Herculean

1

At the top of the low hill overlooking the narrow trail cutting through the rain forest, Nils Van Der Hausen wondered why anyone would choose to build a village in such a place. He understood why settlements and cities sprang up along coastlines or on the banks of a river, but he could not fathom what madness possessed people to hack out an existence in the middle of the jungle, miles from the nearest road.

‘Village’ was too generous a term for this collection of huts that occupied the small clearing. It was a five mile walk to the nearest road and two miles from St. Paul River. There were dozens more just like it scattered throughout the river valley. Hundreds, even. The government in Monrovia was vaguely aware of their existence but made no effort to regulate them or provide even the most basic of services to their inhabitants. The people who called the place home subsisted on bush meat, which included anything that walked in the rain forest. The exact whereabouts of the villages and the names of the families who lived in them were unknown to the outside world.

It had taken him the better part of a day to reach this place, even with his GPS unit pointing him in the right direction. Finding these villages was like a mad scavenger hunt, a lesson he had learned during his first visit to the West African republic during the 2014 Ebola outbreak.

A genetic engineer by trade, Van Der Hausen had been part of the World Health Organization’s response team deployed to Liberia to combat the spread of hemorrhagic fever. Once on the ground, he had discovered that the team had little use for his scientific expertise. Instead, they needed people on the front lines, trekking out to the rural villages, isolating the infected, educating the superstitious villagers about quarantine measures and how to safely dispose of corpses. He had spent weeks tramping around the jungle, in constant fear of the deadly virus, wild animals, bandits and ignorant villagers who were suspicious of everyone.

It had been a life-changing experience.

He had come to Africa with a burning zeal to help the afflicted, to make the world a better place. He had left with the realization that sometimes the only way to fix a thing was to burn it down and start over.

That and one other thing. He had also brought a little souvenir of his stay in West Africa: an ampoule of human blood teeming with the Ebola virus.

He could still recall the heady mixture of exhilaration and panic he had felt when smuggling the sample out. It had been much easier than he had anticipated; everyone trusted the scientists. Of course, things had not exactly gone according to his plan after that. His fumbling attempt to sell the sample might have gotten him arrested, if not for the intervention of the man who now stood beside him, staring down at the nameless village.

“That’s the place?” Vigor Rohn asked.

Rohn was Bulgarian — Van Der Hausen recognized the distinctive Sofia accent. His voice was gravelly and irritable, like someone who had woken up with a hangover, except Rohn always sounded that way. He was big — six-foot-two, with the broad-shouldered physique of a footballer — and ugly. His face was pock-marked, like someone who had taken a double-barreled shotgun blast of rock salt. One of his ears looked like a cauliflower floret. Van Der Hausen felt quite certain that the man was no scientist, but Rohn always asked the right questions. He was either more intelligent than he appeared or he was being coached by a remote mentor. Probably both.

Van Der Hausen nodded and waggled his GPS unit. “I tagged the devices, just to be sure that no one tampered with them.”

“And we will be safe here?”

“Technically, we could get a lot closer. This isn’t some run-of-the-mill infectious bio-weapon.” He smiled, recalling how Rohn had used very similar language two months earlier during their first meeting.

Rohn had found him, just five minutes before his first attempt at selling the Ebola virus to a man in the Stockholm underworld. Rohn had appeared out of nowhere, warning Van Der Hausen that the meeting was a set-up. They had left together, narrowly escaping the tightening police dragnet.

“My employer has noticed you,” Rohn had told him. “You are an amateur, playing a dangerous game with no idea of the risks you face. But my employer admires your initiative.”

Van Der Hausen, still in shock, had managed to ask whether Rohn’s employer might be interested in purchasing the virus.

Rohn had laughed. “Ebola is nothing. A run-of-the-mill threat, good for creating a panic, but almost useless for strategic purposes. You should know this better than anyone.”

“Then what—”

“You have something of even greater worth that my employer is willing to pay for.”

“My scientific expertise?”

Another derisive laugh. “There are many scientists in the world. But only a few of them are…” Rohn paused as if searching for the right word, “…unscrupulous enough to sell a deadly virus to the highest bidder. That is what makes you special. My employer is interested in research and development. Genetic engineering is the new frontier. Those who are the first to blaze trails into unexplored territory reap the greatest reward. You want that, don’t you?”

Van Der Hausen most definitely did.

“Then you must continue to impress my employer.”

With a generous advance of seed money, Van Der Hausen had taken a leave of absence from the University of Stockholm and set up his own genetics lab, outfitted with state-of-the-art equipment purchased off the Internet. At first, he had felt like a frustrated artist, staring at a blank canvas, waiting for inspiration to dawn. Then he had remembered his earlier ordeal, and an idea had come to him.

Rohn had been right. Weaponizing infectious diseases by tweaking various gene sequences to increase lethality and communicability was so twentieth century. This was the new world, where the old limits of DNA and RNA no longer applied. Genetic engineering was a playground, where men like him spliced nucleic acids together like Lego blocks. The only limit was his imagination, and he had a very vivid imagination.

“Unless you’re standing at ground zero,” Van Der Hausen explained, gesturing toward the village, “within about fifty feet of the device when the spores are released, you could simply walk away and not be affected. If, that is, you knew what was happening.”

Rohn grunted. “And you are ready to demonstrate now?”

Van Der Hausen waggled the GPS again. “Say the word, and I’ll press the button.”

“One moment.” Rohn took out a satellite-enabled smartphone and tapped the screen to place a call. There was an audible ringing — the phone was in speaker mode — and then a voice spoke.

“Yes?”

“It is Rohn.”

“Ah, time to see if our Swedish friend is worth the money we’ve spent.” The voice was high-pitched and wheezy.

An old man, Van Der Hausen decided.

“Show me!” the man commanded.

Rohn held the device up so that its built-in camera was oriented down toward the cluster of huts. “You may proceed,” he told Van Der Hausen.

The geneticist nodded and then turned his attention to the village as well. At a distance of almost three hundred yards, the villagers were barely discernible.

Like ants, he told himself. That’s all they are.

He felt no remorse at what he was about to do. These were not people, not fellow human beings… They were a plague of insects, breeding and consuming with no regard for the consequences. Ebola was nature’s way of trying to restore the balance, a fact that his fellow volunteers at the WHO had never understood. They had swept in like crusading knights, intent on slaying the dragon without ever stopping to consider that the dragon might have a role to play in the natural order of things.

His only regret was that this was merely a demonstration. One village. A drop in the ocean. Rohn’s employer — his employer, too, he supposed — wanted a product, not wholesale devastation.

A countdown seemed appropriate. He started at five, and when he got to zero, he tapped the transmit button on the GPS.

He thought he heard a distant popping noise, like a balloon bursting or a cork shooting from a bottle of champagne, but it was probably just his imagination. The aerosol devices that disseminated the spores were more like garden sprinklers. There might have been a faint hiss close to the source but nothing audible at such a distance.

The wheezy voice issued from the phone. “Is something supposed to happen?”

“You must be patient,” Van Der Hausen answered. “It may take a few minutes for the first generation of spores to mature. Growth will be exponential once the spores encounter a source of…ah…nutrients.”

Several seconds passed, but still there was no visible change.

The voice spoke again. “I had expected something a little more dramatic, Dr. Van Der Hausen. This is rather disappointing.”

“We may be too far away to see the results,” Van Der Hausen replied, unable to hide his anxiety. They should have been able to see something. The outcome of the test in the laboratory had been quite dramatic.

“Rohn, take our friend closer so that we may get a better look.” The voice of the old man on the other end of the phone was noticeably impatient and tinged with sarcasm.

Closer? Despite his earlier assurance, Van Der Hausen felt a twinge of panic at this prospect. Now that the spores were circulating, moving closer was definitely a bad idea. He looked at Rohn, hoping to see the same apprehension that he now felt, but the man’s face was an emotionless mask. Rohn nodded in the direction of the village and spoke a single word. “Go.”

Van Der Hausen swallowed nervously, forcing down the impulse to protest. “Very well.” He knew what to look for. He would stop at the first sign of propagation.

As they descended the hillside, they were once more engulfed in the jungle thicket. Van Der Hausen scanned the vegetation, looking for any signs of new growth. After just a couple of minutes of pushing through the foliage, they reached the edge of the clearing. Though still a good hundred yards from the nearest hut, Van Der Hausen could hear the sounds of daily village life — children playing and babies squalling in their mothers’ arms.

Something was wrong.

“There may have been a malfunction in the aerosol devices,” he said, his tone more hopeful than disappointed. That explanation was preferable to the alternative. Yet, he had placed four of the devices — one at each corner of the building that had been set aside for use as a clinic — and the likelihood that all of them had failed was marginal at best. Which meant that the problem was with the organism itself. “Or possibly some environmental counter-agent that I didn’t account for.”

“I’ve seen enough,” the old man replied. “Rohn, I have need of you elsewhere. Get to Athens as soon as possible. Kenner believes we may be on the verge of a breakthrough.”

“What about him?” Rohn’s eyes flashed toward Van Der Hausen.

“A bad investment. Cash him out.”

Van Der Hausen was quick to protest. “Now wait just a minute. This is a minor setback. The whole point of a large scale test is to work out the—”

The words caught in his throat as he spied the glint of sunlight on the knife in Rohn’s other hand. He brought his own hands forward in an instinctive gesture of self-preservation, even as the blade slashed toward him. He felt something tugging at his shirt, but then Rohn took a step back and sheathed the knife.

Van Der Hausen sagged in relief. Rohn’s display of menace was only a reminder of the stakes in this dangerous game he had decided to play, nothing more, and unnecessary at that. Van Der Hausen hardly needed an incentive. He wanted to know what had gone wrong even more than Rohn and the old man.

A strange sensation hit his gut, a hollow feeling, similar to the experience of a rapid ascent in an elevator. Then he heard a wet sound as something hit the ground at his feet. He realized Rohn’s slash had not been a mere threat after all. Darkness swelled at the edge of his vision, and pain bloomed in his abdomen. As he crumpled to the ground alongside his entrails, it occurred to Van Der Hausen that his worst fears had caught up with him. He was going to die in this horrible place.

2

The black-clad figure scrambled up and over the top of the six-foot high, metal fence, dropping down into an isolated corner of the wooded courtyard behind the Heraklion Archaeological Museum. He crouched there for a moment, concealed in the shadows, where the glow of streetlights did not quite reach. Then he extended a hand in a beckoning gesture.

On the other side of the fence, eighteen-year old Fiona Sigler took a deep breath, glanced around to make sure there were no witnesses and then launched herself into motion. Two seconds later, she was hunkered down in the shadows beside the first intruder, her uncle, George Pierce.

He was not really her uncle, just the best friend of her father, Jack Sigler…who was not really her father either, but such distinctions meant little to someone whose life to date was as screwed up as hers.

“See,” Pierce whispered from behind his black ski-mask. “That wasn’t so hard.”

“Climbing the fence? Piece of cake,” she replied, with just a hint of sarcasm. “It’s the trespassing that’s going to take some getting used to.”

“Don’t worry,” he promised. “It gets easier.”

“And so begins my life of crime.”

Strangely enough, she was enjoying herself. Her heart hammered in her chest. She was terrified that a policeman or security guard would appear from out of nowhere, flashlight in one hand, gun in the other. But the fear was oddly exhilarating, like the thrill of a roller coaster ride. Given the sort of life she had led, a little late-night breaking-and-entering was actually pretty tame. If getting busted in the Greek Isles was the worst thing that happened to her tonight, she could deal. She had been through a lot worse.

They stole across the courtyard to the back of the building. The museum was housed in an unremarkable modern-looking structure at odds with the rest of the picturesque port city. They had spent the last two days in Heraklion, familiarizing themselves with the museum. ‘Scoping the place out,’ was the phrase Pierce had used. Being in the town was like traveling back in time. There were statues and fountains, old fortresses, churches and mosques, crumbling ancient walls sitting side-by-side with modern high-rise buildings.

Fiona thought the museum — which had been designed to withstand the frequent earthquakes that rocked the region — was ugly by comparison to the rest of the city. It had all the charm of a high school campus. But what did she know? Architecture really wasn’t her forte. She was fascinated by languages, and while she was by no means fluent in Greek, she could read the Greek alphabet almost as easily as traditional Latin letters. The best part about the walking tour had been trying to decipher the signs, though surprisingly, many of them were in English.

She wondered which language would be on the signs in the local jail.

