Lost Temple

by Tom Harper

  'I promise you, his death had nothing to do with me.' That wasn't entirely true. He could almost taste the poison bile that had clogged his throat as he'd waited in the gorge with the Webley, the sweat stinging his eyes like tears. 'Christ, he was almost like a brother to me.'

  There was a lot more he could have said, but that would only have made things worse. And he didn't have much time. He glanced over his shoulder, then back at Marina. 'I came to warn you.' He'd already said that, he knew. 'You remember the book?'

  She looked up, caught off guard. 'What?'

  'The book. The archaeologist's notebook I gave you to hide. You remember it?'

  A gust of wind suddenly lifted her scarf and snatched it away. It sailed across the garden, catching in the branches of a tree by the wall. Marina's long hair billowed out behind her, savage and untamed.

  'I don't remember it.'

  'Yes you do. Two days after the invasion. I brought it here — the archaeologist asked me to. You were upset because he'd been killed.'

  'Pemberton was a good man,' said Marina softly. 'A

  good

  Englishman.' She stared at Grant a moment longer. A tear glistened in the corner of her eye. It wouldn't fall, but nor would she wipe it away. Grant just stood and waited.

  She seemed to decide something.

  'Come inside.'

  * * *

  The house was exactly as he remembered it: a kitchen, a bedroom and a living room, all simple but impeccably tidy. A charred log smouldered in the stone hearth, and bunches of wildflowers and dried lavender were arranged in vases on the windowsills. Photographs hung on the walls: a man in a broad-brimmed hat sitting on a donkey, struggling to keep still for the camera; two young women laughing by a river bank; a young man in a conscript's uniform, his face grainy and drawn as he tried to look brave. Grant didn't look at that one.

  Marina disappeared into the kitchen, returning a few minutes later with two tiny coffee cups and two glasses of water. She had also brushed her hair, Grant noticed. She put the drinks down on the lace tablecloth and seated herself across from him. Grant sipped his coffee cautiously and made a face. It was thick as tar.

  'Have you lost your taste for Greek coffee?'

  'Just checking it for strychnine.'

  Marina laughed, despite herself. 'I promise you, when I kill you it will be with my own hands.'

  'That's all right, then.' Grant tipped the cup back and drained it in one gulp. He watched as Marina drank hers. She must be twenty-seven now, he thought — thinner than she had been the day he limped into her house, but still with the same wild, unpredictable beauty. Even then, she and her brother had been making names for themselves with the andartiko,

  the Greek resistance. In the months that followed, helped and supplied by Grant, they had become one of the most formidable thorns in the Germans' side. And more than that, Grant and Marina had become lovers. It had been a clandestine affair, hiding from Germans and Greeks alike: brief moments snatched in shepherds' huts and behind broken stone walls, usually during the heat of the day before their night-time missions. Grant could still remember the taste of the sweat on her neck; the rustle of the myrtle and oleander; her moans and the way he had tried to silence them with kisses. They had been brutal, savage times, but that had only made the sex more urgent, more vital. Until it all ended on that blisteringly clear April day, in a gorge in the White Mountains, with the smell of rosemary and cordite.

  Grant realised she was watching him and quickly took a sip of water.

  'So you came to warn me. About what — Pemberton's notebook?'

  She had mastered her emotions now and was calmer, speaking with clipped politeness. Though there was still a flush in her cheeks.

  'It's…' He hesitated. 'It's a long story.'

  'Then tell it from the beginning.' She leaned back and folded her arms across her breasts. 'Tell me what happened after you left Crete.'

  'I went back to England.' Even that simple statement hid a multitude of stories: an inflatable boat racing in to a beach near Dover under cover of darkness; a threadbare bedroom on Old Compton Street over a cafe, twitching the curtains each time a bobby walked down the street; midnight meetings in the shells of bombed-out houses. 'Then one day I was walking down Baker Street and a man bumped into me. Literally — more like a rugby tackle. Terribly apologetic, frightfully sorry, insisted on buying me a cup of tea. He was so keen I said yes.'

