Under His Watch (14 page)

Charity thought of Ozymandias, from Shelley’s great sonnet. The statue of Ozymandias, forgotten emperor, stood in that poem in a desert, while Alexander’s temple of Apollo, which had once held a statue of Apollo carved to look exactly like Alexander, stood amidst fertile greenery. But the mysterious effect seemed to Charity the same: “Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.”

Then Ryan, who was also looking out his window at the temple, bent down and whispered, “Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair?”

Charity felt her eyes go as wide as dinner plates. She turned from the sight of Alexandropolis to look up at him. “You didn’t really just say that, did you?”

“I think I did,” he said with a twisted smile. “What? You don’t think your bodyguard can quote Shelley? I…”

“Kiss me, sir,” she said, and he did.

“It’s just that I was thinking the exact same thing,” she said when he broke the kiss.

“But should we really despair?” Ryan asked mischievously.

“Are we mighty?”

“Huh. Good point.”

“See—” Charity said, but Winnie interrupted her.

“So only the mighty should despair? Cliff, you’re in trouble.”

“Oh,” Hodges said. “I’m not mighty, really. Not by a long shot. I think it’s the Miss Phillipses of the world who are the really mighty ones.”

Chapter Sixteen

Ryan was pretty sure that Winnie was the leader of the CIA contingent, and that Curt was a real mining engineer, but it made an amusing game, trying to tease the two groups apart. The best fun to be had on the plane right then, though, was simply watching Charity look out the window: if Ryan had thought his girl beautiful before, with the light of her passion for the ancient world in her eyes she simply stunned him.

That reverie came to an abrupt end, however, when Hodges said, uncharacteristically, “What the fuck?”

Winnie confirmed Ryan’s suspicion; she said, “It’s Herzyov. He loves surprises.”

Ryan swiveled his eyes in the direction they were looking: a small motorcade, flying colorful flags that he couldn’t see clearly, but which he would bet were the national flag of Handristan, waited at the end of the landing strip.

“Charity,” Winnie said in a low, urgent voice, “we’ll try to prevent it, but there’s a pretty good chance he wants to talk to you.”

“What? Herzyov?” Charity looked at Ryan in alarm, then back at Winnie.

“Yes. We were supposed to go to a reception in Handur City tonight. We were going to spare you that, but Herzyov expressed a special interest in meeting you. We were going to say you had food poisoning.”

“What?” Charity seemed to be having trouble processing the information.

Ryan nodded. “Nice. No way to check, and Charity’s out of here before anything can get rescheduled.”

“But that’s shot now. Just be yourself, Charity, okay? And Ryan will be along. I’m guessing Herzyov wants himself on your footage, showing how much he loves cultural heritage.”

Ryan put his arm around Charity, who had started to tremble. “But this is the guy who murdered an entire TV station, right? And killed three of his wives for adultery, with his own hands?”

Winnie nodded grimly. “You’ll find him surprisingly charming, though.”

* * *

Herzyov was indeed charming, and his English was very good. That didn’t seem to put Charity at her ease in the slightest, though, and Ryan wished he could take her somewhere and hold her close and talk her through what she had to do. Really, she didn’t have anything to worry about—but to a girl who had never found herself in real danger before, Ryan knew it must seem a terrible ordeal. The death threats, after all, had been abstract; Marut Herzyov, mass murderer and oppressor of his people, stood very concretely in front of her, bowing over her hand in an elegant, old-fashioned way.

“Miss Phillips,” he said, “I met your grandfather once.” Herzyov was perhaps sixty-five, with dark skin and white hair—he looked so much like Omar Sharif, actually, that Ryan almost did a double-take.

“My grandfather?” Ryan supposed that Charity’s squeak could be explained equally well as nervousness when meeting a head of state as it could as a response of being part of a mission to assassinate that head of state, but he hoped his sweet girl would calm down before she had a heart attack.

“Your mother’s father, I believe,” Herzyov said. “George Bercier?”

“Yes,” said Charity, after a deep breath that Ryan thought might have helped her compose herself, for her tone had grown firmer. “Yes, of course—he was the ambassador to the Soviet Union.”

