The Minoan Cipher (A Matinicus “Matt” Hawkins Adventure Book 2)

by Paul Kemprecos

  Calvin was cooling his heels at the entrance to the hotel restaurant. He had a sour expression on his face. The maître d’ who had been studiously ignoring Calvin’s request for a table for three had disappeared completely by the time Abby arrived. She had exchanged the jeans and sweater she had worn at sea for a long, silky, white dress that set off her tanned skin and auburn hair.

  Her arrival brought the maître d’ out of hiding, all smiles and heel clicks. He glanced with obvious distaste at the backpack on the tall man’s shoulder, then turned to Abby. He could hardly take his eyes off the attractive woman. He practically groveled when Abby asked for a private table, escorting them to a quiet corner of the dining room away from the ordinary guests. He clapped his hands and a waiter appeared instantly to take their cocktail order.

  Calvin watched the maître d’ strut back to the entrance to defend the restaurant from riff-raff. “Glad you showed up and lured Mr. Fancy Pants out of his hidey hole, Abby.”

  “Can’t blame the guy,” Hawkins said. “Rough-looking characters like Calvin and me probably scare the regulars away.”

  “Nonsense,” Abby said. “I couldn’t ask for more dashing escorts.” She gave their arms a quick squeeze, then her Annapolis and corporate persona asserted itself. “I suggest that we adjourn this meeting of the mutual admiration society and get down to business.”

  Hawkins filled Calvin in on the plans to fly to Crete to see Professor Vedrakis.

  “That works with me,” Calvin said. “Thinking of talking to a couple of arms dealers. Maybe they can put me on the track of Spike missiles.”

  “Coordinate with Molly. She’s researching missile sales.”

  “Will do. I apologize for the excitement today on the boat. Never figured on an air approach.”

  “And I never expected to play bucking bronco with an ROV,” Hawkins said.

  “I don’t understand why they didn’t go after us,” Abby said. “We witnessed their destruction of the archaeological site.”

  Hawkins said, “I’d guess their orders were to get in, drop their firecrackers, and get out.”

  “Orders from who?” Abby said.

  Hawkins tapped the backpack nestled next to his leg. “Whoever wanted this gadget and every trace of the ship blown to smithereens.” He looked across the dining room. “Here come our drinks.”

  There was little talk of business over cocktails, and the Spanish wine and dinner that followed. They were simply three old friends laughing over good times shared. After dinner, Calvin excused himself, saying he had to make some phone calls.

  Abby watched Calvin leave the dining room; a smile on her face. “Do you have the feeling Calvin wants us to be alone?”

  “More than a feeling, Ab. He’s taken on the role of matchmaker. Or should I say rematch-maker.”

  “And—?”

  “I don’t know where this is going, Abby. Until we do, I suggest that we avoid anything that doesn’t have to do with the business at hand. Leave emotion out of it…for now.”

  She nodded in agreement. “Sort of the equivalent of a sterile cockpit on a plane. I can live with that.”

  After dinner they took a stroll around the hotel, breathing in the sights and sounds of the old city. They stopped at a sidewalk café for a nightcap. On the walk back, they held hands like a couple of school kids out on a date. Walking Outside her room, Abby opened the door, then turned and gave him a light kiss on the lips.

  “We are officially in sterile cockpit mode,” she grinned. “For now.”

  Giving him a seductive smile, she closed the door behind her.

  Hawkins stood there a moment, thinking that the usual description of their relationship—complicated—didn’t even begin to describe the situation.

  The long day, combined with alcohol, had caught up with him. He was headed for the bedroom when Professor Vedrakis called with a change of plans.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  The Gulfstream G650 executive jet lifted off the tarmac, ascending over the meadows around Zurich Airport, and rapidly reached a speed of more than six hundred miles an hour on a course that would take it southeast across Europe and the Mediterranean to the island of Crete.

  Hawkins and Abby were the only passengers on the eight-seat plane. Abby spent most of the flight on the phone talking with company headquarters in Virginia. Hawkins pecked away at his tablet, continuing the insurance claims process for Falstaff that he had started earlier in the flight.

