The Minoan Cipher (A Matinicus “Matt” Hawkins Adventure Book 2)

by Paul Kemprecos

The man looked crestfallen. “I haven’t opened correspondence for weeks. I’ve been cloistered like a monk with my work.”

  “Designing a new building project?”

  “I’m afraid my architectural career has suffered from my other preoccupations.”

  “Well…come in, come in. I’m all packed as you can see. A cab is due in twenty minutes. I’ll pour us a quick brandy and we’ll have a short but proper chinwag.”

  “Quite all right, Professor. That’s all the time I need.”

  Robsham led the way into the study and motioned for his friend to take a seat. From a crystal decanter on a low table, he poured two fat fingers of Armagnac into a pair of snifters. Then he settled into a stuffed leather chair.

  “Since time is short, I’ll do this the way I deal with my more prolix students,” he said. “State your premise in twenty words or less.”

  “I only need five words.” The man smiled, “I have done it again.”

  “I don’t—”

  “The second script. I’ve unlocked its secret.”

  “What?” Robsham set his snifter down on the table. “Are you saying you’ve deciphered Linear A?”

  His friend nodded.

  “I’m speechless, Michael. This is stupendous. No, it’s beyond that. Please don’t hold back, young man. Tell me how you succeeded where others failed. Did you use the grid approach that worked with Linear B?”

  “I tried that method, but this script is in a class by itself.”

  “How, then?”

  “I had the help of the Rosetta Stone. Partial, imperfect and incomplete, but it held the key to my findings.”

  Even someone without Robsham’s scholarly credentials would know the Rosetta Stone was the artifact inscribed with a message in three different languages that had allowed the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphics.

  “If what you say is true, the translation of Linear A could tear away the curtain of secrecy that has hid so much of the marvelous Minoan civilization. Finally, we would be able to know everything about those amazing people. Not just through their ruined palaces. Their words would tell us what they were thinking. I’ve got to cancel my trip.”

  “No need to cancel, Professor. You can do far more to advance my research in Greece than here in London.”

  Robsham saw the unwavering determination in the calm eyes that gazed out from under the arching brow and wide forehead. He glanced at the clock. “Very well. You have ten minutes.”

  “I will take you on a shortened version of my linguistic adventure,” Michael said. He unzipped the portfolio and extracted two photocopies. He moved the brandy snifters aside and placed the first copy on the coffee table. “I enlarged these with my architectural camera. What do you make of them?”

  Robsham read a few paragraphs. “My Spanish is rusty, but this appears to involve the transfer of property belonging to a heretic. Something to do with the Inquisition?”

  “Exactly. Now this.”

  Michael Ventris set two more pages covered with pictographs next to the first. Robsham tapped a page with his finger. “Linear A. What does this writing have to do with the Spanish pages?”

  “They are one and the same, Professor. I’ve used the few Linear A symbols that have been deciphered, along with some that I have analyzed. They gave me enough traction to know that both texts are talking about the identical subject.”

  The professor felt as if the room were spinning. He gulped down his brandy to steady his nerves and glanced at the clock. Five minutes before the taxi arrived. Damn. He had told the driver to be prompt.

  “Despite my excitement, I must be frank with my scholarly skepticism. This document would mean that someone knew, and used, Linear A script, thousands of years after it had vanished from all knowledge.”

  “My conclusion as well.”

  “Impossible, but there it is, right in front of us. Where did you find this material?”

  “I was exhausted after my Linear B translation, but the problem of the second script still intrigued me. I engaged a book agent who was instructed to ferret out examples of the ancient script. I wanted a library in place, for me or other scholars who might take up the translation. The agent found a Spanish dealer in antique documents who had discovered the script clipped to legal papers involving a transfer of real estate property under the auspices of the Inquisition.”

  “But Michael, the juxtaposition of these two documents simply doesn’t make sense. The Minoan civilization disappeared thousands of years ago. No one even knew the blasted Minoans existed until Evans started poking around.”

