Project Daedalus

by Thomas Hoover

  Chapter Two

  Wednesday 3:29 p.m.

  "Michael, you look marvelous. It's so good to see you again. I really mean that. The years have treated you well." Eva Borodin leaned back against the gray fabric of the Saab's headrest and appraised him.

  "You don't look half bad yourself." Vance smiled to himself as he returned the favor. Vintage Eva, ladling on the flattery. But she was smashing, just as he remembered-the coal-black hair, the smoldering eyes, the high Slavic cheekbones. Then, too, her every gesture was spiked with the promise of Olympic sensuality; he remembered that as well. Everything about her spoke of a time and place far away, where there were no rules. Eva, the eternal Eva. With a Ph.D. "Everything's just the same."

  That part wasn't entirely true. There had been some changes, probably for the better. Instead of a plunging neckline and a fortune in gold accessories, she was wearing a blue silk blouse, form-fitting designer jeans with an eighty-dollar scarf for a belt, and lambskin boots. Far more demure than the old Eva. What had happened to the dangling turquoise earrings, enough musky perfume to obscure radar, at least one endangered fur draped somewhere?

  The years had definitely mellowed her. The Slavic passion seemed curbed today, the same way her hair had been trimmed down to a pageboy. Maybe, he thought, this was her new look: the Russian aristocrat of the nineties.

  "No, Michael, I'm different now. Or I'm trying to be." She laughed, flashed her come-on smile, and tried to toss her missing hair.

  Whoops, he thought. Sure, you've changed.

  "Being formally promoted to director of SIGINT brings responsibilities," she continued.

  "Congratulations."

  "It was two years ago."

  "Well, congratulations anyway." He was beginning to wonder if she really had mellowed. Back in the old days her Russianness was her way of making a statement. An identity. How much could she change, want to change? She'd always been a firebrand: throwing things was her preferred mode of communication. Not to suggest she wasn't verbal: she was always passionately happy to see him, passionately sad when bad things happened, passionately angry when she didn't get her way. Everything she said was flirtatious, carrying a sexual innuendo. Sometimes he thought she made Jean Harlow sound like Jeane Kirkpatrick.

  "Your call caught me a little off guard." He glanced over. "I never expected to hear from you again after you disappeared into the labyrinth of NSA." He knew she'd been with the National Security Agency for eight years now, but he hadn't heard that she'd been promoted to director of Soviet satellite intercepts. Of course, NSA didn't spend a lot of money on press releases. Still it was no surprise. Eva knew her stuff when it came to the Soviets, their satellites, their codes. "I must say, though, this is a hell of a long way to come for a catch-up chat."

  "It's been way too many years since we've seen each other. I've missed you."

  "Hope you mean that." Did she? he wondered. Even if she did, that wasn't the real reason she'd come. He knew her too well.

  "Guess you'll have to try and find out," she said, her voice holding an instinctive, automatic invitation.

  "Guess I will." Already it felt like the old days. How did she know so precisely where all his buttons were? The only thing I'm sure of so far today is that this morning's little accident was no accident." He'd told her about seeing Novosty, but not what they'd talked about. Why drag her into it? Besides, she'd known about Alex a lot longer than he had. Just one more piece of the past that didn't need to be stirred up. "Somebody got taken out. The question is, Who? We both know Novosty's a survivor, old school, but . . ."

  "I probably shouldn't say this, Michael, but I assume you're aware he's KGB, part of T-Directorate." Her voice had grown serious. "That executive VP slot he has with Techmashimport is just his cover. We've had a file of intercepts on him for years."

  "Of course I know about him. Good old Alex and I go back a while. You're slightly out of date concerning my most recent fun and games."

  "All right. I mean, I wouldn't even bring it up, but I think you should be warned. KGB's in a big turmoil, looking for something . . ." She paused. "Whenever this happens, there're plenty of stray arrows sure to be flying. Just stay out of the crossfire. A word to the wise."

  "I may already be in it. Thanks to Novosty's little 'welcome aboard' breakfast." He remembered the letter Alex had given him. "But I'm beginning to think I'd damn well better find out."

