Project Daedalus

by Thomas Hoover

  Chapter Six

  Thursday 2:51 a.m.

  A very wet, very annoyed Michael Vance rapped on the door of Zeno Stantopoulos's darkened kafeneion. He'd walked the lonely back road into Iraklion in the dark, guiding himself by the rain-battered groves of plane trees, olive, and wild pear, trying to figure out what in hell was happening.

  To begin with, members of the intelligence services of major nations didn't go around knocking each other off; that was an unwritten rule among spooks. Very bad taste. Maybe you tried to get somebody to talk with sodium pentathol or scopolamine, but guns were stupid and everybody knew it. You could get killed with one of those things, for godsake.

  So this operation, whatever it was, was outside the system. Good. That was the way he had long since learned to work.

  There was a lot on his mind, and the walk, the isolation, gave him a chance to think over some of the past. In particular, the austere Cretan countryside brought to mind an evening five years ago when he'd traveled this little-used route with his father, Michael Vance, Sr. That occasion, autumn brisk with a first glimmering of starlight, they'd laughed and joked for much of the way, the old man occasionally tapping the packed earth sharply with his cane, almost as though he wanted to establish final authority over the island and make it his, once and for all. Finally, the conversation turned serious.

  "Michael, don't tell me you never miss academic life," his father had finally brought himself to say, masking the remark by casually brushing aside yet another pale stone with his cane. "More and more, your theory about the palace is gaining credence. You may find yourself famous all over again. It's an enviable position."

  "Maybe one turn in the snake pit was enough," he smiled. "Academia and I form a sort of mutual disrespect society."

  "Well," his father had gone on, "the choice is yours, but you know I'll be retiring from Penn at the end of this term. Naturally there'll be some vicious in-house jockeying to fill my shoes, but if you'd like, I could probably arrange things with the search committee."

  Vindicated at last, he'd realized. It seemed the only sin in academia greater than being wrong was being right too soon. But the small-minded universe of departmental politics was the last thing he wanted in his life. These days he played in the big time.

  "I'm afraid I'll have to pass."

  "I suppose university life is too limiting for you now," the old man had finally said, grudgingly but admiringly.

  He'd said that, and nothing more. Two months later he'd had a second stroke and retired permanently. These days he grew orchids in Darien, Connecticut, and penned impassioned longhand letters to the Times every day or so, just to keep his capacity for moral outrage honed.

  Vance had definitely gone his own way. First he'd published a book that rocked the scholarly world; then he'd compounded that offense by walking out on the brouhaha that followed and going free-lance, starting his own business. Next he'd become involved with the Washington intelligence community, and finally he'd begun working with the Association of Retired Mercenaries. It was a universe so alien to his father it might as well have been on Mars. But if the old man was disappointed that Michael Vance, Jr., hadn't turned out the way he'd planned, he still took pride in his son.

  Now, though, Stuttgart and the restoration of Phaistos would have to be put on hold till the latest game with Novosty was sorted out. The protocol. It was still running through his mind. Could there be some sort of alliance cooking between the Soviets and the Japanese mob? What in hell . . . ?

  "Michael, she is here." A hoarse whisper emerged as the rickety wooden door of the kafeneion edged open. Zeno tugged down his nightshirt and carefully edged it wider, squinting out at the street. "Come in. Quickly. Before you are seen."

  So his guess had been right: she was avoiding the hotel. Good move. Smart and typical of Eva. She was handling this one exactly right.

  He stepped through the door. "Where is she now?"

  "She's in back. Adriana gave her something to make her sleep." Zeno was pulling out a chair from one of the empty tables. The room was shrouded in darkness, and the stale odor of the kitchen permeated the air. "She was not herself, Michael. What happened? She claimed someone was trying to murder her. At the palace. Did you two-?"

  "We tried throwing a party, but it started getting crowded." He looked around. "I could use some of that raki of yours. I just had a close encounter with a guy you wouldn't sit down next to on a bus. He refused to leave politely so . . . I had to make him disappear. Bad scene."

  "You killed him?"

  "He was shooting, at Eva and me. Very unsociable." He glanced toward the back of the darkened room. "Zeno, our party guest tonight was-you're not going to believe this- a Japanese hood. Tell me something. Is the Yakuza trying to get a foothold in Crete? You know, maybe buying up property? That's their usual style. It's more or less how they first moved in on Hawaii."

  "Michael, this country is so poor, there's nothing here for gangsters to steal." He laughed. "Let me tell you a secret. If a stranger came around here and tried to muscle me, or any of my friends, he would not live to see the sun tomorrow. Even the Sicilian Cosa Nostra is afraid of us. Crete is still a small village in many ways, in spite of the crazy tourists. We tolerate strangers, even open our homes to them if they are well behaved, but we know each other's secrets like a family. So, to answer your question, the idea of a Japanese syndicate coming here is impossible to imagine. You know that as well as I do."