  'He was a spy?'

  'I think he worked at Marks & Spencer. A clothes shop,' Grant added, seeing her blank look. 'But he was a Jew. He told me about some friends of his who were trying to persuade our government to hand over Palestine to the Hebrews. God knows how they found me, but they had this idea I could help them lay hands on some weapons.'

  'And?'

  'I could. We'd stashed guns all over the Mediterranean in the war and it was a fair bet some of them had been left behind. They handed over some cash, I bought a boat and we were in business. You know how it is. You get into something, word goes around, soon other people come knocking on your door wanting the same thing. We've finished one war but there's another one starting already. Only now the amateurs have got a taste for it, they all want to catch up with the professionals and they're willing to spend.'

  'So you give them the guns to kill each other.'

  Grant shrugged. 'They'd kill each other anyway. I just help level the playing field. But it all went to hell three weeks ago. The army found out about it; they were waiting for me on the beach.' He leaned forward. 'And that's where it gets interesting. A man came to visit me in prison — an English spy. He didn't give a damn for Palestine and he didn't care much about my guns. He wanted me to tell him where Pemberton's notebook was.'

  Marina was leaning forward too, now, drawn in to the story. Grant tried not to notice how close their faces were. 'But how did he know?'

  'I must have mentioned it in my report — that Pemberton gave it to me when he died. The man who came to see me was just fishing. But he was hungry. He must have been — he'd come all the way from London just to ask me what I knew. Offered me money, a ticket out of jail. Probably a bloody knighthood if I'd pushed him.'

  'What did you tell him?'

  'What do you think? I told him to go to hell.'

  'But he still let you out of the prison.'

  'I escaped.'

  'And came straight here — why? To take the book for yourself?'

  Grant suddenly reached forward and took her hands in his. She gasped with surprise and pulled back, but she couldn't break his grip. 'To warn you. This English spook came all the way to a dungeon in Palestine to find out if I had it, six years after the event. I don't think he's a nice man. He knows I had the book; he knows my connection to you and he knows your connection to Pemberton. It's not going to take him long to join the dots.' He stared into her eyes. 'Have you got the book?'

  Marina squirmed against his grip, tossing her head with anger. 'What will you do with it? Sell it to this man?'

  Grant let go, pulling his hands apart so fast that Marina flew backwards into her chair. Her chest heaved against her dress and the loose lock of hair tumbled forward again over her flushed cheek.

  'That depends what we find. If this is about a few broken pots and some rocks in the ground, why not? But if there's something more worthwhile…' He paused. 'You worked for Pemberton — you told me once that when you were a kid Knossos was practically your sandpit. If he found something valuable, something worth all this bother, don't you want to know what it was?'

  Four

  Marina led him down to the ground floor, a barn-cum-storeroom under the main house. Well-oiled farm tools hung on the walls, while chaff and straw covered the floor. Kneeling down in the far corner, she brushed it away with her hands until she had exposed a square crack running round one of the flagstones. She took a crowbar from a peg on the wall and levered it in, slowly prising back the stone. Grant didn't offer to help; instead, he stood by the door and scanned the surrou
nding countryside. Something felt wrong, some intuition that he couldn't place. He could have dismissed the feeling — but he had learned from experience it rarely paid to ignore it.

  Iron clattered on stone as Marina put down the pry bar. With one last look out through the door, Grant joined her and peered down into the hole she had opened. It sank about three feet into the ground, two feet square and lined with dusty planks. Inside he could see three bundles wrapped in goatskins leaning against the wall and a battered box of ammunition at the bottom. Marina lay down on her stomach, stretched in and pulled it out. The catches snapped; the lid squeaked and there it was. The cream pages had yellowed and gun oil stained the cover, but there was still enough gold on the monogram to read it: JMHP.

  'Well hidden,' said Grant. 'How did you know it was so valuable?'

