Silver

by Brian January

  He glanced over his shoulder. In the rear Nathaniel was sitting bent forward, oblivious to the scenery, his face thrust against the screen of his laptop.

  April flicked a suspicious glance at Skarda. Catching her eye, he grinned softly, knowing she knew what he was thinking: that she and Nathaniel were a mismatched pair.

  With a dark scowl, she jammed her foot on the accelerator.

  At its summit, the road flattened out at the entrance to a broad, empty landscape of dull greens, ringed by hazy blue mountains rising up in the distance. This was the Nissimos Plateau, one of the many smaller plateaus that comprise the Dikti massif, the range of limestone and marble mountains that cradle the much larger Lassithi Plateau like a giant horseshoe. April drove a short distance until they reached the convergence point of three dirt roads. Skarda pointed left and she turned the BMW onto the road leading to a boxlike whitewashed chapel framed by a mountain saddle between two distant peaks.

  She parked in a lot made of crushed stone. Climbing out, Skarda breathed in the crisp, clean air. It was a bit colder at this altitude, and a strong wind had sprung up, but the sun was climbing higher in the sky, warming his exposed skin.

  April slammed her door and went around to the rear. Through contacts found by Candy Man, she’d bought weapons from a black market dealer in Heraklion: an M4 Carbine, two Sig Sauer P229 pistols, and for her, two of her favorite Fusion Fulcrum throwing knives. Sticking one of the pistols in her waistband, she handed the other to Skarda, who did the same. The M4 she carried in a steel case. In their three backpacks she had stowed Vertex climbing rope, three LED lamps, and bottles of water.

  Nathaniel was waiting for them, leaning against the side of the X5, laptop in hand. As they came up he nervously eyed the gun case, but said nothing. From this point on they would have to hike the rest of the way up the mountain to get to the archaeological site that spread out on a flat saddle stretching between Mt. Karfi on its western edge and the peak of Mikri Koprana on the east.

  After that, they’d have to find Blackpool’s secret site on their own. Their only guide was the NASA GPR readout furnished by Candy Man—and it showed dozens of underground caves scattered all over the mountainside.

  “Okay,” April said, striding off up the trail without waiting for her companions. “Let’s move.”

  Nathaniel watched her retreating back, then shot a sheepish glance at Skarda.

  He just shrugged. His face said: “She’s all yours.”

  It took them twenty minutes of steady climbing to reach the site. From this elevation Skarda could see the entire Dikti Range to the west, its highest elevations still snowcapped from the winter months. To the east rose the Sitia Mountains, and beyond them, the flat blue expanse of the far-off sea. On the vast green carpet that was the Lassithi Plateau, he could make out the tiny white clusters that were scatterings of working windmills.

  The archaeological site itself was a letdown. Abandoned by its excavators in 1939, most of the buildings had dilapidated into crumbling piles of stone, eroded to rubble by time and the elements.

  But Nathaniel was overjoyed.

  Trotting forward to one of the ruins, he called out. “Look at this! This was probably a nobleman’s house—here’s where the main hearth was...and the bedrooms in back! Yes...yes! And these are all the storerooms, and probably a stable!”

  “We don’t have time,” April said. Her voice was flat and emotionless, but Skarda could hear the coldness in it, even if Nathaniel couldn’t.

  She was on the job now, all business. She was deliberately sealing off her emotional connection to Nathaniel. It could get in the way if things got rough.

  “Okay,” he said docilely. “It’s just that—“

  But she was already striding ahead toward the east, where a massive hump of gray dolomite blocked their path.

  A jumble of emotions rocketed across the scholar’s face. He started to glance up at Skarda, but then decided against it.

  Skarda shrugged. “She’s very independent,” he said gently.

  Nathaniel managed to find a weak smile and headed after her.

  When they caught up to her, she was standing at the edge of steep drop-off. Beyond a distant shark-toothed mountain was a glimpse of the Mediterranean; to the south the mountainside angled sharply down to a gorge, the pathless landscaped studded with tooth-like rock formations interspersed with an occasional stunted holm oak.

  Skarda accessed the GPR file and pointed at the gorge. “It looks like there’s a big cave system down this way. Worth a try.” Turning to Nathaniel, he asked, “You up for this?”

  The scholar eyed the steep, rocky descent with trepidation.

  “He goes between us,” April said. She put her hand on Nathaniel’s shoulder and smiled warmly. “Don’t worry. I told you I’d take care of you.”

  His beautiful green eyes met hers and he returned the smile.

  But when she turned her back to him and started down the slope, he looked up at Skarda in utter confusion.

  ___

  It was Nathaniel who saw it first.

  They had just slip-slided down a slope of broken limestone when their boots hit a mesa-like table of rock that jutted straight out like a shelf. Below it, the slope continued to plunge down to form a shallow canyon strewn with tilted boulders and clawed into stony gullies by eons of erosion. Following the incline of the slope, they finally reached bottom. At their backs an ancient landslide had tumbled man-sized chunks of stone into a waterfall of rock where juniper and myrtle scrub bushes clung in patches below the tangled limbs of a stand of Kermes oaks.

