"You know, in my travels I've discovered something. A great mind often has a touch of poetry. Sometimes, in order to think like the other guy, you need to be a little artistic. So, I wonder . . . about that cipher.""You mean—?""Just a crazy, early morning idea." He patted the keyboard of the laptop. "What if the mind behind it is using a system no computer in the world would ever have heard of?""There's no such thing, believe me.""Maybe yes, maybe no." He flipped open his book to the central section, a glossy portfolio of photos. He'd shot them himself with an old Nikon. "Take a look at this and refresh your memory."She looked down at the photo of a large Minoan clay jar from the palace, a giantpithoi, once a container for oil or unguents or water for the bath. Along the sides were inscribed rows of wavy lines and symbols. It was the Minoan written language, which, along with cuneiform and hieroglyphics, was among the oldest in the world. "You mean Linear B.""Language of King Minos. As you undoubtedly remember, it's actually a syllabary, and a damned good one. Each of these little pictures is a syllable, a consonant followed by a vowel. Come on, this was your thing, way back when. Look, this wavy flag here reads mi, and here, this little pitchfork with a tail reads no." He glanced up. "Anyway, surely you recall that Linear B has almost a hundred of these syllable signs. But Ventris assigned them numbers since they're so hard to reproduce in typeface. For example, this series here,mi-no-ta-roreads numerically as—" he checked the appendix, "13-52-59-02. Run them together andminotaroreads 13525902. And just like the early Greeks, the Minoans didn't insert a space between words. If somebody was using Linear B, via Ventris' system, the thing would come out looking like an unintelligible string of numbers.""You don't really—""You say you've tried everything else. NSA's Crays drew a blank. Maybe you were looking for some fancy new encryption system when it was actually one so old nobody would ever think of it. Almost four thousand years old, to be exact.""Darling, that's very romantic. You're improving in the romance department." She gazed at him a second, then flashed a wry smile. "But I can't say the same for the good-sense arena. No offense, but that's like the kind of thing kids write to us suggesting. Nobody employs anything remotely that simple these days.""I knew you'd think I was crazy. You're not the first." He rose. "But humor me. Just slice those number sequences into pairs and see what they look like phonetically. Something to take your mind off all the madness around here.""Well, all right." She sighed, then settled unsteadily into the rickety chair he'd just vacated. "Make you a proposition, sweetie. Get me some coffee, nice and strong, and I'll forget I have good sense and play with this a little.""You're a trooper." He turned and headed for the kitchen. "I remember that about you. Not to mention great in bed.""We strive for excellence in all things."Just as he reached the doorway, the kitchen light flicked on. It was Adriana, in blue robe and furry slippers, now reaching up to retrieve her coffee pan.While Eva was typing away behind him, he leaned against the doorframe in his still-wet clothes to watch a Greek grandmother shuffle about her private domain preparing a traditional breakfast. He suspected no male hand had ever touched those sparkling utensils. The Old World had its ways, yesterday and forever.While he drowsed against the doorjamb, the aroma of fresh Greek coffee began filling the room.Sarakin. That was the Japanese name for their homegrown loan sharks, the so-called salary-men financiers. He knew that the Yakuza's four largestsarakinoperations gave out more consumer loans than all of Japan's banks combined. If you added to that the profits in illegal amphetamines, prostitution, bars, shakedowns of businesses, protection rackets . . . the usual list, and you were talking multi multibillions. The major problem was washing all that dirty money. They routinely invested in respectable but losing propositions abroad, on the sound theory that one dollar cleaned was worth two unlaundered.Was that what the Soviet scam was all about? Money from the Japanese mob being laundered through loans to the USSR? What better way to wash it? Nobody would ever bother asking where it came from.But there was one major problem with that neat scenario. Politically the Yakuza were ultra-rightist hardliners. So why would they expose their money with the Soviets, laundered or not? Particularly now, with so much political instability there—hardliners, reformers, nationalists. Somehow it didn't compute."Michael, come here a second." The voice had an edge of triumph."What?" He glanced around groggily."Just come here and take a look at this." She was staring at the screen.He turned and walked over, still entranced by the heady, pungent essence of fresh Greek coffee now flooding the room. "Is it anything—?""Just look at it and tell me what you think." She leaned back from the screen and shifted the Zenith toward him. The ice-blue letters cast an eerie glow through the dull morning light. The color reflected off his eyes, matching them."You did it already?""I started with a one-to-one replacement of numbers with letters. But it's sequence-inverted, which means I had to . . . anyway, what do think so far? Am I a genius or what?"He drew a chair next to the screen and started to examine it. But at that moment Adriana set a tray of coffee down beside the computer, steaming and fresh, together with dark figs and two bowls of yogurt."Kafe evropaiko," she commanded, then thrust a cup into his hand."Malista, efcharisto." He absently nodded his thanks, took a sip of the steaming brew, then returned his attention to the screen.At first he thought he was just groggy, his vision playing tricks, but then the string of letters began to come into focus. Incredible!"Okay, what about this part here," he asked, pointing to the fourth line, where the letters turned to nonsensical garbage, "and then down here again?""That's what I was talking about. The interlacing switches there. It happens every hundred numbers. They started by taking the second fifty digits and interlacing them back into the first fifty. Then they switched the algorithm and interlaced the third fifty digits ahead, into the fourth fifty, but backwards. Then it repeats again.""You figured all that out just fooling around with it?""Darling, I do this for a living, for godsake. After a while you have good instincts." She tapped her fingers nervously on the wooden table, then remembered the coffee and reached for a cup. "Nice little trick. Standard but nice. Every so often you fold the data back into themselves somehow. That way there are no repetitions of number sequences—for words that are used a lot—to give you away. But once you've played with this stuff as much as I have . . . anyway, it's always the first thing I check for.""Congratulations.""Tell me the truth." She looked at him, sipping her coffee. "Can you really still read this? It's been years.""Memory like an elephant. Though you may have to help me along now and then." He pointed. "Look. I think that word's modern Greek. They've mixed it in where there's not an old word for something." He pushed around the computer. "Want to run the whole data file through your system? Clean it up?""My pleasure." She was clearing the screen. "I can't believe it just fell apart like this. The reason our Crays didn't crack it was it's too simple by half."He reached for his coffee, feeling a surge of satisfaction. His hunch had been dead on. Whoever came up with this idea for an encryption must have been a fan of ancient Greek history, and a knowledgeable one. What better cipher for Project Daedalus communiques than the language Daedalus himself used? They'd taken that four-thousand-year-old tongue, an archaic forerunner of ancient Greek, and then scrambled it using a mathematical algorithm. Mino Industries was communicating with the Soviets using an encoded version of Minoan Linear B.It was absolutely poetic. It also appeared, upon first examination, to be very naive. Yet upon reflection it turned out to be brilliant. You convert a totally unheard-of language to numbers, throw in a few encryption tricks, and the result is something that would drive all the hotdog DES-oriented supercomputers crazy. All those chips would be trying trillions of keys when there actually was no key. Yes, you had to admit it was inspired.Except the Daedalus crowd was about to experience a problem, a small headache. Make that a major headache. Because their secret protocol was about to become headlines. He figured that ought to go a long way toward stopping any more shooting."Okay. It's humming." She reached for her yogurt. "This time around all the garbage will be gone." She took a bite, then burst out laughing. "You know, this is wonderful, working with you. Darling, I've just decided. Let's do something together, maybe live on the Ulysses for a while. I might even get to like it. It sounds romantic.""I'm still looking for the romance in life.""Well, love, you've found it. It's me." She leaned over and kissed him on the lips. "End of quest.""Thought I'd never hear you say that. But first you have to help me translate this. I'm over a decade out of date. My modern Greek's a little rusty too, and a lot of the technical terms in this look to be transliterated—""No, sweetie, that's not the first thing we have to do. The first thing is to make sure you've got a separate copy of anything you're working with. Not in the computer. I'll spare you my horror stories about erased files, hard disks going