Uncharted: The Fourth Labyrinth

13

Santorini was unlike any other place in the world. The towns overlooking the caldera were built into the caves and folds of the cliffs left behind when the volcano at the heart of ancient Thera exploded. The blue domes of the larger buildings matched the blue of the swimming pools that dotted the cliff towns and the water of the caldera. Drake reckoned there must have been tens of thousands of stairs just in the village of Oia alone, all of them curving around the inner wall of an island that was part of the rim of a sleeping volcano. Some of the beaches had black sand-volcanic sand-and the beauty of the caldera somehow allowed the people to tell themselves that the sea would never erupt with lava and flame, killing them all.

But it might. Drake knew that, and though Santorini had a beauty and serenity greater than almost anywhere else on the planet, it was this strange peace with potentially imminent destruction that fascinated him most.

It was Sunday night, and the warmth of the day still lingered though the sun had gone down. Drake and Jada walked side by side along the alleys and stairways overlooking the caldera, surrounded by bars and restaurants and shops. Many of the shops were closed on a Sunday night in October, but some remained open, and they wandered and window-shopped, sometimes talking about their lives and sometimes in companionable silence.

They had managed a great deal in just over twenty-four hours. In Port Said they had found a marina where captains offered their boats for day trips. It was an expensive proposition and even more costly when they explained that they wanted the captain to take them to Santorini but didn’t plan on making the return trip. The weathered Egyptian captain made noises about the laws they were asking him to break but was happy enough to break them when money had changed hands.

They had slept fairly comfortably on board the ship, all things considered, and arrived at Santorini in midafternoon on Sunday. It had been a stroke of genius-or luck, Drake allowed-that they had checked out of the Auberge du Lac and brought their duffels with them, guns and ammunition stuffed in among their clean and dirty clothes. They had left the Volvo abandoned in Port Said, but once they took the cable car up from the Santorini docks, getting a taxi was easy enough. Hungry as they were, they had shopped first. October nights could get chilly on the islands, so Sully and Drake each picked up sweaters, and Jada purchased a stylish leather jacket.

Or, rather, Drake purchased them all, as well as a couple of changes of clothes for each of them. He felt bad about using the fake credit card he’d gotten on the way to Montreal, but he couldn’t exactly use his own, and he had to conserve the significant amount of cash he was still carrying from his adventure in Ecuador. He promised himself that when this was all over, he’d pay the store back; he’d even kept the receipt. Drake might have broken the law on a fairly regular basis-that came with the territory in his line of work-but he drew the line at ripping people off.

They’d gone into the first decent hotel they’d found in the village of Oia, pretended not to be twitchy about the exorbitant prices, and booked a suite so they could all be locked up behind the same door that night. In the summer they would never have found a vacancy so easily, but in October rooms weren’t in such high demand.

Dinner had followed, and now Sully was back at the hotel, trying to figure out the best way to get them to Therasia in the morning. Even if they paid someone to take them over tonight, searching for ancient mysteries tended to be easier when the sun was shining. In the dark, Drake figured they’d just walk off a cliff and that would be the end of the whole business.

Now he and Jada were drifting into one of their comfortable silences again. They were on the downhill side of a rise in the cliffside village, on a path among the shops and bars and eateries. There were stretches of path and then a few steps and another longer walk and a few more steps, which was as close to flat as this part of the island got. The smell of burning pipe tobacco reached them, and Jada inhaled and smiled.

“You like that smell?” Drake asked.

She shrugged. “When I was little, my dad smoked a pipe.”

“His doctor made him give it up?”

“No. When I got to high school, I told him it was pretentious and embarrassed me,” she said, a melancholy smile on her face. “He gave it up for me. This thing that gave him pleasure and some kind of peace of mind, and I-”

She couldn’t finish the sentence, her voice quavering. Her eyes filled with tears, but Jada seemed resolutely against shedding them. A moment later she brushed at her eyes, but her cheeks were dry.

“What happened to your parents?” she asked. “Uncle Vic would never tell me.”

“You were asking about me?” Drake said, teasing her.

“I was curious,” she admitted. “But don’t flatter yourself.”

Drake smiled, but after a moment he looked down at the homes and hotels and shops on the cliff beneath them and at the surf smashing the rocks on the rim of the caldera farther below.

“Okay. Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t know it was a taboo subject.”

“It isn’t really,” Drake replied, turning to look at her. “Just something I don’t enjoy talking about. You know what a ronin is?”

