The Lost Labyrinth (39 page)

‘An overdose,’ muttered Knox in disbelief, as he recalled Augustin lying in intensive care.

‘Theofanis thinks it happened like this,’ said Angelos quickly. ‘Petitier was an addict, that much is clear. Mixing with other people is hard after twenty years on your own. Not to mention giving a talk to a large conference. He’d have wanted a big stash close to hand.’

‘That’s why he was protecting his bag? Because it was filled with drugs?’

‘It makes sense. I mean, we’ve been trying to find out what flight he came in on, but none of the airlines have any record of him. So now we’re thinking maybe he came by boat instead,
because he couldn’t risk his bag being searched. Anyway, he gets to the hotel, Augustin lets him in, then leaves. He’s confused, he’s stressed, he thinks he’s being followed. He takes something. Then something else. A real cocktail, uppers, downers, whatever he’s got. He begins to feel unwell. He feels
unclean
. People often do with hallucinogens; their skin crawls. He takes a shower. He has his first cardiac event, not fatal but severe enough to make him fall. He hits his head against the taps. His scalp splits open, he’s disoriented. He knows he needs a doctor, but he can’t risk anyone finding his drugs or it could mean years in gaol, so he struggles out of the bathroom, dripping blood, and takes his overnight bag out onto the balcony. He rips it open, flings his drugs over the railing, then goes back inside for the phone. But he doesn’t make it in time, he has his second heart attack, and it cripples him. And then he just lies there dying, unable to do anything until you and Augustin come in.’

‘LSM,’ muttered Knox.

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘His last word to me. Not Elysium. LSM. It’s a variant of LSD that he experimented with. He was trying to tell me what drugs he’d taken. And his final croak. Cocaine.’

‘I’ve suspended Grigorias,’ said Angelos. ‘I want you to know that. And we’ll hold a full and
independent investigation. You have my word. I’ve already sent a team to look in the alley beneath the balcony, see if we can find those drugs.’

‘The hotel keeps its trash there,’ Knox told him. ‘I heard them collecting it yester—’ A gunshot cracked out ahead, echoed ominously off the pass walls. ‘Jesus,’ said Knox. ‘Did you hear that?’

‘I’ll get you your helicopter,’ promised Angelos.

Knox stuffed the mobile back in his pocket as he ran. Two more shots sounded, giving strength to his heavy legs. The pass suddenly dropped away ahead of him and he reached the precipitous brim of a massive caldera. He scanned the plain at its foot, the fields, the house, the high surrounding cliffs. His eye was snagged by movement in a sea of yellow gorse far away to his right, where a figure shrunk by distance advanced upon another huddled in a clearing. Even from this distance, he knew it was Gaille. He yelled as loudly as he could, but the wind threw his shouts back uselessly in his face. He looked down at the excuse for a path beneath him: however recklessly he took it, he couldn’t hope to get to Gaille in time to help her. But there was a track of sorts leading around the rim of the escarpment, and maybe if he got to the cliffs above her…

His legs were already aching and weak, but he steeled himself for one last effort, and set off.

Gaille flung herself to the ground as Mikhail turned the Mauser on her, hiding beneath the canopy of gorse. Beside her, Argo was going crazy; he danced in circles, tangling up his leash, then broke away from her and raced back along the path. ‘Argo!’ she cried. ‘Come back!’ But he didn’t listen, he charged on. She braced herself; a single shot cracked. Her heart twisted. She heard Argo fall, his piteous yelps and whines. A second shot, then only silence.

Hatred, grief, anger, terror. Too many emotions to process. She heard rustling: Mikhail was coming for her. She scrambled through the gorse on her hands and knees, the gorse’s secret life revealed, beetles and lizards and butterflies, sunlight dappled by the tangle of branches. A bird whirred from its nest almost beneath her face, startling her so that she raised her head above cover, ducking back down again before Mikhail could shoot.

She emerged into a small clearing, the last thing she needed. She crept around its edge, looking around for a way out, not seeing one. The escarpment rose to her left, though it wasn’t a sheer wall like elsewhere, but rather a shale-covered slope. She leapt to her feet and ran along it with her head ducked, hoping to put distance between herself and Mikhail, but the shale gave way beneath her, she stumbled and fell almost at once into the yellow tangle. To her surprise, branches of gorse fell away with
her, and she saw that their bases had been sawn-through, and that they’d been deliberately stacked against the foot of the hill, as if someone had been trying to hide something.