  It was going to be a formidable task. The insurance company wanted to know what happened. Hawkins explained that it had been an equipment malfunction. He omitted one detail. That the equipment failed after being hit by a sinking ship. Asked if the submersible could be lifted off the ocean floor, he wrote that it had been damaged beyond repair.

  He detested paperwork and was ecstatic when the pilot announced that the plane was starting its approach. Hawkins shut down his tablet and glanced out the window. An ash-colored crescent rose from the turquoise sea. The unmistakable contours of Santorini, the volcanic island directly north of Crete.

  He heaved a sigh of relief. “Escaping certain death at the bottom of the sea is a breeze compared to dealing with an insurance company.”

  “Will they cover the loss?” Abby said.

  “Eventually, maybe. My claim must sound a bit fishy.”

  “Simply tell them the truth. A sinking ship hit Falstaff after a missile attack. The submersible was later depth-bombed by black helicopters. Probably because of a mysterious artifact people are willing to die and/or kill for.”

  Hawkins pinched his chin, like Sherlock Holmes pondering a puzzle. “Sounds reasonable when you put it that way. The choppers were gray and white, though.”

  She dismissed him with a wave of her long fingers. “Whatever. Tell me about Professor Vedrakis.”

  “Good sense of humor. Very serious about his work.” Hawkins pointed to the knapsack buckled in the seat next to him. “When I showed him the trinket, his response was scientific. But his excitement was obvious. If he weren’t so dignified, he would have done a Greek dance.”

  “The dancing professor. I can’t wait to see that.”

  The pilot’s voice came over the intercom advising them to buckle their seat belts. Minutes later the landing gear thumped down. The plane taxied to within a few hundred yards of the terminal at Nikos Kazantzakis airport, named after the famed author of Zorba the Greek. They stepped through the plane’s door into the withering heat and descended the gangway. The tarmac baked under the sun, even with the lateness of the day and the cool breeze skimming off the Cretan Sea. They had changed into shorts and casual shirts and merged easily into the lines of tourists at the Customs gate. Their passports were quickly stamped.

  The car rental agency was across from the terminal. They piled their two duffel bags in the trunk of the compact Renault hatchback. Offering to drive, Hawkins got behind the wheel and followed the line of traffic from the busy commercial sprawl around the airport. Traffic thinned out and soon they were heading east on E75, the highway along the island’s northern coastal plain.

  The road gradually rose higher. Hawkins glanced off at the turquoise sea on one side and the mountains on the other, and felt liberated after the confines of the plane’s cabin. He thought back to the conversation he’d had with Professor Vedrakis when he returned to his hotel room.

  “I’ve been thinking about the mechanism you showed me,” the professor had said. “I hesitate to make a definitive assessment until I hold the artifact in my hands, but I’ve become convinced that what you discovered is an ancient translating computer.”

  “How did you come to that conclusion?”

  “The mechanism is a system of interlocking gears, or wheels. There are Egyptian hieroglyphics inscribed on a large wheel. The other gears are inscribed with eastern Mediterranean pictographs and script. What has me hyperventilating is the wheel etched with the Minoan script known as Linear A. We know of two written scripts—Linear A and Linear B
.”

  “One script was decoded, if I recall,” Hawkins said.

  “Correct. Michael Ventris deciphered Linear B. The other script has defied all efforts at translation. This device may be the key that unlocks the secret to understanding a language that hasn’t been understood for four thousand years.”

  “A mechanical Rosetta Stone, in other words.”

  “An apt comparison. But this is far more important than the stele Napoleon’s soldiers discovered in Egypt. The Rosetta Stone had the same decree written in Greek and Egyptian, which allowed for the translation of hieroglyphics. With this wonderful machine, we may translate Linear A and possibly other lost languages.”

  “Can’t wait to get started,” Hawkins said. “I’ll bring the artifact to the museum as soon as we arrive in Heraklion.”