down, all the rest." She was rising, energized. "Cardinal computer rule number one. Always dupe anything you're working on, no matter how sure you are nothing can go wrong. Believe me.""Sounds good." He looked up. "What are you doing?""I need that disk I showed you tonight. We can use it for the backup. It's in my purse, which I now realize I left in the car when I came in. I was slightly crazy at the time." She was turning. "God, it seems like ages.""Look, why don't you let me—?""You don't know where I parked it. My secret hiding place.""Maybe we ought to send Zeno, or Adriana—""Just sit tight. Only be a minute." She wrapped her coat about her and, before he could protest, disappeared out the door, humming.She was a marvel. Everything he'd remembered."Are you still awake?" Zeno was trudging into the room, still wearing his frayed nightshirt."We just solved the riddle of the sphinx, old friend. Except now we have to translate it.""You should be sleeping, Michael. Go now, catch an hour or so. I will start making arrangements. Get tickets for you both on the car ferry to Athens, a pistol, maybe new passports if you want. We have work to do." He reached and took the cup of coffee Adriana was urging on him."All right. As soon as she gets back.""What?" He froze, then looked toward the back. "What do you mean? I thought she was still asleep.""She went out to the car, wherever it is.""I wish she had asked me. I would have been happy—""You know how she is. There's no stopping her when she gets rolling.""This is not good." He turned and called to Adriana to bring his trousers and shoes. "We must find her.""You're right. It was stupid. Damned stupid." He was getting up. "Let's do it together."Chapter SevenThursday 6:28a.m.The morning air was sharp and she wished she'd grabbed one of Adriana's black knit shawls before going out. Could she pass for one of those stooped Greek peasant women? she wondered. Not likely. She shivered and pulled her thin coat around her.The rain was over now, leaving the air moist and fragrant, but the early morning gloom had an ominous undertone. They'd found the key to open the first box, but the message inside still had to be translated. What was it? What could possibly be in the protocol that would make somebody want to kill her?She stared down the vacant street leading away from the square, a mosaic of predawn shadows, and tried to think.Alex Novosty was the classic middleman, that much was a given. But then she'd known that for years. Yes, she'd known about Alex Novosty all her life—his work for the KGB, his laundering of Techmashimport funds. She knew about it because they were second cousins. Fortunately their family tie was distant enough not to have made its way into NSA's security file, but around the Russian expatriate dinner tables of Brighton Beach and Oyster Bay, Alex was very well known indeed. He was the Romanov descendant who'd sold out to the Soviets, an unforgivable lapse of breeding.But for all that, he wasn't an assassin. For him to do what he'd done tonight could only mean one thing: he was terrified. Very out of character. But why?The answer to that wasn't hard: He must be mixed up in Project Daedalus, whatever it was, right up to his shifty eyeballs. But what about Michael? What did Alex want from him?The answer to that could go a lot of ways. When she first met Michael Vance, Jr., she'd been smitten by the fact he was so different. Always kidding around, yet tough as steel when anybody crossed him. A WASP street fighter. She liked that a lot. He was somebody she felt she could depend on, no matter what.She still remembered her first sight of Mike as though it were yesterday. She was taking notes on Etruscan pottery in a black notebook, standing in a corner of the Yale art gallery on Chapel Street, when she looked up and—no, it couldn't be. She felt herself just gawking.He'd caught her look and strolled over with a puzzled smile. "Is my tie crooked, or—" Then he laughed. "Name's Mike Vance. I used to be part of this place. How about you?""Vance?" She'd just kept on staring, still not quite believing her eyes. "My thesis adviser at Penn was . . . you look just like him."And he did. The same sharp chin, the same twinkle in the blue eyes. Even when he was angry, as Mike certainly had been that day, he seemed to be having fun.Thus it began.At first they were so right for each other it seemed as though she'd known Michael Vance for approximately a hundred years, give or take. She'd been one of his father's many ardent disciples, and after finishing her master's at Penn, she'd gone on to become a doctoral candidate at Yale, where she'd specialized in the linguistics of the ancient Aegean languages. She'd known but forgotten that Michael Vance, Sr., had a son who was finishing his own doctorate at Yale, writing a dissertation about Minoan Crete.That day in the museum he was steaming, declaring he'd dropped by one last time as part of a ritualistic, formal farewell to archaeology. The decision was connected with the hostile reception being given a book he'd just published, a commercial version of his dissertation. As of that day he'd decided to tell academia to stuff it. He'd be doing something else for a living. There'd been feelers from some agency in D.C. about helping trace hot money.In the brief weeks that followed they grew inseparable, the perfect couple. One weekend they'd scout the New England countryside for old-fashioned inns, the next they'd drive up to Boston to spend a day in the Museum of Fine Arts, then come back and argue and make love till dawn in her New Haven apartment. During all those days and nights, she came very close to talking him out of quitting university life. Close, but she didn't.He had put off everything for a couple of months, and they had traveled the world—London, Greece, Morocco, Moscow. Once their parents even met, at Count Sergei Borodin's sprawling Oyster Bay home. It was a convocation of the Russian Nobility Association, with three hundred guests in attendance, and the air rang with Russian songs and balalaikas. Michael Vance, Sr., who arrived in his natty bowler, scarcely knew what to make of all the Slavic exuberance.Shortly after that, the intensity of Michael became too much for her. She felt herself being drawn into his orbit, and she wanted an orbit of her own. The next thing she knew, he'd departed for the Caribbean; her father had died; and she'd gone back to work on her own doctorate.Michael. He was driven, obsessive, always determined to do what he wanted, just as she was. But the tension that likeness brought to their relationship those many years ago now made everything seem to click. Why? she wondered.Maybe it was merely as simple as life cycles. Maybe back then they were just out of synch. He'd already survived his first midlife crisis, even though he was hardly thirty. When they split up, she'd been twenty-five and at the beginning of a campaign to test herself, find out what she could do.Well, she thought, she'd found out. She was good, very good. So now what?She was relieved to see the car was still parked on the side street, actually a little alley, where she'd left it. Thinking more clearly now, she realized she'd been a trifle careless, stashing the car in the first location she could find and then running for Zeno's.As she headed down the alley in between the white plaster houses, she suddenly felt her heart stop. Someone was standing next to the Saab, a dark figure waiting. She watched as it suddenly moved briskly toward her.Alex Novosty."What?" She couldn't believe her eyes."Budetya ostorozhyi!" He whispered the warning as he raised his hand and furtively tried to urge her back."Kak! Shto—?" She froze. "How did you find the car?""The hotel. They directed us to akafeneionnear here, but then I noticed your car. I thought . . ." He moved out of the shadows, quickly, still speaking in Russian. "Just tell me where you have the copies of the protocol, quickly. Maybe I can still handle it.""Handle what?" That's when she saw the two other men, in dark overcoats, against the shadow of the building."The . . . situation." His eyes were intense. "They want it back, all copies. I've tried to tell them that killing you won't solve anything, but—" He glanced back with a small shiver. "You must tell them Michael has a copy, stall them.""It's true. He does.""No! Then say there's a copy back in your office. Just let me try and—""Alex, I'm not going to play any more of your games.""Please," he continued in a whisper, "don't contradict anything I say. Let me do the talking. I'll—""You're in it with them, aren't you?" She tried to push past. "Well, you can tell your friends we're onto their 'project.' If anything happens to me, Michael will track them down and personally take them apart. Tell them that.""You don't understand." He caught her arm. "One of their people was killed tonight.""The one trying to shoot Michael and me, you mean?" She was trying to calm the quaver in her voice."He was killed by the KGB. I had nothing to do with—""Is that what you told them?""That's the way it happened. There was an argument.""Over what?""Everybody wants you. It's the protocol." His look darkened. "Eva, they are in no mood for niceties.""Neither am I." She noticed the two men were now moving toward them. One was taller and seemed to be in charge, but they both were carrying what looked like small-caliber automatic weapons.The protocol, whatever it was, was still in code. She didn't know what she didn't know. How could she bargain?It was too late to think about it now. Their faces were hard and smooth, with the cold eyes of men who killed on command. My God, she thought, what had