by Tom Harper
“A good man,” added Marina.
“A dead man.” Grant turned to Muir. “But what I want to know is: what did he find that’s so damn valuable? And why are you so desperate for it?”
“That’s classified.” Muir bared his teeth. “Secret.”
“A secret worth taking to your grave?” Grant glanced over the cliff edge. “The fall’s probably enough to kill you—but you’ll be dead before you land.”
To Grant’s right, Marina kept the Webley pointed straight at Muir. If her slender arms struggled with the weight, they didn’t show it. Muir looked between the two of them. Nothing in their faces gave him the least hope.
Moving very slowly, Muir lit another cigarette. Each sound seemed unnaturally loud in the hot afternoon air—the click of the case, the flare of phosphorus, the crack as Muir snapped the spent matchstick in two. A shadow passed across his face: a hawk hovering in the sky.
“All right.” He took a deep drag and his mouth curled in something like pleasure. “I’ll tell you what I can.”
“You’d better hope it’s enough.”
Muir took a bundle of photographs from his shirt pocket and passed one to Grant.
“It looks like our tablet.”
“It was found by the Americans in the dying days of the war, at a scientific facility they’d captured in Oranienburg. Germany.”
Grant raised an eyebrow. “Wasn’t that in the Soviet sector?”
“They managed to drop in before the Russians got there. Liberated umpteen crates of Nazi papers and paraphernalia—mostly reports, technical documents, tedious crap. Anyway, someone had to have a look at it, so they shipped it back to the States for some sub-committee of nobodies to dig through and tell them there was nothing to worry about. Forgot the whole thing. There was so much coming out of Germany and nobody wanted to spend their time looking back to the dark old days. But these beaks kept plodding away and a couple of months ago they turned up something interesting.”
“This photograph?”
“In a cardboard box with some files, which wasn’t unusual—and a steel flask, which was. Inside was a piece of metal, about the size of a golf ball. They didn’t know what it was, so they sent it off to the labs for analysis. And what they found was something no one had ever seen before.”
“What’s that?”
“Well, no one had ever seen it, so it didn’t have a name. They called it Element 61.”
“Element 61?” repeated Grant. “Like a chemical element?”
“Exactly. You’ve seen the periodic table? Well, apparently there are some holes in it. It’s like an incomplete deck of cards—you know how many you should have and where the missing cards would go, but you haven’t got them all. Same with these missing elements. The scientists know they have to exist and they know where they’d fit, but they’ve never managed to get their hands on the stuff. This Element 61 is one of those missing cards. So, naturally, the boffins got excited and wanted to know where this rock had come from.”
“Is it valuable?”
“Valuable?” Muir ground the remnant of the cigarette under his heel and lit another. “It’s fucking priceless. It’s unique. So far as anyone’s ever known, it doesn’t exist on earth.”
There was silence as they digested this information.
“It’s from a meteorite,” Reed said. Looking at him, Grant could see this story was as new to him as to anyone.
“Correct.” Muir looked pleased. “But that’s not the whole story. Take a look at these.” He tossed over three more photographs. “This is the sample they found. Front, top and bottom. Notice anything?”
Grant looked at the pictures—a shiny lump of rock illuminated against a black cloth. From above and in profile it appeared smooth, almost fluid, pocked with miniature craters like hammered gold. But the third picture was different: here the surface was almost flat, scored by a series of vertical lines into successive ridges.
“It looks like something’s cut through it.”
“Those lines you can see are the strokes of a saw blade. The piece they found in Germany is just the tip of the iceberg—or, in this case, the meteorite.”
“The baetyl,” murmured Reed.
Muir’s head whipped round. “What?”
“Nothing.”
“Anyway, the Yanks read through the files, but all they got was that this had been found on Crete by the Germans. The Krauts didn’t have any more idea than the rest of us where it came from—but they did find the photograph of the tablet with it. Nothing else to go on. Greece is our playground—or was, until Attlee picked up his toys—so the Americans handed it over to us to sort out. And now we’re here.”
