Pappas said, “If I pull my gun, you’ll be the first to die.”
Apollo glared at him and gave him a one-word retort: “If.”
Before Pappas could react, Apollo slipped a small knife from the folds of his tunic and lunged forward. With a wicked slash, he sliced through the veins and tendons of Pappas’s right forearm, rendering his gun hand obsolete. Blood gushed from the open wound, spurting high into the air and splashing onto the dusty ground.
It reminded Apollo of the eight monks he had killed at Metéora.
Manos and Constantinou were stunned by the quick attack. They reached for their guns a second too late, as two Spartans crept up from behind. Each soldier carried a sword, and each sword hit its mark. The blade that struck Manos was raked across his back. The resulting wound started at his left scapula and ended at his right hip. Every muscle in between was severed, as were some of his ribs. He slumped to the dirt, gurgling, while his lungs filled with fluid.
Death was imminent.
But Constantinou wasn’t as lucky. The Spartan’s sword struck him flush above the elbow. A moment later, most of his arm fell to the ground beside him while he screamed out in agony. His fingers twitched for a few extra seconds like a spider that had been poisoned and was slowly waiting to die. He stared at it, disbelieving, unwilling to accept that his hand was no longer a part of him. As he stared, blood poured from the chunk of meat that hung below his shoulder.
“Bind his wound,” Apollo ordered. Then he pointed to Pappas. “Same with his.”
The Spartans disarmed the cops and tended to their wounds, making sure they didn’t die. At least not yet. Opportunities like this were rare, and Apollo wanted to take full advantage—just as he had done with the missing tourists he had found camping near the village.
The best way to teach the boys was to give them a taste of blood.
They would butcher the cops, piece by piece, until everyone had a turn.
Like a lion teaching his young.
45
Jones lingered near the train platform, purposely standing still while he pretended to be confused. He turned around, pondered the blue sign above him, and then grimaced in frustration.
It was a beautiful job of acting, one that accomplished several things.
First of all, it stopped Kozlov in his tracks. There was no way the Russian was going to walk toward the blue line if Jones was still pondering the green. There was too great a risk of being spotted in the narrow hallway that connected the two platforms, or of being recognized later if Kozlov was forced to turn around and follow Jones back toward the other trains.
Secondly, it allowed Jones to glance down the corridor to see if Kozlov was still there. And he was. But the Russian played it smoothly, strolling over to a vending machine where he bought a copy of the local newspaper. Then he leaned against the wall and pretended to read the headlines while dozens of people poured off the escalators in front of him.
Finally, and most important, Jones’s acting bought him the extra time that he needed. The truth was that Jones did not want to take the train that had just pulled into the station. It had arrived too soon. For his plan to work, he needed to miss this train and catch the next one, which would be arriving in roughly five minutes.
That was the only way that everything would be in place.
So Jones kept acting like a tourist. He scratched his head in confusion, asked a few people if they spoke English, and listened to the train as it pulled out behind him. Once it was gone, he slipped into the blue station, where he waited to spring his trap.
As far as Kozlov was concerned, there was no reason to hurry. He knew Jones couldn’t go very far. This wasn’t like the subway system in New York City, where vagrants were able to sneak into the tunnels for warmth or drugs. The local Metro had been built during the Cold War and had been designed to double as a bomb shelter capable of saving thousands of lives.
With that in mind, Saint Petersburg took its security very seriously. Heavy blast doors protected the exits. Tunnels were monitored via closed-circuit television. Photography was banned throughout the subway—in order to prevent advanced surveillance for terrorist attacks. And uniformed officers roamed the corridors, searching for trouble.
So he wasn’t the least bit worried about Jones slipping away.
Furthermore, Kozlov guessed that every camera in the tunnel was currently focused on Jones. Not because he was black, but because he was carrying three bags and fidgeting like a criminal. In fact, Kozlov was surprised that Jones hadn’t been stopped or questioned already.
Because in Moscow, he probably would have been arrested.
This wasn’t the first time that Jones had used this maneuver in a subway. From his experience, he knew the key was in the execution. If he timed things perfectly, he would walk away free. No doubt about it. Plus, his shadow wouldn’t even know what hit him.