The Lost Labyrinth dk-3

by Will Adams

  She fought her instinct to retreat indoors, lest it think it had won a victory. Instead, she took a couple of steps outside into the pleasant freshness of the morning. Sunlight glinted on a pair of steel bowls by the door, presumably food and water for the dog, empty except for a few caked-on scabs; and next to them was what looked like the thighbone of a goat or sheep, gnawed bare of meat. She felt a swell of irritation at Petitier, that responsibility for his wretched dog should fall onto her. But fall on her it had. And suddenly she noticed how thin the German shepherd was, its ribs showing, its coat patchy and speckled with sores and scabs where he-it was a he, Gaille now saw-had scratched himself against the stone walls. And he was slightly favouring his left hind leg too. And despite his still furious barking, her heart went out to him.

  They hadn't finished their conchiglie in tomato sauce the night before. She fetched the leavings down from the roof, scraped them into one of the bowls, refreshed them with some water, then added slivers of ham from the joint hanging in the pantry. Then she filled the second bowl with water and took them both out. He raged to see her, hurled himself so violently towards her that she couldn't help but jump back and splash water over her leg. 'You stupid fucking dog!' she cried. 'I'm only trying to feed you.'

  But he continued to snarl until she shrugged her shoulders and took the bowls back inside. The barking stopped at once, the whimpering resumed. She gave a wail of exasperation and went back out. This time she defied his barking to set both bowls down on the ground as near to him as she dared. Then she went back inside and fetched the Mauser and held it by its barrel and pushed the bowls with its stock close enough to him that he could feed. He didn't even look at them, not while she was there, just continued to rage, so she returned inside and replaced the Mauser and picked her notebook once more, tried to focus on the journals.

  She strongly suspected a simple substitution cipher. Petitier would surely have wanted to be able to consult them without going through elaborate decipherment every time. People who devised their own ciphers were often so familiar with them that they could read them almost as easily as though they were in plain text. No code could hope to defeat sophisticated modern decipherment techniques anyway, so all he'd have hoped to do was confound a casual visitor-and a substitution cipher would have been plenty for that.

  The trick with cracking such ciphers was to find repeating sequences of symbols, which would indicate the same original word. It wasn't long before she'd identified several of these, enabling her to take some guesses at what those words might be, then applying the letters she'd broken back to the journals. But though she tried in a variety of languages, all she got was gibberish. She put it aside for the moment, took a different tack, totting up all the different symbols he'd used, hoping to discover at least what alphabet the deciphered text was in. The Greek alphabet had twenty-four symbols, for example, as opposed to the standard twenty-six of the Roman or the twenty-eight of the Arabic. But she quickly counted forty-two different symbols, suggesting his cipher included numerals and mathematical or grammatical symbols, as well as letters. She tried a third approach, noting down the relative frequency of each of the symbols and combinations of symbols; but that didn't prove much help either, for she didn't know what language she was working in.

  She put her pad down in frustration. There was silence outside. Or not silence, exactly. Her ears pricked up at the sound. She rose stealthily and tiptoed to the door. The dog had his muzzle deep in the bowl of pasta, and as she watched he threw back his head to gobble a mouthful down, and the glad squelching noises of his swallowing were a kind of music to her ears.

  II

  Knox's ribs and chest felt as bruised as he could ever remember. His stomach too, from the punch he'd taken. His heart felt worn as perished rubber, and his throat and nostrils were chafed raw, as though sand-papered from within. He turned to one side, spat out watery mucous that ran feebly past the gag and down the side of his mouth. Time was blurring, his mind was playing tricks. He wasn't sure how many sessions of this torture he'd already endured. Four? Five?

  'Ah,' said Mikhail. 'Rejoined us, I see.' He was holding the hand-towel down by his side, still wet, but twisted in a gentle spiral, as though he'd just wrung it out.

  Knox shivered with Pavlovian tremors. 'What do you want?' he asked. But the gag rendered it into an incomprehensible moan.

