The Vault of Poseidon

CHAPTER FIVE

Hawke peered out the window of the Boeing 777 as it banked to starboard and descended into the clouds above Long Island. According to the screen on the back of the seat in front of him, they were at five thousand feet and would be on the ground in La Guardia in less than twenty minutes.

He turned to Lea who was still sleeping beside him, and nudged her awake.

“Time to reset your watch to East Coast time,” he said. “We’re here.”

“Didn’t you sleep?” she asked, rubbing her eyes and hoisting herself up in the seat. “I always sleep on planes.” She glanced surreptitiously at Ryan.

“I never sleep on planes,” Hawke said. “Especially if I’m expected to do a halo jump out of one.”

“What’s a halo jump?” Ryan asked. He was sitting on the aisle seat on the other side of Lea, ogling one of the flight attendants.

“High Altitude Low Opening,” Lea spoke before Hawke had a chance to respond.

“Sounds cool, actually,” said Ryan.

Hawke smirked. “It usually is. At thirty thousand feet it’s around minus thirty-five degrees or thereabouts.”

“No, I meant…”

“He knows what you meant, Ryan.”

“Ah… well, I knew that,” Ryan said, embarrassed.

“Of course you did,” Hawke said. “To be honest your lecture about ancient Greece and the Ionian Texts back over the Atlantic almost put me into a very deep sleep.”

“Hey, you asked me if I knew anything about it.”

“And the problem with that,” Lea said, smiling wearily, “is that Ryan Bloody Bale knows everything about everything.”

“Except about how to keep a woman happy, apparently,” Hawke muttered.

“What was that?” Lea asked.

“I was just saying that ancient Greece is a fascinating subject.”

“Ah — yes, indeed!” Ryan piped up. “Especially the gods. Poseidon, of course, was one of the twelve great Olympian immortals of the ancient Greek Pantheon. The people feared him so much they called him the earth-shaker because of his ability to create earthquakes and massive tsunamis with his trident.”

“So not a great bloke to invite to your average beach party then?” Hawke said.

“The gods are not to be mocked,” said Ryan, pushing his glasses up on the bridge of his nose. Hawke wasn’t sure if he was being serious or not.

They left the airport and hailed a cab. Moments later they were driving through a crisp New York afternoon. Lea instructed the driver to go to the hotel Eden had booked for them before their flight.

Hawke was already switching back into SBS mode and wondering if the people who killed Professor Fleetwood and stole the Ionian Texts might have prepared a welcoming committee for them here in America.

Presumably they had the same information that Fleetwood had given to Eden and possibly much more, but when they arrived at the Hotel Plaza Athenee there was no one waiting except the front desk clerk and a young bellhop.

Upstairs, Hawke was less than impressed.

“Hang on — so Eden only booked two bloody rooms?”

“Government budget.” Lea shrugged her shoulders and smiled.

“You’re sharing with your ex, right?” Hawke protested, nodding his head in the direction of Ryan, who was struggling to open the window.

“Get out of it, Joe Hawke! You two are sharing, and that’s my room over there.” She pointed across the corridor at the door opposite theirs.

“Talk about motivation to get out of here before nightfall…”

Ryan sat at the table by the still-closed window and took a MacBook Air out of his luggage.

“So what do we know, then?” Hawke asked.

“Not much,” said Lea. “All we have is a vague reference to New York, and the fact a potter left a map to the tomb inside some of his work thousands of years ago.”

“And don’t forget Fleetwood’s cryptic last words,” Hawke said.

“I’ve been thinking about those,” Ryan said. “Her reference to the ‘ultimate power’ probably has something to do with Poseidon’s trident.”

“The trident?” Hawke asked. “Maybe that’s what Eden was being so coy about. What about the vase — anything on that?”

“The vase in question is probably one called the Poseidon Vase by this Vienna Painter Eden told you about. Greek Attic vase creators are named after various things, one of which is often large collections around the world. The Vienna Painter is named after an amphora in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.”

Hawke smiled. “I wouldn’t want to say that after a couple of pints.”

