The Lost Labyrinth (30 page)

‘He’s holding his breath,’ observed Mikhail.

A fist smashed into Knox’s solar plexus, knocking the wind out of him. He heaved for air just as the second saucepan was tipped out, and so he breathed in water, triggering his gag reflex, making him buck and convulse, his whole body arching as it dedicated itself to the single ambition of air. He choked out as much water as he could, sucked in again, got only towel and more water. He couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t breathe. The necessity of air was extraordinary, like nothing he’d ever felt before, utterly terrifying, he tried to
kick and flail, he hurled himself sideways so violently that his shoulder almost dislocated from its joint, but still he had no air, his head was pounding crazily, his heart was bucking and kicking, and he could feel the blackness coming; and it was a relief when it pulled over him like a shroud, and he was gone.

A furious barking accompanied Iain’s departure, but the German shepherd must have realised its impotence, for the fury was soon replaced by a self-pitying snuffling that distracted Gaille from her efforts to decipher Petitier’s code. She went to the door, stood there watching indecisively from the shadows. There was enough slack between the two leashes to allow the dog a little movement. It began to turn in circles, so that she worried it might choke itself; but it stopped in time and went the other way, unwinding itself. A fly buzzed by Gaille’s ear; she flapped it away. The movement caught the dog’s eye. Instantly, its whimpers turned back to yowls of fury, it started straining at the rope, trying to get at her.

She fought her instinct to retreat indoors, lest
it think it had won a victory. Instead, she took a couple of steps outside into the pleasant freshness of the morning. Sunlight glinted on a pair of steel bowls by the door, presumably food and water for the dog, empty except for a few caked-on scabs; and next to them was what looked like the thighbone of a goat or sheep, gnawed bare of meat. She felt a swell of irritation at Petitier, that responsibility for his wretched dog should fall onto her. But fall on her it had. And suddenly she noticed how
thin
the German shepherd was, its ribs showing, its coat patchy and speckled with sores and scabs where he—it was a he, Gaille now saw—had scratched himself against the stone walls. And he was slightly favouring his left hind leg too. And despite his still furious barking, her heart went out to him.

They hadn’t finished their
conchiglie
in tomato sauce the night before. She fetched the leavings down from the roof, scraped them into one of the bowls, refreshed them with some water, then added slivers of ham from the joint hanging in the pantry. Then she filled the second bowl with water and took them both out. He raged to see her, hurled himself so violently towards her that she couldn’t help but jump back and splash water over her leg. ‘You stupid fucking dog!’ she cried. ‘I’m only trying to feed you.’

But he continued to snarl until she shrugged her
shoulders and took the bowls back inside. The barking stopped at once, the whimpering resumed. She gave a wail of exasperation and went back out. This time she defied his barking to set both bowls down on the ground as near to him as she dared. Then she went back inside and fetched the Mauser and held it by its barrel and pushed the bowls with its stock close enough to him that he could feed. He didn’t even look at them, not while she was there, just continued to rage, so she returned inside and replaced the Mauser and picked her notebook once more, tried to focus on the journals.

She strongly suspected a simple substitution cipher. Petitier would surely have wanted to be able to consult them without going through elaborate decipherment every time. People who devised their own ciphers were often so familiar with them that they could read them almost as easily as though they were in plain text. No code could hope to defeat sophisticated modern decipherment techniques anyway, so all he’d have hoped to do was confound a casual visitor—and a substitution cipher would have been plenty for that.

The trick with cracking such ciphers was to find repeating sequences of symbols, which would indicate the same original word. It wasn’t long before she’d identified several of these, enabling
her to take some guesses at what those words might be, then applying the letters she’d broken back to the journals. But though she tried in a variety of languages, all she got was gibberish. She put it aside for the moment, took a different tack, totting up all the different symbols he’d used, hoping to discover at least what alphabet the deciphered text was in. The Greek alphabet had twenty-four symbols, for example, as opposed to the standard twenty-six of the Roman or the twenty-eight of the Arabic. But she quickly counted forty-two different symbols, suggesting his cipher included numerals and mathematical or grammatical symbols, as well as letters. She tried a third approach, noting down the relative frequency of each of the symbols and combinations of symbols; but that didn’t prove much help either, for she didn’t know what language she was working in.