Michael said about theMino-gumi?The Japanese mob.The taller man, she was soon to learn, was Kazuo Ina- gawa, who had been a London-basedkobunfor theMino-gumifor the past decade. He had a thin, pasty face and had once been firstkobunfor their entire Osaka organization, in charge of gambling and nightclub shakedowns. Even in the early dawn light, he wore sunglasses, masking his eyes.The shorter one was Takahashi Takenaka, whose pockmarked face was distinguished by a thin moustache, an aquiline nose, and the same sunglasses.Alex, she realized, must have lied to them, covering up what really happened out at the palace. Now he was bluffing for his life."You can just tell them I don't know anything about it." She felt the cold air closing in."Eva, that's impossible. They know you were given the protocol. Now where is it?"He clearly wanted her to say it was somewhere else. But why bother?"It's in the car. In my purse." She pointed. "Why don't they just go ahead and take it? By the way, it's still encrypted."She fumbled in her pockets. "Here's . . ."Then she realized she'd left the key in the car. There it dangled, inside the locked door. Her purse rested on the seat across from the driver's side."Get it," Inagawa commanded his lieutenant. Takenaka bowed obediently, then turned and tried the door handle, without success."So." He frowned.Inagawa muttered a curse and brutally slammed the butt of his automatic against the curved window. The sound of splintering glass rent the morning air.Quickly Novosty stepped forward and reached through to unlock the door. Then he pulled it open and leaned in.Why is he doing it? she wondered. Easy answer: He's trying to keep control of the situation.Whose side is he really on?Then he backed out and handed her the brown leather purse while he tried to catch her eye.She took it, snapped it open, and lifted out the gray computer disk. "There," she said as she handed it to Inagawa, "whatever's on it, you'll have to figure it out for yourself.""That can't be the only one," Novosty sputtered. "Surely there are other copies.""That's it, sweetheart."Inagawa turned it in his hand, then passed it to Takenaka and said something in Japanese. The other man took it, then barked“Hai”and bowed lightly."Are you sure this is the only copy?" Inagawa asked."The only one."He nodded to his lieutenant, who began screwing a dark silencer onto the barrel of his automatic.Oh my God, she thought. They're going to finish the job."Wait." Novosty reached for his arm. "She's lying. This is a disk from a computer. There must be other copies.""Yes." She was finally coming to her senses. "There are plenty of other copies. In my computer. In—""Where is it?" Inagawa looked at her."It's—it's at the hotel. The Galaxy." She was trying desperately to think. "And then I left another—""You're lying. We have been there. They said a tavern keeper came and took all your luggage." He was staring down the street, toward Zeno's place. "They also told us where he could be found. We will go there now.""My friends," Novosty interrupted again, "it would be most unwise to attempt any violence on a Greek national here. The consequences could be extremely awkward, for all of us.""We must retrieve it.""But why not do it the easy way?" He tried to smile. "There's another man here, traveling with her. We should work through him. I know he will deal. He's a professional.""Who is he?""An American. If we hold her, keep her alive, we can use her to make him bring it to us. We can offer a trade.""No. We will just find him and take it." Inagawa started to move. "Now.""He's armed, my friends," Novosty continued evenly. "He's also experienced. There would be gunfire, I promise you. If that happened, you could have the entire street here filled with rifles in a minute. You do not know these people as I do. They still remember World War Two and the Resistance. Killing unfriendly foreigners became a way of life some of them have yet to forget."Alex is bluffing, she thought. Again. Michael doesn't have a gun. Does Zeno? Who knows?"Let me try and talk to him," Novosty continued. "Surely something can be worked out.""You will stay here, with us." Inagawa seized his arm, then turned and began a heated exchange with his partner. Again Takenaka bowed repeatedly, sucking in his breath and muttering hai. At last they seemed to arrive at a consensus, though it was the taller man who'd actually made the decision, whatever it was."She comes with us.""Oh, no I don't." She looked at Novosty, who seemed defeated, then back at the Japanese. She suddenly realized she was on her own. Novosty had played all his cards. "If I don't reappear in Washington day after tomorrow, you'll have the entire U.S. National Security Agency looking for me. People know I'm here. So think about that.""That is not our concern." Inagawa reached for her. "We do not work for the American government." Then he turned to Novosty. "Tell your friend that this woman will be released when we have all copies of the protocol. All. Do you understand?""But how can I tell him if you won't let me—?""That is your problem.""Perhaps . . . perhaps we should just leave a message here," Novosty sputtered. "I'm sure he'll find the car.""Alex, I'm not going anywhere with these animals." She drew back."Don't worry. I'll take care of everything.""No, I'm not—"That was all she could say before a hand was roughly clapped against her mouth, her body shoved against the broken window.Mike Vance and Zeno Stantopoulos searched for over half an hour before they found the Saab. When they did, the left-hand window was broken, and Eva's purse was missing. She was missing too. The only thing remaining was a hastily scrawled note from Alex Novosty.Chapter EightSaturday 6:13p.m."Vance?" The portly, balding desk clerk studied his computer screen at the Athenaeum Inter-Continental. Here in this teeming marble lobby the new world met the old. "Dr. M. Vance. Yes, we have your reservation."Good. Novosty had done exactly what he said. The play was going down."Welcome back." The man looked up and smiled, his eyes mirroring the green numbers on the screen as he looked over Vance's shoulder. "Our records show you were just with us, four days ago. We still have your old room, if you like.""That would be fine."He was back in a city renowned as much for its hospitality as for its mind-numbing brown haze of smog. It was also said to be the safest city in Europe, with a miniscule crime rate. However, Michael Vance did not feel safe as he stood in the lobby of Athens's most luxurious hotel."Were you on a bus tour of the Peloponnisos, perhaps?" the clerk continued with a pale smile, his voice trying for perfunctory brightness. "The Mycenean ruins in the south are always—""Business." Vance tossed his passport onto the counter. They both knew he didn't look anything like a candidate for a four-day CHAT package tour on a bus. But the man seemed nervous, anxious to make conversation."I'll be needing a car in the morning. Early. Is that in your reservation file too?""No problem." The clerk ignored, or missed, his impatient tone. "We have a Hertz outlet now, just over there," he pointed, "next to the travel desk. I'm sure they will be happy to arrange for it."Vance tossed his Amex card onto the counter, then reached for the slate clipboard holding the registration slip. Dusk was falling outside, but here in the warm glow of chandeliers the moment felt like sleepwalking. His mental bearings kept shifting. Nothing was real. He wanted to think it was merely routine, like checking into a thousand other streamlined international hotels, something he'd done more times than he cared to count. But that was wrong; danger lurked somewhere nearby. His senses were warning him.He kept thinking about Eva. Was she serious about getting back together, sailing on the Ulysses? Maybe he didn't know her as well as he thought, which was troubling for a lot of reasons, not the least being that right now he needed to be able to think exactly the way she did. They'd have to work as a perfectly coordinated team tomorrow, with no rehearsals."May I have someone take your bag?" The clerk glanced down at the new leather suitcase sitting on the floor, then reached to ring for a bellhop."No." Vance lunged to stop his hand.Whoa, he lectured himself, chill out. Keep the lid on. Why not just let it happen? Here. Maybe you want them to do it here. Why wait?The clerk tried to hold his composure. "As you wish. Of course you know your room.""I can find it." He tried to smile, then thumbed over his shoulder. "You're busy anyway. The tour coming in . . .""Yes." The clerk was shoving across the heavy brass key. "You remember our schedule. Breakfast is served until ten over there in the dining room, eleven in your room.""Thanks." He picked up the bag, heavy, and turned.The rental car desk was across the lobby, past the tour group now pouring through the revolving doors. They clearly were just off a Paris flight, chattering in French, brandishing tour badges, and quarreling about luggage with Gallic impatience."I need a car for tomorrow. Early."The dark-haired woman at the desk looked up as he began fishing for his credit card and driver's license. Her Hertz uniform was unbuttoned down the front to display as much of her bosom as Greek propriety, perhaps even the law, would permit. A heavy silver chain nestled between her ample breasts."Our pleasure." She swept back her hair as she mechanically shoved forward a typed sheet encased in smudged cellophane. "We have some new Austin subcompacts, or if you want a full-size—""What's the best car you've got?" It would be a long drive, over uncertain Greek roads. He wanted to take no