  "That's what I thought. But I saw a kobun from the biggest Yakuza organization in Japan tonight. I know because I had a little tango with their godfather a few years back. Anyway, what's one of his street men doing here, shooting at Eva and me?" He paused as the implications of the night began to sink in. "This scene could start to get rough."

  "You did nothing more than anybody here would have done." He looked pensive in the dim light. "Years ago, when the colonels and their junta seized Greece, I once had to-" He hesitated. "Sometimes we do things we don't like to talk about afterwards. But you always remember the eyes of a man you must kill. You dream about them."

  "Our party lighting was pretty minimal. It was too dark to make out his eyes."

  "Then you are luckier than you know." He glanced away. "This was not somebody you knew from another job, Michael? Perhaps the mercenary group you sometimes-"

  "Never saw the guy before in my life, swear to God. Anyway, I think it was Eva he really wanted. But whatever's going on, I have to get her out of Crete now, before whoever it is finds her again."

  "I agree." He was turning toward the living quarters in the rear. "You should stay here tonight, and then tomorrow we can get you both passage on the car ferry to Athens, off the island. I will take care of everything. Tickets, all of it." He returned carrying two tumblers of raki. After setting them on the table, he continued. "I am very worried for her, Michael. And for you. We all make enemies, but-" He took a sip from his glass. "By the way, do you have a pistol?"

  "Not with me." He reached for the glass, wishing it was tequila-straight, with a twist of lime-and he was back on the Ulysses, trimming the genoa. "That's a mistake I may not make again soon."

  "Then I will arrange for one. Like I said, everything. I have many friends. Do not worry." He drank again. "By the way, she asked me go to the hotel and get something for you. She seemed to think it was important. One of your modern American inventions. She had it locked in the safe at the desk. And she gave me money to pay for her room." He sighed. "Why would she waste money on a hotel when she could have stayed here with us?"

  "What is it?"

  "I think it's a computer, though it's barely the size of a briefcase. Part of the new age that mercifully has passed us by. I have it in back, with the rest of her things." His voice disappeared into the darkened kitchen. Moments later he reappeared carrying Eva's laptop. With a worried look he settled it gingerly on the table. "Do you have any idea why she had this with her?"

  "I think she may have something stored in here
." He settled it on the table and flipped up the top. Then he felt along the side for the switch, and a second later the screen glowed blue. After the operating system was in place, he punched up the files.

  A long line of names filled the screen, arranged alphabetically. But nothing seemed right. It was a stream of unclassified NSA memos, and then a lot of personal letters. He resisted the temptation to call them up and delve into her private life. How many men . . . ?

  Stick to business. Save the fun for later. Where's the file?

  Then he noticed the very first alphanumeric.

  "Ackerman."

  Hold on, he thought, wasn't that the name of the NSA guy she said gave her the disk? He highlighted the file on the screen and hit Retrieve. An instant later it appeared.

  Yep, this one had to be it. Clearly an NSA document, very carefully stored.

  (NSCID No. 37896) .Page 1 of 28

  Dept: Rl/SIGINT

  Classification: TOP SECRET

  Authorization: Dept/H/O/D only

  Analyst: Eva Borodin

  Init: EKB

  Encryption: PES/UNKNOWN

  Reference: Classified

  DAEDALUS PROTOCOL

  The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and Mino Industries Group, hereinafter referred to as the Parties;

  MINDFUL of their obligation to strive for technological progress in both nations,

  CONVINCED that the technical and financial agreements specified in this Protocol will serve the long-range strategic interests of both Parties,

  CONSCIOUS that the success of Project Daedalus will lead to increased cooperation and mutual understanding between the peoples of the USSR and Japan,

  HAVE HEREBY AGREED AS FOLLOWS:

  Article I

  4659830481867394210786980498

  67326155979809302918709807985

  78367251426478966596983748586 70309458969709805493817384054

  01290487571092383614254349501

  92947664778102983785785769248

  59850482127385095607097107090

  1613386089274 765608021834860 . . .

  That was it. The stream of numbers filled three pages, and then came Article II. Thus it went, for ten articles. As he scrolled up page after page, he realized that the numbers continued for the rest of the document.

  She was right. Outside of occasional repetitions, there seemed to be no real pattern. He'd seen a lot of encryptions in the old days, but this one didn't look like anything standard.

  He sat staring at the screen. Mino Industries Group. That explained the Mino-gumi goon. The godfather was planning his biggest play yet, global.

  But what was it? What was in the deal? This was something he had to see.

  Eva had said she tried the Data Encryption Standard, the DES system, and got nowhere. Which meant NSA had been foiled. How had he done it?

  DES was a procedure whereby data were passed through a series of eight S-boxes, actually mathematical operations, that when combined with a unique user key converted it into what appeared to be alphanumeric garbage. The receiver also had a copy of the key, which could be used in combination with the same set of mathematical operations to convert it back.

