The Lost Labyrinth dk-3 Read online

  'Forgive me, but I really-'

  'No. You'll like this. You see, Petitier was convinced that farming was the key to understanding how religion and culture had spread through the ancient world. He painted a word picture of a great golden plain of wheat and barley sweeping in from the east like sunrise, bringing socialisation, technology and enlightenment with it; and he was convinced that so beneficial a development would certainly have been memorialised in Greek legend. And because people like to credit their own, he speculated that the story would have been rewritten with Greeks as noble heroes wresting precious secrets from dastardly oriental villains, before bringing them back to Greece.'

  'Don't tell me,' murmured Knox. 'Jason and the Argonauts.'

  'Exactly,' smiled Franklin. 'And the crops they brought back with them, he called "the golden fleece".'

  III

  Nadya Petrova put on her shawl and dark glasses before emerging into the arrivals hall of Athens airport. Sokratis, the private detective she'd contacted through the Internet the night before, was waiting for her as arranged. He was a short and unprepossessing man with sallow skin, a tired brown suit and an unattractive habit of picking the septum of his nose between his thumb and forefinger while trying to make it look as though he was merely scratching. He didn't offer to help her with her bags either, just turned and led her out to his rusting green Volvo, its front bumper patched with silver tape, its tyres as slick as a racing car's.

  'Any success?' she asked, buckling herself in.

  Sokratis nodded briskly. 'There were four of them, like you said. They got into two big black Mercedes with tinted windows. Three in the first, one in the second. I followed the second; less chance of being spotted. He headed to the hills north of Athens. Very expensive up there, very exclusive. If you're not a shipping billionaire or a Russian oligarch, forget about it. And the house…' He waved his fingers as though scalded. 'I couldn't follow him down the drive, he'd have spotted me for sure. So I went on a little way, gave him a few minutes to get inside, then made my way in on foot. There was another car already parked there, a gold Ferrari. But I figured you were interested in the Mercedes, so I was putting my transmitter on it, when guess what?'

  'What?'

  'The second damned Mercedes suddenly turned up!' He gave a laugh, designed to let her know how cool he was in a crisis. 'I had to get out of there pretty damned quick, let me tell you.'

  'But you got the transmitter on, yes?'

  'Sure did.' He proudly patted the SatNav monitor screwed clumsily to his dashboard. 'No sign of life yet this morning, but we'll know the moment they're on the move.'

  'Good job,' she said. 'You've done well.'

  'All in a day's work,' he said. 'Speaking of which…'

  She nodded and handed him a white envelope from her bag. He opened it up at and counted the notes twice, folded them away in his wallet. 'So what's this all about, then?' he asked. 'Husband being naughty, is he?'

  'Something like that.'

  'It always is,' he chuckled. 'That's all I ever get these days, divorces.'

  'Is that a problem?'

  'Not as long as I keep getting paid.'

  'Good,' she said. 'Then we understand one another.'

  SEVENTEEN

  I

  The morning was drawing on, and Mikhail still hadn't emerged from his room. 'Shall we knock?' asked Zaal.

  'He took the Ferrari out again last night,' muttered Boris. 'I think he brought someone back with him.'

  'Is that a yes or a no?'

  'If you want to knock, don't let me stop you.'

  'Maybe another ten minutes.'

  It didn't take that long. His door opened suddenly and he appeared on the balcony, looking very Hollywood in shades, jeans, a white cotton T-shirt and his leather trench-coat. A waif-like young woman in a sequined dress and high heels followed him closely down the stairs, using him for cover. With her short brown hair and slight frame, she had rather the look of Gaille Bonnard about her, and Edouard couldn't help but wonder if that brief encounter in the lift last night hadn't given Mikhail an itch that he'd gone out specifically to scratch. 'Knox will be starting his speech soon,' he said brusquely, as though he'd been the one kept waiting. 'We're leaving in five minutes. Be ready.'

  'I'm going to have to stay behind,' said Edouard. 'Your father has asked me to work on-'

  'You're coming.'

  'Yes, but-'

  'I said you're coming,' said Mikhail. 'Speak to my father from the car.' He turned and walked away before Edouard could protest further, over to the kitchen where he began giving instructions to Boris.