chances."We do have an Alfa, sir. Only one. A Milano." She absently adjusted the V-neck of her uniform. "For VIPs. I should warn you it's expensive." She bent forward to whisper. "To tell you the truth,ine poli akrivo. It's a rip- off." She leaned back, proud of her new American slang. "Take my advice and—""Can you have it here, out front, at six in the morning?""I can check." She sniffed, then reached for the battered phone. A quick exchange in Greek followed, then she hung up. "They say it just came in. There should be no problem."He glanced around the lobby once more as she picked up the charge card and license to begin filling out the form. There was still no sign, no indication. And yet the whole scene felt wrong. Something, something was warning him.That's what it was. The man standing across the lobby, at the far side next to the elevators. He had a newspaper folded in his hand, but he wasn't reading. He was speaking into it.Hotel security? Not a chance. For one thing, he wasn't Greek. Although he was too far away to see his face, something about the way he stood gave him away.Where the hell was Novosty? This wasn't supposed to be the drill.He suddenly found himself wondering how much clout Alex had left. Maybe Novosty was out of the play. Maybe the rules had changed."Could you please hurry that along." He turned back to the dark-haired girl."You said you wouldn't be needing the car until tomorrow, sir." Formal now, abrupt."I just changed my mind. I'd like it tonight. Right now, as a matter of fact.""Do you want the insurance? It will be an extra—""No. Yes. Look, I don't care. Just let me sign that damned thing and give me the keys.""Well, give me a chance." She petulantly turned the form toward him and shoved it across the desk. "If you'll just initial here and here," she was pointing with her pen, "and sign there. And did you say you wanted the car now?""Immediately.""I'm afraid that's not possible." She retrieved the form."What?""It's just—""Then give me something else." He glanced toward the man, still speaking into his newspaper, then back. They would make their move any second now. "What's the problem with the car?""I'm trying to tell you it just came in. Our people will need at least half an hour to clean it, go over the checklist. So if you'd like to have a cup of coffee in the dining room, I'll call you when—""Where is it now?""They said it's just been returned. It's probably parked somewhere outside." She gestured toward the glass revolving door. "Across the street. That's where they usually—""An Alfa?""That's right. Dark blue. But like I said, it's not—""Give me the keys.""They're probably still in it. Our people—""Thanks." He reached down for the suitcase."Your card, sir, and your license." She pushed the items across with a tight smile, clearly happy to be rid of him.As he reached for them, out of the corner of his eye he saw the first movement. The man had stuffed the newspaper, and walkie-talkie, into his trench coat and was approaching across the marble lobby. Just as Vance expected, the garb was polyester, the hair a slicked-up punch-perm, but he still couldn't make out the face.He didn't need to. He knew who they were. The encounter at Knossos flashed through his mind.They know I've got a copy of their protocol. And until that gets iced, there's always a chance their secret is no longer a secret. But they can't know we've cracked the encryption. Unless she told them. Which she never would.No, they couldn't know that yet, which meant he still had the bargaining chip he'd need.Except for one problem. They were about to try and break the rules. Just like the old days. Maybe they'd forgot he knew how to break rules too.As he pushed through the milling crowd of French tourists, suitcases and knapsacks piling up near the entrance, he sensed the man was gaining. But only a few feet more and he'd be at the revolving door. Halfway home.This wasn't going to be easy. There'd be a backup. Probably just outside, at the entrance.As he reached for the rubber flange of the revolving door, he knew the man was just behind him, maybe two steps. Just right. He turned to see a hand emerge from the polyester suit jacket, grasping a Heckler & Koch KA1 machine pistol, a cut-down version of the MP5.The barrel was rising, the hard face closing in. But it was the suitcase he wanted.So why not give it to him?"Here." He jammed his foot into the revolving door, leaving a small opening, then wheeled around, hoisting the case. The quick turn brought just enough surprise to break his attacker's momentum. As the man involuntarily raised his left hand, Vance caught his right wrist, just back of the pistol's grip, and shoved it forward, into the door. Then he brought up his elbow and smashed it into the attacker's jaw. As the man groaned, he caught his other wrist and shoved him around.Now.He rammed his shoulder against the revolving door, closing it and wedging the gun inside."Let's keep this simple, okay? No muss, no fuss."He threw his full weight against the man's body, bending him back around the curved metal and glass of the door. There was a snap and a muted groan as the wrist bones shattered. The machine pistol clattered to the marble floor inside the circular enclosure."Sorry about that." Before the attacker could regain his balance, he kneed him into the next revolving partition and rammed it closed. Only one foot remained outside, kicking at an awkward angle across the floor.Now where's the other one? He glanced around as he drew away. There's sure to be two. Somebody was on the other end of that radio. Novosty? Did he set this up?He swept up the suitcase and shouldered his way through the auxiliary door on the side. Odd, but the scuffle had gone unnoticed amid the din of the arriving tour. Or maybe Parisians weren't ruffled by anything so everyday as an attempted murder.Now what?As he emerged onto the street, he saw what he was looking for. The other assailant was waiting just across the wide entryway, past the jumble of bellboys, taxi drivers, and the last straggle of tourists coming off the bus.Their eyes met, and the man's right hand darted inside his dark suit jacket.Use the crowd, Vance thought. Enough hand-to-hand heroics. These guys mean business.Since the pile of luggage coming off the bus separated them, he had an advantage now, if only for a second or so. Without thinking he seized the straps of a canvas knapsack sitting on the sidewalk with his free hand and flung it with all his strength.It caught his attacker squarely in the chest, breaking his rhythm and knocking him back half a step. It was only a moment's reprieve, but it was all Vance needed to disappear around the rear of the bus, which was pouring black exhaust into the evening air, blocking all view of the avenue. Maybe he could move fast enough to just disappear.As he dashed into the honking traffic, headlights half blinding him, he surveyed the street opposite looking for the Alfa.There? No. There?A pair of headlights swerved by, inches away, accompanied by honking and a cursing Greek driver. Only a few feet more now and he'd be across.There. A blue Alfa. It had to be the one.But it was already moving, its front wheels turning inward as the Hertz attendant backed it around to begin pulling out.He wrenched open the door and seized a brown sleeve. The arm inside belonged to a young Greek, barely twenty, his uniform grease-covered and wrinkled. He looked up, surprise in his eyes, and grabbed for the door handle."Change of plans." Vance heard the Alfa's bumper slam against the car parked behind as the startled attendant's foot brushed against the accelerator."Den katalaveno!""Out." Vance yanked him around and shoved him toward the asphalt pavement. "And stay down."Now the bus had begun pulling out from the entryway across the street. Although traffic still clogged the avenue, he was a clear target.He threw the suitcase onto the seat, then slid in and reached to secure the door. As he pulled it shut, he heard the ping of a bullet ricochetting off metal somewhere. Next came a burst of automatic fire that seemed to splatter all around him.The young Greek pulled himself up off the pavement and reached . . ."Down." Vance waved him away as he shifted the transmission into drive.At that moment a slug caught the young attendant in the shoulder, spinning him around. He gave a yelp of surprise, then stumbled backward. But now he was out of the way, clear, with what was probably only a flesh wound.Vance shoved his foot against the accelerator, ramming the rear fender of the car in front, then again, knocking it clear. Another spray of bullets spattered through the back window as he pulled into the flow of traffic.Your time will come, friend, he told himself. Tomorrow, by God, we finish this little dance.He finally became aware of the pumping of his own heart as he made his way north up Syngrou Avenue, trying to urge the traffic forward by sheer will.The thing now was to get out of Athens, take Leoforos Athinon west, then head up the new Highway 1 toward the mountains, lose them in the country, find some place to spend the night. His final destination was only about two hundred kilometers away. He just had to be fresh and ready tomorrow, with everything in place.
"You know, in my travels I've discovered something. A great mind often has a touch of poetry. Sometimes, in order to think like the other guy, you need to be a little artistic. So, I wonder . . . about that cipher."
"You mean—?"
"Just a crazy, early morning idea." He patted the keyboard of the laptop. "What if the mind behind it is using a system no computer in the world would ever have heard of?"
"There's no such thing, believe me."
