Greek Key

by Spangler, K. B.

  Second, it’s best to deal with Speedy as quickly as possible. If you don’t, Bad Things Happen.

  The clerk peered down at us from behind his desk, and started out with the usual question: “Is this a joke?”

  “Yes,” Speedy replied.

  I’m really lucky Speedy loves to show off. All he has to do to totally screw me with airport security is play dumb.

  The clerk dropped everything to fawn over him, which gave me time to wander over to Mike’s line and let him know we had arrived. He was walking the clerk through Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, and they were knee-deep in the definitions of virtue and happiness.

  “Don’t,” I whispered.

  Mike’s fuzzy red eyebrows moved up a couple of inches. The man pretended pure innocence. “Don’t what?”

  “Don’t talk him into quitting.”

  The clerk glared at Mike.

  “He does this all the time,” I said to the clerk.

  “She’s kidding,” Mike assured him. “Once, our waitress walked out in the middle of our lunch. Just once! But I’ll never hear the end of it.”

  “Has he asked you if you’ve assessed the ultimate value of your life in relation to your personal and societal obligations yet?”

  The clerk blinked at me a few times. “Hey!” he said, as his brain put the details together. “You’re—”

  “Hi,” I said, giving him a little wave. “Hope Blackwell, yeah. And my husband isn’t with us.” Honestly, I don’t even need to participate in conversations any more. The same questions just come and come and come.

  The clerk didn’t believe me, but as he looked around to see if he could catch a glimpse of Sparky, he noticed Speedy sitting a few counters away. “Oh, it’s Speedy!”

  Yes, folks, I wasn’t kidding—the koala is famous, too. Try being me and taking your not-so-nuclear family out for pizza. Just try it, I dare you. Clear your schedule first.

  It took us another hour to get through checkout and security. Speedy and I signed a bunch of autographs. Someone got in my face and started screaming that I had just caused the last good politician to resign from office: when she realized I wasn’t going to respond, she spat on me. Mike spent the entire time laughing. All in all, a typical day.

  Once upon a time, before I married a cyborg, I would have hauled Miss Spitter around the airport by her tongue. These days, I carry moist towelettes and make sure I dab off the spittle before it crusts over. Somewhere between the spitting and the dabbing, I use those magic words: “Yes, I will press charges, thank you.” I’ve learned the hard way that if a dude breaks into my house and I kick his ass, I am much less likely to get slapped with a countersuit than if a random stranger spits on me and I, quote, overreact, unquote.

  If I dab it off with a wistful smile on my face, I end up looking the hero on the evening news.

  People are weird.

  The flight went fine. Speedy took it as an opportunity to catch up on his sleep, which left me and Mike to hash out the details of the trip. And eat. Mike and I never turn down a meal, and while airline food has earned its reputation, the business-class dinners were still edible.

  Mike had insisted on bringing a paper map. This, he had spread over my seat, our empty dinner plates, and most of a snoring koala. He was making careful marks with a blue pencil, sketching out the roads between villages.

  “Was Ambassador Goodwin able to arrange the meeting with the…um…” Mike didn’t know what to call our contact in Athens. Neither of us knew the shorthand for a professional tomb robber.

  “Archaeologist,” I said. It seemed as safe a job description as any. “And yes, he asked one of the museums to contact a freelancer they know, a guy named Atlas Petrakis. Goodwin thinks we’re operating on OACET’s behalf to track down other pieces of the Antikythera Mechanism.”

  Speedy and I had come up with this story before we had even considered leaving Washington. It was a better reason for us to move around a strange country than sightseeing. I was on good speaking terms with Jack Goodwin, the American ambassador to Greece, so I had emailed him and gushed in giant wordy paragraphs about how finding the first fragment of the Mechanism had won OACET a ton of positive press, and how I wanted to come to Greece to see if I could locate any others that had gone missing.

  Oh, and I’d be bringing some friends. Greece is so lovely at this time of year…

  It was the kind of bullshit excuse you’d get from a spoiled rich girl who wanted to rationalize a vacation, but Goodwin was a politician. He had sent a polite reply saying that it was a fabulous idea, and promised to do what he could to help. A few email exchanges later, and he claimed to have found me the male version of Lara Croft.

