The Grecian Manifesto (20 page)

Chapter 38

Rome, Italy

A thin line of sunlight poured
across Sean’s face from the window on the other side of the room. He groaned at
the brightness filling his eyes.

The night before, he and Tommy
had spent over an hour carefully opening the stone cylinder. They’d been
surprised at how well the wax had sealed the cap into place, especially after
such a long time and what had to be extreme conditions on the mountain.
Temperatures would drop to well below freezing during the winter, and the
summers could get fairly hot. Tommy reasoned that inside the miniature cave of
the spring, temperatures would stay more consistent, and thus not damage the
object or its contents.

With white gloves and special
tools, the two managed to remove the cap and open the ancient tube. Sean held
the cylinder up to the light and looked inside. The hollowed out space was
about half an inch in diameter, only big enough to hold a small piece of paper,
or in this case, a tiny scroll. Sean reached in with a pair of tweezers and
ever so gently removed the roll of animal skin.

After twenty minutes of
cautiously rolling the scroll out a few millimeters at a time, the two men stared
down at what appeared to be a map of ancient Greece. The detail was remarkable,
even given the abilities ancient cartographers displayed in many instances.
Whoever had drawn it had taken into account most of the surrounding islands,
along with providing their names.

Tommy’s wonder at the aged
document rapidly turned to confusion. “I don’t understand. This is just an old
map of Greece. I expected there to be an X or something marking the spot.”

Sean would normally have
laughed at his friend’s comment; instead, his irritation had overridden his
sense of humor. “Why would Caesar go to all that trouble to leave a map with no
directions on it?”

“It doesn’t make sense,” Tommy
agreed.

Sean removed the white gloves
and rested both palms flat on the work table, leaning over it and scanning the
map slowly, taking in every single detail. “We have Corfu right here,” he said,
pointing at the map. He moved his finger to a place where another city had been
labeled. “Thessaloniki is here.” Then he waved the finger around at all the
islands on the bottom of the scroll. “He even made sure to detail the names of
all these islands. But why?”

Sean lay in the soft bed,
staring at the window with a dazed consciousness. They’d gone to bed, unable to
figure out what the meaning of the map could be. What good was a map that
didn’t tell the reader where to go? Sean had sealed the map in a large plastic
bag to preserve it and left it on the desk. Both men were exhausted and decided
that maybe a fresh pair of eyes would help them see things a little more
clearly in the morning.

Outside his hotel room window,
Sean could hear the streets of Rome beginning their morning activities. He
rolled over and stared at the ceiling for a second before a deep voice nearly
startled him right out of the bed.

“Good morning. Sleep well?”

Sean quickly flipped over,
grabbing the gun from under the pillow next to the one he’d used. He let go of
the weapon when his eyes adjusted to see who had spoken to him. Agent Yarbrough
sat in the corner near the closet with one leg crossed over his knee. His right
arm was in a sling, but he was dressed in his usual secret service attire as if
he were going back to work that same day.

“Jeez, Yarbrough. You scared
the crap out of me. You’re lucky I didn’t shoot you.” Sean swung his legs over
the edge of the bed and planted his feet on the thinly carpeted floor. He
always slept in a T-shirt and boxers. His left hand reached out and grabbed the
khakis from the back of a nearby chair. He stood up, slid the pants on, and
stared curiously over at the agent. “What are you doing here? I thought you’d
be in the hospital.”

“I was…for a few hours,” he
answered with a sly grin. “Gonna take more than a sniper bullet to keep me
down. I was lucky. Whoever the shooter was didn’t use a big round.” He glanced
down at the sling. “It’ll be a while before I throw a baseball again, but I’m
okay.”

“I’m glad you’re okay,” Sean
said as he zipped up his pants. “But that still doesn’t answer the question as
to why you’re here.”

“Always direct, huh?”

“Usually. I don’t like to beat
around the bush.”

Yarbrough smiled. “I like that.
I’m sure the president would too.” The agent paused for a second and then went
on. “He wants an update on your progress.”

“The president?”

