The Minoan Cipher

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

Lily met the DNA expert from Madrid at the courtyard restaurant of the Melia Santi Petri hotel. He had called the night before to say he had the test results. When she told him that she wanted to meet with him as soon as possible, he said he would catch a flight to Cadiz in the morning.

The slightly-built, well-groomed man in the dark blue suit and gray tie emerged from the hotel, glanced around the courtyard and saw Lily waving him over to her table. They shook hands.

“You must be Ms. Porter,” he said.

“And you would be Luis Flores from the genetic profiling lab. Please have a seat.”

Flores sat at the table and placed a leather briefcase on his lap.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t get the test results to you earlier,” he said. “Genetic testing has come a long way, but the process still involves several steps. The sample goes through a machine that isolates it from the other material, then it must be heated to magnify the DNA and frozen before it can be analyzed.”

“Don’t worry, Senor Flores. This was an unusual request to toss at you on such short notice. I appreciate your company’s decision to give it Priority as I asked.”

Flores beamed. “I was glad to do it, Ms. Porter. I’m a great fan of Hidden History. I particularly enjoyed that segment you did in Madagascar about the zombie batmen.”

“Thank you. I’m sure you will also enjoy the program we just finished filming, called Werewolves of the Paris Sewers.”

The eyes behind the circular wire-rimmed glasses widened. “Werewolves! You certainly cover the spectrum of the supernatural.” He grinned. “Anyway, on to the subject at hand. The analysis we just completed was somewhat unusual. Is it something related to a future program?”

“Hidden History is constantly researching possible projects. There are only so many zombie or vampire stories you can run.”

“I can hardly wait,” he said. He unsnapped the briefcase and reached in for a file folder, placing it on the table directly in front of him. He asked Lily if she knew much about genetic profiling.

“I was a reporter before I became a producer,” she said. “I know a great deal about many things but not very much about one thing in particular.”

“Picture the human cell as a bubble, and within that is a smaller bubble called the nucleus. Within that nucleus, both men and women have twenty-three pairs of chromosomes. When men and women conceive a child, one chromosome in each pair comes from the mother and the other from the father. The ‘Y’ chromosome is passed down from the father, whereas women pass along their DNA from the mitochondria that float in the space between the nucleus and the outer layer of the cell.”

“All very informative, Senor Flores.” She glanced at her watch. “I don’t mean to rush you, but I’m on a tight schedule.”

“Sorry. I felt I had to lay a foundation so you would appreciate the special problems we had to deal with in analyzing these samples.”

“What kind of problems?”

“None with the hair sample. Using the polymerase chain reaction, we easily developed a genetic profile of the subject.”

“Was the bone sample too old to analyze?”

“Not at all. With the latest techniques, ancient DNA can be traced back tens of thousands of years. All the way to the African ‘Eve’ who is supposedly the mother of all mankind. The bone sample you provided was dated between three thousand and four thousand years old. A comparatively recent period when we look back in human history.”

“I’m afraid you’re losing me, Mr. Flores.”

“Had this been a sample from the tissues of a mummy, we could have dated the sample using the PCR process. The problem with dating ancient specimens is that skeletal remains, bones and teeth, are fragile and highly degradable. No cells are preserved, which means we can’t use the PCR lab procedure I described a moment ago. It is mitochondrial, not the nuclear DNA, that survives.”

“You said you could date a specimen back to Eve.”

“Yes, Eve, but not Adam. Mitochondrial markers are passed down from the maternal line, not the paternal one. The bone sample came from a male, so it was impossible to make the genetic connection between the two samples.”

“That’s disappointing, Senor Flores. I had hoped you could do better,” Lily said in a flat tone of voice.

“I had hoped so as well,” he said with a sigh. “This is a fascinating assignment, and I would have loved to establish a connection between the two samples. But not all is lost. It’s possible that circumstantial evidence may establish a link.”

