The Mask of Troy Read online

  Costas pulled his own suit over his head and stepped out of the legs, and Jack did the same with his. They both quickly went to Costas’ bag and got dressed, zipping up their fleeces. Jack went back and took the bag with the swastika box from his e-suit belt and tucked it under his arm. Costas delved in his bag and pulled out two small bottles of water and two energy drinks, and they both squatted on their haunches, drinking. Jack finished the water, then uncapped the other drink. ‘I couldn’t help noticing. Some good archaeology down there.’

  ‘Jesus, Jack.’

  ‘You had your fix. The bomb.’

  ‘Jack, for all the Neolithic hand axes and little statues in the world, I wouldn’t go back in there again.’

  Jack took a deep swig, then stood up, nodding. ‘Roger that.’ He dropped the bottle in the bag. ‘Right. We have to get cracking. Got everything we need?’ He patted his pockets, feeling for his things. Costas did the same, then looked at him, and put his hand on his shoulder. Costas’ hair was matted and his face lined with exhaustion, but his eyes were cold and determined. ‘We can leave all this here. All we need is your phone.’

  ‘I know where that is. We need to get in touch with the kidnappers and convince them that we’ve got what they want. They’ll have been expecting Chechnya to have it, having disposed of us. But if they’ve got any intelligence, what’s happened won’t come as a complete surprise. Not the desired outcome, but it doesn’t change the balance of power. They’ve still got what we want, and we’ve got what they want. We have to keep them thinking that.’

  There was a sudden rumble, a deep vibration that sent a shimmer across the pool of water, a pulse of energy that coursed through the rock. They both stood silently for a moment, watching dust shake off the walls of the chamber. The rumble stopped. The tunnel ahead was still clear.

  Costas coughed. ‘Remote detonation. Always the safest way. I timed that perfectly, don’t you think?’

  Jack narrowed his eyes. ‘Let’s move.’

  Ten minutes later they left the lift shaft and went straight into the office where they had first met Wladislaw. Jack found his phone on the desk pad, exactly as he had instructed. Good man. He picked it up and switched it on, tapping his fingers impatiently while it connected, and then he pressed the code for the IMU secure channel. It was picked up immediately. ‘Jack.’

  ‘Ben.’

  ‘Status.’

  ‘The Lions are at the Gate.’ It was a code they had prearranged in case anyone might be eavesdropping on the line. ‘I repeat, The Lions are at the Gate.’

  ‘Copy that. Now switch off your phone and put it down.’ Jack did as instructed. Seconds later there was a muffled ringing sound. He went round to the front of the desk and pulled open a drawer. It was another phone, evidently Wladislaw’s personal phone he had left there. Jack picked it up. ‘Yes?’

  ‘Okay, Jack.’ It was Ben again. ‘Wladislaw called us when he returned to the office and I told him to leave his phone there. I’m using a disposable. We can’t be too careful. In about two minutes you’ll be answering your phone again. It’s a pre-recorded message that will only come through once. It’s essential that you listen to what I’m about to say now.’

  ‘Copy that.’ Jack did as instructed, staring hard at the ground as Ben spoke. After less than a minute he lowered the phone and clicked it off. Almost immediately his iPhone rang, and he answered it. There was a crackle, and then he heard a voice, educated English but with a hint of an accent. ‘Dr Howard. This message presupposes that you have found what I want but your diving companions are unable to bring it to me. As you will know by now, your people have been given our instructions. You will wish to speak to your daughter.’ The crackle ended, there was a click and then a uniform hissing sound. He heard sounds of movement, a scuffle, then breathing close to the phone.

  ‘Dad?’

  ‘Rebecca.’ Thank God. ‘Are you all right?’ Jack’s mind raced. ‘You must be tired.’

  ‘Yes, but nice to stand here and imagine Orion.’

  Jack’s mind raced. Night sky. A time zone ahead of where they were now. And the constellation Orion. She and Jack had stood on the battlements looking for it two nights ago, then realized it was still below the horizon. He had told her that he had always thought of Orion as his guardian, ever since he was a boy. So that was it. She really was there.

  ‘Orion’s looking after you, even if you can’t see him,’ Jack said carefully. ‘You don’t need to worry.’

  ‘It’s kind of, um, creepy, though. I could really do with a double vodka.’