  She looked around sharply. "What happened? Did he say something?"

  "If you believe him, somebody in Moscow mislaid a few million dollars. Darndest thing."

  "It's better left alone, darling."

  "I'm on vacation, remember?" He winked at her. "With better things to do."

  "I should hope so." She leaned back again and studied his profile. "Well, at long last it's happened. I finally have to admit I need you for something." Her long, dark lashes fluttered. Warming me up, he thought. Now we're getting down to business. "Which is why I wanted to meet you here."

  They were five minutes out of Iraklion, on an unpaved back road he loved, headed for the palace at Knossos, and so far she'd done nothing but hint about what was on her mind. Everything was still a puzzle. For one thing, she never needed anybody. She was the stalwart Russian who'd ended their affair eleven years earlier just as casually as she had begun it. This afternoon, though, she seemed to be deliberately keeping the lid on, holding back. Uncharacteristic.

  "The truth is," she went on, "I've been thinking about us, the old times, and the palace."

  She'd called him in Nassau four days earlier, wanting to get together. It was the old Eva, darling this and darling that. When he said he was going to Crete, she'd grown strangely silent. Then she'd said-in a curious, tiny, voice-"Why don't I just meet you there? In fact, that's sort of why I rang. . . ."

  "So why's the palace suddenly so important to you?" He examined her, still trying to read her mood. "I need to go back out today. Try and brush up a bit. But that place was part of our problem back when, not part of the solution."

  She didn't answer. Instead she shifted the conversation sideways. "Speaking of the palace, I suppose I should congratulate you on finally being proved right. Did the Stuttgart team really ask you to look in on their dig?"

  "Call it the ultimate capitulation," he grinned. "Remember, they were the ones who led the critical fusillade when the book first came out. That makes it doubly sweet."

  "Right. I also remember that book of yours caused such a stink that no serious university would consider hiring you. Which, I assume, is why you ended up a part-time spook. Probably it was the only job you could get."

  "You're closer to the truth than you know." He laughed, wondering for the ten-thousandth time if he should have stuck out the academic slings and arrows. No, the secret truth was he was bored with the university regimen. He yearned for the real world. He knew it then and he knew it now.

  "Then the next thing I heard, you were down in the Bahamas, goofing off and renovating some old yacht." She looked him over once more, shaking her head. "What did you end up christening it? The Fuck Everybody?"

  "Crossed my mind. But then I chickened out and called her the Ulysses." He leaned back and reflected momentarily on the forty-four-foot Bristol racing sloop he'd restored, having picked it up for a song at a customs-house sale on Bay Street. Formerly the possession of a Colombian in the export business, it had a hull of one and three-quarter inch planked cedar, with a trim beam, did an easy fifteen knots in a decent breeze. He loved her. He'd installed a fortune in electronics, including a Micrologic Commander LORAN and a Navstar satellite navigation system. "It started out as a hobby, and three boats and a mortgage later it ended up a business."

  "And what do you do down there all day? Just sit around and drink margaritas?"

  "Sure. About once a month." He reached up and adjusted the open top of the car. "Hate to admit it, but on a typical day I'm usually out of bed by sunrise. Check the weather, then maybe take a short swim to get the oxygen flowin
g. After that I go to work. The 'office' is up forward in the Ulysses. My main discovery is that chartering is pretty much like any other business. Mostly problems."

  It was. There were always tourists who came to Nassau thinking they wanted more than the standard hotels, topless shows, and casinos on Paradise Island and Cable Beach. They wanted a taste of what it was like sailing through the Family Islands, away from the glitz, a feeling for the real Caribbean. Or so they thought. That was until they discovered the hard way that the real thing included broiling sun, jellyfish stings, nosy sharks, hangovers, seasickness, close-quarters quarrels with spouses and significant others, snapped fishing lines, generator failures, unexpected weather . . .

  "And you manage to do okay, right?"

  "Nobody ever got rich in the charter business, at least the kind I'm in. If you're not running high-priced South American produce, you have to do it for love, not money."