Pierce led her to an unmarked metal door, then he knelt before it, illuminating the doorknob with a flashlight clenched between his teeth. The intensely bright LED bulb in the MagTac tactical flashlight was muted to a warm red glow by the addition of a snap-on filter lens. Enough light to work by, but much harder to detect from a distance. Pierce produced a slim black wallet and took out a strip of metal that Fiona recognized as a lock-pick. He held the pick up to the keyhole, but then stopped and raised his eyes to her, mumbling something around the flashlight. “Awn oo eye?”

It was not a foreign language, but she had no trouble interpreting. Want to try?

Hell, yeah, she thought, but she merely shrugged, worried about appearing overly eager to engage in this criminal act, even with his approval. “Sure.”

Pierce passed over the tool set and then moved aside, removing the light from between his teeth and holding it low, to illuminate the lock.

“Tell me about the Herculean Society while you do it,” Pierce said, flashing a grin.

“What? Why?”

“Since tonight is an initiation of sorts, your first field mission, I want to be sure you know what led us here.”

“You want a history report while I pick a lock?”

“Mind and body on separate tasks.” He nodded. “It’s an important skill.”

Fiona inserted the pick. “The Herculean Society was formed in 800 BC, maybe earlier, by Hercules, hence the name. But he wasn’t a demi-god. He was a man who used science to extend his life, tapping ancient secrets — and DNA, long before modern scientists even discovered it — to make himself immortal.”

She raked the pick’s tip along the keyway, feeling the pins move against the springs. She then removed a small tension lever from the kit and placed it in the cylinder, applying gentle but steady pressure, just enough to hold the pins in place as she teased them up, one by one.

“Over time, Hercules witnessed how mankind abused certain powers, and he realized that most of us couldn’t be trusted with certain knowledge, artifacts or creatures. So he created the Society to hide, alter and protect history from humanity, and sometimes humanity from history. And he protected his own existence by exaggerating the truth about his life until it reached mythological proportions.”

Each move of the lock-pick was second nature. One of her father’s friends had taught her how to do this years ago. She had practiced until it was drilled into her muscle memory, along with hand-to-hand combat, shooting and some simple computer hacking techniques — all useful skills for cat burglars and government agents. Her father and his friends were the latter, all members of an elite paramilitary special operations team.

“In more recent years, Hercules went by the name Alexander Diotrephes, who I first met four years ago, under…interesting circumstances. Not long after that, he passed leadership of the Society on to my father, and he passed it on to you, what, six months ago? With that turnover rate, I’ll be in charge by the time I’m nineteen.” The cylinder rotated. The bolt slid away with a click. She grinned. “So are we here to protect history from people, or people from history?”

Pierce returned her smile. “It’s usually a little of both.”

She reached for the door knob, but Pierce shot out a restraining hand. “Alarm,” he whispered.

She grimaced. Of course there’s an alarm. Stupid.

Pierce reached into a pocket and took out a black plastic box that looked like a cross between an ohmmeter and an electronic stud-finder. It wasn’t the kind of thing the average professor of archeology carried, but he wasn’t the average professor of archeology. Not anymore. Those calm days were long behind him now. He missed the quiet sometimes, but he had no regrets. He was living every archeologist’s dream, which sometimes included breaking into a museum. He held the device close to the door and moved it along the edge of the frame. As he swept the device across the top of the door, a red LED began to blink, and then it remained steadily bright. Pierce gave a satisfied nod and pressed a button on the device. When he lowered his hand, the device remained in place, magnetically affixed to the door.

“Open it,” he said. “Slowly.”

She turned the knob and eased the door open an inch, then another. There was no clangor of bells or sirens alerting the world to their unauthorized presence. The door was equipped with a contact-circuit — the idea was that when the door was opened, the circuit would be broken, triggering the security alarm — but the electromagnetic induction field generated by the black box ensured that the circuit remained unbroken, even though the contacts were no longer touching. Of course, the alarm was not the only security measure they would have to worry about. The museum also employed a night watchman.

Pierce pressed his face close to the gap. “All clear.”

He gripped the door and slipped inside. Just before he disappeared completely, he waved her forward. Once she was inside, Pierce reached up to the top of the door and carefully slid the black device around to the inside of the door frame. With the door firmly shut and locked, he deactivated the box and removed it, slipping it back into his pocket.

The service door opened into what appeared to be a supply room. Pierce shone his red flashlight around until he found a door leading deeper into the museum. He motioned for her to follow.

They entered a corridor lined with several more doors, but Pierce passed all of these by and went to the double doors at the end of the hallway. After a quick check to ensure that the doors were not rigged with an alarm, he cautiously opened them to reveal a dimly lit room.

Fiona recognized what lay beyond from their visit earlier in the day, a gallery of sculptures, some of the pieces life-sized and dating from the late Hellenistic and early Roman periods. The sculpted likenesses of gods and mythical heroes represented the tail-end of Crete’s history, at least as far as archaeologists like Pierce were concerned. The museum contained antiquities dating back more than seven thousand years, to the Neolithic period, long before the rise of Classical Greek civilization.

Most of the collection in the twenty-one exhibition rooms of the Heraklion Museum was dedicated to the Minoan culture, which had not only dominated the island of Crete but much of the Mediterranean up until about 1200 BC. Then their society vanished so completely that, by the time of Alexander the Great, the Minoans were remembered only in myths, a forgotten kingdom. One contributing factor had been the catastrophic eruption of a volcano on the nearby island of Thera — the largest volcanic event in recorded history, an order of magnitude greater than the eruption of Krakatoa in 1883. Many scholars believed that the Minoan culture had been the inspiration for the legendary Atlantis, described in the dialogues of Plato as a highly advanced but arrogant civilization, wiped out by angry gods in a single day.

Although later civilizations had occupied the site of the ancient Minoan capital, it remained buried until 1878, when the ruins of the ancient palace of Knossos were found, just three miles from the site of modern day Heraklion. More than a century later, archaeological excavations continued to shed new light on the Minoan culture, and it was one such discovery that had attracted the attention of the Herculean Society.

Fiona knew much of this from her own studies, but strolling the galleries with Pierce that morning, he had been unable to resist the urge to lecture, and he had filled in the gaps. He was silent now, communicating only with hand signals. He pointed to an opening in the center of the far wall. Fiona nodded and crept through the gallery to the arch that led into the adjoining room. She edged out, looking and listening for any signs of the roaming watchman. When she detected nothing, she turned back and signaled a thumbs-up to Pierce, who was checking out the doorway in the opposite corner. He returned the signal and then motioned for her to join him.

The room beyond the doorway contained relics recovered from the ruins of Phaistos, a Minoan palace thirty miles away on the south shore of the island. The artifacts were arranged in simple glass display cases, with very little supplemental interpretive information. Most of the pieces were simple — bits of pottery, tools and jewelry. Irreplaceable items to be sure, but with very little intrinsic value, which no doubt accounted for the sparse security measures. But there was one artifact in the room that was truly unique. The reason for their after-hours ‘visit.’

The Phaistos Disc was mounted in a circular metal bracket that reminded Fiona of a two-sided swivel mirror, secured behind panes of glass in a free-standing display case, in the center of the room. The artifact was a pancake-flat circle of glazed and kiln-fired clay, almost six inches in diameter, decorated on both sides with a series of symbols that spiraled from the center.

Almost from the moment of its discovery in 1908, in the basement of the Phaistos palace complex, the Disc became one of the greatest mysteries in archaeology and language studies. The symbols, forty-five distinctive pictograms, arranged into different ‘word’ combinations, were the source of the mystery. The pictograms, which were very similar to Egyptian hieroglyphs and depicted the shapes of people, animals, plants, tools and weapons, formed a message of some kind. Some believed it was an ancient zodiac horoscope or a child’s board game. Some even believed it was of Atlantean origin.

For more than a century, all attempts to decipher the message had been unsuccessful. There was no way to know for sure if the images on the Disc even represented a real language. The meaning of the symbols was so perplexing that a few embittered researchers believed that the Disc was a twentieth century hoax. But in late 2014, a team of scholars led by Gareth Owens, a linguist working at the Technological Educational Institute of Crete, announced that they had cracked the code, using the Minoan Linear A script along with Mycenaean Linear B to identify several keywords. The working hypothesis was that the Disc contained a prayer to a Minoan mother goddess.

Yet while the mystery of the message had been solved, what could not be explained was the uniqueness of the symbols themselves. Each of the pictograms had been stamped into the soft clay using carved seals, one of the earliest known instances of typographic printing. Some ancient craftsman had carved the forty-five seals, used them to create the Disc, and then evidently destroyed them so they could never be used again. The symbols on the Phaistos Disc were unique, appearing there and nowhere else.

Or so it was believed.

Fiona knew differently.

They closed in on the display, and Pierce shone his red light on the keyhole of a cabinet lock, which was partially concealed in the base of the display. Fiona selected the appropriate tools from the pick kit and went to work on the lock. It took less than two minutes for her to defeat the simple mechanism, and this time she double-checked for an alarm before opening the case.

Pierce moved the beam of his light to the shadowy interior of the display, illuminating the Phaistos Disc. It looked so ordinary, a slightly irregular pat of clay, like a grade school art project stamped with what looked like decorative images. It was hard to believe that something so ordinary could be so mysterious, and potentially dangerous.

Fiona reached a hand in and grasped the Disc between thumb and forefinger. She eased it from the bracket and brought it out. Pierce took the artifact from her, and then proffered something with his other hand: an exact replica, created using 3-D molecular printing technology, precise down to the microscopic level. A scientific analysis of this duplicate disc might reveal it to be a fake — or it might not. The technology at the Herculean Society’s disposal was truly that good — but because such a test had never been conducted on the real McCoy, no one would suspect that a substitution had been made. The assumption would be that the infamous Phaistos Disc had been a hoax all along.

With equal caution, Fiona reached back into the case and placed the duplicate where the original had been. She made one final adjustment, rotating the bogus disc a degree or two, then closed the display while Pierce slipped the authentic Disc into a cloth pouch, which he then stowed in a small satchel slung over one shoulder.

Behind her black ski-mask, Fiona allowed herself a satisfied smile. They had done it. Now all they needed to do was relock the display case and get out without—

Her smile died along with the hopeful sentiment as she caught a glint of white light, reflected in the glass pane. She looked up just as the source of the light, a flashlight in the hands of a uniformed man, appeared in the doorway. Then it shone right into her eyes.

3

Pierce gave the end of his MagTac a quick twist to remove the red filter cap and aimed the naked light directly into the face of the startled watchman. The man flinched, throwing his hands up and looking away, too late to prevent temporary blindness. The high intensity LED bulb would leave him seeing bright green spots for the next few minutes.

Pierce grabbed Fiona’s shoulder. “Run.”

He sensed her hesitation, so he gave her a shake to snap her out of her paralysis. “Remember the plan.”

The exhortation broke the spell. She whirled around and bolted for the exit. Pierce was just a few steps behind her, but as they reached the door, he slowed and glanced back at the guard. Despite being unable to see, the man stumbled through the maze of display cases, intent on pursuing them. Pierce checked to make sure that Fiona was still moving toward the door, and then he turned back toward the night watchman, sweeping the room with the beam of the MagTac to make sure he had the man’s attention.

The ‘plan’ Pierce had spoken of, which had been worked out in detail during their earlier reconnaissance, was simple. In the event that they were discovered, they would split up and leave the museum by different routes to confound pursuit. Because she had no experience with such things, Fiona accepted the plan without protest. This break-in was, after all, her baptism by fire. It was her first taste of what being an agent of the Herculean Society really meant.

As missions went, this one was pretty tame, but even so, allowing Fiona to accompany him and get her feet wet had been a tough decision for Pierce. She was an adult now, in both the legal and literal sense of the word. Old enough to vote and enlist in the military, old enough, as she all too often reminded him, to make long-term life decisions for herself. Nevertheless, she was still young and immature, and more importantly, she was Pierce’s responsibility, which meant that if anything happened to her — if she was caught and arrested, or God forbid, injured — it would be on his head. The fear of what might go wrong hadn’t been enough for him to leave her behind, though, especially since she was eager to take on greater responsibility. But that did not mean Pierce would throw all caution to the wind.

Some discreet inquiries had revealed that the museum utilized only one watchman for the night shift. He walked the galleries and manned a security station at the locked front entrance. Because there was no way to completely eliminate the possibility that the guard might stumble upon them, they had rehearsed several egress routes. The escape plan hinged on giving the guard two targets to pursue, each going in a different direction. Pierce, however, had not told Fiona the whole plan — specifically, his part of the plan. After splitting up, it was his intention to draw the guard after him, to give Fiona the best possible chance for a clean getaway. Unfortunately, he was the one with the Phaistos Disc, which meant that if he was caught, there would be hell to pay.

