Thomas Hoover - Project Daedalus

"You're going to get me on the Ulysses or die trying, aren't you."

He decided to let the crack pass. It was true, however. If she ever saw it, he was sure she'd start to understand.

"You know," she went on, "this afternoon I was merely worried. Now I'm actually frightened. Guess I'm not as brave as I thought. I'm sorry about tonight, running off like that."

"Not the first time I've had a woman give me the gate." He laughed, then reached out and stroked her hair, missing the long tresses of the old days. "Now, you can help me out with something. Does the name Yakuza mean anything to you?"

"What are you talking about?" She studied him, puzzled.

"I probably shouldn't tell you this, maybe it'll just upset your morning, but that wiseguy who broke up our party last night was a Japanese hood. From the Mino-gumi syndicate. Back home they're Numero Uno. They run Tokyo and Osaka and they've got half the Liberal Democratic Party in their pocket. Then there's the old CIA connection, from days gone by."

"How do you know?"

"After you took off, our friend dropped in again. Uninvited as usual. That's when Novosty finished him off with his Uzi and I got a closer look."

"Alex killed-! My God, that makes three."

"By actual count. He's gone a little trigger happy in his old age. That or he's very, very scared." He rubbed at the scratch on his neck, remembering. "What if it's the Japanese mob that's behind this? They have the funding, that's for sure. Among other things, they run consumer loans in Japan, legalized loan sharking. They've got more money than God."

"This is too much. I don't know anything about…" She rose, trembling. "I'll go with you to Nassau, Michael. Let's take the Ulysses and just disappear in the middle of the Atlantic."

"It's a deal." He beamed. "But first we've got to answer some questions. You say the Yakuza are not part of anything you know about?"

"I'm only vaguely aware they exist."

"And you don't know who runs Mino Industries?"

"Never heard of it before."

"It's a bunch of nice, clean-cut mobsters. Problem is, one of the owner's kobun, street men, tried to kill us tonight. Maybe we're finally getting a little light at the end of the tunnel." He looked her over. Eva was always beautiful in the mornings. There was something wanton about her this time of day. "Come here a minute."

He took her and cradled her in his arms, then brushed his lips against her brow. "You okay?"

"I think so." She took a deep breath.

"Never knew you to quit just because things got tough." He drew her around. "You're the cryptography expert. Why don't we try to find out what kind of phonetics Ventris's numerical correlates for Linear B would produce from these numbers?"

"What are you talking about?" She rubbed at her eyes.

"You know, in my travels I've discovered something. A great mind often has a touch of poetry. Sometimes, in order to think like the other guy, you need to be a little artistic. So, I wonder… about that cipher."

"You mean-?"

"Just a crazy, early morning idea." He patted the keyboard of the laptop. "What if the mind behind it is using a system no computer in the world would ever have heard of?"

"There's no such thing, believe me."

"Maybe yes, maybe no." He flipped open his book to the central section, a glossy portfolio of photos. He'd shot them himself with an old Nikon. "Take a look at this and refresh your memory."

She looked down at the photo of a large Minoan clay jar from the palace, a giant pithoi, once a container for oil or unguents or water for the bath. Along the sides were inscribed rows of wavy lines and symbols. It was the Minoan written language, which, along with cuneiform and hieroglyphics, was among the oldest in the world. "You mean Linear B."

"Language of King Minos. As you undoubtedly remember, it's actually a syllabary, and a damned good one. Each of these little pictures is a syllable, a consonant followed by a vowel. Come on, this was your thing, way back when. Look, this wavy flag here reads mi, and here, this little pitchfork with a tail reads no." He glanced up. "Anyway, surely you recall that Linear B has almost a hundred of these syllable signs. But Ventris assigned them numbers since they're so hard to reproduce in typeface. For example, this series here, mi-no-ta-ro reads numerically as-" he checked the appendix, "13-52-59-02. Run them together and minotaro reads 13525902. And just like the early Greeks, the Minoans didn't insert a space between words. If somebody was using Linear B, via Ventris' system, the thing would come out looking like an unintelligible string of numbers."

"You don't really-"

"You say you've tried everything else. NSA's Crays drew a blank. Maybe you were looking for some fancy new encryption system when it was actually one so old nobody would ever think of it. Almost four thousand years old, to be exact."

"Darling, that's very romantic. You're improving in the romance department." She gazed at him a second, then flashed a wry smile. "But I can't say the same for the good-sense arena. No offense, but that's like the kind of thing kids write to us suggesting. Nobody employs anything remotely that simple these days."

"I knew you'd think I was crazy. You're not the first." He rose. "But humor me. Just slice those number sequences into pairs and see what they look like phonetically. Something to take your mind off all the madness around here."

"Well, all right." She sighed, then settled unsteadily into the rickety chair he'd just vacated. "Make you a proposition, sweetie. Get me some coffee, nice and strong, and I'll forget I have good sense and play with this a little."

"You're a trooper." He turned and headed for the kitchen. "I remember that about you. Not to mention great in bed."

"We strive for excellence in all things."

Just as he reached the doorway, the kitchen light flicked on. It was Adriana, in blue robe and furry slippers, now reaching up to retrieve her coffee pan.

While Eva was typing away behind him, he leaned against the doorframe in his still-wet clothes to watch a Greek grandmother shuffle about her private domain preparing a traditional breakfast. He suspected no male hand had ever touched those sparkling utensils. The Old World had its ways, yesterday and forever.

While he drowsed against the doorjamb, the aroma of fresh Greek coffee began filling the room. Sarakin. That was the Japanese name for their homegrown loan sharks, the so-called salary-men financiers. He knew that the Yakuza's four largest sarakin operations gave out more consumer loans than all of Japan's banks combined. If you added to that the profits in illegal amphetamines, prostitution, bars, shakedowns of businesses, protection rackets… the usual list, and you were talking multi multibillions. The major problem was washing all that dirty money. They routinely invested in respectable but losing propositions abroad, on the sound theory that one dollar cleaned was worth two unlaundered.

Was that what the Soviet scam was all about? Money from the Japanese mob being laundered through loans to the USSR? What better way to wash it? Nobody would ever bother asking where it came from.

But there was one major problem with that neat scenario. Politically the Yakuza were ultra-rightist hardliners. So why would they expose their money with the Soviets, laundered or not? Particularly now, with so much political instability there-hardliners, reformers, nationalists. Somehow it didn't compute.

"Michael, come here a second." The voice had an edge of triumph.

"What?" He glanced around groggily.

"Just come here and take a look at this." She was staring at the screen.

He turned and walked over, still entranced by the heady, pungent essence of fresh Greek coffee now flooding the room. "Is it anything-?"