  His real livelihood, which he didn't bother to mention, came from elsewhere. In between managing Bahamian skippers and crews he also kept a hand in another occupation. In years past he'd served as a financial consultant for the CIA, helping monitor the flow of illicit drug and terrorist money passing through the banking laundries of Geneva and the Caribbean. When the Company finally formed its own section to handle that work, he'd moved on and hired out his expertise to a free-lance organization called ARM, the Association of Retired Mercenaries. They were retired, all right, but only from the antiterrorist units of a half dozen European nations. They still saw plenty of covert action, squelching those terrorist activities European governments wanted dealt with outside official channels. He was their money man and they paid him well, which was how he kept his three vessels shipshape and lived a yachtsman's life of "ease."

  "So after all these years, you ended up doing exactly what you wanted." She looked at him admiringly. "A lot of people would probably envy you that."

  "I like taking my own risks, if that's what you mean."

  "Well, all the same I suspect you're secretly very pleased with the fact you've been invited back to Crete. I always thought you'd return to archaeology sooner or later. If I know you, you couldn't stay away forever."

  Was she right? Even now he didn't know. "One thing's for sure. Crete's a world apart."

  That was an understatement. As he glanced back at the road, it was now blocked entirely by a herd of sheep, their shaggy brown fleeces suspended above dark, spindly legs. Around them the silence of the Cretan countryside was rent by bleats and the jangle of bells. The flock milled and darted about their rented Saab, but failed to move on down the road. Why bother? The shepherd, in dark hat and coat, lounged sidesaddle on his burro, oblivious, while his black-shawled wife trudged in his dusty wake, bringing up the rear. Strangers came, gazed upon the wonders of his land, then departed; he, possessor of donkey, sheep, and wife, would remain. And prevail. His weathered face contained all the worthwhile knowledge in the world. The parched hills and verdant valleys of Crete belonged to him alone. Now and forever.

  "Okay," he went on, "you're here, I'm here. Now how about telling me what's going on?"

  "That's just it. I don't know for sure. Everybody at NSA claims I'm starting to see things." She paused to examine a long red fingernail. "So don't you say it too. I need some moral support."

  "Maybe I'd better hear this first."

  "Michael, I . . . I don't want to talk about it yet. It's just-"

  "Well, give me a hint at least."

  "A few days back I decoded part of a transmission . . ." She leaned over and started to turn on the radio, then changed her mind and straightened. "Look, I just need you to help me get my thoughts organized."

  "Is that why you came all the way here? To organize your thoughts? You'll forgive me if I'd hoped for a little more." In spite of himself, he felt mildly annoyed. The truth was, he'd been looking forward to a reunion that wasn't about business. "You know, I sort of had the idea you wanted to . . . well, maybe try and piece things back together." He looked her over. "Being with you wasn't exactly the worst experience of my life."

  She sighed wistfully and smoothed back her hair. "Fixing Humpty Dumpty is tough work, darling. We both know that. It's been a long time. Life's never that simple."

  "Maybe not for you. But it seems very simple to me. We just lose the past. Pretend it never existed." He felt his pique growing. "Or then again, screw it. What are we doing here anyway?"

  Could it really work a second time around? he asked himself. Why not? Through all those years after things fell apart, he'd never once stopped remembering her. Her mind, her body, her excitement.

  Those memories dogged him now as they drove down the road he knew so well, had traveled so many times in his long-ago life. At times the ancient palace here on Crete had seemed almost a second home. After the publication of his book about it, Realm of the Spirit-to universal denunciations-he even began to dream about it. He thought he'd never come back, and now here he was with Eva. Life took strange turns sometimes.

  Eleven years ago in New Haven when he'd decided to work for himself, he'd actually been saying good-bye to this world and all it stood for. Back then it had seemed a golden moment to give academia the bird.

  Had it all come full circle now? Fortunately he'd kept up with the journals when he had the chance, tried to stay on top of what was happening. With any luck he'd have the pleasure of watching a lot of academics eat crow. All he had to do was just deal with whatever was bugging Eva and then get on down to Phaistos. He hoped the Stuttgart crew wouldn't realize he was over a decade out of date.

  "You know," she was searching in her purse, then stopped herself and looked up, "I always remember the palace when I think of you. It sort of tied us together."