  He knew that back when DES was being invented by IBM, the National Security Agency had purposely sabotaged Big Blue's original plan to make it uncrackable. NSA had insisted that the key, a string of zeroes and ones, be limited to 56 bits, rather than the proposed 128 bits, which would have made the system so complex it would have been safe forever. The reason, of course, was that NSA didn't want an unbreakable cipher loose on the planet; after all, their primary business was reading other people's mail. IBM didn't know it at the time, but the smaller key was already a pushover for NSA's Cray supercomputers, which could try a trillion random keys per second and routinely crack any 56-bit DES encryption in the world in half a day.

  Anybody familiar with the intelligence business was well aware of that. Which was, obviously, why somebody had turned to NSA.

  But Eva said she'd tried the usual random-key procedure and got nowhere. So what was the answer?

  His head was buzzing from the raki now, but he kept turning over in his mind the possibility that she'd been looking in the wrong place. Trying to find the DES key when in fact this encryption used some entirely different scheme.

  He rubbed at his temples and tried to run the scenario backward.

  Project Daedalus. The more he thought about it, the more . . .

  "Zeno." He looked up from the screen. "Do you still have that copy of Realm of the Spirit?" He'd sent the old Greek an autographed first edition the week it came out.

  "Your book, Michael? Of course I have it. I treasure it. It's in the bedroom, in back."

  "Mind getting it for me? I feel like a little light reading."

  "At four in the morning? Michael, I think-"

  "You know how it is when your mind gets filled up with garbage at bedtime."

  "You should be getting some sleep, like Eva. Tomorrow we have to-"

  "I need to relax a little first. And I need that book. There's a chart in the appendix guaranteed to put anybody to sleep."

  "Very well." He sighed, drank off the last of his raki, and pulled himself erect. "Sometimes you can be as headstrong as your father."

  As quiet settled over the room, Vance continued to stare at the screen. Why did he have a hunch he was right on this one? Could he really crack a cypher with a 486 portable when NSA's Cray supercomputers had bombed?

  Maybe. Stranger things had happened. The samurai swordsmen said you needed to know your opponent's mind. Here, in the waning hours before dawn in the middle of Crete, he was feeling a curious oneness with whoever had devised this random-looking string of numbers. He'd created number strings just like this himself, back before the CIA had come into his life.

  "Here it is, Michael. Adriana said Eva is still asleep. I don't know what she gave her, perhaps one of her old wives potions." He chuckled quietly. "That's one of the reasons I love her so much. When you get ancient like I am, it's good to be married to a nurse."

  Vance took the book and, in spite of himself, weighed it in his hand. What was it? maybe two pounds? The glistening dust jacket, unusual for a university book back in those days, was still pristine. He smiled, realizing it was unread.

  "Thanks." He finally remembered Zeno. "This should do the trick. Now why don't you go on to bed? I'll just stretch out here on a table when I get sleepy."

  "Michael, sometimes I think you are a madman." He shrugged, then turned to hobble back toward the bedroom. "Just don't answer the door, whatever you do."

  "Get some sleep. I'll be doing the same."

  "Then good night. May God give you rest." He was gone.

  Vance barely nodded, since he was already turning to the appendix of the book and switching on the dim overhead light. The volume brought back a world long lost for him. Now he wanted it back, if only for a moment.

  He flipped to Appendix C. There he'd reproduced, as a dutiful scholar should, the standard numerical correlates for the syllabary of Linear B.

  Mycenaen Syllabary (after Ventris)

  da qa sa je o ra

  01 16 31 46 61 76

  ro za qo pu pte ka

  02 17 32 47 62 77

  pa zo ti du ta qe

  03 18 33 48 63 78

  The numbers continued on to ninety. He checked the files and, sure enough, she had a Lotus data management system on the hard disk. He quickly structured a format for his matrix, then began coding in the sounds. The setup was simple, but the next part would need some programming. The numbers in the protocol had to be converted to sounds. It looked easy, but what if they'd been deliberately garbled somehow? He'd be no better off than before.

  Think positive.

  As he finished coding in the grid, he could hear the tentative stirrings of early morning Iraklion outside. Trucks were starting up, birds coming alive. He began noticing the lack of sleep, but he pushed it aside and t
ook another sip of raki. Just keep going, he told himself. You're about to find out if great minds really do think alike. . . .

  "Darling, what in the world are you doing with my computer?" The voice was like a whisper over his shoulder.

  "How about checking to see if you've got any video games?" He turned around, startled in spite of himself. What had woken her? She was probably wired. "Eva, why did you take off tonight? And what was that nonsense you were yelling at me?"

  "Maybe it wasn't nonsense. Alex said you were working for him. He said you two were partners. It's not really true, is it?" She slumped into a chair. She was wearing a light dressing gown, her hair tousled. With a groan she rubbed at her eyes. "I don't need this."

  "You can forget about Alex. He's playing way over his head. It's always bad judgment to underestimate the other team's strengths." He reached for her. "You've just got to decide who you trust. You might start with Zeno. He's offered to help me get you out of Crete."

  "And go where?" She moved against him. "Michael, they found me here. They'll find me anywhere."