  “That’s why I have put aside the question of how until I deal with what. I will use the documents to establish a lexicon. Then I can decipher this fully and perhaps it will tell us who.”

  “Have you told anyone else about this?”

  “I corresponded with a historian at the University of Seville who is an expert on the Minoan colonization of Spain. I wondered whether there was a linguistic link, similar to the way Greek had become the basis for a Minoan script. He encouraged me to continue my research and I’ve kept him up-to-date.”

  The honk of a car horn interrupted their conversation.

  “Blast it,” the professor said. “Cab is right on time. Quickly now, tell me what I can do.”

  “Your trip to Greece must be the handiwork of the gods. The photocopies are for you to keep, but I need more examples of Linear A script to provide context for my translation. You have contacts in Athens and Heraklion.”

  “And I’ll be happy to use them to get what you need.” The professor stood and braced his friend by the shoulders. “The professional naysayers in academia will resist your findings as they did before. You know how they howl when amateurs like us beat them at their own game. But if you succeed, young man, this will far eclipse your debut.”

  “I’m aware of that, which is why I have been nervous and depressed even on the verge of success.”

  The horn honked again.

  “The cab driver is getting impatient,” the professor said.

  They carried the bags out to the curb. While the driver packed the boot, the two men shook hands and the professor said he would call his friend after the conference. He got in the back seat and flashed his friend a Winston Churchill victory sign as the cab drove off. Michael smiled and returned the ‘V.’

  Robsham sat back in his seat and pondered the implications of his brief conversation. If there was one person on earth who could translate a script that had, thus far, defied all attempts at decipherment it was Michael Ventris. Once he set his mind, he pursued his goal to the end. There was no disputing the man’s brilliance.

  Ventris had been only fourteen years old when he went to a lecture given in London at the 50th anniversary of the British School of Archaeology. The speaker was Arthur Evans, the amateur archaeologist who had excavated the palace at Knossos, discovering the long-lost Minoan civilization that once ruled the eastern Mediterranean before slipping into oblivion.

  Evans had talked about his unsuccessful attempts to decipher two different Minoan scripts, which he had labeled Linear A and Linear B. Ventris was a prodigy who possessed a photographic memory and would become fluent in several languages. As he sat, spellbound in the auditorium at Burlington House, the teenaged Ventris vowed that he would one day decipher a Minoan script.

  He went on to become an architect, and was a Royal Air Force bomber navigator over Germany during World War II.

  After the war he’d resumed his architectural career, but had devoted most of his energy to deciphering the ancient script. He brought cryptographic techniques to his work and gathered together a work group that corresponded on their findings. He drew heavily upon the notes of Alice Kober and Emmett Bennett, Jr.

  Sixteen years after hearing Evans, he announced his controversial finding. The script known as Linear B was a Greek dialect, apparently used mainly for keeping trade records.

  It was the archeological discovery of the century.


  Robsham chuckled with amazement. Now three years later, the young genius was poised to do it again.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Ventris was ebullient after his talk with Robsham.

  The professor was one of the few people who had kept in touch after Ventris went into a funk following his decipherment of Linear B.

  The daunting task of decoding a language more than four thousand years old had taken its toll on him mentally and physically. He was proud of his accomplishment, but disappointed at the contents of the script he worked on. The text subjects were mundane and dealt mostly with commerce. They revealed little about the Minoan culture and why it had vanished.

  Ventris would not have been comfortable being in the public eye, even if critics had not questioned his findings. When he produced evidence refuting their criticisms, they sniped at the unspectacular nature of the scripts.

  He withdrew from the limelight and seldom appeared in public after that. As his energy gradually returned, he thought about delving into a study of Etruscan, another mysterious language used by a mysterious culture. The library collection had started off as a passive way to get back to his studies without having to throw himself into them.

  The Spanish papers had changed all that.