“Like I said,” Lea muttered. “Not as funny as you think you are.”

Ryan continued without replying. “It’s one of a pair, the other featuring Amphitrite. They make a set because the scene is one of Poseidon fishing, and then the other has Amphitrite holding the fish. The obvious corollary is that the Vienna Painter hid the location of the vault in either one or both of these vases.”

Hawke mouthed the word corollary to Lea behind Ryan’s back and winked.

Lea smiled at him as Ryan continued, oblivious. “Amphitrite — who would have thought it?”

“So who was Amphitrite?” Hawke asked.

Ryan stared at the MacBook for a few moments as he flicked through a few pages before winding up on Wikipedia. “Amphitrite was an ancient goddess, originally the wife of the great sea god Poseidon, one of the twelve great Olympian gods of the ancient Greek Pantheon. She was a nereid, which was a sea nymph a little like the sirens.”

“The ones that used to sing sailors to their deaths by making them sail into rocks?” Lea asked.

“Uh-huh, but nereids were good and they used to help sailors make safe passage through dangerous storms. According to ancient Homeric scripture, all this starts with Kronos.”

“Who?” Hawke said. “Sounds like an aftershave.”

Lea sighed. “Only the kind you would buy.”

Ryan sighed and shook his head in disappointment. “Kronos, he was a Titan who descended directly from the ultimate divine beings — Uranus, who was the sky, and Gaia, who was the earth. Kronos had three divine children, Poseidon, Zeus and Hades.”

Hawke frowned. “This is getting complicated.”

“Hardly. Poseidon inherited divine power over the sea, Zeus got the sky and Hades got the underworld. Simples.”

“What else does it say about Poseidon in particular?” Hawke asked.

“With the exception of his father Zeus, king of all gods, he was the most powerful god the earth has known. As I say, he was once called the earth-shaker because of his ability to cause earthquakes and tsunamis. He was also known among the ancients for his unpredictable temper and wild nature. He was not a god to displease, it seems.”

“But the ancient gods were myths.” Hawke said. “This is what I’m just not understanding.” He walked to the door and checked the spyhole to make sure the corridor was still empty.

Ryan continued. “According to this, the myth of Amphitrite is…” he squinted through his glasses at the screen. “Er… the process of deification in reversal. In the earliest days she was understood to be a sea-goddess, but the Olympian pantheon reduced her status to Poseidon’s consort — a bit like when Princess Diana was stripped of her HRH status.”

“Nice topical analogy, Ryan.” Lea shook her head and sighed.

“He likes keeping it simple, I can see that,” said Hawke.

“Hey, if it helps proles like you to understand, then I’m happy with it.”

“Hey, Hawke is not a prole,” Lea said. “He’s a pleb.”

Ryan continued. “Anyway, much later, the ancient poets and storytellers reduced Amphitrite once again to a metaphor for the sea itself and — wait — this is important.”

Lea looked at him. “What?”

“We need to make sure Hawke knows what metaphor means.”

“Get on with it, Rupert,” Hawke said. “Unless you want a knuckle sandwich.”

“Oh you do know what a metaphor is, good. Anyway, in other words, as time passed the absolute certainty that she was a real goddess — breathing, and walking on earth — was slowly diminished in gradations until today we see her as a myth. Shit! I’m really good at researching this ancient Greek stuff.”

“A myth like Jesus, you mean?” Hawke said, ignoring the hubris.

“Many high-profile atheists believe Jesus was a real man who walked the earth, even if they dispute he was the son of god. Why is it possible for so many of us to accept Jesus was really on earth, and also a god, but not for us to believe that the ancient gods of earlier cultures were also real, and had a physical presence here on earth?”

“Because there’s no evidence of it.”

“In the last few minutes I’ve been to more than one website which claims there is solid evidence of it.”

“You mean tin foil hat websites?”

“Not necessarily, no.”

“So why has no one ever heard of this evidence then?” Hawke asked.