  "Not if we turn this scene around and take the action to them. But that's the next move. Right now, you just have to be out of Crete while I do a little checking. How about flying to Miami, grabbing a plane down to Nassau, then-"

  "You're going to get me on the Ulysses or die trying, aren't you."

  He decided to let the crack pass. It was true, however. If she ever saw it, he was sure she'd start to understand.

  "You know," she went on, "this afternoon I was merely worried. Now I'm actually frightened. Guess I'm not as brave as I thought. I'm sorry about tonight, running off like that."

  "Not the first time I've had a woman give me the gate." He laughed, then reached out and stroked her hair, missing the long tresses of the old days. "Now, you can help me out with something. Does the name Yakuza mean anything to you?"

  "What are you talking about?" She studied him, puzzled.

  "I probably shouldn't tell you this, maybe it'll just upset your morning, but that wiseguy who broke up our party last night was a Japanese hood. From the Mino-gumi syndicate. Back home they're Numero Uno. They run Tokyo and Osaka and they've got half the Liberal Democratic Party in their pocket. Then there's the old CIA connection, from days gone by."

  "How do you know?"

  "After you took off, our friend dropped in again. Uninvited as usual. That's when Novosty finished him off with his Uzi and I got a closer look."

  "Alex killed-! My God, that makes three."

  "By actual count. He's gone a little trigger happy in his old age. That or he's very, very scared." He rubbed at the scratch on his neck, remembering. "What if it's the Japanese mob that's behind this? They have the funding, that's for sure. Among other things, they run consumer loans in Japan, legalized loan sharking. They've got more money than God."

  "This is too much. I don't know anything about . . ." She rose, trembling. "I'll go with you to Nassau, Michael. Let's take the Ulysses and just disappear in the middle of the Atlantic."

  "It's a deal." He beamed. "But first we've got to answer some questions. You say the Yakuza are not part of anything you know about?"

  "I'm only vaguely aware they exist."

  "And you don't know who runs Mino Industries?"

  "Never heard of it before."

  "It's a bunch of nice, clean-cut mobsters. Problem is, one of the owner's kobun, street men, tried to kill us tonight. Maybe we're finally getting a little light at the end of the tunnel." He looked her over. Eva was always beautiful in the mornings. There was something wanton about her this time of day. "Come here a minute."

  He took her and cradled her in his arms, then brushed his lips against her brow. "You okay?"

  "I think so." She took a deep breath.

  "Never knew you to quit just because things got tough." He drew her around. "You're the cryptography expert. Why don't we try to find out what kind of phonetics Ventris's numerical correlates for Linear B would produce from these numbers?"

  "What are you talking about?" She rubbed at her eyes.

  "You know, in my travels I've discovered something. A great mind often has a touch of poetry. Sometimes, in order to think like the other guy, you need to be a little artistic. So, I wonder . . . about that cipher."

  "You mean-?"

  "Just a crazy, early morning idea." He patted the keyboard of the laptop. "What if the mind behind it is using a system no computer in the world would ever have heard of?"

  "There's no such thing, believe me."

  "Maybe yes, maybe no." He flipped open his book to the central section, a glossy portfolio of photos. He'd shot them himself with an old Nikon. "Take a look at this and refresh your memory."

  She looked down at the photo of a large Minoan clay jar from the palace, a giant pithoi, once a container for oil or unguents or water for the bath. Along the sides were inscribed rows of wavy lines and symbols. It was the Minoan written language, which, along with cuneiform and hieroglyphics, was among the oldest in the world. "You mean Linear B."

  "Language of King Minos. As you undoubtedly remember, it's actually a syllabary, and a damned good one. Each of these little pictures is a syllable, a consonant followed by a vowel. Come on, this was your thing, way back when. Look, this wavy flag here reads mi, and here, this little pitchfork with a tail reads no." He glanced up. "Anyway, surely you recall that Linear B has almost a hundred of these syllable signs. But Ventris assigned them numbers since they're so hard to reproduce in typeface. For example, this series here, mi-no-ta-ro reads numerically as-" he checked the appendix, "13-52-59-02. Run them together and minotaro reads 13525902. And just like the early Greeks, the Minoans didn't insert a space between words. If somebody was using Linear B, via Ventris' system, the thing would come out looking like an unintelligible string of numbers."

  "You don't really-"

  "You say you've tried everything else. NSA's Crays drew a blank. Maybe you were looking for some fancy new encryption system when it was actually one so old nobody would ever think of it. Almost four thousand years old, to be exact."

  "Darling, that's very romantic. You're improving in the romance department." She gazed at him a second, then flashed a wry smile. "But I can't say the same for the good-sense arena. No offense, but that's like the kind of thing kids write to us suggesting. Nobody employs anything remotely that simple these days."

  "I knew you'd think I was crazy. You're not the first." He rose. "But humor me. Just slice those number sequences into pairs and see what they look like phonetically. Something to take your mind off all the madness around here."