Mikhail was still bulling his way towards her. She pulled more branches away, revealing symbols chiselled into the rock-face, a triangle and a wavy band, and then the small low black mouth of a cave opening. She dropped down onto her hands and knees to crawl along it, grit and earth sprinkling on her face and hair, before it abruptly opened up. It was too dark to see inside, yet the echoes of her own heavy breathing gave her the impression of cavernous space. She got out of the way of the mouth, allowing in enough light to see a pickaxe and a sledgehammer resting against the wall. The sledgehammer was too heavy for her, so she took the pickaxe instead. The thought of using it against anything living made her feel queasy, but she reminded herself of what Mikhail had just done to Iain and Argo, and it gave her strength. She could hear him approaching outside; she hid herself out of view. The faint light dimmed further as he found the mouth. ‘Are you in there?’ he teased. ‘Are you
waiting
for me?’

‘Go away,’ she told him.

‘I won’t hurt you if you come out. You have my word.’

‘I said go away.’

It went even darker, she heard him grunting his way through the cave’s tight mouth. She lifted the pickaxe, readied herself to strike. Perhaps he heard her, or glimpsed her foot, but he must have realised his vulnerability, for he stopped and then retreated. The cave grew a little lighter again. She rested the pickaxe back down on the ground, keeping a firm grip upon its shaft, certain it wouldn’t be long before he tried again.

Nico held his phone in both hands for the best part of a minute, as though it were a talisman, as though it had the power to answer prayers. And maybe it did.

All people’s lives were set as children, Nico believed. Formative years, they called them, and they were right. The first time you ate a food that astonished you with its exquisite taste. Your first love, your first applause. Magical moments that made you so yearn for a reprise that you’d structure your whole life around them.

For Nico, the defining moment had come during a family holiday in the Peloponnese. His brother had been the class swot; he’d persuaded his father to take them on a tour of Mycenae, Epidaurus, Corinth and the other great sites. Nico had suffered
from a boredom so intense that it had been a kind of torture. Then they’d visited Olympia, site of the ancient games. This had been long before the tourist boom, of course; they’d been the only ones there.
More damned ruins! What did people see in the things?
He’d mooched off by himself, had come across a tall grassed bank, a short arched passageway cut into it. He’d walked through it and had emerged shockingly into the ancient stadium. He could remember that moment still, the dazzle of the rising sun, the grassed banks for the crowds, the whole arena infused with a spirit of celebration, competition, achievement. Of
greatness
. He’d never really understood until that moment what people had meant by atmosphere. He’d never believed in ghosts. But all that had changed in a single heartbeat. His dream of becoming an Olympic athlete had been born at that moment; and when that dream had failed him, he’d turned to archaeology instead, because his love of ancient Greece had been born that day too.

He owed that love to his parents.

The ringing, when finally it began, seemed longer and deeper than usual, as though time itself were being distended. He almost hung up on the fifth ring, but then it was picked up and it was too late. A man’s voice. ‘Hello?’ he said.

‘Hello, father,’ said Nico, his mouth sticky and dry. ‘It’s me.’

A silence ensued; an incredulous silence, if silence can have such a quality. Then: ‘
Nico
?’

‘Yes.’ The silence grew and grew. Too much time had passed. This had been a mistake. ‘I’m sorry,’ he blurted out. ‘I shouldn’t have—’

‘No!’ said his father. ‘Don’t hang up. Please. I beg you.’

‘I wanted to talk to you,’ said Nico. ‘I wanted to see you. I thought maybe lunch.’

‘Of course. Your mother and I…that is, we were having friends over. The Milonas. You remember them?’

‘Yes.’

‘We’ll put them off. They won’t mind.’

‘Not on my account. But maybe I could join you. I’d like to see them. It’s been a long time.’

‘Of course. Of course. I’ll go tell your mother now. She’ll want to make sure we have enough. And Nico…’

‘Yes?’ He waited, but his father said no more. It took Nico several seconds to realise it was because he couldn’t speak without betraying himself. It was strange and rather shocking to hear his father weep. He’d always seemed the embodiment of strength. ‘It’s okay,’ he told him.

‘It’s not okay,’ sobbed his father. ‘It’s not. It’s not. Forgive me, Nico. You have to forgive me.’