She put her pad down in frustration. There was silence outside. Or not silence, exactly. Her ears pricked up at the sound. She rose stealthily and tiptoed to the door. The dog had his muzzle deep in the bowl of pasta, and as she watched he threw back his head to gobble a mouthful down, and the glad squelching noises of his swallowing were a kind of music to her ears.

Knox’s ribs and chest felt as bruised as he could ever remember. His stomach too, from the punch he’d taken. His heart felt worn as perished rubber, and his throat and nostrils were chafed raw, as though sand-papered from within. He turned to one side, spat out watery mucous that ran feebly past the gag and down the side of his mouth. Time was blurring, his mind was playing tricks. He wasn’t sure how many sessions of this torture he’d already endured. Four? Five?

‘Ah,’ said Mikhail. ‘Rejoined us, I see.’ He was holding the hand-towel down by his side, still wet, but twisted in a gentle spiral, as though he’d just wrung it out.

Knox shivered with Pavlovian tremors. ‘What do you want?’ he asked. But the gag rendered it into an incomprehensible moan.

Mikhail flapped out the hand-towel and then folded it in half, ready to lay once more over Knox’s face. ‘Hold his head,’ he told Davit.

‘Please,’ wept Knox. ‘No more.’

‘He’s ready to talk,’ said Davit.

‘Lift his feet,’ Mikhail told Zaal.

‘Please,’ said Knox. ‘I beg you.’

Mikhail set the folded towel back over Knox’s face, turning his world dark. His heart started racing, he could hear footsteps going round and around,
deliberately building his apprehension. ‘Do you know what the function of torture is, Zaal?’ asked Mikhail.

‘To get information, sir?’

‘No,’ said Mikhail. ‘Information is the
fruit
of torture. It’s not the function.’

‘I’m not sure I understand, sir.’

‘Mankind is self-aware, Zaal. It’s what separates us from the animals. Our minds are distinct from our bodies, our thoughts from our words. If you like, we’re each puppeteers pulling our own strings. During ordinary interrogations, that gap is still there, that distance between mind and body. It allows people like Mr Knox here to
consider
their answers, to say whatever they believe is to their greatest benefit. The function of torture is to eradicate that gap, so that the subject’s thoughts are no longer distinct from their words.’

‘To turn people back into animals?’

‘Exactly, Zaal. Very well put. The trouble is, of course, that you need a certain level of pain to eradicate that gap; but people can’t talk under that level of pain. It’s not physically possible. You therefore have to relieve the pain to conduct the actual interrogation. And as soon as you relieve the pain, that gap can grow again, your subject regains a little control over their own strings. So the true purpose of torture is to eliminate that gap for good, and we do that with
dread
. Not suffering itself,
but the anticipation of it. Watch.’ Knox’s feet began to rise, he heard the swill of water, he bucked and kicked and screamed. ‘See,’ said Mikhail. ‘I’m not doing anything to him at all. All I’m doing is lifting up his feet. But right now he’ll tell me just exactly what I want to know.’ He removed the towel then reached behind Knox’s head and loosened the gag. ‘Won’t you, Mr Knox?’

‘Yes,’ wept Knox.

‘So what am I after?’

‘The fleece. You want the golden fleece.’

‘Because you have it, don’t you?’ And he folded the towel and made to place it over his face once more.

‘Yes,’ screamed Knox. ‘I have it! I have it! I have it!’

‘You see,’ said Mikhail. ‘
That’s
how torture works.’

Gaille had already given Petitier’s journal code her best shot in French, English, German and Greek, both modern and ancient. But perhaps she should be trying other languages still. He was almost certain to have been an accomplished linguist: archaeologists had to be, not merely because they dealt so directly with ancient languages, but also
because the important literature was still divided between English, German and French.

