The Lost Labyrinth

II

It was still too early for Knox to call it a night, so he played around on the Internet for a while. He forwarded the photos Gaille had sent to his email, opened them on his screen. Agia Georgio, her message had said, near the southern coast. He tracked it down on a map of Crete, then brought up Google Earth. The connection was light-speed compared to the treacle of Egypt. He zeroed in on the Mediterranean, Crete, its southern coast. He found the port of Hora Sfakion, the town of Anapoli, then Agia Georgio.

Seen from above, the terrain looked mountainous and bleak, grey limestone covered in thin scrub, dotted with the green circles of trees. He zoomed in on remote buildings, but none of them matched Petitier's house. He broadened his search, looking for that distinctive amphitheatre of rock. It was amazingly, disturbingly voyeuristic: nowhere was private any longer. At last he found a plausible candidate, zoomed in until he was certain: a house with two polythene greenhouses nearby.

He stared at it a while, thinking fondly of Gaille, wondering how mad she still was at him, how much grovelling he'd have to do. The prospect made him smile. He wondered if she'd learn much about Petitier. If anyone could, she would. It bugged the hell out of him that so many people insisted on giving him all the credit for their Alexander and Akhenaten adventures, because the plain truth was that she deserved most of it.

He closed Google Earth, ran a search on Roland Petitier instead, not expecting much other than a few news reports about his murder. He'd dropped out of sight twenty years before, after all, well before the Internet age. But to Knox's surprise, he got a number of hits linking to the on-line index of one of the more obscure archaeological journals. Petitier, it seemed, had published an article in it, and it had evidently provoked quite a vibrant discussion. But it wasn't Petitier's name that most struck Knox, nor even the title of the piece, though that was intriguing too.

No, what really caught his eye was the name of the man who'd co-authored it.