  "Best I remember, it's what finally drove us apart. It turned into our 'irreconcilable difference.' "

  "Maybe you're right, and it was dumb of me. Given the lousy luck I've had with men, you're probably the best thing that ever came along. After that flap over your book, I let you get away."

  "Hold on a second. You announced you had to live your own life, and I was getting too emotionally involved in my work and it would be better all around if we just shook hands and called it quits. No hard feelings."

  "It wasn't quite like that." She laughed her alluring laugh, the one he remembered so well.

  "Oh, no?"

  "Okay, maybe it was a little like that." Out came the sunglasses. The old Eva again. "But I was changing, Michael, more every day. It was time to try and make it on my own."

  That was definitely what she'd decided to do. He'd always thought she broke things off because she was obsessed with finishing her own Ph.D. Self-centered and self-indulgent, that's what he'd called her at the time, just another pampered Russian blue blood. Only years later did he realize how self-centered he'd been. Maybe she'd been right; maybe they weren't ready for each other yet.

  She sighed, and then her voice came as a whisper. "You know, after you called this morning and told me about that nightmare with Alex, I just drank some retsina and went back to bed." She put on the shades, adjusted them, and looked his way. He thought they went well with her new forties hairstyle. "Michael, I know things I shouldn't. And the things I should know, I don't. The worse part of all is, none of it makes any sense." Her eyes seemed to soften behind the tinted plastic. "Do you remember the first time you and I talked about this place?"

  "Like it was yesterday." Who could forget? It was just after Realm was published, relating his theory that the palace, whatever it may have been originally, had eventually become a ceremonial necropolis, an abode of the dead. "We ended up having a terrific argument over the book. Nobody wanted to believe me, including you."

  "Come on, darling, it wasn't my opinion you cared about. It was your father's. The revered holder of Penn's Edelstein Chair of Classical Antiquities. Supposedly the world's living expert on Minoan Crete."

  Did he really care what the old man thought? he wondered. Not in the way she meant.
He would have liked it, though, if everybody had gotten along a little better. Michael Vance, Sr., never quite knew what to make of Eva's Slavic intensity, since it contrasted so vividly with his own up-tight Anglo-Saxon instincts. That was a repressive family strain Mike had fought-successfully, he hoped-to undo all his life. Eva had looked to be the perfect soul mate in that battle. She was born unrepressed.

  Her own father, Count Serge Borodin, was president emeritus of the Russian Nobility Association in America, exiled aristocracy. They were a people apart. He recalled in particular a Russian Orthodox wedding they'd all attended once. The operative assumption that sunny afternoon in Oyster Bay was that the czar had been a living god, the Romanovs the world's last surviving cherubim. He still remembered the black-hatted Orthodox prelates and the incense and the tinny balalaikas and all the counts and countesses drunk and dancing and crying at the same time. Growing up in the middle of that, she had to be exuberant.

  "You'd gone off on your own and set the world of archaeology on its ear," she continued. "Typical Michael. But your father refused to stick up for you when all the shit came down. I guess I didn't support you very well either, I admit now. I'm truly sorry, darling, looking back."

  "No big deal. I could handle it."

  "Sure." She reached over and patted his thigh. "You handled it just great. You were disgusted. At me, at him, at all the 'stuffed-shirt' academics who never went out on a dig and got their hands dirty. You practically dragged me here to show me you were right. You were obsessed with the palace, admit it."

  "It wasn't that bad." He looked over at her. "Was it?"

  "Let's not talk about it anymore, all right?" She sighed. "Christ."

  "Fine with me." He was pulling off the main road, heading into the flower-lined trail, the arcade of magenta bougainvillea that led down toward the palace. "By the way, I brought along some ouzo." He indicated a pint bottle in his coat. "What's a picnic without a little rocket fuel?"

  "You think of everything."

  "I also think we should park up here, dodge the tour-bus mayhem. Keep the funny hats and loudspeakers to a minimum."

  "Yes, please. Besides, I could use the air." She inhaled deeply.