  “That’s the reason I called. I won’t be in Heraklion,” Vedrakis said. “I’ll be at the archaeological museum in Sitia looking over rubbings of Linear A Minoan tablets from the Robsham collection.”

  “Not familiar with the name,” Hawkins said.

  “The tablets were found in a mountain cave and acquired by an English amateur archeologist named Howard Robsham, back in the 1950s. He died in a car accident on one of our treacherous roads. The tablets were destroyed in the crash, but what’s not generally known is that the museum had made paper copies of some inscriptions shortly after he acquired them.”

  Sitia was around two hours from Heraklion. Vedrakis proposed that they meet halfway at the ruins of Gournia, an ancient Minoan settlement being excavated by the students from the University of Buffalo. As project supervisor, Vedrakis would be checking on the progress of the dig after the students left for the day.

  “I’ll leave the gate open for you,” he said. “The ruins will be a great setting for the opening chapter when we write the book on this discovery.”

  “You’re way ahead of me, but I’ll be sure to sharpen up my quill pen,” Hawkins said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  While Hawkins and Abby were still on the road, a black Suzuki Sidekick sports SUV turned off the E75 at a sign marking the Gournia ruins. The vehicle followed a dirt and gravel service road that lay between an olive grove and the ancient settlement. The Suzuki pulled up behind a vintage Land Rover parked near the entrance. A tall man got out of the SUV and walked to the gate.

  The man was dressed in baggy shorts, a brightly-colored Hawaiian shirt with a hibiscus motif, and leather hiking sandals. Unruly hair the color of hay stuck out from under the brim of a wide-brimmed tan Tilley hat. The ruddy features visible below the mirrored sunglasses were on the fleshy side. A black leather camera case hung from his shoulder. He could have been a British tourist on holiday, which was exactly the look Leonidas was trying for when he’d assembled this latest identity.

  He had listened to the recorded conversations between Hawkins and Vedrakis and the discussion of travel plans with Abby. Then he had gone to the lobby and asked the concierge to arrange a flight to Crete for the next day. A last-minute decision, he explained. He and his late wife had traveled to the island years before her death and he wanted to return to some of the spots they had visited.

  The sympathetic concierge worked the computer. An Iberia Air flight was scheduled to leave early the next morning and connect with an Air Berlin flight traveling from Zurich to Heraklion. Leonidas made sure he gave the concierge a big tip.

  The Air Berlin flight landed a couple of hours ahead of the Gulfstream and its two passengers. Leonidas pick up his rental car and headed east. He stopped to enjoy a Greek lunch at a taverna in the resort town of Aghios Nickolaos before continuing on to Gournia.

  A sign on the chain-link fence announced that the site was closed to the public, but the gate was unlocked, allowing Leonidas to enter. He walked for about a hundred feet and studied the narrow, stepped streets and foundations covering the slope. Movement at the top of the hill caught his eye.

  Leonidas took a pair of binoculars from his camera case and focused on the bearded face of the man walking along the ridge. He recognized Vedrakis from photos he had seen while checking the Heraklion museum’s website. The professor walked a short distance before he disappeared on the other side of the hill.

  Leonidas checked his watch. If Hawkins were following the schedule he had discussed with Vedrakis, he would arrive soon. Heading back to the Suzuki, he drove around to the other side of the olive grove where he parked under the cover of trees.

  Leaving the Suzuki, he walked back through the grove to a stone wall located around fifty feet from the service road. He sat on the wall and studied the site. He could see the road and gate from his chosen perch, and would be almost invisible in the shade. Closing his eyes, he inhaled the heady fragrance of rosemary and ripening olives and went into a calming, almost Zen-like state.

  For a few minutes, the only sounds were a chorus of cicadas and the rustle of the wind in the olive leaves. Then his ears picked up the growl of a car engine. His eyelids snapped open like window shades. The sun glinted off the hood of a silver Mercedes moving along the service road. The car slowed to a crawl near the Land Rover, then sped up and kept going. A short distance from the gate, the car pulled into the olive grove where it would be hidden, much the same as Leonidas had done with his ride.

