Herculean (Cerberus Group Book 1)

by Jeremy Robinson

  A moment later, the canned music was silenced as someone picked up the line. “Fiona? Are you safe?” It was Pierce.

  She heaved a sigh of relief. “I’m safe, Uncle George.”

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m at the old fort.”

  “What are you doing there?”

  “After I left the museum, an old friend of yours offered me a ride. I think the actual word he used was ‘colleague.’ Liam Kenner.”

  There was a long silence over the line.

  “Uncle George?”

  “Kenner,” Pierce said in a low, almost menacing voice. “Son of a bitch.”

  5

  “Colleague? That’s what he said?”

  Fiona sank into the passenger seat of the rental car and gazed over at Pierce. “Happy to see you, too,” she remarked, more amused than sarcastic. She had not been waiting long, less than ten minutes, though it had seemed a lot longer.

  Pierce looked mildly embarrassed. “Sorry. I’m still trying to process this.” He took a breath. “It was clever of you to draw him off like that.”

  “Thanks. So what’s the story with you and Kenner? He seemed to know an awful lot about your search for Hercules.”

  Pierce stared straight ahead, as if driving the deserted streets required his full attention. “Several years ago, when I first came across some documents that mentioned Hercules in a historic context, I made the mistake of sharing that information with some other members of the archaeological community. At the time, I was merely looking for more of the same, inquiring to see if anyone else had found similar evidence.”

  “Then Kenner is a colleague? An archaeologist?”

  “His specialty is paleopharmacology, a multi-disciplinary field that focuses on the medical treatments used by ancient cultures. When I originally proposed the idea that Hercules might have been an ancient scientist, Kenner was intrigued by the possibility of an elixir to explain Hercules’s strength and invincibility. Evidently, he was more interested than I realized at the time.”

  “Interested enough to stalk you for the last seven years?”

  Pierce shook his head. “It’s possible that he was here conducting research of his own, and noticed us touring the museum earlier.”

  Fiona raised a skeptical eyebrow. “You don’t actually believe that, do you?”

  Pierce checked the rearview, prompting Fiona to look over her shoulder, but there was no one following them. “I wish I did,” Pierce replied. “But no. It’s probably not a coincidence.”

  “So what do we do about it? About him?”

  Pierce sighed. “He’s just fishing.”

  “He knew that we broke into the museum. What if he goes to the police?”

  “He won’t. Not right away. He’ll want to talk to me first. Maybe try to blackmail me, but it won’t do him any good. He can’t prove anything.” Pierce drove in silence for a few minutes. “This isn’t the first time someone has gotten close, you know. There are protocols for dealing with situations like this.”

  “Protocols?” Fiona did not like the sound of that. “Like making him disappear?”

  “Nothing so dramatic. At the very worst, we might have to destroy him professionally. Discredit him, so that no one takes him seriously ever again. But I doubt it will come to that. He has other…pressure points.”

  Fiona sensed that Pierce did not want to elaborate further, so she changed the subject. “So we’re still going to do this?”

  “I don’t think we have a choice. Especially not now, with Kenner sniffing around. He probably heard about the discovery at Ideon Andron. That would explain why he’s here in Heraklion. We need to move now, before anyone else figures this out.”

  Fiona nodded in acceptance. Pierce was right, of course. This, too, was all part of the plan.

  6

  Central Crete

  According to Greek mythology, Zeus, the ruler of the gods of Olympus and father to numerous divine and semi-divine offspring, including the legendary Herakles, was born on the island of Crete. He was the child of the Titans Cronus and Rhea. Cronus, fearing a prophecy that his own offspring would destroy him, had already devoured Zeus’s elder siblings. Zeus would have suffered the same fate if his mother had not hidden him away in a cave beneath Mount Psiloritis.

