developing. The Olympians were, for the first time ever, looking vulnerable. Their iron grip was loosening. The perch they sat on, which for so many years had seem so lofty as to be unassailable, now seemed as though it might be within reach, since someone had managed to knock a couple of them off it.

The doubters had, for once, real fuel for their scepticism. The pessimists were converting to the church of optimism. The cynics were laughing. The scoffers were turning serious. Could this be it? The beginning of the end? Was the closing chapter in the saga of Pantheonic rule being written?

"Jerry was LLH on
Paulita
," ran a typical post. "The J's don't know what's hit them," ran another. "Whoever the guys in the super-suits are, they're MHB-ing the Pantheon," was a common refrain.

More and more, the New Labours of Hercules were coming to be regarded as a cheap ploy by Zeus, a bid for public kudos, an attempt to save some face by winning hearts and minds. It was almost taken as read, now, that Poseidon must have been behind the Staten Island Ferry near-disaster, and some were speculating whether the 25-foot alligator in the New York sewers hadn't just been planted there for Hercules to find. That 'gator was a kind of monster, after all, and the Olympians knew a thing or two about monsters, did they not? It stood to reason.

As for Hercules himself, a certain grudging pity was in evidence. "Jessie," as he was dubbed in J-Series Cipher, was judged to have been a patsy in the whole affair. Zeus had dangled him out there in front of the noses of the monster killers, setting him up as their first Olympian target. They'd taken the bait, and all along Hercules had been oblivious, innocently obeying Zeus's orders, until out of the blue the attack had come. "Jim," a.k.a. Hermes, was never meant to have arrived in time to save him. Zeus had, in other words, sacrificed Hercules in the hope of killing or capturing one or more of the enemy in exchange. Herc the Jerk was a perennial embarrassment for the Olympians. His death was no real loss to "Jerry." Get rid of him, get rid of some of the opposition at the same time - two birds with one stone, win-win, all that. Only, the scheme had backfired, and "Jim" was now MIA. One of the Pantheon's major assets, gone. Little wonder "Jerry" had been in such a grump on the chatshow. He'd made a bold play, and the other team had spanked him.

So ran the sentiment within humankind's electronic collective consciousness, and whether the internet shaped or only reflected the mood out there in the real world, its users were certainly becoming more strident in their views, more daring, more willing to stick their necks out and say what they thought. There was a fever building. The Titans, though no one apart from them knew yet that that was their name, had started the infection, and now it was incubating nicely, replicating, spreading. At last it seemed possible that Pantheonic rule was finite. The future wasn't going to be just year after year of the same old arrogant tyranny, the same old squirming submission.

A tantalising prospect. No more Olympians. If everyone could just get together, following the example of those unknown champions in their strange high-tech armour. If ordinary people would just rise up. If national armies would just unite and march on Olympus. If, if, if...

And as the fever grew, the temperature online rising and the internet buzzing and thrumming with a febrile radical zeal, hardly anyone noticed a brief, anonymous email that was lodged in the Comments and Suggestions section of the British government's official website. Hardly anyone noticed because such emails were routinely discounted and discarded. The UK's leadership had little interest in learning what the common man had to say about the way it ran the country, and even less interest in putting any of the common man's ideas or proposals into practice. The civil servant whose daily chore it was to delete each of these missives didn't even glance twice at this particular one, despite it having as its subject heading the words "I KNOW WHERE OLIMPAN KILLERS R HIDING." All sorts of crazy people wrote in to parliament, and emailers were often the worst. They were the new green-ink brigade. "Disgusted" of wherever-it-was had access to a computer now and no qualms about bombarding those in power with whatever nonsense happened to percolate up in his or her pea-sized brain that day. The poor grammar, the capitals, the misspelling of Olympian, and the textspeak "R" all confirmed that this particular email was the work of yet another uneducated, semiliterate nutcase. The civil servant opened it, ignored the content, pressed Reply, pasted in the stock answer template - "The Prime Minister thanks you for your concern and will address the valid issue you raise as soon as time permits" - then Send, Delete, done. Next!

Someone did sit up and pay attention, however.

Argus.

The email snagged at the fringes of his awareness. His enormous, globe-spanning ether-self felt a tweak, a faint, distant niggling as some lexical filter or other that he had set up years ago probed the content of the communiqué and was made curious. With intangible tentacles the software plucked the email from oblivion, much like a librarian retrieving a tome from the basement or a truffle pig snuffling out a fungal delicacy in the depths of the forest, and brought it winging to the forefront of Argus's mind, for his closer attention. Thousands of operations like this occurred every hour of every day. Argus's life was a perpetual assessment of data, an unending sorting of the relevant from the irrelevant, the pertinent from the impertinent, the tolerable from the intolerable. He would sift everything down further and further until only the finest-graded stuff remained - the credible threats to Pantheonic control, the most insulting or seditious opinions given voice to, the matters that demanded immediate action. He would then inform Zeus, leaving it to the king of the Olympians to determine the appropriate response.

The email in question read:

DEAR MR CATSBEY BARTLET

I CAN TELL U XACTLY WERE THESE PEOPLE R HANGING OUT IT WILL COST THOUGH, IM TALKING MABE A MILLION

"NUMBER 12"

It was the tone of it more than anything that temporarily arrested the billion-baud flow of Argus's thoughts - the certainty, the crude confidence, the cool sincerity. The sender of the email was either a fraudster with nerves of steel or someone with genuine insider intel.

Argus elected to take matters into his own hands, to a degree. Zeus was absent from Olympus at present. A face-to-face consultation would not be possible until his return, and the email merited, Argus felt, face-to-face. In the interim, he had authorisation to let the sender know that the Olympians themselves were taking an interest. It was standard procedure with potential informants. He despatched a peacock icon back along the filepath of the email. It pinged up in the sender's inbox.

Sitting at a terminal in an internet café in south-east London, Darren Pugh at first frowned. Then, as the full implications of the peacock icon dawned on him, his face broke into a broad, feral grin.

48. DETECTIVE WORK

A
t another terminal, underground on Bleaney, Sam sat. Mahmoud sat beside her.

"You're sure about this?" Mahmoud said.

"I'm not sure about anything, Zaina," Sam replied. "All I know is, there's something Landesman's not been telling us. It's been nagging at me for a while. Little things here and there. Like when I was talking to Lillicrap and he used the word 'vendetta.' He tried to make out it was a slip of the tongue, but I don't think it was. And Landesman's behaviour on the whole. I don't buy the whole 'billionaire on a mission to save the world' bit, not any more."

"And this isn't just because you're pissed off with him, after New York?"

"Not just because of that, although I swear to God he knew Kerstin was in trouble and he didn't even think about turning back to go and help her. I'm also pissed off with him because he's been busy avoiding me ever since."

"Due to 'work commitments'?"

"What bloody work commitments? Being a Titan is his job now. What else does he have to do?"

"He still has a business to run. Daedalus Industries is still a going concern."

"Nothing he can't delegate," Sam said. "It's been three days. He's hiding from me. He knows it. I know it. And he knows I know."

"Maybe he's embarrassed. His first op as leader wasn't exactly a roaring success."

"Whatever. The point is, I'm convinced he's been holding out on us. It was watching Zeus on that programme with the chubby woman that clinched it for me."

"Paulita, chubby?"

"Don't you think so?"

"I'd describe her as healthy-looking. Latinas are always quite rounded anyway. Bit like Arab-ethnic women."

"You've got a great figure, Zaina. I'd kill to have boobs like yours."

"Bless you, duck."

"But, if I can get back to my argument..."

"Of course."

"I've lost my thread, actually."

"Zeus on
Paulita
."