“Something Japanese, right?”

“A masterless samurai,” he said. “One who has left his master’s house and cut off all connections to his past, gone into the world, and made his own path. I know it sounds ridiculously geeky and self-important-”

“Actually, it sounds like something that takes a lot of courage. Having no one.”

“Sully was around when I needed someone there,” Drake said, voice low. He wasn’t used to opening up, to letting the court jester that seemed to rule his tongue half the time go silent.

“He’s always been like that,” Jada agreed. “He plays it like he’s a rogue, like he doesn’t care. He vanishes for months at a time, makes out like he’s only out for himself, pretends that the money is his top priority-and maybe most of the time it is. But my dad used to say that with his back against the wall, when it counts, there wasn’t anybody he’d rather have in his corner than Victor Sullivan.”

“Yeah,” Drake agreed, and they walked on a couple of minutes longer before he spoke again. “Listen, I wish none of this had ever happened, but if it had to happen, I’m glad I’m here with you both. You’ve got me in your corner, too.”

“I know,” she said. “And it’s appreciated.”

They fell silent again, but this time the quiet between them had a breathless quality, as if each of them feared the next words that might be spoken. A burst of song, Greek voices raised in alcohol-fueled camaraderie, caught on the breeze and swept by them. It came from the nearest bar and was followed by a round of laughter. A man jogged by, intent on the effort of his athletic self-discipline. Two stylishly dressed young women came up the walkway, exuding sexy confidence. But for those few seconds, Drake and Jada couldn’t take their eyes off each other.

Blinking, taking a quick breath, Jada forced a nervous smile. “It’s beautiful here. Romantic. Gives you all kinds of crazy thoughts.”

Drake felt grateful. If she’d kissed him, he might have kissed her back, and that wasn’t the way any of this was meant to go. For just a moment, the dynamic between them had been on the verge of drastic changes. He smiled, waiting a few seconds before speaking, wanting to be certain the moment truly had passed them by.

“I haven’t had a lot of luck in that department,” Drake said.

“Yeah. Me, either. Maybe I should come back here afterward, meet some handsome fisherman, and open a dress shop.”

Drake laughed. “You’ve seen too many movies.”

When Jada punched him in the arm, back to her usual abuse, he knew that the moment was officially over. They were allies. In a strange way, they were almost siblings. And nothing else. Drake knew that that was for the best, that anything else would be far too complicated, but he knew he would always be curious about the road not traveled. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d felt that way in his life, and he knew it wouldn’t be the last.

“Look,” she said, shifting her weight from one foot to the other, pushing magenta bangs away from her eyes as she huddled into the leather jacket as if the night was colder than it felt. “There’s something we’ve been avoiding talking about, and I don’t think we can go any further without at least addressing it.”

Aw, no, Drake thought. We had the perfect moment, the silent acknowledgment. Talking about it is only going to lead to crippling awkwardness and me babbling like a fool.

“The hooded guys,” Jada went on.

Drake arched an eyebrow, his mind shifting gears. “Yeah. Of course. Them.”

“I mean, yeah, we talked about them in the sense of ‘those guys are creepy, who the hell are they and why are they trying to kill us and why did they try to warn us to go home before they tried to kill us…’ And I’m babbling.”

“Yes.” Drake leaned against the railing over the cliff. “Yes, you are.”

Jada smiled. He thought she might punch him again, but apparently she was too tired from all the other times she had punched him.

“We haven’t really talked about what I think is the big question.”

“Which is?”

“Those doors in the labyrinth of Sobek,” Jada said. “I don’t know about you, but I’ve kind of been avoiding it because I’m trying not to think about Welch being taken. His sister’s boyfriend was murdered because he tried to help my father solve this puzzle, and now Ian’s missing, maybe dead, because he did the same for us. It’s weighing on me. I can’t help feeling responsible.”

Drake nodded grimly. “It goes away, that feeling. Not as quick as you’d like, but it does. The thing to remember is that we didn’t force him to help us. He knew there was danger, and he wanted to help anyway. That won’t make you feel less guilty, but it’s a good thing to remind yourself that you can’t control other people. Not the ones who want to help you and not the ones who want to kill you.”

“They dragged him through the door at the back of that worship chamber. And the rest of the hooded guys had to have come through the sealed doors in the other rooms. Even if we assume there’s a simple way to open those-triggers, something to make them swing easily, that we just hadn’t found yet-how did they get down there?”