  “Oh!” he cried out, pointing. “Yes...yes!”

  The others swung around to follow his outstretched finger. To the east a single V-shaped peak soared up into the sky, its summit split into two horn-shaped spikes linked by a U-shaped notch.

  “The lunar horns!” he said. The words tumbled out of his mouth in a rush. “They would have thought this place was sacred! They would have thought it was ordained by the Goddess!” He turned around, his face flushed with excitement. “The cave has to be somewhere around here!”

  Pushing forward, he headed for the stand of oaks. “I’ll bet there’s a path through here...yes!” Clawing branches and leaves aside, he showed them a pyramid-shaped opening large enough for a man to wriggle through.

  Fear clenched at Skarda’s stomach. His claustrophobia was a weakness he’d never been able to overcome.

  “I’m first,” April said.

  Striding up beside Nathaniel, she helped him clear away the foliage, then bent down and pushed her head into the opening. Then she pulled out and looked back at her companions. “From what I can tell, it goes through.” Pulling an LED lamp from her pack, she shone it into the hole and wriggled inside.

  Nathaniel went next, followed by Skarda. When he finally emerged at the other end, his shirt was soaked in sweat and his heart was hammering in his chest. Sucking in a deep breath to calm himself, he crawled through and scrambled to his feet, sweeping his lamp around the stone chamber he now stood in.

  The cave was shaped like an inverted bowl, less than twenty feet in height, its black-stained dun-colored walls glistening with reflected highlights where water trickled down from the outside world above. Now that he was cut off from the heat of the sunlight outside, he shivered with the abrupt change in temperature, and the soggy humidity was already making him gasp for breath.

  On the dirt-covered stone floor ahead of him, he could see the impressions of a pair of modern boots that weren’t theirs.

  Blackpool had been here.

  In spite of April’s reservations, he felt an expanding surge of excitement.

  Off to his right, Nathaniel was shining his lamp on a formation that seemed to grow out of the wall. “This is incredible!” he cried out.

  Focusing his own light, Skarda could see a heavy block of pinkish-red dolomite that was shaped in the crude outline of a crescent moon lying on its side.

  The scholar bent closer,
his slim figure outlined eerily in the glow of his LED. “This is a natural rock formation! Carved by nature, not man! Imagine what went through the minds of these people, who thought this cave was the sacred womb of the Mother Goddess! They would have thought she sculpted this herself!”

  “Park.” April was standing at the entrance to what looked like a connecting passage.

  He moved to her side, mating the beam of his lamp with hers. In the combined light he could see a short, jagged corridor that opened into the rock wall, and beyond it, a glimpse of what looked like an impenetrable forest of stalagmites and stalactites.

  Nathaniel came up behind them, his breathing raspy with excitement. “If this cave is dedicated to the lunar Goddess, then maybe the silver is here after all.”

  “Let’s hope so,” Skarda said.

  They moved into the opening. Coming to its end, he could now see that the passageway opened onto a huge natural chamber at least one hundred and fifty feet long, with widths of varying dimensions so that in the gloom it appeared to undulate in his vision. Stalagmites thrust up from the cavern’s floor, sometimes tapering to needle-like points and sometimes to bulbous excrescences that looked like flowers from an alien world. From the ceiling thick, ribbed stalactites seemed to be dripping down like liquid rock, their bases lost in darkness. Many of them met the stalagmites below to form single, tapering columns.

  A natural path between two massive lumps of stone sloped downward at a steep angle, threading through the rock formations. April led the way, swinging her lamp to and fro, the glistening stone walls wetly reflecting her beam before becoming engulfed in darkness again. When they reached the bottom, Skarda saw they were surrounded by tiered deposits of ochre-colored limestone that looked like waterfalls of melting ice cream. The cave floor was slick with moisture. Sweat from the high humidity trickled down both sides of his face.

  “What are we looking for?” April called out to Nathaniel.

  “Some sort of natural shrine. An altar, maybe,” he answered. In front of Skarda, he was having a tough time keeping his boots from slipping out from under him, his flash bouncing at crazy angles over the rock formations. “But keep an eye out for votive offerings, like vases or Goddess figures. The Minoans would stick them into crevices in these caves.”

  April halted up in front of a massive stalagmite column that looked like it had been joined together from fat beads on a string. She shone her lamp on a spot just below eye level.

  Nathaniel rushed up next to her. “Oh! Yes...yes!”

  Skarda swung his light to merge with theirs. Scratched on the stone column was a crude drawing of the Minoan Snake Goddess with a pair of bull’s horns and a labrys over her head.

  Nathaniel turned to look at him, his face bright with excitement. “Ariadne! This must be the right spot!”

  April’s lamp flashed over a spot of color. She stooped and picked up a shard of terra cotta from a rock crevice. On it was inscribed an oblong-shaped seven-circuit labyrinth with the image of the crescent moon at its center. She showed it to Nathaniel.

