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

by Paul Kemprecos

  Her camera had captured images of dusky fly-catchers, yellow-rumped warblers and a Golden eagle to add to her photo files. She had taken pictures of these birds on previous field trips, but like any photographer, she was always looking for the photograph. The click of the shutter when action, light and color conditions were perfect.

  Time to wrap things up. Her knees creaked from sitting and she was getting hungry. In line with her vow to keep to a healthy diet, Molly had dined on oatmeal and fresh blueberries before she’d left the house, and ate a protein bar out in the field. Packing up her camera and stool in a carry-all bag, she slung the tripod over her shoulder and hiked back to the dirt road where she had parked her motorcycle.

  After returning to her house, she went out to the shed to see how the eagle was doing. He seemed content, but that didn’t lessen her guilt. She would set him free tomorrow. Having made her decision, she headed for the kitchen. She made herself a toasted ham and Havarti sandwich on multi-grain bread, opened a bag of sweet potato chips and popped a can of Diet Coke. Carrying her lunch to her office, she clicked on the computer. The message from Hawkins popped up on the screen.

  Hi, Molly. Hope you’re well. Need you to dig into Auroch Industries and CEO Viktor Salazar. Thanks. MH.

  The email was around two hours old. She munched on her sandwich as she reread the request. Molly was glad to help. So far, it was easy stuff, like tracking down the arms dealer in The Netherlands, but she didn’t want Matt or anyone else to take her for granted.

  Relax girl, you can’t spend the rest of your life talking only to birds.

  She finished her Coke, thought about heading back into the kitchen for dessert, but pushed the temptation aside.

  Eventually, she’d weaken, but Molly was energized by her temporary resolve. Auroch Industries. Funny name, she thought to herself.

  Looking up Auroch on the internet, images of a weird-looking cow popped up on the screen. She’d come from a farming community, but had never seen anything closely resembling this animal. Probably because the Auroch was an extinct species of cattle. The last one died in 17th century Poland. The breed had a pretty good run until then, and was probably domesticated in Neolithic times.

  Dang thing was big. Stood six feet high at the shoulders and could weigh more than a ton. The critter had crazy-looking horns that went up, forward, then turned in. Its body shape looked like pictures she’d seen of Spanish fighting bulls. Like those animals, it could move fast and was sometimes aggressive toward humans. Nothing like the friendly dairy cows that grazed the scraggly fields behind her family’s shack in West Virginia. She wondered why anyone would name a corporation after a big cow.

  The company name was familiar…as well as odd.

  She Googled Auroch Industries and pulled up a pile of news articles. Molly may be reclusive, but she was not uninformed. She read a number of on-line publications, which is how she had first come across the article on sexual abuse in the military. One of the stories was a report in the New York Times that she had read a few months ago. The headline caught her eye because it had to do with the latest in a series of mining accidents occurring at or near Auroch sites. Auroch was the target of some environmental groups. Good luck pitching a hissie fit, she remembered thinking. West Virginia mining companies got away with murder.

  She proceeded to the company’s website.

  The logo was a stylized bull’s horns like those on the flesh and blood animal. Auroch was one of the worlds’ ten largest mining, metals and petroleum companies with headquarters in Cadiz, Spain. The corporate history said that Auroch was an old company, its origins stretching back to the 17th century. It came into existence with the consolidation of a number of mining companies in Spain and had expanded into more than thirty countries around the globe.

  Flowing from that wellspring was a river of iron ore, coal, diamonds, manganese, gold, petroleum, aluminum, copper, natural gas, nickel, uranium and silver. The statistics were stunning. Auroch earned more than fifty billion dollars a year and had more than forty-thousand people working for the mining operation and a dozen subsidiaries. It owned smelters and refining companies and was a major producer of fossil fuels.

  Molly puffed out her cheeks. This was no fly-by-night operation Hawkins was asking her to stick her nose into. Its security wall would be tough to breach. A company as big as Auroch could hardly be invisible. She would comb the information available on unsecured sources first. She clicked off the website and skimmed the dozens of files.

