Will Adams - The Lost Labyrinth

He sighed and found a smile. 'Forgive me,' he said. 'I didn't mean to be curt. It's just, I've just been getting a bit of grief from the guys.'

'What on earth for? You're getting your book published. You should be really proud.'

'Didn't you see the title?'

'No. Why?'

He pulled a self-deprecating face. 'My book's about how we need to revise our understanding of the Eastern Med during the bronze age, using all the information we're gleaning from our excavations here in Crete, as well as in Santorini and the other islands. I originally submitted it as The Pelasgian and Minoan Aegean: A New Paradigm.'

'Catchy,' said Gaille.

'Exactly. Not a sniff of interest. I kept rewriting it and rewriting it, thinking the problem must be with ideas or my prose. But then one night I had a brainwave. I changed the title to The Atlantis Connection and got an offer within a week.' They laughed together at the ways of the world, and the moment of tension was forgotten.

The printer finished chunking out; they went over to it together. It gave Gaille a bit of a jolt to see Petitier: he'd been an abstract concept until now. His photograph did little to warm her to him, his indignation at being forced to pose for the camera evident, impatience and superiority written in the sour line of his upper lip, visible even through his tangled, tawny-grey beard. 'You don't have an address for him, I suppose?'

'We do require one for our records, as it happens,' Iain told her, 'but he only put down some hotel in Heraklion. I called them, just in case, but the woman didn't know of him, or of anyone answering his description. Maybe she was covering, but I don't think so. I've never seen him in Heraklion myself, and I certainly would have done had he been living there for the past ten years. But don't worry. I haven't told you the best bit yet.'

'The best bit?'

His eyes twinkled. 'It was just, I was struck by a thought. I mean, if he's been doing research here, then maybe he's been to other sites too, right? So I started calling around, and guess what?'

'You've had a result?'

He nodded vigorously. 'There's this Belgian dig a little east of here. One of the girls there knows Petitier quite well. The thing is, her brother came over to visit a couple of years back, and she took him on a tour of the island. And who should she see on her travels but Roland Petitier, selling several kilos of walnuts to a local shop and promising to bring more on his next visit.'

'Home turf!' exulted Gaille. 'Where was this?'

'A town called Anapoli. It's in the hills above Hora Sfakion on the south coast.'

'And how can I get there?'

His grin grew broad. 'By getting back into my car and enjoying the drive,' he told her.

The pavilion was deliberately windowless, to enable lighting to be controlled during the talks. Only the back third was currently lit, two matronly women setting out coffee cups and jugs of water on trestle tables. Knox felt a twinge of alarm. He'd expected the AV guys to be on hand to show him how everything worked. They must have been caught up in the traffic. He poured himself and Franklin glasses of water. They took them over to the back row of folding wooden chairs, where they sat either side of the aisle. 'You were telling me how your crusade finished,' he prompted.

'Yes,' agreed Franklin. 'It was absurd, in its own way. One of my professors-my mentor, I suppose you'd call him-had finally had enough of me. He invited me to his home, an invariable sign of trouble. I was glad, though. I was fired up, eager to hurl my young career in his teeth. He was a stickler for punctuality, so I presented myself at his front door at seven p.m. sharp. But it wasn't he who answered. It was his daughter, Maria.'

'Ah!' smiled Knox.

'Quite,' agreed Franklin. 'A man gets to know himself in such moments. One look at Maria was all it took for me to reassess my priorities in life. In a way, I'm ashamed of that. In another, I couldn't be prouder.'

'Was it reciprocated?'

'She became my wife, if that's what you mean, though it took me several years to persuade her. And her first impressions of me were not good. She teases me with it still, the way I gawped. Her father had been delayed at the university, she told me. Some idiot had let off a fire alarm.' He shook his head at the perverse tricks of fate. 'Maria sat with me as I waited. By the time her father finally made it home, I was head over heels in love, I couldn't apologise fast enough. I pledged never to embarrass him or his university again. He asked me to cut myself off immediately and completely from Petitier, who he held more to blame than me. I agreed. He was kind enough to give me another chance.'

'How did Petitier take that?'

'I don't know. I never saw him again. I moved out of the house while he was at work, and he left Athens shortly afterwards.' He gave a short laugh. 'That was a story in itself. The British School put on a series of lectures to honour the memory of Sir Arthur Evans and his excavations at Knossos. Petitier apparently stood up during a Q amp;A and launched into a drunken rant. It was the last straw. The French School fired him for embarrassing them, and he left soon afterwards.'

'What was his rant about?'

'He accused Evans and his successors of doing with Minoan Crete exactly what other academics had done with the Doric Invasion; that is to say, rewriting history to boost the Greeks at the expense of Egypt and the Near East.' He glanced at Knox to see if further explanation was necessary, and evidently decided that it was. 'Crete only gained independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1898, you see. But independence wasn't what the new Cretan government wanted; they wanted unification with Greece instead. They were desperate, therefore, to play up any and all historical links with Greece, while downplaying those with Egypt and Turkey. And this was almost the exact moment Evans began excavating at Knossos. Not that he needed any encouragement to make Crete more Greek. His head was stuffed so full of Greek myths and legends that within a week of breaking ground he'd found Ariadne's bathroom. Not a bathroom or even a royal bathroom. No. Ariadne's. After that, it was Minos' throne room, and so on. It wasn't archaeology. It was myth-making.'

Knox laughed. 'And Petitier really said all that at a commemoration of his work?'

Franklin nodded. 'And there's a lot to what he said, to be fair. Had Knossos been excavated by an Egyptologist, for example, we'd almost certainly have a completely different view of Minoan Crete. We'd think of it as the westernmost part of the Eastern Mediterranean, not as the southernmost part of Greece. But once an idea gets into the popular consciousness, it's almost impossible to get it back out.' He gave a heartfelt sigh. 'People simply don't realise how much Egyptian material has been found in Minoan contexts. Pottery, jewellery, hippopotamus ivory, seals and scarabs. Musical instruments, weapons, lamps, everything you can think of. Minoan culture is widely celebrated as unique because of its bull-leaping and distinctive artistic style; yet we've found evidence of bull-leaping all across Egypt and Asia Minor, and identical styles of artwork in Tell el-Daba and elsewhere. And that's not to mention the tantalising hints offered by language, too. The word "Minoan" derives from Crete's legendary king Minos, for example. But Minos wasn't a person's name so much as a job title. And who was Egypt's first pharaoh?'

'Menes,' answered Knox.

'Credited with uniting Upper and Lower Egypt,' nodded Franklin. 'Yet modern scholarship suggests Menes was a job title too. Egyptian didn't have vowels, as you know, so that all we're really sure of is that it had the consonants MNS, exactly the same as Minos. Coincidence?'

'Probably,' said Knox. The lighting in the pavilion auditorium suddenly came on. He looked around to see that a first few delegates had gathered at the back, chatting and drinking coffee. But there was no still sign of Nico.