  'Don't worry so much,' said Davit, with unexpected sympathy, from an armchair. 'It'll be fine.'

  'I'm a historian,' shrugged Edouard, as he went over to join the big man. He felt clammy with perspiration. 'This kind of business…' He shook his head.

  'I understand,' said Davit. 'It can take a bit of getting used to.'

  Edouard sighed as he sat down. 'How come you look so familiar?' he asked. 'Have we met before?'

  'I don't think so. But perhaps you watch rugby?'

  'That's it!' said Edouard, snapping his fingers. 'The Tbilisi Lions! You play lock for them.'

  'Used to,' grinned Davit.

  'I saw you jumping against Pavel in the semis a few years back. What a game that was.'

  'He was a good line-out man, Pavel. The best I ever went up against.'

  'You gave him one hell of a fight.'

  'We still lost.'

  'Games like that, no one really loses.'

  'I can tell that you've never played sports for a living.'

  Edouard grinned. 'He's my son's hero, Pavel. All he wants in life is to be a lock. Poor kid takes after me, though. He'll be lucky if he's big enough to play scrum-half.'

  'Best position, scrum half,' Davit assured him. 'All the glory, all the girls, none of the damage.'

  'Try telling him that.'

  'Maybe I will, if I see you at one of the games. I could introduce him to Pavel if you like.'

  'Would you? He'd love that. Honestly, he worships you guys. I'd be his hero for a year if you-'

  'Are you two going to be yapping all night?' asked Boris, standing by the door with Mikhail and his hooker.

  'Coming,' said Davit, pushing to his feet.

  'Hell!' muttered Edouard, feeling a little sick again. 'What if we're seen? What if someone remembers us?'

  'Don't worry,' murmured Davit, nodding towards Mikhail. 'Who's going to remember you with Morpheus over there to look at?' He spoke in a low voice, yet Mikhail must have heard. He turned immediately their way and began to march towards them with such coldness in his eyes that Edouard and Davit both froze. He undid and drew out his leather whipcord belt as he advanced, feeding one end back through the buckle to make an improvised noose, wrapping the free end twice around his fist, the better to hold it. He raised it up and feinted to lasso Edouard, but at the last moment turned on Davit instead, throwing it over the big man's head and hauling it tight with such swiftness that he had no time to interpose his fingers. Then he tugged so hard that he spilled backwards over the arm of his chair, sending shudders through the polished wooden floorboards. And now Mikhail dragged him behind him, while Davit kicked and squirmed and scrabbled uselessly at the strangling leather, unable to prevent it tightening around his throat and cutting off his windpipe, his face bulging and turning crimson.

  Edouard watched in horror. Davit was only in trouble for trying to reassure him. He felt he should be doing something to help, but he was paralysed by fear. Davit slapped the ground in submission, yet Mikhail still didn't relent. His struggles began to weaken, his eyes threatened to turn upwards, and finally Mikhail dropped the belt contemptuously onto the floor, allowing Davit to get a fingertip beneath the noose to loosen it, then to turn onto his side and suck great draughts of air into his starving lungs.

  Mikhail sank down onto his haunches to gather up his belt and feed it back through his belt-loops. Then he li
fted Davit's head by a hank of hair and looked him in his eyes. 'I need you alive,' he said. 'You should be glad of that.'

  'I'm sorry, sir,' gasped Davit, tears streaming down his cheeks. 'I didn't mean anything.'

  'If you ever say anything disrespectful about-'

  'I won't! I swear I won't!'

  'Don't interrupt me,' said Mikhail. 'I don't like being interrupted.'

  'I'm sorry,' wept Davit. 'I'm sorry. I didn't mean anything.'

  'Good. Then as I was saying, if you ever again say anything disrespectful about me again, it won't matter whether I need you alive or not. Is that clear?'

  'Yes.'

  'Yes, what?'

  'Yes, sir.'

  Mikhail let him go, then stood up and looked disdainfully down. 'Pull yourself together,' he said. 'We've got work to do.'

