Immediately, she found herself amid a swarming rush of sounds and movements, fur and feathers, jumping and flying. Wild rabbits and birds were as unaccustomed to creatures of her sort on their island at this hour as she was to being here. She dropped to her knees, her body shaking. She let the stones fall from her hands, bowed her head, and thanked God her tormentor wasn't there. The adrenaline rush had passed, followed by exhaustion. But still there was a climb to make. She struggled to her feet and trudged toward the hillside.
The climb made her dizzy, and halfway she gagged as if to vomit — but there was nothing to come up. She crawled the rest of the way in a daze. At the top she collapsed. If he found her now, she was as good as dead.
When she looked up, it was all as she remembered. It was far different from any place she'd passed through below. A headless statue of the goddess Isis stood framed within the four entrance columns and crowning horizontal entablature to a small, 2,200-year-old Doric temple. Though no more than seventeen feet wide, nineteen feet from floor to cornice tip, and thirty-six feet deep, it had once boasted a magnificent entrance, which had been painstakingly resurrected from scattered remnants. Now — as before — the Temple of Isis stood facing west toward the sea astride a foundation of stone five feet higher than the path leading to it.
A beautiful place… the perfect place for her… to wait to ambush him. 'My God,' she said aloud. Her heart skipped a beat. He could have taken the road past the museum and be inside waiting for her. Her eyes darted about in the dark — or he could be hiding behind the temple's walls. Her heart was racing.
Very carefully, Annika climbed to where she could peer between the columns. She wanted no more surprises. There was nothing inside but the statue of Isis and several large pieces of carved marble a few feet from the far left corner. They stood tall and wide enough for him to hide behind. She picked up a rock and held her breath as she carefully edged along inside the right side wall to where she could see behind the marble pieces. Nothing there. She let out a breath and made her way out of the temple to search behind its walls.
Unlike most of Delos' ruins, the Temple of Isis had had its stone rear and side walls rebuilt in their original place. Although not as tall as the originals, they were more than high enough to hide behind. From its highest point at the edge of the temple's front cornice, each side wall descended abruptly to where it leveled out a little more than halfway to its intersection point with the eight-foot-high rear wall. Annika slowly circled the temple walls twice — first counter-clockwise, then clockwise. She found no sign of him. She climbed back into the sanctuary.
For a moment she stood quietly staring at the statue of Isis, the rock still in her hand. She walked back to the front of the temple and set the rock next to a pillar. From here, she could see across Delos to the sea and anything moving below.
Annika had wondered when she worked here how any being — even a betrayed king — possibly could possess rage deep and bitter enough to reduce such an extraordinarily vibrant civilization to this tragic island of rocks. She no longer wondered; she knew.
Her mind raced over her plan. If he came for her, she'd see him and bombard him with rocks as he climbed. She could kill him from here — even if he came with a gun. If he tried to flank her from the other side of the hill or from Mount Kynthos, she'd have plenty of time to escape along the ridgeline to any number of paths to other places filled with stones to throw. If he kept after her, she'd find her way back to Isis along another path and start the cycle all over again. Yes, that was her plan. If only her body would cooperate.
Annika knew she'd picked the obvious place for what she had in mind. Anyone familiar with the island could figure that out, but so what? There was no sign of him anywhere. She was here first, and that was all that mattered. This was where she'd fight until help arrived — or one of them was dead.
For the first time, Annika felt prepared for whatever he might try. She stretched out her arms and yawned. The dress she wore as a cape whipped about her face in the wind. She'd become so accustomed to the cold, and her feet so numbed to the pain of the stones, that she'd forgotten she was naked. She touched the dress. It was almost dry. Only parts around her neck were still damp. She pulled it over her head and wrapped it around her neck so the wet ends trailed behind her like a scarf. The wind would dry them quickly.
She wondered how much longer until dawn. Not much, she hoped. Her mind wandered to how it would feel standing as a mortal — a mortal woman no less — with the goddess Isis as first light fired across the legendary birthplace of the god of light, Apollo. It was an enchanting thought — but one that ended abruptly with a flash of light from the base of the hill. Someone was there.
Instinctively, she stepped back. It was a natural reaction to fear, and she knew how to handle it. From the movement of the light, she could tell he was climbing quickly toward her. Annika took two deep breaths and focused solely on how best to kill him before he made it up the hill. It was a mistake she'd realize too late.
25
Andreas and the port cop had an easy time tracking Annika to the hillside. From the way she was moving, she seemed determined to get there as fast as she could and didn't care who knew. At the bottom of the hill by the House of Hermes they stopped to look up. 'She has to be up there somewhere,' Andreas said. He took out his flashlight and ran it along the hillside toward the ruins above.
'There!' the cop yelled.
Andreas had seen it too, a figure jumping back into the shadows of ruins, some 250 yards away. 'Tell Tassos and your buddy we found her and we need those lights here, now. Stay here and show them where to shine them.'
Andreas started running up the hill toward the ruins along an old dirt path and rough-cut stone steps. The wind was howling down the hill; after a few moments he couldn't even hear the cop shouting on his walkie-talkie for the lights. Andreas thought of yelling up the hill, but it was useless to try in this wind. He knew that had to be Annika, but would she be alone? Not having heard from Tassos, he knew the killer could be anywhere — including up there, in that place with the four pillars. All he could do was move as fast as he could to get there — and pray for no surprises. He limped toward his destination. It was a long climb, one he'd not made in years, but he remembered the way. Very few even knew the tunnel existed, and probably none alive had explored it as he had.
He hadn't heard a sound but his own footsteps for almost an hour, but now there was whistling. It was the wind rushing between the loose-fitting stones of the foundation walls of the place just above. He made his way around the last of the maze of boulders and dead-end passages and pulled himself out into a stone-walled space not quite high enough for him to stand fully upright. He still carried the rope.
It was a place built by ancients to hide from pursuers and, if necessary, escape through the mountain tunnel to the sea. He wondered how so many, over so many centuries, had so wrongly guessed the real purpose for its construction. They thought of it as merely the foundation for a sanctuary built to honor three foreign gods: Anubis and Serapis from the Land of the Dead, and Serapis' wife from the Land of the Living.
He moved to the left rear corner of the space and ever so carefully removed two square feet of stone from above his head — and from the floor of the Temple of Isis, wife of Serapis, ruler of the underworld.
Annika knew her time had come. She saw how close he was getting, even sensed it. She had to move. She drew a deep breath and started forward. Her foot brushed against the rock she'd left by the pillar, and without slowing down, she knelt to pick it up. As her hand touched the rock she heard the violent crash of stone against stone only inches above her head and felt a body falling over her from behind.