The Lost Labyrinth

II

All the early flights to Heraklion were full, but there was room on the first departure for Chania, a port in north-western Crete. Knox landed a few minutes before six-thirty; with no luggage to collect, he breezed through arrivals. There was only one car-hire booth open, manned by an unshaven middle-aged man in sunglasses who kept pushing the sleeves of his rumpled linen suit up past his elbows. He tried to scare Knox into taking additional insurance against the deductible. 'Nasty roads,' he told him. 'Terrible drivers.'

'Don't worry about me,' Knox assured him, as he took the keys to a Hyundai. 'I live in Egypt.'

It was still early, the roads were empty and good, gorgeous shrubs in full bloom either side, like an extended fairway at Augusta. Bugs tapped the windscreen every few minutes, leaving little smears of themselves. He made excellent time to Vrises, cut south and headed up into the White Mountains. Black nets hung from the steep hillsides like widows' veils. There was a haze in the air, as though someone had lit bonfires. He passed through Petres, then had the road entirely to himself. At first he enjoyed it, taking the hairpins a little faster than was prudent, but gradually the complete quietness began to alarm him. Even this early on a Saturday, it shouldn't be this quiet. He was nearing the top of a high pass when he saw the first sign of trouble, road so freshly laid that the glistening tarmac slurped stickily at his tyres. He'd only gone another quarter mile when he saw a pair of huge grey pipes by the side of the road ahead, supports for a tunnel being bored in the cliff. A thin slurry sprayed against his undercarriage as he drove over it, and then the surface disintegrated even further, just raw bedrock in places, scattered with weeds and grasses. He went down into first gear, crested the peak and then wound back and forth on the descent, half expecting to meet some impassable obstacle. It wasn't that great a surprise, therefore, when he saw the two red-and-white barriers across the road, and the bulldozers and earth-movers parked nose-to-tail beyond them, along with huge hummocks of hardcore and tarmac waiting to be laid.

He pulled to a stop, clenched his steering wheel. At another time, he might rather have savoured the righteousness of his indignation that no one had seen fit to put out warning signs thirty miles back, but all he felt at this moment was a dreadful foreboding, an irrational yet overpowering sense that Gaille was in terrible danger. He grabbed his car-rental map. His choices were awful: a massive detour through the mountains or returning all the way to the north coast, then east to Rethymno and south from there. Either option would cost him at least three hours. He got out of the car, slammed his door in frustration, then walked between the barriers to go study the road ahead.