The Crown of Fire

“Or if you cannot be calm, do not infect the others with your fear.” She eyed his trembling fingers and gazed at the waiting excavators. “The colonel’s Burmese militia, our possession of the astrolabe and enough relics to make it fly, the atomic cargo of our tanker beneath the waters of Cyprus, and the world’s horror of a detonation they can neither risk nor defuse—these things ensure our success, Ebner. Calm yourself.”

  Ninety-eight minutes before, the two of them, the colonel, and two hundred paramilitary commandos had stormed through the gates of NATO’s Maritime Interdiction Operational Training Centre. They had arrived silently, but the silence didn’t last. The battle was fierce but brief. After Galina and the troops attacked, guns blazing, and the base was hers, Ebner quickly disabled all outgoing communications.

  Surveying the dead and the captured huddled in the base administration quarters, Galina had instructed the colonel, “Leave twenty of your troops at the base. Take the NATO uniforms, weapons, and vehicles and meet us at the palace of Knossos in two hours.”

  Now, as the caravan of armored NATO vehicles drove toward them from the west, Galina studied a large shipping container being brought ashore from her yacht.

  Inside it was the Eternity Machine, the astrolabe built by Copernicus; his brother, Andreas; and the young assistant, Hans Novak. The golden creation fairly throbbed with power inside that giant, lead-lined coffin.

  “Once we locate the site of the labyrinth, we will install the astrolabe in its center,” she said. “We will find the walls of the maze’s core adorned with images of griffins, birds, blue monkeys, a slithering green serpent.”

  “Yes, Galina,” Ebner said. “Of the mysterious art of ancient Knossos, you have seen what even the great archaeologists have not. In your dreams, yes?”

  His cell rang; he answered it with a frown.

  Galina watched his eyelids twitch. “Well?”

  “Ships,” he said, holding the phone away from his ear. “Patrol craft—small destroyers from Sweden, Denmark, Italy—have been spotted near the tanker off Cyprus. A convoy of American and British ships are also converging. There is a coalition after all, even if a limited one. There are two Russian submarines in the area, as well.”

  “To be expected,” she said. “The world would be foolish not to mount a defense. It is posturing, nothing more.”

  “And still you are calm?” he said.

  “We are on the verge of achieving what you could not conceive of four years ago. Do you recall, Ebner? I, a dying fifteen-year-old, armed only with an obsession, and you a physicist with a desire for . . . more. Yet here we are, on the eve of traveling in time.”

  She took his phone. “Lock down the tanker,” she said. “Sequence the detonators. Keep this line open.” She returned the phone and fingered the kraken-shaped jewel that hung heavily around her neck. The air was cooling now that autumn was mere hours away.

  Moments later, the colonel drove up in the lead vehicle.

  “To the palace,” she said. “Immediately.”

  Ebner slid his phone into his side pocket. It was warm from her hand. He hitched up his pack, rechecked his automatic—bullet in the chamber—and followed Galina into the rear of the colonel’s vehicle.

  They were off on a grindingly bumpy road from the shore to the interior precincts of the legendary ruins. The heavy transport carrying the astrolabe’s container followed them at a short distance.

  Ebner feared that their efforts, labyrinthine though they were, would not be enough to enable them to launch the Eternity Machine. The infamous “hole in the sky” was needed at the exact moment of the autumnal equinox, coupled with the appearance of the aurora.

  This was essential.

  Since his imprisonment in London, Ebner had known that Nikolai Kardashev’s description of the energy required to create the proper circumstances for a traversable wormhole would necessitate a particular pitch of energy to propel the astrolabe into time.

  But what if we should fail in our terrible gambit?

  The audacity of their undertaking seemed nothing less than madness, a sequence of war crimes damnable to the lowest circle of Hell. Could he stomach being prosecuted in the world court, standing alone like a miserable specimen confined in a glass box?

  The truck stopped.

  The colonel turned in his seat. “We arrive.”

  Galina looked out over the rambling palace of King Minos, vast, hulking, mostly undone by time. It shimmered into view atop a small hill, a stout but inefficient vantage to anticipate attacks from the north. Some columns stood, some lay crumbled, while great blocky fragments of wall and tumbled stone formed the barest outlines of where structures had once stood, their half rooms and countless staircases zigzagging ever downward into innumerable passages.