  After twenty minutes or so, she had built a mental image of the company in her mind. They stayed under the radar for the first few hundred years. Then Auroch got into steel manufacturing in 1915, on the eve of World War I, putting it in a position to profit from massive arms production.

  She started digging into the company’s more recent history. Auroch was one of the world’s major polluters, joining a group of ninety responsible for two-thirds of the globe’s greenhouse gas emissions. Auroch operations had been responsible for hundreds of deaths, from landslides, explosions, poisonous emissions—even an earthquake triggered by its fracking techniques. All lethal. All summed up as ‘accidents.’

  A news clip caught her attention. It was an account of a mine accident in Africa that killed more than a hundred miners. An explosion had occurred in a poorly ventilated gold mine. Auroch claimed that the mine was owned by the subsidiary of a subsidiary, thus it bore no responsibility. The corrupt government investigators agreed.

  Molly got a lump in her throat. A similar mine explosion had killed her favorite uncle back in West Virginia. Uncle Gowdy had left a wife and six kids behind. His mine was cited with hundreds of safety violations but the owners pulled strings and spread bribes. Like the case in Africa, no one was called into account. Her family tried to help her aunt and cousins. They would bake fried chicken, make cold potato salad and toss a few coins their way when they had any, but they couldn’t erase the grief and misery.

  Her curiosity now stirred, she looked up the company her uncle had worked for at the time of his death. It had gone out of business decades ago, its assets acquired by other companies which in turn went bankrupt or sold out. There was still coal in the ground, attracting the attention of a large corporation that started huge strip copper mining operations, devastating the once-beautiful countryside and polluting the air and water. The mines no longer worked, but the scars they inflicted remained.

  Molly was on a roll. Her fingers flew over the keyboard. Images flashed onto the screen. Government records. Company reports. News clips. Legal filings. She hacked into data banks when necessary, her photographic memory categorizing the details. She had a funny habit of blinking when she sunk her teeth into something that excited her. By the time she reached the end of her search, her eyes were fluttering so hard behind the circular eyeglass frames that she could hardly see. What made her stop was a footnote in a government investigation of Uncle Gowdy’s accident.

  The real owners of the mine had been hidden under layers of corporate insulation. But in the small print of the national mine safety board she found what she was looking for. The corporate owner of the mine was Auroch Industries. She set her jaw. This had just become personal.

  She went back to the Auroch website and looked up the company officers. The corporation was privately held. The CEO and President was Viktor Salazar, the man Hawkins had asked her to investigate. She gazed at the photograph of the olive-skinned man with the bullet head and beetling brow. She’d been asked to dig up dirt on Salazar, but she wasn’t going to stop there. She was going to wipe the phony smile off his ugly face.

  Molly kept digging. Minutes after she began, she read a news story out of Cadiz, saying that Auroch Industries had donated money toward the establishment of a foundation to explore alternatives to fossil fuel. The news seemed at odds with what she had learned about the company and its leader. She read more and discovered she wasn’t the only one who had expressed disbelief. Several environmentalists were quoted, includ
ing one who referred to Auroch as a ‘wolf in sheep’s clothing.’ She looked up the name of the environmental organization and discovered their headquarters was in Portland, Oregon. She called the telephone number listed. The recorded message said that the phone was no longer in use and forwarded her to the number for a law firm. Molly always had a direct manner, so when the phone was answered, she told the receptionist that she wanted to talk to the environmentalist about Viktor Salazar.

  A woman came on the phone, said the organization was defunct, and asked why she had called.

  “I’m from West Virginia,” she said. “My name is Molly Sutherland. My favorite uncle was killed in a mine accident that shouldn’t have happened. Auroch Industries was the owner of the mine. I want to get to Viktor Salazar.”

  “Do you want to sue him?”