  Around them the few lingering white sprays of almond blossoms seemed like remnants of late spring snow, while the ground itself was blanketed with wild orchids, lavender and pink anemones, white narcissus. He watched as she climbed out of the car, then stopped to pluck a waxy yellow prickly pear flower, next an orange-blue Iris cretica. He loved the flowers of Crete, and the afternoon was fragrant with the scent of jasmine and lemon blossoms. Ahead, down the hill, was the parking lot for the palace, with two tour busses in attendance, one just pulling out.

  "How long has it been since we were last here together?" She brushed her dark bangs back from her brow as she squinted into the waning sun, sniffing at her cactus flower.

  "It's beginning to seem like forever. But I think it's about-what?-almost twelve years now."

  "And how old is the palace supposed to be? I've gotten a little rusty."

  "The latest theory going is that it was destroyed about fourteen hundred B.C. So we're talking roughly three and a half thousand years since it was last used."

  "Guess our little decade doesn't count for much in the grand scheme."

  "Time flies." He remembered how she'd been back then, that day so long ago when she had been in her mid-twenties, as inviting as the brazen ladies-in-waiting of the palace frescoes, and even more voluptuous. Mais, ce sont des Parisiennes, a dazzled French scholar had marveled. She was like that. Perfect sensuality. For a while he'd forgotten all about archaeology and just concentrated on beauty.

  The place where all this occurred was the Palace of Knossos, lovingly restored in the early part of the twentieth century by the wealthy English archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans. There an almost modern civilization had flowered to magnificent heights, then mysteriously vanished. The path leading to the palace down the hill was becoming wider as they walked, opening on the distant olive groves in the valley. The vista was stunning, probably the reason it had been built here.

  He looked over and noticed she was digging in her purse again. This time she drew out a pack of Dunhills. He watched while she flicked a gold lighter, the one he'd given her as a present so long ago, emblazoned with a lapis lazuli skull and crossbones. At the time, the hint had worked. She'd quit.

  "The return of the death wish? When did you start that again?"

  "Last week." She defiantly took a puff.

  "Any particular reason?"

  "No, darling, I just did it." She exhaled. "I'm wound up. I'm . . . I'm scared. Michael, for godsake, how many reasons am I supposed to need?"

  "Hey, lighten up." He'd quit a month after they met, but it hadn't been a big deal. "I've mellowed out from the old days. Life is like most other things-a lot more fun when you don't take it too seriously."

  They were moving across the empty parking lot, headed for the entrance to the palace. It had once been a twelve-hundred-room labyrinth, perhaps deliberately confusing. Now the upper courtyard and chambers lay exposed to the sky, their massive red-and-ocher columns glistening in the waning sunlight. The columns tapered downward, as though tree trunks had been planted upside down to prevent resprouting.

  It was a poetic place to meet Eva again, he thought. And thoroughly bizarre as well. She'd gotten her Ph.D. in linguistics, specializing in ancient Aegean languages, then a few months later she'd surprised everybody by accepting a slot at the National Security Agency, that sprawling electronic beehive of eavesdropping that lies midway between Washington and Baltimore, on the thousand acres of Fort Meade. It'd seemed a startling about-face at the time, but maybe it made sense. Besides, it was that or teaching.

  NSA was a midsized city, producing among other things forty tons of classified paper trash a day. Its official insignia, appropriately, was a fierce eagle clasping a key-whether to unlock the secrets of others or to protect its own was unclear. Eva's particular branch, SIGINT-for signals intelligence-was an operation so secret NSA refused even to admit it existed. Employing ten acres of mainframe computers, Eva's SIGINT group monitored and analyzed every Russian transmission anywhere: their satellite downlinks, the microwave telephone networks within the Soviet Union, the chatter of civilian and military pilots, missile telemetry far above the Pacific, the split-second bursts of submarines reporting to base, even the limousine radiophone trysts between Politburo members and their mistresses. The instant an electromagnetic pulse left the earth, no matter its form or frequency, it belonged to the giant electronic ears of the NSA.

  So why shouldn't Eva end up as the agency's top Russian codebreaker? She was a master at deciphering obscure texts, and she'd spoken Russian all her life. Who better to make a career of cracking secret Soviet communications. Her linguistics Ph.D. was being used to real purpose.