  All these remnants spoke to Galina of a once-magnificent life.

  “Ebner,” she said, “somewhere in these ruined depths stands the spot where Copernicus discovered and rebuilt the machine, and from where he flew it through the twisting tunnels of time.”

  “Somewhere indeed,” Ebner said. “The legendary labyrinth, the deadly maze of the twin-horned Minotaur, has never been located. Pray we discover it tonight. Colonel, set your men to work!”

  Under their stolen NATO identity, the colonel’s troops boldly set up a wide perimeter around the ruins within minutes. A main checkpoint was established to mimic an actual military occupation. A crew of excavators installed a web of spotlights around the proposed location of the labyrinth and began to dig.

  One hour. Two. Three. They found nothing but dead rock. The slivered moon drifted across the night. Four hours. Nothing. The eastern sky began to turn pale on the horizon. Dawn would soon arrive. Galina stood on a slight promontory overlooking the work. Her blood alternately boiled and froze. Time, the great tyrant, would run out for her soon.

  “Nothing there!” the colonel shouted at one work crew. “Move five meters to the northeast!”

  Another hour passed, and still no labyrinth was discovered. Then, an idea.

  “Ebner, the reference to Dante in Michelangelo’s fresco, do you remember it? The souls of the damned entering Hell? ‘There dreadful Minos stands and growls, judging sinners’ sins upon the step; and having judged, he fixes each as far below as his tail twines.’”

  “Yes, Galina, I remember,” he replied.

  “The snake coiling round King Minos in the Sistine Chapel fresco is Minos’s tail, and the number of coils is the level of Hell to which each soul he judges is damned. How many coils has he in the fresco? How many?”

  “Ah! Ah!” Ebner’s trembling fingers fiddled with his phone. He located and enlarged the image of Michelangelo’s fresco, angling the screen to her. “Two coils.”

  She turned to the workers, her face gleaming in the spotlights. “Dig down two levels below the lowest floor! This is a clue meant for the Guardians. Two levels down!”

  The workers started anew, excavating the sand and dirt and stony rubble until, slowly, two levels below the lowest floor, a large, angular, strangely circular pit appeared.

  “The sacred site!” Ebner cried. He made his way down thirty or more feet to the floor of the pit. “Galina, you are a genius! There are passages here, leading away. And ramps. Arches. Trap floors. I see them, yes. And staircases that appear to lead nowhere. It is the maze of the Minotaur! The labyrinth. We have found it!”

  “The center of the maze must be cleared!” said Galina. “I must see the walls!”

  Two long hours of workers picking, shoveling, removing, swearing revealed that the maze below the palace of King Minos had indeed survived whole and untouched by centuries of archaeological excavations and the plundering of treasure seekers.

  Under the spades of the small army, then under the brushes of their squad leaders, then finally under the feathery touch of Ebner’s own fingers, the ancient labyrinth of the Cretan Minotaur was revealed.

  “Aside, everyone! Stand aside!” Ebner scrambled up and reached out his hand. “My dear, accompan
y me!”

  Galina took his hand and entered the pit—down to the first sublevel and the level below that. Releasing his hand, she stood in the center of the floor, staring at the tall, irregularly shaped room. It had twelve sides, each of a different width. On them, brilliant as the day they were painted, swam women, birds, the mystical landscapes of sea and mountain, and the innumerable bull heads that Galina had seen in her dreams and waking visions for months. What had lingered hidden in the fog of memory had slowly, ever so slowly oozed out into consciousness, and here was the proof.

  She had known these images, was seeing them for the second time.

  Ebner shone his light around the walls. The openings of this passage and that alley entered abruptly into the center, where King Minos’s legendary man-bull devoured his victims. And all around was a thick band of scorched black that seared the walls in a perfect circle around some central object, as if it had exploded in fire.

  “The Eternity Machine was launched from this very spot,” Ebner said.

  Galina turned her face up. “The coiling serpent, where is it?”

