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“Disappearing isn’t really Ulysses Sherwood’s style,” Byron said, using Zeus’s full name. “Hiding would imply he had something to fear, something to run from.”
“If he’s not afraid, why is he in Europe?”
“Regrouping,” Hugo said. “Zeus doesn’t believe this is over.”
“Neither do you,” she said. So far everyone involved in Olympus acknowledged that the situation was dire. Yet, it seemed, none of them were ready to let it go. “How do you plan to progress?”
“Olympus Gamma will become our base,” Byron said. “Hades and Garrick are working to get it online.”
Which Tess knew because Daire and Hugo had told her as much.
“And you think Hades can run your missions with the men he has?”
“He’ll have others,” Byron said.
“Recruits are already being considered,” Hugo said. “And some of his men are still in the wind.”
“You can’t bring them in unless you can find them,” she said. “Which doesn’t seem likely unless they wander into Garrick’s radius.”
“A mission will be set to track them down,” Byron said. “As soon as Gamma is up to speed.”
Her conversation that afternoon with Daire came to mind. He’d told her about Harry holding back. They needed to get Minotaur and JARR from the beta site. She couldn’t say that, not in those words, because no one could know that Daire had trusted her with intel.
“How long do you think that will take?”
Tipping the last of his champagne into his mouth, Byron shrugged. “Could be weeks, could be months. There are too many variables in play to give an exact date.”
“What variables?” she asked. “Surely all you have to do is get the equipment and set it up. That’s like orders and delivery dates, isn’t it?”
Byron’s smile returned. “It is far more complex. The beta site was run by a central computer we dubbed Minotaur. It’s an extremely complex system with control over many factors.” Such as whether or not death gas would be released into the ventilation system. “Extracting it from Beta to install it in Gamma will not be a simple process.”
“Why not?” she asked. “If you have Poseidon on board, he must know how to do it.”
“He does. Removing Minotaur’s core, which includes its memory and CPU, requires three keys.”
All three? The Bolt, Trident, and Scepter. That put a wrench in the works but made sense. If Zeus was able to remove the essence of Minotaur with what he had, he wouldn’t have left the beta site without it. Harry’s choice to stash his key was smart. The two men, Hades and Zeus, had been face to face on the day of the Exodus. Taking the risk of keeping the Scepter on his person was too great.
“So?” she asked with a shake of her head, acting like she didn’t understand why that was a big deal. “Use the keys, take it out.”
She liked Byron’s half smile, not because it relaxed his commanding air, but because it suggested he didn’t see her as any kind of threat. On her own, she wasn’t. But the more she heard from their mouths, the less anyone could suspect she’d got from her Heart.
Protecting Daire was paramount. She didn’t want anything bad to happen to Harry either. They might not be close, and she still didn’t completely trust him, but he was her blood and deserved the benefit of the doubt.
THIRTEEN
“THE KEYS ARE NOT AVAILABLE to any one person,” Byron said. “All three principal agents will need to work together to retrieve it.”
No way that would be happening any time soon. Poseidon had given his key to Zeus, so the latter already had two. Even if Harry had his, they’d still need Poseidon to deal with the technical aspects of removal and re-installation.
“And that’s why you need Six, to ensure Zeus’s compliance,” she said, then frowned at them. “You can’t expect that the three principals will share space… They could kill each other.”
Maybe that was the plan. Get rid of all the principals, but make sure they brought their keys to the cull, thus ensuring the remaining members of the Six could progress with reinventing the organization.
“They could,” Byron agreed. “As I said, it’s a precarious situation. Before we can worry about personnel, we need to secure the necessary physical resources.”
“The three keys.”
“Yes,” Byron said, watching Hugo refill their glasses.
