The Minoan Cipher (A Matinicus “Matt” Hawkins Adventure Book 2) (34 page)

“I will look forward to bearing witness to your ascension,” Salazar said.

Lily made no attempt to acknowledge the compliment. “Tell me what happened.”

“My men broke into the Greek woman’s house. Hawkins must have had warning. He and another escaped along the caldera cliffs. One of my men was killed in the chase.”

“No sign of the device?”

“We searched the house and found nothing.”

“It’s fortunate the Priors were able to carry out the will of the Mother Goddess.”

It was a subtle rebuke. Lily showed no sympathy for the loss of his man. More telling, she had said nothing about his previous failures. The failed attempt to stop the ship expedition, to deal with Hawkins and the loss of the translating device. She was keeping her anger in check, but he knew that he would soon be finished. The situation was deteriorating even without the troublesome security breach in Oregon.

Salazar had to move fast on all fronts. As the next in line, Lily would be anointed the new High Priestess, giving her vast powers of life and death and total control of Auroch Industries. Before the death of the crone, Lily lacked the power to go head-to-head with him. The authoritative tone to her voice now, signaled that she was already enjoying a taste of the authority that would come with her rise to the High Priestess throne.

Salazar saw this not as a challenge but as an opportunity. With a single blow he could destroy the new High Priestess and her assistants and eliminate the last two Priors. With the core of the Believers gone, he would take total control of Auroch. Once the mission in the United States was carried out, he would be sitting at the top of a multi-national corporation that controlled most, if not all, of the world’s mining, petroleum and gas extraction operations. With the money and power that came with an energy monopoly, political influence would follow. He would be able to do what he wanted, where he wanted. His first step would be to eliminate, or bend to his will, the members of the Way who held key positions in the company. And that would be easy once they saw there was nothing to fear from the priestesses or the Priors.

In a supreme irony, the bull that the Believers held sacred would be the key to carrying out his goals.

Salazar’s driver placed the box on the ground, lifted out an object and set it on the platform. The bull’s head was around twelve inches high, fashioned from a greenish-black material. Sharp, curving horns gleamed in the sunlight. Red eyes blazed from the broad face.

Salazar ran his fingers over the bull’s crown and down the blunt muzzle to the white line defining its snout.

“Gentlemen, this is a Minoan vessel called a
rhyton
, and was designed to hold liquid which can be poured out through the nostrils. The original was found in the ancient city of Knossos and was made of Serpentinite with inlays of shell, crystal and jasper. The horns were born of gilded wood.”

He turned to his explosives expert. “Bruno, could you tell us how this
rhyton
differs from the original?”

“Glad to, Mr. Salazar. The head here is made mostly of PETN, the same explosive being used for the show we’ll be putting on in the U.S. The horns enclose chemical detonators.”

“And this is the triggering remote,” Salazar reached into his right ear with his fingertip and dislodged a contoured piece of pink plastic. He held it in the palm of his hand. “This is capable of sending a signal more than a hundred feet. Shall we give it a test?”

He led the way behind an earthen bunker. Small viewing ports enclosed in tinted blast-proof glass allowed a view of the platform. Salazar and his men donned ear protectors, then he took the ear plug in his fingers, turned a knob on it and pressed three times. The bull’s head vanished. In its place was a miniature sun of yellow and red fire. Even with the protectors, the explosion hurt their ears.

As the blast echoed through the forest, Salazar walked through the smoke and inspected the splintered trees around the edge of the clearing. The head had disintegrated. There was no shrapnel damage, but the shock wave from the explosion would have been fatal to anyone in the open.

He complimented his explosives expert on the extensive kill zone.

“Thanks,” Bruno said. “The second bomb I had built will work just as well, killing anyone within a radius of thirty feet.”

“That will be more than adequate. The targets will all be clustered in a small area of the sanctuary of the snake goddess. The procession of the priestesses will move toward the Horns of Consecration, flanked by the Priors and by musicians chanting and playing the pipes. The new High Priestess will dispatch the victim. I will present the
rhyton
to catch the blood of the sacrifice. The attention of everyone in the room will be on the altar. I will slip out of the sanctuary and trigger the bomb.”

“Okay. The bomb goes off. What next?”

“The Auroch security guards will be waiting in the courtyard for the announcement that the ceremony is over, waiting for the new High Priestess to emerge. They will rush into the sanctuary after the explosion. Finding only the dead, they will come out of the shrine. They will be confused. We will quickly dispatch them. Once that is done, I will broadcast a message to the Faithful worldwide saying that everyone in the old order was killed and that I am taking charge.”

“What about the big dogs?” another man asked.

“The Daemons will be in the ceremonial room with the Priors.”

“What’s the time table, sir?” the man asked.

Salazar looked at his watch. “The ceremony is set for tomorrow night. I’ll deliver the second bull’s head personally. You will accompany me. Your loyalty will soon be rewarded. As soon as I’m in power, I’ll make you rich beyond your wildest dreams.” He glanced toward the empty bomb test platform and in an uncharacteristic display of humor, added, “And that’s no bull.”

CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

Uncle Gowdy was talking to Molly from the grave.

She pictured him in a rocking chair on the sagging porch, with his children and their cousin Molly at his feet, telling what it was like to mine coal. From time to time the narrative would be interrupted by a coughing fit brought on by the coal dust irritating his lungs.

“Diggin’ coal is easier’n making pie,” he said in his soft West Virginia accent. “You ride down a shaft a coupla hundred feet, careful you don’t go too deep ‘cause you’d come out in China. Then you blast the seam out with dynamite, bust the big hunks to bitty pieces.” He wrapped his coal-stained fingers around the hammer of an invisible pick handle. “Pickety-pick, pickety-pick. Then you go on to the next seam.”