  “A mechanism must exist to coil the ceiling over and hide or reveal the maze,” Ebner said, “so that King Minos could view the spectacle from on high and observe the demise of the beast’s unfortunate victims.”

  “Find the mechanism,” she said.

  This began another hour of scrambling and searching, until a pair of bronze talon-shaped levers were discovered near the surface of the pit. These were worked loose, and the colonel and a worker simultaneously pulled. At first, nothing happened, then the walls shuddered over Galina and Ebner, and the ceiling began to spiral closed.

  Stone ground slowly against stone, louder and louder, until a shallow, domed ceiling sealed over their heads.

  And there it was.

  A mosaic set into the stones depicting a large slithering green serpent, its head in the center, its tail coiling twice and circumnavigating the outer edge.

  The tail of King Minos.

  “My dear . . . ,” Ebner breathed. “My dear . . .”

  “This room, Ebner, must be positioned directly below the hole in the sky. This is where Ptolemy first discovered the astrolabe. This is where, nearly fourteen hundred years later, Copernicus and Hans Novak rebuilt it, perfected it, flew it. Where five hundred years after that, I shall pilot the machine myself and complete the vow made five centuries ago. Open the ceiling! Bring the machine!”

  In short order, winches were brought, and the golden machine, gleaming in the spotlights, was lowered into the pit. Galina stepped back and watched from the perimeter of the maze. Gradually, the shadow of the astrolabe filled its center, its circular armature matching perfectly the height of the burn mark around the walls.

  The Eternity Machine was in position.

  Galina set six of its twelve relics in place. Serpens, Draco, Crux on one side. Scorpio, Lupus, Aquila on the other.

  “Colonel,” she said softly. “Secure the area. There are but hours before the equinox arrives and all our stars align.”

  The colonel offered a silent bow of his head.

  “Ebner,” she continued, “prepare for our journey!”

  Our journey!

  Ebner stepped onto an empty winch hook and rose from the pit, observing the fiery intensity in Galina’s eyes as she stared at the gold machine. He shuddered.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  In the sky over Crete

  September 22

  Before dawn

  Wade sat near the gurney Becca lay on, his hand on her wrist, and stared out the jet window into the darkness below.

  After the grueling sequence of flights, they were finally minutes from setting down on Crete. The island straddled the water between Greece and Turkey, a sliver of land like the rim of a barely surfaced bowl sitting at the southern end of the Aegean Sea. It was now lit with clusters of light, one of which was a small airfield.

  He closed his eyes and counted Becca’s pulse. It slowed, sped up, slowed again, but her breathing was steady. Julian sat across from him, his eyes glued to one of two monitors, while one of the doctors adjusted a single saline bag dripping fluid into her vein. Since Becca was off all other medications, there wasn’t much to do but watch her stillness.

  “If this doesn’t work,” Wade said, “it’s the end of everything. Just so you know.”

  Darrell tapped him on the shoulder. “Are you going to make it, bro?”

  “Will any of us?” Lily said.

  As they circled for their final approach, Lily, who had immersed herself in the history of Crete from two volumes picked up at an emergency stop at a Swiss bookstore, finished writing her notes in Wade’s notebook.

  “Ears on me, everyone,” she said. “I think I’ve uncovered a new thread in the history of the Eternity Machine, and the thing is older than we think. First of all, huge ceremonies used to take place to celebrate the Minoan new year, which, guess what, wasn’t the same as ours. The Minoan calendar began, that’s right, at the autumnal equinox.”

  “Whoa, Lily,” said Darrell.

  “No kidding. But that isn’t even the good part,” she continued. “The main thing they used to worship at the new year was ‘a golden treasure of monstrous size.’ Not only that, there was a legend that the famous labyrinth, or maze, in King Minos’s palace was actually built to protect that treasure, with the Minotaur as its guard.”

  Wade turned to her. “Golden treasure? So the astrolabe goes back to the time of King Minos?”

  “Or even before,” she said. “But the best part? The palace and the whole civilization of King Minos was destroyed on the very day of their new year.”

  “Whoa,” said Wade. “The ancient astrolabe exploded—that must be it.”