  'There was a man here in forty-three, a Nazi named Belzig. You were on the mainland then. He was an archaeologist — but not like Pemberton. He was a pig. He forced people to work for him like slaves: many died. And he wanted the journal. I heard from my cousin that he ransacked the Villa Ariadne looking for Pemberton's journal. When he did not find it, he rounded up the staff who had worked there and did unspeakable things to them, trying to discover what happened to it.'

  'What did he want with it?'

  'I never met him to find out — I'd have killed him if I had.'

  Grant stared at the book, his mind racing. What was in it that could be so important? He remembered seeing Pemberton die: an old man who had spent his life in the safety of the past, only to be overwhelmed by the violence of a new chapter in history writing itself. What had he discovered that could possibly have mattered in the last three thousand years?

  'Did you ever read it?' he asked Marina.

  'No.'

  'But you worked with Pemberton. Weren't you curious?'

  She twitched her head dismissively. 'The war came. I forgot that life. I forgot archaeology; I forgot Pemberton. If you hadn't come back, they'd probably have dug up the book in a thousand years and put it in a museum.' She glared at him. 'I wish you hadn't come back. Then I could have forgotten you also.'

  'I'll be off then.' Grant stretched out his hand to take the book. Marina didn't move.

  'What will you do with it?'

  'Read it. See if…' He broke off as Marina burst into laughter. 'What?'

  'Nothing.' Her voice was brisk, but the corner of her mouth twitched. 'Take it. Read it.' She tossed it to him across the barn. Grant caught it one-handed and flipped it open. He looked at the page, then turned through a few more with mounting frustration. 'It's all in Greek.'

  'Ancient Greek. Even if you could read Greek as well as you read English, for you it would be like attempting to read Chaucer.'

  'I never tried.'

  She made a face that told him she wasn't surprised. 'Lots of the words would look the same, but some would not mean what you thought and some you would not recognise at all.'

  'Christ. He didn't make it easy for us.'

  'He always kept his notes in ancient Greek. He said it made him feel closer to the past.'

  'Well, he's close to it now.' Grant wondered if, down the valley, the corpse still lay where he had buried it in the foundations of Knossos. 'How the hell am I supposed to read this?'

  'Get a dictionary.' Her face was alight now with the uninhibited passion he remembered so well. 'A dictionary of archaeology, also. And a pile of history books. Even if you could read it, it would take you six months to understand what he was talking about.'

  Grant looked down at the book. The neat rows of indecipherable letters seemed to swim in front of his eyes. Marina was taunting him, but she was taunting him with the truth. Of course he could just sell it — track down the bastard from SIS and strike a deal. But how could he get the right price if he didn't know what he was selling? More than that: he couldn't let go of the simple, stubborn desire to find out what someone didn't want him to know.

  'I don't suppose…' He shot her a sideways glance. She was standing beside the hole, dust and straw clinging to her dress, her face glistening with sweat from the effort of pushing back the stone. Her lips were slightly parted in a triumphant smile and her dark eyes flashed the challenge. Her mind was already made up — but she would make him ask for it.

  He cleared his throat. 'Will you help me work out what Pemberton was up to?'

  * * *

  They took the book inside the house and laid it on the table. Grant wanted to start at the end, reasoning that whatever Pemberton had discovered must have been not long before he died. But Marina insisted on opening the book at the first page and reading through, muttering the words under her breath. Grant lit a cigarette. A few goat bells clanked in the distance, and the leaves of the apricot trees rustled in the wind. In the village below, the locals would be closing their shutters for their afternoon siestas. Otherwise the only sound in the room was an occasional pop from the burning log and the crisp slice of pages being turned.

  Grant stared out of the window. Away to his left, where the road to the coast snaked down the valley, a car was crawling up the hill. It disappeared behind a bend, reappeared and vanished again, flashing in and out of the sun like a mirror. Grant felt a familiar prickle in his gut.

  'How much longer?' he asked, trying to be casual.

