The Lost Labyrinth (28 page)

Not for much longer.

There were techniques for taking down people as powerful as Ilya Nergadze. Humiliation was one. Film them doing something shameful, and they were politically finished. That had been his initial plan. Ilya’s predilection for young boys was well-known, though getting footage was easier said than done. But Viktor’s brief hadn’t been merely to bring down Ilya. It had been to destroy his entire brood, their capacity for revenge. So he’d devised other approaches. They’d been ready to go for weeks. All he’d needed was the pretext.

Nikortsminda was the Nergadze’s stronghold.
That made it their weakness too. They thought themselves safe here, impregnable. That was why, though the whole clan never all gathered together in Tbilisi, they often did here. And they saw themselves as above the law. The last time a policeman had come here uninvited, he’d been chased off with shotguns.

Viktor’s ears had pricked up when he’d heard that.

Through his field-glasses, he could see tarpaulins on the battlements. Word was, they were gun emplacements arrayed to defend the castle from ground, lake or aerial assault. He hadn’t been able to verify it, but he wouldn’t put it past them. Such was the arrogance of the Nergadzes here in Nikortsminda; such was the arrogance he needed for his plan to come off. He felt flutters in his chest, exacerbated by the Kevlar vest beneath his shabby police uniform. ‘Are the phones out yet?’ he asked.

‘On your command,’ said Lev.

‘And the mobile masts?’

‘Like I said, on your command.’

‘What about our teams?’

‘They’re all in place. Like they were five minutes ago.’

It was the speed with which this had been put together that worried him. In plans this rushed, it was all too easy to overlook something. In plans
this rushed, you couldn’t assemble overwhelming force, you had to rely on surprise—and he’d already missed the dawn. But election day was looming, and his boss was getting fretful. He took a deep breath. He’d joined the service out of a genuine desire to serve his country, not to make a career. But the life grew on you; you came to realise that nothing else would do. Fuck this up, and his career was toast. But make a success of it…

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Let’s do it.’

Franklin had been generous enough to offer Knox a bed for the night; now he followed up by insisting on driving him to a nearby Metro station so that he could make his breakfast with Nadya. The train arrived just as he reached the platform; he had to squeeze into a crowded carriage, uncomfortably aware that he was still wearing yesterday’s shirt.

He got off at Monistariki. A woman in unnecessarily high heels grabbed the escalator handrail in front of him and clung on like a first-time ice-skater. It was overcast when he emerged into the square; hawkers showed off their latest toys, while others spread out fake designer handbags and pirated DVDs on blankets. He glanced
up at the white marble of the Parthenon, the camera flashes of early-bird sightseers giving off sparks like a glitter-ball. A boy blew bubbles that drifted on the light breeze, keeping Knox company as he walked along a narrow street of restaurants and shops. He found himself caught up with a Japanese tour party; they seemed to be heading towards his café, so he allowed himself to be swept along with them, fighting an urge to yawn. They emerged into a small square, most of the buildings showing patches of fresh paint: this was too important a tourist area for graffiti to be tolerated. Several mopeds were chained against the high wall to his right, the perimeter of some historic site. This whole area was studded with them. He and Gaille had already visited several during their—

He heard the man before he saw him, shouting into his mobile phone as he scanned the crowds, a hand clamped over his ear to block out the hubbub. The giant from yesterday, not a doubt of it, but he hadn’t yet spotted him. Knox instinctively span on his heel and hurried away, his head ducked, his shoulders hunched, pushing his way through the tourists, praying his luck would hold. At the corner he risked a glance around. To his dismay, the giant was coming after him, bullying his way through the crowds, yelling into his phone. Knox broke instantly into a run, though it was impossible to move quickly through the narrow thronging streets.

He reached again the small square, saw two more of the Georgians from the day before converging from his right and from straight ahead. They saw him and shouted out to each other, forcing him to flee to his left, the only direction open to him, up a steep cobbled lane. A man was lopping branches from a tree with a petrol-powered chainsaw. For a mad moment, Knox considered wresting it from him and fighting a desperate rearguard until the police arrived; but the Georgians were too close behind him. And now he saw yet another of them striding purposefully towards him. There was a narrow alley to his right. At least it was empty of people, allowing him to break at last into a full-blooded sprint, put some distance between himself and the pursuit. The alley kinked so sharply right that his soles lost grip on the polished cobbles, and he crashed hard into the facing wall, falling onto the ground and scraping his palms, picking himself instantly up and running on.

The alley kinked again; he slowed a little to take this corner, keeping his eyes down to make sure of footing. But when he looked up again, a white van was parked immediately ahead of him, its rear doors open, blocking the full width of the alley. And then, even as he heard the Georgians running up the alley behind him, he saw Mikhail Nergadze leaning against the wall with his arms
folded, looking distinctly pleased with himself at the ease with which he’d driven his lab rat here through this Athens maze.

Viktor drove alone down to the castle in the battered, unmarked Lada he’d picked out from the pool. It was just the kind of car that a low-level policeman might own. He got into character as he drove: pompous, officious and stupid, just the kind of man to get under the skin of the Nergadzes. The drawbridge was up, but there was a wooden cabin this side of the moat, two guards on duty outside. One of them, his feet up on a low rattan table, was wearing a holstered handgun. The other was leaning against the cabin wall, a shotgun over his shoulder.

