The Vault of Poseidon

CHAPTER TEN

Thanks to Vetsch’s team infiltrating them at the hotel Eden had booked, they were forced to book a new room for the night, and it was several stars south of the Athenee, with a view of a side street and a brick wall instead of Manhattan’s skyline, and a vending machine half-full of Dr Pepper replacing the luxury restaurant.

“I never met anyone like you before,” said Lea as she dabbed Hawke’s grazed temple with an alcohol wipe.

“I’ll take that as a compliment.”

“Well don’t. You’re a total idiot who’s going to get himself killed one of these days.”

“I’ll say,” Ryan added.

“You attract bullets like you were a magnet, Mr Hawke.” Lea gently cleaned the wound.

“Actually,” Ryan said, perking up a little, “most bullets are made of lead, which doesn’t have any magnetic qualities to speak of.”

“Shut up, Ryan,” Lea said. “I know that. It was just an expression. Weasel.”

“Yeah,” added Hawke. “Shut up, Rupert.”

“Let me look at the fragment,” Ryan said. He picked it up off the bed and turned it in his hands. It reflected the light of the lamp dully in the low light of the room.

“Anything?”

“There’s writing on it, but it’s in what I presume is ancient Greek.”

Lea sighed. “And your language genius doesn’t extend to that, am I right?”

“Partly. I can tell you this word here probably means acropolis, but other than that even I can't help on this one.”

Hawke looked at the line of foreign letters neatly carved into the gold, unfamiliar and alien to him.

“Acropolis? That’s in Athens, isn't it?” he said.

“There are many acropoles all over Greece as a matter of fact,” said Ryan. “But yes, I suppose most ordinary people would leap to the one in Athens.”

“I swear I’m going to punch him, Lea.”

“Please, Joe — no. It’s just what he is — like it or leave it.” Lea turned to Ryan and shook her head at him, frowning. “I left it.”

“No, I left you!”

“Not this again.”

“Just, please Ryan,” Lea said, “would you start working on the translation for us? Just for me?”

Ryan mumbled something about people using him only when they wanted something, and opened the MacBook, bathing his face in a bluish glow in the corner of the hotel room. “Luckily for you heathens, I happen to know an excellent yet sadly unvisited Ancient Green translation engine on here, and will endeavour to convert this to English for you.”

“Thanks Ryan,” said Lea, yawning. “It’s been a long day.”

“Yeah,” said Hawke, “I’m being sincere when I say thanks too, Rupert.”

“Listen, I guess we’re making progress,” Lea told him. “So I’m going to check that bar downstairs for a beer or something.”

She returned a moment later holding two bottles of Rolling Rock.

Rolling Rock. The last thing he and Liz had shared before the terror that unfolded on his honeymoon in Vietnam all those years ago. The day when he lost his beloved wife in a vicious drive-by shooting in Hanoi’s Nha Tho Street, just outside a small bar they had just discovered together.

He knew the bullets were meant for him, but in the chaos they had ripped through his new bride, and left her dying in his arms on the sidewalk. Hawke had vowed revenge, but days after the attack a senior SBS officer had informed him the killer had died in an ambush by the Thai Special Forces in Bangkok, and so he was forever denied the closure of avenging his wife.

“What’s the matter, you don’t like beer?” Lea asked, handing him a bottle.

“Sorry, of course I do.” Hawke took the beer and downed half a bottle in one swig. “I’m going to grab a shower and then we should get something to eat while Rupert here translates the fragment.”

In the restaurant, Hawke bought Lea a steak and fries and they shared a bottle of wine. After she had drunk three glasses, Hawke asked her a question he’d had on his mind since the very beginning.

“Are you and Eden keeping something from me?”

She looked shocked and sat back in her chair. “I’m sorry?”

“Call me insane, but I’m sure there’s more to this whole business than meets the eye, or my eye, anyway.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“It’s like you’re holding something back from me — you and Richard.”

“Don't be silly, Joe.”

Hawke reconsidered. “It just seems like you seem to know more about this than I do. That’s all.”

“I told you, don't be silly.”

He took a sip of wine and put his hand on Lea’s but she pulled it away.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I just thought…”

“Forget it.”

“There’s someone else?”

Lea shook her head.

“You’re still in love with Ryan?” Hawke could hardly believe it was possible.

“Bloody hell, no. It’s nothing, really. Listen, it’s not you, Joe. I’m not ready for anything like this. Something happened to me, all right? Something a long time ago, and it nearly destroyed me. That’s part of the reason things didn’t work out with Ryan.”

“And I was thinking it was because he was an annoying little…”

“Please, Joe I’m trying to be serious here.”

“Forgive me,” he said sincerely.

“For your information, Ryan was actually very different when we were married. He was a very caring guy, you know? And so bright it’s scary — that much stayed the same, of course, but he changed after the divorce and in a way I blame myself for that. I think I wrecked his life when I divorced him. It’s all my fault you see…”

“You don’t have to tell me this.”