He definitely had the watchman’s full attention. The man cursed loudly as he collided with a display case, rattling pieces of three-thousand-year-old pottery off their shelves, but he managed to keep his flashlight trained in Pierce’s general direction. Pierce moved along the wall of the gallery, toward the opening in the corner that led to another room, but he didn’t turn and run until he was certain the guard would follow.

The next room contained artifacts from other major Minoan palace sites, but Pierce kept his focus on the spaces where there were no relics on display. There was an arched opening to his left, and the archway ahead led to the gallery where treasures from the Stone Age were exhibited. Beyond that room lay the entry foyer and one possible exit from the museum.

He glanced back and glimpsed the dancing beam of the watchman’s flashlight only ten steps away.

Okay, maybe this part of the plan is working a little too well, Pierce thought, returning his gaze forward. No more fooling around.

He flicked off his light and sprinted toward the lobby. The museum was not pitch black, but the abrupt absence of illumination from the MagTac made it seem that way. Pierce knew that there were no obstacles ahead but he had to fight an almost primitive urge to slow down and grope in the darkness like a blind man.

Once he reached the relative openness of the lobby, he hooked left, away from the main entrance, which was too close to Fiona’s exit. He darted through another gallery full of Minoan antiquities, making a beeline for the stairwell on the other side of the room.

He risked a glance back as he veered toward the stairs and saw that his lead on the security guard had shrunk to just a few steps.

This isn’t working, he thought. Change of plans.

As he ducked into the stairwell, Pierce grasped the central handrail and vaulted over it like an Olympic gymnast. He felt an abrupt strain in his forearm as his forward momentum stretched the limb, but then like the business end of a bullwhip, he was flung around 180 degrees, right into the path of the watchman.

At the instant of collision, Pierce curled into a fetal ball, protecting his head and vital organs. His shoulder caught the unsuspecting guard squarely in the chest, and the man was driven back as if hit by a wrecking ball. The impact sent Pierce flying as well, but because he was prepared for it, he recovered quickly, regaining his feet and whirling around to mount the stairs.

Beneath the knit weave of his ski-mask, Pierce was grinning like an idiot.

Growing up, he had not exactly struck an ideal balance between intellectual and physical pursuits. While the dream of being a two-fisted adventurer like his hero, Indiana Jones, had set him on the path to a career in archaeology, he had avoided athletic pursuits and focused on academic excellence, which had made him a top-notch professor but a piss-poor action hero.

Fortunately, since taking the directorship of the Herculean Society, he had been working to correct that deficiency, with a regimen of exercise and mixed-martial arts training. It was slow going, but evidently it was possible for an old dog to learn a few new tricks.

He bounded up the stairs, shaking out the mild pain in his shoulder. As he rounded the landing, he saw no sign of pursuit. The watchman was either still recovering or knocked out cold. Pierce’s elation faltered a little as he considered the possibility that he might have seriously injured the man.

Nothing you can do about it now, he told himself. Focus on the mission.

The mission.

Burglary and brawling weren’t the only new tricks he’d had to learn since taking on his new role as the leader of the Herculean Society.

As an archaeologist and a historian, he had been committed to advancing the cause of knowledge. Only by learning about the past could mankind chart the course to a better future. Or so he had always believed. But experience had taught him a lesson that no textbook ever could. Some secrets needed to stay buried.

Six years earlier, this point had been driven home when the truth he had wanted so badly to discover had nearly cost him his humanity.

Ultimately, only the intervention of the Herculean Society had saved him. Alexander Diotrephes had pulled him from the brink. Only later would Pierce learn another astonishing secret: Diotrephes was the immortal Hercules, and he’d created the vast organization, which had literally rewritten history over the course of thousands of years. Pierce had made a career of uncovering history, but it had now become his job, his mission, to conceal it. The old saying about being doomed to repeat history if you didn’t know it, wasn’t always true. Sometimes the only way to not repeat history was to have no idea it had ever existed.

The second floor of the museum was laid out in a sideways H-shape. The gallery where Pierce now found himself formed one side of the H, with stairs at either end. Two parallel rooms bisected the exhibit hall and provided access to the rooms that comprised the other side of the H. There was an emergency door in the far corner of one of those rooms. The only problem was the door alarm. He could use the induction field generator — his black box — to fool it, but that would take time.

The alarm!

Pierce’s guts twisted into a knot of dread as he realized that Fiona would be facing a similar problem, and without the black box to help her. He imagined her standing in front of the door through which they had entered, wondering what to do. This was something that had not come up during their rehearsal.

Damn it. I screwed up.

He briefly considered trying to send Fiona a text message, acknowledging the problem, but it occurred to him that there was a more direct way of communicating with her. He just hoped she would be able to interpret the message.

He ran headlong through the galleries, following the illuminated signs to the emergency door, but he did not take out the black box. Nor did he slow down. Instead, he hit the door at a full run.

A piercing siren shattered the deceptive stillness. A moment later, a second alarm joined the shrieking symphony.

Fiona had received the message: Screw the alarm. Just go for it.

Now it was time for him to do the same.

Ignoring the commotion, Pierce flipped on his flashlight and scanned the corridor in which he now found himself. An illuminated arrow on an overhead ‘Exit’ sign pointed the way to a door marked in both Greek and English with the words: Fire Stairs.

He weighed his options. The fire stairs would be the most direct path to freedom, but that also made it a dangerous choice. Would the guard be waiting for him to emerge? Were the police already on their way?

Too risky, he decided. But maybe there was another way out of the building. He dashed down the corridor, checking each door until he found one marked with the word:

Roof.

Perfect.

He twisted the doorknob but it refused to turn. Locked.

Damn. Not perfect.

Fiona still had his pick set, though even if he’d brought a spare, there probably would not have been time for him to mess around with the lock. There was a reason he had allowed her to use the picks earlier, and it wasn’t to give her more experience. She was a natural with locks, faster and smoother than he would ever be.

Fine, he thought. There were other ways to deal with locked doors.

He drew back a step, lowered his shoulder and started to charge…but then stopped short. Bashing down doors always looked easy in movies, but something told him that real life might not be so accommodating. A second look at the door revealed three sets of hinges; the door opened toward him. He could have thrown himself against it all night long and the only thing he would have to show for it would be a bruised shoulder.

He glanced back down the corridor. The stairs were starting to seem like a much better idea.

Okay, if I can’t pick the lock and I can’t break it down…what can I do?

There was a sliver-thin gap between the door and its frame. With a blade, or even a credit card, it might be possible to jimmy the lock open, but he had neither.

Note to self. In the future, always carry a knife.

What he did have was the black box device, and that was almost as good as a blade. He took it out and placed it against the door, between the knob and the strike plate, and then hit the button to activate the induction field. There was a click as the electromagnet engaged and pulled the device tight against the metal. Something moved against his shoulder, and before he could even think to be surprised, he felt something strike the back of his hand.

His satchel, or more precisely, its contents — the Phaistos Disc — had been drawn into the powerful magnetic field.

That’s interesting.

But there was no time to explore the mystery. Ignoring the satchel, he gripped the black box in both hands and slid the device toward the door knob. As the electromagnet moved, it pulled the metal latch bolt clear of the strike plate, and the door popped open.

“Top that, Dr. Jones,” he said.

As soon as he switched off the device, the satchel fell away, but Pierce barely noticed. He stuffed the device back into his pocket and ventured through the door onto the rooftop, above the museum’s first floor. The low wail of police sirens greeted him. Close but not yet too close.

Pierce ran to the edge of the rooftop, trying to get oriented. He could just make out the harbor off to his left, a couple of miles distant, at the base of the slope upon which the city of Heraklion had been founded. That meant he was on the east side of the museum complex. If she stuck to the plan, Fiona would be leaving from the south, only a few hundred yards away. Pierce would have preferred a route that led him further away from her, but there was nothing to be done about it now. He looked down, focusing his attention on the more immediate problem of his own escape.

Because the museum was built on a hillside, the ground was a lot further away than he had anticipated — at least a forty foot drop. The wall below was smooth concrete, with no windows or ledges.

Note to self, addendum: Also bring rope. He growled in frustration. Forget Indiana Jones. He was going to have to start wearing a utility belt like Batman…if he actually made it out of this without getting killed or arrested.

He switched on his MagTac and shone the beam along the low parapet at the edge of the rooftop. A square shadow caught his eye and revealed a small opening that fed into a metal downspout that ran down the exterior wall.

Pierce stared at it for a few seconds. He could think of at least a dozen reasons why trying to shinny down that pipe was a foolish idea, but the one argument in favor of it was even more compelling: he had no other choice.

The sirens were getting louder.

Biting his lip, he hoisted himself onto the parapet and swung his legs out into space.

Oh, crap. Nope. Can’t do this.

But there was no turning back now. Although he was still gripping the edge of the roof, too much of his body weight was already hanging out over the side. Climbing back up would be harder than sliding down the spout.

He stretched his feet out, probing the wall until he felt the pipe. He tried to grip the slick surface with the soles of his boots, but struggled to find purchase. Despite his lifelong action-hero fantasies, he had always been the kid in gym class who couldn’t climb the rope to save his life.

You don’t have to climb, he reminded himself. Just go down.

Going down was inevitable now. It was just a question of whether he slid or plummeted.

He unclenched his left hand from the parapet and reached down for the pipe. It was secured tightly against the wall, with no room for him to wrap his hand around it, but he got his best grip on it and squeezed with all his strength.

Now the other one.

His right hand seemed to have developed its own opinion on the subject of letting go. Pierce squeezed the spout even harder with his left, trying to work up the courage to… “Just. Let. Go.”

He let go.

Gravity seized control of the situation. There was a shrieking noise, like air escaping from a balloon, as the soles of his boots rasped against the pipe. Pierce felt a bloom of heat against his palm, friction caused by sliding down the spout much faster than he had intended. Frantic, he groped for the pipe with his right hand. He felt more friction heat as his fingertips grazed the wall, but somehow he managed to grab hold and squeeze—

He hit the ground like a pile driver. White hot skewers of pain stabbed up through the soles of his feet, all the way to his knees. Yet, even as he pitched backward, staggering like a drunken sailor and finally landing hard on his ass, he knew that his efforts to slow the crazy descent had not been futile. He was still alive.

Ignoring the pain, he got to his feet and shuffled across an open space that appeared to be a cross between an active archaeological dig and a picnic area. A wrought-iron fence guarded this section of the museum perimeter. The street beyond was quiet, but Pierce moved along the fence until he was in the shadow of a large rhododendron bush. Then he attempted to scale the barrier. The climb out required more effort than the climb in, and was less graceful, but he was in the homestretch now.

He dropped to the base of the fence and slid down a sloped retaining wall to the sidewalk. The street before him was one of the main boulevards running down the hill toward the harbor. There was a good chance at least some of the police units responding to the alarm would be coming up it. He stripped off his ski-mask and gloves and shrugged out of his black turtle-neck to reveal a garish tropical print shirt — just the sort of thing a tourist might wear. Then he started down the sidewalk, moving as nonchalantly as his aching legs would allow. He took the next left, heading west down the narrow urban canyon between the museum and a neighboring office building.

The siren noise abruptly peaked as a police car, with emergency lights flashing, rounded a corner and raced toward the museum entrance. Pierce decided it was better to look directly at it, like a curious passerby, rather than turning away and arousing suspicion. The vehicle did not slow, but continued past, the noise of its siren building to a high-frequency shriek before Dopplering away to nothing.

Pierce did not allow himself a relieved sigh. Fiona was still back there somewhere, her fate uncertain. He quickened his step, wincing as each footfall stressed the minor injuries sustained in his fall, and continued on toward the designated rendezvous point.

“Please let her be safe,” he whispered, a prayer to any actual God who might still be paying attention.

4

Fiona had only just arrived at the exit, when an alarm sounded from somewhere in the building behind her.

Well that takes care of that, she thought, twisting the knob and easing the door open. After a quick check to confirm that the courtyard beyond was still deserted, she stole forward, keeping to the shadows, and scaled the fence in the same spot she and Pierce had used to enter. As she waited for a car to clear the nearby traffic circle, she stripped off her black over-garments and stuffed them into a nearby storm drain. Clad in denim shorts and a T-shirt emblazoned with a silk-screened likeness of the Acropolis, she looked like a young tourist out for a late-night stroll. She hoped Pierce was having as easy a time sticking to the plan.

