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  April opened her eyes and looked at Skarda. “Have a nice nap?”

  He knew she’d been meditating. She didn’t appear to be experiencing any negative symptoms at all.

  He grimaced and ran his hand over his temple. “Did you recognize her?”

  She shook her head. “No. But I doubt she’s connected to Krell. He’d never hire a woman, from what I’ve heard. Whoever she is, she’s got to be after the silver, too.”

  He showed her a tortured grin. “Well, one thing in our favor. She wants us alive.”

  April’s black eyes were inscrutable. “Yeah...but for what?”

  ___

  Rethymno Harbor

  The soldier stifled a yawn. He was wearing a pair of jeans and a loose black shirt to hide the Beretta M9 pistol stuck in his waistband.

  He was supposed to look like a tourist lounging around in front of the Alkmene, whose lights were casting long shadows on the jetty behind him.

  But he didn’t feel like a tourist. At least a tourist would be drinking a beer or maybe some local wine. Not sitting here wasting time keeping watch over a colonel that nobody even knew was here.

  Or cared.

  Not for the first time his eyes roved to the jumble of boxes where he’d stashed his M4 carbine, just a short leap away.

  If only something cool would happen so he’d have to—

  A sound like a book slamming shut reached his ears a split-second before a dart sprouted from his neck, just above the collar bone.

  He toppled forward, meeting the rough stone surface of the jetty with a soft plop.

  ___

  The moon had risen higher in the dark sky, paling the stars around it. Morgana’s own moonlike eyes glinted as she padded toward the Alkmene with Marsik at her side, skirting around the guard he had just anesthetized. Ahead, at the bow, she could see the silhouette of another sentry, his back turned toward them.

  She motioned for Marsik and her two other men to stop. Here the situation was different from the open sea: with the harbor water so flat and calm, any motion they made climbing onto the yacht would cause the big vessel to rock and betray their presence. And she couldn’t be sure they didn’t have motion sensors.

  With a lusty grin, she caught Marsik’s eye and nodded. Pulling out a remote detonator, he pressed the button. Across the harbor, the booming flash of an explosion in the rear of a pleasure boat lit up the night.

  Immediately distant shouts raised up. The sentry turned to stare, stooping to grab his rifle and raising it into ready position. On the dockside in front of the stricken boat a crowd was gathering, their faces lit orange and yellow. Curious onlookers boiled out of the tavernas to gape.

  As Morgana watched, Turner barreled up on deck, followed by Senator Lake and the shorter of her bodyguards. The sentry turned around and pointed.

  His words carried to Morgana’s ears: “Some idiot didn’t vent the gas fumes. Boom!”

  Nodding at Marsik, she stepped across the gap between the jetty and the Alkmene’s aft. Her crew followed.

  Crouching low, they ran forward. Turner and the men were focused on the burning boat, where a column of black smoke churned up to meet the night sky.

  But the colonel was already losing interest. With an indifferent shrug, he turned away—

  Then the sentry in front of him cried out and sank to his knees, a dart sticking out from the back of his neck.

  Whipping around, Turner glared at the man in front of him with the pneumatic pistol, his arm held steady in firing position, now covering the colonel, Lake, and the bodyguard, who thrust his hands high above his head.

  But Makris didn’t shoot.

  With a theatrical flourish, Morgana stepped forward, her teeth flashing in a good-natured grin. “Good evening, Colonel,” she said politely. “Good evening, Senator.”

  Lake scowled angrily, trying to mask her shock and fear. “How dare you come aboard this boat—“

  The glare hadn’t left Turner’s face. With a slashing gesture, he cut her off. “What the hell do you want?”

  Morgana’s grin cranked up its wattage. “Same thing as you, Colonel. The neosamarium.”

  ___

  When Makris had rounded up all of the Alkmene’s crew, Morgana ordered them to sit in the situation room. The Greek and his men covered them with their QBZ-95’s.

  She glanced around at the computers and video screens. “Nice set-up. It should do just fine.”

  “What do you want?” Turner asked.