“Not now, no. But one day I will. And when I do, you have to promise me you won’t judge me.”

“That’s fair enough.”

“Tell me,” she asked. “Who is this mysterious Nightingale?”

“Just a woman.”

“How long have you known her?”

“I don’t think anyone truly knows her.”

“You know what I mean, Joe.”

“I was in Bosnia during the war — behind the lines, covert ops with a squadron of SAS and some US Delta Force. My squadron was teaching that lot a few things about covert warfare.”

“My God, you really do love yourself…”

“It was a lot of fun for a while. Then I was selected to go dark for a few months and infiltrate a group of Serbian radicals — my cover was being a journalist for an Argentine newspaper — I’m fluent in Spanish — and things were going well until my cover got blown.”

“It happens, I know…”

“We don’t know how it happened, but I lost all comms with my team. Agent Nightingale, who’d been supporting the Delta lads, literally talked me out of their interrogation HQ with a schematic of the building she had pulled up from somewhere. It took an hour, and we talked for a long time — it was her training to keep me calm, not that I needed that, of course, but it brought us together. She saved my life that night. We keep in touch, and that’s it.”

“But you’ve never met her?”

“Nope. All I know is she lives in New York. She’s a very private person and she has the skillset to keep it that way — I don’t even know her name. She makes J.D. Salinger look like an America’s Got Talent contestant.”

Lea laughed. “Well… she sounds mysterious to me.”

“All I know is she left the agency a couple of years ago and that she lives in New York City — that’s it.”

“But you want to know more about her?” she asked. Hawke now wondered why Lea was asking so many questions about her.

“Well, do you?” she repeated.

He shrugged his shoulders and took a sip of the wine.

Back at the hotel, Hawke checked the place over for anything suspicious, and then pulled a miniature vodka from the minibar before crashing on the bed and flicking the television on.

“Any progress with the golden arc, Ryan?” Lea asked.

“Er, so I worked it out, yeah,” he replied.

“You mean Google worked it out,” Hawke said, sitting up again.

Ryan sighed. “Do you want to know or not?”

Hawke smirked. “Hit me.”

“Don’t tempt me, Big Fella.”

“I would pay good money to see you try.” Hawke pulled twenty dollars out of his pocket and waved it in the younger man’s face.

“And I would pay for you both to shut the hell up,” Lea said. “Ryan, what’s the damned translation?”

“It’s cryptic, I'm afraid. It reads Beneath the Highest City, Where The Samian’s Sacred Work Shall Guide.”

“Oh, that is just bloody fantastic,” Hawke said. “More word games.”

“And it gets worse. It seems to me that the way this sentence was phrased and inscribed, it’s only a fragment of the original inscription.”

“How do you mean?”

“I think this fragment is only half of what should be some kind of golden disc — maybe even some kind of technical machinery, so somewhere is the other half, and on that half is the second part of this inscription.”

Hawke took a deep breath and walked to the window. He felt the vodka burning its way through him. He watched the traffic trundling along the street, stopping at red lights and moving off again when they turned green. A light flurry of snow blew down the street and dusted the sidewalks with a fine white powder. “I thought you said the word acropolis was on it?” he asked Ryan, thinking about the translation he had just read out.

“It is, acropolis means highest city.”

“I’ll let you off,” Hawke said, irritated he had let Ryan humiliate him in front of Lea. “Tell me — what did you mean, exactly, when you were talking about out-of-place artifacts?”

Ryan spun around and rubbed his hands together, clearly enjoying the research. Hawke didn’t imagine squatting in an abandoned paint factory, hacking computers for a living was much fun. “Many strange objects have been found that don’t belong — like this which was blown out of the side of a hill with some dynamite. Wait a sec…” He looked at the MacBook again. “Here it is — Meeting Horse Hill in Massachusetts. They discovered a metallic vase in the earth there in 1951.”

Hawke sat forward. “You’re telling me these things are actually real?”

“Some say so. Check this out.” He clicked his way to another page. “This is called the Dorchester Pot, it’s the classic out-of-place artifact.”

“What is it?”

“A sort of bell-shaped, metal vase.” Ryan began to read the information on the screen to Hawke and Lea. “According to this, it was extracted from the Roxbury Conglomerate, a form of puddingstone rock formation nearly six hundred million years old and it was recovered in two pieces, both of which now sit, again according to this, in an alarmed glass museum case in Zaugg’s library. Mainstream academics dismissed the pot finding as a Victorian hoax, but maybe Zaugg knew better.”

“Why am I only just hearing about this?”

“Some will tell you that these discoveries are suppressed by the governments via their puppets and proxies in the academic community. They consider such knowledge would be highly detrimental to the public. If you ask me, I would say it’s because no one gives a shit.”

Hawke smiled. Maybe he could warm to Ryan after all. “And Zaugg?”

“He’s obviously a believer, but for his own reasons.”