She crossed the street and skirted along the edge of a city park, heading west, not moving toward a specific destination but putting as much distance between herself and the museum as possible. The noise of the alarm had already diminished, but she could hear police sirens in the distance.

“Need a lift?”

The voice startled her. She had been so focused on getting away that she had failed to notice the car pacing her. A quick glance showed a man with wavy blond hair leaning out the side window of a blue sedan. He looked old — probably as old as Pierce, who had to be at least forty. The man immediately raised her hackles. The last thing she needed right now was some perv hitting on her. She looked away, trying to send a clear ‘buzz off’ message with her body language, realizing only then that the man had spoken in English.

British, judging by the accent.

The man called out again. “You’re here with George Pierce, aren’t you?”

The question startled her, and she came to an abrupt and unintentional halt. She forced herself to resume walking, refusing to give any further acknowledgement, but her mind was racing to make sense of the situation.

“I saw you come out of the museum just now.” His tone was offhand, casual.

Fiona stopped again. This time, she gave him more than a cursory look. Aside from the fact that he had approached her out of the blue, after evidently stalking her and Pierce, there was nothing particularly scary about him. Somehow that only made the situation worse.

“The police are going to be here soon,” he continued in the same unruffled manner. “I’m sure they’re bound to notice me following you, and since I have no intention of just driving away, you should probably ask yourself whether you want to attract their attention.”

Fiona muttered a curse under her breath. Under any other circumstances, she would have welcomed the arrival of the police. “Who the hell are you?”

“My name is Liam Kenner. Dr. Pierce and I are colleagues.”

“Never heard of you.” It was true. Fiona had been attending classes at the University where Pierce taught. She knew everyone in the department, and most of the other archaeologists who came and went on a regular basis. The name Kenner did not ring any bells.

“We were acquainted several years ago.” Kenner paused a beat, then set the hook. “When he first began his search for Hercules.”

If she had not already been standing still, Fiona would have tripped over this revelation.

“I’ll tell you all about it,” Kenner went on, “but I really think we’d both be more comfortable if you joined me. I don’t bite.”

Fiona desperately wanted to beg off, citing the old wisdom about not taking rides from strangers. Something told her that Kenner might be more dangerous than a random sexual predator, but the mere fact that he knew about Pierce’s connection to Hercules convinced her that not knowing was even more of a risk.

“Well, I do,” she said, trying to keep the fear out of her voice. “If you try anything…” She let the threat hang. Kenner merely smiled.

As she circled around to the passenger side, Fiona stuffed her hands in her pockets, trying to make the gesture seem as casual as possible. The fingers of her right hand closed around the wallet containing the lock picks. They would be very effective stabbing weapons, if the need arose. She noted a rental sticker in the corner of the windshield. That was a good sign. It meant Kenner probably wouldn’t have been able to rig the electronic locks to hold her prisoner. At the first hint of trouble, she could stab him with a pick and then jump out.

She slid into the passenger seat but didn’t buckle the seat belt. “Okay. Talk.”

Kenner smiled again, then turned his eyes forward. He started to pull away from the curb, but at that moment, a pair of police cars screamed past, going the wrong way on the one-way street, heading for the museum. Fiona tried to hide her concern for Pierce behind a mask of indifference, but Kenner was not going to let her off that easy.

As he started forward again, he glanced in the rearview mirror at the receding lights. “You and Dr. Pierce separated. Why?”

“Long story.” She stared straight ahead. “What do you want?”

“Actually, I want the same thing George does. The truth.” He paused, perhaps hoping that she would voluntarily fill the silence. When she did not, he went on. “Has he told you the story? Seven years ago, he discovered proof that Hercules was a real, historic person, named on the manifest of a ship from the fifth century BC. The ship was the Argo.” When she did not respond to this, he glanced at her. “Does your American education include the classics? Argo? Jason and the quest for the Golden Fleece?”

Without meeting his gaze, Fiona replied, “Although the most complete account of Jason’s voyage, the Argonautica, was written by Apollonius of Rhodes in the third century BC, the works of Homer make reference to both the Argo and Jason, not to mention Herakles—” She broke from an otherwise flat monotone to emphasize the correct Greek pronunciation—“which date to at least the year 850 BC and may be as much as two centuries older than that. So, while my uncle might have discovered a ship named Argo, with a crew member named for the mythological hero, I doubt very much he would have made the mistake of believing that it was the inspiration for a legend that was at least five hundred years old when that ship was built. That’s what I learned in my American education.”

Kenner burst out laughing. “Touché, my dear. As a matter of fact, I think I made a similar observation at the time. I don’t recall what George’s reaction was. Regardless, shortly thereafter, the document was stolen. George believed the theft was the work of a secret society dedicated to preserving the legacy of Hercules.”

Fiona felt a chill of apprehension and dug her hand deeper into her pocket. Had Kenner spotted the tattoo on the back of her right hand?

The symbol, a circle crossed by two parallel lines, was the mark of the Herculean Society, a souvenir of her first encounter with Alexander Diotrephes. It had always reminded her of a livestock brand, not so much a declaration of ownership as a sign of protection. Despite all the grief accompanying his interference in her life, Fiona had for a time secretly liked the idea of having the legendary Hercules as her guardian. Throughout her high school years, she had done her best to keep the tattoo hidden from her classmates at Brewster Academy. With her olive-complexion, raven-black hair and distinctly Native-American features, not to mention the fact that she was a Type 1 insulin-dependent diabetic, she was already different enough.

The symbol of Hercules was not widely known outside the Society, though it had been adopted as a Druid sigil in the 1960s. But if Kenner had done his homework, he would probably have come across it.

“Secret society?” Fiona rolled her eyes and tried for her best dismissive teenager voice. “Cool story. Is that why you were following Uncle George and me? Are you in this Hercules Club?”

“I’ll tell you, if you tell me why you and Dr. Pierce broke into the museum tonight.”

Fiona weighed her options. She was not about to share the truth about the Society with this man, no matter who he claimed to be or how much he claimed to know. But what tack should she take? What lie should she tell?

Before she could make up her mind, Kenner chortled again and clapped her shoulder. Fiona jerked away as if his touch had been red hot, but he continued laughing, oblivious to her reaction. “Just having a spot of fun with you,” he said, though his humor sounded forced. “Of course I’m not part of that group, if it even exists at all. And your business at the museum is none of mine. Where can I drop you?”

The abrupt reversal stunned Fiona almost as much as the uninvited familiarity, and it took her a moment to gather her wits. Did he want her to take him to Pierce? Was that his game? If so, she wasn’t going to play.

“That old fort,” she said, choosing one of Heraklion’s most notable landmarks.

“The Koules fortress?” There was a hint of amusement in his voice, as if he sensed what she was trying to do.

“That’s the one.”

Kenner said nothing more, but at the next intersection he made a right turn, heading in the direction of the old harbor. They made the short journey in almost complete silence. Kenner merely looked ahead, focused on the road. A few minutes later, the marina appeared. Fiona could just make out the squat silhouette of the old Venetian fortress that had once guarded the port. It was situated on a causeway that was part of the long breakwater, which still sheltered the marina.

Kenner stopped the car near the entrance to the breakwater, which was barricaded to prevent vehicle traffic. He looked out at the fort. “Rather isolated here.”

“I’ll be fine.” Without another word, Fiona opened the door and got out.

“If you should see your uncle,” Kenner called out, “Ask him to contact me. I have some information that may be of interest to him. Provided he’s still looking for Hercules, of course.”

Fiona kept walking toward the old monument. The faint noise of an engine revving and tires crunching on pavement prompted her to glance over her shoulder. The car was moving away.

Kenner had not been wrong about how isolated the place was, but Fiona was a lot more worried about him coming back than running into some lurking stranger. She calculated the distance to the edge of the causeway. If Kenner came after her, she would leap into the harbor and swim for it.

She kept walking, but when the receding taillights disappeared, she ducked behind a barrier and waited. A minute. Five minutes. There was no sign of Kenner.

She dug her phone from a pocket, checking for messages from Pierce. Nothing. She started to tap out a text message to him, but stopped short of sending it. If he had been caught or arrested, then the police would be monitoring his phone. They might be able to use it to track her down.

Even if he had not been captured, he would be observing the ‘no contact’ rule that had been part of the plan.

She left the message unsent.

The designated rendezvous was about two miles away, at the Heraklion Airport. Her arrival at such a late hour would be less likely to attract unwanted attention than anywhere else, even at a hotel, but she knew the real reason he had chosen the airport for a fallback position. If he was not there waiting, she would board a waiting jet, which would take her to a destination known only to the pilots. The Gulfstream G550 was owned and operated by one of the Herculean Society’s many shadow enterprises — legitimate corporations that facilitated operations in every part of the globe, not to mention providing a steady source of revenue. The flight crew, like most of the people employed by the Society’s subsidiary ventures, were unaware of the role they played in protecting the world from history, and history from the world. They did not even know the Herculean Society existed, much less that they were a part of it. But they would follow Pierce’s instructions to the letter.

That might have been Pierce’s plan, but there was no way she was going to leave him behind. Still, maybe there was another way she could make use of the Society’s resources.

She opened the Internet browser on her phone and found the contact information for the company that managed logistics for the Society. She called the international number, and then identified herself as a passenger on the Gulfstream. She hoped that would accord her VIP status, but the operator promptly put her on hold.

A moment later, the canned music was silenced as someone picked up the line. “Fiona? Are you safe?” It was Pierce.

She heaved a sigh of relief. “I’m safe, Uncle George.”

“Where are you?”

“I’m at the old fort.”

“What are you doing there?”

“After I left the museum, an old friend of yours offered me a ride. I think the actual word he used was ‘colleague.’ Liam Kenner.”

There was a long silence over the line.

“Uncle George?”

“Kenner,” Pierce said in a low, almost menacing voice. “Son of a bitch.”

5

“Colleague? That’s what he said?”

Fiona sank into the passenger seat of the rental car and gazed over at Pierce. “Happy to see you, too,” she remarked, more amused than sarcastic. She had not been waiting long, less than ten minutes, though it had seemed a lot longer.

Pierce looked mildly embarrassed. “Sorry. I’m still trying to process this.” He took a breath. “It was clever of you to draw him off like that.”

“Thanks. So what’s the story with you and Kenner? He seemed to know an awful lot about your search for Hercules.”

Pierce stared straight ahead, as if driving the deserted streets required his full attention. “Several years ago, when I first came across some documents that mentioned Hercules in a historic context, I made the mistake of sharing that information with some other members of the archaeological community. At the time, I was merely looking for more of the same, inquiring to see if anyone else had found similar evidence.”

“Then Kenner is a colleague? An archaeologist?”

“His specialty is paleopharmacology, a multi-disciplinary field that focuses on the medical treatments used by ancient cultures. When I originally proposed the idea that Hercules might have been an ancient scientist, Kenner was intrigued by the possibility of an elixir to explain Hercules’s strength and invincibility. Evidently, he was more interested than I realized at the time.”

“Interested enough to stalk you for the last seven years?”

Pierce shook his head. “It’s possible that he was here conducting research of his own, and noticed us touring the museum earlier.”

Fiona raised a skeptical eyebrow. “You don’t actually believe that, do you?”

Pierce checked the rearview, prompting Fiona to look over her shoulder, but there was no one following them. “I wish I did,” Pierce replied. “But no. It’s probably not a coincidence.”

“So what do we do about it? About him?”

Pierce sighed. “He’s just fishing.”

“He knew that we broke into the museum. What if he goes to the police?”

“He won’t. Not right away. He’ll want to talk to me first. Maybe try to blackmail me, but it won’t do him any good. He can’t prove anything.” Pierce drove in silence for a few minutes. “This isn’t the first time someone has gotten close, you know. There are protocols for dealing with situations like this.”

“Protocols?” Fiona did not like the sound of that. “Like making him disappear?”

“Nothing so dramatic. At the very worst, we might have to destroy him professionally. Discredit him, so that no one takes him seriously ever again. But I doubt it will come to that. He has other…pressure points.”

Fiona sensed that Pierce did not want to elaborate further, so she changed the subject. “So we’re still going to do this?”

“I don’t think we have a choice. Especially not now, with Kenner sniffing around. He probably heard about the discovery at Ideon Andron. That would explain why he’s here in Heraklion. We need to move now, before anyone else figures this out.”