  Jack remembered what she had called Raitz. A creep. And what the US Marines she had befriended in Kyrgyzstan called a Russian male. A shot of vodka. Professor Raitz, and two Russian thugs. ‘You need to keep warm,’ Jack said slowly. ‘You should be inside.’

  ‘Don’t worry, Dad. We’re going back in now. I found us a place. It’s only just opened. You’d be amazed, Dad. It’s so cool.’ There was a sudden scuffling sound, then a guttural snarl, Russian, and another man’s voice in English. ‘Give it back to her,’ the voice said. Rebecca came on the line again. She was panting. ‘Sorry, Dad. I have to go. I love you. I just want to know. On the shipwreck. Did you find it?’

  Jack was stunned. It seemed an age ago. A lifetime. He flashed back to the moment the day before when he had been carrying the shield upwards, imagining Rebecca looking down and seeing it. He swallowed hard. ‘We found it, Rebecca. Costas and I found it. You’ll be amazed.’

  ‘When do I get to see it?’

  ‘Tomor—’ The phone was snatched away, and went dead. He hoped Rebecca had heard the word. He turned to Costas, who had gone out of the room and now returned. Jack clenched his hands, felt the energy course through him. He was beyond tired, but those few words with Rebecca had kept the adrenalin pumping. ‘Okay. Here’s the plan. Ben’s got in touch with Wladislaw and he’s coming to pick us up. The Embraer’s fuelled and ready to go at Krakow airport. At Istanbul we transfer to the helicopter and then to Seaquest II. If all goes to plan, we should be there by about three a.m. Ben’s going to have a security team ready, as well as a section of Turkish navy commandos from the minesweeper.’

  ‘He’s told the authorities?’ Costas asked.

  Jack shook his head. ‘Too risky. The kidnappers want the Lynx to fly to international waters, where they’re going to drop Rebecca in a Zodiac. They must have a vessel offshore. There’s obviously big money behind this. We don’t want an overzealous policeman jeopardizing the whole thing. But Ben’s told the minesweeper captain we suspect we’re being shadowed. Has to be kept top secret. The Turkish navy guys are fully prepped on the illegal antiquities trade and this is just what they’d love to get their teeth into. Officially it’s a covert training exercise. Ben will tell them about the kidnapping once they’re in position and you and I are inside.’ He heard a car draw up outside. ‘Here’s our ride. We’ve got to move, now.’

  ‘Where are we going?’

  Jack looked at his hands. There was still blood in the cracks, under his fingernails. He thought of what he had just done, in the mine. He felt nothing. Nothing. He looked up, and gave Costas a steely look. ‘We’re going to Troy.’

  20

  Troy

  Jack crouched low against the bank of the watercourse, training his night-vision scope on the overgrown mound about a kilometre away across the fields. It was the first time for fifteen years that he had seen Troy from this vantage point, only a few hundred yards from the spot where he and Costas had excavated the ancient beach with the galley timbers from the time of the Trojan War. The dykes and marshy fields looked like no-man’s-land, an image of war. There was a hint of a breeze, and Jack remembered imagining Greek warriors standing silently among the rustling reeds, their spears black against the moonlight, waiting for the signal to move forward. Except they now knew it had not been like that. It had been a maelstrom of raging sea and hellfire, a wave of destruction that swept the warriors in their ships from this place u
p against the battlements, arrows storming down, engulfed in flames.

  He never could have imagined being back here again in these circumstances, sighting the best approach route to confront the kidnappers who had taken his daughter. He put down the scope, took a deep drink from his water bottle, zipped up his fleece and slid down close to the river course where he could stand up without being seen from the mound. He had to keep moving. He had not slept while he and Costas had been on the Embraer from Krakow airport in Poland, cooped up for half the flight in the recompression chamber after their dive in the mine. His only thoughts had been of Rebecca. He knew she was out there. He had spoken to her on the cell phone the night before. And it might only be a matter of time before whoever was behind this determined that the palladion had not been in the mine after all, and that what Jack was doing now was a charade. If that happened, all bargaining chips were lost. Rebecca might became irrelevant to the kidnappers, yet too much of a liability to return alive.