  "Well, all right." She sighed, then settled unsteadily into the rickety chair he'd just vacated. "Make you a proposition, sweetie. Get me some coffee, nice and strong, and I'll forget I have good sense and play with this a little."

  "You're a trooper." He turned and headed for the kitchen. "I remember that about you. Not to mention great in bed."

  "We strive for excellence in all things."

  Just as he reached the doorway, the kitchen light flicked on. It was Adriana, in blue robe and furry slippers, now reaching up to retrieve her coffee pan.

  While Eva was typing away behind him, he leaned against the doorframe in his still-wet clothes to watch a Greek grandmother shuffle about her private domain preparing a traditional breakfast. He suspected no male hand had ever touched those sparkling utensils. The Old World had its ways, yesterday and forever.

  While he drowsed against the doorjamb, the aroma of fresh Greek coffee began filling the room. Sarakin. That was the Japanese name for their homegrown loan sharks, the so-called salary-men financiers. He knew that the Yakuza's four largest sarakin operations gave out more consumer loans than all of Japan's banks combined. If you added to that the profits in illegal amphetamines, prostitution, bars, shakedowns of businesses, protection rackets . . . the usual list, and you were talking multi multibillions. The major problem was washing all that dirty money. They routinely invested in respec
table but losing propositions abroad, on the sound theory that one dollar cleaned was worth two unlaundered.

  Was that what the Soviet scam was all about? Money from the Japanese mob being laundered through loans to the USSR? What better way to wash it? Nobody would ever bother asking where it came from.

  But there was one major problem with that neat scenario. Politically the Yakuza were ultra-rightist hardliners. So why would they expose their money with the Soviets, laundered or not? Particularly now, with so much political instability there-hardliners, reformers, nationalists. Somehow it didn't compute.

  "Michael, come here a second." The voice had an edge of triumph.

  "What?" He glanced around groggily.

  "Just come here and take a look at this." She was staring at the screen.

  He turned and walked over, still entranced by the heady, pungent essence of fresh Greek coffee now flooding the room. "Is it anything-?"

  "Just look at it and tell me what you think." She leaned back from the screen and shifted the Zenith toward him. The ice-blue letters cast an eerie glow through the dull morning light. The color reflected off his eyes, matching them.

  "You did it already?"

  "I started with a one-to-one replacement of numbers with letters. But it's sequence-inverted, which means I had to . . . anyway, what do think so far? Am I a genius or what?"

  He drew a chair next to the screen and started to examine it. But at that moment Adriana set a tray of coffee down beside the computer, steaming and fresh, together with dark figs and two bowls of yogurt.

  "Kafe evropaiko," she commanded, then thrust a cup into his hand.

  "Malista, efcharisto." He absently nodded his thanks, took a sip of the steaming brew, then returned his attention to the screen.

  At first he thought he was just groggy, his vision playing tricks, but then the string of letters began to come into focus. Incredible!

  "Okay, what about this part here," he asked, pointing to the fourth line, where the letters turned to nonsensical garbage, "and then down here again?"

  "That's what I was talking about. The interlacing switches there. It happens every hundred numbers. They started by taking the second fifty digits and interlacing them back into the first fifty. Then they switched the algorithm and interlaced the third fifty digits ahead, into the fourth fifty, but backwards. Then it repeats again."

  "You figured all that out just fooling around with it?"

  "Darling, I do this for a living, for godsake. After a while you have good instincts." She tapped her fingers nervously on the wooden table, then remembered the coffee and reached for a cup. "Nice little trick. Standard but nice. Every so often you fold the data back into themselves somehow. That way there are no repetitions of number sequences-for words that are used a lot-to give you away. But once you've played with this stuff as much as I have . . . anyway, it's always the first thing I check for."

  "Congratulations."

  "Tell me the truth." She looked at him, sipping her coffee. "Can you really still read this? It's been years."

  "Memory like an elephant. Though you may have to help me along now and then." He pointed. "Look. I think that word's modern Greek. They've mixed it in where there's not an old word for something." He pushed around the computer. "Want to run the whole data file through your system? Clean it up?"

  "My pleasure." She was clearing the screen. "I can't believe it just fell apart like this. The reason our Crays didn't crack it was it's too simple by half."

  He reached for his coffee, feeling a surge of satisfaction. His hunch had been dead on. Whoever came up with this idea for an encryption must have been a fan of ancient Greek history, and a knowledgeable one. What better cipher for Project Daedalus communiques than the language Daedalus himself used? They'd taken that four-thousand-year-old tongue, an archaic forerunner of ancient Greek, and then scrambled it using a mathematical algorithm. Mino Industries was communicating with the Soviets using an encoded version of Minoan Linear B.

  It was absolutely poetic. It also appeared, upon first examination, to be very naive. Yet upon reflection it turned out to be brilliant. You convert a totally unheard-of language to numbers, throw in a few encryption tricks, and the result is something that would drive all the hotdog DES-oriented supercomputers crazy. All those chips would be trying trillions of keys when there actually was no key. Yes, you had to admit it was inspired.