  "I want you to help me think some, love," she went on. "I know it may sound a little bizarre, but I'd like to talk about some of the legends surrounding this place. You know, try and sort out fact and fiction."

  Now they were headed side by side down the stairway leading into the central court, an expanse of sandstone and alabaster tile glinting golden in the pale sun. On their left a flight of stairs seemed to lead out, but in fact they led right back in again. The deceptions of the palace began at the very entrance.

  "The truth is, about all we have is stories, though sometimes stories can be more true than so-called history. The standard version is that this area was where the athletes performed ritual somersaults over the sacred bulls."

  The restored frescoes around them showed corridors crowded with lithe Minoan priestesses, eyes rounded with green malachite, faces powdered white, lips a blood red. They all were bare-breasted, wearing only diaphanous chemises, while their jewels glistened in the sunshine as they fanned themselves with ostrich plumes.

  There were no frescoes, however, of the powerful, bloodthirsty King Minos.

  "Michael," sh
e called out, her voice echoing off the hard walls, "you know, this place has always felt a little sinister to me. None of the lightness and gaiety in those frescoes seems real."

  "That's part of what made me start wondering if the Minoans hadn't somehow managed to make a monkey out of every ponderous scholar on the planet." They were moving down the monumental grand staircase, three restored flights of which had originally been five, toward the rooms called the royal chambers. "Maybe the reason this place had no walls or fortifications was because you only came here when you were dead. Who the hell knows."

  Whatever the truth was, the eerie feeling of the palace seemed to make the ancient stories even more vivid. The legends told that King Minos's wife, Pasiphae, had a burning passion for one of the sacred white bulls he kept, so she arranged for his chief architect, Daedalus, to design a hollow wooden cow for her covered over with a hide. She concealed herself inside and, as luck would have it, lured one of the beasts. The progeny of that union was equally beastly-the Minotaur, a monster with a human body and a bull's head.

  Now they were rounding a final corner in the twisting maze of stairs. Directly ahead was the boudoir of the queen. The past welled up for him.

  The frescoes over the alabaster arches showed bold blue dolphins pirouetting in a pastel sea dotted with starfish and sea urchins. And just beneath them stood the famous bathroom of the queen, connected to the vast drainage complex of the palace, great stone channels curved in precise parabolas to control and dampen turbulence. Daedalus was an engineer-architect who had mastered the science of fluid dynamics thousands of years before the invention of wind tunnels and supercomputers.

  "My favorite spot. The bedroom." He slipped the small bottle of ouzo from his trench coat pocket. In the dank of the palace's lower depths, he needed its warmth. "I've had unspeakably erotic thoughts about this place-now it can be told-with you no small part of them." He handed her the bottle. "Want a hit of high octane?"

  "Glad to know I've had a place in your memory all these years, even if it was X-rated." She took the bottle with a knowing smile, then drank. "It's like licorice."

  He laughed. "Blended with JP-7."

  "Michael," she continued, looking around, "maybe this is the very room where Pasiphae gave birth to the Minotaur. What do you suppose?"

  "That would fit the story." He moved on, his eyes still adjusting to the shadows. "The only thing the legends actually say is that King Minos ordered Daedalus, resident genius, to create a secret labyrinth in the cellar of the palace to keep the beast. But nobody's ever located it."

  "You know, I think the labyrinth was no myth. It was real, only it was here. All around us. We're in it now." She handed back the bottle. "It was this whole sinister palace, this realm of the dead. After all these years, I finally think maybe you were right."

  Vindicated at last? Had even Eva come around? But why didn't he feel any satisfaction? Instead he found himself aware of the old chill, the almost occult intuition that had first told him the palace wasn't the happy playground everybody supposed it was. Once more it felt like death.

  But now something else was entering his senses. Was it imagination? In the encroaching dark the lower levels of the palace seemed to be totally deserted, with only a couple of persistent German tourists arguing out near the parking lot, and yet . . .

  They weren't alone. He could feel it. He knew it. Was it the spirits of the dead?

