The Oracle

by D. J. Niko

  A theft.

  With her gaze, she followed the trail of glass shards to a flat case in Room B, where pottery and small objects were displayed. She checked over both shoulders to ensure she was alone and walked toward it.

  Standing over it, she frowned. The case had been shattered and gutted. She read the display text, written in Greek: Brass stake, unknown origin.

  That was odd. Usually, objects of unknown origin or chronology were not displayed until they could be studied further.

  Sarah looked around. On the far side of the western wing, the same candy-cane-striped tape sectioned off an open doorway. She recalled that was the entrance to a storage room where the museum’s archives were kept. She walked toward it.

  She saw the papers first. Every box had been upturned, its contents strewn along the floor, on shelves, on a work table. The place had been ransacked.

  Behind a stack of empty boxes, she saw a pair of feet. Sarah’s face warmed as adrenaline surged through her. She stepped over the slack tape, just enough to get a better view without disturbing the crime scene.

  She raised a hand to her mouth to contain a gasp. The night guard lay motionless in a corner, his hands tied with a computer cable and mouth sealed with black tape. His face was badly bruised and bloodied. A long line of raw skin cut across his neck, as if someone had tried to strangle him.

  She felt a hand on her shoulder and jumped.

  “Sorry to startle you.”

  Relieved to see Evan, she exhaled loudly. “It’s all right. Care to fill me in?”

  “It’s what I’m told I have to do.”

  Sarah ignored his snarky remark.

  “There was a break-in in the middle of the night.” Though his English was flawless, his Greek accent came across in the trilled r.

  “Who’s the guard? I don’t recall seeing him before.”

  “He was new. Not even a week on the job.” He scanned the scene. “Looks like he put up quite a fight.”

  Sarah felt nauseated. In the twelve years she’d worked as an archaeologist, she had witnessed antiquities theft and violence over and over—and it never got any easier to process. “I don’t understand. Didn’t the alarm sound?”

  “It did, but no one heard it—at least not in time.” He shrugged. “Since the budget cuts, we were forced to do away with the monitoring.”

  Sarah grimaced, an outward expression of her contempt for the government’s shortsightedness. She was well aware that the Ministry of Culture had suffered since the economic crisis, but failing to protect its national treasures was nothing less than criminal—particularly in light of all the opportunists who circled like vultures, waiting for the right time to strike.

  “How did the police know to come here then?”

  “I called them.” He pushed his round, black-rimmed glasses up the bridge of his nose. “I was driving up to the lab to complete a report when I heard the alarm. I rushed to the museum, but it was too late.”

  She recalled the broken case. “What was taken?”

  “Nothing, actually. The object had been removed.”

  “Removed . . . to where?”

  Evan was quiet for a moment. He turned to her, his deep-set eyes obscured beneath a heavy black brow. “I can’t say.”

  “Can’t or won’t?”

  “The investigation is open. You know what that means.” He turned toward the door. “Look, I have to go. They have more questions.”

  “Evan, wait.” Her tone was sharper than she intended it to be. “Where’s Daniel?”

  “He had to go to Athens.”

  “Athens?” She tensed. “What for?”

  “I can’t talk now. They’re expecting me.”

  Sarah watched Evan walk toward the men and wondered what he wasn’t telling her. She considered the improbability of Daniel leaving in the middle of the night to go to Athens. What could be so urgent? And why not inform her? Something did not add up.

  Her internal alarm tolling, she felt a bit numb. She gazed absently at the vandalized storage room and the motionless form of a man who a few hours prior was very much alive. Her thoughts raced across memories from her recent past: a monk knifed to death for keeping an ancient secret, a tribal warrior gored in sacrifice to a madman seeking biblical treasure, her father held hostage and nearly killed. She rubbed her eyes to shake the unwelcome visions of the violence that seemed to plague her assignments, tainting the thrill of archaeological discovery.