  He slithered along the mud bank to where Ben and Costas were waiting, just visible in the moonlight. He glanced at his watch. It was five a.m., and the time stipulated by the kidnapper was an hour from now. They had got here as fast as they could, with barely time to get their plan into action. Ben beckoned him over, and Jack and Costas hunched down, listening. ‘I’ve got to get my team in position now,’ Ben said. ‘Here’s the score. The kidnappers have come here because this is our turf. They know we’ve got carte blanche here from the authorities. We can clear the place, which we’ve done. There’s nobody else anywhere near the site tonight. All our personnel, Hiebermeyer, everyone, are back on Seaquest II. And the kidnappers are using us for the getaway. The Lynx is going to land in the car park at 0530. They’re going to leave in it, with Rebecca, once the exchange is made, and go directly to a vessel waiting for them beyond the twelve-mile territorial limit. Except they’re not going to do that. Because Jack doesn’t have what they want, only an empty box. So the only way they’re getting out of here is in a body bag or in cuffs. Am I right?’

  ‘Roger that,’ Costas muttered.

  ‘Costas has an iPhone. When he calls, my team goes in. Until then, you’re on your own. Jack, Costas has what I promised you. All clear?’

  ‘Copy that,’ Costas said. Ben disappeared into the darkness. Costas reached in his bag and took out Macalister’s Webley revolver. ‘Ben said he’s tested the loads. The accuracy’s phenomenal, but aim low and to the right because there’s an almighty kick. Something about a manstopper.’

  Jack picked up the heavy revolver, weighing it in his hands, seeing that the chambers were loaded. He opened his khaki bag, took out the black box with the swastika emblem on the lid and put the revolver inside, in the space that had once held the Trojan palladion, with the impressed pocket in the shape of the reverse swastika removed to make space for the pistol. ‘That would be the flat-nosed bullet designed for maximum damage on impact.’

  ‘Sounds about right.’ Costas pulled out his own Beretta pistol from a shoulder holster and snapped the slide, checking that a round was chambered, then holstered it again. ‘Good to go?’

  Jack closed the lid and put the box in his khaki bag, folding the flap over. ‘Good to go.’

  Ten minutes later they were at the entrance to the underground watercourse some two hundred metres south-west of the mound. It was a low dell, surrounded by trees and dense undergrowth, where a muddy trickle came through a narrow tunnel that went underground towards Troy. It had been found by the Austrian excavators several years before, and was part of a water supply system that allowed the ancient Trojans to tap into a spring beyond the city walls. Jack followed Costas to the iron grid door, shut but with the lock hanging to one side. He gave a silent prayer of thanks to Hiebermeyer for having left it that way. The two men had spoken on the phone from the Embraer on the way to Istanbul airport. Maurice had come down to this spot the previous morning, while the excavation was still ongoing and before Rebecca had been kidnapped, and had managed to make his way through the tunnel as far as a low portal blocked up with rubble. He had cleared that single-handedly and got into the underground chamber he had reached previously by its other entrance, the passageway Jack would be following shortly. And if Maurice could get through this smaller tunnel, then Costas could make it too.

  Jack ducked his head away from the wasps that were swarming around the entrance. He flicked on Costas’ headlamp and gave him a Maglite for back-up. They heard the helicopter approaching, clattering loudly over the citadel mound towards the far side, where it landed and powered down. ‘Okay,’ Jack said. ‘That’s the cue. It’s 0535. I’m due to be in there at 0600. According to the time it took Maurice, you should be in position by then. Your entrance to the chamber will be on my right as I enter from the main passageway, and I’ll be looking for you. I’ll leave my bag outside and then return for it once I’ve made contact with the kidnappers. When you see me come back in and put the black box down, you might be taking a shot. I’ll try to make eye contact with Rebecca, warn her something is about to happen. We’ll have to play this as it comes.’

  ‘I’m moving now. Good luck, Jack.’