  Like all such myths, a thread of truth ran through the tale. There was indeed a cave. Ideon Andros, the Cave of Zeus. It had been revered by the ancient Mycenaeans—the civilization that had arisen on Crete after the fall of the Minoans, and which ultimately became the Greek civilization. For centuries, long after the center of the world shifted to Athens, Ideon Andros was believed to be the actual birthplace of the king of the Olympian gods. Archaeological excavations had revealed a long tradition of votive offerings at the cave, but Pierce knew that such evidence confused cause and effect. There were many caves all across the island, but the ancients had chosen to venerate this particular cave as the birthplace of their faith. There had to be a very good reason for that.

  Although just twenty linear miles from Heraklion, it took Pierce nearly two hours to make the drive, the last five miles of the trip on a dusty road that wound up the mountainside. Ideon Andros was yet one more tourist destination on an island that was renowned for places of historic interest, but what Pierce and Fiona sought was not in any of the guidebooks.

  They left the car near the small museum and gift shop that serviced visitors. Then they hiked in the darkness to the mouth of the cave, checking frequently to ensure that they had not been followed. The mountain air was chilly, and Fiona hugged her arms close, but did not complain as they slipped through a small fence that kept local goats out of the cave. Pierce kept the red filter on his MagTac until they finished descending the stairs that led down into the enormous opening beneath the mountain. Once they reached the main gallery, Pierce removed the cover and played his light on the high walls, which were rippling with stalactite growth. He quickly located a shadowy recess at the rear of the cavern. The surrounding area was cordoned off with wooden barricades and caution tape, indicating that an excavation was currently in progress, but Pierce had learned through the grapevine of the archaeological community that the dig had hit a wall. Literally.

  “There it is,” Pierce said, motioning with the light. He moved to the narrow fissure and lowered himself into it, shining the beam into its depths. The bright flashlight illuminated a flat stone wall, clearly worked by a human craftsman and adorned with a strange symbol.

  “The Horns of Consecration,” Fiona said. “The symbol of the Sacred Minoan Bull. Just like the monuments in the palace at Knossos.”

  Pierce nodded. They had seen several examples of bull iconography at the museum, ranging from the simple motif like that carved into the cave wall—dubbed ‘The Horns of Consecration’ by Sir Arthur Evans, the archaeologist whose work in Knossos had laid the foundation for the modern concept of the Minoan civilization—to much more realistic paintings and sculptures. Despite being lost to history for three millennia, the significance of the bull to the Minoan civilization had been immortalized in Greek mythology, particularly in the legend of the Minotaur, the half-man, half-bull chimera that roamed the subterranean Labyrinth, devouring human sacrifices.

  There was even a connection to the story of Hercules. One of the legendary Labors imposed upon Hercules by King Eurystheus, as penance for killing his family in a fit of madness, had been the capture of the monstrous Cretan Bull. Pierce knew that much of that story was a fabrication—there had been no mental lapse, no family tragedy—but the stories hid an account of actual deeds. He had seen ample evidence that some of the Labors were based on real events, and of them all, the tale of the capture of the Cretan Bull seemed the least fantastic. It might simply have been a metaphor for a victory against the bull-worshipping Minoans, but Pierce suspected that there was probably a real bull in the story somewhere.

  However, it was not the petroglyph of the horns on the wall that had drawn him to Ideon Andros, but rather
a set of smaller images carved into the rock between the bull’s horns.

  Pierce took the Phaistos Disc from his satchel and held it at arm’s length. He oriented it so that the outermost totem in the spiral—the beginning or the end, depending on whose interpretation was to be trusted—was in the six o’clock position.

  Fiona looked over his shoulder. “It’s a match. You were right.”

  “Of course I was right,” Pierce answered with a grin. “You didn’t think I’d come all this way on a hunch.”

  Fiona’s shrug suggested that she thought him capable of doing exactly that.

  “Alexander wrote that the Phaistos Disc was a key,” Pierce went on. “He established a protocol in the event that a discovery like this was made.”

  “Right. More protocols. In this case, steal the Disc. Only we replaced it with an exact replica. I’m not sure how that changes anything.”