  She decided not to linger. As she walked down the corridor toward the exit, she noticed tiny red droplets on the floor between the shards of glass. She followed the trail down the hall and to the front door. Near the threshold, a muddy footprint tinged with blood pointed toward the building. Though the impression was faint, she could make out the herringbone pattern of the sole.

  Sarah pushed the door open slowly and scanned the courtyard but saw nothing. Any more traces of the intruder were surely washed away by the rain. She walked past the cops and out of the crime scene. At the edge of the museum complex she stood still for a moment, gazing at the slate sky that signaled the hour before dawn.

  She reached into her pocket for her phone with the intention of calling Daniel. As she looked down, she noticed something odd. A small object attached to a black leather lace was half buried in the mud. She looked behind her at the guards; they were still smoking and guffawing.

  She squatted for a closer look. She brushed away the wet soil with her hand, revealing a pendant, or perhaps an amulet, made of marble. The bottom edge was ragged and sharp, as if a piece was missing, and the leather chain had broken cleanly. She picked up the object. A glance at the veining and coloration placed the stone in an ancient context, but she could not be sure in the demilight.

  Sarah turned it over. Her jaw tightened as she realized there was an inscription on the back. She rubbed the mud off and revealed a symbol she did not comprehend. Carved into the marble was a row of four evenly spaced dots.

  Three

  Daniel Madigan stood at the edge of the tarmac at the private jet port at Athens International, his gaze fixed on the refracted wing lights as the plane taxied toward him. The high-pitched whine of the engine seared his ears, adding to his unease.

  The marshaller crossed a pair of fluorescent yellow light wands overhead to signal the plane to stop. The five minutes before the aircraft door opened seemed like hours. Daniel rubbed his eyes in an attempt to erase the fatigue. He couldn’t remember when he last had a good night’s sleep.

  The man he was expecting stood at the top of the metal stairs and lifted the collar of his trench coat. He descended the stairs with a lively step that belied his portly figure.

  Daniel walked toward him, meeting him halfway. He’d been given specific instructions: the meeting was to take place on the tarmac, where they could not be overheard.

  “Madigan.” James Langham, the chairman of the A.E. Thurlow Foundation, extended a puffy, short-fingered hand. “Thanks for meeting me on such short notice.”

  “Don’t mention it, James.” Daniel exaggerated his Tennessee accent, as he often did when talking to high-born Brits. He also left out honorifics, in this case Sir, because he never could stomach the pretense.

  “I trust no one knows you’re here.”

  “No one. Just like you asked.”

  “Not even—?”

  Daniel cut him off before he could say Weston’s daughter. Hearing her name only added to his guilt over keeping secrets from her. “Look, I know the drill.” He crossed his arms. “Let’s just get to the point, all right?”

  Langham put his hands in his pockets and exhaled a puff of mist. “There has been a complication. We need you to do more than originally agreed upon.”

  “Such as?”

  “It seems the brass obelisk is more valuable than we’d thought. It appears to be the key to something.”

  Langham was referring to an object of mysterious origin, found a year ago in the bottom of a river in central Greece and turned over t
o the ephorate in Thebes. A collector whose identity was well protected had offered the Greeks a large sum in exchange for the artifact, but the foundation fathers used their political clout to block the transaction. The object had been displayed in the museum since.

  There were reasons for this, and Daniel had been made aware of them. But as part of the deal he’d struck, he had to keep silent. Two months into this assignment, he felt as though he’d made a mistake. “A key. How do you know this?”

  “You know better than to ask this of a high-ranking officer of the British government. Simply assume our intelligence is accurate. We know two things”—he enumerated on those stout fingers—“one, the collector who offered to buy the obelisk is the man we have been seeking, and two, he’s desperate to get his hands on it—or rather what it unlocks. To catch him, we must play a bit of cat and mouse.” He nodded to Daniel. “This is where you come in.”

  Daniel felt the bite of a frosty gust on his lips. “That wasn’t the deal we had. ‘Get the information, and get out’—remember?”