  No, it was far more real. Someone was with them, somewhere. In the shadows. They were being watched.

  He looked at Eva, trying to make out her eyes in the semidarkness. Did she sense it too? That somebody was nearby, waiting, maybe listening?

  "Darling, let's talk some more about the myth of Daedalus. In the version I remember he-"

  "Not much more to the tale. After a while a Greek prince called Theseus arrived, to brave the labyrinth and do battle with the man-eating Minotaur. When he showed up, King Minos's beautiful daughter, Ariadne, instantly fell in love with him, naturally."

  "I love myths. They're always so realistic."

  "Well, he dumped her later, so I guess he did turn out to be a creep. But anyway, she persuaded Daedalus to give him a ball of string. He attached it to the door of the labyrinth and unwound it as he went in. After he killed the beast, he followed the twine back out, and escaped. With Ariadne. Unfortunately, when Minos discovered what had happened, he was so mad he locked the great chief architect in a tower. But Daedalus managed to get out, hoping to escape from the island. However, it wasn't going to be easy, since Minos had clamped down on all the harbors, having the ships searched. That's when Daedalus declared, 'Minos may control the land and the sea, but he doesn't control the regions above.' And he constructed some wings, attached them to his shoulders with wax, and soared away into space. First human ever. Up till then, only the gods could just leave the earth anytime they wanted."

  "What?" She'd stopped dead still.

  "Daedalus. You remember. The first person to fly, mankind's ago-old dream. In fact, a few years back some Americans duplicated the feat with a human-powered glider. They made it from here on Crete over to the island of-"

  "No, you said 'space.' "

  "Did I?" He smiled. "Call it poetic license. But why not? Back in those days I guess the skies themselves could be considered outer space, if they even knew such a thing existed." Then he looked at her and sobered. "What's-?"

  "It's-it's just something that's been in the back of my mind." She moved on.

  With a shrug, he took another drink of the ouzo and followed her on down the hall toward the famous Throne Room. He was bracing himself now for what was next.

  Its walls were decorated with frescoes of the massive Minoan body shields, shaped as a figure-eight, that signified the men's quarters of Knossos. And incised in stone above King Minos's wide alabaster throne was his fearsome emblem of authority, symbol of his domination of the ancient world.

  There it was. He looked around, reassuring himself that it was everywhere, just as he'd remembered. He'd also been right about something else. It was precisely the same, right down to the smooth curves of the blade, as the "watermark" that had been on the sheet of "paper" Alex had given him. Almost four thousand years old, it was the insignia of the new Daedalus Corporation.

  The Minoan double ax.

  Wednesday 6:12 p.m.

  The dusk was settling majestically over Tokyo, after a rare smogless day. The view was particularly inspiring from the fifty-fifth-floor penthouse of the granite-clad Mino Industries building. The corner office was an earth-tone tan, carpeted in a thick wool shag the color of elm bark. The heavy doors at the far end of the office were emblazoned with a two-bladed ax, and in the center of the wide expanse between the door and the single desk, on a gleaming steel pedestal, stood a meter-long model of an airplane more advanced than any the world had yet seen.

  The temperature of the room was kept at a constant 59 degrees Fahrenheit, a frigid comfort-accommodation for the tawny, eight-foot snow leopard named Neko now resting on a pallet beside the window, gazing down. Remnant of an endangered species, she'd been rescued as a starving, motherless cub during an expedition in the Himalayas and raised for the past six years as a pampered pet of the penthouse's owner.

  Along the sound-proof walls were gilt-framed photographs of a Japanese executive jogging with Jimmy Carter in Tokyo, golfing with Ferdinand Marcos in Manila, receiving an accolade from Linus Pauling in San Francisco, dining with Henry Kissinger in Paris. He was the same man now sitting behind the massive slate desk.

  "You believe he was an American?" Tanzan Mino, president and CEO of the Daedalus Corporation, a paper creation of the Mino Industries Group, adjusted his pale silk tie and examined the subordinate now standing before him. He had just turned seventy-three, but the energy in his youthful frame made him seem at least a decade younger, perhaps two.