  II

  Iain and Gaille headed up into the central highlands, quickly leaving the built-up northern coast behind. A row of wind turbines stood like Easter Island statues on a ridge, holding vigil over the seas. Away to her right, the snow-capped peaks of the White Mountains came into view. Nearby, crude stepped terraces had been cut in the hillsides, their fields full of raw young crops, while sunlight glittered on their mica-rich stone walls. Traffic clogged as the road narrowed through villages and towns. They'd been driving for less than an hour when they crossed another ridge and the southern sea came into view, the plain beneath them crawling with ugly grey polythene-clad greenhouses, like so many maggots.

  Iain leaned forward and pointed away to their left. 'See that hill?' he asked. 'Phaistos.'

  'Where the disc came from?' asked Gaille. The Phaistos disc was a famous fired-clay Minoan tablet stamped front and back with spirals of unfamiliar symbols. It had baffled archaeologists, historians and everyone else who'd studied it, who'd explained it away as everything from a mathematical theorem to a board-game.

  'I'll take you round the palace on our way back, if we have time,' nodded Iain. 'It's a wonderful setting. And far fewer tourists than Knossos, of course, though still pretty busy, especially in season.' He glanced sideways at her. 'Crete's like Egypt that way. Tourists come for the sun and the sand, but they like a bit of culture too. Which makes the Minoans big business. Take the Phaistos disc, for example. There's a lot of controversy about its authenticity. I'm pretty sure that it's for real myself, but plenty of others reckon Luigi Pernier, the Italian archaeologist who found it, faked it himself out of jealousy for all the publicity Sir Arthur Evans was getting over at Knossos. But the point is, the dispute could be resolved one way or the other in a heartbeat if Heraklion Museum allowed a thermoluminescence test. They won't, of course. It's one of the most iconic images of Minoan Crete, so why risk it?' He shook his head. 'That's the way things work here. Profit before truth every time.'

  'Says the author of The Atlantis Connection,' she teased.

  'I guess I asked for that,' he laughed ruefully, as they came up behind a diesel-belching lorry on the switchback descent. 'But at least I'm not trying to hide anything. I honestly believe the Atlantis legend is a genuine folk-memory of the Minoans.' He slid her a glance. 'You know the gist of it, I assume?'

  'Sure,' shrugged Gaille. 'In ten thousand or so B.C. there was a great empire called Atlantis somewhere west of the pillars of Hercules. It was larger than Africa and incredibly powerful, yet was eventually defeated by Athens and other Greek cities before being destroyed by an extraordinary cataclysm, never to be seen again.'

  'You sound sceptical,' said Iain, swinging out wide to see if there was any way to overtake the lorry, before pulling sharply back in when he saw a car approaching.

  'We only have the one source for the story,' replied Gaille, 'and that's Plato, who wasn't exactly frightened of using allegory to explain his ideas. There never was any great island west of the pillars of Hercules, or geologists would have discovered it by now. And there were no civilisations to speak of in ten thousand B.C., or we'd have found evidence of them. And even if there had been, then Athens couldn't have been involved in destroying it, because it didn't exist back then. And Egyptian temples couldn't have recorded it, because they didn't exist either. So, yes. I'm a little sceptical.'

  A short stretch of empty road appeared ahead. Gaille braced herself with her feet as Iain charged the Mustang recklessly into an overtake, tooting his horn to warn the lorry driver and any oncoming traffic. 'Look,' he said, swinging back in once he'd passed it, 'I know Atlantis is risky territory. All those outlandish theories about fish people from outer space with ludicrously advanced technology. But there's nothing in Plato about fish-people or aliens. Believe me. I've looked. And the technology he describes isn't much more than irrigation systems and hot and cold running water, which we know the Minoans had.'

  'Not in ten thousand B.C.'

  'Of course not. You're absolutely right that a lot of Plato's account simply doesn't fit.' They came up behind a long train of traffic, and for a horrible second, Gaille feared Iain was about to try and overtake it all in one go, but then he clucked his tongue in evident frustration, and fell into line instead. 'But you've got to remember how much the story went through before it even got to Plato. For one thing, some Egyptian had to record the story in the first place. Easier said than done. They didn't have Reuters back then. They couldn't just turn on CNN. Garbled stories would have come in from across the ancient world, leaving some poor sap to try to make sense of it. And once they'd made a record, they had to keep it safe in their temple archives, even though that temple and much of northern Egypt was under foreign occupation for much of the Minoan era. And you must know better than anyone that the Egyptians weren't anything like as meticulous in their record-keeping as popular opinion would have them. They were just as lazy, deceitful, propagandistic and prone to natural disasters as anyone else. Then there's the Egyptian High Priest who read the story in his temple records and told it to the Greek Solon. Surely there's at least the possibility that something got mangled in the translation. Solon then went back home and told it to his grandson, who later told his own grandson, who in turn told it to Socrates before Plato wrote it down. How many different people is that it had to pass through? And yet you somehow expect his account to capture the fall of the Minoan empire with perfect accuracy?'