"Maybe yes, maybe no." He flipped open his book to the central section, a glossy portfolio of photos. He'd shot them himself with an old Nikon. "Take a look at this and refresh your memory."
She looked down at the photo of a large Minoan clay jar from the palace, a giantpithoi, once a container for oil or unguents or water for the bath. Along the sides were inscribed rows of wavy lines and symbols. It was the Minoan written language, which, along with cuneiform and hieroglyphics, was among the oldest in the world. "You mean Linear B."
"Language of King Minos. As you undoubtedly remember, it's actually a syllabary, and a damned good one. Each of these little pictures is a syllable, a consonant followed by a vowel. Come on, this was your thing, way back when. Look, this wavy flag here reads mi, and here, this little pitchfork with a tail reads no." He glanced up. "Anyway, surely you recall that Linear B has almost a hundred of these syllable signs. But Ventris assigned them numbers since they're so hard to reproduce in typeface. For example, this series here,mi-no-ta-roreads numerically as—" he checked the appendix, "13-52-59-02. Run them together andminotaroreads 13525902. And just like the early Greeks, the Minoans didn't insert a space between words. If somebody was using Linear B, via Ventris' system, the thing would come out looking like an unintelligible string of numbers."
"You don't really—"
"You say you've tried everything else. NSA's Crays drew a blank. Maybe you were looking for some fancy new encryption system when it was actually one so old nobody would ever think of it. Almost four thousand years old, to be exact."
"Darling, that's very romantic. You're improving in the romance department." She gazed at him a second, then flashed a wry smile. "But I can't say the same for the good-sense arena. No offense, but that's like the kind of thing kids write to us suggesting. Nobody employs anything remotely that simple these days."
"I knew you'd think I was crazy. You're not the first." He rose. "But humor me. Just slice those number sequences into pairs and see what they look like phonetically. Something to take your mind off all the madness around here."
"Well, all right." She sighed, then settled unsteadily into the rickety chair he'd just vacated. "Make you a proposition, sweetie. Get me some coffee, nice and strong, and I'll forget I have good sense and play with this a little."
"You're a trooper." He turned and headed for the kitchen. "I remember that about you. Not to mention great in bed."
"We strive for excellence in all things."
Just as he reached the doorway, the kitchen light flicked on. It was Adriana, in blue robe and furry slippers, now reaching up to retrieve her coffee pan.
While Eva was typing away behind him, he leaned against the doorframe in his still-wet clothes to watch a Greek grandmother shuffle about her private domain preparing a traditional breakfast. He suspected no male hand had ever touched those sparkling utensils. The Old World had its ways, yesterday and forever.
While he drowsed against the doorjamb, the aroma of fresh Greek coffee began filling the room.Sarakin. That was the Japanese name for their homegrown loan sharks, the so-called salary-men financiers. He knew that the Yakuza's four largestsarakinoperations gave out more consumer loans than all of Japan's banks combined. If you added to that the profits in illegal amphetamines, prostitution, bars, shakedowns of businesses, protection rackets . . . the usual list, and you were talking multi multibillions. The major problem was washing all that dirty money. They routinely invested in respectable but losing propositions abroad, on the sound theory that one dollar cleaned was worth two unlaundered.
Was that what the Soviet scam was all about? Money from the Japanese mob being laundered through loans to the USSR? What better way to wash it? Nobody would ever bother asking where it came from.
But there was one major problem with that neat scenario. Politically the Yakuza were ultra-rightist hardliners. So why would they expose their money with the Soviets, laundered or not? Particularly now, with so much political instability there—hardliners, reformers, nationalists. Somehow it didn't compute.
"Michael, come here a second." The voice had an edge of triumph.
"What?" He glanced around groggily.
"Just come here and take a look at this." She was staring at the screen.
He turned and walked over, still entranced by the heady, pungent essence of fresh Greek coffee now flooding the room. "Is it anything—?"
"Just look at it and tell me what you think." She leaned back from the screen and shifted the Zenith toward him. The ice-blue letters cast an eerie glow through the dull morning light. The color reflected off his eyes, matching them.
"You did it already?"
"I started with a one-to-one replacement of numbers with letters. But it's sequence-inverted, which means I had to . . . anyway, what do think so far? Am I a genius or what?"
He drew a chair next to the screen and started to examine it. But at that moment Adriana set a tray of coffee down beside the computer, steaming and fresh, together with dark figs and two bowls of yogurt.
"Kafe evropaiko," she commanded, then thrust a cup into his hand.
"Malista, efcharisto." He absently nodded his thanks, took a sip of the steaming brew, then returned his attention to the screen.
At first he thought he was just groggy, his vision playing tricks, but then the string of letters began to come into focus. Incredible!
"Okay, what about this part here," he asked, pointing to the fourth line, where the letters turned to nonsensical garbage, "and then down here again?"
"That's what I was talking about. The interlacing switches there. It happens every hundred numbers. They started by taking the second fifty digits and interlacing them back into the first fifty. Then they switched the algorithm and interlaced the third fifty digits ahead, into the fourth fifty, but backwards. Then it repeats again."
"You figured all that out just fooling around with it?"
"Darling, I do this for a living, for godsake. After a while you have good instincts." She tapped her fingers nervously on the wooden table, then remembered the coffee and reached for a cup. "Nice little trick. Standard but nice. Every so often you fold the data back into themselves somehow. That way there are no repetitions of number sequences—for words that are used a lot—to give you away. But once you've played with this stuff as much as I have . . . anyway, it's always the first thing I check for."
"Congratulations."
"Tell me the truth." She looked at him, sipping her coffee. "Can you really still read this? It's been years."
"Memory like an elephant. Though you may have to help me along now and then." He pointed. "Look. I think that word's modern Greek. They've mixed it in where there's not an old word for something." He pushed around the computer. "Want to run the whole data file through your system? Clean it up?"
"My pleasure." She was clearing the screen. "I can't believe it just fell apart like this. The reason our Crays didn't crack it was it's too simple by half."
He reached for his coffee, feeling a surge of satisfaction. His hunch had been dead on. Whoever came up with this idea for an encryption must have been a fan of ancient Greek history, and a knowledgeable one. What better cipher for Project Daedalus communiques than the language Daedalus himself used? They'd taken that four-thousand-year-old tongue, an archaic forerunner of ancient Greek, and then scrambled it using a mathematical algorithm. Mino Industries was communicating with the Soviets using an encoded version of Minoan Linear B.
It was absolutely poetic. It also appeared, upon first examination, to be very naive. Yet upon reflection it turned out to be brilliant. You convert a totally unheard-of language to numbers, throw in a few encryption tricks, and the result is something that would drive all the hotdog DES-oriented supercomputers crazy. All those chips would be trying trillions of keys when there actually was no key. Yes, you had to admit it was inspired.
Except the Daedalus crowd was about to experience a problem, a small headache. Make that a major headache. Because their secret protocol was about to become headlines. He figured that ought to go a long way toward stopping any more shooting.
"Okay. It's humming." She reached for her yogurt. "This time around all the garbage will be gone." She took a bite, then burst out laughing. "You know, this is wonderful, working with you. Darling, I've just decided. Let's do something together, maybe live on the Ulysses for a while. I might even get to like it. It sounds romantic."
"I'm still looking for the romance in life."
"Well, love, you've found it. It's me." She leaned over and kissed him on the lips. "End of quest."
"Thought I'd never hear you say that. But first you have to help me translate this. I'm over a decade out of date. My modern Greek's a little rusty too, and a lot of the technical terms in this look to be transliterated—"
"No, sweetie, that's not the first thing we have to do. The first thing is to make sure you've got a separate copy of anything you're working with. Not in the computer. I'll spare you my horror stories about erased files, hard disks going down, all the rest." She was rising, energized. "Cardinal computer rule number one. Always dupe anything you're working on, no matter how sure you are nothing can go wrong. Believe me."
"Sounds good." He looked up. "What are you doing?"
"I need that disk I showed you tonight. We can use it for the backup. It's in my purse, which I now realize I left in the car when I came in. I was slightly crazy at the time." She was turning. "God, it seems like ages."
"Look, why don't you let me—?"