“Why do you want it?” Marina’s voice was hard. “Why is this Element 61 so important?”
Muir took a long drag on his cigarette. “You think they tell me? I’m just the bag man. Half of what I’ve told you even I don’t know officially. But what I do know is that the Yanks are desperate for this thing and they’re lining up to piss money on whoever finds it. So you can shoot me off this cliff like a fucking fairground duck if you like—but if you’ve any sense, you’ll join my jolly crew and start digging.”
“Join you?” Grant threw the photographs back at him. “What’s to say you won’t stick a bullet in my back the moment I put this gun down?”
“Because you’re useful. You’re so far off the map no one will suspect you’re working for us, and you know how to operate incognito in this part of the world.” He jerked his thumb at Marina. “Her too. Plus she knew Pemberton better than any of us.”
“And when we stop being useful to you?”
“You’ll stop being useful when we find that lump of metal. Then you can fuck off with your share of the loot and never see me again.” He tried to contort his sharp features into something like a pleasant smile. “What I said in Palestine still stands. You’re a wanted man; I can make that all go away. And as for you . . .” He turned to Marina. “I know all about you and your brother. Quite a double act, weren’t you. Shame the way he died. Single bullet at close range—must have been someone he knew. Did you ever wonder who pulled the trigger?”
Marina was staring at him, her gaze as black and lethal as the barrel of the gun. “What do you mean?”
“We’ve got a file on your brother in London. Do right by me and I can let you see it when this is over. You’d be amazed what’s in there.”
He cocked an eyebrow toward Grant, who tried to look unconcerned.
“You’re full of shit.”
“Actually, I’m dying for a piss. So make up your minds. Are you with me or not?”
“Does it make any difference? The meteorite’s not here.”
Muir scowled and flicked his cigarette butt over the cliff edge. “I didn’t say it would be easy. Maybe we’ve got the wrong place.”
“No.” Reed had sat out the negotiations unnoticed, perched on a rock and staring vacantly at the lion over the doorway. Now the quiet certainty in his voice surprised them all. “This is where the meteorite was. Come and have a look.”
One by one, they squeezed through the crack into the rock-cut shrine. Muir lit the paraffin lamp and together they stared at the snub-nosed shape of the carved stone in its niche.
Once again, Grant was struck by how much it looked like a bullet. “What are those ridges round it?” he asked.
“The original meteorite was probably covered in some sort of sacred mesh or web,” Reed explained. “When they carved this copy, they also copied the ropes.”
“They?” Muir sounded tense enough to snap. “Who the fuck are they?”
“The people who took the original meteorite away.” Serenely oblivious to Muir’s simmering anger, Reed stared at the baetyl. “You see the small hollow in the top? I expect that held the fragment that Pemberton found. They’ll have sawn it off and left it here, to give the effigy the power of the original. A propitiation to the gods, if you like.” He gave a small smile—lost on Muir.
; “They . . . they . . . Who are we talking about here? Pemberton? The Nazis? Some Cretan shepherd who wandered into the wrong cave?”
“Oh no.” Reed knelt down and started examining the piles of pottery laid out on the stone bench. “The meteorite was gone long before that—probably at around the time the Bible was being written.”
Muir paled. “You’re saying we’re two thousand years too late?”
“Not the New Testament.” Reed seemed to lose his train of thought completely as he peered closely at a piece of painted pottery. He held it up to the lamp, turning it this way and that. Then, just as suddenly, he continued, “They took the meteorite around the same time that Moses was leading the Jews out of Egypt. Three thousand years ago—give or take the odd hundred.”
“Jesus Christ.” Muir slumped against the wall and pushed an unlit cigarette into his mouth. Grant and Marina looked at each other uncertainly, while at the far end of the chamber Reed busied himself with the potsherds.
“What do we do now?” Muir asked no one in particular.
Reed stood and brushed the dust from his knees. Lamplight smoldered in the lenses of his glasses and a stray tuft of hair cast a hornlike shadow on the wall behind him. “Actually, I think I know where they took it.”