  Mikhail flapped out the hand-towel and then folded it in half, ready to lay once more over Knox's face. 'Hold his head,' he told Davit.

  'Please,' wept Knox. 'No more.'

  'He's ready to talk,' said Davit.

  'Lift his feet,' Mikhail told Zaal.

  'Please,' said Knox. 'I beg you.'

  Mikhail set the folded towel back over Knox's face, turning his world dark. His heart started racing, he could hear footsteps going round and around, deliberately building his apprehension. 'Do you know what the function of torture is, Zaal?' asked Mikhail.

  'To get information, sir?'

  'No,' said Mikhail. 'Information is the fruit of torture. It's not the function.'

  'I'm not sure I understand, sir.'

  'Mankind is self-aware, Zaal. It's what separates us from the animals. Our minds are distinct from our bodies, our thoughts from our words. If you like, we're each puppeteers pulling our own strings. During ordinary interrogations, that gap is still there, that distance between mind and body. It allows people like Mr Knox here to consider their answers, to say whatever they believe is to their greatest benefit. The function of torture is to eradicate that gap, so that the subject's thoughts are no longer distinct from their words.'

  'To turn people back into animals?'

  'Exactly, Zaal. Very well put. The trouble is, of course, that you need a certain level of pain to eradicate that gap; but people can't talk under that level of pain. It's not physically possible. You therefore have to relieve the pain to conduct the actual interrogation. And as soon as you relieve the pain, that gap can grow again, your subject regains a little control over their own strings. So the true purpose of torture is to eliminate that gap for good, and we do that with dread. Not suffering itself, but the anticipation of it. Watch.' Knox's feet began to rise, he heard the swill of water, he bucked and kicked and screamed. 'See,' said Mikhail. 'I'm not doing anything to him at all. All I'm doing is lifting up his feet. But right now he'll tell me just exactly what I want to know.' He removed the towel then reached behind Knox's head and loosened the gag. 'Won't you, Mr Knox?'

  'Yes,' wept Knox.

  'So what am I after?'

  'The fleece. You want the golden fleece.'

  'Because you have it, don't you?' And he folded the towel and made to place it over his face once more.

  'Yes,' screamed Knox. 'I have it! I have it! I have it!'

  'You see,' said Mikhail. 'That's how torture works.'

  III

  Gaille had already given Petitier's journal code her best shot in French, English, German and Greek, both modern and ancient. But perhaps she should be trying other languages still. He was almost certain to have been an accomplished linguist: archaeologists had to be, not merely because they dealt so directly with ancient languages, but also because the important literature was still divided between English, German and French.

  So what other languages had Petitier known? She went along his shelves. He had a couple of works in Italian, another in Spanish. She couldn't help but notice that many of the volumes were still in pristine jackets, and she recognised several that had only recently been published. Academic texts like these didn't come cheap. Along with the solar panels on the roof, and the well-provisioned pantry, it seemed that, whatever else had motivated Petitier to announce his discoveries to the world, it wasn't the need for money. She went back to her chair, but her mind was clouded with fatigue, and she knew she'd never make any real headway unless she cleared it first. She clenched and then splayed her hands fast fifteen times, an old student trick that unfortunately seemed to have lost its potency, so she went outs
ide instead, to get some exercise and fresh air.

  The German shepherd was having a snooze. That was something. She went around the side of the house, where a pen had been put up in a clearing, presumably for the dog when it wasn't on guard outside the front door. It was a wire cube some two metres square, ugly, uncomfortable and offering no shade at all, and its corners were filthy with dusty, dried-out stools, not cleaned for months.

  She continued on around the back. There was a citrus grove there, with an outbuilding beyond it, and then a chicken run with a wooden hutch, out of earshot of the house. The birds clucked and jerked in alarm at her approach, all trying to hide behind each other. There were gutters on bricks for food and water, but they were empty. Her exasperation with Petitier grew stronger. The outhouse door gave a tormented squeal when she pulled it open. A long-handled broom, a spade, a fork and some other gardening tools were slouching against the left-hand wall, a sack of chicken-feed against the right. She grabbed handfuls from it that she tossed through the wire for them to peck at, then fetched a basin of water from the house. She let herself into the run, slopped the water into the trough, then retrieved eleven eggs from the hutch.

