Will Adams - The Lost Labyrinth

Knox told him. 'I just ran an Internet search on Roland Petitier. Unusual name. Did you know he'd published an article while he was at the French school. More to the point, can you take a wild guess as to who his co-author was?'

'It was a long time ago.'

'It was you, Dr Franklin. You, who told me this morning that you weren't really his friend, that you only shared a house with him for a while.'

'Everything I told you was the truth.'

'But not the whole truth,' said Knox. 'You coauthored an article with him called The Mysteries of Eleusis Revealed. Or didn't you think that was worth mentioning?'

Franklin looked both ways down the street, almost as though contemplating running for it. But then his shoulders slumped a little. 'Let's go inside,' he said. 'I'm going to need a drink for this.'

V

Nadya walked slowly through Psyrri on her return to her hotel. There were queues outside the nightclubs; music boomed from within. Evenings like this, loose with drink, she liked it if a brash young man made a play for her. But there were no takers tonight, not even for a little eye contact. She'd been beautiful once, lusted after; and not even that long ago. But the last few years hadn't been kind.

She reached the quieter, older streets of Plaka. Several middle-aged men were sitting in low-slung canvas chairs around a table. She walked close by them, but they didn't even look at her, so she turned around and came back and gave one of their chairs a little nudge. But all she got was laughter.

Her ankle turned on the cobbles. She went sprawling. It was always a risk to mix vodka and heels. She picked herself up, brushed off her hands and knees, aware she should be embarrassed, yet not. Her left palm began to throb. It was wet and speckled with grit and torn skin. She watched with passive curiosity as the first hints of blood arrived, the sharpness of each pulse.

'Excuse me?' asked a man, German from his accent. 'Are you okay?'

She looked hopefully around, but he already had a woman. 'I'm fine,' she told him.

She took her shoe in both hands, tested the heel. It wobbled a little, so she kicked the other one off too, then carried them as she wandered, uncertain of her way. Her feet grew cold and wet; the streets grew narrow and emptier. She reached a familiar plaza, turned left and saw the illuminated sign that ran down the front of her hotel. There were no black Mercedes outside her hotel, just a few cars and a white van. She wasn't that drunk, not to check. She paused to pull her shoes back on; her concierge was pompous, she didn't want him getting all superior with her. The echo of her footsteps made her realise how empty the streets had become.

The van door opened. A man got out. She knew at once. She turned and tried to flee, but her broken heel betrayed her and she tumbled hard onto the pavement. She opened her mouth to scream, but too late; a hand was clamped over it, holding a moistened pad of some kind. She felt its chemical burn on her lips as she breathed it in, and the strength began draining from her muscles, despite her fear. Then she was lifted bodily and carried to the van; and the last thing she saw was Mikhail Nergadze kneeling beside her, smiling down at her as though he'd just won himself a bet.

Franklin led Knox through to a dimly-lit front room with huge unframed expressionist canvases on the walls. He went to a drinks cabinet and poured himself a clouded shot-glass of firewater that he knocked straight back and refilled. 'My wife doesn't like me drinking in public,' he confided. 'I have a bad habit of not knowing when to stop, and then saying things to embarrass myself.' He turned to Knox with a meaningful look. 'She hates embarrassment, my wife, more than anything in the world. So I do all I can to avoid it: because I love her.'

'I understand.'

He found and filled a second glass that he handed to Knox. 'Do you smoke?' he asked, opening a silver case filled with cheroots.

'No, thanks.'

'You don't mind if I do?'

'Of course not.'

They sat in a pair of armchairs set obliquely near the front window, through which they could watch the few cars that passed, the occasional pedestrian. Franklin lit his cheroot; it gave off an aromatic smoke. 'I apologise for not mentioning that article earlier; you must understand that I gave my word I'd never talk about it again.'

'To your wife?'

'In part. But more so to her father.'

'Your mentor,' nodded Knox. 'When you promised to change your life, and he gave you another chance.'

'Exactly,' said Franklin.

'Still,' said Knox. 'I need to know.'

Franklin sank back into his chair, vanishing into shadow, except for a faint glow whenever he took a puff. 'It was Petitier's influence. It was greater on me than I like to admit. I already told you about his battle against Eurocentric history, but that wasn't his only fight. He hated all establishment institutions, particularly anything smug, anything vested. He was raised a Catholic, but of course he turned against them. And he couldn't just set it all aside, like most lapsed Catholics. He wanted payback.' A car pulled up a little way down the street. Its doors opened and then closed again. Knox kept an ear cocked as Franklin talked, wondering if Nergadze could somehow have tracked him here. 'He became obsessed by the absurdity of belief. Mocking religion was one of his favourite pastimes. That was one reason he was so fascinated by Eleusis. All these brilliant Greeks convinced they'd encountered something numinous and transcendent here: he was sure if he could find out what it was, he could take the mystique out of it, and so debunk belief.'

'And?'

'He'd originally written the paper while lecturing in France, but the journals wouldn't deal with him any more, he was simply too difficult.' He reached forward, tapped off some ash. 'But they would deal with me, so I submitted his paper instead. It was rather mischievous, I'm afraid, but then I was in the mood for mischief. It attributed the Greek Mysteries, indeed pretty much all established western religion, to something called ergot.'

'Ergot?' frowned Knox.

'A naturally-occurring parasitic fungus you sometimes find on grasses and grains,' explained Franklin. 'But, more pertinently for our case, a precursor of lysergic acid diethylamide.'

'You don't mean…'

'Yes,' smiled Franklin. 'LSD.'

A shock of smelling salts beneath her nose startled Nadya back to consciousness. She tried to open her eyes, but they seemed to be glued shut, leaving her reliant instead on the sensations flooding in from all across her body. She was sitting in a hard chair, her ankles tied to the legs and her wrists to the struts behind her back, the knots pulled so tight that her fingers and toes were tingling, and stress was building uncomfortably in her joints. A rope gag cut into her lips and gums. She had a crick in her neck. Panic welled suddenly in her; she began struggling and trying to kick out.

'Calm down,' grunted a man in Georgian. 'How can I loosen these damned things if you won't keep still?'

She breathed in deep through her nose, forced herself to stop fighting. There'd be time for that.

'That's better,' said the man, as he picked at the knots and then removed the gag. 'Scream if you want to. No one will hear, and I'll just put it back in.'

She licked the edges of her sore lips, worked her jaw this way and that. 'I won't scream,' she assured him.

'Good.' He picked his fingers at the tape over her eyes next, then pulled it off in one go, leaving her eyebrows raw and stinging. She blinked several times as her vision adjusted. There was no one in front of her, just a plush double bed with a red chintz cover and, on its far side, a mahogany dressing table with a triple mirror on which stood a bottle of water and two glasses, a bowl of pot pourri, a vase of carved and painted wooden lilies.