  "Hai, Mino-sama." The other man, in a dark suit, bowed. "We have reason to believe the Russian has . . . they were seen exchanging an e
nvelope."

  "And your people failed to intercept either of them?"

  The man bowed again, more deeply. "An attempt was made, but unfortunately the Soviet escaped, and the American . . . my people were unsure what action to take. We do know the funds have not been deposited as scheduled."

  Tanzan Mino sighed and brushed at his silver temples. His dark eyes seemed to penetrate whatever they settled upon, and the uncomfortable vice-president now standing in front of him was receiving their full ire.

  Back in the old days, when he directed the Mino-gumi clan's operations at street level, finger joints were severed for this kind of incompetence. But now, now the organization had modernized; he operated in a world beholden to computers and financial printouts. It was a new age, one he secretly loathed.

  He'd been worried from the start that difficulties might arise. The idiocy of Japan's modern financial regulations had driven him to launder the payoffs thoroughly. In the old days, when he was Washington's man, controlling the Liberal Democratic Party, no meddling tax agency would have dared audit any of his shadow companies. But after a bastard maverick named Vance-with the CIA, no less!-had blown the whistle on his and the Company's clandestine understanding . . .

  He had arranged the initial financing for the project, as well as the political accommodations, with letters of credit, promissory notes, and his word. And, eventually, if need be, the full financing could be raised by partial liquidation of his massive real estate holdings in Hawaii.

  But the near-term expenses-and the necessary payoffs in the LDP-that was different. In Japanese kosaihi, the "money politics" of gifts and outright bribes, secrecy was everything. He remembered how he'd had to arrange for the mighty Yoshio Kodama, a powerbroker who had once shared his virtual ownership of the Japanese Diet and the Japanese press, to accept responsibility for the CIA-Lockheed bribe affair. It was a close call. That had involved a mere twelve million of American cash to Japanese politicians, but it had changed the rules forever. These days- particularly after the Recruit debacle had disgraced the LDP yet again-money had to be laundered and totally untraceable.

  Promises had been made, schedules signed off, the veil of total secrecy kept intact. Everything was arranged. The Soviets, incompetents that they were, had no inkling of the larger plan.

  Now it all came down to the funds. He needed the money at once.

  He turned in his chair, pressed a gray button on his desk, and watched the window blinds disappear into their frame. Neko rose from her languorous pose, stretched her spotted white fur, and gazed down. This was the panoramic view she loved almost as much as he did, for her perhaps it was the memory of a snowy Himalayan crest; for him it was the sprawl of Tokyo, the elegant peak of Mount Fuji to the west, the bustling port of Yokohama to the south. From this vantage atop the powerful financial world of Japan, Tanzan Mino wanted two final triumphs to crown his career. He wanted to see Japan become the twenty-first century's leader in space, and he wanted his country finally to realize its historic wartime objective: economic domination of the continent of Asia, from Siberia to Malaysia, with freedom forever from the specter of energy and resource dependence. The plan now in motion would achieve both.

  He revolved again in his chair, ignored the subordinate standing before his desk, and studied the model. It was a perfect replica, one-hundredth the actual size, of the spaceplane that would revolutionize the future, the symbol that would soon signify his country's transcendence in the high-tech age to come.

  Then his gaze shifted.

  "You were 'unsure what action to take'?" He leaned back, touching his fingertips together, and sadness entered his voice. "You know, there was a time when I thought Japan might still one day recapture the spirit we have lost, the spirit of bushido. In centuries gone by, a samurai never had to ask himself 'what action to take.' He acted intuitively. Instinctively. Do you understand?"

  "Hai, wakarimasu." The man bowed stiffly. "I am prepared to funnel trillions of yen into this project before it is over. Legitimate, clean funds. So the sum now in question is almost inconsequential. However, it is the bait we need to set the trap, and it must be handled exactly as I have specified."

  "Hai, Mino-sama." Again he bowed.

  "The next time you stand before me, I want to hear that the laundered Soviet funds have been deposited in the Shokin Gaigoku Bank as agreed. You have one week." He slowly turned back to the window. "Now, must I tell you what you have to do?" The man bowed low one last time. He knew exactly.