  “No,” Molly said. She had darker reasons in mind. “I just want to find out more about him. I saw that the organization is in Portland. I live in Bend.”

  “Hold on, Ms. Sutherland. I’ll see what I can do.”

  A few minutes later the lawyer came back on the phone.

  “I can set up a meeting with someone who is knowledgeable about Mr. Salazar. Can you come to Portland?”

  Molly had a flashback of her Uncle Gowdy strumming his guitar and singing on the front porch of his house.

  She didn’t hesitate. “How about tomorrow morning?”

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  Salazar didn’t know who had put two Priors out of commission on Crete but he could have jumped for joy when he heard the news. The assassins who did the bidding of the Way would have to be eliminated if he were to carry out his plan, and that could have been a problem. One never knew where they were. They didn’t even have real names, except for the four cardinal directions.

  With only two Priors remaining of the monastic order that had once protected the Maze, Lily found it necessary to call on Salazar to back up their mission to Santorini, where they would retrieve the translating device, kidnap Kalliste and kill Hawkins. He had said he would get right on it, speaking in the same subservient tone that the Salazar family had used with its masters since they had established their unholy alliance centuries before, but he could barely keep himself from gloating.

  Salazar was determined to end that arrangement and, to do so, had secretly been building his power base. He had to be extremely careful, especially around Lily who had the ear of the High Priestess. Any hint that he was forming a private army to counter the Priors and the mercenaries who protected the priestess would have brought quick retribution from the Maze. He’d characterized the group of bodyguards he’d gathered around him as his personal security staff, the type needed to protect the CEO of a major corporation.

  Lily reluctantly allowed Salazar to bring his men into the plan after he pointed out that a kidnapping in a crowded neighborhood would be tricky. Hawkins was a former Navy SEAL and had already eluded two attempts to kill him. Just using the Priors would put them at risk. Sunglasses covered their strange eyes, and the Greek fishermen’s caps hid their brightly-colored scalps, but not their wolfish features. The collarless Greek shirts they had bought in Thera added color to their otherwise funereal outfits. The result was slightly grotesque, and there was still something repellant and menacing about their appearance that would be imprinted in the memory of anyone who encountered them.

  Salazar’s team had arrived separately. Some sharp-eyed taverna waiter or shop owner would remember the hard-faced men, with physiques like gorillas, wandering suspiciously around the narrow streets and alleys. Their polo shirts and shorts only emphasized their muscular arms and legs. But he had recruited the most elite of his mercenaries for this mission. They would be in and out before anyone put things together.

  As he walked along under the hot Greek sun he reveled at the opportunity to unleash his more violent instincts. His career had come full circle. Here he was again managing a team of killers. Salazar had worked his way up the family criminal organization ladder as an enforcer and enjoyed the killing and maiming that went with the job.

  He had ordered his men to spread out around the village until he located the house. Even with the address, Kalliste’s place was hard to find. He walked along a walled path above the jumble of houses that sprawled along the terraces of the caldera until he came to a small square with a fountain in the center. An elderly woman in a black dress was crossing the square. He asked where he could find the address.

  She gave him a 14-karat smile and pointed to stairs that led down off the square. He thanked her and descended a stone-paved stairway to a house built into the cliff. He raised his camera and took pictures of the cliffs, but his mind was busy planning the assault.

  Salazar approached the kidnapping of the Greek woman as he would a mining operation. Locate. Extract. Transport. Process. His men would knock on the door, burst in like a SWAT team, kill Hawkins and the Greek woman and procure the device. He had asked the Priors to cover the square to intercept anyone who escaped the assault.

  He would summon the Priors down to take charge of Kalliste. His men would kill them and set fire to the house. Lily would be told that the device was destroyed in the fire. With no Priors to intimidate them, the Auroch corporate officers he’d been cultivating would come over to his side. He’d persuade them that Auroch no longer needed the Minoans and their mumbo-jumbo. With the High Priestess on her death bed, the time was ripe for a coup.