  The greenhouses were next. The wooden framed door of the first dragged on the ground, as though unopened in weeks. It was murky inside from the dirty polythene, sweltering and pungent with rotting vegetation. There were parallel beds of rich dark soil either side of the central aisle, and raised plastic guttering above, with tiny holes pricked in them, from which to sprinkle water. She went a little way along the walkway, checking out the produce, congested and in serious need of attention. Tomatoes, potatoes, eggplants, sweet-corn, broccoli, pomegranates, peppers, cucumbers. More than Petitier could possibly have needed for himself and his menagerie; presumably he sold his surplus in Agia Georgio or Anapoli in exchange for supplies. She took enough for herself and Iain, was glad to re-emerge into fresh air.

  The doorway of the second greenhouse was even more overgrown, an impenetrable tangle that made it hard for her to fight inside. But the interior was surprisingly well tended, far more so than the first. She walked down the aisle with mounting astonishment. The beds were filled with crocuses, poppies, marijuana and other exotic plants. And, at the far end, a miniature forest of hallucinogenic mushrooms: the distinctive red-and-white caps of amanita muscaria, the muted tans of psilocybin. She laughed out loud. How about that? The man was a stoner. She went back to the house. The dog had woken up. She hoped that she'd earned a little credit with the food and water she'd given him. Not a bit of it. If anything, they'd restored his strength and determination to defend his territory. He snarled and snapped and strained so hard for her that she feared one or other of his leashes would give way. Fine, she thought. Be like that. She stowed her eggs and vegetables away in the pantry, then settled once more to work on Petitier's journals.

  IV

  Mikhail was delighted to have broken Knox so cleanly, but when he looked around at Boris for commendation, all he saw was doubt instead. 'Yes?' he asked. 'Is there something you want to say?'

  Boris pulled a face, apologising in advance for any potential offence. 'It's just, I was wondering, this man you talked about the night we arrived The professor. The one who'd seen the golden fleece for himself. The one who'd touched it. Remember?'

  'Of course I remember. What about him?'

  'Did he…I mean, did he tell you this freely? Or did you have to…you know?'

  'What does that matter?' asked Mikhail. 'He wasn't lying, if that's what you're getting at. He told me the truth.'

  'Yes, I'm sure, but how can you-'

  'He was telling me the truth,' bridled Mikhail. 'Or are you questioning my judgement?'

  'No, sir. Of course not.'

  'Good.' The question had soured his mood, however. It was time to show these people that his judgement could be trusted. He looked down at Knox. 'Tell me how it happened,' he said. 'Start at the beginning.'

  'It was all Augustin's idea,' said Knox urgently. 'I didn't want anything to do with it.'

  'What was his idea?'

  'Petitier came to him asking for help. He thought someone was after his fleece. But Augustin wanted to turn it in. I mean it's history, for Christ's sake. Petitier went crazy. They got into a fight. And then…you know. But he was only defending himself.'

  'Is that what he told you?'

  'He'd never have done something like that deliberately.'

  'Sure!' snorted Mikhail. It always amazed him how trusting these sheep were. 'And what happened then?'

  'He called me in my room. He was in a panic. I promised to help. We were due to collect his girlfriend from the airport, so we decided to make it look as though we'd left Petitier unharmed, that he'd been attacked and robbed after we'd left. We took the fleece into the airport before she arrived, stashed it in one of those airport lockers.'

  'And the key?'

  'We knew we were likely to be searched when we got back, so we buried it out there. There are hedges all around short-term parking. We meant to go back for it when everything had settled down, but Jesus!'

  Mikhail sat back on the settee. It sounded plausible enough, except that Knox seemed a little too eager to be believed. He turned to Boris. 'What do you think?'