“I’d imagine there aren’t many people willing to risk their careers for the truth. It’s probably almost impossible to prove, I’d bet. Either the cultures in question are so old they have turned to dust, or the authorities work hard to suppress the truth in order to keep control of the current narrative.”

“You mean the history we all know?” Hawke asked.

“The history you think you know, yes,” Ryan said with a smile.

Hawke turned to Lea. “I know you said this guy was a bit of conspiracy theorist but you never said he was a total nutcase.”

“Excuse me,” Ryan objected, “but evidence of antediluvian civilizations is probably out there for those who care to look. The scientific community regard some believers as conspiracy nuts and maybe that’s their loss — or perhaps their discrediting of those people is more than a simple dismissal of the unlikely — we may never know.”

Hawke thought things through for a second. He felt like his mind was melting. “So where do we find this Vase of Poseidon?”

“The Met,” Ryan said.

Under the pretext of grabbing a coke from the vending machine, Hawke took a walk and put a call through to Nightingale. He was still concerned about whatever it was Sir Richard Eden was keeping from him.

“It’s this trident that’s bothering me,’ he said to her. “What can you tell me about that?”

Nightingale worked fast and was soon hacking through secret government documents. “The legend says that the trident was pretty much the most powerful weapon possessed by any god. Apparently it had some kind of power that enabled Poseidon to cause earthquakes and tsunamis at his command anywhere in the world at any time… but there’s some other stuff in here about the contents of the vault.”

“And?”

“And it’s blocked.”

“I thought you hacked it?”

“Sure did, but this is a PDF of a scanned letter, and someone’s blocked out a few lines with a black pen. Whatever it is, they don’t want anyone to know about it. I guess that explains why Langley is keeping an eye on this.”

“Langley believes this crap?”

“Joe, the US Government is heavily invested in the esoteric — MK Ultra, teleportation experiments, telepathy experiments, you name it. If they thought there was even the slightest possibility that something like the trident really existed, believe me, they would want it.”

“This just gets worse.”

“As for the stuff that’s blacked out… who knows? Back when I worked for them there was even a rumor they took the Ark of the Covenant from the Nazis way back in World War Two and hid it in a giant storage facility, but none of us ever bought that one — some things are just too ridiculous to believe, you know?”

“Yeah, that is ridiculous.” Hawke’s mind raced with ideas. “So let me get this straight — you’re saying that Poseidon’s trident really exists and is a weapon of mass destruction and that a Swiss megalomaniac is trying to get his hands on it and that there’s stuff even worse than that because it’s blacked out?”

“Pretty much.”

At times like this, he missed the Special Forces. Life seemed somehow simpler back then. Less nuance and more black and white back in the old SBS.

The SBS were the Royal Navy’s equivalent to the British Army’s SAS, just as highly trained but much less comfortable in the public eye. Not being as well-known as the SAS didn’t bother the men in this elite unit — it was a small band of soldiers of less than two hundred, and they lived by their motto: By Strength and Guile.

They were especially proud of the fact they had the only Victoria Cross in the Special Forces, won in 1945 by Anders Lassen who led a daring attack in the north of Italy at the end of the war.

But recently, the section had suffered a hammering to their reputation after a failed attempt to rescue hostages held by jihadi terrorists in Nigeria. Some had argued the SAS should have been used, but Hawke knew the situation would have been the same whoever was handling it. He had served in M Squadron, the Maritime Counter Terrorism sub-unit, and life there was unpredictable and dangerous.

But that was then and this was now. Like it or not.

Hawke thanked Nightingale and returned to the room. He put the cokes on the table. Ryan had packed up the MacBook and was flicking through the TV channels.

“We didn’t pay for the porn option, sorry Rupert,” Hawke said.

“Very funny.”

“Listen,” Lea said, rubbing her temples. “I’m going to grab a quick shower before we head over to the museum.”

Hawke thought the two of them looked like they had been arguing.

“Do you need any help?” Ryan said, cockily.

“Those days are over, Ryan. You stay here with Joe and work on this.”

Hawke watched Lea pull out her hair-tie and close the door behind her.