“They could’ve gone down the night before and been waiting for us,” Drake said. “They told us to go home, but they figured either we were going to find those rooms or Henriksen would.”

“Uh-uh, no,” Jada said, shaking her head. “The skeleton, the Minotaur or whatever-his fingers broke off when we slid the altar back. If anyone else had gone down that way before us, that would’ve happened then, not now.”

Drake pondered that, running a finger inside the collar of his new sweater. The tag was bugging him, distracting him, but there was no arguing with Jada’s point. Not that he had actually believed the hooded killers had slipped past the dig workers or security and gone down through the upper-level worship chamber. Sure, he’d seen the way they seemed able to melt silently in and out of shadows like some kind of crazy ninja assassins, but if they wanted to, he would have bet they could have killed every person working on the dig team.

So why hadn’t they? They had rules, he thought. They weren’t going to kill people who didn’t break them.

Had they been giving Drake, Sully, and Jada the benefit of the doubt? The hooded men had told them to go home; had they been waiting for the three of them to cross some invisible line? To trespass?

“We already talked about there being another way in,” he reminded her. “We felt the air moving. By now, Hilary Russo and her people-and probably the antiquities minister or whoever-have already found the other entry point.”

“Agreed,” Jada said. When she nodded, her hair veiled her face again. “But the labyrinth was buried for, like, thousands of years. If the archaeologists unearthing the site didn’t know there was another way in, how did they?”

“Now you’re just creeping me out,” Drake said.

“I’m creeping myself out!” Jada said. “ ’Cause the next question is, if they knew the bat cave entrance to that labyrinth, do they know about this one?”

Drake caught another whiff of the pipe smoke he’d smelled before. Mixed in with that odor were delicious aromas of frying onions and spices. From another bar, a ways back along the walk, loud music had begun to play, the kind of thumping dance noise that roared in the sort of nightclub he had always avoided. But earlier they had passed a young bearded guy playing a bouzouki, and Drake had allowed himself a moment to wish they were here on some less troubling errand and without the specter of Luka’s death looming over them.

“I don’t think I want the answer to that,” he admitted. “But I figure we’ll find out when we find the labyrinth on Therasia.”

“Can’t wait,” Jada muttered.

They turned together, in silent agreement that they were moving on from both the topic and the location. Something caught Drake’s attention, a shifting of the night shadows on top of the darkened jewelry store to their left. He glanced up and froze, staring.

Jada walked on several steps before she realized he wasn’t with her.

“Nate?” she asked, turning to see what had snagged his attention.

Drake started walking again, taking her elbow and hurrying along the path. He glanced over his shoulder, looking at the jewelry store’s roof and then checking others on both sides of the path. They went down five steps, and he picked up his pace further.

“What the hell’s wrong with-” she started. “Wait, did you see one of them? The hooded guys?”

“I’m not sure,” Drake said.

And he wasn’t. It had been a momentary glimpse, little more than a shadow detaching itself from another shadow and retreating out of sight. But something had been moving up there, and even if Henriksen had caught up with them this quickly, the men he’d hired thus far weren’t clever or stealthy enough to lurk in shadows.

“You think they’re trailing us right now?” Jada asked.

“Maybe.”

“Why just watch? They don’t know what to make of us? Or they’re biding their time?”

Drake wanted to comfort her, but he’d had a lifetime of telling people what they needed to hear instead of what they wanted to hear. And Jada wasn’t exactly a damsel in distress.

“These guys are like shadows. They don’t like being seen,” Drake said. “They took a risk back in Egypt with so many people seeing them. My guess is they didn’t like it. They’re doing what any decent hunter would do, waiting for the right moment. They’ll want us alone, away from a crowd. Better still if they can take us one by one.”

Jada’s face went slack. “Oh, no. Uncle Vic.”

Drake felt his heart sink. He couldn’t be sure of what he’d seen, but if they were being shadowed-if these ninja assholes really did want to take them out-and they’d left Sully alone-

He took Jada’s hand, and together they ran.

They raced along the walkway, past the bars and darkened shops, watching rooftops and shadows for any further threat. But Drake’s thoughts had shifted away from self-preservation. The fear that made his heart race, thrumming in his skull, had nothing to do with his own safety. He hadn’t seen the corpse of Luka Hzujak, but he knew how the dead man had ended up-in a trunk with his arms and legs cut off and his decapitated head resting on his chest, abandoned on a train platform. He had to force himself not to picture Sully’s face staring up from inside that trunk, a bloodstain spreading out beneath it on a vintage guayabera, the copper stink of blood mixing with the earthy odor of old cigars.

