“That’s a tempting offer to an academic.”
“He couldn’t resist it. He said he’d gone to witness a ceremony of the harmless nature lovers. A woman he met there got into the sacrificial wine and let loose about a friend, even told him her name, who’d joined the animal sacrifice cult but pulled out after going to a ceremony. Too bloody, she said. When the woman sobered up, she told the professor she had made it up. The shadow society didn’t exist.”
“Did the professor believe her?”
“No. He even tried to track down the former member, but she had died in a car accident.”
Hawkins pondered the reply. Yet another accident. “What else did the professor’s source tell him?”
“She said the cult went back thousands of years; said they believed in continuous sacrifices to ensure good fortune. Anything less would anger the earth goddess. She was constantly thirsty for human blood, apparently.”
“Which this gang provided.”
“That’s what we were told.”
“Did this cult have a name?”
“It was called the Way of the Axe. They’re spread around the world. All the pieces were starting to fit. A Minoan cult. A Minoan ship. Human sacrifice. I saw stars, especially after I heard about Kalliste’s scroll in a lost language and the translation device you salvaged from the ship. I envisioned a mini-series that would give Hidden History the kind of respectability it never had.”
“People who practice human sacrifice would do everything they could to stop that from happening.”
Lily bit her lower lip. “I know that now. I got worried and called Kalliste to let her know what was going on. She didn’t answer her phone. Today I got the photo of her with those two… things. What in God’s name are they?”
“Nothing I want breathing down Kalliste’s neck.”
“I know it sounds crazy. That’s why I called you instead of the police. Was that the right decision?”
“The Spanish cops still don’t believe someone blew our dive boat out of the water.” He stared off into space, working his jaw muscles, then said, “Let’s assume your theory has legs. The kidnappers could have killed Kalliste at any time, but they sent the photo instead. My guess is that they want the scroll and translation device.”
“That seems like a reasonable assumption, but where does it leave us?”
“With leverage. We’ll say that we’ll give them what they want in exchange for Kalliste.”
“You have the scroll and the translator?”
“I can put my hands on them. Setting up a deal will keep Kalliste alive and give us time to figure things out.”
“She could already be dead. They could have killed her after they took that picture.”
“I’m aware of that possibility. I’d like you type out the following message:
Miss you too. Let’s get together. Stay well. Matt.”
She finished typing and hit Reply. “Now what?”
“We wait. And we try to learn whatever we can about the Way of the Axe.”
“Maybe we should talk to the professor again.”
“Good suggestion. Maybe we can pry something out of him that will give us an edge.”
“I’ll try to arrange a meeting.”
She said she would call Hawkins as soon as she heard from the professor. She gave him another hug and waved down a cab to take her back to the hotel. She sat back in her seat with a smile of satisfaction on her lips. The eyes that had been moist with tears were desert dry. The quivering lips were compressed into a tight smile. There was not a shred of resemblance to the helpless female who’d fallen on Hawkins’ broad shoulders.
Hawkins had made her work even easier. He was a modern-day swashbuckler, a man of immense courage and resources. The same qualities that could make him a formidable foe would be his downfall. His friend was in trouble and he would do anything he could to rescue her. His fierce determination would blind him to the real dangers that threatened.
She had lured him in with the mix of fact and fiction. The Way of the Axe was real. The Oxford professor was fiction. The University of Cadiz scholar was real but she had never talked to him.
After she got back to her hotel room, she would call the Maze and instruct the priestesses to prepare Kalliste for her meeting with the Mother Goddess. Then she would contact Hawkins, and say the professor wanted to meet him. Before the night was over, she would have the scroll and translator in her hands, Hawkins would be dead, and Kalliste offered up to the Mother Goddess.
She stared out the taxi window at the busy Cadiz street scene, but her mind’s eye saw the sanctuary of the Snake Goddess. As she pictured herself walking toward the altar and the Horns of Consecration, her long slender fingers closed around the jeweled hilt of an invisible bronze dagger.
CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO
Molly stood in the yard behind her house, eyes fixed on the cloudless blue sky. Her ears were cocked for the plaintive whistle of a Golden eagle, but the only sound she heard was the breeze soughing in the aspen trees.
On the ride back from Portland she had passed the accident site. A wrecker had towed the car away. She examined the raw scars on the tree and wondered what the medical examiner would make of the claw marks on the stranger’s head, but decided she didn’t really care.
When she got home, she garaged the motorcycle and went around behind the house to stand near the shed. Maybe Wheeling would drop by for a snack, but probably not. After its traumatic escape, the bird was probably so danged scared it would never come back.
Molly lowered her chin and rubbed the back of her neck. She took a final glance at the empty sky and headed into the house, stopping in the kitchen to rummage through the cupboards. She filled a bowl with tortilla chips and opened a jar of cheese dip. To take the edge off her guilt she liberated a can of diet soda from the refrigerator and carried her snack into her office.
She sat down in front of her computer, munched some chips and stared vacantly at the screen. Her mind methodically checked off a mental checklist. She ran a test of her computer. The firewalls and protections were in place. Some hackers throw every possible password at a wall to see what sticks. The technique was known as brute force. Amateur move. Time-consuming. Unlikely to reach higher levels of authentication. Guaranteed to alert the target.
Molly decided against a direct approach, such as running a scan to see how high the Auroch protective walls were. This was her first foray into Auroch. Poking around the edges of a target as big as Salazar’s company would likely trigger alarms and a counter attack.
Molly finished her chips and salsa. Then she flexed her fingers like a piano virtuoso preparing to dig into a Chopin etude, tapped the keyboard and called up the Auroch company logo with its stylized bull’s horns. She glanced with contempt at the photo of Salazar, thinking that he looked like a big old smiling lizard. Then she dissected the website.
She zeroed in on the Auroch subsidiaries. There were dozens, nearly all in the fossil fuel industry, mining or related businesses, such as, equipment manufacture or transport. With the patience of a Swiss watchmaker, she studied each company one-by-one, but made no attempt to get into their files.
After finishing the first pass, she gazed at the monitor, imagining herself on the other side of the screen. She put herself in the place of the computer experts who would have built defensive walls around Auroch. In their position, she would have made a few entry points accessible. Nothing too easy, just enough to pose a reasonable challenge to a competent hacker. She’d use sloppy programming, as if by mistake. The hacker who went down that pathway would eventually encounter a no-nonsense barrier. But by then the trap would have been sprung. The hacker would have no idea he’d been traced until he heard someone pounding on his door.