Oracle (22 page)

Ophelia ignored him. 
“What if we tried using the Shew Stone here?” She stuck out a hand. “Let me try?”

Jade shrugged and proffered the orb. Ophelia clutched at it greedily and then started back along the path to the sanctuary. Dorion quickly followed after her.

“Think it’ll work?” Jade asked.

“
Not really.”

“
So what do we do next? I mean after you and,” she nodded suggestively in the direction the others had gone, “sleep on it?”

“
Really, Jade?”

She laughed and took his arm.
“Come on. Let’s go watch the show.”

They found Dorion and Ophelia huddled together on the ruins of Apollo
’s temple, caressing the Shew Stone.

“
Reminds me of the Graeae,” Jade remarked. “Those Greek witches, squabbling over who would get to use their Eye next.”

“
We seem to be short one witch. Maybe you should join them.”

Jade made a face at him. After a few minutes, she leaned close and spoke
in a sotto voice. “How long are we going to let them go at this?”

“
They’ve got to get tired eventually.”

Suddenly one of the bodyguards on the far side of the ruin crumpled to the ground. Professor was instantly alert, poised for action, but before he could make a move, another man was down. He leaped forward
into the ruins and grabbed Dorion and Ophelia, dragging them back to where Jade stood, still uncomprehending.

“
Up the hill!” He shouted. “Run!”

Jade knew better
than to ask questions. She ran.

The air was suddenly alive with faint zipping noises and the sound of men shouting and dying. A single pistol report sounded; one of Ophelia
’s men returning fire, but it was the only shot she heard. The attackers—it had to be Hodges—were using suppressed weapons.

Professor was pounding up the trail beside her, urging Dorion and Ophelia to run faster.
“Turn off your lights,” he said. “They’ll use them to track us.”

Jade complied and for the next few seconds, the world was plunged into total darkness. She tried to orient herself on the noise of footfalls and labored breathing. For a little while, that was all she could hear. There was a subtle change in the feeling of the ground underfoot but before she could make sense of this, her shins struck something hard and unyielding.

“Climb the steps,” Professor urged. His voice was urgent but he sounded strangely calm. He wasn’t even out of breath.

We
’re in the theatre,
Jade realized. She groped forward until she found the obstruction she had barked her shins on, and then hoisted herself onto it. She slid forward until she found the next seating tier and repeated the process. As her night vision gradually improved, she could see the others, just silhouettes in the moonlight. She was out in front; Dorion and Ophelia were lagging, and Professor was urging them on.

“
What if we’re running into an ambush?” Jade managed to ask between labored breaths.

“
Then we’re dead,” he replied, matter-of-factly. “I think they’re all behind us. If they wanted to ambush us, they would have waited and caught us on the trail.”

Something cracked on the stone nearby and
Jade felt chips of stone brush against her face.

“
We’re exposed here,” she called out. “Run to the left. We can get back to the trail.”

Professor did not argue. Jade took that as tacit agreement and heeded her own advice, sprinting along the terrace toward the western edge of the scallop-shaped theatre, even as more bullets started striking all around her.

She was starting to recall the layout of the site, where the ruins were situated in relation to the trail she and Dorion had followed from the modern city of Delphi. She knew that the curved shape of the theatre would turn her south, away from her goal and ultimately bring her right to the unseen hunters stalking them. She started counting her steps, and when she reached a hundred, she turned and started climbing again, ascending several more tiers until the sound of bullets striking stone warned her that it was time to change direction again.

She barely stopped herself before running headlong into a wall at the edge of the ruin. She risked a glance back and saw that the others were still alive and moving, and not far behind. She could also see, far below, several dark shapes, like ants, moving along the dais and the lower tiers. One of them stopped and pointed up in her general direction. A moment later she heard the resonant crack of a bullet striking the rock nearby.

Jade scrambled up several more steps until she spied a break in the theatre perimeter. “This way!”

She crawled through the gap then turned to help pull Ophelia and Dorion through. As Professor clambered up, she risked another look back down at the small army pursuing them.