  She didn’t reply. Instead, she motioned to Makris, who activated one of the video displays and a two-way camera. On it appeared the live feed from the holding cell in Heraklion, showing Skarda, April, and Nathaniel sitting under the watchful eyes of men holding assault rifles in rock-steady hands.

  “As I said, Colonel, I want the neosamarium.” She jabbed a finger at the video screen. “So here’s what’s going to happen. These three are going to find it and deliver it to me. To ensure that they do, I’m keeping all of you as hostages.”

  Outraged, Lake started to climb to her feet, but a gunman pushed her down.

  “Get your filthy hands off me!” she snarled. To Morgana, she snapped, “Are you aware that you’re taking hostile action against the United States government? That makes you a terrorist in my eyes. Even if you succeed, you’ll be hunted down and exterminated.”

  The pirate showed her a lazy smile. “Let me worry about that, Senator.” Her eyes moved to Turner and she gestured at the screen “In the meantime, Colonel, please instruct your agents to do as I say.”

  He glared at her. “They’re not my agents.”

  Morgana moved like quicksilver. The cutlass streaked a black blur.

  A second later the stocky bodyguard’s head leapt from his shoulders, smacking against the floor with a solid thunk. His corpse toppled forward, gushing out a torrent of blood on the oak floor.

  For several heartbeats, Lake stared in horror, then wrenched herself violently toward the wall, vomiting.

  Morgana wiped her sword on the dead man’s shirt. “Sorry about the mess,” she said to Turner.

  Lake turned back, her face white. “You didn’t have to do that.”

  Morgana smiled. “This is a man’s world, Senator. Sometimes a girl has to make a strong statement.” She shifted her glance to the colonel. “Now...please instruct these people to do as I say. Otherwise, I’ll start executing hostages until you’re all gone.”

  Turner was visibly controlling his rage. He locked his eyes on the video camera. “Do what she says,” he said to Skarda and April.

  “Thank you,” Morgana said. Then she looked into the camera, too, ignoring the icy glares staring back at her from the cell. “I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that any attempt to get help or to contact outside assistance, in any way, will be dealt with severely. And, oh...” She glanced down at the clock. “It’s now 12:01 A.M. You have forty-eight hours or I start lopping off heads. Starting now.”

  BOOK TWO

  TEN

  Elounda, Crete

  IN the yellow light of dawn Skarda glanced at the countdown timer on his Stealth VII smartphone: 43:07:11. Five hours already gone. He was standing at the open terrace door of their suite at the Porto Elounda Hotel on the eastern coast of the island. In front of him stretched the leaden panorama of the Bay of Mirabello and to the east, the distant mountains of Sitia, their faces darkened by the early morning shadows.

  But he barely noticed the scenery. Fatigued to the bone, they’d snatched a few hours sleep, but for him, the rest had been fitful, plagued by more dreams about Sarah. But he knew it was more than that. Morgana’s deadline was weighing on his mind, because the odds were greatly stacked against them. Everything now depended on Nathaniel’s ability to decipher the clues to where the treasure was hidden—if the location was even on the silver plaque.

  And peoples’ lives were on the line.

  The Stealth chimed: an answer to his request for background information on Morgana from Candy Man,
OSR’s computer genius. Self-sequestered from human contact on an abandoned oil drilling rig thirty miles off the Florida coast, he’d earned his nickname from his habit of gobbling down Milky Ways and Hershey bars by the box.

  Skarda turned around and read the message aloud to April and Nathaniel: “’name is morgana lafayette, alias. dob unknown, birth name unknown. probably 27, probably born in instanbul, raised in american orphange, early history of gang activity, theft, robbery, graduated to high seas piracy. languages: english, greek, turkish. considered violent.’” He exited the screen and looked at them. “At least we know who we’re up against.”

  Spearing a forkful of kreatotourta, April frowned. “How did she find out about the neosamarium?”

  Skarda shrugged, still distracted. “I don’t know. But she did. That’s all that matters.”