  Except the Daedalus crowd was about to experience a problem, a small headache. Make that a major headache. Because their secret protocol was about to become headlines. He figured that ought to go a long way toward stopping any more shooting.

  "Okay. It's humming." She reached for her yogurt. "This time around all the garbage will be gone." She took a bite, then burst out laughing. "You know, this is wonderful, working with you. Darling, I've just decided. Let's do something together, maybe live on the Ulysses for a while. I might even get to like it. It sounds romantic."

  "I'm still looking for the romance in life."

  "Well, love, you've found it. It's me." She leaned over and kissed him on the lips. "End of quest."

  "Thought I'd never hear you say that. But first you have to help me translate this. I'm over a decade out of date. My modern Greek's a little rusty too, and a lot of the technical terms in this look to be transliterated-"

  "No, sweetie, that's not the first thing we have to do. The first thing is to make sure you've got a separate copy of anything you're working with. Not in the computer. I'll spare you my horror stories about erased files, hard disks going down, all the rest." She was rising, energized. "Cardinal computer rule number one. Always dupe anything you're working on, no matter how sure you are nothing can go wrong. Believe me."

  "Sounds good." He looked up. "What are you doing?"

  "I need that disk I showed you tonight. We can use it for the backup. It's in my purse, which I now realize I left in the car when I came in. I was slightly crazy at the time." She was turning. "God, it seems like ages."

  "Look, why don't you let me-?"

  "You don't know where I parked it. My secret hiding place."

  "Maybe we ought to send Zeno, or Adriana-"

  "Just sit tight. Only be a minute." She wrapped her coat about her and, before he could protest, disappeared out the door, humming.

  She was a marvel. Everything he'd remembered.

  "Are you still awake?" Zeno was trudging into the room, still wearing his frayed nightshirt.

  "We just solved the riddle of the sphinx, old friend. Except now we have to translate it."

  "You should be sleeping, Michael. Go now, catch an hour or so. I will start making arrangements. Get tickets for you both on the car ferry to Athens, a pistol, maybe new passports if you want. We have work to do." He reached and took the cup of coffee Adriana was urging on him.

  "All right. As soon as she gets back."

  "What?" He froze, then looked toward the back. "What do you mean? I thought she was still asleep."

  "She went out to the car, wherever it is."

  "I wish she had asked me. I would have been happy-"

  "You know how she is. There's no stopping her when she gets rolling."

  "This is not good." He turned and called to Adriana to bring his trousers and shoes. "We must find her."

  "You're right. It was stupid. Damned stupid." He was getting up. "Let's do it together."

  Thursday 6:28 a.m.

  The morning air was sharp and she wished she'd grabbed one of Adriana's black knit shawls before going out. Could she pass for one of those stooped Greek peasant women? she wondered. Not likely. She shivered and pulled her thin coat around her.

  The rain was over now, leaving the air moist and fragrant, but the early morning gloom had an ominous undertone. They'd found the key to open the first box, but the message inside still had to be translated. What was it? What could possibly be in the protocol that would make somebody want to kill her?

  She stared down the vacant street leading away from the square
, a mosaic of predawn shadows, and tried to think.

  Alex Novosty was the classic middleman, that much was a given. But then she'd known that for years. Yes, she'd known about Alex Novosty all her life-his work for the KGB, his laundering of Techmashimport funds. She knew about it because they were second cousins. Fortunately their family tie was distant enough not to have made its way into NSA's security file, but around the Russian expatriate dinner tables of Brighton Beach and Oyster Bay, Alex was very well known indeed. He was the Romanov descendant who'd sold out to the Soviets, an unforgivable lapse of breeding.

  But for all that, he wasn't an assassin. For him to do what he'd done tonight could only mean one thing: he was terrified. Very out of character. But why?

  The answer to that wasn't hard: He must be mixed up in Project Daedalus, whatever it was, right up to his shifty eyeballs. But what about Michael? What did Alex want from him?

  The answer to that could go a lot of ways. When she first met Michael Vance, Jr., she'd been smitten by the fact he was so different. Always kidding around, yet tough as steel when anybody crossed him. A WASP street fighter. She liked that a lot. He was somebody she felt she could depend on, no matter what.

  She still remembered her first sight of Mike as though it were yesterday. She was taking notes on Etruscan pottery in a black notebook, standing in a corner of the Yale art gallery on Chapel Street, when she looked up and-no, it couldn't be. She felt herself just gawking.

  He'd caught her look and strolled over with a puzzled smile. "Is my tie crooked, or-" Then he laughed. "Name's Mike Vance. I used to be part of this place. How about you?"

  "Vance?" She'd just kept on staring, still not quite believing her eyes. "My thesis adviser at Penn was . . . you look just like him."

  And he did. The same sharp chin, the same twinkle in the blue eyes. Even when he was angry, as Mike certainly had been that day, he seemed to be having fun.