He opened the file folder, extracted two sheets of paper and slid them across the table. Printed on each sheet was a pie-chart and a map of the world’s continents with areas that were color coded. He tapped the pie-chart labeled “Subject A” with the tip of his finger. “This is the genetic profile from the bone sample. What do you see?”

“It is almost entirely in red except for a small sliver in green.”

“Correct. The island of Crete on the map is also in red, indicating that the individual we’re interested in is almost entirely of Cretan origin. The green sliver corresponds to the area around the eastern Mediterranean where the subject had ancestral antecedents.”

Lily stared at the other pie-chart. “Tell me more about the diagram.”

“As you can see, most of the chart is red, indicating that the subject is around ninety percent Cretan. Subject B is around fifty per cent pure Cretan, with the balance mostly Spanish and other western European areas.”

“What’s this?” she said, pointing to an irregular black section of Crete that was the same in both maps.

“You have a quick eye. That’s the circumstantial evidence I mentioned. This is the Lassithi Plateau. Some scholars refer to it as the Machu Picchu of the ancient Minoan civilization. As Crete was overrun by various invaders, the last of the Minoans retreated to the plateau and the adjoining mountain slopes.”

“Are you saying that both subjects go back to Lassithi?”

“Their genes do. In fact, they go back to the Neolithic people who first settled the island more than seven thousand years ago. These were small settlements. Families intermarried, so it’s entirely possible the subjects were related. I can’t confirm that. You’ll have to go back along the maternal line. We’ll try to refine the search and see if we can come up with anything that we didn’t pick up with the initial analysis.”

“Thank you, Senor Flores. May I keep these charts?”

“I printed them out for you to keep. I’ll be looking forward to the Paris werewolves. Please let me know when the program airs.”

“I’ll do that,” Lily said, forcing a smile.

After a quick handshake Flores headed back into the hotel and Lily sat down again and studied the pie charts and maps. The skull sample produced no surprises. Minos could trace his Cretan ancestors back for centuries. But the chart based on the hair sample from Kalliste Kalchis really intrigued her.

The Cretan section indicated that Kalliste and Minos both descended from inhabitants of Crete who had arrived on the island in Neolithic times. The king’s daughter had moved from Crete which accounted for Spanish and European DNA in the genetic profile of her descendant.

One pie slice caught her eye. It was much thinner than the others and constituted only a small percentage of the chart for Kalliste. The sliver showed that she had a distant ancestor from the Caucasus. Lily tapped out Caucasus in the Google space of her phone. The northern part of the region on the coast of the Black Sea in ancient times was known as Colchis.

She Googled Colchis. As she read further, her pulse began to race. Colchis was the home of Medea, daughter of the king who lost the Golden Fleece to Jason and the Argonauts. Medea had a niece named, Persiphae. Lily looked up Persiphae and confirmed what she already knew; Persiphae was the wife of King Minos. How could she have missed it?

Names often change over time. Even her own, Lily, came from Lil-ee, the sacred flower of the Minoan goddess Britomartis, who went back to the Neolithic era. But Lily’s ancient name was not Porter, but Portina, Minoan Mistress of the Animals.

Colchis. Kalchis.

It was no coincidence. Kalliste was descended from the daughter of King Minos.

She had to bring Kalliste to her long overdue fate in the Maze. The decree from the High Priestess whose mummy sat on a throne in the Maze had been passed down through the centuries. The spawn of Minos must be given to the Mother Goddess if the Way of the Axe were to prosper.

Lily silently mouthed the old chants, murmurings that had their roots in the primitive rituals when men lived in caves. The past seemed like a river rushing through her brain, but the sound it made was not water but a chorus of voices. An image flashed before her eyes. The photograph on the wall of Kalliste’s apartment. White cubical houses set against black ashen cliffs. The Mother Goddess was leading the way.

“Would you like more coffee, Madame?”

The waiter standing at her table had come over to see if Lily needed anything. She snapped out of her trance, gave him her playful TV producer smile, then scooped up the graphs and stuffed them into her pocketbook. She rose from her chair.

“I’m fine, thank you. I’m very fine indeed.”