Fiona nodded in acceptance. Pierce was right, of course. This, too, was all part of the plan.

6

According to Greek mythology, Zeus, the ruler of the gods of Olympus and father to numerous divine and semi-divine offspring, including the legendary Herakles, was born on the island of Crete. He was the child of the Titans Cronus and Rhea. Cronus, fearing a prophecy that his own offspring would destroy him, had already devoured Zeus’s elder siblings. Zeus would have suffered the same fate if his mother had not hidden him away in a cave beneath Mount Psiloritis.

Like all such myths, a thread of truth ran through the tale. There was indeed a cave. Ideon Andros, the Cave of Zeus. It had been revered by the ancient Mycenaeans — the civilization that had arisen on Crete after the fall of the Minoans, and which ultimately became the Greek civilization. For centuries, long after the center of the world shifted to Athens, Ideon Andros was believed to be the actual birthplace of the king of the Olympian gods. Archaeological excavations had revealed a long tradition of votive offerings at the cave, but Pierce knew that such evidence confused cause and effect. There were many caves all across the island, but the ancients had chosen to venerate this particular cave as the birthplace of their faith. There had to be a very good reason for that.

Although just twenty linear miles from Heraklion, it took Pierce nearly two hours to make the drive, the last five miles of the trip on a dusty road that wound up the mountainside. Ideon Andros was yet one more tourist destination on an island that was renowned for places of historic interest, but what Pierce and Fiona sought was not in any of the guidebooks.

They left the car near the small museum and gift shop that serviced visitors. Then they hiked in the darkness to the mouth of the cave, checking frequently to ensure that they had not been followed. The mountain air was chilly, and Fiona hugged her arms close, but did not complain as they slipped through a small fence that kept local goats out of the cave. Pierce kept the red filter on his MagTac until they finished descending the stairs that led down into the enormous opening beneath the mountain. Once they reached the main gallery, Pierce removed the cover and played his light on the high walls, which were rippling with stalactite growth. He quickly located a shadowy recess at the rear of the cavern. The surrounding area was cordoned off with wooden barricades and caution tape, indicating that an excavation was currently in progress, but Pierce had learned through the grapevine of the archaeological community that the dig had hit a wall. Literally.

“There it is,” Pierce said, motioning with the light. He moved to the narrow fissure and lowered himself into it, shining the beam into its depths. The bright flashlight illuminated a flat stone wall, clearly worked by a human craftsman and adorned with a strange symbol.

“The Horns of Consecration,” Fiona said. “The symbol of the Sacred Minoan Bull. Just like the monuments in the palace at Knossos.”

Pierce nodded. They had seen several examples of bull iconography at the museum, ranging from the simple motif like that carved into the cave wall — dubbed ‘The Horns of Consecration’ by Sir Arthur Evans, the archaeologist whose work in Knossos had laid the foundation for the modern concept of the Minoan civilization — to much more realistic paintings and sculptures. Despite being lost to history for three millennia, the significance of the bull to the Minoan civilization had been immortalized in Greek mythology, particularly in the legend of the Minotaur, the half-man, half-bull chimera that roamed the subterranean Labyrinth, devouring human sacrifices.

There was even a connection to the story of Hercules. One of the legendary Labors imposed upon Hercules by King Eurystheus, as penance for killing his family in a fit of madness, had been the capture of the monstrous Cretan Bull. Pierce knew that much of that story was a fabrication — there had been no mental lapse, no family tragedy — but the stories hid an account of actual deeds. He had seen ample evidence that some of the Labors were based on real events, and of them all, the tale of the capture of the Cretan Bull seemed the least fantastic. It might simply have been a metaphor for a victory against the bull-worshipping Minoans, but Pierce suspected that there was probably a real bull in the story somewhere.

However, it was not the petroglyph of the horns on the wall that had drawn him to Ideon Andros, but rather a set of smaller images carved into the rock between the bull’s horns.

Pierce took the Phaistos Disc from his satchel and held it at arm’s length. He oriented it so that the outermost totem in the spiral — the beginning or the end, depending on whose interpretation was to be trusted — was in the six o’clock position.

Fiona looked over his shoulder. “It’s a match. You were right.”

“Of course I was right,” Pierce answered with a grin. “You didn’t think I’d come all this way on a hunch.”

Fiona’s shrug suggested that she thought him capable of doing exactly that.

“Alexander wrote that the Phaistos Disc was a key,” Pierce went on. “He established a protocol in the event that a discovery like this was made.”

“Right. More protocols. In this case, steal the Disc. Only we replaced it with an exact replica. I’m not sure how that changes anything.”

Pierce held up the Disc. “I was a little worried about that, too. But the likeness of the Disc is everywhere, especially here on Crete, so if it was just a matter of hiding the message…well, that ship sailed a long time ago. I thought there might be something important about the physical disc itself, though. And guess what? I was right again. The Disc reacts to magnetic fields.”

“No one ever noticed that?”

“I don’t think it occurred to anyone to check. It’s just a clay tablet after all. My guess is that there are flakes of magnetized iron embedded in the clay.”

Fiona narrowed her eyes. “We didn’t come all the way out here in the middle of the night just to compare the script, did we?”

Pierce grinned again. “Smart girl. Alexander said it was a key. I don’t believe he was speaking figuratively.”

He stepped closer to the wall and held the Disc up so that it was situated in the valley between the horns. The artifact was abruptly yanked out of his grasp, hitting the wall with a hollow clank, like a terra cotta bell. It did not slide to the ground but remained fixed in place between the horns. An instant later, there was a grinding sound from beyond the wall, and then a crunch, as some unseen force battled thousands of years of inertia and calcification. The wall began to move, rolling away into a hidden recess. Not a wall after all, but a circular door, with the Disc still affixed to its center. It rotated only half a turn before stopping, revealing a crescent-shaped opening.

“Open Sesame,” Pierce said. “It would appear that the Phaistos Disc is actually an ancient Minoan key card.”

He shone the light into the opening. The shape of the passage was too straight and uniform to be the work of nature. There was just enough space to accommodate a single person. It continued for at least fifty feet, at which point the black walls devoured his light. What lay beyond remained shrouded in darkness. “Shall we?”

“I thought we were just supposed to make sure no one gets the key,” Fiona said. “Wasn’t that what the protocol said to do?”

“Sometimes you have to go outside the letter of the law to keep the spirit of the law. Even without the Disc, someone might be able to get through that door. We need to know what Alexander wanted kept secret. If it’s something we can remove or…” he frowned, “…destroy…then this is our chance. Besides, I’m curious. Aren’t you?”

“I should call you Curious George,” Fiona replied before following and sticking close behind him. As Pierce advanced into the passage, his own eagerness diminished a little. The tunnel was more confining than he had imagined. The weight of the earth above seemed to press down on him, making it difficult to breathe. The air felt warmer, and there was something else about it that seemed…off.

“What’s that smell?” Fiona asked. “It’s like…blood.”

Pierce played the light against the walls of the passage. The black surface was mottled with what looked like a dull orange fungus. “Rust. These walls are sheeted with iron plates.”

“Iron? I thought the Minoan civilization pre-dated the Iron Age.”

Pierce gave an approving nod. Fiona had been paying attention to her studies. “They did. This is…interesting…to say the least. Some of the legends about this cave mention a race of spirit beings called Dactyls.”

“As in ‘fingers?’”

“When Rhea gave birth to Zeus, she dug her fingers into the earth, and the Dactyls were created. They were expert metal-workers, and they gave the secret of forging iron to mankind.” He shrugged. “That’s the myth, anyway.” He stopped as the light revealed a T-junction at the end of the passage. The passages leading off in either direction were, like the first, finished with walls of featureless iron, vanishing into darkness beyond the reach of the flashlight.

Fiona peered over his shoulder. “Which way?”

“Good question. In many ancient belief systems, the choice of right or left had great symbolic significance, but in this instance, we may just have to flip a coin.”

“What’s that?” Fiona pushed past him and moved closer to the facing wall a few steps down the right hand passage. She pointed to a large patch of rust which, after a closer look, revealed lines and curves that were too precise to be random.

“The Horns again,” Pierce said. “It’s the same as the glyph on the door. But it’s different. The Phaistos symbols aren’t the same.” He approached and brushed away some of the rust to get a better look.

“There are only three symbols here. This is probably some kind of identifier. The name or number of this tunnel.” He moved a few steps down the left hand passage, searching the wall until he found another symbol.

“Feel up for a linguistic puzzle?” he asked, grinning, as he took out his cell phone and handed it to Fiona. “Owens published his decipherment key online. It should give us a rough idea of what these signs are trying to tell us. See if you can find it.”

Fiona stared at the screen. “No reception down here.”

Pierce barely heard her as he studied the symbols, darting back and forth between the two glyphs. “We don’t need it.”

“You know what it says?”

He shook his head. “No, but I know what it means.” He pointed at the symbol in the left hand passage. “This is on the Phaistos Disc. It’s the second word in the spiral. That other one is nonsense. The Disc isn’t just a key card. It’s a route map. If we go down this tunnel…” He turned and headed down the left tunnel.

Fiona followed quickly and caught up to him a few steps from another junction, this time with a passage intersecting from the right. He was scanning the wall, looking for another symbol. He aimed his flashlight at the wall, revealing another glyph, identical to the one at the other end of the passage. “Here.”

A quick check revealed a symbol with a different set of Phaistos characters at the beginning of the adjoining passage, and yet another on the wall that continued straight.

“One of these is the third word on the Disc,” Pierce said. “If we keep going in that direction, we’ll find more symbols in the same order as the Disc.”

“A map,” Fiona said, eyes widening. “I should have seen it.”

Fiona had a gift for languages, modern and ancient, spoken and nearly forgotten, but spotting patterns was a skill that took practice. And her self-deprecation was preventing her from realizing the true scope of what they had found.

Pierce smiled wide. “Fi, do you know what this place is? This is the Labyrinth.”

Her eyes widened in time with a broad smile. “Holy sh— Think there’s a Minotaur down here?”

Pierce thought she meant it as a joke, but he gave the question serious consideration. He doubted that a literal bull-man creature had been wandering the iron corridors for over three thousand years, but the mere fact that the tunnels existed, to say nothing of the magnetic lock on the front door, strongly suggested that at least some parts of the legend were true.

“According to the myth,” Pierce said, “the Labyrinth on the island of Crete was designed by the master architect, Daedalus. Ovid wrote that it was so elaborate that even Daedalus himself almost got lost in it.”

“Daedalus. The guy who made the wings.”

Pierce nodded. “After designing the Labyrinth, King Minos imprisoned Daedalus and his son, Icarus, so they would not be able to share its secrets. Daedalus collected feathers and stuck them together with wax to make a pair of wings so they could escape, but Icarus flew too close to the sun. The wax melted, his wings fell apart, and he crashed and burned.

“That story is also from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and it came much later. First century BC. But the stories of Daedalus’s inventions go back much further. He was a mechanical genius. I’ve often thought he might be one of Alexander’s alter-egos.”

He knew it was a bit of a stretch, but by no means impossible. Alexander Diotrephes was a complicated man with an even more complicated story, and he’d gone by many other names in addition to Hercules and Alexander. Pierce was not sure how much Fiona knew about Alexander, and this was not the time or place for that discussion.

The short version was that Alexander had achieved a sort of immortality by virtue of a unique physiology combined with a comprehensive knowledge of chemistry and biology that was advanced even by modern standards. George wasn’t positive, but he thought the man had been alive since before the ninth century BC. Immortality was a trait most often applied to supernatural beings or fictitious gods, but it was also the pursuit of learned men throughout all of history, ancient and recent. Alexander was one of the few who had achieved it.

“It would explain why he established the protocol,” Pierce said. “He knew that if this place was ever discovered, there would be a lot of impossible questions.”

“But why build it in the first place?”

“To imprison the Minotaur?”

“There are over thirty word combinations on each side of the Disc. If we take that to mean two safe paths through the maze, and we double that number for false trails, that makes at least a hundred and twenty different passages down here. Seems like a lot of work just to cage one magical beastie.”

Pierce shrugged. “If the Disc is a map, then the answer to your question is probably waiting at the center.”

“We’ll need the Disc,” Fiona said, and she headed back up the passage to the entrance, evidently having overcome her reluctance to explore the subterranean tunnels.

