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

by Paul Kemprecos

  Calvin read the list. “Looks okay. Got all the main stuff and the special order.”

  Higgins got up from his chair, and with Calvin following, went out onto the warehouse floor and walked to a stack of corner shelves that was almost lost in the cavernous space. He explained that goods were stored in a central distribution center, and orders were shipped to the warehouse as needed. The warehouse was like a post office and he was Postmaster.

  Higgins asked Calvin to help pull three wooden boxes off the shelf and set them on the floor. He pried the tops off so Calvin could check the contents against the order.

  The first box contained two lines of SEAL underwater gear and paraphernalia. A second carton had the weaponry he had ordered. Calvin lifted a Spike missile out of the third box and hefted it in his hands.

  “Cute,” he said.

  “Potent, too,” Higgins said. “We pride ourselves on the latest technology. Launcher is under the other stuff.”

  He replaced the cover, then he and Calvin loaded the boxes onto a dolly which they pushed to an overhanging door. Higgins opened the door and told Calvin to drive around back to the loading platform for a pick-up. They loaded the boxes in the trunk.

  Higgins said the order would be billed to the numbered Swiss bank account Calvin had set up. All products had a thirty-day guarantee. The surveillance system would watch him leave and if anyone tailed him, personnel would take care of it. Once out of the three-kilometer safety zone he’d be on his own. Calvin didn’t know why he had ordered the Spike missile kit. He didn’t see any use for the weapon in the operation he and Hawkins contemplated, but he’d learned to expect the unexpected.

  Heck, maybe he simply liked to make things go ‘boom.’

  CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE

  Lily had been waiting for Hawkins at a sidewalk cafe near the Central Market. She saw him dodging the traffic as he crossed the street, popped up from her chair and waved her arms like a semaphore signalman. She was wearing a short purple leather skirt and matching jacket. When he walked over to her table, she wrapped her arms around him in a desperate hug.

  “Thank you so much for coming,” she said. “I don’t know what I would have done if I hadn’t reached you. I’m practically falling apart with worry.”

  Hawkins disentangled himself from her embrace and sat down. He put his cell phone on the table.

  “Before you fall apart, can you tell me where you got this photo of Kalliste?”

  Lily was taken aback by his abrupt tone and relentless gaze. Her face crumpled. She started to blather in an unbroken stream of words. Hawkins reached across the table and gave her hand a gentle squeeze.

  Speaking in a soft tone, and with more deliberation, he said, “Sorry for snarling at you, Lily. Please tell me the whole story from the beginning. Take your time. Try to remember every detail.”

  Lily smiled through her tears. “My specialty is fake television, Matt. I don’t do well with reality.”

  The creatures menacing Kalliste were unlike any reality Hawkins could recall, but he kept his thoughts to himself. He signaled the waiter and ordered two coffees. Lily took a sip from her cup. Her eyes still brimmed with tears, but she had regained her composure.

  “Kalliste called me from Santorini,” she said. “She was trying to translate an ancient scroll, using the device you brought up from the Minoan ship. She was very frustrated. The work was going slowly and she needed help.”

  “Why call you rather than an expert in her field of study?” Hawkins said.

  “I asked her the same question. Kalliste said the translation work was labor intensive. She could hurry things along if she had access to computer technology and wondered if Hidden History would foot the bill for technical services. I told her I’d ask my boss. He said no, because the project was too speculative.”

  “More speculative than werewolves in Paris?”

  “Paris was a proven formula. Dig out an old legend, throw in some movie clips, make it relevant with a hook that pulls the story into the present, and trot out pseudo-experts who drag up obscure historical tidbits to make the case. Paris had a series of unsolved mutilation murders. Probably the work of a sicko, but it fit the formula. Voila. The murders were the work of werewolves stalking the Left Bank.”

  “Interesting,” Hawkins said. “But what does it have to do with Kalliste’s disappearance?”

  Heaving a sigh, Lily said, “It goes back to research my team was doing on modern-day Druids.”