  'For ever, if you keep interrupting.' Marina's face was set in a scowl of concentration. 'There's a lot of Linear B in here I can't understand. I think Pemberton was trying to decipher it.'

  Grant didn't know what Linear B was, but just at that moment he wasn't interested. The car had disappeared into the village's tightly packed streets. Maybe it was just a local bigwig showing off his wealth, or an official from Heraklion come to impress the populace, he told himself.

  'Do you get many motor cars around here?'

  'Yorgos up the valley has a Ford.'

  A few hundred yards away a black snout inched its way through the narrow lane, on to the track between the apple orchards.

  Grant touched the Webley tucked into his waistband. 'Were there any bullets in that ammo box?'

  'Just the book. I used the bullets on the Germans.' More curious than exasperated now, she looked up. 'Why?'

  The car halted outside the front gate. The engine throbbed for a moment, then abruptly died away. Two men in dark hats and overcoats got out; one went round to the boot and pulled out a long, snub-nosed package wrapped in brown paper.

  'Because we've got visitors.'

  * * *

  Grant squeezed through the small window at the back of the house and dropped to the ground. Round the corner he could hear the iron clop of hobnailed boots stamping up the path to the front door. Whoever they were, they weren't worried about being heard. Grant wasn't sure if that was good or not.

  The footsteps stopped at the door and a fist thudded against it — the clumsy sound, Grant thought, of a heavy man trying to be casual. Another thud, and the tap-tap of the boots shifting impatiently.

  'Maybe it's just the man from the Pru,' Grant whispered.

  A sharp crack ripped through the garden, followed by the tearing of wood and a bang as the door flew in — probably under the impact of a hobnailed boot, Grant guessed. A few moments later came the rumble of furniture being overturned and the clatter of drawers being tipped out over the floor. Next to Grant, Marina's face was drawn in fury and he grabbed her arm, digging his nails into her wrist.

  'Is there a window at the other end of the house?'

  She shook her head.

  'Good. Let's go.'

  Shielded by the house, they ran across the broken ground, vaulted a tumbledown stone wall and slid into a shallow gully in the hillside. Loose stones and gravel crunched underfoot, but the men in the house were making a thorough business of tearing it apart, and their noise drowned out anything Grant and Marina did. He could hear angry shouts from inside, though muffled by the walls he couldn't make out the language. Was it English?

  Lying on their bellies, they wriggled
up the gully. When Grant judged they'd gone far enough he waved Marina to stop. The noon sun blazed down and his shirt was damp from the effort of crawling up the slope. Gripping the Webley, Grant inched himself up and peered over the lip of the gully.

  The house had fallen silent. From where Grant lay, the front door and the car parked beyond were hidden, but through the living-room window, framed in the curtains, he could see a dark figure standing in the middle of the room. From the way he moved and gesticulated, Grant guessed some sort of discussion was under way. He turned to Marina. 'Still got the book?'

  She half lifted it to show him. A few more grazes had scuffed the worn leather binding, but otherwise it was unharmed. 'Is that why they came?'

  'I don't think it was for the pleasure of your conversation.'

  'Who are they?'

  Grant had a fair guess, but he hid it behind a bland shrug. 'No one we want to meet.'

  He looked back down the hill. The dark figure had vanished. On the far side of the house an engine coughed into life and a few moments later he saw the car pull away down the road towards the village. It squeezed down the narrow lane between the houses and disappeared. Marina started to rise, but in an instant Grant's hand was on her wrist and dragging her back down, so quick she almost fell on top of him. She rolled away with a growl of fury — as she came back up, Grant saw that a small knife had appeared from nowhere in her hand.

  'What are you doing?'

  Her tumble had disarranged her dress, dragging down the neckline. She seemed not to notice.

  'You can't go back there,' he said. Very deliberately, he let his gaze drift from the hovering knife to the exposed skin below her collarbone. A bud of white lace peeked out from under the black dress.

  She tugged it back into position with a snort of disgust. 'Why not? First you come, when I never wanted to see you again, and an hour later there are two