"You don't know where I parked it. My secret hiding place."
"Maybe we ought to send Zeno, or Adriana—"
"Just sit tight. Only be a minute." She wrapped her coat about her and, before he could protest, disappeared out the door, humming.
She was a marvel. Everything he'd remembered.
"Are you still awake?" Zeno was trudging into the room, still wearing his frayed nightshirt.
"We just solved the riddle of the sphinx, old friend. Except now we have to translate it."
"You should be sleeping, Michael. Go now, catch an hour or so. I will start making arrangements. Get tickets for you both on the car ferry to Athens, a pistol, maybe new passports if you want. We have work to do." He reached and took the cup of coffee Adriana was urging on him.
"All right. As soon as she gets back."
"What?" He froze, then looked toward the back. "What do you mean? I thought she was still asleep."
"She went out to the car, wherever it is."
"I wish she had asked me. I would have been happy—"
"You know how she is. There's no stopping her when she gets rolling."
"This is not good." He turned and called to Adriana to bring his trousers and shoes. "We must find her."
"You're right. It was stupid. Damned stupid." He was getting up. "Let's do it together."
Thursday 6:28a.m.
The morning air was sharp and she wished she'd grabbed one of Adriana's black knit shawls before going out. Could she pass for one of those stooped Greek peasant women? she wondered. Not likely. She shivered and pulled her thin coat around her.
The rain was over now, leaving the air moist and fragrant, but the early morning gloom had an ominous undertone. They'd found the key to open the first box, but the message inside still had to be translated. What was it? What could possibly be in the protocol that would make somebody want to kill her?
She stared down the vacant street leading away from the square, a mosaic of predawn shadows, and tried to think.
Alex Novosty was the classic middleman, that much was a given. But then she'd known that for years. Yes, she'd known about Alex Novosty all her life—his work for the KGB, his laundering of Techmashimport funds. She knew about it because they were second cousins. Fortunately their family tie was distant enough not to have made its way into NSA's security file, but around the Russian expatriate dinner tables of Brighton Beach and Oyster Bay, Alex was very well known indeed. He was the Romanov descendant who'd sold out to the Soviets, an unforgivable lapse of breeding.
But for all that, he wasn't an assassin. For him to do what he'd done tonight could only mean one thing: he was terrified. Very out of character. But why?
The answer to that wasn't hard: He must be mixed up in Project Daedalus, whatever it was, right up to his shifty eyeballs. But what about Michael? What did Alex want from him?
The answer to that could go a lot of ways. When she first met Michael Vance, Jr., she'd been smitten by the fact he was so different. Always kidding around, yet tough as steel when anybody crossed him. A WASP street fighter. She liked that a lot. He was somebody she felt she could depend on, no matter what.
She still remembered her first sight of Mike as though it were yesterday. She was taking notes on Etruscan pottery in a black notebook, standing in a corner of the Yale art gallery on Chapel Street, when she looked up and—no, it couldn't be. She felt herself just gawking.
He'd caught her look and strolled over with a puzzled smile. "Is my tie crooked, or—" Then he laughed. "Name's Mike Vance. I used to be part of this place. How about you?"
"Vance?" She'd just kept on staring, still not quite believing her eyes. "My thesis adviser at Penn was . . . you look just like him."
And he did. The same sharp chin, the same twinkle in the blue eyes. Even when he was angry, as Mike certainly had been that day, he seemed to be having fun.
Thus it began.
At first they were so right for each other it seemed as though she'd known Michael Vance for approximately a hundred years, give or take. She'd been one of his father's many ardent disciples, and after finishing her master's at Penn, she'd gone on to become a doctoral candidate at Yale, where she'd specialized in the linguistics of the ancient Aegean languages. She'd known but forgotten that Michael Vance, Sr., had a son who was finishing his own doctorate at Yale, writing a dissertation about Minoan Crete.
That day in the museum he was steaming, declaring he'd dropped by one last time as part of a ritualistic, formal farewell to archaeology. The decision was connected with the hostile reception being given a book he'd just published, a commercial version of his dissertation. As of that day he'd decided to tell academia to stuff it. He'd be doing something else for a living. There'd been feelers from some agency in D.C. about helping trace hot money.
In the brief weeks that followed they grew inseparable, the perfect couple. One weekend they'd scout the New England countryside for old-fashioned inns, the next they'd drive up to Boston to spend a day in the Museum of Fine Arts, then come back and argue and make love till dawn in her New Haven apartment. During all those days and nights, she came very close to talking him out of quitting university life. Close, but she didn't.
He had put off everything for a couple of months, and they had traveled the world—London, Greece, Morocco, Moscow. Once their parents even met, at Count Sergei Borodin's sprawling Oyster Bay home. It was a convocation of the Russian Nobility Association, with three hundred guests in attendance, and the air rang with Russian songs and balalaikas. Michael Vance, Sr., who arrived in his natty bowler, scarcely knew what to make of all the Slavic exuberance.
Shortly after that, the intensity of Michael became too much for her. She felt herself being drawn into his orbit, and she wanted an orbit of her own. The next thing she knew, he'd departed for the Caribbean; her father had died; and she'd gone back to work on her own doctorate.
Michael. He was driven, obsessive, always determined to do what he wanted, just as she was. But the tension that likeness brought to their relationship those many years ago now made everything seem to click. Why? she wondered.
Maybe it was merely as simple as life cycles. Maybe back then they were just out of synch. He'd already survived his first midlife crisis, even though he was hardly thirty. When they split up, she'd been twenty-five and at the beginning of a campaign to test herself, find out what she could do.
Well, she thought, she'd found out. She was good, very good. So now what?
She was relieved to see the car was still parked on the side street, actually a little alley, where she'd left it. Thinking more clearly now, she realized she'd been a trifle careless, stashing the car in the first location she could find and then running for Zeno's.
As she headed down the alley in between the white plaster houses, she suddenly felt her heart stop. Someone was standing next to the Saab, a dark figure waiting. She watched as it suddenly moved briskly toward her.
Alex Novosty.
"What?" She couldn't believe her eyes.
"Budetya ostorozhyi!" He whispered the warning as he raised his hand and furtively tried to urge her back.
"Kak! Shto—?" She froze. "How did you find the car?"
"The hotel. They directed us to akafeneionnear here, but then I noticed your car. I thought . . ." He moved out of the shadows, quickly, still speaking in Russian. "Just tell me where you have the copies of the protocol, quickly. Maybe I can still handle it."
"Handle what?" That's when she saw the two other men, in dark overcoats, against the shadow of the building.
"The . . . situation." His eyes were intense. "They want it back, all copies. I've tried to tell them that killing you won't solve anything, but—" He glanced back with a small shiver. "You must tell them Michael has a copy, stall them."
"It's true. He does."
"No! Then say there's a copy back in your office. Just let me try and—"
"Alex, I'm not going to play any more of your games."
"Please," he continued in a whisper, "don't contradict anything I say. Let me do the talking. I'll—"
"You're in it with them, aren't you?" She tried to push past. "Well, you can tell your friends we're onto their 'project.' If anything happens to me, Michael will track them down and personally take them apart. Tell them that."
"You don't understand." He caught her arm. "One of their people was killed tonight."
"The one trying to shoot Michael and me, you mean?" She was trying to calm the quaver in her voice.
"He was killed by the KGB. I had nothing to do with—"
"Is that what you told them?"
"That's the way it happened. There was an argument."
"Over what?"
"Everybody wants you. It's the protocol." His look darkened. "Eva, they are in no mood for niceties."
"Neither am I." She noticed the two men were now moving toward them. One was taller and seemed to be in charge, but they both were carrying what looked like small-caliber automatic weapons.
The protocol, whatever it was, was still in code. She didn't know what she didn't know. How could she bargain?
It was too late to think about it now. Their faces were hard and smooth, with the cold eyes of men who killed on command. My God, she thought, what had Michael said about theMino-gumi?
The Japanese mob.
The taller man, she was soon to learn, was Kazuo Ina- gawa, who had been a London-basedkobunfor theMino-gumifor the past decade. He had a thin, pasty face and had once been firstkobunfor their entire Osaka organization, in charge of gambling and nightclub shakedowns. Even in the early dawn light, he wore sunglasses, masking his eyes.