  'I don't know. Maybe.'

  'Davit?'

  'Don't ask me, sir. Above my pay grade.'

  'That's helpful.'

  'Why don't we get him to describe the fleece to Edouard,' suggested Zaal. 'He should be able to tell us whether or not it sounds authentic.'

  'Good thinking,' said Mikhail. He looked around the atrium and frowned. 'And just where exactly is our historian friend?' he asked.

  THIRTY-ONE

  I

  Edouard had been fighting anxiety all morning, desperate to find out what had happened to Nina and the children, yet unable to make the call. But the moment attention had focused on Knox, he'd headed up to his room, closed the door, taken the mobile into his bathroom, turned on the shower. Then he'd called Viktor for news.

  Four times he'd tried his number. Four times someone else had answered, told him that Viktor was unavailable, offered to get him to call back in due course. But Edouard couldn't wait for due course. And when he tried for the fifth time, he was finally put through.

  'Hang on,' said Viktor. 'I've got someone here for you.'

  'Edouard?' asked Nina. 'Is that you?'

  'Nina, my darling!' he said, tears springing to his eyes. 'Are you all right? Are the children all right?'

  'We're fine. We're all fine. Thanks to you.'

  'What happened?'

  'I've never seen anything like it,' she exulted. 'The Nergadzes are finished. Ilya and Sandro were driven off in a police van. A police van! We'll never have to fear them again.'

  'No,' said Edouard.

  'And we got your cache back too, your Turkmeni gold.' She gave a happy laugh. 'Actually we got two sets, because they'd already made copies of all the pieces, so that they could have substitutes ready when they melted down the originals; but they hadn't started yet.'

  'That's wonderful news. And listen, if you ever tell me not to trust someone in future, I'll take that as-' Outside the bathroom door, a shoe scuffed on carpet. His heart seemed to stop.

  'Edouard,' said Nina anxiously. 'What is it? What's going on?'

  The door kicked open. Mikhail stood in its frame, his shotgun in both hands, the others standing behind him. Edouard clenched the mobile tight. 'I love you, Nina,' he told her.

  'Edouard!' she screamed. 'Edouard!'

  'Tell the children I love them,' he told her. 'Tell them I was thinking of them.'

  'Edouard!'

  'Finish the call,' said Mikhail. Edouard nodded and complied. He couldn't let Nina hear this.

  'Who was that?' asked Mikhail. 'Who were you talking to?'

  'Your grandfather was abusing my son,' said Edouard. 'I had no choice.'

  'Your son is dead,' Mikhail told him flatly. 'All your family are dead. You've just
seen to that. I'm going to slit their throats one by one, and I'm going to reach inside and pull their fucking tongues out. Now tell me who you were talking to.'

  To Edouard's surprise, the imminence of his own death didn't scare him as much as he'd always anticipated. 'You're finished,' he said, looking from one to the next. 'All of you, you're all finished. And I did it. Me. Edouard Zdanevich.' The muzzle of the shotgun erupted; he felt for the briefest moment the astonishing force of the impact upon his chest and throat, but then he was gone.

  II

  The dog kept nagging at Gaille's conscience like an unwritten thank-you note. She didn't know what to do about it. She took out a jug of water and some more slivers of ham. The sun was high and fierce upon her skin, making her wonder how it felt for the dog, who had no shade at all. He just stood there with his tongue lolling out, panting hard. At least he didn't fly into a fury with her this time, perhaps out of exhaustion, perhaps because he was as uncertain about their changing relationship as she was.

  She couldn't reach his bowls without putting herself within his range, so she set down the plate of ham and the jug of water just out of his reach, hoping he didn't think she was teasing him with it. Then she went back inside for the gun, used the muzzle to hook the bowls and drag them towards her. The dog watched silently as she put a few slivers of ham in his bowl, not wanting to give him too much, for she didn't know what kind of diet he'd been on and didn't want to make him sick. She refilled his water bowl too, then pushed them both back.