Molly sat in front of her computer, thinking how digging coal wasn’t much different from mining the internet. She’d blasted out the Auroch Industries seam and had picked her way through the hunks of data. The company’s deplorable behavior as an international corporate citizen. Its disdain for public opinion. The damage caused by its mining and drilling operations. The lawsuits filed against anyone or anything in its way. And most troubling, the strange deaths associated with its mergers and acquisitions.

Yet, Salazar, the CEO who presumably orchestrated all this bad behavior, came out smelling as sweet as yam pie. He served on charitable boards and contributed heavily to the arts. Most puzzling, was not only his support, but his leadership of a consortium focused on alternative energy research. He had even funded a foundation that was backing an important conference to be held in Cambridge, Massachusetts, within a few days.

Molly’s life experiences had taught her that people like Salazar could back all the concerts and lectures money could buy, but the halos over their heads still wouldn’t take a polish. She asked herself why Salazar would invest in research that might put him out of business. Maybe he actually wanted to do something to help the planet, but she doubted it. She read the
Wall Street Journal
headline again:

Experts to Unveil Important Energy News at MIT Conference

The article described the excitement over a revolutionary energy source to be demonstrated at the conference organized by the Salazar Foundation. The presenters were the world’s best-known experts in the fields of physics and energy distribution. It was a stellar scientific line-up and the first time all the leaders in new technologies would be in the same place at the same time.
The Journal
speculated on turmoil in the markets. Energy stocks would plummet.

Guys like Salazar stood to lose a bundle, but here he was, saying Auroch was well-positioned to embrace cleaner technologies that would reduce the carbon footprint. She shook her head. Salazar was a skunk. Plain and simple. You could clean him up but he’d still stink to high heaven. There was no way he would back something that was bound to put him out of business. Yet here he was giving people the shovel that would bury him.
Why
?

Thinking made her hungry. She put the computer in sleep mode and went into the kitchen. Her shelves and refrigerator were filled with gluten-free products. She didn’t have celiac disease, with its intolerance to grain, but eating gluten-free food sounded healthy. She cooked up a gluten-free pizza and ate half of it, washed down with a couple of cans of diet soda. Time to feed Wheeling. She got some calves liver pieces out of the fridge and put them in a dish.

The big bird clucked his beak in anticipation when she entered the shed. She watched him chow down, knowing it was wrong to pamper this magnificent wild creature. Being accustomed to gourmet meals would hamper him when he had to hunt for his own food. Heck. Maybe that’s why she was doing it, trying to come up with a reason to postpone Freedom Day.

The chirp of her cell phone was a welcome diversion from her guilty wallowing. She checked the screen. The alert had been transmitted by a motion-activated camera at the front of the house.

Molly had decided not to install a fence, a safe room and full-fledged camera and alarm system like the one she had in Arizona. After all, her house burned down in spite of all her precautions. But she had placed four cameras around the property, each capable of transmitting photos to her cell phone. Mostly, the cameras snapped photos of bats and owls, but the image on her phone now was that of a man who’d triggered the automated flood light.

He was walking toward her house, slightly crouched over. Cradled in his arms was a short-barreled automatic weapon. He wore a baseball cap with a B on it, like the one on the man who’d been bent over his laptop in the Portland coffee shop.

Another camera picked up the man walking along the side of the house. He may have found the front door locked and was making his way around to the back. She turned out the shed light, went to the door and pushed it almost shut, leaving it open just a crack to allow her a glimpse of the man as he turned the corner. He glanced at the shed, then headed for the kitchen door, which she’d left unlocked, and went inside.

She could see him through the windows. He paused to examine the partially-eaten pizza on the table, then went from room to room on the first floor. The second floor lights clicked on. She felt a rush of anger at having the privacy of her bedroom violated by this stranger. She thought of trying to break out of the shed, but Sutherland was in no shape to run for it, even without the pizza sitting like gluten-free lead in her stomach.

The best she could do would be to keep watch and hope that he’d give up and leave. She waited. Moments later she glimpsed him again through the kitchen window. Then he stepped out the back door, stared thoughtfully at the shed, and walked slowly toward it. She moved away from the door, loosened the overhead light bulb and crawled under the shelf in front of Wheeling’s perch to the back wall of the shed.

The unexpected intrusion into his space made the eagle nervous. He spread his wings slightly, shifted from claw to claw and made a soft ‘wonk’ sound.

The crunch of footsteps stopped outside. A man’s voice said, “You in there, sweetheart? Come out, come out, or I’ll huff and puff and blow the place down. Okay. Guess you’re shy. Maybe I’ll just burn the place down.”

A chill went down her spine. She would be trapped. She stayed silent.

“No answer? Hey, girl, maybe I won’t burn you. They said you were in the Army. So you know what a machine pistol can do. I can just riddle that little hen coop full of holes with you in it. So why don’t you come out and we’ll talk?”

The voice was closer. Molly figured the stranger was moving in as he talked, and that he’d kick the door in when he got close enough. The eagle was even more nervous after hearing the stranger’s voice. She placed her hands on the bird’s wings and felt it shudder.

Then she yelled, “Changed my mind about coming out, you stupid man. I called 911. Cops are on their way. You’d better get your sorry ass out of here.”

That did it. He kicked the door open. He was holding a flashlight against the machine pistol, which was raised to his shoulder. He stepped inside.

Molly stood up suddenly and launched Wheeling at the intruder. The bird flapped its wings. The man stood in the way of the only avenue of escape. The eagle landed on his head, sinking its sharp talons into his scalp through the thin fabric of the baseball cap. He tried to knock the bird off with the short barrel of the machine pistol. This only frightened Wheeling more, and it dug in deeper, wings beating furiously.