The shorter one was Takahashi Takenaka, whose pockmarked face was distinguished by a thin moustache, an aquiline nose, and the same sunglasses.
Alex, she realized, must have lied to them, covering up what really happened out at the palace. Now he was bluffing for his life.
"You can just tell them I don't know anything about it." She felt the cold air closing in.
"Eva, that's impossible. They know you were given the protocol. Now where is it?"
He clearly wanted her to say it was somewhere else. But why bother?
"It's in the car. In my purse." She pointed. "Why don't they just go ahead and take it? By the way, it's still encrypted."
She fumbled in her pockets. "Here's . . ."
Then she realized she'd left the key in the car. There it dangled, inside the locked door. Her purse rested on the seat across from the driver's side.
"Get it," Inagawa commanded his lieutenant. Takenaka bowed obediently, then turned and tried the door handle, without success.
"So." He frowned.
Inagawa muttered a curse and brutally slammed the butt of his automatic against the curved window. The sound of splintering glass rent the morning air.
Quickly Novosty stepped forward and reached through to unlock the door. Then he pulled it open and leaned in.
Why is he doing it? she wondered. Easy answer: He's trying to keep control of the situation.
Whose side is he really on?
Then he backed out and handed her the brown leather purse while he tried to catch her eye.
She took it, snapped it open, and lifted out the gray computer disk. "There," she said as she handed it to Inagawa, "whatever's on it, you'll have to figure it out for yourself."
"That can't be the only one," Novosty sputtered. "Surely there are other copies."
"That's it, sweetheart."
Inagawa turned it in his hand, then passed it to Takenaka and said something in Japanese. The other man took it, then barked“Hai”and bowed lightly.
"Are you sure this is the only copy?" Inagawa asked.
"The only one."
He nodded to his lieutenant, who began screwing a dark silencer onto the barrel of his automatic.
Oh my God, she thought. They're going to finish the job.
"Wait." Novosty reached for his arm. "She's lying. This is a disk from a computer. There must be other copies."
"Yes." She was finally coming to her senses. "There are plenty of other copies. In my computer. In—"
"Where is it?" Inagawa looked at her.
"It's—it's at the hotel. The Galaxy." She was trying desperately to think. "And then I left another—"
"You're lying. We have been there. They said a tavern keeper came and took all your luggage." He was staring down the street, toward Zeno's place. "They also told us where he could be found. We will go there now."
"My friends," Novosty interrupted again, "it would be most unwise to attempt any violence on a Greek national here. The consequences could be extremely awkward, for all of us."
"We must retrieve it."
"But why not do it the easy way?" He tried to smile. "There's another man here, traveling with her. We should work through him. I know he will deal. He's a professional."
"Who is he?"
"An American. If we hold her, keep her alive, we can use her to make him bring it to us. We can offer a trade."
"No. We will just find him and take it." Inagawa started to move. "Now."
"He's armed, my friends," Novosty continued evenly. "He's also experienced. There would be gunfire, I promise you. If that happened, you could have the entire street here filled with rifles in a minute. You do not know these people as I do. They still remember World War Two and the Resistance. Killing unfriendly foreigners became a way of life some of them have yet to forget."
Alex is bluffing, she thought. Again. Michael doesn't have a gun. Does Zeno? Who knows?
"Let me try and talk to him," Novosty continued. "Surely something can be worked out."
"You will stay here, with us." Inagawa seized his arm, then turned and began a heated exchange with his partner. Again Takenaka bowed repeatedly, sucking in his breath and muttering hai. At last they seemed to arrive at a consensus, though it was the taller man who'd actually made the decision, whatever it was.
"She comes with us."
"Oh, no I don't." She looked at Novosty, who seemed defeated, then back at the Japanese. She suddenly realized she was on her own. Novosty had played all his cards. "If I don't reappear in Washington day after tomorrow, you'll have the entire U.S. National Security Agency looking for me. People know I'm here. So think about that."
"That is not our concern." Inagawa reached for her. "We do not work for the American government." Then he turned to Novosty. "Tell your friend that this woman will be released when we have all copies of the protocol. All. Do you understand?"
"But how can I tell him if you won't let me—?"
"That is your problem."
"Perhaps . . . perhaps we should just leave a message here," Novosty sputtered. "I'm sure he'll find the car."
"Alex, I'm not going anywhere with these animals." She drew back.
"Don't worry. I'll take care of everything."
"No, I'm not—"
That was all she could say before a hand was roughly clapped against her mouth, her body shoved against the broken window.
Mike Vance and Zeno Stantopoulos searched for over half an hour before they found the Saab. When they did, the left-hand window was broken, and Eva's purse was missing. She was missing too. The only thing remaining was a hastily scrawled note from Alex Novosty.
Saturday 6:13p.m.
"Vance?" The portly, balding desk clerk studied his computer screen at the Athenaeum Inter-Continental. Here in this teeming marble lobby the new world met the old. "Dr. M. Vance. Yes, we have your reservation."
Good. Novosty had done exactly what he said. The play was going down.
"Welcome back." The man looked up and smiled, his eyes mirroring the green numbers on the screen as he looked over Vance's shoulder. "Our records show you were just with us, four days ago. We still have your old room, if you like."
"That would be fine."
He was back in a city renowned as much for its hospitality as for its mind-numbing brown haze of smog. It was also said to be the safest city in Europe, with a miniscule crime rate. However, Michael Vance did not feel safe as he stood in the lobby of Athens's most luxurious hotel.
"Were you on a bus tour of the Peloponnisos, perhaps?" the clerk continued with a pale smile, his voice trying for perfunctory brightness. "The Mycenean ruins in the south are always—"
"Business." Vance tossed his passport onto the counter. They both knew he didn't look anything like a candidate for a four-day CHAT package tour on a bus. But the man seemed nervous, anxious to make conversation.
"I'll be needing a car in the morning. Early. Is that in your reservation file too?"
"No problem." The clerk ignored, or missed, his impatient tone. "We have a Hertz outlet now, just over there," he pointed, "next to the travel desk. I'm sure they will be happy to arrange for it."
Vance tossed his Amex card onto the counter, then reached for the slate clipboard holding the registration slip. Dusk was falling outside, but here in the warm glow of chandeliers the moment felt like sleepwalking. His mental bearings kept shifting. Nothing was real. He wanted to think it was merely routine, like checking into a thousand other streamlined international hotels, something he'd done more times than he cared to count. But that was wrong; danger lurked somewhere nearby. His senses were warning him.
He kept thinking about Eva. Was she serious about getting back together, sailing on the Ulysses? Maybe he didn't know her as well as he thought, which was troubling for a lot of reasons, not the least being that right now he needed to be able to think exactly the way she did. They'd have to work as a perfectly coordinated team tomorrow, with no rehearsals.
"May I have someone take your bag?" The clerk glanced down at the new leather suitcase sitting on the floor, then reached to ring for a bellhop.
"No." Vance lunged to stop his hand.
Whoa, he lectured himself, chill out. Keep the lid on. Why not just let it happen? Here. Maybe you want them to do it here. Why wait?
The clerk tried to hold his composure. "As you wish. Of course you know your room."
"I can find it." He tried to smile, then thumbed over his shoulder. "You're busy anyway. The tour coming in . . ."
"Yes." The clerk was shoving across the heavy brass key. "You remember our schedule. Breakfast is served until ten over there in the dining room, eleven in your room."
"Thanks." He picked up the bag, heavy, and turned.
The rental car desk was across the lobby, past the tour group now pouring through the revolving doors. They clearly were just off a Paris flight, chattering in French, brandishing tour badges, and quarreling about luggage with Gallic impatience.
"I need a car for tomorrow. Early."
The dark-haired woman at the desk looked up as he began fishing for his credit card and driver's license. Her Hertz uniform was unbuttoned down the front to display as much of her bosom as Greek propriety, perhaps even the law, would permit. A heavy silver chain nestled between her ample breasts.
