Will Adams - The Lost Labyrinth

She went to the desk to see what books Petitier had been reading before leaving for Athens. A dictionary of Minoan scripts. A treatise on the Phaistos disc, along with a replica of the disc itself, as though for reference. A book on vulcanology; a copy of Plato's Timeaus; an article on the Late Helladic in Akrotiri. 'Hey!' she grinned. 'Seems he was working on his own "Atlantis Connection".'

'How about that,' said Iain. He went to the shelves. Two ranges were crammed with leather-bound journals, dates in black marker pen upon their spines. He plucked down Mai-Decembre 1995, flipped through the creamy pages, turned to show her. There were entries on each page, written in some kind of code, blocks of five hieroglyphs at a time. 'You're the expert,' he said. 'Reckon you can crack it?'

Gaille shrugged. If it was a straightforward substitution cipher using English, French or Greek, it would only be a matter of time and effort; but Petitier would have known that himself, and so might well have sought to make it harder. 'I'll give it a go,' she said.

There were three doors in the right-hand wall, all closed. The first led to the kitchen. Several plates were stacked neatly in a draining rack. There was cutlery in the drawers, well-used saucepans on a shelf, a basket of logs by the wood-fired oven. The fridge was off; when she opened it up, she found nothing inside but a bad smell. The larder, by contrast, was well stocked. A smoked ham was hanging from a ceiling hook, two fat sausages and a plucked game bird. There was a sealed tub of coffee, another with a freshly harvested honeycomb inside, dripping sweet gold. Earthenware jars and screw-top bottles on the shelves held olives and olive oil, garlic, tomatoes and tomato juice, sweet-corn, onions, beetroot and other pickled vegetables. A rack of unlabelled red and white wines stood on the floor between a small sack of grain and another of rice.

The second door led to a bedroom, a discoloured sheet over the thin double mattress, a couple of bare grey pillows from which tiny feathers were protruding, like white stubble. She got down onto her knees to look under the bed, thick with dust, like winter's first sprinkling of snow, while a boot lay on its side with a hole gaping in its rubber sole. The third door led to the bathroom, its sink yellowed with age, the cast-iron bath caked with grime, its plug-hole clotted with hair. There was a shower attachment too, but its head was rusted and the curtain was all bunched up at one end, while the wall behind it was black with mildew. She gave the loo a precautionary flush before she glanced into it, then threw open the window shutters and leaned out, grateful for the fresh air. Mercifully, the dog had stopped barking, perhaps realising the futility of its efforts, or merely worn out.

'What do you say to a division of labour?' suggested Iain. 'You check out this place, try to crack that code. I'll take the valley and the hills. After all, if he's found a Minoan site, it won't be in here. And with your ankle and all…'

'Makes sense,' agreed Gaille.

'Good,' said Iain, rubbing his hands in anticipation. 'Then let's rustle up some breakfast and go to it.'

Alexei Nergadze dropped his cup as he saw the armoured personnel carriers charge out of the forest fringes down the hillside towards the castle. He saw them but he couldn't take them in. It wasn't possible. Not here. No way could they have driven those vehicles up here without being spotted and reported by lookouts in the villages. Not unless they'd bypassed the villages with transport helicopters.

But that would mean…

He heard the chunter of distant rotor blades, turned to see a pair of white swans taking off from the lake, leaving their reflections on its rippled surface, and a moment later a formation of helicopters appeared over the woods on the far bank and sped low across the water, fanning out and weaving as they grew close. This couldn't be happening. It couldn't be. But it was. Their shitbag president had decided to pre-empt the elections. And he, Alexei, had just given them their excuse. He looked with utter hatred down at the antiquities policeman lying at his feet. 'You're dead,' he told him. He pressed the stock of the shotgun into his shoulder and aimed down at the man's face. 'You're fucking dead.'

He didn't hear the sniper's bullet that killed him, supersonic as it was. His shotgun clattered to the ground. A moment later, he'd joined it.

An empty water bottle in the back of the van rolled back and forth across the floor each time they took a corner. The noise got on Edouard's nerves, but he didn't stamp on it or pick it up, because looking at it gave him an excuse not to look at Knox, lying there balled up, his wrists bound behind his back, a roll of duct-tape making a merman of his legs. His mouth was taped too, and he was breathing fast and hard through his nose, as though suffering a panic attack.

They passed through Kifissia out into the open country. Gravel crunched beneath their wheels as they turned up Mikhail's drive, then stopped outside the house. Davit came around to open the rear doors, not meeting Edouard's eyes, as though he felt just as ashamed, but didn't want to acknowledge it. He picked Knox up, slung him easily over his shoulder, then carried him inside and dropped him on the front of the settee, so that he spilled onto the floor.

Nadya was still cuffed to a downstairs radiator, just as they'd left her. 'I'm so sorry,' she wept, when she saw Knox. 'I'm so sorry.'

He paled when he saw her pulped hand. He shook his head, perhaps to tell her that it wasn't her fault; perhaps to deny the brutal reality that faced him.

Mikhail sat on the settee and smiled politely down at Knox, a surgeon meeting his next case. He ripped the tape free from Knox's mouth, scrunched it up into a ball that he tossed aside. 'I wanted you to see your friend Nadya,' he said. 'I wanted you to know she'd betrayed you. It's okay, you understand, to betray things. Unless you want to tell her differently.' Mikhail had been through Knox's pockets on the drive here. He held up his mobile phone, the photo Gaille had sent him on its display. Then he opened the red-leatherette box and showed everyone the ring inside. 'Planning to pop the question, are you?'

'Those are mine,' said Knox. 'Give them back.'

'Or perhaps you already have, and she said no.'

'Fuck you.'

'I wouldn't blame her for saying no, if this is the best you can afford. I bet that's why she fucked off to this Agia Georgio place. Or maybe she's got a hankering for a new man. I enjoyed our little tussle in the lift. I think she did too.'

'She thought you were a creep.'

Mikhail's expression tightened. He set the mobile and ring-box down on the glass table, picked up the pliers instead. 'You and I are going to spend a little quality time together now,' he said. 'If you're disrespectful to me, if you hold out on me, if you cause me excessive trouble, it won't only be you who pays. Your girlfriend will too. I'll make sure of it.'

'There's no need for this,' said Knox. 'Whatever you want, just ask.'

'What a hero! No wonder she said no.' He leaned closer. 'She'll say yes to me, all right. I bet she's already thinking about it.' With the sole of his boot, he pushed Knox onto his front, so that he could get at his hands. Then he separated his left thumb from his other fingers and took it between the jaws of his pliers. Knox braced himself for the pain, he cried out in anticipation.

It was too much for Edouard to bear. 'No!' he blurted out.

Mikhail turned and drilled Edouard with his gaze. 'I beg your pardon.'

'Think about it,' said Edouard, switching to Georgian, lest Mikhail think he was coaching Knox on his interrogation. 'Imagine you're right about all this, I mean that this guy and his friend really stole the fleece and hid it at the airport. What if they don't have lockers? What if they have one of those left luggage places where you have to hand your stuff in then show some ID to get it back?' He nodded at Nadya. 'How will it look if his hand's like that? You know what security's like in airports these days. They'll be onto us in no time.'