Viktor wound down his window. ‘Police,’ he said. ‘I’m here to speak to Ilya Nergadze.’

‘At this time of morning?’ grunted the first guard, not bothering to put his feet down. ‘You’ve got to be kidding.’

‘No,’ said Viktor. ‘I’m not kidding.’

‘Come back in a couple of hours. They had a late one last night.’

‘I’m here on police business,’ snapped Viktor. ‘I demand to see Ilya Nergadze. Now.’

‘Demand all you like,’ said the guard. ‘Won’t make a damned bit of difference.’

Viktor got out of the Lada, slammed the door. ‘Then please let him know I’m here. And that I have a warrant.’

‘Fine,’ sighed the guard. He got to his feet, went inside, held a brief conversation on the intercom, then came back out and sat down again.

Men appeared on the battlements, flaunting their weapons. Viktor leaned back from the waist so that his buttonhole camera could film them. You could never have too much footage. The drawbridge began to lower, evidently operated from inside. He expected the main gates to open too, but a smaller door inset in the foot of one of the turrets opened instead, and then Alexei Nergadze padded out, wearing only a pair of cut-off jeans, proudly showing off his paunch. ‘Who the fuck are you?’ he grunted, walking across the drawbridge.

‘Police,’ said Viktor.

‘You’re not from round here.’ He’d brought a cup of coffee with him, was warming his hands around it. ‘I know our local police.’

‘I’m in the antiquities department,’ said Viktor grandly. ‘From Tbilisi.’

‘Antiquities!’ scoffed Alexei. ‘You’ve got to be fucking kidding me. I didn’t even know there was such a thing.’

‘Well, now you do.’

‘Couldn’t hack it as a real cop, eh?’

‘I am a real cop. What’s more, I have a real warrant to search these premises.’

‘Give it here, then,’ said Alexei. ‘We’re running short of toilet paper.’

‘This is not a joke, I assure you,’ Viktor told him primly. ‘We have reason to believe that you have valuable artefacts here; artefacts that belong to the nation of Georgia, and that are in danger of being destroyed.’

‘You have to be out of your fucking mind,’ said Alexei, his good humour all used up. ‘Don’t you know who we are?’

‘You’re a citizen of the Republic of Georgia, subject to its laws, just like the rest of us.’

‘That’s it! I’ve had enough of this! Get the fuck out of here.’

‘I have a warrant,’ said Viktor, barging past Alexei to the drawbridge. ‘I’m conducting my search, whether you like it or not.’

‘You’re doing nothing of the fucking sort,’ said Alexei, grabbing his shoulder and pulling him back. ‘This is private property.’

‘Assaulting an officer in the course of his duties,’ said Viktor smugly. ‘Alexei Nergadze, I arrest you on the—’

The head-butt caught Viktor completely by surprise. He found himself lying dazed and on his
back nursing his nose, studying his hands for blood, while Alexei went over to the cabin, grabbed the shotgun from the guard, then came back to stand over Viktor. ‘You were saying?’ he asked, taking a sip of coffee.

There were many reasons why other careers had been spoiled for Viktor, but this was the biggest. This moment right here. In what other field would he have this kind of power over powerful men? He pressed the transmitter button on his chest. ‘Officer down!’ he cried. ‘Back-up! Back-up! Back-up!’

‘Here, doggie, doggie,’ called out Gaille, standing well to the side of the house. ‘Here, boy.’

The German shepherd opened one eye, then the other. It looked wearily at her for a moment, as though this wasn’t how it wanted its day to start, but then duty called and it bounded to its feet and galloped towards her, so that even though she knew she was well out of its range, she jumped backwards all the same, sending a jolt through her ankle. The dog reached the end of its tether and jerked back, though not so violently as last night, as though it was learning. Then it rose up on its rear legs and made like it was one of the four horses of the apocalypse.

Behind its back, Iain appeared round the far side of the house. Using Gaille as a distraction, he crept forwards with his rope, tied a slipknot round the dog’s leash where it met the metal spike, then retreated to a safe distance. Now it was his turn to make a rumpus. The dog turned and looked back and forth between him and Gaille, torn by choice. Iain took a couple of steps towards the front door, enough to provoke it into charging. He danced easily out of range, then pulled on his rope so that the slipknot ran all the way up the dog’s leash until it was tight against its collar, effectively pinning it between himself and the spike, like a wild horse being broken by two cowboys with lassos. Iain now leaned back as though abseiling down a cliff, and stepped to his left, dragging the dog after him, until he’d reached an olive tree. He looped his rope twice around its trunk then tied another knot in it, trapping the dog impotently between its two leashes.

After that, getting through the front door was a breeze. The wooden jamb had rotted; it splintered quickly before Iain’s crowbar. The door opened straight into a main room, its bare-cement floor covered by scattered worn rugs. There was a tattered armchair to their left by a shuttered window, a Mauser hunting rifle leaning against it, along with a box of shells, as though Petitier had liked to sit there and shoot any wildlife that came
into view. The walls above it were haphazardly decorated with framed black-and-white photographs of what appeared to be the surrounding countryside and escarpment, while the back wall was given over entirely to shelving, crammed with books, folders and magazines, more books stacked upon the sturdy oak desk in the corner.

Iain sniffed the vinegary air. ‘Fish and chips,’ he said. ‘A man after my own heart.’

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.