Yarbrough nodded. “According to
our sources, Gikas has been buying up companies left and right in Greece.”

“Yeah, you guys mentioned that
before.”

“It would seem he is becoming
more aggressive now. One of Gikas’s main rivals has disappeared, along with his
wife. They have a young boy named Niki who has also disappeared.”

Sean’s eyebrows furrowed. “You
think Gikas killed them?”

“We don’t know for sure,”
Yarbrough shrugged. “But it’s only a matter of time until he makes a power play
to take over the Greek government.”

Sean shook his head and made
his way over to the workstation where the map still lay on the surface,
shrouded in clear plastic. “So what?” he asked and turned back around to face
Yarbrough. “If the people want a new leader, isn’t it their right to choose who
that leader is? If they don’t want Gikas they can pick someone else.”

“Sure,” Yarbrough said with a
slow nod. “But not if he begins to starve his people into submission.”

The dubious look on Sean’s face
transitioned to concern. “Starve?”

“Our intel on the Greek situation
is that Gikas controls a significant percentage of food distribution companies
all across the country. Right now, those channels are only running at 70 percent
capacity, down 20 percent from two weeks ago.”

“He’s closing the supply chains,”
Sean realized out loud. “When too many people begin to starve, they’ll riot in
the streets. Government officials will be publicly executed.”

“And they will be all too happy
to vote for someone who can feed them,” Yarbrough finished Sean’s thought.

Sean considered the theory.
Would Gikas really starve tens of thousands of his fellow countrymen? If he
did, chaos would certainly ensue. “A lot of people will die,” he said finally.

“Yep. And we have a feeling
that would only be the tip of the iceberg.”

Sean pulled a chair over and
sat in it backward, resting his arms on the top of its back. “Why do I feel
like you’re about to tell me why the president wanted me involved from the
beginning?”

Yarbrough held up a hand. “It’s
not like that, Sean. We didn’t have enough information to be sure at first. Now
it looks like our suspicions were right all along.” He swallowed hard and then
started speaking again. “We believe that Gikas is going to try to crash the
European stock market.”

The absurd-sounding sentence
hung in the air for a moment as Sean took in the information. His eyes
narrowed. “How would he do that, with a computer virus? The world’s stock
exchanges are the most secure computer systems around. The best hackers on the
planet wouldn’t dare touch them with a ten-foot fiber optic pole.”

The joke was lost on Yarbrough.
Instead, he stayed locked in on Sean’s eyes. “He isn’t going to use a virus.
He’s going to use the Eye of Zeus.”

Things quickly began to add up
in Sean’s mind. “If the device really can tell the future, Gikas could make
every correct move on the stock market. He could buy and sell at just the right
times. He’d make billions in a matter of weeks.”

“And worse,” Yarbrough added.
“He could destroy companies if he wanted. In a position of power, where money
doesn’t matter, Gikas would be able to inflate the value of his holdings. He
could send prices of everything from corn to toilet paper through the roof. If
he had access to what the markets were going to do, he could become the most
powerful man in Europe in less than a month. And he would have the power to
bring much of the continent to its knees.”

Sean stared at the floor for a
moment, dazed by the information. “That’s too much power for any one man to
have,” he said after a minute of thought. “That’s why Julius Caesar hid the
thing.”

“Precisely. And that is why we
cannot let it fall into the wrong hands. The antikythera has to be found and
destroyed.”

Sean wasn’t so quick to agree
with the last statement, but Yarbrough was right, at least if what they
believed about the device was correct. “You’re certain that this thing can tell
the future?” Sean still needed convincing.

Yarbrough took a deep breath,
wincing as he did. Apparently, the bullet wound in his arm was still tender.
“Because of the damage done to the original, all we have is speculation, well-researched
theories. But from all we have learned about the device, it does seem like
that’s what it was used for.”

Sean let out a long sigh.
“Well, I guess that changes things a bit.”

A knock at the door interrupted
the conversation.

“It’s probably Tommy. I assume
you have a guy at the door,” Sean said with fake derision. He got up, stalked
over to the entry, and peeked through the eyehole. Tommy was outside, glancing
nervously down both sides of the hallway.