  Pierce held up the Disc. “I was a little worried about that, too. But the likeness of the Disc is everywhere, especially here on Crete, so if it was just a matter of hiding the message…well, that ship sailed a long time ago. I thought there might be something important about the physical disc itself, though. And guess what? I was right again. The Disc reacts to magnetic fields.”

  “No one ever noticed that?”

  “I don’t think it occurred to anyone to check. It’s just a clay tablet after all. My guess is that there are flakes of magnetized iron embedded in the clay.”

  Fiona narrowed her eyes. “We didn’t come all the way out here in the middle of the night just to compare the script, did we?”

  Pierce grinned again. “Smart girl. Alexander said it was a key. I don’t believe he was speaking figuratively.”

  He stepped closer to the wall and held the Disc up so that it was situated in the valley between the horns. The artifact was abruptly yanked out of his grasp, hitting the wall with a hollow clank, like a terra cotta bell. It did not slide to the ground but remained fixed in place between the horns. An instant later, there was a grinding sound from beyond the wall, and then a crunch, as some unseen force battled thousands of years of inertia and calcification. The wall began to move, rolling away into a hidden recess. Not a wall after all, but a circular door, with the Disc still affixed to its center. It rotated only half a turn before stopping, revealing a crescent-shaped opening.

  “Open Sesame,” Pierce said. “It would appear that the Phaistos Disc is actually an ancient Minoan key card.”

  He shone the light into the opening. The shape of the passage was too straight and uniform to be the work of nature. There was just enough space to accommodate a single person. It continued for at least fifty feet, at which point the black walls devoured his light. What lay beyond remained shrouded in darkness. “Shall we?”

  “I thought we were just supposed to make sure no one gets the key,” Fiona said. “Wasn’t that what the protocol said to do?”

  “Sometimes you have to go outside the letter of the law to keep the spirit of the law. Even without the Disc, someone might be able to get through that door. We need to know what Alexander wanted kept secret. If it’s something we can remove or…” he frowned, “...destroy…then this is our chance. Besides, I’m curious. Aren’t you?”

  “I should call you Curious George,” Fiona replied before following and sticking close behind him. As Pierce advanced into the passage, his own eagerness diminished a little. The tunnel was more confining than he had imagined. The weight of the earth above seemed to press down on him, making it difficult to breathe. The air felt warmer, and there was something else about it that seemed…off.

  “What’s that smell?” Fiona asked. “It’s like…blood.”

  Pierce played the light against the walls of the passage. The black surface was mottled with what looked like a dull orange fungus. “Rust. These walls are sheeted with iron plates.”

  “Iron? I thought the Minoan civilization pre-dated the Iron Age.”

  Pierce gave an approving nod. Fiona had been paying attention to her studies. “They did. This is…interesting…to say the least. Some of the legends about this cave mention a race of spirit beings called Dactyls.”

  “As in ‘fingers?’”

  “When Rhea gave birth to Zeus, she dug her fingers into the earth, and the Dactyls were created. They were expert metal-workers, and they gave the secret of forging iron to mankind.” He shrugged. “That’s the myth, anyway.” He stopped as the light revealed a T-junction at the end of the passage. The passages leading off in either direction were, like the first, finished with walls of featureless iron, vanishing into darkness beyond the reach of the flashlight.

  Fiona peered over his shoulder. “Which way?”

  “Good question. In many ancient belief systems, the choice of right or left had great symbolic significance, but in this instance, we may just have to flip a coin.”

  “What’s that?” Fiona pushed past him and moved closer to the facing wall a few steps down the right hand passage. She pointed to a large patch of rust which, after a closer look, revealed lines and curves that were too precise to be random.

  “The Horns again,” Pierce said. “It’s the same as the glyph on the door. But it’s different. The Phaistos symbols aren’t the same.” He approached and brushed away some of the rust to get a better look.

