Calvin looked at his watch and saw that it was afternoon. “What say we take a break? I’ll go into town to fetch some grub for when Matt and Abby return. When I get back, we’ll dig into it again. Maybe we can polish off the first thousand years before midnight.”
“That’s a good suggestion, Calvin. I’ll go over my notes. Maybe ghosts of the past will rise from the caldera and whisper secrets in my ear.”
“Whatever works, Kalliste. See ya in a bit.”
Leonidas was returning from a stroll when he saw Calvin emerge from the house without Kalliste.
With nothing else to occupy him, Leonidas followed Calvin down an alley and into the commercial section of the village. He lingered outside an all-purpose market until Calvin came out with some bags of groceries and headed back towards the house. Leonidas thought about following him, but Calvin might suspect something if he saw the same American tourist everywhere he went.
He strolled to the main village square and was sitting at a taverna having a beer when a taxi pulled up at the curb and three men got out. His hand automatically slid under his shirt and rested on the holster at his belt. The first two men exiting the cab looked like the thugs he had chased away from Gournia and later encountered on Spinalonga.
Leonidas couldn’t believe his eyes when he saw who the third man was. Salazar. He was dressed casually and the brim of his Borsalino straw hat was pulled down over his dark sunglasses. Leonidas recognized the wide jutting chin and the muscular shoulders bulging under the blue linen jacket. The Spaniard paid the taxi driver, then he and the other men headed into the village. Leonidas was right behind them.
Kalliste sat on the terrace behind her house and gazed out at the caldera. She pondered her situation. She had been blessed as an archaeologist to start unraveling not one, but a number of the mysteries that had defied historical scholars for centuries. The gods of Olympus must be laughing at their joke; the tantalizing gifts they had bestowed upon future humanity were still out of reach.
She possessed the key to Linear A, but using the mechanism to decipher a lost language that consisted of hundreds of pictograms was a fool’s errand. She needed the help of expert linguists, philologists and computer capacity. And all that would cost money.
She had cut her ties to the government, but Greece wouldn’t have the funds to sponsor her project even if they wanted to. She knew of only one potential source of financing. She went back into her house, picked up her phone and punched in a number.
Lily Porter answered, “Kalliste! How wonderful to hear your voice.”
“Yours, too, Lily. I have a great favor to ask.”
“Yes, of course, Kalliste. I want to know all about it.”
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
Molly pointed her D3X Nikon camera at the olive and yellow bird sitting on the top branch of a rabbit bush. She sat on a folding stool, hidden in the wheat grass in the high desert region known as the Badlands Wilderness, around fifteen miles east of Bend. The camera rested on a carbon fiber tripod, the 600mm lens pointed at the fat, little short-tailed bird. She pressed the shutter release and banged off a dozen or so photos of the MacGillivray’s warbler before it flew away.
Her camera had captured images of dusky fly-catchers, yellow-rumped warblers and a Golden eagle to add to her photo files. She had taken pictures of these birds on previous field trips, but like any photographer, she was always looking for the photograph. The click of the shutter when action, light and color conditions were perfect.
Time to wrap things up. Her knees creaked from sitting and she was getting hungry. In line with her vow to keep to a healthy diet, Molly had dined on oatmeal and fresh blueberries before she’d left the house, and ate a protein bar out in the field. Packing up her camera and stool in a carry-all bag, she slung the tripod over her shoulder and hiked back to the dirt road where she had parked her motorcycle.
After returning to her house, she went out to the shed to see how the eagle was doing. He seemed content, but that didn’t lessen her guilt. She would set him free tomorrow. Having made her decision, she headed for the kitchen. She made herself a toasted ham and Havarti sandwich on multi-grain bread, opened a bag of sweet potato chips and popped a can of Diet Coke. Carrying her lunch to her office, she clicked on the computer. The message from Hawkins popped up on the screen.
Hi, Molly. Hope you’re well. Need you to dig into Auroch Industries and CEO Viktor Salazar. Thanks. MH.
The email was around two hours old. She munched on her sandwich as she reread the request. Molly was glad to help. So far, it was easy stuff, like tracking down the arms dealer in The Netherlands, but she didn’t want Matt or anyone else to take her for granted.
Relax girl, you can’t spend the rest of your life talking only to birds.
She finished her Coke, thought about heading back into the kitchen for dessert, but pushed the temptation aside.
Eventually, she’d weaken, but Molly was energized by her temporary resolve. Auroch Industries. Funny name, she thought to herself.
Looking up Auroch on the internet, images of a weird-looking cow popped up on the screen. She’d come from a farming community, but had never seen anything closely resembling this animal. Probably because the Auroch was an extinct species of cattle. The last one died in 17th century Poland. The breed had a pretty good run until then, and was probably domesticated in Neolithic times.
Dang thing was big. Stood six feet high at the shoulders and could weigh more than a ton. The critter had crazy-looking horns that went up, forward, then turned in. Its body shape looked like pictures she’d seen of Spanish fighting bulls. Like those animals, it could move fast and was sometimes aggressive toward humans. Nothing like the friendly dairy cows that grazed the scraggly fields behind her family’s shack in West Virginia. She wondered why anyone would name a corporation after a big cow.
The company name was familiar… as well as odd.
She Googled Auroch Industries and pulled up a pile of news articles. Molly may be reclusive, but she was not uninformed. She read a number of on-line publications, which is how she had first come across the article on sexual abuse in the military. One of the stories was a report in the New York Times that she had read a few months ago. The headline caught her eye because it had to do with the latest in a series of mining accidents occurring at or near Auroch sites. Auroch was the target of some environmental groups. Good luck pitching a hissie fit, she remembered thinking. West Virginia mining companies got away with murder.
She proceeded to the company’s website.
The logo was a stylized bull’s horns like those on the flesh and blood animal. Auroch was one of the worlds’ ten largest mining, metals and petroleum companies with headquarters in Cadiz, Spain. The corporate history said that Auroch was an old company, its origins stretching back to the 17th century. It came into existence with the consolidation of a number of mining companies in Spain and had expanded into more than thirty countries around the globe.
Flowing from that wellspring was a river of iron ore, coal, diamonds, manganese, gold, petroleum, aluminum, copper, natural gas, nickel, uranium and silver. The statistics were stunning. Auroch earned more than fifty billion dollars a year and had more than forty-thousand people working for the mining operation and a dozen subsidiaries. It owned smelters and refining companies and was a major producer of fossil fuels.
Molly puffed out her cheeks. This was no fly-by-night operation Hawkins was asking her to stick her nose into. Its security wall would be tough to breach. A company as big as Auroch could hardly be invisible. She would comb the information available on unsecured sources first. She clicked off the website and skimmed the dozens of files.