Sean opened the door and his
friend stepped in, surprised to see Yarbrough sitting in the corner. Tommy’s
face curled, confused as to what was going on. “What’s he doing here?”

“It’s good to see you too,
Tommy,” the agent said sarcastically.

Tommy felt guilty for two
seconds. “Sorry. You know what I mean. How long have you been in here? Did he
come in here last night?” he asked, raising an eyebrow.

“Very funny,” Sean said,
closing the door after giving a quick look around outside. “Agent Yarbrough was
just giving me the lowdown on what they think Gikas has planned.”

“Basically,” Yarbrough cut in,
“we believe he is going to try to starve the people of Greece into submission
by cutting off supply lines for food.”

Tommy shook his head. “The
people would kill him for that.”

“The people,” Sean corrected,
“won’t know it’s him. They are already suspicious of their inept government. If
something like this happens, there’s only one place the blame will get
directed.”

“I hadn’t thought about it that
way.”

“I’ll fill you in on all the
other stuff later. It goes way bigger than just Greece.” Sean moved back over
to the map on the desk. “We can’t let him get to the antikythera. It’s a key
piece to his plan.”

Tommy joined him at the
workstation. “Yeah, but how do we know where it is? There’s nothing on this map
that suggests the location.”

“That is the map to the Eye of
Zeus?” Yarbrough asked, cutting into the conversation again.

Both men turned back to him and
nodded. “Yeah,” Sean said. “We found it last night in the mountains at the
source of the Tiber. Ran into a few crooked cops. Although they probably had a
worse night than us.” He passed Tommy a knowing, just-us-guys glance and
smirked.

Yarbrough ignored the last
part. “Guys, if this is the only map leading to the Eye of Zeus, why not just
destroy it? Then Gikas will have no way of finding it.”

Tommy and Sean were appalled at
the idea. “First of all, with all due respect,” Sean began, “that thing
deserves to be researched and analyzed. It could change the future of
technology if what we have learned is true. Second, just because we destroy the
map right now doesn’t mean the thing won’t be found someday. And we will have
no idea who that person is or what they might do with it. Better to have it in
the right hands than no hands at all.”

Yarbrough considered Sean’s
rationale. “You really believe that’s what’s best?”

Sean’s face remained stern.
“You know as well as I know the other reason I can’t trash this,” he tapped on
the plastic protecting the map. “It’s the only bargaining chip I have to get
Adriana back.”

“You might as well forget about
that idea,” Tommy added. “There’s no way he’s going to let anything happen to the
device.”

An uncomfortable silence fell
on the room for a moment. Yarbrough stared at the two friends with a hint of
disbelief. Finally, he said, “I understand. If I were in your shoes I would do
the same thing.”

“Right,” Sean said and turned
his attention back to the map. “The problem is we don’t know where to look for it.”

His eyes pored over the old
piece of animal skin, desperate to find the solution to the riddle. They’d
stayed up late the night before, hoping to find a clue, but none was had. They
decided fresh eyes would help their plight, but as they peered at the document
nothing stood out.

Yarbrough stood up and walked
over to the other side of the desk. He was out of his league when it came to
that sort of thing, but he was still curious. “What are we looking at?” he
asked, trying to help despite doubting he could.

Sean gave a quick explanation,
walking Yarbrough through the ancient map of Greece and the names of all the
cities and islands. The agent paid close attention to what Sean was saying, and
when he was done speaking asked, “So, I don’t mean to ask a dumb question, but
these names are all in Latin?”

Sean smiled. “Yes. They’re all
in Latin, the language of ancient Rome.”

“I see. So what do these names
mean?”

Tommy cut in, explaining the
meaning of a few names on the map. When he reached one of the islands to the
west of Greece, he paused for a second with his finger resting on top of the
outline.

“What is it?” Yarbrough asked.
“Don’t know what that one means?”

Tommy didn’t respond to his
question. Instead, he directed his attention to Sean. “Do you see the name of
this island?”