The Lost Temple (10 page)

“His name’s Arthur Reed. Professor of Classical Philology at Oxford.”

“May I?” Reed reached toward Marina. Utterly disarmed, she let him take the torch from her hand.

“Remarkable,” he said again, gazing at the artifacts ranged along the back wall. “This, I presume, must be some sort of baetyl.”

“That’s what we thought,” said Grant. Suddenly, he didn’t know why, he felt as if he had to be on his best behavior—like a boy dragged out of his tree house and forced to have tea with a distant aunt.

Muir reached for his pocket, froze as he saw Grant’s hand tighten round the Webley, then laughed. “Don’t worry.” He fished out the ivory cigarette case. “Want one?”

Grant would almost have killed for a cigarette, but he wasn’t ready to accept Muir’s generosity yet. “How about you tell me what in hell’s going on here?”

Muir struck a match, adding the warmth of flame to the torch’s electric glow. “I suppose you think I owe you an explanation?”

Stone grated at the back of the chamber and all three of them spun round. Reed was kneeling on the bench by the niche in the wall. He seemed to have lifted the stone baetyl off its perch, or at least managed to tip it back, revealing a shadowy hollow within.

“Could somebody help me, please?”

Grant and Muir stared at each other across the barrel of the Webley. With an exasperated huff, Marina stepped toward Reed.

“There’s something underneath,” he explained. “Can you reach it?”

Marina leaned in. After a couple of seconds her hand emerged clutching something small and flat and hard. She examined it, turned it over and almost gasped with surprise. Wordlessly, she handed it to Reed.

“Remarkable,” he whispered.

Grant flipped up the safety catch on the Webley. “Now,” he said, “would someone please tell me what this is about?”

They sat on the ledge outside the cave, blinking and squinting to be out in the sunlight again. Reed had put on a broad-brimmed sunhat; he sat on a rock and peeled an orange. Marina held the Webley, still trained on Muir, while Grant turned over the object in his hands. It was a clay tablet, a
quarter of an inch thick and about the size of his palm, with rounded corners and smooth surfaces—except at the bottom, where a jagged edge suggested part had been broken off. Age, earth and fire had mottled the clay, but the designs wrought in it were clear enough. One side was covered with strange, miniature symbols—row after row, carved into the clay when it was wet, then baked into eternity.

“Is this Linear B?”

“Yes.” Reed and Marina answered in unison, then looked at each other with the delighted surprise of shared understanding.

Grant ran a finger over the symbols, tracing the rough edges and deep whorls, as if by touching he could somehow feel the pulse of its ancient secrets.
What did they say?
He turned the tablet over. There was no writing on the underside: the clay was flat and smooth, still showing the impression of the hands that had kneaded it out. But it was not empty. Grant balanced Pemberton’s notebook on his knee, using the tablet to weigh down the page, and looked between the two. One was drawn in Pemberton’s strong ink strokes, the other in paint that was badly chipped and faded, but there was no mistaking the similarity. They were the same. Two mountains, the sides of the valley; a domed hill, a horned shrine and a pair of doves. And hovering above them all a lion, the same animal that still watched them from its perch above the crack in the rock.

“Pemberton must have hidden it in the cave when he left,” said Reed. He took the diary and the tablet from Grant and examined them again, turning through some of the pages until he came to the final Homeric quotation. He grimaced. “
Each bold figure seemed to live or die
. That was John Pemberton. A bold man.”

“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.”

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 . . .”