"Our pleasure." She swept back her hair as she mechanically shoved forward a typed sheet encased in smudged cellophane. "We have some new Austin subcompacts, or if you want a full-size—"
"What's the best car you've got?" It would be a long drive, over uncertain Greek roads. He wanted to take no chances.
"We do have an Alfa, sir. Only one. A Milano." She absently adjusted the V-neck of her uniform. "For VIPs. I should warn you it's expensive." She bent forward to whisper. "To tell you the truth,ine poli akrivo. It's a rip- off." She leaned back, proud of her new American slang. "Take my advice and—"
"Can you have it here, out front, at six in the morning?"
"I can check." She sniffed, then reached for the battered phone. A quick exchange in Greek followed, then she hung up. "They say it just came in. There should be no problem."
He glanced around the lobby once more as she picked up the charge card and license to begin filling out the form. There was still no sign, no indication. And yet the whole scene felt wrong. Something, something was warning him.
That's what it was. The man standing across the lobby, at the far side next to the elevators. He had a newspaper folded in his hand, but he wasn't reading. He was speaking into it.
Hotel security? Not a chance. For one thing, he wasn't Greek. Although he was too far away to see his face, something about the way he stood gave him away.
Where the hell was Novosty? This wasn't supposed to be the drill.
He suddenly found himself wondering how much clout Alex had left. Maybe Novosty was out of the play. Maybe the rules had changed.
"Could you please hurry that along." He turned back to the dark-haired girl.
"You said you wouldn't be needing the car until tomorrow, sir." Formal now, abrupt.
"I just changed my mind. I'd like it tonight. Right now, as a matter of fact."
"Do you want the insurance? It will be an extra—"
"No. Yes. Look, I don't care. Just let me sign that damned thing and give me the keys."
"Well, give me a chance." She petulantly turned the form toward him and shoved it across the desk. "If you'll just initial here and here," she was pointing with her pen, "and sign there. And did you say you wanted the car now?"
"Immediately."
"I'm afraid that's not possible." She retrieved the form.
"What?"
"It's just—"
"Then give me something else." He glanced toward the man, still speaking into his newspaper, then back. They would make their move any second now. "What's the problem with the car?"
"I'm trying to tell you it just came in. Our people will need at least half an hour to clean it, go over the checklist. So if you'd like to have a cup of coffee in the dining room, I'll call you when—"
"Where is it now?"
"They said it's just been returned. It's probably parked somewhere outside." She gestured toward the glass revolving door. "Across the street. That's where they usually—"
"An Alfa?"
"That's right. Dark blue. But like I said, it's not—"
"Give me the keys."
"They're probably still in it. Our people—"
"Thanks." He reached down for the suitcase.
"Your card, sir, and your license." She pushed the items across with a tight smile, clearly happy to be rid of him.
As he reached for them, out of the corner of his eye he saw the first movement. The man had stuffed the newspaper, and walkie-talkie, into his trench coat and was approaching across the marble lobby. Just as Vance expected, the garb was polyester, the hair a slicked-up punch-perm, but he still couldn't make out the face.
He didn't need to. He knew who they were. The encounter at Knossos flashed through his mind.
They know I've got a copy of their protocol. And until that gets iced, there's always a chance their secret is no longer a secret. But they can't know we've cracked the encryption. Unless she told them. Which she never would.
No, they couldn't know that yet, which meant he still had the bargaining chip he'd need.
Except for one problem. They were about to try and break the rules. Just like the old days. Maybe they'd forgot he knew how to break rules too.
As he pushed through the milling crowd of French tourists, suitcases and knapsacks piling up near the entrance, he sensed the man was gaining. But only a few feet more and he'd be at the revolving door. Halfway home.
This wasn't going to be easy. There'd be a backup. Probably just outside, at the entrance.
As he reached for the rubber flange of the revolving door, he knew the man was just behind him, maybe two steps. Just right. He turned to see a hand emerge from the polyester suit jacket, grasping a Heckler & Koch KA1 machine pistol, a cut-down version of the MP5.
The barrel was rising, the hard face closing in. But it was the suitcase he wanted.
So why not give it to him?
"Here." He jammed his foot into the revolving door, leaving a small opening, then wheeled around, hoisting the case. The quick turn brought just enough surprise to break his attacker's momentum. As the man involuntarily raised his left hand, Vance caught his right wrist, just back of the pistol's grip, and shoved it forward, into the door. Then he brought up his elbow and smashed it into the attacker's jaw. As the man groaned, he caught his other wrist and shoved him around.
Now.
He rammed his shoulder against the revolving door, closing it and wedging the gun inside.
"Let's keep this simple, okay? No muss, no fuss."
He threw his full weight against the man's body, bending him back around the curved metal and glass of the door. There was a snap and a muted groan as the wrist bones shattered. The machine pistol clattered to the marble floor inside the circular enclosure.
"Sorry about that." Before the attacker could regain his balance, he kneed him into the next revolving partition and rammed it closed. Only one foot remained outside, kicking at an awkward angle across the floor.
Now where's the other one? He glanced around as he drew away. There's sure to be two. Somebody was on the other end of that radio. Novosty? Did he set this up?
He swept up the suitcase and shouldered his way through the auxiliary door on the side. Odd, but the scuffle had gone unnoticed amid the din of the arriving tour. Or maybe Parisians weren't ruffled by anything so everyday as an attempted murder.
Now what?
As he emerged onto the street, he saw what he was looking for. The other assailant was waiting just across the wide entryway, past the jumble of bellboys, taxi drivers, and the last straggle of tourists coming off the bus.
Their eyes met, and the man's right hand darted inside his dark suit jacket.
Use the crowd, Vance thought. Enough hand-to-hand heroics. These guys mean business.
Since the pile of luggage coming off the bus separated them, he had an advantage now, if only for a second or so. Without thinking he seized the straps of a canvas knapsack sitting on the sidewalk with his free hand and flung it with all his strength.
It caught his attacker squarely in the chest, breaking his rhythm and knocking him back half a step. It was only a moment's reprieve, but it was all Vance needed to disappear around the rear of the bus, which was pouring black exhaust into the evening air, blocking all view of the avenue. Maybe he could move fast enough to just disappear.
As he dashed into the honking traffic, headlights half blinding him, he surveyed the street opposite looking for the Alfa.
There? No. There?
A pair of headlights swerved by, inches away, accompanied by honking and a cursing Greek driver. Only a few feet more now and he'd be across.
There. A blue Alfa. It had to be the one.
But it was already moving, its front wheels turning inward as the Hertz attendant backed it around to begin pulling out.
He wrenched open the door and seized a brown sleeve. The arm inside belonged to a young Greek, barely twenty, his uniform grease-covered and wrinkled. He looked up, surprise in his eyes, and grabbed for the door handle.
"Change of plans." Vance heard the Alfa's bumper slam against the car parked behind as the startled attendant's foot brushed against the accelerator.
"Den katalaveno!"
"Out." Vance yanked him around and shoved him toward the asphalt pavement. "And stay down."
Now the bus had begun pulling out from the entryway across the street. Although traffic still clogged the avenue, he was a clear target.
He threw the suitcase onto the seat, then slid in and reached to secure the door. As he pulled it shut, he heard the ping of a bullet ricochetting off metal somewhere. Next came a burst of automatic fire that seemed to splatter all around him.
The young Greek pulled himself up off the pavement and reached . . .
"Down." Vance waved him away as he shifted the transmission into drive.
At that moment a slug caught the young attendant in the shoulder, spinning him around. He gave a yelp of surprise, then stumbled backward. But now he was out of the way, clear, with what was probably only a flesh wound.
Vance shoved his foot against the accelerator, ramming the rear fender of the car in front, then again, knocking it clear. Another spray of bullets spattered through the back window as he pulled into the flow of traffic.
Your time will come, friend, he told himself. Tomorrow, by God, we finish this little dance.
He finally became aware of the pumping of his own heart as he made his way north up Syngrou Avenue, trying to urge the traffic forward by sheer will.
The thing now was to get out of Athens, take Leoforos Athinon west, then head up the new Highway 1 toward the mountains, lose them in the country, find some place to spend the night. His final destination was only about two hundred kilometers away. He just had to be fresh and ready tomorrow, with everything in place.