Jada let go of his hand, and he wished she had held on. But they needed to run faster, and that didn’t leave time for them to soothe each other’s fears.

Drake darted along a narrow path that led down, cut into the cliff face. The island fell away to the right. There were homes and hotels and even a few more restaurants below, slashed into the rock, but none of them were likely to save them if they fell. Small trees and bushes grew around the path, along with fall flowers, a minor miracle considering the severely arid climate of the island. Drake scratched his arm on something as he whipped by, but those were the sorts of things that grew on Santorini-the prickly, dangerous ones.

A chorus of laughter rippled into the air ahead. They descended narrow steps carved from stone and came to another long slash of a terrace, a walkway filled with middle-aged Germans on holiday. Several of them swore as Drake and Jada elbowed through them. One man tried to grab Jada’s arm, but she popped her open hand against his chest, shoving him away. Drake smelled licorice and knew that one of them had spilled ouzo on his clothes. These were the details he absorbed as he ran, the minutiae he tried to use to drive back the dark thoughts.

“He’ll be all right,” Jada whispered as she ran beside him. “He has all the guns.”

The guns had occurred to Drake the moment he saw the dark figure on the rooftop. He and Jada had not wanted to risk carrying illegal weapons in public unless they were sure they would need them. Stupid, he thought now. Careless. They weren’t on holiday. The very idea of a moonlit stroll had been ridiculous. The three of them should have holed up in their suite until morning, waiting for daybreak, when they could search for the labyrinth.

The hotel lay ahead. They reached a narrow set of stairs winding up the cliff face and ran up the seventeen steps to the top, and the doorway loomed on their left. Straight ahead was the pool, still bright blue under the lights, heated just enough that a few brave souls stood quietly flirting with one another in the water and admiring the view of the caldera far below, glistening in the moonlight.

Drake scanned the entrance, checked the darkness beyond the lights of the pool. Nothing. He hauled the door open and hurried inside, Jada darting along in his wake. They hurried through the lobby, trying to move fast without attracting too much attention. Drake ignored the elevator. They were only two stories up. He vaulted the first three steps, gaining speed as he ascended, holding on to the railing. By the time he reached the third floor corridor-the walls curved to follow the line of the cave in which the hotel had been built-he had a lead of half a flight of stairs on Jada, but he didn’t wait for her.

He sprinted, slowing as he neared his room so he could retrieve the key card from his wallet. As he slid the key into the slot, he held his breath. Jada came rocketing toward him and skidded to a halt on the carpet as the light turned green and he shoved the door open, his hands aching for a gun.

They entered, and Jada pushed the door quietly shut behind them.

Drake led the way into the suite. He glanced into the bathroom, where the faucet dripped and there was evidence that Sully had shaved. The suite’s bar was open, a bottle of wine open on the small table in the common room. Jada ducked into her room, poked around a moment, then emerged, shaking her head. No sign of Sully. But she held the gun that had been in her duffel, so that, at least, had been left alone.

Jada frowned, glancing around in alarm. It took Drake only a moment to realize what was troubling her-the breeze. He shivered a little at the cool night air that eddied around them and turned to stare at the door to the last place Sully might be, the other bedroom. The door hung open wide, but only a dim light glowed within. Drake and Jada moved to either side of the door and took a breath. Jada motioned for him to wait, showing him the gun, indicating she wanted to go first.

Drake slipped into the bedroom, forcing her to follow. But as she came up beside him, they both stared at the French doors, holding their breath. The doors were open, the curtains rustling with the breeze. They could see through to the balcony and the Mediterranean night beyond, but the only trace of Sully was the cigar smoke that lingered in the room.

A sick feeling swept over Drake. He closed his eyes and pressed his palms against his temples, trying not to scream in fury and anguish, trying not to think about heads and torsos in railway trunks.

Jada found their duffels, and the sound of her rustling through Sully’s made Drake open his eyes. She pulled out the gun Sully had been carrying, and Drake stared at it. Whoever had come for him had been stealthy enough that he hadn’t had enough warning even to go for his gun.

She handed the gun to Drake and then sat down on the bed. Her face looked drawn and pale, her eyes hollow.

“Uncle Vic,” she whispered, hanging her head, the gun dangling from both hands, down between her knees.