“Keep going,” Professor shouted. “Climb the hill.”

Jade almost balked. The lights of Delphi were visible above the treetops to the west, and that seemed like a better option than running up Mount Parnassus and hoping that the bad guys would give up and go home.

He knows what he’s doing,
she told herself.
Trust him and don’t be such a control freak.

Easier said than done, especially when every fiber of her body told her to run toward the light.

The one good thing—maybe the only good thing—about running uphill was that it was almost impossible to wander off course. Her quadriceps burned, and while she wasn’t out of breath, she was definitely breathing faster than normal. Dorion and Ophelia were having even more difficulty than she was, barely moving faster than a walking pace. Without the persistent threat behind them, they probably would have already dropped in their tracks.

Jade dropped back to where Professor was trying to cajole them to move faster.
“We can’t keep this up,” she managed to say. “We’re not SEALs.”

She thought she heard him mutter a curse under his breath, then in the same even tone of someone who had barely exerted himself, he said,
“Those guys trying to kill us know that. They also know that the only chance we’ve got is running back into town. They’ll be waiting for us.”

“
If they don’t kill us, the mountain will.” She looked back into the darkness behind them. There was no sign of pursuit, but she knew it would only be a matter of seconds before their foes began emerging from the theatre. “What’s that old saying about the best defense?”

“
Jade, I think these guys are using military hardware, maybe night scopes. We’re unarmed. We don’t even have a rock to roll down on them.”

“
We have to do something.” She knew how useless that sounded, so she added. “This is Greece, right? Where the underdogs always win. Like in ‘300’.”

“
The Spartans got completely wiped out at Thermopylae.” He glanced at the slope ahead, scanning back and forth. “But maybe you’re right. The Spartans were able to hold off the Persian army as long as they did because they chose their battlefield.” He pointed off to the left. “That way,” he said, loud enough for Dorion and Ophelia to hear, and with an intensity that would have shocked a drill instructor he added, “Move your ass!”

An invisible light
show was playing on the slopes Mount Parnassus. Hodges marveled at the dancing laser beams that crisscrossed the mountain side and shot up into the heavens, beams which only he and the others wearing night vision goggles could see. Yet, despite the almost magical spectacle, Hodges felt uneasy. Although the initial phase of the attack had gone off almost perfectly—the bodyguards eliminated in a bloody pre-emptive strike—the primary targets had slipped away. It had been easy enough to track them, but the team had gotten too spread out. Despite Gutierrez’s best efforts to deploy the mercenaries strategically, like pieces on a game board, they had all struck out on their own, driven by bloodlust or machismo or just plain stubbornness. The billionaire, for all his imagined leadership skills, had learned that most basic lesson of warfare: no battle plan survives first contact.

Not
that things were going too badly. They had not suffered a single casualty and from what Hodges could tell, Chapman and the others were running scared, heading up the mountain and away from any possible refuge. If Gutierrez did manage to corral his human hunting dogs, organize them into a picket line and march them up the slope, they would eventually run their prey down.

There was a faint hiss as someone broke squelch over the radio net.
“I’ve got them. Signaling now.”

Hodges scanned the sky until he saw a laser waving back and forth off to his left. He consulted his mental map of the site.
“That’s near the stadium,” he told Gutierrez.

“
So?” grunted the billionaire.

Hodges wondered if the man, in his eagerness to play commando, had bothered to do any map reconnaissance. The stadium, where athlete-warriors from all over Greece had competed in the Pythian Games, was a five hundred foot long open limestone trough, surrounded by a terraced seating area and beyond that, a ring of evergreens.
“There are a lot of places for them to hide there. If we charge in, they might be able to slip out the other end. But if we can surround them, cut off their escape, we’ll have them.

Gutierrez keyed his mic.
“All units, converge on that location.”

Jade counted to
twenty and then darted out from behind the stone structure and ran to the next one in line. As soon as she was behind cover, she pressed herself flat against the rough surface and held her breath. She listened, but heard nothing except the insistent throb of her own heartbeat. She counted, and when she got to twenty, she moved again.