  ‘Good luck.’ Jack watched Costas slosh down the tunnel and disappear around a corner, then turned and made his way back towards the mound, walking openly once he had reached the main path, where anyone watching might have assumed he had come from the helicopter. He entered the deep trench where Hiebermeyer had been excavating, where they now knew Schliemann had worked as well. He passed the two gate guardians, the statues of ancient kings of Troy, and then went into the tunnel through the rubble, enlarged to over his height and shored up now with timber. He found a place to hide his bag. Maurice had told him on the phone what they had found, but nothing could have prepared him for it. There was a great bronze door, half ajar. He remembered how Gladstone had argued that the Treasury of Atreus at Mycenae once had a beaten bronze door. And there in the middle was the symbol, the impression of the reverse swastika in a roundel, exactly as Dillen had told him, from the story recounted by the old foreman to Hugh and Peter. There were columns of green stone on either side, with meander pattern decoration, again exactly as in the Treasury of Atreus. He stepped through into a cavernous chamber, and switched on his diving torch, flashing it round. There was no noise, only a slight hollow echo, but he knew he was not alone.

  ‘Rebecca?’ he said. ‘Are you there?’

  Still nothing. He could only wait. He looked around. It was an astonishing sight. Just as in the Treasury of Atreus, the chamber rose in a beehive shape, with corbelled masonry, but it was what was on the floor in front of him that was so astonishing. It was a circle of stone seats, set halfway to the centre of the chamber, a dozen of them, all identical. They were like seats he had seen in Bronze Age palaces before, in Knossos on Crete, in Egypt, in the citadels of the Near East. The thrones of kings. He panned his light over them. Each chair had an inscription on the back. He saw hieroglyphs on one, cuneiform on another, Hittite, Linear B. A council chamber of kings. He glimpsed something lustrous behind the seats, around the base of the chamber, as if the lower courses of masonry had been gilded. He panned his light sideways, to the wall nearest him, and stared in amazement.

  Ingots. Metal ingots. There were hundreds of them, stacked to his height and higher, row upon row, surrounding the entire circular wall of the chamber. They were copper, dull green in his torchlight. And there were ingots of tin, absolutely distinctive, their silvery surface covered in a fine white corrosion dust. Each ingot was about a metre long, with arms at the corners like flayed oxhides, just as he had seen them on shipwrecks of the Bronze Age. Ingots being brought to the great palaces of the Aegean, copper from Cyprus, from the Levant, from the west. He stared at a tin ingot on top of the stack beside him. It had a stamp that he recognized. A stamp of the Cornovii, the prehistoric tribe inhabiting south-west Cornwall. So it was true. The Trojans were importing tin from the Cassiterides, the British Isles.

  He stared back a
t the thrones, his mind in a turmoil. A council chamber of kings. Kings who had kept the peace. Kings who controlled the supply of metals for weapons, who doled it out among themselves, keeping the balance of power. Until one came along whose ambition, whose lust for power, could not be contained within these walls. One who had found a new, more deadly weapon, a better metal, harder, which made all of this stockpile of copper and tin redundant. Agamemnon, king of kings.

  A light shone blindingly in his face, and someone grabbed his neck in a lock, twisting his arm behind his back. He had been expecting this, and did not resist. He was pushed and kicked forward, and then his neck was released and he was frisked. A voice came from the other side of the circle of stone seats, somewhere near the light. ‘Dr Howard.’

  ‘Where’s my daughter?’ Jack snarled. The man behind him yanked his head back, and Jack strained against him. ‘I want to see my daughter.’ The man got his hand over Jack’s eyes, then pushed him forward roughly, releasing him. Jack blinked hard, and saw three figures against the stack of ingots on the back wall. One of them was Rebecca. A man was holding a pistol to her head. The figure on her other side stepped forward, put his torch on one of the seats with the beam angled upwards and stopped a few feet in front of Jack.

  ‘Dr Howard.’

  Jack stared at him. ‘Professor Raitz.’

  ‘Fortunately Rebecca had her passport on her and we were able to fly to Istanbul first class, a distinguished architectural historian and his new girlfriend. I told her we would kill you and Costas if she didn’t behave.’

  ‘Why are you doing all this?’

  ‘Because you have something I want.’ His voice was suddenly shrill. ‘Where is it?’

  ‘You can keep the Goebbels impression for the bathroom mirror, Raitz. It really doesn’t work.’

  Raitz clicked his fingers, and Jack was suddenly winded, on his knees on the floor, unable to breathe. He gasped, then struggled up, staggering forward, feeling the throbbing pain in his back where the man behind had slammed into him. As he got up, he scanned the other side of the chamber, facing south-west. He could see another opening in the wall, with rubble in front. That must be it. The entrance to the tunnel. Costas should be there by now. Jack would stall for another few minutes. Then he had to take a gamble.