  Thus it began.

  At first they were so right for each other it seemed as though she'd known Michael Vance for approximately a hundred years, give or take. She'd been one of his father's many ardent disciples, and after finishing her master's at Penn, she'd gone on to become a doctoral candidate at Yale, where she'd specialized in the linguistics of the ancient Aegean languages. She'd known but forgotten that Michael Vance, Sr., had a son who was finishing his own doctorate at Yale, writing a dissertation about Minoan Crete.

  That day in the museum he was steaming, declaring he'd dropped by one last time as part of a ritualistic, formal farewell to archaeology. The decision was connected with the hostile reception being given a book he'd just published, a commercial version of his dissertation. As of that day he'd decided to tell academia to stuff it. He'd be doing something else for a living. There'd been feelers from some agency in D.C. about helping trace hot money.

  In the brief weeks that followed they grew inseparable, the perfect couple. One weekend they'd scout the New England countryside for old-fashioned inns, the next they'd drive up to Boston to spend a day in the Museum of Fine Arts, then come back and argue and make love till dawn in her New Haven apartment. During all those days and nights, she came very close to talking him out of quitting university life. Close, but she didn't.

  He had put off everything for a couple of months, and they had traveled the world-London, Greece, Morocco, Moscow. Once their parents even met, at Count Sergei Borodin's sprawling Oyster Bay home. It was a convocation of the Russian Nobility Association, with three hundred guests in attendance, and the air rang with Russian songs and balalaikas. Michael Vance, Sr., who arrived in his natty bowler, scarcely knew what to make of all the Slavic exuberance.

  Shortly after that, the intensity of Michael became too much for her. She felt herself being drawn into his orbit, and she wanted an orbit of her own. The next thing she knew, he'd departed for the Caribbean; her father had died; and she'd gone back to work on her own doctorate.

  Michael. He was driven, obsessive, always determined to do what he wanted, just as she was. But the tension that likeness brought to their relationship those many years ago now made everything seem to click. Why? she wondered.

  Maybe it was merely as simple as life cycles. Maybe back then they were just out of synch. He'd already survived his first midlife crisis, even though he was hardly thirty. When they split up, she'd been twenty-five and at the beginning of a campaign to test herself, find out what she could do.

  Well, she thought, she'd found out. She was good, very good. So now what?

  She was relieved to see the car was still parked on the side street, actually a little alley, where she'd left it. Thinking more clearly now, she realized she'd been a trifle careless, stashing the car in the first location she could find and then running for Zeno's.

  As she headed down the alley in between the white plaster houses, she suddenly felt her heart stop. Someone was standing next to the Saab, a dark figure waiting. She watched as it suddenly moved briskly toward her.

  Alex Novosty.

  "What?" She couldn't believe her eyes.

  "Budetya ostorozhyi!" He whispered the warning as he raised his hand and furtively tried to urge her back.

  "Kak! Shto-?" She froze. "How did you find the car?"

  "The hotel. They directed us to a kafeneion near here, but then I noticed your car. I thought . . ." He moved out of the shadows, quickly, still speaking in Russian. "Just tell me where you have the copies of the protocol, quickly. Maybe I can still handle it."

  "Handle what?" That's when she saw the two other men, in dark overcoats, against the shadow of the building.

  "The . . . situation." His eyes were intense. "They want it back, all copies. I've tried to tell them that killing you won't solve anything, but-" He glanced back with a small shiver. "You must tell them Michael has a copy, stall them."

  "It's true. He does."

  "No! Then say there's a copy back in your office. Just let me try and-"

  "Alex, I'm not going to play any more of your games."

  "Please," he continued in a whisper, "don't contradict anything I say. Let me do the talking. I'll-"

  "You're in it with them, aren't you?" She tried to push past. "Well, you can tell your friends we're onto their 'project.' If anything happens to me, Michael will track them down and personally take them apart. Tell them that."

  "You don't understand." He caught her arm. "One of their people was killed tonight."

  "The one trying to shoot Michael and me, you mean?" She was trying to calm the quaver in her voice.

  "He was killed by the KGB. I had nothing to do with-"

  "Is that what you told them?"

  "That's the way it happened. There was an argument."

  "Over what?"

  "Everybody wants you. It's the protocol." His look darkened. "Eva, they are in no mood for niceties."

  "Neither am I." She noticed the two men were now moving toward them. One was taller and seemed to be in charge, but they both were carrying what looked like small-caliber automatic weapons.

  The protocol, whatever it was, was still in code. She didn't know what she didn't know. How could she bargain?

  It was too late to think about it now. Their faces were hard and smooth, with the cold eyes of men who killed on command. My God, she thought, what had Michael said about the Mino-gumi?

  The Japanese mob.

  The taller man, she was soon to learn, was Kazuo Ina- gawa, who had been a London-based kobun for the Mino-gumi for the past decade. He had a thin, pasty face and had once been first kobun for their entire Osaka organization, in charge of gambling and nightclub shakedowns. Even in the early dawn light, he wore sunglasses, masking his eyes.