So what other languages had Petitier known? She went along his shelves. He had a couple of works in Italian, another in Spanish. She couldn’t help but notice that many of the volumes were still in pristine jackets, and she recognised several that had only recently been published. Academic texts like these didn’t come cheap. Along with the solar panels on the roof, and the well-provisioned pantry, it seemed that, whatever else had motivated Petitier to announce his discoveries to the world, it wasn’t the need for money. She went back to her chair, but her mind was clouded with fatigue, and she knew she’d never make any real headway unless she cleared it first. She clenched and then splayed her hands fast fifteen times, an old student trick that unfortunately seemed to have lost its potency, so she went outside instead, to get some exercise and fresh air.

The German shepherd was having a snooze. That was something. She went around the side of the house, where a pen had been put up in a clearing, presumably for the dog when it wasn’t on guard outside the front door. It was a wire cube some two metres square, ugly, uncomfortable and offering no shade at all, and its corners were filthy with dusty, dried-out stools, not cleaned for months.

She continued on around the back. There was a citrus grove there, with an outbuilding beyond it, and then a chicken run with a wooden hutch, out of earshot of the house. The birds clucked and jerked in alarm at her approach, all trying to hide behind each other. There were gutters on bricks for food and water, but they were empty. Her exasperation with Petitier grew stronger. The outhouse door gave a tormented squeal when she pulled it open. A long-handled broom, a spade, a fork and some other gardening tools were slouching against the left-hand wall, a sack of chicken-feed against the right. She grabbed handfuls from it that she tossed through the wire for them to peck at, then fetched a basin of water from the house. She let herself into the run, slopped the water into the trough, then retrieved eleven eggs from the hutch.

The greenhouses were next. The wooden framed door of the first dragged on the ground, as though unopened in weeks. It was murky inside from the dirty polythene, sweltering and pungent with rotting vegetation. There were parallel beds of rich dark soil either side of the central aisle, and raised plastic guttering above, with tiny holes pricked in them, from which to sprinkle water. She went a little way along the walkway, checking out the produce, congested and in serious need of attention. Tomatoes, potatoes, eggplants, sweet-corn, broccoli, pomegranates, peppers, cucumbers. More than Petitier could
possibly have needed for himself and his menagerie; presumably he sold his surplus in Agia Georgio or Anapoli in exchange for supplies. She took enough for herself and Iain, was glad to re-emerge into fresh air.

The doorway of the second greenhouse was even more overgrown, an impenetrable tangle that made it hard for her to fight inside. But the interior was surprisingly well tended, far more so than the first. She walked down the aisle with mounting astonishment. The beds were filled with crocuses, poppies, marijuana and other exotic plants. And, at the far end, a miniature forest of hallucinogenic mushrooms: the distinctive red-and-white caps of
amanita muscaria
, the muted tans of psilocybin. She laughed out loud.
How about that? The man was a stoner.
She went back to the house. The dog had woken up. She hoped that she’d earned a little credit with the food and water she’d given him. Not a bit of it. If anything, they’d restored his strength and determination to defend his territory. He snarled and snapped and strained so hard for her that she feared one or other of his leashes would give way.
Fine
, she thought.
Be like that
. She stowed her eggs and vegetables away in the pantry, then settled once more to work on Petitier’s journals.

Mikhail was delighted to have broken Knox so cleanly, but when he looked around at Boris for commendation, all he saw was doubt instead. ‘Yes?’ he asked. ‘Is there something you want to say?’

Boris pulled a face, apologising in advance for any potential offence. ‘It’s just, I was wondering, this man you talked about the night we arrived The professor. The one who’d seen the golden fleece for himself. The one who’d
touched
it. Remember?’

‘Of course I remember. What about him?’

‘Did he…I mean, did he tell you this
freely
? Or did you have to…you know?’

‘What does that matter?’ asked Mikhail. ‘He wasn’t lying, if that’s what you’re getting at. He told me the truth.’

‘Yes, I’m sure, but how can you—’

‘He was telling me the truth,’ bridled Mikhail. ‘Or are you questioning my judgement?’

‘No, sir. Of course not.’

‘Good.’ The question had soured his mood, however. It was time to show these people that his judgement could be trusted. He looked down at Knox. ‘Tell me how it happened,’ he said. ‘Start at the beginning.’