CHAPTER 7
SS Kalisti, North Aegean. Four days later
So explain this to me again.”
They were sitting out on deck as the ferry steamed across the Aegean. The sea lane had always been a busy one: in its time it had seen heroes, gods and a thousand vengeful ships on their way to sack a city, all sailing by. Some were still there, watching from above: the Gemini, the twins Castor and Polydeuces who sailed with Jason on the Argo; Pegasus, who had carried Perseus and Andromeda over the sea to Greece; Hercules, who had travelled this way to perform his labors. They glimmered in the night sky, while below the moon laid out a silver path on the water.
“I think Pemberton guessed. Those lines from the Iliad he wrote down—he wasn’t only thinking of the Germans. He must have been reading them because he’d made the connection.” Reed shifted slightly on the hard wooden bench and pulled his scarf closer round his neck. Around him, Muir, Grant and Marina all waited like students in a tutorial. On the table between them lay two fragments of pottery, the clay tablet and Pemberton’s journal.
“To understand this story you have to begin with the Minoans. Or rather, begin with their ending. Around 1500 BC they were at the height of their powers. What they achieved then in architecture, painting, sculpture and writing was the high point of all European civilization for a thousand years afterward. Then . . .”
“Bang.”
Reed gave Grant a severe look over the rim of his spectacles. “Are you familiar with this story, Mr. Grant?”
“Lucky guess. In my experience, when everything’s going so swimmingly, that’s when it’s time to load your gun.”
“In this case, bang is the literal truth. A vast volcanic eruption on the island of Thera—or what used to be Thera. Now it’s a ring of islets round a very large hole in the sea. It blew its top—must have shaken the earth to its core. You can imagine what followed: earthquakes; tidal waves sloshing around the Mediterranean like a bathtub; ash covering the islands like snow. All the Minoan cities were destroyed. Civilization collapsed.”
“But that wasn’t the end of the Minoans,” Marina objected. “They were devastated, but they weren’t wiped off the map.”
“Indeed not.” Reed paused as a steward put four cups of steaming coffee on to the table. “Once the dust had settled, so to speak, they picked themselves up and tried to carry on. But now there’s a new complication. Suddenly, Minoan culture starts popping up all over mainland Greece.”
“Maybe it got washed up by the tidal waves,” Grant suggested. Reed ignored him.
“At the great centers in Greece—Mycenae, Tiryns, Argos—Minoan art and pottery become increasingly influential. Meanwhile, on Crete we start to find all sorts of exotic foreign objects. New types of swords and spears, chariots—weapons the peaceful old Minoans never had any use for.”
Muir sipped his coffee. “Sounds to me as if the Greeks took advantage of the disaster to get one over on the Minoans.”
“Or perhaps it was the other way round,” Marina countered. “Perhaps the Minoans started making colonies in Greece.”
“Un-bloody-likely.” Muir rolled his eyes. “The tanks come one way and lorries carrying the loot go back the other. Never changes.”
“Scholars debate this,” said Reed smoothly. “The evidence is inconclusive. Personally, I find myself agreeing with Mr. Muir. Crete was ravaged by the volcano just as the mainland Greeks were hitting their stride. It would be reasonable to expect that the Minoan survivors naturally fell into the Mycenaean orbit.”
“Just like us and the fucking Yanks. One country’s misfortune . . .”
Grant cleared his throat. “Who are the Mycenaeans?”
“Greeks,” said Marina. “From the great age of heroes.”