  Darrell turned in his seat. “Then we flash forward a bunch of centuries, and Ptolemy discovers the treasure when he’s drawing maps of the Mediterranean islands, which he was famous for. But of course the machine is all wrecked. He tries to repair it, and can’t; but he writes about it. Flash forward another bunch of time, and Nicolaus reads what Ptolemy wrote and—boom!—he finds the machine, and because he’s a genius, he does fix it, and the rest is history! Or the future. Whichever.”

  Wade felt his blood race. “It also answers another puzzle. The hole in the sky. The astrolabe creates some kind of super energy explosion—maybe the relics do this when they’re together—and that’s the energy that launches it. During King Minos’s time, something went wrong, and it blew up.”

  Silva turned from his pilot’s seat. “There are some folks who say Crete is what’s left of Atlantis. Could be the same thing as what you’re talking about. A huge catastrophe. Anyway, we’ll be touching the ground in five minutes. Less. Check Becca and strap in.”

  He landed the jet smoothly, and as they were taxiing briskly to the hangar, Julian got on and off his phone quickly. “I just talked to my dad. Naturally, I didn’t let on what we’re doing, but he says Roald will be here soon. We need to move fast.”

  “We’re ready,” Wade said. “Silva, the plan?”

  Silva pulled the jet to a hastily rented private hangar. “Go with your father when he comes. Julian and I’ll bring Becca to the dig site in the Hummer. Put the kidnapping on me, say I did it to confuse the Order. Just play dumb and stay free to do your part.”

  “We will,” Darrell said. “We’re good at playing dumb.”

  Silva smirked. “You’re anything but. Still, you’ve heard the expression ‘behind enemy lines’? Well, for this mission, everyone’s an enemy. Act cool, and we’ll get it done.”

  Wade’s throat thickened. “Silva . . . we never knew about your brother. We . . . I . . .”

  “Thanks. I appreciate it, and right back at you. Becca’ll be safe until you call for me. Use these tracking devices so I’ll know exactly where to find you. Now go.”

  They pocketed the devices while Silva and Julian moved Becca into a nearby black Hummer and tore off down the tarmac. Moments later, Wade’s fath
er drove up to the wide doors and stormed out. The greeting was brief and sharp.

  “What happened at Davos? What did you do?”

  “We were saying our good-byes,” Wade said, crying, though he hadn’t intended to. “Then Silva got word that the Order was closing in. He took Becca off to some safe house. We couldn’t do anything at all.”

  “Her parents are going absolutely crazy wondering where she is!” his father shouted. “No one knows where Silva took her. You should have called me or your mother!”

  “Radio silence,” Lily said. “Silva insisted on it. He said Galina’s got some kind of vendetta against Becca, and he needed to get her safe until the deadline’s over.”

  It hurt Wade for them to lie so bald-facedly to his father, but maybe that was the thing about being a kid. Either you didn’t know when things were just too dangerous, or you didn’t know enough to let the danger stop you from doing them.

  His father muttered to himself, shook his head, but didn’t say any more about it. “Into the car then. Sara is waiting for us. Where’s Julian?”

  “He . . . had to file paperwork with the airport,” Darrell said. “He’ll join us soon.”

  Wade’s father nodded once. “He’d better. We need everyone together now. No more skipping off. This is the end of it.” He took a breath. “Last night, Galina took over the NATO training center in northwestern Crete. The Brits are holding back while she excavates Knossos under the NATO flag.”

  “We think she’s searching for the maze,” Darrell said, “the ancient labyrinth of the Minotaur that no one’s found so far. It’s somewhere in the ruins, and she’s going to find it.”

  “If she hasn’t already,” Wade said. “Can we please get going?”

  Twenty minutes later, their car slowed as they approached the hills surrounding the ruins. Sara came running over to them. She was in combat fatigues and a helmet with a night visor. She had an automatic rifle strapped over her shoulder. She hugged them.

  “Thanks to Terence,” she said, “we have about fifty MI6 and MI5 agents. Papa Dean pulled some strings and got us a unit of mercenaries. We have a crack troop of Chechen fighters sent by Chief Inspector Yazinsky. Dennis is here from New York with his Marine friends. And Simon Tingle, of course. He’s out of his scooter now and packing a sidearm. You can’t keep him down.”