  I wasn’t too happy about working with a stranger, but whatever. As much as I would have loved to touch down in Athens and merrily wander about a strange country, several facts needed to be taken into consideration.

  Fact: I’m famous. Like, ridiculously famous. Not to mention how I’m usually running around with this talking koala. The only one of us who could pass for an average tourist on this trip was Mike. Traveling incognito was out.

  Fact: During the ten-day period when Mike and I were preparing to travel to Greece, Rachel had solved her murder mystery. The story had blown up in the media, and had resulted in the resignation of a prominent politician from office (see: Miss Spitter). The whole world was now obsessed with the Antikythera Mechanism, so we couldn’t ask questions about it without getting inspected and dissected.

  Fact: Senator Richard Hanlon—sorry, former Senator Richard Hanlon—had wanted the fragment of the Antikythera Mechanism. He had wanted it so badly that he had hired a thief to break into the White House to steal it.

  Fact: If Hanlon was involved, shit had gotten real. Mike and I weren’t just dealing with a millennia-old mystery: we were dealing with crazy-making evil geniuses and their schemes…

  Without looking up from his map, Mike reached over and took the plastic knife out of my mouth.

  I tasted blood, and my tongue found where I had accidentally cut my lip on the edge of the knife. “Thanks,” I said, as I pried a piece of plastic from between my teeth.

  He nodded, and passed me a napkin.

  (Business class had linen napkins and plastic silverware? What a strange world this is.)

  “What’s on your mind?” he asked. His big fingers trailed across the map, charting a path from Athens to where the Mechanism had been found.

  “Hanlon.”

  “Ah.”

  “I’m thinking that we might want to check and see if Hanlon’s been to Greece lately.”

  “Mmm,” Mike said. He made a tick mark on the map. “Your husband knows every move Hanlon’s made over the past ten years. He would have mentioned.”

  “Maybe Hanlon sent a proxy,” I said. “Or maybe he’s already got connections in Greece. Seems like breaking into the White House is a last resort. If I were Hanlon, I would have checked to see if I could find any fragments of the Mechanism in Greece before I went that far.”

  Mike nodded. “True.”

  “Is this a trap? This doesn’t feel like a trap.”

  “I don’t think so,” Mike said, and then grinned at me. “But wouldn’t it be fun if it were?”

  I cackled so loudly that the other passengers poked their heads up to see what had happened. I waved them off, then said to Mike: “You are a shit pacifist.”

  “I practice nonviolence,” he corrected me. “Not pacifism.”

  “Shouldn’t you stop hanging out with me, then?” I asked, half-seriously. We’d had this discussion before, but I was always worried that one day Mike would finally stop rationalizing his way through our friendship. “Seems like when you associate with someone who puts you in a position where you have to commit violence on a regular basis…”

  “How can one be sure of their beliefs unless they’re tested?” he replied.

  I chuckled, much more softly this time. “You just enjoy beating people up.”

&nb
sp; “I enjoy practicing the evolving applications of an art I’ve dedicated my life to learning,” he said.

  I rolled my eyes at him, and Mike patted my knee. “It’s okay,” he assured me. “It’d be one thing if you went looking for conflict, but you don’t—it happens naturally.”

  “And now we’re back to the issue of whether or not we’re walking into a trap,” I said.

  “I vote no,” Mike said. “Even if Hanlon knew we were going to Greece, there’s no reason for him to come after us.”

  “Hanlon knows every move Sparky makes, too,” I said. “They hate each other. That’s reason enough for Hanlon to try and bag me, especially if he’s in a whole other country and can claim he had nothing to do with my accidental demise.”

  “Hanlon wouldn’t try that,” Mike said. “That’d turn his cold war with OACET into open murder. Your husband would destroy him.”

  I grinned.

  Mike stretched, already tired of being caged in an airbound metal tube. The map across his lap crinkled with the movement. “Do you think we’ll bump into any of the regulars?”

  “Definitely,” I said. “I don’t know what they’ll be like in Greece, though.”

