The Lost Temple (20 page)

“You seem to know a lot about it,” said Marina.

“I’ve dabbled.” A dangerous glance from Muir discouraged Reed from being any more forthcoming. “The problems that confront us with the tablet are very different. We can
assume that the men who wrote the tablets weren’t trying to disguise what they wrote. On the contrary, they probably wanted it to be as plain as possible. But three thousand years later, we’ve lost not only the key to the code, but also any knowledge of the language that’s been encoded. There are two ways of approaching it. You could start by looking at the symbols—or you could attempt to guess the underlying language, and then work out how the symbols represent it.”

“But these tablets are over three thousand years old,” Grant objected. “How would we know what they spoke?”

“We wouldn’t. But that hasn’t stopped scholars trying to fit other languages—or their hypothetical antecedents—to the pattern of Linear B. They’ve proposed everything: Hittite, Basque, archaic Greek, proto-Indian, eteo-Cypriot, Etruscan—which is particularly fanciful, as no one’s managed to translate
that
yet. Most of it’s a load of nonsense, a rather hopeless blend of tenuous coincidence and willful optimism.”

“Sounds like another dead end.”

“I agree. So rather than go straight for the language, we attack the symbols. We try to discover their patterns, their internal logic and the rules that govern them, to see what we can learn about the underlying language. The problem is, we don’t even know how many symbols we’re dealing with.”

“Presumably they’re all written out on the tablet,” Muir said acidly.

Reed raised an eyebrow, a mild gesture that had driven many an undergraduate to despair. “Are they?” He pulled a fountain pen from his jacket pocket and drew a cursive letter on the tablecloth, oblivious to the waiters’ horrified stares. “Which letter is that?”

“A ‘
g,
’ ” said Grant.

“A ‘
y,
’ ” said Muir.

“A ‘
P,
’ ” said Marina, who was sitting across the table from Reed and reading it upside-down.

Reed settled back with a mysterious air of contentment. “Is it? Or is it a ‘
j
’ or an ‘
f
’? Or ‘
if
’? Or ‘
of
’? Or maybe Miss Papagiannopoulou is reading it the right way up and it’s ‘
Pn
’ or ‘
Pr.
’ Or perhaps it’s just a slip of the pen. The Minoans and Mycenaeans didn’t set their alphabet in typefaces. They scratched it into wet clay with reeds and sticks—possibly in a hurry, or balancing the tablet on their knees. Even in their perfect forms, lots of the symbols seem to be extremely similar. Judging how much of the difference is genuine and how much is just variation in handwriting requires the wisdom of Solomon. And that’s just to get to the starting gate.”

A glum silence fell over the table. Grant picked at his food, while Muir watched a long finger of ash droop from his cigarette.

“Did I miss anything?”

The dining room’s double doors burst open as if blown in by a gale. A tall, broad-shouldered man was pushing through the field of empty tables toward them. There was something drearily wholesome about him: the tennis shoes; the adolescent haircut; the white trousers and white open-necked shirt, as crisply pressed as his smile. Even if you hadn’t heard the accent, there would still only be one word to describe him: American. If he noticed the four astonished pairs of eyes staring at him, his beaming face showed no awareness.

“Jackson,” he introduced himself. “Marty Jackson.” He pumped Marina’s hand, then turned to Reed. “Let me guess: Professor Reed. I’ve read all about your books. And you must be Sam.”

He grabbed a chair from the neighboring table, pirouetted it round and squeezed himself in between Marina and Grant.

Grant shot Muir a quizzical look. “Did we make the papers?”

Jackson waved a waiter over and ordered a beer. “Never get it cold enough in this damn country,” he groused good-naturedly. “Still, better than the wine. I hear they make it out of pine cones. You believe that?”

“Mr. Jackson is attached to the Allied Military Mission,”
said Muir. It seemed an utterly inadequate explanation. “He flew in this morning.”