Listen.
Count.

There was a loud snap from somewhere behind her, not a bullet striking stone
, but something more like a twig snapping or a piece of glass crunching underfoot.

Here they come.

There were more sounds from just around the corner, a clicking noise, a scuffle, grunts and a strange animal cry. Then silence. She tried to assemble the pieces of the auditory puzzle, but her apprehension—her raw primal fear—told her something very bad was coming.

She tensed, gripping the flashlight, preparing to shine it at the first hint of movement. If Professor was correct and the men hunting them were wearing night vision goggles, then the brilliant LED light would blind anyone coming around the corner, giving her a chance to strike back. If he was wrong, or if her timing was off even by a second, she would give her position away, and they would be all over her.

“Jade,” hissed Professor. “Coming your way.”

She let her breath out in a low sigh. The plan had worked; she had been the bait, and Professor—the trap—had caught something.

A few seconds later, a silhouette appeared from around the corner. In the moonlight, she could see something half covering a silvery-white face and almost panicked.

“
It’s me,” Professor whispered, as if tuning into her sudden alarm. He passed something to her; a small plastic object that looked like a camera, with straps hanging from it. She knew it had to be some kind of night vision device. “Quick. Put it on.”

Jade slipped it over her head, fitting a small rubber cup.
“I don’t see anything.”

“
These things have a tilt-switch that shuts them off automatically. There’s a little button on top. Turn it off and then back on again. Hurry.”

She did as instructed and winced as a flash of green light hit her fully dilated pupil. The effect was startling. She now saw Professor as clearly as if they were both standing in broad daylight. He had a similar device covering one of his eyes, but that was not his only new acquisition; hanging from a sling over one shoulder was a gun—the kind she always associated with SWAT teams—and there was another one in his hands.

She looked past him and saw clearly for the first time, the stadium where they had decided to make their final stand. Beyond the mountainside was alive with strange dancing lights. They were beautiful and a little frightening.

“
What are those lights?”

“
PAQ4 aiming lasers. They’re invisible to the naked eye, but with NV, all you have to do is point and shoot.”

“
How did they miss us then?”

“
Lasers always point in a straight line. Bullets aren’t quite as predictable, especially with short-barreled weapons. They probably also didn’t take the time to zero them; just grabbed their new toys out of the box and went hunting.”

He handed one of the machine pistols to her.
“Get the others. We’re going.”

“
Going? I thought we were going to fight here.”

“
We don’t have to. Those lasers show us where they are. All we have to do is avoid them.” He held up his hand and showed her a ring of keys. “If we can make it to the bottom of the hill, we’re home free.”

Home free sounded overly optimistic, but Jade didn
’t argue. Gripping the unfamiliar weapon, she ran along the terrace to the seating area that overlooked the stadium floor. She had told Ophelia and Dorian to hide in the trees above the stadium. What had seemed like a good plan in total darkness was now revealed to be sadly deficient; she spotted them almost effortlessly, crouching down behind tree trunks that weren’t broad enough to conceal them.

Professor was right behind her.
“Keep your finger off the trigger unless you’re ready to shoot,” he whispered. “The laser will give your position away. Hurry. They’re almost here.”

She grabbed hold of Dorion and lifted him erect.
“Stay close. We’re going to make a run for it.”

“
I can’t run anymore,” Ophelia protested, still half-panting from the ordeal of climbing the hill.

“
Then I’ll drag you,” Jade threatened.

“
It’s all downhill from here,” Professor added, as if deciding to play good cop to Jade’s bad. “Just a little further.”

Despite his assurance, they were soon climbing again. The assault force was converging on the stadium and the only avenue of escape was, once again, up. Fortunately, as the killers funneled into the stadium, the route back down the hill was left wide open. Jade took the lead, easily picking out a trail that cut east across the slope, while Professor brought up the rear, keeping a constant watch on their foe.

“Pick up the pace,” he advised when they had been running for just a few minutes. “I think they found the guys I took out. They just shut off their lasers. So much for our early warning system.”