  Wherever I went, I could count on being followed by a bunch of goons who OACET’s various enemies hired to keep tabs on me. Usually they just watched and took pictures, but sometimes they tried to beat me up. Speedy, Mike, and I had tons of fun fucking with them—it was like running our own personal paparazzi obstacle course.

  “We face what comes, when it comes. But I still don’t think this is a trap. I think we’ve got other things to worry about,” Mike said, and fluttered a corner of the map at me.

  “Yup,” I said, and the two of us settled down to plan our route.

  We weren’t starting in Antikythera. The Mechanism had been built elsewhere. We didn’t know where, exactly. Nobody knows where! Sparky had put OACET’s research team on it, and they had come up with a pile of facts tied together by guesswork. It’s about eighty pages long, and so dry that it might as well have laid down to die in the Sahara ten years ago. Mike and I read the entire thing cover to cover, and we kept copies on our phones in case we needed a refresher.

  Speedy had it memorized.

  We were starting in Athens, because when you go to Greece, you start in Athens. From there, Rhodes definitely, and maybe some other spots along the way. There were a couple of names that kept popping up in relation to the Mechanism, and the big ones were Archimedes and Posidonius. These two dudes were phenomenal mathematicians and astronomers, and were separated by about a hundred years, with Posidonius refining much of Archimedes’ earlier work. And they had both built complex mechanical orreries which were centered on the movements of the Sun.

  Now, I’m not suggesting that Posidonius wasn’t a genius in his own right, but when you’re looking for evidence of ghosts, you start by checking into legacies. It’d be so much easier if ghosts just clanked around your attic and went Boo!—but no, they like to hang around and poke at the living. Genius or not, Posidonius was our best lead, and he’d set up shop in Rhodes, so…

  “There’s a problem,” Mike said, poking the map with his pencil. It left a little blue pucker on Rhodes, which fluttered up and down as Speedy snored. “Posidonius spent years living in Roman territory. It’s likely he made it all the way to northern Africa.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “It’s a lot of ground to cover.” I didn’t see it as a problem, but I love to travel. Speedy, on the other hand, is a territorial homebody. I figured I had about a week before his instincts kicked in and I had a furious Queensland koala to manage.

  “Not that,” he said. “New work by Archimedes keeps turning up. I wonder…” His voice trailed off.

  I nodded. I had the same thought.

  Have you heard about the Archimedes Palimpsest? In the 13th century, a bunch of monks got their hands on some used parchment, cleaned it up, and wrote a bunch of prayers on it. Seven hundred years later, a British dude realized the original writing on the parchment was mathematical theorems. There was the usual academic headbangery, followed by the discovery that some of those theorems were developed by Archimedes, they had been written down over a thousand years after his death, and they had never been recorded in print anywhere else.

  Do a little light reading on Archimedes, and you’ll find coincidences like the Palimpsest all over the place. It’s almost like Archimedes didn’t stop making or inventing or discovering shit after he died.

  Listen, I know human history is rife with coincidence, and lost artifacts are turning up all of the time, and blah blah blah. If you dick around with powerful ghosts long enough, this sort of thing is a red flag.

  Maybe Archimedes’ ghost was still kicking around.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  I’d never been to Greece before.

  We landed at night, which muffled the edges of the city. I’ve done a lot of traveling, and when you’re tired and hungry and jet-lagged, every airport looks like the same. I dragged Mike and Speedy across Athens, got us checked into our hotel, and hit the sheets for something like ten hours until the boys decided they were ready to explore and the best way to wake me up was to sit on me.

  I forgave them as soon as I made it to the window.

  I had booked us a room in a hotel on the edge of the old city, a fact I had forgotten until I saw this amazing landscape of white and gold laid out beneath us. The sun was high enough to bounce light off of limestone and marble, and the entire place glowed like an ancient gem.

  I might have squeaked.

  We were close enough to the Parthenon to pick out the details. It looked as if a giant had smashed a club against its roof, leaving columns and craters. The rocks running across the hill were this glorious tumble of rubble. All I wanted to do was explore.