  Next to her, Nathaniel was hunched forward against the tabletop, his nose close to the laptop screen. On it were the photos of the silver plaque. “’PI’”, he said softly, his head bobbing up and down in satisfaction.

  April shoved the meat pie in his direction. “Have some.”

  It took a moment for her words to register. Then he lifted his head, glancing first at the plate and then at her. “PI...oh, pie!” He chuckled to himself. “Sorry! PI, as in pee-eye, not pee-eye-eee! Of course, that’s just the way I pronounce it. No one really knows how the Minoans would have pronounced it.” Again he chuckled, pointing at the screen. “I’ve already told you about ‘SA-RA-PU’, which I think is the Minoan word for ‘silver’. It occurs many times on this plaque.” He zoomed in on the image and traced a finger over the surface. “You see this symbol here...and here...that looks like a stylized insect? It’s a bee! There’s a similar sign on the Phaistos Disk. It’s the symbol for the syllable PI and may be the root of the theonymn PI-PI-TU-NA, which some people think identifies Britomartis, the ‘Sweet Virgin’, also known as Diktynna, the ‘Lady of the Net’, either because she was said to have invented the hunting or fishing net—diktyon in ancient Greek—and so was associated with the huntress and virgin moon goddess Artemis, or because, fleeing the romantic pursuit of King Minos, the son of Zeus, she threw herself off the edge of a cliff and was rescued by the nets of fishermen. But I think it’s an epithet for Ariadne, whom I identify as a primal Minoan lunar Goddess and also the Snake Goddess, referred to on a Linear B tablet as ‘DA-PU-RI-TO-JO PO-TI-NA’, the “Lady of the Labyrinth”, to whom was offered a jar of honey.”

  He paused, cocking his head as if he were listening to something only he could hear. “So you see? Honey is made by bees and bees were sacred to the Mother Goddess. Proof, I think, that the plaque is telling us about Ariadne’s silver. Silver is a metal the ancient world associated with the moon—as a matter of fact, people used to believe the moon was made of silver. I think silver was a sacred metal to the Minoans, because it was associated with the moon, and hence with the lunar Mother Goddess. According to the later Greek myth, at Knossos Ariadne, the daughter of the moon goddess Pasiphae, gives the lunar silver thread to Theseus to guide him out of the Minotaur’s labyrinth.

  “So the upshot is, I think that the Minoan Snake Goddess was Ariadne, the Lady of the Labyrinth—and her seal on this plaque is another link to the silver treasure sacred to her. I think Ariadne is the clue we’re looking for.”

  Skarda sat up straight and snapped his fingers. “Wait a minute! Ariadne? Blackpool mentioned ‘Ariadne’ before he died. He said it had to be Ariadne.”

  Nathaniel bobbed his head vigorously. “Yes...yes! He was connecting the link between the silver and Ariadne! Yes!”

  April scowled. She clearly wasn’t following him.

  Glancing at her and grinning, Skarda scratched his temple. “I’m getting a bit lost here.”

  Again Nathaniel cocked his head, eyeballing him curiously. Then he flicked a sheepish glance at April. “I think I’m going to have to give you a little historical background,” he said.

  Her black eyes were impassive. But she crossed her arms over her chest and stared at him.

  His gaze shifted away. “Well...to start, we’ll have to go back to the Upper Paleolithic—very broadly between 40,000 and 8,500 years ago. This is the era of the Cro-Magnons—now more properly called ‘Anatomically Modern Humans’—who lived in the land of the receding ice sheets from Portugal to Siberia. They were no doubt nomadic, following the herds of mammoth and reindeer as they migrated in the warm months, and living in permanent huts in the winter. They wove cloth, made pottery, and created art. The AMH’s were the artists who painted the famous animal images on the cave walls of Chauvet, Lascaux, and Altamira, to name a few.