  “There are only three symbols here. This is probably some kind of identifier. The name or number of this tunnel.” He moved a few steps down the left hand passage, searching the wall until he found another symbol.

  “Feel up for a linguistic puzzle?” he asked, grinning, as he took out his cell phone and handed it to Fiona. “Owens published his decipherment key online. It should give us a rough idea of what these signs are trying to tell us. See if you can find it.”

  Fiona stared at the screen. “No reception down here.”

  Pierce barely heard her as he studied the symbols, darting back and forth between the two glyphs. “We don’t need it.”

  “You know what it says?”

  He shook his head. “No, but I know what it means.” He pointed at the symbol in the left hand passage. “This is on the Phaistos Disc. It’s the second word in the spiral. That other one is nonsense. The Disc isn’t just a key card. It’s a route map. If we go down this tunnel…” He turned and headed down the left tunnel.

  Fiona followed quickly and caught up to him a few steps from another junction, this time with a passage intersecting from the right. He was scanning the wall, looking for another symbol. He aimed his flashlight at the wall, revealing another glyph, identical to the one at the other end of the passage. “Here.”

  A quick check revealed a symbol with a different set of Phaistos characters at the beginning of the adjoining passage, and yet another on the wall that continued straight.

  “One of these is the third word on the Disc,” Pierce said. “If we keep going in that direction, we’ll find more symbols in the same order as the Disc.”

  “A map,” Fiona said, eyes widening. “I should have seen it.”

  Fiona had a gift for languages, modern and ancient, spoken and nearly forgotten, but spotting patterns was a skill that took practice. And her self-deprecation was preventing her from realizing the true scope of what they had found.

  Pierce smiled wide. “Fi, do you know what this place is? This is the Labyrinth.”

  Her eyes widened in time with a broad smile. “Holy sh— Think there’s a Minotaur down here?”

  Pierce thought she meant it as a joke, but he gave the question serious consideration. He doubted that a literal bull-man creature had been wandering the iron corridors for over three thousand years, but the mere fact that the tunnels existed, to say nothing of the magnetic lock on the front door, strongly suggested that at least some parts of the legend were true.

  “According to the myth,” Pierce said, “the Labyrinth on the island of Crete was designed by the master architect, Daedalus. Ovid wrote that it was so elaborate that even Daedalus himself almost got lo
st in it.”

  “Daedalus. The guy who made the wings.”

  Pierce nodded. “After designing the Labyrinth, King Minos imprisoned Daedalus and his son, Icarus, so they would not be able to share its secrets. Daedalus collected feathers and stuck them together with wax to make a pair of wings so they could escape, but Icarus flew too close to the sun. The wax melted, his wings fell apart, and he crashed and burned.

  “That story is also from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and it came much later. First century BC. But the stories of Daedalus’s inventions go back much further. He was a mechanical genius. I’ve often thought he might be one of Alexander’s alter-egos.”

  He knew it was a bit of a stretch, but by no means impossible. Alexander Diotrephes was a complicated man with an even more complicated story, and he’d gone by many other names in addition to Hercules and Alexander. Pierce was not sure how much Fiona knew about Alexander, and this was not the time or place for that discussion.

  The short version was that Alexander had achieved a sort of immortality by virtue of a unique physiology combined with a comprehensive knowledge of chemistry and biology that was advanced even by modern standards. George wasn’t positive, but he thought the man had been alive since before the ninth century BC. Immortality was a trait most often applied to supernatural beings or fictitious gods, but it was also the pursuit of learned men throughout all of history, ancient and recent. Alexander was one of the few who had achieved it.

  “It would explain why he established the protocol,” Pierce said. “He knew that if this place was ever discovered, there would be a lot of impossible questions.”

  “But why build it in the first place?”

  “To imprison the Minotaur?”

  “There are over thirty word combinations on each side of the Disc. If we take that to mean two safe paths through the maze, and we double that number for false trails, that makes at least a hundred and twenty different passages down here. Seems like a lot of work just to cage one magical beastie.”