  Highly suspicious behavior. Leonidas swung his legs to the other side of the wall and dropped belly-first to the ground. His hand reached into his camera bag and came out with a Sig Sauer pistol. He checked the load, then peered through a gap in the wall and saw four men dressed in black, moving single file along the road. He did a double-take. Their skulls were shaved and painted blue. They paused at the entrance, pushed the unlocked gate open and entered the site.

  Waiting until they went past the ticket booth, Leonidas then stood and climbed back over the wall. Dangling the pistol at his side, he bent low in a half-crouch, dashed across the road and squatted behind a clump of oleander bushes where he’d have a good view of the slope. The group had broken up. Each figure was climbing a stairway, moving parallel to one another through the ruins. He spotted more movement at the top of the hill. Professor Vedrakis had reappeared and was silhouetted on the ridge.

  He looked at his watch.

  Hawkins could arrive at any time.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Professor Vedrakis was lost in the mists of time. His body existed in the present but his mind had traveled four thousand years into the past, when Gournia was a thriving seaport. He was exercising the most important talent an archaeologist can possess—the ability to see things not as they are, but as they were. In the eye of the virtual time-traveler, a shard of plaster becomes an ancient pot. A piece of rock becomes a tool used for cutting or pounding.

  He stood in the central plaza of the old city. As he swept his eyes over the network of stone foundations spread across the slopes, his imagination reconstructed houses, storage buildings and workshops. People thronged the narrow streets. Potters and bronze smiths pursued their trades.

  The professor brought his gaze back to the low stone platform at the summit of the hill and imagined a multi-story palace, similar except for its smaller size to the edifice at Knossos. The sound he heard in his ears was not the soughing of the wind in the stunted trees but the voices of kilted Minoans. Hundreds were gathered in the plaza before a sacrificial altar surmounted by the stone carved horns of consecration. Dancers gyrated to the piping of flutes.

  The ruins only hinted at the original size of Gournia, which would have spread across what was now the E75 highway and down a valley to the port. Years of painstaking excavation would have to be done before the full extent of the city was known. The college students who sweated under the sun were enthusiastic and energetic, undaunted by the heat, dust and boredom that make up the less glamorous side of archaeology. The students had removed rectangular sections of topsoil marked out with stakes and twine in the central plaza. On most days, teams painstakingly scraped the earth with trowels while others ran shovel
fuls of the loose soil through sieves that rested on four legs. The piles of earth under the sieves were high, which meant that the students had worked hard while he was in Sitia.

  Vedrakis had made copies of a dozen Linear A tablet rubbings at the Sitia museum. He’d stuffed the rubbings into his briefcase along with a volume of commonly used Egyptian hieroglyphics. It was only a short while later that he was driving along the winding highway to Gournia.

  He’d parked at the entrance, left the briefcase in the Land Rover and locked the car. The only thing he carried was a replica of the Phaistos disk he had acquired from the Heraklion museum gift shop. He hiked to the top of the hill. Good, he thought. The mournful wind blowing in from the sea would add drama to the first chapter of the book he had already started writing in his head.

  He had worked out the Prologue on the drive from Sitia.

  Alone amid four-thousand-year-old ruins, my only companions the ghosts haunting the remnants of this once-magnificent city, I anxiously awaited the discovery that would allow me to strip the veil off one of the most mysterious civilizations of all time.

  Hawkins would arrive with the machine that would allow the translation of Linear A. Of course, he would give Hawkins credit for finding the device, but Vedrakis would quickly write him out of the narrative. He imagined himself holding the Phaistos disk high above his head to catch the rays of the setting sun.

  Snap.

  The noise of a breaking twig ended his literary reverie. He lowered his arms and turned around. He was no longer alone. A tall, slender figure dressed in black had emerged from behind an outcropping of rock.

  The sun was setting behind the figure so the face was in shadow, but the professor could see that the man had a narrow waist and barrel chest.

  “Hawkins?” Vedrakis asked.