“Holding the line against the Commies. You hear what Truman said the other week? ‘We must assist free peoples to work out their own destinies in their own way.’ That’s what I’m here to do.”

“Are you army?”

“Not exactly.” Just for a second the bonhomie vanished, and Grant glimpsed something sharp and hard behind the floppy grin. Then the smile was back. “But I guess we’re all on the same team, huh?”

“Mr. Jackson . . .”

“Call me Marty.”

Muir winced. “. . . has been liaising with us in the search for Element 61.”

“I hear you’ve been doing some great things.” He leaned forward earnestly, resting his elbows on the table. “That cave on Lemnos—just incredible. I wish I’d been there.”

Reed murmured something that sounded like a mutual sentiment.

“But now we’ve got to shift this thing up a gear. Intelligence says the Reds are all over it like a kike in a coin shop. They put one of their biggest guns on it—Colonel Kurchosov.” He took a photograph from his shirt pocket and laid it on the table. It must have been snatched surreptitiously: blurred and underexposed, there was little to see besides a pair of narrow cheekbones, a thin moustache and eyes that almost vanished in the shadow of his peaked cap. It took a moment for Grant to realize that one eye was actually missing, covered by a black eyepatch. “This is the only picture we got, but we’ve heard plenty. He made his name at Stalingrad—not fighting the Nazis, shooting deserters. Guess the Sovs saw something they liked: the folks at Langley reckon he’s Uncle Joe’s golden boy.”

Grant eyed the picture. “I think we ran into some of his friends on Lemnos.”

“Muir said. So we gotta get to this thing before they do.”

“Well, we have the tablet. That seems to be the best lead.
However, the professor was just explaining how much work there is still to do before we can read it.”

“Anything I can do to help, just let me know.”

Reed looked startled by the offer, though it seemed genuine.

“Meanwhile, we think we’ve traced the tablet to a site on Cephalonia.”

“Great. We’ll check that out first thing tomorrow. I got a plane.” He said it as casually as if he was talking about a pair of shoes. “Sam, I hear you’re a good man to have around. You come with me.”

Grant prickled; he felt an instinctive urge to refuse, but swallowed his objection. There was no point making an enemy of Jackson yet.

Jackson turned to Reed. “Meanwhile, you get back in that library and keep on with that tablet.” He glanced at Marina. “You too, honey. And Muir can stay to watch your backs.”

He looked around the table, fixing each of them with a serious stare. “I can’t tell you how important this is.”

Cephalonia, Ionian Sea

The plane kissed the sea, settled and glided smoothly toward the beach. When the water beneath was barely two feet deep, Jackson cut the engines and let the waves wash them the last few yards. Grant leaped down from the cabin and splashed ashore, heaving on the plane’s strut to pull it up the beach. When it was secure, he pulled out the map they had bought that morning in Athens and studied it. “According to the application Belzig filed at the Ministry, the site should be somewhere up there.” He pointed north, to a rocky hill that crowned the flat coastal plain.

“Looks like a nice spot.”

“For an ambush,” said Grant sourly. Bright sunshine and sea air couldn’t lift him from his mood. He’d distrusted Jackson from the start and two hours in the plane enduring the American’s cheerful banalities hadn’t mellowed his feelings.

“We can handle it.” Jackson swung the leather rucksack off his shoulder and pulled out a Colt pistol. Jackson didn’t hear him. “What are we expecting to find here, anyway?”

Grant shrugged. “ ‘Mycenaean substructures,’ according to Belzig’s permit application. Reed thinks we’re looking for the palace of Odysseus.”

“Odysseus? His palace was on Ithaca.” He saw Grant’s surprise. “What? Didn’t you ever read the
Odyssey
in college?”

“No.”

“Great book. But I guess what the professor says goes. He’s a real Einstein, huh?”

Grant gave a razor-thin smile. “I guess.”