  “It seems you’re the one who doesn’t remember.” Langham’s voice took on an acerbic tone. “Need I remind you what we did for you a few months ago?”

  Daniel resented being backed into a corner. But he had no choice: he’d given his word. “That won’t be necessary. I will repay my debt to the British government, as I said I would.”

  “Good. Now, listen carefully. Things are heating up. There was a break-in at the museum”—he looked at his watch—“about an hour ago. Someone attempted to steal the obelisk.”

  His brow wrinkled as he thought of Sarah. “Was anyone hurt?”

  “Things got a bit messy. Apparently, the guard put up an unreasonable fight. For whatever reason, he defended the archives as if they were his own.” Langham shook his head. “Silly sod. It cost him his life.”

  Daniel exhaled. His breath hung in the frigid air, dissipating in slow motion.

  Langham went on. “There is good and bad news. The good: the obelisk was not in its appointed case. It appears Rigas had moved it to the vault just hours prior.”

  “What? How could he have known?”

  “He says he didn’t. He claims he moved it for further study. But something does not smell right to me.”

  “What’s the bad news?”

  “The papers cataloguing the obelisk have gone missing. They now have all known information on the object, including that pesky detail about its storage in the vault.” He huffed. “They will be back.”

  “Let me guess. You have a plan.”

  He smiled sideways. “Indeed. But we must act quickly. This is what I need you to do.”

  Four

  On the morning following the heist, the stones at Ismenion Hill were particularly silent. Beneath a moody sky, Sarah worked alone on the site of a second millennium BCE Mycenaean tomb.

  She brushed the dirt away from the lip of a funerary vessel, looking for solace in the fastidious act. She could not concentrate. In her mind she replayed the predawn events, trying to find an explanation.

  It wasn’t the break-in itself that baffled her. Museum thefts and ancient site lootings were rampant in crisis-stricken Greece. It was always the same story: the thieves plundered only a few objects and seldom the most charismatic ones. Rather than a large, identifiable cache, they consistently funneled small numbers of stolen antiquities into a vast black market, like drops that disappeared in a bucketful of water. It was akin to opening a wound a little at a time: the pain was not enough for people to care, and no one took note of the cumulative damage.

  But this was different. The looters were after information, not artifacts. Though the local police were treating the incident as a botched theft, Sarah’s instincts told her something big was percolating beneath the surface.

  She reached into the small pocket sewn into the seam of her trousers and pulled out the marble amulet with the four dots. She ran a finger across the ragged edge. The sharp surface indicated it was broken rather recently, perhaps in the skirmish. Earlier that morning, after the investigators had left, she’d quietly returned to the site and scoured the ground for another piece of the amulet but found nothing. Either it had vanished, or it was never there in the first place. She closed her fist around it. There was more to this object than met the eye.

  Sarah’s thoughts turned to Daniel. His trip to Athens in the middle of the night was another straw in a pile of unexplained behavior. In the short time they had been in Thebes, he had been quiet and at times aloof. His laid-back style and signature wit had all but evaporated.

  Her gaze wandered as she recalled a phone call Daniel had received the afternoon prior. He had looked down at his phone and frowned. He turned away to answer, saying only “I’ll call you back.” A moment later he excused himself from the lab, leaving Sarah and Evan in the midst of conversation. When he returned, five minutes later, he looked agitated.

  “What’s wrong?” Sarah asked.

  He gave a rigid smile. “All good. Just a call from the foundation. Let’s get back to work.”

  Sarah wondered now if that was the call summoning him to Athens. But why the secrecy? She wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt, to not accuse him of omitting the truth, but memory mocked her, reminding her of a history she had been trying hard to ignore.

  She put the brush down and leaned back on the excavated bedrock. She slipped the bandana off her head, letting her hair tumble down her back, and wiped the grime from her face. In the leaden light of the overcast morning, the Italian cypress trees—slender spires sprouting from the rocky ground—displayed none of their usual majesty. The olive trees, with their gnarled old trunks and silver-green leaves, looked like denizens of a petrified forest.

