The Minoan Cipher

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

Fueled by generous amounts of wine, the party was going full tilt. The actor who’d played the werewolf role got drunk, put his mask back on and growled at a woman sitting at a nearby table. With typical Parisian imperturbability, she asked if he was an American. When he said yes, she accepted his invitation to join the celebration.

Lily whooped it up with the rest of the Hidden History crew, but her thoughts were light years away. She had her hand resting on her purse and felt the vibration signaling a call. Pulling the phone out, she held it under the edge of the table. On the screen was the image of the Prior known as North. Each one of the Priors was named after the cardinal directions on a compass. The one named North was their leader.

She excused herself and walked outside to the relative quiet of the sidewalk. The smile left her lips and when she spoke her voice had a hard edge to it.

“Well. Do you have her?” she said.

“We’re in the apartment now. We came here immediately after your call but she was gone when we arrived.”

“Then you must wait until she returns.”

“I don’t think she will be coming back soon. Clothes are missing from the closet and drawers. We found no luggage.”

“Show me.”

The face disappeared and the screen showed a sofa and chairs in a living room. The camera spun slowly around, then the view moved into the kitchen and bedroom. The hangers were empty in the bedroom closet and spaces in the drawers showed where items had been removed. There was no sign of a toothbrush or hairbrush in the bathroom.

The camera phone moved into a small office. On the neat desktop were photos of Kalliste with her colleagues on a research vessel, and a picture of white, cube-shaped houses hugging black cliffs. The drawers were pulled open, but contained only office supplies. Of course, Kalliste would keep her files electronically and would have taken her computer with her. The face reappeared in the screen.

“Enough,” Lily said. “Go back into the bedroom and examine the pillows on her bed. Look for hair. Do the same in the shower drain.”

Less than a minute later, the voice came on again, “I found two long hairs.”

“Now go into the kitchen and place the hairs in a plastic bag. Bring the bag and its contents to me at the Cadiz Airport. I want you to carry it personally.” Lily clicked off and made a call to Salazar. “Send a plane to pick me up. I’ll need a helicopter in Cadiz, as well.”

“I’ll order an Auroch jet to Le Bourget right away,” Salazar said. “The helicopter will be at the Auroch corporate hangar. Anything further I can assist you with?”

“I’ll let you know.”

Lily went back to the party and stayed only long enough to excuse herself. She said the office called and assigned her to scope out a new assignment. She thanked the crew for its work, posed for photos with the French woman, who had donned the werewolf mask, and said she would see them back in New York. She took a cab to the hotel and asked the front desk to arrange for a limo to the airport while she packed.

Le Bourget Airport is used primarily for business aviation. The executive jet that landed minutes after her arrival was distinguished from the other corporate aircraft only by the stylized bull horns insignia of Auroch Industries on the fuselage. The jet taxied up to the limo where she was waiting. The jet kept its engines going while she boarded and an hour later it touched down in Cadiz. A tall thin figure dressed in black was standing near the Auroch hangar. He handed her the plastic bag as she walked to the helicopter.

The helicopter lifted into the air, headed east at two hundred miles per hour and soon approached its destination. Lily felt the tension slip away as she glimpsed the crenelated towers of the old castle looming like dragon’s teeth against the blue-black sky. The helicopter touched down inside the castle walls. Lily got out and strode across the courtyard under a translucent roof that had been built over a structure consisting of three towers, the tallest resting between the others.

Lily entered the door of the middle tower, walked through a dimly lit antechamber, then descended a wide set of stairs.

She placed the axe medallion hanging around her neck against the metal pad next to the doors to identify herself. When the doors opened, she stepped through into a passageway lit by electrical wall torches to a second set of steel doors and opened them with another press of her medallion on an ID plate. As she stepped into this new room and the doors silently closed behind her, she was enveloped by a sickly sweet odor of ancient decay. Anyone else would have retched, but Lily inhaled the miasma deep into her lungs. With each breath, she underwent a transformation.

The soft features of her face became rock hard. The corners of the lush mouth turned downward. The brow dipped into a shallow V. The warmth drained from her eyes. She elevated her chin at a haughty, uncaring angle and her long fingers curled into claws. The friendly, outgoing woman who had caroused with the film crew in Paris just a short time ago disappeared. In its place was a cruel caricature of herself.

She was in a huge chamber lined on four sides by red and black columns. The panels that decorated the walls between the columns included none of the finer aspects of Minoan art, such as flying fish or graceful swallows. These were pictures of death and destruction: An erupting volcano; bloody battle scenes on land and at sea; a bull being sacrificed.

She made her way between two lines of marble platforms. Lying on the biers were the mummified remains of high priestesses going back four thousand years. She walked further through the centuries with every step until she stopped at an altar surmounted by two up-swept stone horns. On a dais behind the altar was the first of the high priestesses.

Unlike the other mummies, she sat upright on a granite throne flanked on each side by a metal stand holding a double-edged axe. The round eyes that stared out through the horns at the lines of mummies were made of ivory. She wore the traditional dress of the priestess; the open bodice and long ruffled skirt. On her skull was a flat cap with a wide brim. Her desiccated skin was the color of old leather.

Lily gazed at the figure as if in a drug-induced haze. Although the silent thing on the throne was nothing but a pile of dry skin and bones, the High Priestess still exerted a power that was only somewhat diminished since that ancient time when she spoke with the voice of the Mother Goddess.

Lily had been aware that she was considered special even as a girl, when she was removed from an orphanage in California and placed under the guardianship of a foundation that had moved her to the Paris mansion where she was educated by the priestesses who lived there. Later she learned that she had been chosen because her blood contained what some psychologists canned “the murder gene,” an inherited characteristic that blots out normal human traits, such as empathy and sympathy. Her cold-blooded persona had been refined by bloody rituals that stretched back to the dawn of time, grooming her for the role she would play. Now… that time had come. Only the faint heartbeat of the crone lying in a room of the Paris sanitarium separated her from joining the line of high priestesses that stretched back forty centuries.

Set in the folds of the mummy’s apron, clutched in boney fingers, was a skull. The long ragged hole in the crown of the skull suggested that the owner had died a swift and violent death. Lily reached into a bronze chest at the feet of the mummy and came out with a dagger that would have been used for sacrifices. With the skill of a surgeon, she scraped a shaving of bone from the skull’s forehead into the plastic bag and put it in her pocket.

Lily turned to face the altar. Lifting the dagger in both hands, holding it high above her head with the deadly blade pointed downward, her voice rang out, echoing off the walls of the huge tomb.

“She is near. And she will die.”