They found a causeway that led across the marshy ground behind the beach and followed it. The ground grew firmer, rising toward a valley that divided the hill from the ridge to the west. Where the path forked they turned left and gradually wound their way up an ever-steepening slope until it came out on a wooded summit. A steady breeze blew through the trees; looking back, Grant could see the floatplane on the beach, shining like a mirror in the sun, and the arms of the bay curving out around it.

They spread apart, picking their way between the trees. The air was warm, even in the shade, but Grant was on edge. Though he was supposed to be watching the ground for signs it had been disturbed, he kept on glancing around. Away to his right, Jackson was stamping and crashing through the undergrowth like a boar. It was impossible to hear anything else, and that only made him more nervous. He scanned his surroundings.

Hello
. The trees almost hid it, but away to his left he could see flashes of what looked like a painted wall. He forgot his fears and struck off down the slope toward it.

The trees thinned and Grant came out in a tight clearing. It looked like a giant molefield: mounds of earth were heaped all around it, though they must have lain untouched for years. Weeds and wildflowers covered their slopes; one even had a sapling sprouting out at the top. A lopsided wooden shack stood at the edge of the clearing, its door hanging open.

“Over here.” His voice sounded uncomfortably loud among the deadening trees. He wondered who else could hear it.
Hardly matters
, he thought: they’d certainly have heard Jackson.

The American blundered into the clearing, snapping off three low-hanging branches on his way. He must have been feeling jumpy too: as he emerged from the undergrowth, Grant saw him slip the Colt into his trouser pocket. It bulged suggestively.

He peered inside the empty shed. “Looks like someone got here before us.”

“The villagers probably broke in to get at the tools.”

“Geez.” Jackson shook his head in disgust. “No wonder the Reds do so well here.”

“They’re starving,” said Grant bluntly. “They haven’t had food for six years. And now they’ve become an international football, kicked from one country to the next. They’re just desperate to survive.
That’s
why the Communists do so well. They’re the only ones who offer them hope.”

Jackson looked at him incredulously. “Are you out of your mind? You can’t say that kind of thing. After what happened on Lemnos, you gotta think the Reds are already on to us.”

“They certainly have a knack of turning up . . .”

Grant spun round, the Webley suddenly in his hand. But he was too late. Across the clearing, a single eye squinted at him down the sights of a gun.

Reed and Marina sat facing each other at the long table in the library, divided by a rampart of books. Rumpled sheets of paper littered Reed’s side of the table: half-filled grids, lists, diagrams, crossings-out and what looked like penmanship exercises. Opposite, Marina contented herself with a solitary book, a jotting pad and a sharp pencil. In contrast to Reed, her paper was almost empty.

She gave a sigh—the sort that invites an enquiry. Across the table, the white thatch of hair stayed bowed over its work. A nib scratched furiously on paper. “It’s such a mess,” she said, choosing a more direct approach.

Reed’s horn-rimmed spectacles appeared over the books. “I’m sorry?” He looked startled—though whether by some discovery he’d just made, or simply at being reminded she was still there she couldn’t tell.

“I’ve been looking at the
Odyssey
again—to see if I can find any clues about what Odysseus might have done with the shield.”

“Explorers and philologists have been trying to map Odysseus’s
wanderings for centuries,” said Reed. “It can’t be done.”

Her face fell. “Why not?”

Reed capped his pen and moved aside a volume of
The Palace of Minos
that was obstructing the view between them. Absent-mindedly, he pushed his glasses up to the bridge of his nose. “Who do you think wrote the
Iliad
and the
Odyssey
?”

She laughed. “If you go to school in Greece, you know there’s only one answer to that: Homer. Pemberton used to tease me for thinking so. He said it was a trick question, that nobody wrote the poems. He said they were the products of centuries of oral tradition, handed down and adapted from one generation of poets to the next.” A sadness crept into her voice. “He said that looking for what was original in the final poems was as hopeless as peering at a baby’s face and trying to see the features of his great-great-great-great-grandfather.”