Just as she said it, Drake frowned. The cigar smoke hadn’t dissipated. If anything, the odor had grown stronger.

“Wait a-” he started to say.

“Who’s there?” asked a voice from the balcony.

“Sully?” Drake called.

“Out on the terrace, making friends,” Sully replied.

Drake and Jada both exhaled, chuckling softly at their panic and the grief that had come and gone in half a minute. She rolled her eyes at him, mocking them both, but Drake knew he had not been wrong in chiding himself. They had gotten careless. Paranoia had to be their ruling emotion if they wanted to stay alive.

Jada hurried to the door, putting her gun in the rear of her waistband. Drake didn’t even do that, holding on to Sully’s gun but keeping it out of sight as he followed her to the balcony. He stood half inside and half out. The noises of Santorini were dim and distant enough not to intrude on the breathtaking vista of the caldera and the rest of the islands that ringed it.

Sully stood at the balcony to the left, leaning with his back to them. On the next balcony, separated from theirs by a gap of barely a foot, a thirtysomething black woman with flawless skin and copper-penny eyes smiled as Jada and Drake emerged.

“These must be your mates,” the woman said in a bright British accent. She held Sully’s cigar in one hand and a wineglass in the other. “Nice to meet you both.”

“Jada and Nate, meet Gwen,” Sully said, barely looking at them, clearly enchanted. As he half turned to make the introduction, Drake saw the wineglass in his hand. “Gwen, say hello to Jada and Nate.”

Gwen raised her nearly drained wineglass in a salute. “Cheers.”

“Hi,” Jada said.

“Hello,” Drake added.

They had come onto the balcony-Drake only halfway, still hiding the gun-carrying an air of urgency that Gwen must have seen. Her eyes narrowed, and she gave a small, reluctant smile.

“Looks like you have business to attend to,” Gwen said. She puffed on the cigar, coughing a little before handing it back to Sully. “There, I’ve tried it. And it sort of tastes sweet and like crap at the same time. I hope you’re happy.”

Sully smiled at her. “Very.”

Gwen glanced at Jada and Drake. Sully did as well, though he had an irritated smile on his face, as if wondering why they weren’t going away. It was obvious he had been doing some serious flirting with the woman, and it seemed like he might have been making some progress. Now she handed him back the second wineglass.

“I’ll only be a few minutes,” Sully promised her. “It’s a sin to leave a bottle of wine this good half full.”

“Sorry. It’s getting late, and I have to meet some friends,” Gwen said. “Maybe tomorrow night?”

Sully smiled. “I’ll be here.”

“It’s a date.”

Gwen turned to go back inside, and Sully shot Drake and Jada an unforgiving look. They retreated to the suite together, and Sully closed the French doors before turning toward them.

“This better be good,” he grumbled.

“You won’t be here tomorrow night,” Drake said. “Well, probably not.”

“Thanks, genius,” Sully muttered, one eyebrow raised. “As if I didn’t know that.”

“But you just told her-”

“Hey, a guy can hope. It’s about all I can do if you two are going to barge in on me any time I’ve made a new friend.”

Drake lifted the gun, drawing Sully’s attention to it. “We barged in because we thought the spooky ninjas were about to cut your throat and chuck you over the cliff. Then we got here, and hello, no sign of Sully. The doors are open, and we’re thinking ‘intruder.’ ”

“It was so hard to imagine I might be smoking a cigar and relaxing with my thoughts?”

“We didn’t see you,” Jada said, obviously irritated with his truculence. “Not until we smelled your stinky cigar.”

Sully actually looked wounded. He brandished the smoldering cigar. “This is a Cuban. They’re harder to smuggle into the States than guns, drugs, or antiquities.”

“Oh, well, in that case, good job, Uncle Vic,” Jada said, her voice dripping with sarcasm.

“We were worried about you, dumbass,” Drake said. “Or did you miss that part?”

Sully gave him a devious smile. “No, I got that. I just like to rile you guys up. You deserve it after interrupting what could’ve been a beautiful-Wait. Why were you so worried? Did something happen?”

Drake opened his mouth, then closed it again. He glanced at Jada.

“We’re not sure.”

“What do you mean, ‘not sure.’ Either something happened or it didn’t.”

“It might’ve,” Jada said. “We might’ve seen one of the hooded men from the labyrinth up in the village, on a roof.”

“I guess it’s pointless to ask if you noticed anything weird or saw anyone skulking around,” Drake said. “Your attention being otherwise occupied by the lovely Gwen.”