  Beyond the hill, tiny gray dots emerged from the mist like brushstrokes in a pointillist landscape. The city of Thebes, an arbitrary arrangement of tiny red-roofed houses and monolithic white buildings interrupted by patches of green, sprawled on the valley. It was hard to reconcile the unremarkable modern city with the Theban powerhouse of antiquity. It was in that valley and in the citadel that rose above it that ancient Thebes’ mortal enemies, the Athenians, had been driven into the earth and the fateful alliance with Xerxes’ Persians had been formed. And it was there that hubris led to ruin as the Sacred Band of Thebes fell spectacularly to Alexander the Great’s long-speared armies.

  She had always found solace in walking in the footsteps of ancient sages and fools, warriors and poets, great leaders and wicked traitors: the men who, with their blood or their tongues, shaped western civilization. Yet at that moment such comfort eluded her, like water escaping from a sieve.

  Out of the gloom emerged a hunched figure. Sarah stood, thinking it was Daniel. She felt a tinge of disappointment when she realized Evan was walking toward her, his hands in his pockets and head bent as if to avoid a blustery wind.

  She tucked the amulet back in her pocket and met him halfway. “Any news?”

  Evan’s face was tight to match his guarded posture. “Not much. Since nothing was taken, they’re closing that part of the case. They’re still investigating the murder, but that could take years. The cops here are a joke.”

  “How can you be certain nothing was taken from the archives?”

  He shrugged. “Even if there was, they are not concerned about that. No antiquities are missing; that’s the important thing.”

  “They may not be concerned, but we should be. Surely you’ve taken inventory. You must know whether some files are missing.”

  He looked away, obviously uncomfortable.

  “Evan.” She waited for him to look at her. “I can’t help you if I don’t know.”

  He hesitated. Something in the way he scanned her face indicated he was framing his answer. “All right. They took the folders pertaining to the artifacts currently in storage.”

  “You think they are after something in the vault?”

  “I doubt it. They’re probably just fishing to see what we have. Thes
e petty criminals do things like this all the time.”

  Sarah stared at Evan. Was he really that naïve—or just acting the part? “Is the brass stake in the vault?”

  “Yes. That, and a hundred other items we’re studying.”

  “May I have a look?”

  Evan shrugged. “Suit yourself. I’ll be in the lab in about an hour. You can come by then.” He squinted at the sky. Dark clouds crowded the western horizon. “Looks like more rain anyway.”

  Sarah nodded. “I will be there.”

  He started to walk away but stopped. He turned back to her. “About Daniel . . . He’s been acting odd, hasn’t he?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The other day, I overheard him talking to someone on the phone about going back to the Middle East.” He shrugged. “Well, you probably know about it.”

  She felt the familiar burning sensation in her abdomen. Fears she thought she’d buried were clawing their way to the surface.

  A frigid breeze, the harbinger of the storm, whistled through the olive leaves. Evan raised his collar, put his hands back in his coat pockets, and disappeared into the gathering mist.

  The green LED numbers on the alarm clock read 02:20. Sarah rolled onto her back and stared at the peeling plaster on the ceiling. Like naiads in the brooks of antiquity, thoughts swam through her mind, rendering her sleepless.

  She had spent the afternoon in the lab, examining the brass stake and the other artifacts stored in the vault. She had pressed Evan for data on each of the objects, but he was only able to produce the original log. All other information had been taken from the archives.

  According to the log, the obelisk-shaped stake was a chance discovery at the headwaters of the Herkyna river, just outside of the town of Livadeia. It was handed over to the ephorate about a year prior and was still being studied.

  But there was another object of interest: an anthropomorphic pottery rhyton in the shape of a wolf’s head. Like the obelisk, the ceremonial drinking vessel that looked to be late fifth- or early fourth-century BCE had very little information ascribed to it. It was apparently unearthed during the building of a church in Chaironeia, a village outside of Livadeia. It had been found in pieces and partially reconstructed.