  “The nuts who dress up in robes and prance around Stonehenge on the solstice?”

  She nodded. “My researchers talked to an Oxford professor who had written books about secret societies. During the interview, he mentioned hearing about a cult much older than the Druids that went back to ancient Sumer. The cultists migrated to Crete and built the Minoan palace at Knossos.” She leaned forward on her elbows and lowered her voice. “Here’s what caught our attention, Matt. These folks are still around.”

  “Around? As in, still alive and kicking?”

  “Very much so.”

  “How did the professor know about this society if it’s so secret?”

  “The Oxford guy knew about it from a colleague in the anthropology department at the University of Cadiz. When I heard about the Minoan connection I thought about the shipwreck off the coast of Spain.” With excitement growing in her voice, she said, “If I could put this bunch of crazies together with Kalliste’s project, my tightwad boss would leap at the chance for an exclusive.”

  “Is that what happened?”

  “He was practically drooling when I gave him the pitch. I sent my team to see the professor in Cadiz. Big disappointment. He said the society was a harmless bunch of back-to-nature types. They got dressed up in funny costumes, made offerings to the earth goddess and had a big feast. My researchers were packing it up when the professor mentioned yet another group that made animal sacrifices to the earth goddess. And maybe more.”

  “What did he mean by more?”

  “He clammed up, even when we waved money under his nose. Said he had talked too much already. I wasn’t about to let the story go, so after Kalliste called from Santorini I went back to the professor and told him about her Linear A scroll and the translating device. I said I would give him exclusive access to the story. He’d be a star.”

  “That’s a tempting offer to an academic.”

  “He couldn’t resist it. He said he’d gone to witness a ceremony of the harmless nature lovers. A woman he met there got into the sacrificial wine and let loose about a friend, even told him her name, who’d joined the animal sacrifice cult but pulled out after going to a ceremony. Too bloody, she said. When the woman sobered up, she told the professor she had made it up. The shadow society didn’t exist.”

  “Did the professor believe her?”

  “No. He even tried to track down the former member, but she had died in a car accident.”

  Hawkins pondered the reply. Yet another accident. “What else did the professor’s source tell him?”

  “She said the cult went back thousands of years; said they believed in continuous sacrifices to ensure good fortune. Anything less would anger the earth goddess. She was constantly thirsty for human blood, apparently.”

  “Which this gang provided.”

  “That’s what we were told.”

  “Did this cult have a name?”

  “It was called the Way of the Axe. They’re spread around the world. All the pieces were starting to fit. A Minoan cult. A Minoan ship. Human sacrifice. I saw stars, especially after I heard about Kalliste’s scroll in a lost language and the translation device you salvaged from the ship. I envisioned a mini-series that would give Hidden History the kind of respectability it never had.”

  “People who practice human sacrifice would do everything they could to stop that from happening.”

  Lily bit her lower lip. “I know that now. I got worried and called Kalliste to let her know what was going on. She didn’t answer her phone. Today
I got the photo of her with those two…things. What in God’s name are they?”

  “Nothing I want breathing down Kalliste’s neck.”

  “I know it sounds crazy. That’s why I called you instead of the police. Was that the right decision?”

  “The Spanish cops still don’t believe someone blew our dive boat out of the water.” He stared off into space, working his jaw muscles, then said, “Let’s assume your theory has legs. The kidnappers could have killed Kalliste at any time, but they sent the photo instead. My guess is that they want the scroll and translation device.”

  “That seems like a reasonable assumption, but where does it leave us?”

  “With leverage. We’ll say that we’ll give them what they want in exchange for Kalliste.”

  “You have the scroll and the translator?”

  “I can put my hands on them. Setting up a deal will keep Kalliste alive and give us time to figure things out.”

  “She could already be dead. They could have killed her after they took that picture.”

  “I’m aware of that possibility. I’d like you type out the following message:

  Miss you too. Let’s get together. Stay well. Matt.”

