He had listened to the recorded conversations between Hawkins and Vedrakis and the discussion of travel plans with Abby. Then he had gone to the lobby and asked the concierge to arrange a flight to Crete for the next day. A last-minute decision, he explained. He and his late wife had traveled to the island years before her death and he wanted to return to some of the spots they had visited.
The sympathetic concierge worked the computer. An Iberia Air flight was scheduled to leave early the next morning and connect with an Air Berlin flight traveling from Zurich to Heraklion. Leonidas made sure he gave the concierge a big tip.
The Air Berlin flight landed a couple of hours ahead of the Gulfstream and its two passengers. Leonidas pick up his rental car and headed east. He stopped to enjoy a Greek lunch at a taverna in the resort town of Aghios Nickolaos before continuing on to Gournia.
A sign on the chain-link fence announced that the site was closed to the public, but the gate was unlocked, allowing Leonidas to enter. He walked for about a hundred feet and studied the narrow, stepped streets and foundations covering the slope. Movement at the top of the hill caught his eye.
Leonidas took a pair of binoculars from his camera case and focused on the bearded face of the man walking along the ridge. He recognized Vedrakis from photos he had seen while checking the Heraklion museum’s website. The professor walked a short distance before he disappeared on the other side of the hill.
Leonidas checked his watch. If Hawkins were following the schedule he had discussed with Vedrakis, he would arrive soon. Heading back to the Suzuki, he drove around to the other side of the olive grove where he parked under the cover of trees.
Leaving the Suzuki, he walked back through the grove to a stone wall located around fifty feet from the service road. He sat on the wall and studied the site. He could see the road and gate from his chosen perch, and would be almost invisible in the shade. Closing his eyes, he inhaled the heady fragrance of rosemary and ripening olives and went into a calming, almost Zen-like state.
For a few minutes, the only sounds were a chorus of cicadas and the rustle of the wind in the olive leaves. Then his ears picked up the growl of a car engine. His eyelids snapped open like window shades. The sun glinted off the hood of a silver Mercedes moving along the service road. The car slowed to a crawl near the Land Rover, then sped up and kept going. A short distance from the gate, the car pulled into the olive grove where it would be hidden, much the same as Leonidas had done with his ride.
Highly suspicious behavior. Leonidas swung his legs to the other side of the wall and dropped belly-first to the ground. His hand reached into his camera bag and came out with a Sig Sauer pistol. He checked the load, then peered through a gap in the wall and saw four men dressed in black, moving single file along the road. He did a double-take. Their skulls were shaved and painted blue. They paused at the entrance, pushed the unlocked gate open and entered the site.
Waiting until they went past the ticket booth, Leonidas then stood and climbed back over the wall. Dangling the pistol at his side, he bent low in a half-crouch, dashed across the road and squatted behind a clump of oleander bushes where he’d have a good view of the slope. The group had broken up. Each figure was climbing a stairway, moving parallel to one another through the ruins. He spotted more movement at the top of the hill. Professor Vedrakis had reappeared and was silhouetted on the ridge.
He looked at his watch.
Hawkins could arrive at any time.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Professor Vedrakis was lost in the mists of time. His body existed in the present but his mind had traveled four thousand years into the past, when Gournia was a thriving seaport. He was exercising the most important talent an archaeologist can possess — the ability to see things not as they are, but as they were. In the eye of the virtual time-traveler, a shard of plaster becomes an ancient pot. A piece of rock becomes a tool used for cutting or pounding.
He stood in the central plaza of the old city. As he swept his eyes over the network of stone foundations spread across the slopes, his imagination reconstructed houses, storage buildings and workshops. People thronged the narrow streets. Potters and bronze smiths pursued their trades.
The professor brought his gaze back to the low stone platform at the summit of the hill and imagined a multi-story palace, similar except for its smaller size to the edifice at Knossos. The sound he heard in his ears was not the soughing of the wind in the stunted trees but the voices of kilted Minoans. Hundreds were gathered in the plaza before a sacrificial altar surmounted by the stone carved horns of consecration. Dancers gyrated to the piping of flutes.
The ruins only hinted at the original size of Gournia, which would have spread across what was now the E75 highway and down a valley to the port. Years of painstaking excavation would have to be done before the full extent of the city was known. The college students who sweated under the sun were enthusiastic and energetic, undaunted by the heat, dust and boredom that make up the less glamorous side of archaeology. The students had removed rectangular sections of topsoil marked out with stakes and twine in the central plaza. On most days, teams painstakingly scraped the earth with trowels while others ran shovelfuls of the loose soil through sieves that rested on four legs. The piles of earth under the sieves were high, which meant that the students had worked hard while he was in Sitia.
Vedrakis had made copies of a dozen Linear A tablet rubbings at the Sitia museum. He’d stuffed the rubbings into his briefcase along with a volume of commonly used Egyptian hieroglyphics. It was only a short while later that he was driving along the winding highway to Gournia.
He’d parked at the entrance, left the briefcase in the Land Rover and locked the car. The only thing he carried was a replica of the Phaistos disk he had acquired from the Heraklion museum gift shop. He hiked to the top of the hill. Good, he thought. The mournful wind blowing in from the sea would add drama to the first chapter of the book he had already started writing in his head.
He had worked out the Prologue on the drive from Sitia.
Alone amid four-thousand-year-old ruins, my only companions the ghosts haunting the remnants of this once-magnificent city, I anxiously awaited the discovery that would allow me to strip the veil off one of the most mysterious civilizations of all time.
Hawkins would arrive with the machine that would allow the translation of Linear A. Of course, he would give Hawkins credit for finding the device, but Vedrakis would quickly write him out of the narrative. He imagined himself holding the Phaistos disk high above his head to catch the rays of the setting sun.
Snap.
The noise of a breaking twig ended his literary reverie. He lowered his arms and turned around. He was no longer alone. A tall, slender figure dressed in black had emerged from behind an outcropping of rock.
The sun was setting behind the figure so the face was in shadow, but the professor could see that the man had a narrow waist and barrel chest.
“Hawkins?” Vedrakis asked.
No reply. Vedrakis frowned. This wasn’t the friendly man he’d talked to on the telephone.
Someone must have strayed through the gate he’d left open.