  The shorter one was Takahashi Takenaka, whose pockmarked face was distinguished by a thin moustache, an aquiline nose, and the same sunglasses.

  Alex, she realized, must have lied to them, covering up what really happened out at the palace. Now he was bluffing for his life.

  "You can just tell them I don't know a
nything about it." She felt the cold air closing in.

  "Eva, that's impossible. They know you were given the protocol. Now where is it?"

  He clearly wanted her to say it was somewhere else. But why bother?

  "It's in the car. In my purse." She pointed. "Why don't they just go ahead and take it? By the way, it's still encrypted."

  She fumbled in her pockets. "Here's . . ."

  Then she realized she'd left the key in the car. There it dangled, inside the locked door. Her purse rested on the seat across from the driver's side.

  "Get it," Inagawa commanded his lieutenant. Takenaka bowed obediently, then turned and tried the door handle, without success.

  "So." He frowned.

  Inagawa muttered a curse and brutally slammed the butt of his automatic against the curved window. The sound of splintering glass rent the morning air.

  Quickly Novosty stepped forward and reached through to unlock the door. Then he pulled it open and leaned in.

  Why is he doing it? she wondered. Easy answer: He's trying to keep control of the situation.

  Whose side is he really on?

  Then he backed out and handed her the brown leather purse while he tried to catch her eye.

  She took it, snapped it open, and lifted out the gray computer disk. "There," she said as she handed it to Inagawa, "whatever's on it, you'll have to figure it out for yourself."

  "That can't be the only one," Novosty sputtered. "Surely there are other copies."

  "That's it, sweetheart."

  Inagawa turned it in his hand, then passed it to Takenaka and said something in Japanese. The other man took it, then barked "Hai" and bowed lightly.

  "Are you sure this is the only copy?" Inagawa asked.

  "The only one."

  He nodded to his lieutenant, who began screwing a dark silencer onto the barrel of his automatic.

  Oh my God, she thought. They're going to finish the job.

  "Wait." Novosty reached for his arm. "She's lying. This is a disk from a computer. There must be other copies."

  "Yes." She was finally coming to her senses. "There are plenty of other copies. In my computer. In-"

  "Where is it?" Inagawa looked at her.

  "It's-it's at the hotel. The Galaxy." She was trying desperately to think. "And then I left another-"

  "You're lying. We have been there. They said a tavern keeper came and took all your luggage." He was staring down the street, toward Zeno's place. "They also told us where he could be found. We will go there now."

  "My friends," Novosty interrupted again, "it would be most unwise to attempt any violence on a Greek national here. The consequences could be extremely awkward, for all of us."

  "We must retrieve it."

  "But why not do it the easy way?" He tried to smile. "There's another man here, traveling with her. We should work through him. I know he will deal. He's a professional."

  "Who is he?"

  "An American. If we hold her, keep her alive, we can use her to make him bring it to us. We can offer a trade."

  "No. We will just find him and take it." Inagawa started to move. "Now."

  "He's armed, my friends," Novosty continued evenly. "He's also experienced. There would be gunfire, I promise you. If that happened, you could have the entire street here filled with rifles in a minute. You do not know these people as I do. They still remember World War Two and the Resistance. Killing unfriendly foreigners became a way of life some of them have yet to forget."

  Alex is bluffing, she thought. Again. Michael doesn't have a gun. Does Zeno? Who knows?

  "Let me try and talk to him," Novosty continued. "Surely something can be worked out."

  "You will stay here, with us." Inagawa seized his arm, then turned and began a heated exchange with his partner. Again Takenaka bowed repeatedly, sucking in his breath and muttering hai. At last they seemed to arrive at a consensus, though it was the taller man who'd actually made the decision, whatever it was.

  "She comes with us."

  "Oh, no I don't." She looked at Novosty, who seemed defeated, then back at the Japanese. She suddenly realized she was on her own. Novosty had played all his cards. "If I don't reappear in Washington day after tomorrow, you'll have the entire U.S. National Security Agency looking for me. People know I'm here. So think about that."

  "That is not our concern." Inagawa reached for her. "We do not work for the American government." Then he turned to Novosty. "Tell your friend that this woman will be released when we have all copies of the protocol. All. Do you understand?"

  "But how can I tell him if you won't let me-?"

  "That is your problem."

  "Perhaps . . . perhaps we should just leave a message here," Novosty sputtered. "I'm sure he'll find the car."

  "Alex, I'm not going anywhere with these animals." She drew back.

  "Don't worry. I'll take care of everything."

  "No, I'm not-"

  That was all she could say before a hand was roughly clapped against her mouth, her body shoved against the broken window.

  Mike Vance and Zeno Stantopoulos searched for over half an hour before they found the Saab. When they did, the left-hand window was broken, and Eva's purse was missing. She was missing too. The only thing remaining was a hastily scrawled note from Alex Novosty.