Pierce followed and they slipped through the opening. He reached out to pry the Disc free of the magnetic grip. It took some effort, but he managed to wedge his fingertips beneath it, and peel it away. As soon as he did, the door rolled back into place, sealing the tunnel again.

“I guess we’re supposed to leave the key in the door,” Fiona said.

Pierce stared at the Disc. “If I had some paper, we could do a rubbing. That way we’d have our map.”

Fiona grinned and held up her phone. “Or we could do something a little more twenty-first century, and take a picture of it.”

Pierce made a face. “You know what the problem with twenty-first century solutions is? Batteries die.”

“I’m at ninety percent.” She waggled the phone at him, then clicked a picture of the front side of the Disc. “That should give us plenty of time to get in and get back out again. Turn it over so I can get the other side.”

When she was finished, Pierce used the Disc to open the door again. They retraced their steps to the second intersection, where their hypothesis was proven correct. The symbols on the wall indicated that they should continue straight. Soon thereafter, they reached yet another junction, this time with three possible choices, all marked with Phaistos script, but only one corresponded to the expected sequence found on the Disc.

“If the Phaistos symbols do represent actual letters or phonemes, could it be possible that the Labyrinth could have been a sort of literacy test?” Fiona asked. “Someone who knows how to read them would see the difference between real words and gobbledygook.”

“Makes sense,” Pierce said.

“What do you suppose happens if we make a wrong turn?” Fiona asked.

Pierce flashed his light down one of the alternate tunnels. “Best case, we get lost and follow the maze while keeping a hand on the wall, eventually making our way back here…which could be miles of walking.”

“And worst case?”

“I suppose the very worst case would be something like the Minotaur, but my guess is that there are probably some booby traps.”

“Nice.” Fiona held up her phone, zooming in on the next set of symbols they were seeking.

The passages were not uniformly straight or flat. Some meandered back and forth, up long inclines and down spiral staircases. Only the reliability of the Phaistos symbols, marking the way every hundred yards or so, kept Pierce’s anxiety in check. As they neared the end of the spiral, apprehension gave way to anticipation.

The final intersection presented them with a choice. Up or down. They emerged from a passage onto a broad landing, which appeared to be in the middle of a spiral staircase.

“Down,” Fiona announced, checking the symbols against the picture of the Phaistos Disc. “This is it.”

She started down the descending staircase.

And vanished.

7

As darkness engulfed her, Fiona felt her stomach rise into her throat. Her first thought was that she was falling, but this was more like being in a fast elevator. Her feet were still on solid ground, but she was definitely descending. A sudden heaviness signaled the end of her downward journey, and then all was still.

“Fiona!”

Pierce’s frantic shout echoed in the air overhead. She looked up, searching for the source. She saw the faint glow of his flashlight, at least fifty feet above her. The light was not nearly bright enough to illuminate her surroundings, but just being able to see it filled her with hope.

“I’m down here!” she called. The iron walls created a weird reverberation effect, like shouting down a metal pipe. “I’m okay.”

“What happened?” The glow intensified into a bright star, shining down into her upraised eyes. “The stairs disappeared.”

“Did they? I can’t see anything.”

She blinked, forcing herself to look away from the pinpoint of light. “Was this a trap?”

“I don’t know.” Pierce’s voice sounded fainter, as if the distance separating them was increasing. She knew it was not; the light above remained unchanged. “Don’t move. I’ll figure something out.”

“I know I picked the right symbol,” she insisted, more for her own sake than for Pierce’s. To reassure herself, she raised her phone again, intending to double-check the symbols. “Oh, duh!”

She thumbed on the phone’s built-in flashlight, and the darkness retreated.

She was standing in a small square room with walls that rose up into the black void overhead. There was no sign of the steps, but the floor beneath her feet was lined with evenly spaced grooves, each as wide as the treads of a stairway.

The stairs had been rigged to collapse downward as soon as anyone stepped onto them. A trap, but not a lethal one. At least, not right away. She and Pierce were separated. He could still get out, maybe bring back some rope…

He’ll have to backtrack through the maze, but I’ve got the pictures of the Disc. Wonderful.

An arched doorway was the only way out of the room. Fiona flashed her light into the opening, but was unable to see much of what lay beyond. There were no Phaistos symbols on the black iron walls to indicate whether going through the door was the right course of action.

“Like I’ve got a choice,” she muttered. Raising her head, she shouted up at Pierce. “There’s a door here. I’m going to go through it.”

“No! Stay right there!”

She ignored his warning and stepped closer to the door, checking the floor for pressure plates and trip wires. There was a wooden table at the edge of her light, holding something on its center. She couldn’t quite make out what the object was, but the overall presentation reminded her of the display cases at the Heraklion Museum.

“I don’t think this is a trap,” she called. She stepped through the arch.

There was a rasping sound behind her. She whirled around and saw that another opening had appeared on the opposite side of the small room. On the wall, just to the right of the new passage, there was another glyph with Phaistos symbols.

“Freaky,” she said. She stuck her head back into the room and looked up. “Uncle George?”

There was no sign of Pierce’s light. Instead, there was now a ceiling, just a few feet above head level, consisting of metal panels each about the same width as the segments on the floor.

“What the hell?”

The hissing noise came again, startling her back a step. The reflex saved her life. A wall of metal descended through the air just beyond the arch, and would have sliced her in half if she had not moved.

Before she could recover her wits, an opening appeared at the top of the arch, growing larger as the wall descended into the floor. When it stopped, the second opening had vanished into the floor, and the room was configured again as it had been at first. There was just one major difference. Standing in the middle of the room was the somewhat bewildered form of Pierce.

“Uncle George!”

He raised a hand. “Don’t move.”

She nodded, signaling that this time, she would do as instructed.

Pierce’s eyes darted around, taking in the changes. He shone the light up, revealing smooth walls with no visible ceiling. “The steps were camouflage. This is some kind of weight-sensitive elevator. Step on it, and it goes down. Step off, and it rises back up. Probably works on magnetic repulsion. It’s a one-way trip though.”

“I think this is where we’re supposed to be.” Fiona turned around and shone her phone’s light at the table. There were several more like it, dotting the floor and lining the walls of a circular chamber, which was at least fifty feet in diameter. Interspersed with the displays were several more arched openings, which presumably led back into the Labyrinth, but Fiona gave these only a cursory glance. Her attention was held by the contents of the room. “Uncle George, you’ve got to see this…but if you step off, we won’t be able to get back.”

Pierce scratched his head, furrowed his brow, pursed his lips and then said, “We’re not supposed to leave the same way we came in. There are two sides to the Disc. Two routes through the maze. One way in, one way out, but it leads here first.”

Pierce stepped through the opening and turned to watch the segmented floor rise, propelled by invisible lines of magnetic force. The passage was momentarily blocked, then opened up to reveal the second configuration.

He joined Fiona at the central table. Resting upon it, spread out to show its extraordinary size, was what appeared at first glance to be a bearskin rug — perhaps from a Kodiak grizzly — head and all. On closer inspection, the tawny gold fur, along with the shaggy mane surrounding the fiercely snarling head, showed it to actually be the pelt of an enormous lion.

Pierce gasp in astonishment. “The Nemean Lion.”

Fiona grinned as Pierce began to recount how Hercules, after strangling the Lion, had used its own claws, which were sharper than any sword, to cut through its skin, since no blade could penetrate it.

She drifted away and began looking at the other display tables. Some contained what might have been trophies from other Herculean conquests — swords, armor, teeth and claws from enormous beasts — while others contained items that were more utilitarian, with no explicit link to the myth. Fiona was drawn to one of the latter: a small chest, about one foot square and six-inches deep. It was covered in a reflective substance that showed no sign of corrosion or oxidation. Although she was no expert, Fiona thought it must be gold. Yet that was not what had drawn her eye. Something had been stamped into the soft metal, creating a raised relief. Fiona reached out a cautious finger and traced the shape.

Letters.

Greek letters.

“Uncle George, this isn’t right.”

Pierce moved to join her, shining his light directly on the small chest. “Heracleia,” he said, translating the ancient Greek script. “It’s in Greek,” he said, proud that she had noticed the aberration. “The Greeks didn’t develop their alphabet until the eighth century BC. The Phaistos Disc was uncovered in the ruins of a palace that was destroyed centuries before the Greeks started using this alphabet.”

He tested the lid, which refused to open, then tilted the chest up to reveal a thin line of some opaque material holding the cover in place. “Beeswax. Whatever’s in here has probably been perfectly preserved for thousands of years.”

She watched as he exerted a little more pressure, breaking the wax seal. The lid popped open with a faint sucking noise, revealing what looked like a stack of dingy old papers covered with Greek script.

“Papyrus leaves,” Pierce said, shaking his head as the mystery grew.

“You seem frustrated, Doctor Pierce. Perhaps you don’t know Hercules as well as you think you do.”

Fiona whirled in the direction of the familiar but unexpected voice, and found Liam Kenner standing just inside the entrance to the room. He wore the same smug smile that Fiona remembered from their earlier encounter.

Before she or Pierce could say a word to challenge him, a faint rasping noise signaled the arrival of yet another unexpected guest on the magnetic elevator.

Fiona did not recognize the man that stepped out of the small room. He was tall, broadly built and so ugly that for a moment, she wondered if he was some humanoid monster out of mythology. But this wasn’t a bull-man standing before them. It was just a man. She could tell because he was pointing a gun at them.

8

Note to self, Pierce thought. Next time, bring a gun.

But a gun was only as good as the person holding it. His experience with firearms was mostly limited to plinking beer cans off a fence post with about fifty percent accuracy. The guy standing next to Kenner looked like someone who not only knew how to use his gun, but had every intention of doing so.

Pierce’s gaze flickered around the room, looking for something he might be able to use as a weapon, calculating the distance to the nearest exit passage. He and Fiona might be able to make a mad dash out of the room, but escaping into the uncharted Labyrinth created its own set of problems. He brought his stare back to Kenner.

“What are you doing here, Liam?” Pierce tried to inject a note of righteous indignation into his voice. It was not difficult. He was angry, though mostly it was self-directed. He had badly underestimated Kenner and allowed himself to be caught flat-footed.

“Why, the same thing as you, old chap. I’m looking for Hercules. I seem to recall a time when that’s what you wanted.” Kenner’s lips curled into a wry smile. “Not any more, though, right? Now you’re the inside man.”

Pierce answered him with silence. He was not about to confirm the man’s suspicions by volunteering information.

“How did you find us?” Fiona demanded. “You didn’t follow us. I made sure of that.”

Kenner regarded her with a mixture of curiosity and disdain. “I didn’t really need to, did I? It was obvious from the start why you had come to Crete. I knew you’d end up here, especially after that little caper at the museum.” He advanced until he was standing right in from of her. “But I had to be sure.”

He reached out a hand toward her, brushing lightly against her shoulder. She flinched a little, but her face remained defiant. Kenner drew back his hand with a flourish, like someone using sleight-of-hand to produce a coin from a child’s ear. However, what he held between his fingers was not a coin, but a tiny cylinder of plastic trailing a short length of wire.

“You bugged me?” Fiona was livid. “You son of a—”

“Enough,” the man with the gun growled. “You’re wasting time. Get what we came for.”

Kenner looked over his shoulder to his accomplice. “Tsk, Vigor. There’s no need to be rude. We can behave civilly.” He turned his gaze to Pierce. “I trust we can?”

“Putting that gun away would be a good start.”

Kenner ignored the comment. “The transmitter wasn’t much use once you went underground, but I took the open door as an invitation. After that, it was a simple matter of following the Phaistos symbols and trying not to give ourselves away too soon.” He looked around the room, as if noticing its contents for the first time. “I must say, this exceeds my expectations.”

He reached out for the chest containing the papyrus leaves. “The Heracleia.” His tone was reverent. “This is the book that guided Euripides and Apollodorus. The definitive source of information about Hercules in the ancient world. There are no known copies of it still in existence, aside from this one, of course. We only know of it from references in other historical sources.

“I’ve always thought it strange that such an important and well-regarded work should vanish so thoroughly from the Earth. It’s almost as if someone set out to erase it from existence.” He cast a knowing wink in Pierce’s direction, then grunted as he hefted the gold-plated chest into his arms. “Not exactly light reading, but it should prove very illuminating.”

“You’re not interested in the myth of Hercules, Liam.” Pierce crossed his arms. “What are you really after?”

“Myth? It’s the reality that fascinates me, just as it once did you.” As he spoke, Kenner commenced a circuit of the room. He produced a small penlight and shone it on the contents of each display table in turn. “I’m not blind, George. I’ve seen what’s been happening in the world these last few years. I’ve heard the whispers, the rumors. I’ve paid attention, and I’m not the only one who can see the pattern.”