Ryan looked at his wonderful honey—his beautiful slut, as he guiltily found he liked to think of her, most of the time—in amazement. How many more powerful and famous relations would he discover she had in her family tree?

“Such a charming man,” the mass murderer said.

“I hardly knew him,” Charity said, her composure seeming fully to return to her, “but I do remember that he dressed up as Santa Claus—Pere Noel, he called it, of course, since his own grandparents had come from France.”

Herzyov laughed. “Indeed. I think he would be very proud of what you have done, Miss Phillips.”

Charity seemed to stiffen at that, as if it were not very welcome to be praised by a dictator, especially when the praise assumed more familiarity with her grandfather than she herself had.

“Why?” she asked, clearly trying to sound as if she were bantering innocently.

“If I am not mistaken, His Excellency Ambassador Bercier was a great patron of the arts? A major donor to your Metropolitan Museum of Art?”

Ryan suppressed an urge to shake his head in disbelief. Herzyov had done his homework, and he wanted everyone to know it. They stood—Charity, Herzyov, Ryan, Herzyov’s two bodyguards, and Cliff Hodges and the ex-Marine whose name Ryan had already forgotten—on the tarmac in an uncomfortable little knot. Hodges clearly wished Winnie were there, though he kept his broad smile. The rest of the team had already dispersed for the temporary buildings that it appeared the Handristanis had set up for the miners, or were assisting in getting the first of the equipment unloaded from the hold of the plane.

“Yes, I think that’s right,” said Charity uncertainly, clearly thrown a bit just as Ryan had been.

“Well, will his granddaughter show me the famous ruins that I was so rude as to say I wished to destroy? I shall be happy to have such a lovely tour guide, and the prospect of devoting the matching resources I have pledged for their preservation seems to become more attractive to me every minute. And—” he pointed at one of the bodyguards “—Mosa here will take some pictures and little videos, alright?”

Charity looked at Ryan, then at Hodges.

“Well,” Hodges said, “that sounds just fine. What do you think, Mr. Bedford?”

“As long as I can tag along,” he said as evenly as he could. Actually it sounded like a nightmare, but he could tell that Hodges wanted to get back to Winnie as soon as he could, to consult about Herzyov’s surprise visit, and he knew that the CIA assets would be watching with eagle eyes. They were probably watching right now, with technology that would allow them to hear exactly what was said. Hodges probably wasn’t wired because of the possible risks, but an operative undoubtedly was listening in somehow.

So they walked the short distance to where the temple’s hill rose out of the vegetation. Charity took the lead, walking with Herzyov just a pace behind her, listening as she narrated the little tour. Ryan hoped that maybe some of the confidence she seemed to have found came from the strength he had tried to give her, but really he suspected Charity Phillips just had it in her, when it came to the things she cared about. She didn’t seem to think it strange in the slightest to be giving a tour of a place she had only ever been virtually.

Ryan walked right behind her, a step back from Herzyov. Herzyov’s men, who were clearly packing very large handguns, judging from their bulging coats, were two steps behind him.

“It’s such an honor to be here,” Charity was saying. “I suppose I never thought I’d actually be allowed to see it.”

“It is off limits to my people,” Herzyov said. “That began under the Soviets, because no one wanted to take responsibility for the site and no one wanted to be held responsible if it was damaged. Of course, you know the way young people are, so it has seen its share of, shall we say, nocturnal visitors. But really, it has been undisturbed for more than a hundred years.”

Charity nodded. “And before that, since there was no treasure left to loot, for a thousand more. Only shepherds came here, I imagine.”

“Indeed—perhaps my great-grandparents among them. I come from a family of shepherds, you know.”

Charity stopped walking and turned around. She gestured to the sweep of the overgrown ruins. “It was never a big town,” she said, “and it didn’t last long. It seems like Alexander liked it because the hill gave him a nice place to put the temple to his favorite God, the god of youth and light.”

Ryan turned and looked. At first he saw only the trees and the grass, with what seemed like stone outcroppings poking through. Then he realized that those outcroppings were ruined
buildings,
and the whole scene became different, and very eerie.

“He died so young,” he said, almost without meaning to speak at all. “Only thirty-two.”