  He drove along, deep in thought, a dreamy expression on his handsome face. He hardly noticed that the brakes had an increasing squishy feeling when he stopped at a couple of traffic lights. He snapped to alertness at one stop. The pedal had gone almost half-way to the floorboards. He kept a light foot on the gas pedal and slowed the car to twenty miles per hour.

  He was nearing home when the blinding reflection of headlights appeared in his car’s rearview mirror. He squinted against the glare and pulled over to the left to give the car room to pass.

  The obnoxious vehicle on his tail drew back several car lengths, then sped up to come within inches of the rear bumper before falling back again.

  Ventris tried to keep his speed a steady forty miles per hour, hoping this would encourage the other driver to go by him. Instead, the car fell back. When it closed on Ventris again, it tapped the rear bumper.

  Crying out in surprise, he regained control of the wheel, only to be bumped again.

  His foot instinctively hit the gas pedal. The car sped up to forty-five.

  He left his pursuer behind for a moment, then the car closed on him and once more tapped the bumper. Harder this time.

  Ventris responded with greater speed, and his car surged up to more than fifty miles per hour. He was on the Barnet By-Pass. He’d soon be home, and away from this lunatic.

  The pursuer moved in again.

  Ventris got his car up to fifty-five. This was as fast as he dared or wanted to go given the state of his brakes.

  As the car moved in again his eyes automatically went to the mirror. He was temporarily blinded by the high beams and didn’t see the truck pull out of a side road until it turned directly in front of him.

  He jammed his brake pedal. This time it went all the way to the floor. The car slammed into the rear of the truck.

  The impact pushed the truck forward and the driver could barely keep control of the steering wheel, but he managed to bring his lorry to a halt. He grabbed an electric torch from its dashboard bracket, got out of the cab and staggered around to the rear of the truck.

  The car looked like a large metal accordion. He flashed the torch at the body slumped behind the twisted steering wheel.

  There was another car behind the wreck. Its headlights silhouetted a tall, slender figure moved toward the crushed car. At the side of the stranger was a huge four-legged creature.

  The driver pointed the torch at the newcomers. The man was dressed entirely in a snug-fitting black once-piece suit that emphasized his barrel chest and narrow waist. He wore sunglasses and a short-brimmed hat that set low on his forehead. The driver realized he was shining the light in the man’s face and lowered the beam, which fell on the body of the animal.

  “Good God!” he muttered.

  This was a dog like no other he had ever seen. Its bony white face resembled a skull that was vaguely human. But it was satanic in form, long and narrow, with the chin pointed. Red eyes blazed in their sockets like hot coals. The creature opened its mouth to display long curved fangs.

  “The light makes my pet nervous. Give me the torch.” The voice was quiet, like the rustling of a snake slithering over dry autumn leaves.

  The stranger stepped forward and took the torch from the lorry driver’s trembling fingers, then went over to the wrecked car. He reached in and placed his hand on the man’s neck.

  “Is he dead?” the lorry driver said.

  “Very dead,” the man said.

  “Slammed right into me. Poor bloke never had a chance,” the driver said. “We need help.”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” the stranger said. He tossed the torch back, said something to the dog and opened the back door of his car for the creature to get in. Then he got behind the wheel and accelerated quickly, flying past the site of the wreck.

  A police car arrived minutes later. The lorry driver was surprised to see it come from the direction opposite from the one the stranger had gone, but with two police officers walking his way, he had other things to think about.

  The stranger drove back to Robsham’s house. He didn’t know whether the brief visit he’d witnessed earlier had concerned the discovery, but he could take no chances. He had flown to London as soon as the call came from the Seville informant. With the newfound data, he had followed Ventris that night and disabled his car brakes, allowing them to leak fluid.

  The house on King’s Road was dark. Leaving the Daemon curled up in the back of his Jaguar, he broke in through a window.