  She finished typing and hit Reply. “Now what?”

  “We wait. And we try to learn whatever we can about the Way of the Axe.”

  “Maybe we should talk to the professor again.”

  “Good suggestion. Maybe we can pry something out of him that will give us an edge.”

  “I’ll try to arrange a meeting.”

  She said she would call Hawkins as soon as she heard from the professor. She gave him another hug and waved down a cab to take her back to the hotel. She sat back in her seat with a smile of satisfaction on her lips. The eyes that had been moist with tears were desert dry. The quivering lips were compressed into a tight smile. There was not a shred of resemblance to the helpless female who’d fallen on Hawkins’ broad shoulders.

  Hawkins had made her work even easier. He was a modern-day swashbuckler, a man of immense courage and resources. The same qualities that could make him a formidable foe would be his downfall. His friend was in trouble and he would do anything he could to rescue her. His fierce determination would blind him to the real dangers that threatened.

  She had lured him in with the mix of fact and fiction. The Way of the Axe was real. The Oxford professor was fiction. The University of Cadiz scholar was real but she had never talked to him.

  After she got back to her hotel room, she would call the Maze and instruct the priestesses to prepare Kalliste for her meeting with the Mother Goddess. Then she would contact Hawkins, and say the professor wanted to meet him. Before the night was over, she would have the scroll and translator in her hands, Hawkins would be dead, and Kalliste offered up to the Mother Goddess.

  She stared out the taxi window at the busy Cadiz street scene, but her mind’s eye saw the sanctuary of the Snake Goddess. As she pictured herself walking toward the altar and the Horns of Consecration, her long slender fingers closed around the jeweled hilt of an invisible bronze dagger.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO

  Molly stood in the yard behind her house, eyes fixed on the cloudless blue sky. Her ears were cocked for the plaintive whistle of a Golden eagle, but the only sound she heard was the breeze soughing in the aspen trees.

  On the ride back from Portland she had passed the accident site. A wrecker had towed the car away. She examined the raw scars on the tree and wondered what the medical examiner would make of the claw marks on the stranger’s head, but decided she didn’t really care.

  When she got home, she garaged the motorcycle and went around behind the house to stand near the shed. Maybe Wheeling would drop by for a snack, but probably not. After its traumatic escape, the bird was probably so danged scared it would never come back.

  Molly lowered her chin and rubbed the back of her neck. She took a final glance at the empty sky and headed into the house, stopping in the kitchen to rummage through the cupboards. She filled a bowl with tortilla chips and opened a jar of cheese dip. To take the edge off her guilt she liberated a can of diet soda from the refrigerator and carried her snack into her office.

  She sat down in front of her computer, munched some chips and stared vacantly at the screen. Her mind methodically checked off a mental checklist. She ran a test of her computer. The firewalls and protections were in place. Some hackers throw every possible password at a wall to see what sticks. The technique was known as brute force. Amateur move. Time-consuming. Unlikely to reach higher levels of authentication. Guaranteed to alert the target.

  Molly decided against a direct approach, such as running a scan to see how high the Auroch protective walls were. This was her first foray into Auroch. Poking around the edges of a target as big as Salazar’s company would likely trigger alarms and a counter attack.

  Molly finished her chips and salsa. Then she flexed her fingers like a piano virtuoso preparing to dig into a Chopin etude, tapped the keyboard and called up the Auroch company logo with its stylized bull’s horns. She glanced with contempt at the photo of Salazar, thinking that he looked like a big old smiling lizard. Then she dissected the website.

  She zeroed in on the Auroch subsidiaries. There were dozens, nearly all in the fossil fuel industry, mining or related businesses, such as, equipment manufacture or transport. With the patience of a Swiss watchmaker, she studied each company one-by-one, but made no attempt to get into their files.