  He was under no illusions. His ambitious plan was like an inverted pyramid. Success or failure depended on what happened in the next few hours.

  Leonidas was having a hard time finding a coil of rope. Oia had no shortage of tavernas, jewelry and souvenir shops that sold refrigerator magnets of the Parthenon. But he was unable to find a good, old-fashioned hardware store. He would have given his right arm for a Home Depot. Coming to the mule path at the edge of the town, he looked out at the fishing boats tied up at the quay.

  Suddenly inspired, he made his way down the switchbacks and headed to the nearest boat. The captain was too polite to ask why this crazy tourist wanted rope, and he dug out a fifty-foot coil of manila rope encrusted with dry seaweed, handed it over and gladly accepted the wad of bills. Leonidas asked if he had more. The fisherman dug out another coil. Leonidas hung the coils over his shoulder and caught a mule ride to the top of the path.

  Back in his apartment, he attached one line to the balcony railing. It was about a thirty-foot drop to the cliff below. He tied knots in the rope at intervals. Not exactly a department store escalator, but it would have to do. Next he needed an escape route. Taking the second coil of rope with him, he left the apartment and followed a path along the rim of the caldera. The sun was setting, transforming the violet waters into a shimmering lake of silver, when he found what he was looking for.

  Half an hour later he was back on the roof of his apartment. He stoked up the doobie he had scored from the German kids on the old kastro. After a few tokes of the high-powered cannabis a foolish grin came to his face. He took another drag, snuffed the joint and went back into the house. He pulled a chair up to a mirror and dug into his disguise kit.

  As he peeled the tourist face off and begin to apply his new features over the scarred flesh, he was already praising himself that this would be one of the best make-up jobs he’d ever done.

  Hell, maybe it would even earn him an Oscar.

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  Kalliste peered through a magnifying glass at the inked symbols on the vellum. To the left of the scroll was a thick lexicon of archaic Greek. On the other side was a yellow, legal-sized notepad filled with symbols and pictograms. Calvin sat patiently at the table waiting to give the handle another crank.

  When she finally raised her head from her work, Kalliste had a weary, but triumphant smile on her face.

  “Eureka,” she said. Her voice came out as a croak. “I’ve got it. Correction. I’ve got part of it, but I don’t know what I’ve got.”

  She turned the pad around so C
alvin could see what she had written below the word Minotaur. The first sentence of the scroll read:

  “O my King as thou hast (commanded) thy humble protector of thy treasure(s) has (written) the story of thy greatness and wisdom.”

  Calvin had listened to Kalliste’s sighs of frustration for the last hour. He tapped the notebook with his fingertip. “Looks like you’re getting somewhere.”

  “After the first flush of victory with the Minotaur I thought I would quickly make progress, but this is the best I can do after hours of painstaking work. It reinforces my decision to seek outside money from the Hidden History channel for linguistics expertise. Maybe I should put this off until I know if that’s a possibility.”

  Calvin tried to back her up. “That might not be a bad idea,” he said. “Why don’t we decide what we want to do after we go over the latest stuff?”

  “A good idea. My brain is frazzled. Tell me what you think this means. The words in parenthesis are educated guesses.”

  He read the sentence again. “Easy call. Our pal Minotaur worked for the king who ordered him to write his boss’s biography. Like anyone in that position, he’s gonna butter up the guy who signs his paycheck.”

  “Very good, Calvin. As to the author?”

  “He’s been given an important and sensitive job. That means he’s pretty close to the king. Maybe even a confidant.” He paused. “He describes himself as a protector, which may mean he’s military.” Calvin read the notebook again. “You’ve got treasures, plural. Is that a mistake?”

  “It could be, but I’m pretty sure I got it right. There was more than one treasure. Based on the link to the Minotaur, I’m assuming this was the treasure of King Minos. He was one of the richest rulers in the world.”