  'I don't expect anything,' said Gaille mildly.

  'Take this business of dates. Plato said that Atlantis was destroyed nine thousand years before Solon's time. The Minoan empire collapsed nine hundred years before Solon's time. Isn't it just possible that someone somewhere got a symbol wrong?'

  'What about it being west of the pillars of Hercules? Or being larger than Africa?'

  'Some people back then believed that the Hercules had set his pillars at the Hellespont, not the Straits of Gibraltar. Crete was west of them. And, yes, the Egyptian high priest did indeed describe Atlantis as bigger than Africa, but he went straight on to say that it was the main island of an archipelago ruled by a confederation of kings. Plato describes this main island as a rough oblong, six hundred kilometres long by three hundred wide. Nothing like as big as Africa, but actually pretty close to Crete. So it wasn't the island of Atlantis that was huge, but the area it controlled. The Minoan empire had outposts all over the Eastern Mediterranean, from Greece round to Egypt, just like Atlantis did. Add all this space together, land and sea, then you do indeed get a vast area, as large as Africa was believed to be back then.'

  'I suppose.'

  'And Plato describes Atlantis's main island in some detail. He says it was mountainous with a big plateau in its south.' He waved his hand out the window. 'We've just passed over a mountain range, in case you weren't watching, and we're currently driving through a great plain. The Atlanteans worshipped Poseidon, just as the Minoans did. They revered bulls, just like the Minoans. And Atlantis was divided into at least ten kingdoms, just like Minoan Crete. And when it finally fell, it fell to mainland Greeks, just like Minoan Crete.'

  'Don't I remember something about Atlantis being formed
from black, red and white rock?' asked Gaille mischievously.

  'Quite right,' nodded Iain. 'Doesn't sound much like Crete, I admit, but it is a perfect description of Santorini, the Minoan's most important outpost. We can't be sure precisely how important, of course, because Santorini used to be a volcano, Mount Thera, until it blew itself up in the most violent eruption in human history, leaving just a semicircle of rock in the water. And that eruption is of course another point of similarity between the Minoans and the Atlantis legend, perhaps the most remarkable of all. Plato says that Atlantis vanished after a great earthquake, leaving behind only an impassable mud shoal. Thera's eruption would have felt like a massive earthquake, even as far away as Egypt, and it would have left the Aegean a thick soup of pumice and ash for decades. And it surely inflicted a mortal wound on the Minoan empire, leaving them at the mercy of whoever came conquering first. The Mycenaeans, as it happened.'

  'If you say so.'

  They'd reached the town of Timpaki. Iain put on his indicator and began to brake and pull in. For a shocked moment she feared he'd taken umbrage at her tone, that he was about to stop and order her out. But he merely turned into a petrol station instead. 'Stay here,' he said, getting out. 'I need to fill her up.'

  III

  The delegates suddenly started arriving at the pavilion in a flood. The buses from the hotel had evidently arrived. Nico entered with them, talking animatedly with a member of his staff. Knox went to join them, and they went together up to the podium, where they talked him through the controls. He felt a sudden flutter of nerves, that coppery taste at the back of his mouth. Public speaking didn't come naturally to him.

  'Fifteen minutes,' said Nico. 'Okay?'

  'Okay.' He walked back and forth across the rear of the stage, keeping a lid on his nerves as he gave Augustin's text a final read-through. The lights in the main part of the pavilion went down; the stage grew brighter. He went to sit upon his appointed chair. Nico took his good time about making his way to the podium, where he tapped the microphone to make sure it was on, then cleared his throat, milking the moment. The auditorium was now packed, people standing at the back, even a few journalists, to judge from the notepads and cameras, presumably looking for new angles on Petitier's death.