Sully grinned. “Smokin’ hot, right?”

Drake gave a nod of appreciation. “No argument.”

“Okay,” Sully said, turning to Jada. “So you maybe saw something and you maybe didn’t. We’ll stay vigilant-”

Jada shot him a dubious look.

“We’ll work on our vigilance. Get better with that,” Sully corrected. “But since none of us has had their throat cut tonight, can we talk about something that’s actually important?”

“Like?” Drake asked.

Sully stabbed his cigar out in an empty hotel water glass, then made a beeline for Drake’s duffel. He dug through it and pulled out the maps and journal Luka had squirreled away for Jada to discover in Egypt. He set the maps aside and started flipping through the pages again.

“Before I went out for a smoke, I had a little wine and took a closer look at the journal.”

“We’ve been through the whole thing,” Jada said.

Sully found his page, stroked the paper with a finger, holding it open, and nodded to her. “I know. But sometimes things like this don’t make sense until you’ve gotten new information. When you look back through it, it’s like you’ve got new glasses on, and you can see things you didn’t see before.”

“How much wine did you have?” Drake teased.

“Two glasses,” Sully said. “I opened a beer, but it tastes like crap.”

“Focus?” Jada prodded, hands on her hips. Drake would have thought it difficult to look stern with magenta bangs, but somehow she managed.

“Right.” Sully nodded. “So I found a book about Akrotiri in the little library in the hotel-it’s out in the living room-and I was reading about the excavation there. If there ever was an Atlantis, I understand why so many people believe this was it. Atlantis was supposed to be advanced, right? Well, Akrotiri was so far ahead of the rest of the world for its time, it’s amazing. They only unearthed one tiny tip of the town. More of it is there, and some is underwater. But what they found-we’re talking multistory buildings, neighborhoods, looms to weave textiles that they exported. They had hot and cold running water. Think about that. Four thousand years ago, before anyone else, hot and cold running water. Then the volcano erupted, and it was bye-bye Akrotiri.”

“This is all fascinating,” Drake said, “but-”

“Yeah, yeah,” Sully said, frowning. “I’m getting to it. The volcano wasn’t the only thing. They had a lot of earthquakes on Thera in those days, leading up to the big blow. But the earthquakes didn’t stop then. They’re not as frequent, but they still happen. There was a major one here in 1956-did a lot of damage to the modern village of Akrotiri, which is near the excavation but not right next door. The modern village had been built around a medieval fortress that stood at the top of a hill, but the earthquake in ’56 did a ton of damage, destroyed a lot of houses, and turned the fortress into unsafe ruins. They rebuilt the houses at the bottom of the hill, but the fortress has essentially been abandoned and off-limits for more than half a century.”

Sully smiled. “All interesting, right. But a hell of a lot more interesting when you consider this.”

He opened the journal to the page he’d marked with his finger. There were labyrinth designs and notes scribbled all over the two-page spread, so it took a moment before Drake noticed the sideways scrawl in the margins of the left-hand page.

“Quake of ’56,” Luka had written. “Under Goulas?”

“What the hell is ‘Goulas’?” Drake asked.

“I’m guessing the Greek name for this fortress you’re talking about,” Jada said.

Sully grinned. “Smart kid.” He beamed, almost as proud of her as he seemed of himself.

“Wow, look at that,” Drake said. “I didn’t think Victor Sullivan had ever done homework in his life.”

Sully flopped onto the bed, set the journal on his chest, and put his hands behind his head-the picture of relaxation.

“I guess you can teach an old dog new tricks,” he said.

“So we’re not going to Therasia tomorrow, I take it?” Jada asked. “Ian seemed so sure that the reference to Therasia on that jar meant that’s where the labyrinth must be. And you’ve gotta admit, there was logic to that.”

Drake went to the French doors and looked out at the moonlit water of the caldera. “There still is. But it’s been awhile. What’s called Therasia now is not the same as what was called Therasia then. We can’t know until we look, but if you think about Knossos and Crocodilopolis, the labyrinths there were not in the city or next to the temple; they were a short distance away. That fits with the location of the fortress.”

“Which would mean the labyrinth was underground,” Sully said. “Built right into the hill. That would’ve taken a hell of a long time.”

Drake ruminated on that a minute, then glanced at Jada.

“Your father thought it was under Goulas.”

Jada came up beside him, and together they stared out at the water for a moment. Then she smiled and turned to Sully.

“That’s good enough for me.”