  Examining it, he bobbed his head. “Mycenaean! They’ve found coins like this, too! It means the lunar Goddess continued to be worshipped here after the fall of the Minoan civilization!”

  They pushed ahead, threading a path around the stalagmites, their LED’s raking across the slick rocks. Skarda glanced around the cavern. To the south, the chamber closed off into a solid, impenetrable wall. Ahead, to the northwest, the vast chamber narrowed, the walls closing around them until they finally realized they were approaching a roughly rectangular slit in the north wall, just wide enough to squeeze through one by one.

  For Skarda, it was like crawling into a coffin and slamming the lid behind him. Raw panic clawed at him. His pulse pounded in his temples. Here the walls were slimy and smelled of rotten eggs. He knew it was hydrogen sulfide, which would ultimately be transformed by the seeping oxygen-rich water into sulphuric acid, the corrosive agent that over the eons had eaten away the limestone to create this cave.

  But that knowledge didn’t keep the stench from overpowering his senses and making him choke.

  Ahead, April’s lamp jerked and disappeared. “Okay,” he heard her call out. “We’re through.”

  On the other side of the slit, the fissure widened by several inches. Skarda squeezed out after Nathaniel, sucking in a deep breath with grateful relief. The beam of his LED showed April standing in a natural U-shaped chamber, her own lamp stabbing through the darkness to reveal immense drapery-like formations of stone flowing down the walls, their folds coruscating with shimmering colors of browns, reds, and startling marble-like whites. At their foot votive objects had been piled up or shoved into natural crevices: vases, statues of Snake Goddesses, rhytons in the shape of bull’s heads, and double-headed axes—all fashioned from pure silver.

  Nathaniel picked up one of the Snake Goddesses. It was about a foot high and blackened with tarnish. In each hand the Goddess held a spiraling snake. “Incredible” he said.

  “Nathaniel.” Skarda had moved into a shadowed niche and was shining his lamp on a long, narrow altar that protruded perpendicularly from the wall about three feet off the cave floor. On it rested a skeleton covered in blackened silver.

  The scholar rushed up next to him, his flash jerking in his hand. “Yes! Oh...yes!” Bending over the skeleton, he inspected it, his nose an inch away.

  Skarda’s pulse quickened.

  But April turned to him, her face grim. “This can’t be the Thera hoard.” she muttered. “It’s too small.”

  His heart sank. He’d thought the same thing. “It looks like it’s all tarnished, too. No neosamarium.”

  Moving forward, he looked down at the skeleton. The living person had been small—maybe five feet tall at the most—and, judging from the shape of the pelvis, a female. She was wearing what must have originally been a robe or coat, whose fabric had long since rotted away, and which had been covered with hundreds of small silver foil plates, each sewn to the next with lengths of silver wire.

  “This must have been Ariadne’s high priestess,” Nathaniel mumbled. He was talking to himself, lost in his own world. “This is incredible! Yes! Absolutely incredible!”

  April stood on the other side of the altar, looking at him. “This isn’t the hoard,” she said softly. “We have to get out of here. We have to keep looking.”

  A few moments dragged past before Nathaniel lifted his head. The lamplight reflected in his pupils. “You two go ahead. I need to stay here. This find is too important!”

  Her head moved back and forth. “You can’t do that. Peoples’ lives are at stake. We need you, Nathaniel.”

  The scholar just stared at her, his face stricken.

  “When this is over, you can come back here and work for as long as you like,” Skarda told him. “I’ll personally fund the project, if that’s what you need. But right now, we need you to help us find the neosamarium.”

  For a few heartbeats Nathaniel continued to stare as a wave of unrestrained emotions flooded his face. Then he slowly nodded. “All right.”

  With visible reluctance he tore himself away from the altar.

  Skarda pulled out the Stealth and looked at the countdown timer: 38:07:34.

  They were quickly running out of time.

  Thirty-eight hours from now people would start to die.

  THIRTEEN

  Rethymno Harbor

  CATHERINE LAKE sat in a leather chair apart from the activity at the computer stations, now manned by the pirate crew. The technicians brought along as part of Turner’s support staff had been locked into cabins under the bow, as had the senator’s remaining bodyguard. Morgana herself had gone up top for a moment to confer with Makris on the bow. But she’d left a gunman to guard them.

  It was what Lake been waiting for.

  Moving her head, she caught Turner’s eye. He was sitting deep in the shadows halfway across the salon, where the shafts of sunlight streaming through the deck window
s didn’t reach. He got up and crossed the carpet to sit down next to her.

  Taking a swig from the bottle of water in his hand, he said, “Thirty-eight hours left.”

  The senator nodded, keeping her eyes on the gunman on the other side of the salon. The man was clearly bored; he kept craning his neck to glimpse a view of the harbor through the windows.

  She waited until he looked away again. Then, with her lips barely moving, she said, “We need to get off this boat. We need to get to a secure phone.”