The man with the gun let out a low, threatening growl, perhaps signaling his displeasure at Kenner for volunteering too much information, or simply as a way of expressing impatience.

Pierce nodded at the gunman. “You mean him?”

“Mr. Rohn? No, he’s just…what’s the term they use in the movies? The muscle? The man he works for, however, is very interested in the truth about Hercules. A truth that you have conspired to keep hidden.”

“Why on Earth would I want to do that?”

“Must we play this tiresome game? You have seen the monsters with your own eyes; I know this to be true. Real monsters.” Kenner turned and pointed to the lion skin. “There’s the proof. The Nemean Lion. The creatures that inhabited ancient stories weren’t fanciful daydreams. Some of them perhaps, but not all. Many were real, flesh and blood creatures. Impossible creatures. The product of recombinant DNA engineering produced thousands of years before the discovery of the DNA molecule. If we can unlock the secrets of their genetic code, figure out how to combine diverse genetic material with viable results, there’s nothing we won’t be able to accomplish.”

“It’s been tried,” Pierce said, unable to hide his disgust. “It never ends well.”

“The key to finding the source of those mutations is in this room.” Kenner picked up another item. He regarded it for a few moments before holding it up for inspection. “Do you know what this is?”

Pierce bit back an angry retort. The artifact was a wide band of what looked like leather, dyed black, at least eight inches wide and about two feet long. Kenner’s light revealed an intricate pattern of decorative tool work. Pierce couldn’t make out all the details, but he had quickly identified the object. His real effort was put into keeping that fact hidden from Kenner.

“Come, George, you’re the expert on Hercules. This is the girdle of Hippolyte, the Amazon Queen. Capturing it was his Ninth Labor.”

Pierce gave a noncommittal shrug.

After a few moments of studying the artifact, Kenner raised his eyes to Rohn. “This is it. This is what we came for.”

“Good,” Rohn declared. Then, without any hesitation, he aimed his pistol and fired.

9

Kenner jumped at the noise of the pistol discharging in the enclosed space. He had known it was coming, but the noise was much louder than he had expected.

At almost the same instant as the shot, the room went dark. Pierce’s light had gone out. Kenner dropped to the ground and caught a glimpse of movement in the paltry beam of his own light.

The gun thundered again, and again, as Rohn pumped shot after shot into the darkness, where Pierce had stood. Kenner waited until the noise stopped, and then a few seconds more before raising his head and playing his light around the room. The air was filled with smoke and the stink of sulfur, but through the haze, he saw the big man heading for one of the exit openings.

“Stop!”

Rohn turned, his already unbearable visage twisted with disgust. “They’re getting away.”

“You missed?”

“No.” The reply was immediate, defensive. “I don’t think so. But a wounded animal can run for many miles before dying.”

Kenner felt an unexpected surge of emotion. He had known all along that Rohn intended to kill Pierce and the girl, and while he found the prospect distasteful, he had come to terms with it. Sacrifices had to be made sometimes. Now, he felt a measure of relief. This was a better outcome. Not as cold-blooded. “Let them go. They’ll never make it out of here.”

“How do you know that? They know how to read the signs.”

Kenner frowned. Rohn was right. The connection between the Disc and the correct path through the Labyrinth had been easy enough to figure out, and he had pictures of the Disc to help him navigate. “Which way?”

Rohn pointed to one of the exits. Kenner swept the floor with his light, hoping to see tell-tale drops of blood — there were none. Then he moved the beam up to shine on the walls beside the passage. As expected, there was a Phaistos glyph, but it did not match any of the combinations on the Disc. “This is not the right way,” he said, then he moved quickly around the perimeter, checking the other exits until he found one that matched the character stamped in the center of the reverse-side of the artifact.

“Here. This way will take us out.”

Rohn jabbed his gun into the passage Pierce and Fiona had used. “What about them?”

“Forget them. The Labyrinth will take care of them. And we’ll close the door on the way out. Even if they find their way back here, they’ll never be able to leave.”

The big man growled his displeasure but complied. Kenner suspected his reluctance had less to do with uncertainty about Pierce’s fate and more to do with Rohn’s belief that he had failed. Missing his targets at such close range must have been a bitter pill. Kenner wanted only to be done with it all: out of the bizarre iron maze and back to civilization, where he could exploit what he had just discovered.

He allowed himself a satisfied grin as he trekked down the passage to the next junction. Pierce had no idea how significant the Labyrinth’s treasures were. He had not even recognized Queen Hippolyte’s belt, much less studied the image engraved upon it.

Pierce had always been a dreamer, an idealist. For him, archaeology was some kind of game, an intellectual puzzle. The man had no sense of how to leverage his discoveries into something more meaningful — wealth, influence, power. Pierce could have written his ticket seven years earlier when he had found the Argo manifest, but he had chosen to share it with only a few colleagues, instead of telling the world and launching his career as a celebrity archaeologist and TV star. And that was only the tip of an iceberg of opportunities that he could have seized.

Kenner had parlayed the mere knowledge of the document’s existence into a more discreet kind of success. He had been paid a hefty finder’s fee and a lucrative annual retainer simply to keep an eye on Pierce, in hopes that the archaeologist might stumble upon something even more impressive. For six years, Kenner had done just that, watching Pierce from a distance, following his movements, reporting everything back to his benefactor, the same man who had sent Rohn to join him on Crete.

From the outset, it had been clear that Pierce was continuing his search for the historic Hercules. Equally obvious, the investigation was connected to a series of global upheavals and natural disasters, though Kenner could not tell to what extent Pierce had been involved in some of those situations.

One clear picture that had emerged was that the Herculean Society, the faceless conspiracy about which Pierce had once speculated, was very real. Moreover, Kenner was now certain that Pierce was working for them. Pierce’s decision to visit Crete after the strange discovery in the Cave of Zeus was the opportunity Kenner had been waiting for. He could expose both Pierce and the Society, and cash in on the subsequent revelations.

What he had found in the Labyrinth had surpassed his wildest expectations. Rohn’s employer would be very pleased, and the man’s gratitude was not something Kenner regarded lightly.

He was barely conscious of the journey out of the maze. The only time he paid any attention to their route was at the various crossroads, where he had to select the correct passage onward. It was only near the end that anxiety crept in to darken his mood. In his eagerness to follow Pierce, it had not occurred to him to think about the possibility that the exit from the Labyrinth might be buried, just as the entrance had been until recently. He did not share this thought with Rohn, who trudged along behind him, watching to see if Pierce was following them.

Ultimately, neither man had cause to worry. The sequence of turns indicated by the Disc brought them to another stairwell like the one that had brought them to the trophy room. As before, a magnetically regulated descent delivered them into a new chamber facing the maze entrance. They had come full circle.

After they emerged into the cave, Kenner reached for the Phaistos Disc, intending to seal the passage, but Rohn stopped him.

“Not yet,” the big man said. He pressed his pistol into Kenner’s hands. “Wait here. If they come out, shoot them.”

Kenner blanched. “Where are you going?”

Rohn did not answer. Instead, he jogged away, leaving the uncomprehending Kenner to stand vigil at the open door. A few minutes later, Rohn returned bearing a canvas satchel. He went directly to the opening and re-entered the maze, but quickly came back out without the bag.

“Now we go,” he told Kenner, extending an open hand to reclaim his sidearm.

Kenner parted with it happily. “What did you leave in there?” he asked, as he pried the Phaistos Disc loose from the rolling door.

“Semtex. We have ten minutes.”

Kenner did not need to ask for an explanation. The Phaistos Disc was the only key to the Labyrinth, but there were other ways to get through locked doors, and Pierce was certainly resourceful enough to figure something out. At the very least, Rohn’s bomb would cave in the entrance, blocking the way to the door, but there was a very good chance that the entire maze of passages worming back and forth under the mountain would be collapsed by the blast, pulverizing anyone still inside.

“Tough break,” Kenner muttered with a shrug, and then he followed Rohn out of the cave.

10

Fiona lay in the darkness, half-crushed beneath Pierce’s weight, holding her breath. Pierce did not seem to be breathing either, and as much as she wanted to believe that he was just trying to remain quiet, she knew better.

How many shots had there been? Four? Five? More? It seemed impossible that the ugly gunman, Rohn, had missed that many times.

She struggled to recall exactly what had happened. The room had plunged into darkness, and she had felt someone — it could only have been Pierce — grab hold of her, almost lifting her off her feet. That was when the shooting had started.

All was quiet now. She lay motionless, pinned down and immobilized by Pierce’s—don’t say it, don’t even think it—dead weight.

Voices drifted toward her, Kenner and Rohn discussing what to do next, then silence again.

“Uncle George?” The question was barely a whisper. Despair had stolen her voice.

A low hissing sound issued from the darkness. “Shhh.”

Fiona’s heart leapt, but she stifled a squeal of joy. Pierce was still alive. Just as quickly her relief was dampened by other possibilities. What if Pierce was injured? What if the killer came after them? There was nothing she could do but hope and wait.

Finally, Pierce stirred and rolled off her. She took that as a cue to break the silence. “Are you okay?”

“I’m not hurt, if that’s what you mean,” he replied, with palpable anger. “But I’m not okay. Not by a long shot.”

A light flashed on, blindingly bright after such a long time in the dark. Fiona raised a hand to provide some shade and braved the stinging brilliance to get a look at him. For a moment, she thought her eyes were playing tricks on her. Then, despite everything they had just gone through and the crisis they were still facing, she burst out laughing.

Pierce glowered at her from beneath the regal mane of the Nemean Lion, which he wore as Hercules once had, if the legends were to be believed. After a few seconds, his expression softened. He turned, playfully showing off the long cloak of lion skin like a runway model, and he joined her in laughter.

Fiona understood now how they had survived the barrage of gunfire at almost point blank range. In the instant before Rohn had pulled the trigger, Pierce had flicked off his light and pulled the lion skin over him like a blanket. The legendary creature’s skin was evidently as impervious to bullets as it had been to swords and arrows in Hercules’s time. Pierce had then scooped Fiona up and headed into the nearest passage.

That, Fiona realized, had probably been the most dangerous part of his desperate plan. The odds were against it being the correct route out of the Herculean trophy room, which meant that they were no longer in the ‘safe’ part of the Labyrinth. Though they had gone less than a hundred yards, Fiona was not sure which direction to go now. And even if they managed that, she doubted that Kenner and Rohn would leave the door open.

But they were still alive, and that was better than nothing.

“A dead lion,” she murmured.

“What’s that?”

“Something I heard once. ‘Better to be a live dog, than a dead lion.’ It seemed appropriate given the circumstances.”

He nodded, approving. “It’s from the Bible. Ecclesiastes, chapter nine. ‘To him that is joined to all the living there is hope: for a living dog is better than a dead lion.’ Loosely paraphrased: Where there’s life, there’s hope. We’re a couple of lucky dogs who are still alive because of a dead lion.” He turned around and pointed down a passageway. “I’m pretty certain that’s the way back to the center. From there, we can follow the Phaistos markings to the exit. If Kenner and his ugly friend are waiting for us… Well, we’ll figure something— Wait. The papyrus in the chest. The Heracleia. The Greeks didn’t develop their alphabet until the eighth century BC. So that document couldn’t have been written until about six hundred years after the Disc was buried in the ruins of Phaistos palace.” Pierce considered this for a moment. “Alexander might have had another way to open the door. A duplicate key.”

Fiona shook her head. “But no one knew about the door. It was covered up long before the Greeks started coming here. Alexander came here later, maybe hundreds of years later.”

Pierce rubbed his jaw thoughtfully. “A back door, then. The Labyrinth wasn’t originally built to hide these treasures. That came later, after the main entrance was covered up.”

“If you’re right, we still have to find it.”

“Let’s get back to the trophy room,” Pierce said. “Maybe there’s a clue.”

Pierce, still wearing the Nemean Lion’s skin, led the way back to the central chamber. As expected, Kenner and Rohn were long gone. Pierce made a cursory check of the other display tables, identifying several of the relics, many of which were clearly from later periods in history, but there was nothing that indicated which path led to the hypothetical back door.

He turned his attention to the symbols that marked each passage, hoping to find a similarly anachronistic marker. “These appear on the Disc, but they’re not in the right place.”

“Right,” she said.

“Focus,” he said. “Forget about everything else. Tell me what you see.”