‘I forgive you, father. And I’ll see you for lunch. Ask mother to do some of her
spanakopites
. I can’t
tell you how I’ve missed them.’ He put the phone down then stared down at his hands in surprise, the way they were shaking. Then something splashed into his palm, and he realised he was weeping too.

Inside the cave, Gaille waited for Mikhail; but moments stretched into minutes and still he didn’t come. Her adrenal surge ebbed; her arms and shoulders began to ache from the tension and from gripping the pickaxe handle too tight. She tried to loosen her grip, only to discover that her palms had glued to the wood with congealed blood. She must have torn them open on the thorns or the shale. She pulled them free one at a time, the reopened cuts stinging like lashes.

She risked a glance along the throat of the cave to its mouth. Motes danced with midges in the circle of sunshine, but there was no sign of Mikhail. She felt a flutter of hope. Perhaps he’d given up, realising that her position was impregnable. Perhaps rescue had arrived. Or perhaps he was simply waiting for curiosity to get the better of her. Her eyes had adjusted a little to the gloom. She could see things now that had previously been hidden. A generator with its pearly white plastic
tank; an orange electrical cable snaking off it; a wooden crate on the floor beside it. She took another glance to make sure Mikhail hadn’t returned, then hurried to the crate and rummaged through it for anything useful. Old water bottles filled with fuel that left their distinctive stench on her hands. A torch, heavy with batteries. She turned it on, found another replica Phaistos disc in the crate, reminding her of the triangle and wavy line she’d seen carved in the rock. She looked for those symbols now and found them at the very centre of one of the spirals, suggesting the disc was a map of some kind, one side of which led here. She looked at the spiral on the obverse side. There was a rosette at its heart, symbol of Minoan royalty. She set the disc back down and shone the torch upon the nearest wall, where faint traces of ancient paintings showed upon the rock, then up at the high jagged ceiling and finally at the rear of the cave, where a passage vanished into the darkness. She considered going to look for somewhere to hide, but decided against. The cave mouth was defensible, but once Mikhail got inside, she’d be lost.

The torch beam started to dim, the batteries evidently weak, for all their weight. She turned it off again, its light too valuable to squander, then put it back in the crate and returned to her post. Her hopes began to rise as the minutes passed and
there was still no sign of Mikhail. But then she heard noises outside, and those hopes came crashing back to earth. The cave grew darker again. ‘Getting lonely yet?’ he asked.

‘Leave me alone.’

‘It’s lovely out here. Lots of nice moss for you to lie on.’

‘Go away.’

‘I have to do this, you know. I gave your boyfriend my word. I always keep my word.’

His assault was coming. She could tell it from the excitement in his voice. She tightened her grip on the pickaxe, lifted it above her head, prepared herself to bring it down.
One shot,
she prayed silently
. That’s all I ask
.

Scuffling in the passage, then a glimpse of his head beneath his baseball cap. She didn’t hesitate, she smashed the pickaxe down. But to her horror his head simply tumbled away across the cave, coming to rest on its side, and it was Iain looking up at her, not Mikhail. She shrieked and dropped the pickaxe just as Mikhail appeared, his blood-smeared knife in his hand. She turned and fled blindly into the cave. The floor was slick; her feet flew from beneath her, she careened down a short abrasive chute, her elbow and knee banging, her head hitting rock. She staggered up, fumbled her way along a wall, small pools of drip-water on the floor seeping through the
thin canvas of her shoes, cold as fear upon her soles.

Behind her, she heard the rip and stutter of Mikhail hauling at the generator’s starter-rope. The engine caught first time and lamps began to glow all around, robbing her of the sanctuary of darkness, and leaving her at Mikhail’s mercy.

Knox’s legs were jellied with fatigue, his ankles turning with painful regularity on the loose rocks that he used as stepping stones to cross the thick tangle of thorny shrubs. It felt like he’d been circling the escarpment for hours, though it could only in truth have been twenty minutes. The terrain near the cliff edge was so difficult that it forced him out wide, denying him the chance to monitor what was going on below. But eventually he reached the marker he’d given himself—an outcrop of rock like a pine-cone lying on its side—and he cut back to the escarpment rim to find himself high above the yellow sea of gorse, the clearing visible a little to his below, though without any sign of life.