“And look what has happened to his empire,” said Herzyov, sounding both more thoughtful and rather more crazy than he had before, so that Ryan looked a bit uneasily at the two Handristani bodyguards. They remained entirely impassive, Mosa filming with a little digital camcorder and the other scanning the horizon. “Nothing but stone that the land tears apart. I, his successor, will leave behind monuments that do not succumb so easily.”

Ryan looked at Charity then, and saw that a retort—probably about the importance of learning from the past—had apparently died on her lips. She clearly sensed the slight slip in Herzyov’s facade as well as he did. “Let’s keep climbing,” she said brightly.

They soon reached the temple steps, walking up a narrow, nearly overgrown path, through grass as high as Charity’s chest. The steps themselves had the same grass growing in the cracks between the great stones. Charity looked up at the columns, looming up to the roof in front of her.

“There are even traces of the paint left on the columns,” she said with awe in her voice. She turned to Ryan. “Did you know that all the Greek temples were painted? We think of them of being this pure white color, but look.” She pointed to a patch of faded red. “Mosa, can you get a shot of this?”

“Wow,” was all Ryan could say. That made Charity giggle.

“Miss Phillips,” said Herzyov, “please accept my apologies for what I am about to do.”

Before even Ryan could react, Herzyov’s bodyguards sprang into action: the one who wasn’t Mosa had Ryan down to the ground and Mosa, having dropped the camcorder, had Charity. Herzyov had put his back to a column, and the bodyguard stepped in front of Herzyov, with Charity, too shocked to struggle, held in front of him like a shield.

Ryan didn’t struggle, because he knew not to waste his strength that way. There would be a time to fight, and it might be very soon.

Herzyov said loudly, “May I ask the intelligence personnel to show themselves? I am certain that there is at least one of you nearby. It appears we have two hostages, and I would hate to have to show myself to be in earnest by taking this man’s life—”

Charity screamed, “No! Please!”

“Especially since,” Herzyov continued, “it appears that Miss Phillips is rather attached to him.”

A figure rose in the grass—it was one of the engineers, Ryan thought he could make out from his position prone in the dirt at the bottom of the temple steps. Ryan imagined the quick decisions Winnie was having to make, and didn’t envy her.

“Now,” Herzyov said. “I know that if I were to kill anyone here, it would make my request for a negotiated departure rather problematic. And you know that I know that. So here is what I propose. I will put Miss Phillips and her bodyguard in a secure location with my most trustworthy representative. They will not be harmed in any way, so long as I believe you to be negotiating my departure in good faith. Please communicate that to whoever is in charge of your operation.”

Ryan pictured the mouth of the engineer moving—he couldn’t see very much—as he communicated with Winnie. Then the engineer said, “She’s on her way, and she wants me to tell you that she’s authorized to negotiate.”

Chapter Seventeen

They put Charity and Ryan in the adyton of the temple. Charity thought she had probably never known the true meaning of irony until that moment. “How could this happen?” she demanded of Ryan in a whisper as they were forced down the ancient steps to the little cellar beneath the temple. Then she said, “Holy shit.”

Ryan clearly didn’t know how to respond, especially to the second part, since he didn’t see what she had seen in a ray of light slanting through a hole in the temple roof and into the cellar. Then he saw, and he said, “What the hell is that?”

“It’s the head of Apollo,” Charity whispered. “And if the chronicles are true, it’s one of the few likenesses of Alexander to survive.” She started to laugh hysterically.

“What?” Ryan said, his tone saying that he was sure she was going into shock. Maybe she was.

“Fucking Ozymandias,” she gasped. “Half-sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown…” She couldn’t continue, because her laughter had turned to tears. “Jesus, Ryan, you’re going to save me, right?”

“Right,” he said.

Mosa took his stand halfway down the stairs. His face was stony, but Charity thought she could tell that he got no joy from what his boss had asked of him. She wondered if he felt some kind of comradeship with Ryan, even. Herzyov’s megalomania had placed two warriors at odds when they might have been buying each other a beer and swapping stories.

Ryan was gathering her into his arms now.

“How could this happen?” she asked again, mostly because she didn’t have anything more to say. She didn’t even want to think about the implications of the head of Apollo-Alexander lying in the corner, apparently forgotten for at least a thousand years.