  “They also carved sculptures from stone, bone, and ivory, and this is what’s of importance to us. Approximately 25,000 years ago, a sculptor carved the figure of a woman into the wall of a rock shelter that overlooked a valley in what is now Dordogne, France. She is called the ‘Venus of Laussel’ and stands about a foot-and-a-half high, carved in bas-relief so that her figure extrudes from the limestone wall. She is obviously pregnant, with swollen breasts and vulva—“ He broke off as he glanced at April, his face coloring. “—and her distended belly bulges out, sculpted to follow the natural convexity of the wall. Her left hand rests on her abdomen or womb, and her right hand holds up a bison horn, crescent-shaped like the moon, and notched with thirteen lines that represent the thirteen months of the lunar year. At one time she had been covered in red ochre—hematite ore that represented the life-giving blood of humans and animals and the blood of menstruation and birth.

  “Very clearly she is a representation of the Mother Goddess, the great lunar deity of the Upper Paleolithic. The Goddess is the moon, and the moon’s constant, but always changing, phases are the phases of her life. The new crescent is the girl, the young maiden; the full moon is the pregnant mother, her stomach swelling like the waxing moon; and the darkening, waning moon is the old woman, the crone. We can see her image again in a cave at Angles-sur-L’Anglin where three Goddess figures with pronounced vulvas were carved on a cave wall. They stand on a bison, whose horns represent the horns of the crescent moon, just like the bison horn held in the hand of the Venus of Laussel, and no doubt represent the three phases of the lunar month. As early as 40,000 years ago, Paleolithic peoples were inscribing lunar observations on bone, stone, and antler. Many of these artifacts have been found—a clear indication that the AMH’s had language and were capable of abstract thought and religious belief.

  “In the waxing, full, and waning moon they would have recognized the patterns of their own lives: youth, maturity, and old age. But there was another phase, too—the three days each month when the moon goes dark and seems to disappear before being reborn as the new crescent. This is the essence of the Paleolithic lunar religion: like the Goddess, who ‘dies’ each month and then is reborn, so they, too, expected to be resurrected when they died. As it is above, so it is below. Death would not have been seen as an ending, but as a beginning, just one part of a never-ending cycle of birth, death, and rebirth. So the cave was imagined to be the womb of the Mother Goddess, the source of her regenerative power, where the dead returned to be reborn again into the world of the living. Clearly these caves were holy places, considered sacred by the people of the Upper Paleolithic, and no doubt they were the stages for religious ceremonies. Early discoverers of these caves assumed that the animals painted on the walls represented hunting magic—rituals to help the hunters kill their prey—but the majority of animals pictured were not even hunted and eaten by the AMH’s! Besides, they were depicted as pregnant females, so clearly the caves were meant to be symbolic wombs of the Mother Goddess—again, the sacred places of rebirth and resurrection.

  “Naturally, the Goddess, not having a male consort, was imagined to be a virgin, embodying both the female and the male, and so was parthenogenic—capable of virgin birth—and this aspect was echoed down through the ages as the Goddess mythology evolved: the Sumerian/Akkadian Inanna-Ishtar; Isis of Egypt; Tiam
at of Babylon; in Greece, Artemis; Cybele in Anatolia; and, of course, Mary of the Catholic Church—all lunar virgin goddesses and continuing incarnations of the original Paleolithic Mother Goddess.

  “The symbols that eventually came to be associated with the Mother Goddess in the Neolithic and Bronze Ages also started here: the lunar crescent-shaped horns of the bison or bull; the rosette; the spiral and meander, representing the flowing of rivers and streams which were sacred to the Goddess, and which eventually evolved into the labyrinth; the V-shaped symbol that represents the vulva, the source of birth; the bird, especially the dove; the snake, which sloughs its skin and appears to be reborn; the fish, which lives in the life-giving waters; the butterfly, which is regenerated from the caterpillar, likewise seeming to be reborn; the spider as the weaver of the thread of life; and the bee, which from very early on was linked to parthenogenesis. Bees, in fact, were believed to be spontaneously generated in the carcasses of bulls. The labrys, by the way, the double-headed axe of the Minoans, was made of up of two butterflies joined together, linking it directly to Goddess worship.