Thomas Hoover - Project Daedalus

"It wasn't that bad." He looked over at her. "Was it?"

"Let's not talk about it anymore, all right?" She sighed. "Christ."

"Fine with me." He was pulling off the main road, heading into the flower-lined trail, the arcade of magenta bougainvillea that led down toward the palace. "By the way, I brought along some ouzo." He indicated a pint bottle in his coat. "What's a picnic without a little rocket fuel?"

"You think of everything."

"I also think we should park up here, dodge the tour-bus mayhem. Keep the funny hats and loudspeakers to a minimum."

"Yes, please. Besides, I could use the air." She inhaled deeply.

Around them the few lingering white sprays of almond blossoms seemed like remnants of late spring snow, while the ground itself was blanketed with wild orchids, lavender and pink anemones, white narcissus. He watched as she climbed out of the car, then stopped to pluck a waxy yellow prickly pear flower, next an orange-blue Iris cretica. He loved the flowers of Crete, and the afternoon was fragrant with the scent of jasmine and lemon blossoms. Ahead, down the hill, was the parking lot for the palace, with two tour busses in attendance, one just pulling out.

"How long has it been since we were last here together?" She brushed her dark bangs back from her brow as she squinted into the waning sun, sniffing at her cactus flower.

"It's beginning to seem like forever. But I think it's about-what?-almost twelve years now."

"And how old is the palace supposed to be? I've gotten a little rusty."

"The latest theory going is that it was destroyed about fourteen hundred B.C. So we're talking roughly three and a half thousand years since it was last used."

"Guess our little decade doesn't count for much in the grand scheme."

"Time flies." He remembered how she'd been back then, that day so long ago when she had been in her mid-twenties, as inviting as the brazen ladies-in-waiting of the palace frescoes, and even more voluptuous. Mais, ce sont des Parisiennes, a dazzled French scholar had marveled. She was like that. Perfect sensuality. For a while he'd forgotten all about archaeology and just concentrated on beauty.

The place where all this occurred was the Palace of Knossos, lovingly restored in the early part of the twentieth century by the wealthy English archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans. There an almost modern civilization had flowered to magnificent heights, then mysteriously vanished. The path leading to the palace down the hill was becoming wider as they walked, opening on the distant olive groves in the valley. The vista was stunning, probably the reason it had been built here.

He looked over and noticed she was digging in her purse again. This time she drew out a pack of Dunhills. He watched while she flicked a gold lighter, the one he'd given her as a present so long ago, emblazoned with a lapis lazuli skull and crossbones. At the time, the hint had worked. She'd quit.

"The return of the death wish? When did you start that again?"

"Last week." She defiantly took a puff.

"Any particular reason?"

"No, darling, I just did it." She exhaled. "I'm wound up. I'm… I'm scared. Michael, for godsake, how many reasons am I supposed to need?"

"Hey, lighten up." He'd quit a month after they met, but it hadn't been a big deal. "I've mellowed out from the old days. Life is like most other things-a lot more fun when you don't take it too seriously."

They were moving across the empty parking lot, headed for the entrance to the palace. It had once been a twelve-hundred-room labyrinth, perhaps deliberately confusing. Now the upper courtyard and chambers lay exposed to the sky, their massive red-and-ocher columns glistening in the waning sunlight. The columns tapered downward, as though tree trunks had been planted upside down to prevent resprouting.

It was a poetic place to meet Eva again, he thought. And thoroughly bizarre as well. She'd gotten her Ph.D. in linguistics, specializing in ancient Aegean languages, then a few months later she'd surprised everybody by accepting a slot at the National Security Agency, that sprawling electronic beehive of eavesdropping that lies midway between Washington and Baltimore, on the thousand acres of Fort Meade. It'd seemed a startling about-face at the time, but maybe it made sense. Besides, it was that or teaching.

NSA was a midsized city, producing among other things forty tons of classified paper trash a day. Its official insignia, appropriately, was a fierce eagle clasping a key-whether to unlock the secrets of others or to protect its own was unclear. Eva's particular branch, SIGINT-for signals intelligence-was an operation so secret NSA refused even to admit it existed. Employing ten acres of mainframe computers, Eva's SIGINT group monitored and analyzed every Russian transmission anywhere: their satellite downlinks, the microwave telephone networks within the Soviet Union, the chatter of civilian and military pilots, missile telemetry far above the Pacific, the split-second bursts of submarines reporting to base, even the limousine radiophone trysts between Politburo members and their mistresses. The instant an electromagnetic pulse left the earth, no matter its form or frequency, it belonged to the giant electronic ears of the NSA.

So why shouldn't Eva end up as the agency's top Russian codebreaker? She was a master at deciphering obscure texts, and she'd spoken Russian all her life. Who better to make a career of cracking secret Soviet communications. Her linguistics Ph.D. was being used to real purpose.

"I want you to help me think some, love," she went on. "I know it may sound a little bizarre, but I'd like to talk about some of the legends surrounding this place. You know, try and sort out fact and fiction."

Now they were headed side by side down the stairway leading into the central court, an expanse of sandstone and alabaster tile glinting golden in the pale sun. On their left a flight of stairs seemed to lead out, but in fact they led right back in again. The deceptions of the palace began at the very entrance.

"The truth is, about all we have is stories, though sometimes stories can be more true than so-called history. The standard version is that this area was where the athletes performed ritual somersaults over the sacred bulls."

The restored frescoes around them showed corridors crowded with lithe Minoan priestesses, eyes rounded with green malachite, faces powdered white, lips a blood red. They all were bare-breasted, wearing only diaphanous chemises, while their jewels glistened in the sunshine as they fanned themselves with ostrich plumes.

There were no frescoes, however, of the powerful, bloodthirsty King Minos.

"Michael," she called out, her voice echoing off the hard walls, "you know, this place has always felt a little sinister to me. None of the lightness and gaiety in those frescoes seems real."

"That's part of what made me start wondering if the Minoans hadn't somehow managed to make a monkey out of every ponderous scholar on the planet." They were moving down the monumental grand staircase, three restored flights of which had originally been five, toward the rooms called the royal chambers. "Maybe the reason this place had no walls or fortifications was because you only came here when you were dead. Who the hell knows."

Whatever the truth was, the eerie feeling of the palace seemed to make the ancient stories even more vivid. The legends told that King Minos's wife, Pasiphae, had a burning passion for one of the sacred white bulls he kept, so she arranged for his chief architect, Daedalus, to design a hollow wooden cow for her covered over with a hide. She concealed herself inside and, as luck would have it, lured one of the beasts. The progeny of that union was equally beastly-the Minotaur, a monster with a human body and a bull's head.