“Augustina!”
The shout sent a fresh wave of panic through her, partly because it might be enough to upset the balance and bring the birds down on them, and partly because of who the voice belonged to. She glanced back and saw that there could be no retreat. Kenner was approaching the bridge, and he was not alone. Rohn was with him, along with two other Cerberus men. They had not come through the attack unscathed. All four men were bloody from head to toe, clothing sliced to unrecognizable tatters, their bodies bristling with quills. Kenner was faltering, but Rohn and the others stalked forward like relentless automatons.
Kenner stretched out a hand. “Augustina. Wait.”
She turned to Dourado. “Go!”
They plunged into the dark stairwell, Dourado running and Gallo shuffling along as best she could. Behind them, Rohn charged, reaching the bridge and sprinting across it. Gallo bounded blindly up the stairs, two at a time. The light beckoned to her, but before she could reach the top, a hand clamped down on her biceps and pulled her off her feet. She didn’t fall. Instead, Rohn dragged her along until, at the topmost step he caught Dourado, too.
He took a few more steps then hurled both women forward. Gallo cried out as the impact with the moss-covered stone drove some of the quills deeper into her leg, but fear of what Rohn would do next compelled her to keep moving. She stumbled and fell to her knees, but kept crawling.
As she beheld the interior of the temple, dimly illuminated by daylight seeping in from beyond the colonnade, the fight nearly went out of her. There was nothing particularly glorious about the sacred building. It was as overgrown and dilapidated as the rest of the city, but Gallo saw past the decay and neglect, imagining the place as it might have been three thousand years earlier.
Directly ahead, occupying the center of the sanctuary, stood a colossal statue of a warrior. Like everything else, the old stone was weathered and overgrown, but the image was unmistakably that of a muscular man wearing battle armor and a helmet. A round shield covered his left arm. In his right, poised for a throw, was a long spear.
It was Ares, the god of war.
A Greek temple to Ares in the Amazon. At least I lived long enough to see this, she thought.
“Stop,” Kenner shouted. “Vigor, what are you doing?”
Gallo looked back and saw Rohn stalking toward her, a long double-edged knife, like a dagger, clenched in one hand.
“Leave her alone,” Kenner said. He sounded weak and ineffectual, begging more than demanding. “You’re not supposed to kill her.”
Rohn wasn’t listening. He advanced, moving faster than Gallo could crawl. There was nowhere to go. She heard his footsteps, felt his hand seize hold of her once more, saw the blade rise…
“Let her go!”
The voice was strained, but so filled with authority and passion that, even if Gallo had not recognized it, she would have known that it was not Kenner.
A lone figure stepped out from behind the statue of Ares. The man was as bloody and bedraggled as the Cerberus men, but Gallo recognized him immediately.
“You made a classic mistake,” George Pierce said, aiming his machine pistol at Rohn. “You brought a knife to a gunfight.”
40
Rohn moved faster than Pierce would have thought possible, but he did not attack. Instead, he ran. The retreat was so unexpected that Pierce didn’t have time to pull the trigger.
He had been prepared to shoot. The MP5K was equipped with an Aimpoint holographic reflex scope. Lazarus had assured him that the rounds would go right where the red dot pointed, so there was little risk of accidentally hitting Gallo or Dourado, but keeping that red dot on a fast moving target wasn’t easy.
Rohn vanished, disappearing into the stairwell.
Kenner seemed as stunned by the big man’s flight as Pierce was, but the other two Cerberus men made a desperate rush at Pierce.
This time, there was no hesitation. Pierce jerked the gun toward the nearest man and pulled the trigger. There was hardly any recoil, and the suppressor muffled the report so effectively that, for a fleeting instant, Pierce thought the gun had malfunctioned. It had not. The first Cerberus man went down, stumbling and skidding across the floor until both his momentum and his life ran out.
Pierce brought the gun around to the second man, who after witnessing his comrade’s fate, was already trying to veer off. Pierce squeezed the trigger, but the bullets sizzled past their intended target, smashing into the stone walls of the temple. The man twisted around and dove to the ground, right behind Dourado.