  Heading into the study, he ransacked the desk drawers and found nothing that even mentioned the ancient script. Receipts on the desktop identified the occupant of the house as a Professor Robsham. Next to the papers were annotated train and ship schedules, which he stuck into his pocket. The stranger explored the rest of the house, including the bedroom closet. A number of hangers stood empty.

  Leaving the home, he got back into his car and drove to the airport where a private plane awaited his arrival. Boarding the plane with the canine-like creature, he gave the pilot new instructions. First he would fly to Seville to visit the university professor who’d sounded the alarm. The professor had served his purpose and had to be dealt with. When that task was accomplished, he’d fly to Greece. The added travel was unanticipated, but it was all part of his lifetime mission. He had sworn on the altar of the Horns of Consecration an oath that required him to carry out his sacred work. He must eliminate anybody who unlocked the sacred script and threatened the Way of the Axe.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Woods Hole, Massachusetts, Present Day

  Matt Hawkins pedaled his high-performance lightweight bicycle along the edge of Vineyard Sound, ignoring the twinge that reminded him, with each downward stroke, of the metal pins holding the bones of his left leg together. The lava black eyes behind the wrap-around sunglasses were tightly focused on the tarmac strip ahead of him. His muscular thighs pumped the pedals at a steady fifteen miles per hour pace. Sweat beaded a face that looked as if it had been carved from an oak tree.

  Hawkins had rolled out of bed at dawn, downed a mug of black Jamaican coffee and grunted through a half hour of Navy SEAL exercises. After his workout, he had pulled on his biking shorts and jersey and grabbed his helmet. Before heading to the front door, he stopped in the kitchen and threw some dog munchies into a bowl for Quisset, the female golden retriever he had adopted from the animal rescue league. Her name meant Star of the Sea in the language of Cape Cod’s Wampanoag Indian tribe.

  He plunked the helmet over his salt-and-pepper mane of hair and buckled the chin strap. “Be back in a while,” he said. Quisset barely lifted her nose from her dish. “Okay, be that way, doll. Good thing for you that I’ve got a weakness for blondes.”

  He wheeled h
is bike from the front porch of his Victorian-era house to the street where he pushed off and rode through the quiet neighborhood. He pedaled along the harbor past the Marine Biological Laboratory and the Georgian-style brick buildings of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, the academic powerhouse that had transformed the old fishing village into a world-renowned center for oceanic research. Cars and trucks were lining up in the island ferry parking lot for the morning run to Martha’s Vineyard.

  Hawkins rode on to the Shining Sea bike path and picked up speed. He swept past Nobska Light hill and along expanses of turquoise water and velvety marshes cloaked in sea mist. He braked to a stop at the end of the path after covering more than ten miles, downed a deep swallow from his water bottle, and set off on the return stretch. By the time he reached the ferry terminal he had accomplished his two-fold mission.

  He had beefed up the muscles of the leg that had been shattered by an improvised explosive device on a Navy SEAL operation in Afghanistan. And the cool breeze in his face had blown away the mental fog shrouding his brain. Thoughts fluttered around his head like butterflies, making him eager to get back to work before they flew away.

  The Water Street drawbridge was being raised for a sailboat heading out of Eel Pond. He almost made it across the short span but had to skid to a stop when the gate dropped in place. He cursed a bit too loudly for some tourists, who moved away, allowing Hawkins to be the first across when the bridge came down. A couple of hundred yards past the bridge, Hawkins turned off Water Street and rode to the oceanographic institution’s south dock. He leaned his bike against the twenty-foot-long metal shipping container that served his field office, opened the door and stepped inside.

  Slipping his helmet off, he settled into a swivel chair, then powered up his laptop. The file he’d abandoned appeared on the screen. Late the previous night his frustration had peaked. Slamming the cover down on the computer, he’d walked across the street to the Captain Kidd bar, grabbed a beer and sat under the mural of pirates burying a treasure chest. After downing his second beer, he’d decided that an early morning bike ride might stimulate his sluggish mind.