She furrowed her brow in thought. “If this really is some kind of literacy test, then the glyphs that lead out should form words. Even though we don’t speak the language, there’s going to be a logic to the way the symbols are used. In English, certain letters are frequently used together, while others almost never are.”

“Go on,” he said, smiling. She was on the right track.

“Some of the symbols appear with a lot more frequency. Like Wheel of Fortune. People always start with the high frequency letters? R, N, S, T, L, and E. Even though we can’t read this language, we should be able to see the difference between real words and nonsense combinations.”

Pierce grinned. “Well done. I knew there was a reason I brought you along.” He handed her the flashlight. “Now, keep your eyes peeled for traps.”

Fiona stared at the glyph, feeling the weight of responsibility. Their survival depended on her. If she was wrong, they would wander the maze until they dropped from exhaustion, or worse, got killed by some ancient booby trap.

“We should mark our trail,” Pierce said. “In case we have to backtrack. Like Theseus, trailing Ariadne’s thread.” He held up a massive lion forepaw and squeezed it, extending the razor sharp black claws. He scratched a single vertical line on the iron wall beneath the glyph. “That should do the trick.”

Grateful for the safety net, Fiona ventured into the passage.

When they arrived at each junction, she studied the choices, looking for the one that matched a word on the Disc or was consistent with the internal logic of the ancient Minoan language. They didn’t encounter any traps or dead ends, but it was impossible to know if they were on the right track. Navigating the passages was like being in an ‘old school’ arcade game, where winning a level simply took you to the next battleground, identical in every respect, except harder. Each decision was a gut check, and as they pushed deeper into the unknown, she felt the cumulative weight of all those choices. Either she was leading them to safety, or they were already hopelessly lost. Yet, with each hard decision, she felt her confidence growing. She was getting it. She was going to beat this game.

Then the uniformly cramped iron walls gave way to native rock. A few steps further, the winding tunnel led out onto a rusty iron bridge spanning an open fissure with nearly vertical walls.

Fiona shone her light across the gap, which she judged to be about thirty feet wide. She saw a ledge on the far side, wide enough to walk on, stretching in either direction beyond the reach of the light. But there did not appear to be any openings in the far cave wall. She glanced back at Pierce. “Did we make a wrong turn?”

He shook his head. “I don’t think so. It wouldn’t make any sense to build a bridge that goes nowhere.”

“Maybe the bridge is a trap. Get halfway across and then—click! Going down in a hurry.”

Pierce studied the metal span for a moment. “I don’t think it’s rigged to fail. Now, whether it will hold up after all this time…” He gave a helpless shrug. “Stay here.”

“What? I don’t think—”

Pierce was already in motion, walking cautiously out onto the bridge. Each step generated an ominous creak, but the bridge held. Fiona held her breath, willing the metal to remain intact just a few minutes longer. Pierce stepped onto the ledge at the other side and then waved her on.

“Take it slow,” he warned. “But if you think it’s starting to go, run like hell.”

Fighting the urge to simply run across, Fiona took a step onto the bridge, then another. She could feel it vibrating beneath her, could almost see flakes of oxidized metal crumbling away with each footfall.

Halfway.

The bridge groaned and started swaying… Just my imagination, she told herself.

The ledge was just ten feet away now.

Close enough.

She launched herself forward, but the extra force generated by the attempt punched a hole clean through the walkway. Her toe caught on the edge, and she pitched forward. Her knee struck the deck, the impact crumbling the metal like a stale potato chip. In her mind’s eye, she saw the entire bridge disintegrating under her as she struggled to get back to her feet—

Pierce caught one of her outstretched arms and yanked her the rest of the way off the bridge. He held her upright, which was good, because her legs felt like overcooked spaghetti noodles. “I said, take it slow,” he chided. “You all right?”

She glanced back at the bridge, which to her complete astonishment, looked pretty much unchanged. “Uh, huh.”

He waited until she had both feet firmly planted, then let go and directed her attention to the wall. “Take a look at this.”

She took a deep breath, her heart still pounding like a jackrabbit’s, and shone the flashlight where Pierce indicated. There was something carved into the wall, but it was not Phaistos script.

“You know what that is, don’t you?” Pierce said.

She nodded slowly, still not quite able to believe what she was seeing. “It’s the Mother Tongue.”

The reason for Fiona’s initial encounter with the Herculean Society and the man who called himself Alexander Diotrephes, was her knowledge of the old and almost completely forgotten language of the American Indian Siletz tribe. It was a Salish dialect with several unique components that, if Diotrephes was to be believed, could be traced back to the original human language, what he called ‘the Mother Tongue.’ It was a manner of speech that transcended mere words, and could affect matter in seemingly magical ways. Diotrephes had also called it ‘the Language of God.’

With it, Moses had commanded the elements, unleashing deadly plagues against Egypt, and parting the waters of the Red Sea. Many centuries later, Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel had used his knowledge of the Mother Tongue to animate a clay effigy of a man — a golem—to protect Jews living in the ghettos of Prague. Such incidents were exceptional. Very few people living even knew there was one original language. Although all languages could be traced back to it, the oldest tongues that were the closest descendants of the Mother Tongue — like the language of the Siletz — were nearly extinct.

Fiona’s grasp of the Siletz tribal language had led, not only to her acquaintance with Diotrephes, but also to the upheavals that had destroyed her former life, and inadvertently given her a new one as Jack Sigler’s adopted daughter. She was now the only person alive who spoke the Siletz language, and according to Diotrephes, she was the perfect candidate for mastering the Mother Tongue.

Unfortunately, there was no Rosetta Stone for that ancient language. Fiona’s interest in linguistic studies was a direct result of Diotrephes’s desire to unravel the mystery of the Mother Tongue. It was no exaggeration to say that she had a gift for learning languages, but she was no closer to understanding it now than she had been at the start. She could see fragments of that original tongue sprinkled throughout modern languages in the same way that certain words in English could be traced to Latin roots, but trying to rebuild a language that had not been spoken for thousands of years was like trying to guess what a completed jigsaw puzzle might look like after finding a few random pieces underneath the couch.

She stared at the letters but their meaning was lost on her. “This doesn’t make any sense. Alexander didn’t know how to speak the Mother Tongue. So why would he put this here?”

“Maybe he knew more than he let on. Or maybe he was able to figure out some of it, the way you figured out how to read the Phaistos script.” With his knowledge of the Herculean Society’s inner workings, Pierce knew as much about the Mother Tongue from an academic perspective as Fiona did, even if he couldn’t speak any of it. “Ten bucks says that speaking these words will unlock our back door.”

“I have no idea what it says.”

When it came to ancient languages, Pierce was fluent in Greek and Latin, but those were languages that could be taught. While there were traces of Mother Tongue in many modern languages, teasing them out was less about knowledge and more about intuition. It was a gift. And not his. But Fiona…she might be the only person alive who had actually spoken — and forgotten — a few phrases. But that was four years ago. “If anyone can figure it out, it’s you.”

“I appreciate the pep talk, but the Mother Tongue isn’t just about knowing what the words sound like or even what they mean. It’s deeper than that.”

Fiona struggled to think of a way to explain the mechanics of the mysterious language, a combination of vibrational frequencies and focused intention that could affect matter at the subatomic level. She had no doubt that if she was able to master the words and frame the appropriate mental image, the stone wall would become as insubstantial as mist, but doing that was like trying to move a muscle by telling it to move. Mastery of the Mother Tongue was more a subconscious process than a conscious one.

But there was no other choice.

She took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and envisioned a tunnel through the rock wall that led out of the cavern. As she did that, she began to clap her hands against her thighs, pounding out a slow but regular rhythm. Then she began to sing.

Her grandmother had taught her the chant, the first words of the Siletz language that she had ever learned. It was a song to the spirits of the sea, praising the power and beauty of the waves, thanking the spirits for the bountiful gift of fish and oysters that sustained her people from one turning of the seasons to the next.

The thought of her people, the Siletz Nation, all but extinct now, nearly broke her out of the rhythm, but she focused on the words and let herself be carried along, like a leaf on the wind.

The chant was repetitive, but she gradually changed the words of the song, asking the spirits to open the door to the world beneath the sun. It was not meant as a literal prayer. She was, more than anything, hoping to get lucky and find the right words. Hopefully, the words for ‘open the magic door’ were the same in both the Mother Tongue and the language Fiona’s grandmother had taught her, but either her mental discipline was insufficient, or the words just weren’t right.

Nothing was happening.

She tried harder to visualize the rock opening up, and chanted the words again.

Without warning, something like a gust of wind pushed her forward, slamming her against the stone wall and silencing both the chant and the persistent beat she had been clapping. She felt a tightness in her inner ear, the result of a sudden change in air pressure that went from uncomfortable to agonizing in the space of a heartbeat. Before she could start to make sense of it, she was assaulted again, this time by an ear-splitting sound, like a jet engine tearing itself apart.

Is this something I did?

She turned to Pierce, who seemed equally bewildered by what was happening. The noise was coming from behind them, from out of the depths of the Labyrinth. In the dark mouth of the passage back across the bridge, she glimpsed a dull red glow, growing brighter. The maze had been transformed into a passage to Hell itself.

Then the ground heaved beneath her as the world came apart at the seams.

11

Pierce leapt forward and threw the Lion skin over Fiona as a shower of loose earth and rocks rained down. He could feel the impact of larger stones striking the thick pelt. It had weathered a storm of bullets, dissipating their ballistic velocity so effectively that he had barely noticed, but he doubted even the legendary lion hide could protect them against a Volkswagen-sized boulder. He looked out from beneath the skin’s protective shadow, searching for some refuge from the cave in. What he saw was not encouraging.

Fissures appeared in the ledge, zigzagging like lightning bolts, transforming the solid ground underfoot into a fractured and fragile web. The low persistent rumble of the collapse was briefly punctuated by a shriek of twisting metal. The bridge tore loose, along with a generous portion of the ledge, disappearing into the chasm below. Pierce barely had time to press himself and Fiona flat against the wall before the floor crumbled as well. That was when he saw an opening in the wall.

It had not been there a moment before. Either the tremor had broken through, or Fiona’s chant had worked. Regardless of the explanation, there was now a hole where there had been none. Maybe it led to salvation, maybe it led nowhere, but either option was preferable to staying put and waiting to die. He bundled Fiona into his arms and leapt into the gap.

There was no floor beneath them now, just a V-shaped crevice, widening with every passing second. Pierce felt his feet sink deeper like a wedge driven into a log. Each step was a struggle. His left foot caught and he pitched forward, Fiona’s weight pulling him off balance. She seemed to sense that he was falling and slipped free of his grasp, catching herself and steadying him. The shift was just enough to free his foot. He managed to stumble forward out of the spill, realizing only after a few steps that he was on flat ground.

“We made it!” Fiona said.

Pierce took a few more steps before Fiona’s words registered. His mouth and nose were full of grit, but the air was clearer, cooler. He staggered to a halt and lifted the Lion skin away from his eyes. Patches of scruffy grass grew across rocky terrain. He looked up, and saw stars in the black expanse overhead.

Behind them, the summit of Mount Psiloritis was outlined against the night sky, and much closer, there was a cliff face rent by a jagged crack. A plume of dust rose from the gap like a smoke signal. He wasn’t sure where they were, but given the serpentine nature of the Labyrinth, they were probably less than a mile from the entrance to the cave.

Fiona bent over beside him, hands on her knees as if on the verge of exhaustion, but laughing. While he shared her sense of relief at their escape, another emotion burned hotter.

Rage.

Kenner had blown up the Labyrinth, probably expecting to seal them in, to die a slow death of starvation, rather than killing them outright. But the intent was the same. He had tried to kill them. Both of them. And Pierce couldn’t let that go unanswered.

Yet, revenge alone was not Pierce’s sole motivation. There was more to this than Kenner’s ambition. The man was working with someone else, someone with a lot of resources and few scruples. Kenner was also now in possession of at least two items that Alexander Diotrephes had seen fit to hide away in the Labyrinth’s forgotten depths. There was no telling where those artifacts would lead him. The Heracleia alone might contain enough information to help Kenner unlock the genetic treasure he sought — the secret of how to make viable chimeras — not to mention other revelations that might overturn everything the Herculean Society had accomplished over the millennia.

To say that the situation was dire seemed like an understatement. But like Fiona said, they were alive. Where there was life, there was hope. He allowed her a few more seconds to catch her breath then clapped her on the back. “Come on. We’ve got work to do.”