Jeffrey Siger - An Aegean Prophecy

She paused and shut her eyes. ‘But he was more than just a member of the Holy Administration. He was from a senior monastery.’ Maggie opened her eyes. ‘And that made him protos, the head of it all. He’s their president, the most powerful churchman on Mount Athos.’

Andreas picked up the flash drive and stared at it. He’d guessed right about the man being from the Holy Mountain, but never imagined that it was his mountain. ‘You know, Maggie, somehow I’m not as excited as I once was to learn what’s on this thing.’ He fluttered his lips. ‘But what the hell, what’s the worst that can happen?’

He slid the drive into his computer’s USB port, hoping the answer to his question was not eternal damnation.

The Protos wasn’t used to arriving home in secret. But Sergey was adamant. No one should see them arriving so early in the morning from the mainland. Karyas was a small village and gossip its primary pastime — especially among civilians working for the civil governor appointed by Greece’s ministry of foreign affairs and charged with supervising the area’s secular matters. It was their way of impressing co-workers back on the mainland that what they did really was important, even if they seemed to be living in the middle of nowhere.

A simple, ‘It’s Easter Week and the Protos was away last night,’ would spawn endless speculation on his whereabouts, and perhaps a ‘My cousin Nick drives a taxi and thought he saw the Protos at the Athens airport,’ followed by more speculation over the reason for the trip at such a busy time. That was not the sort of gossip Sergey wanted to risk reaching the ears of nervous killers.

By mid-morning they were back at the Protaton, in the Protos’ Church, a place of serenity and prayer. Yet the Protos’ thoughts were on its martyrs, for here a protos and monks loyal to him were slaughtered on orders of a ruler who had replaced Orthodoxy with another faith and sought retribution against that protos for denouncing his new faith as heresy. But that was in 1282, in a time of savage zealots murdering monks in the name of God.

The words repeated through the Protos’ mind: ‘a time of savage zealots, murdering monks in the name of God.’ He shook his head and thought of Vassilis. Old friend, why did you get us into this?

Three faces stared at the computer screen. Twenty-one faces stared back. Make that forty-two: twenty-one on each of two photographs. That was all Andreas, Kouros, and Maggie found on the flash drive. That and a few cryptic lines typed on a one-page document. The reluctant computer whiz that Andreas had Kouros ‘drag up here by his geek whatever’ had no better luck. He swore nothing else was on the drive and left.

They’d been staring at the photographs for what seemed eternity, and must have read the words a hundred times. The document bore no sender or recipient, only two lines:

THE END WILL COME AS A THIEF IN THE NIGHT.

PREPARE, FOR THE TIME IS IN THEIR HANDS.

‘Okay, I get the “thief in the night” reference to Revelation,’ said Maggie. ‘No one knows when the end may come, so be prepared spiritually and morally for that moment, but the part about time being “in their hands” makes no sense. Eastern Orthodoxy doesn’t believe mortals can bring about or even anticipate the end.’

Kouros smiled. ‘Sort of sounds like the answer I get every time I ask a Greek bureaucrat about the status of anything. “It will happen when it happens, it’s in God’s hands.”’

Andreas laughed, Maggie stuck out her tongue.

‘So whose “hands” are we talking about?’ said Kouros. ‘It has to tie into the photographs; otherwise, why did he put it on the drive?’

‘Well, we know one of them is the Protos, so unless he’s a bad guy, it can’t be all of them.’ Andreas kept switching between the two photographs; each showed twenty-one clerics, identically posed in full regalia in three rows of seven, as if attending the same ceremony. The photographs looked to be taken at the same time, although in one a tiny oriental rug was centered at the feet of the clerics in the front row and an empty chair sat at the right end of each row. He shook his head. ‘There’s something not right about this.’ He brought the photos up onto the screen together, one above the other.

‘Look here.’ Andreas pointed his left index finger to the top photo, at the cleric on the left end of the bottom row, and his right index finger at the one in the same position in the bottom photo. Slowly, he moved his fingers across each row, cleric by cleric.

‘My God,’ said Maggie.

‘It’s the same bodies in each photograph,’ said Kouros.

Andreas nodded and leaned back in his chair. ‘Someone spent a lot of time and care putting new heads on old bodies.’

‘But why?’ said Kouros.

‘The answer to that probably answers everything.’ Andreas leaned forward and stared at the photographs. ‘And why the three empty chairs and that carpet in one, but not the other? Were they added to the one or deleted from the other?’

Silence.

‘Maggie, do you recognize any of them?’

‘A few. These are abbots from monasteries at Mount Athos.’ She pointed to five faces on the photograph without the empty chairs. ‘But I have no idea who the others are. Some men from my church might know; they’re regulars at Mount Athos.’

Andreas gestured no. ‘Nobody but us can know about this. If there’s a message hidden in all this, and there must be, we can’t risk letting it out to the wrong people. And I have no goddamn idea who the wrong people are.’ He picked up a pencil.

Maggie smiled. ‘Is this snap-and-throw time? You’re averaging two dozen a week.’

Andreas put down the pencil. ‘Cute. Now would you please ask our computer guru which photo is the original?’ He pressed a button on the keyboard, pulled out the drive, and handed it to her. ‘And this time, you can take the drive to him. Just copy everything first.’

‘Will do. Bye-bye.’

‘Bye. So, what do we do now?’ asked Kouros.

‘Only thing I can think of is to ask the Protos if he sees anything in all this. After all, he’s in one of the photos and Vassilis was taking everything to him.’

‘Or so he says,’ said Kouros.

Andreas nodded. ‘Good point. But I don’t see any other play, do you?’

‘No.’

Andreas paused. ‘But first.’ He picked up the phone and dialed.

‘Tassos, can you talk?’

He pointed to the extension and gestured for Kouros to pick up.

‘Sure. My office line is secure,’ said Tassos.

‘Good, Yianni and I have something to run by you. It’s about that guy who belongs to the phone number you got for us.’ Andreas briefly told him of his meeting with the Protos and that they’d found what he believed Vassilis was passing on to the Protos.

‘How do you know he’s the Protos?’

‘You mean Maggie didn’t tell you?’

Tassos’ tone turned serious. ‘Maggie and I have a wonderful relationship. She refuses to tell me anything about the other men in her life, and I don’t ask.’ He laughed.

Andreas chuckled. ‘Fair enough. She recognized his voice when transcribing the tape. He’s the Protos, for sure. Do you know him?’

‘Yes, but he’s in his seventies, and I knew him when he was a lot younger. I’d just started out on the force and he wasn’t protos then, just a priest visiting my guests.’

Andreas knew Tassos was referring to his time guarding political prisoners. He wondered if the Protos had followed Tassos’ strategy of making friends with the inmates, so that if they returned to power he’d still have friends in government.

‘He was pretty respected, though, even back then,’ said Tassos.

‘By whom?’