  After finishing the first pass, she gazed at the monitor, imagining herself on the other side of the screen. She put herself in the place of the computer experts who would have built defensive walls around Auroch. In their position, she would have made a few entry points accessible. Nothing too easy, just enough to pose a reasonable challenge to a competent hacker. She’d use sloppy programming, as if by mistake. The hacker who went down that pathway would eventually encounter a no-nonsense barrier. But by then the trap would have been sprung. The hacker would have no idea he’d been traced until he heard someone pounding on his door.

  After a few minutes of contemplation, Molly came to a reluctant conclusion. There was no safe way she could get directly into Auroch or its subsidiaries. The barriers were too formidable. But every wall has a finite height and width. The Chinese had learned that with the Great Wall. So had the builders of the Maginot Line. If she couldn’t go through the cyber wall she could go over or around it.

  The lavender eyes blinking behind the round lenses were the only outward sign of her inner excitement. She scrolled down the website. Her cursor came to rest on the section entitled ‘Corporate Responsibility.’ She reread the puff piece that had caught her eye on the first pass. Probably written by a committee of company public relations hacks, it was a surprising candid admission that Auroch could have been less than a good corporate citizen.

  Without going into detail the piece described the damage some Auroch operations had caused. To demonstrate that the company had changed its ways, the article contained a list of two dozen environmental and green energy organizations that Auroch now sponsored. The benevolent attitude was at odds with the company’s history. The same corporation that destroyed the Oregon environmental non-profit in a few days’ time, was like a born-again sinner preaching Salvation.

  She followed the links and read everything available about each non-profit. It was grinding, time-consuming work. She had to replenish her snacks a couple of times. Her computer-like memory stored every pertinent fact about each organization. One name blazed in her mind like a neon sign. She went back to the link for Fusion Technologies Research. FUTR for short.

  Molly had noticed on the first run-through that FUTR had its headquarters at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She was about to pop a tortilla chip into her mouth but she stopped short. MIT was in Cambridge. The dude who’d attacked her and scared off Wheeling had been in Cambridge only a week before. Funny coincidence.

  She dug into the FUTR website. The grou
p had been created by some of the world’s leading scientists in the field of fusion power, in which atoms are joined together to produce heat that drives a turbine to produce energy. FUTR’s goal was to lay the groundwork for a clean energy source that would be cheap and plentiful. The organization coordinated a number of research labs experimenting with ways to harness the atomic reaction that powers the sun and the stars.

  An MIT plasma physicist named Dr. Moncrieff Gardner was the chairman of FUTR. The photo of Dr. Gardner showed a middle-aged man with short pepper-and-salt hair, a friendly smile and intense blue eyes that looked as if they could see through solid objects. Molly got dizzy from reading his scientific accomplishments.

  Under the photo was a message from Dr. Gardner reminding readers of FUTR’s annual conference at MIT. The conference was in a few days. The entire FUTR scientific board would attend. An announcement of global importance would be made at the conference, whose subject was: The FUTR of Energy. Dr. Gardner referred back to his first column, made at FUTR’s founding two years ago.

  Molly clicked on the Archives. Summaries appeared of all Gardner’s past messages. His first outlined the non-profit’s goals, and said there hadn’t been such a concentration of intellectual power since the Manhattan Project scientific team developed the atomic bomb in a mere twenty-seven months. Gardner hoped this group accomplished its far more peaceful goal in twenty-four months.

  She went back to a recent column under the title:

  Auroch CEO: An Inspiration

  Her frown deepened as she read the message that described in glowing terms how Viktor Salazar was sponsoring FUTR even though fossil fuel alternatives would damage his company. Gardner had enclosed the copy of a ‘thank you’ letter he wrote after a telephone conversation with Salazar. The letter said in part that, “the selfless example of Auroch would encourage other companies to come forward for the good of mankind.”

  Molly looked up Gardner’s email and phone number on the website. With that information, it was a simple matter for her to hack into Gardner’s business and personal files and follow them to Salazar. The cyber watchdogs who defended Auroch would not expect an indirect assault. Just in case, she built a firewall to prevent her probe from being traced back to her.