“And he has this evidence, you say?”

“Yes. Beside the Dorchester Pot he also has other precious discoveries that he either made or bought, including the Kingoodie Hammer, a corroded manmade iron nail found embedded in Devonian sandstone four hundred million years ago, a Norwegian silver penny from the reign of Olaf Kyrre in the 11th Century, discovered at an old Native American settlement in New Hampshire, and his prized possession — the Antikythera Mechanism.”

“Sounds dangerous.”

“Only in terms of its sheer existence. It’s an ancient analog computer designed and built to make accurate astrological predictions such as eclipses. The mechanism was dated to at least one thousand years before clock mechanisms were known to have been built, and many people, including presumably Hugo Zaugg are convinced it was made not by man, but by a higher intelligence, perhaps even the ancient gods themselves. Zaugg paid the National Archaeological Museum of Athens a massive sum of money for it and it took pride of place in his collection — until now.”

“Now?”

“I mean now the way is clear to obtaining the vault of Poseidon, Joe. If it was found to exist then it would prove our understanding of time was all wrong — that our interpretation of history was totally wrong — and then all the out-of-place artifacts around the world would assume a new legitimacy.”

“I don't recall saying you could call me Joe.”

“Er, sorry, I…”

“I’m just kidding, Rupert. Relax. Zaugg can't be the first person to look for this?”

“He isn’t — I’ve been reading about it. Many people have tried to find it throughout history, including an attempt in 1887 by a Turkish archaeologist named Mustafa Özal, and another one in 1911 by a team of Russian treasure hunters in the Aegean.”

“Interesting.”

“They claim to have found conclusive evidence of it and given it to the Czar but after the revolution in 1917 it was seized by the Bolsheviks and moved to the State Hermitage in St. Petersburg. That turned out to be a hoax.”

“I can hardly believe any of this.” Hawke thought he maybe needed another vodka.

“The third attempt was in 1925 by a Greek shepherd who became very rich indeed when he successfully sold what he claimed were relics from the tomb to a private collector in Athens, but that turned out to be yet another hoax.”

Hawke shook his head in disbelief.

“The fourth attempt was after the war in 1946. It was made by Bernard Decaux, a French amateur collector. He was very rich and no one knows what happened there — he disappeared.”

“I don’t like the sound of any of this,” Lea said. “What happened to this Decaux character?”

“The last place he was seen was in Marseille in the south of France. He disappeared off the face of the earth in 1948. The final attempt — until Eden’s effort this year — was an excavation funded by J. Paul Getty in the 1950s. Again, no one knows if he really discovered anything or not.”

“And they were all searching for the lost tomb of Poseidon,” Hawke said, his mind slowly coming to accept the idea. “So these vases — what’s the deal?”

Ryan sighed. “From what I can tell, the Poseidon and Amphitrite vases are just regular works of pottery from the fourth century BC, and so is this inscribed golden arc that now we know must have been a disc which was broken into two halves and hidden in them.”

“But the vault of Poseidon is much older?”

“It must be. Poseidon was a god, and that would predate history as we know it. If we can work out the meaning of the inscription hidden in the vases by the Vienna Painter they could lead the way to the greatest treasure on Earth, something far older than even Hellenistic Greece.”

“And this ultimate power I keep hearing so much about?”

Ryan shrugged his shoulders. “Got to be the trident, an awesome doomsday weapon by all accounts — one of the most powerful ever wielded by any deity.”

Hawke took a deep breath. “And what does it do, exactly?”

“Oh, just the usual fire and brimstone stuff — earthquakes and tsunamis on an unprecedented scale. When Poseidon was insulted by the people he would strike the ground with it and cause terrifying earthquakes. He could flood any land, cause oceans to swell and smash ships but worst of all were the tsunamis.”

Lea frowned. “I don’t like where this is going, Ryan.”

“Poseidon used the trident to create massive tsunamis that raced across oceans and decimated entire coastlines.”

Hawke frowned. “I begin to see why Hugo Zaugg is so keen to find the tomb if it’s got that bloody thing in it.”

“Not to mention the gold.”

“Gold?”

“Naturally, any tomb like that would contain almost unbelieveable amounts of gold, both that collected by Poseidon himself and also the massive amounts given to him in tribute over the years.”

“This just gets better.”

Lea’s mobile phone rang. She took it into the bathroom, pausing in the door to say: “It's Sir Richard.”

Moments later she returned.

“What’s the news?” Hawke asked.

“He’s pleased we got the gold fragment,” she said. “And he says we need to meet him at once.”

“Back in London?”

“No, he wants to meet in Geneva. He says he has a lead for us there, and he wants us to talk to someone. He sounded worried.”

Hawke was considering these words when they heard screams outside their room and men trampling along the corridor. He reached for a weapon but before he got his hands on it the door was smashed open and officers from the NYPD rushed into the room.

“And we were having it so easy,” Lea said.