“Pre-Greeks,” Reed corrected her. “The era that the Greek myths hark back to and that Homer describes. The civilization of Agamemnon, Odysseus, Menelaus and Achilles. If you believe the legends. Historically speaking, they were probably a culture of warriors and pirates, a loose federation of semi-independent city states who paid allegiance to a high king whose capital was Mycenae. They flourished in the later stages of the second millennium BC—then, suddenly, around 1200 . . .” Reed gave Grant a pointed stare. “Bang. Everything was lost and Greece lapsed into a dark age that lasted five hundred years. Invaders moved in—the true ancestors of the modern Greeks, most likely. They looked at the remains the Mycenaeans left behind—the vast walls, the finely worked treasures, the intricate arms and armor . . . In the darkness of their own existence, they couldn’t conceive of men ever creating such things, so they invented myths to explain them. The massive stone foundations could only have been laid by Cyclops and giants; magical craftsmen must have wrought the jewellery; only heroes descended from gods could have wielded those swords. Like all barbarians, rather than rise to the challenge of civilization, they explained away its achievements in order to excuse the poverty of their own.”
“Though afterward those people laid the foundation for all your Western civilization,” said Marina tartly. She seemed to have taken Reed’s sermon as a personal affront. “Philosophy, democracy, mathematics, literature. And as for the myths, there’s another theory about those.”
Muir groaned. “There’s always another fucking theory with you people.”
“The time we stop proposing theories is the time the barbarians take over,” said Reed firmly.
It earned him a more sympathetic look from Marina. “What if the myths weren’t written by the invaders?” she said. “What if they were the stories the Mycenaeans wrote themselves, remembered down the generations?”
“It seems unlikely,” said Reed. “The myths are so convoluted and contradictory—even the Greeks struggled to make sense of them when they tried to write them down.”
“What about Homer?”
“Homer was a poet.” Reed’s tone, normally mild, suddenly took on unexpected strength. “Myth was the yarn he used to weave his creation, but the result is pure . . . poetry.”
Muir yawned. “Is this relevant?”
Reed muttered something under his breath about barbarians, while Marina drank her coffee and made a sour face.
“From a crudely teleological perspective, all that need concern you is that the Mycenaeans—probably—came to Crete in the latter half of the second millennium BC. If they followed the usual practices of invading armies, we can perhaps assume that they carried off a number of treasures. Including, possibly, the baetyl—the meteorite. Certainly, some of the pottery we found in the cave shrine seems to be Mycenaean in origin.”
“That explains the picture on the tablet,” said Grant, glad to have something useful to say amid all the academic argument. “The waves,” he added, answe
ring the quizzical looks he drew. “They’re in the foreground. It’s drawn as you’d see it from the deck of a ship. In fact . . .” He picked up the tablet and stared at it. The picture of the valley filled most of the space, but in the bottom right-hand corner—just by the jagged fracture where the tablet had been broken—he could make out a dark brown blob. He might have mistaken it for a stain or a smudge of earth, but the edges were too distinct. He showed it to the others. “This could be the prow of a ship.”
“Or the tip of another pair of sacred horns,” said Marina doubtfully. “Or—anything. I told you, you can’t assume that ancient artists saw the world the same way you do.”
“We seem to have done all right so far.”
“Let’s hope your luck continues.” Muir tossed a cigarette butt over the ship’s side. “Anyway—the Mycenaeans came to Crete and did what invading armies usually do: knocked down the palaces, helped themselves to the women and looted the treasure. Then they took away our sacred meteorite—where? Why not Mycenae?”
“They could have—but I think not.” Reed glanced around. That late, most of the passengers had found space inside, but with Easter only three days away the ship was overladen with islanders travelling home. Dark lumps broke the line of the deck where men and women curled up to sleep, while further forward a group of conscripts knelt round a bollard playing cards for cigarettes. A graybearded Orthodox priest sat on a bench under a bare light bulb and spun a string of silver worry beads in his hand. Slap—against his knuckles; slap—against his palm. It was a timeless sound, as natural as the creak of the ship or the lapping of waves.
Reed leaned forward. “The Mycenaeans had nothing against the Minoan religion. The whole idea of a war of religion—fighting someone because he worships a different god, then giving him a choice of conversion or death when he loses—is a much more modern invention. Another innovation for which we have Christianity to thank. The ancients were far more broad-minded and acquisitive in their dealings with the gods. If you defeated an enemy, the only logical thing to do was to take away his relics and his holy objects and use them for yourself. No point letting divine power go to waste.”