  We were off and running.

  I think I’ve mentioned how I’m new to the spy game, but one of the first things I learned is that bad guys get bored. If Speedy, Mike, and I were being followed, we could do worse than play tourists for a little while. The bad guys—if there were any—wouldn’t quit following us, but they’d take out their phones and start Candy Crushing or whatever the cool hitmen are playing these days.

  Bored bad guys are sloppy bad guys. After six hours of us acting like jerky tourists, we’d be able to recognize them.

  We usually just waved and blew kisses. Sometimes, if they’re really extra-terrible at their jobs, we pay someone to bring them coffee or beer.

  (Speedy and I love to buy drinks for our bad guys. It scares the shit out of them.)

  The walk up the hill to the acropolis was steeper than it appeared from the hotel room. Mike and I took it as an opportunity to run sprints. I won; he was wearing a heavy backpack and an additional thirty-five pounds of male Queensland koala. By the time we got to the Parthenon at the top, we were both winded. We figured it’d buy us some time to talk freely: any bad guys who had followed us on foot had probably died.

  Mike deposited Speedy on a nearby chunk of fallen marble, and the three of us took in the view.

  Spectacular.

  “Did Archimedes ever visit Athens?” I asked as I passed a canteen of water to Mike.

  “Nobody knows,” Speedy whispered. He was stalking a lizard across the rocks. “Probably, but there’s no record of it. We know he made it down to Egypt—ach!” He mistimed his pounce, and missed the lizard by a mile. It scurried behind a clump of tawny grass. This, he ate.

  “Greece and Rome were at war when he was alive,” he continued around a mouthful of grass. “Archimedes lived in Syracuse. There was bad blood between Syracuse and Athens, and Greece was hell to move around in, but any scholar who made it all the way to Alexandria must have also hit up Athens.”

  “So what can we expect to find here?” Mike asked, thumbing through Archimedes’ dossier on his phone.

  “For Archimedes? Jack fuck-all shit. But Posidonius studied in Athens when he was a student.”

  I leaned back on my
rock. Athens morning sunlight, folks? Absolutely divine. “Have we just outright accepted that Archimedes was haunting Posidonius?”

  “Yes,” Speedy said.

  “Maybe.” Mike was always open to alternatives. “But if Posidonius did bump into Archimedes, where did it happen? Their geographies didn’t overlap.”

  “We should find a Greek ghost and ask,” Speedy suggested.

  “Working on it,” I muttered.

  There was another reason—a darned good reason—we had started in Athens.

  We were looking for ghosts.

  The Afterlife is…

  Okay. Imagine a bag of marbles.

  Now, imagine a bag of marbles a billion times the size of that one. And dump all of those marbles on the metaphysical floor.

  Now, imagine you have to move from this nice Cat’s Eye here to that lovely Aggie aaaaaaall the way over there, but only, like, one out of fifty of those marbles are connected, and you have no clue how to locate these connections.

  That’s the Afterlife.

  Please remember that ghosts don’t tell us shit about shit. Everything I know about the Afterlife is conditionally vague. Since I’m, you know, still alive, my impression of the Afterlife is that it’s not so much Heaven as it is your own personal version of Better Metaphysical Homes and Gardens. You and your buddies who have chosen to remain in the Afterlife, rather than dissipating into the aether or getting reincarnated as bunnies or whatever, get to play with your own section of space-time. It’s yours. It’s your own slice of paradise to manipulate as you see fit. You want to live in a cave? Bam! There’s your cave. You want to live in Kim Kardashian’s mansion? Bam! There’s your mansion.

  (I’m not sure if a facsimile of Kim Kardashian comes with it, by the way. I’ve never asked, because ugh.)

  But this little slice of paradise? It’s private. Unless you’re the type of person who’s okay with strangers barging into your home, your borders are impenetrable.

  From what I’ve gathered, this creates something of a challenge in making new friends. Your old friends can find your home just fine, and maybe you all go hang out in spaces that certain ghosts have created for get-togethers or whatnot, but you can’t just wander into someone else’s backyard and ask to use their Kardashian cave-pool.