The Lost Temple (6 page)

The fighter’s arms sagged as he took the weight, but the determination in his young face was unbending.

Grant’s eyes widened. “Ephraim?”

The boy hoisted the gun on to the earthen parapet and squinted down the barrel with fierce concentration. Grant turned to the commander. “You can’t leave him here.”

“We need someone to hold off the British until we’re away.”

“I’ll do it,” Grant said, without even thinking.

The commander shrugged. “Do what you want, English. They hang you if you stay.”

“They’ll hang the boy if I go.”

Ephraim shook his head and gave a white-toothed grin. “They cannot—I am too young. By the time I am old enough to hang, Israel will be free.”

“You’d better hope so.”

Grant looked down at the boy, his floppy hair and his bright eyes shining with a desire to strike at the hated colonizers. Maybe Grant had looked the same at that age, the day he stepped on to the quay at Port Elizabeth with nothing but a suitcase to his name. Part of him—the young man who had run away to South Africa—wanted to stay with the boy and live his heroic dreams. But another, colder part knew what he had to do.

Grant reached out and ruffled Ephraim’s hair. “Keep moving around,” he told him. “It’ll make them think there’s more of you.”

Ephraim smiled, then leaned over the weapon and squeezed the trigger. The gun almost leaped out of his hands, before he slowly wrestled it under control.

The Irgun commander tugged Grant’s sleeve. “We have to go.”

They ran along the base of the wall. Grant felt horribly exposed, but Ephraim’s ragged bursts of gunfire were still keeping the garrison distracted. At the bottom of the furthest tower he found a rope ladder. With a quick scramble he was up it, standing on the rampart and looking out on a moonlit sea. Just off the rocks, where the wall met the waves, thirty men sat huddled in a motor launch.

“Down we go.” A rope dangled from one of the ancient battlements. Grant took hold of it, swung himself out and slid down—so fast he burned his palms on the coarse rope. Two steps on the slippery rock and he was looking down into the boat. Another step and an almost headlong plunge, and he was sprawled in the bilge. He heard a thud from nearby as the Irgun commander jumped down. Then the big engine opened up and Grant was tipped back as the launch gathered speed over the calm sea. No one spoke. Every man was tensed, waiting for bullets to rip apart the open boat. But none came.

Grant pulled himself up and managed to squeeze on to the bench that ran along the side of the boat. After about a quarter of an hour one of his companions lit a match, and a few moments later the boat was alive with glowing cigarettes and whispered jubilation. Grant picked his way aft and found the Irgun commander. “Where are we going?”

“We have a cargo ship waiting off shore. She’ll take us up the coast to Tire.” He opened his hands. “After that, wherever you want.”

Grant thought for a moment. Muir’s visit had planted an idea in his mind—though he had never expected to be able to act on it so quickly. He took a drag on his cigarette and blew smoke into the moonlight. “Can you get me to Crete?”

Archanes, Crete. Two weeks later

The locals called the mountain the Face of Zeus. It towered over the village and its surrounding vineyards, a high fist of rock clenched against the sky. In prehistoric times the bull-worshipping Minoans had built a shrine on its summit; thousands of years later a small, whitewashed church had replaced the shrine, but every August the villagers still made their pilgrimage up the slopes to take offerings to the sanctuary. Even the comings and goings of gods could not change the island’s routine.

At about eleven o’clock on that April morning, any god looking down would have seen the old bus rattle into the town square and discharge a gaggle of passengers—mostly farmers returning from the market. Many drifted toward the
kaphenion
to continue their arguments and gossip over coffee, but one walked in the opposite direction and turned down the narrow lane that led up toward the foot of the mountain. No one paid him much attention, though everyone noticed him. They had grown used to strangers passing through their village, ever since the Germans came. Hard experience had taught it was always safest to ignore them.

Grant walked to the edge of the village, where the lane became a track running between apple orchards. The ground rose to meet the mountain and there, just where cultivated
fields gave way to rock and wild grass, a stone house stood. Hens pecked around a rusty grape press in the front garden and bundles of unplanted vines leaned against the wall, but the shutters were freshly painted and a thin trail of smoke rose from the chimney. At the side of the house the first leaves were beginning to appear on the small grove of apricot trees.

Grant stood there for a moment, watching, then let himself through the gate and walked softly up the stairs to the front door which—as usual with Greek village houses—was on the first floor. He didn’t knock; instead, he whistled a few bars of a mournful Greek marching song.

The wind coming off the mountain snatched the notes from his lips and whisked them away. Wildflowers rustled in the breeze. A loose shutter banged against the wall. Afraid that his hat might blow away, Grant took it off and tucked it under his arm. He’d bought it in haste at the bazaar in Alexandria, three days earlier, and the band was a little loose.

He waited another minute, then decided to come back later. He turned round—and stopped.

Even with all his training, he hadn’t heard her come up behind him. She wore a plain black dress, and a black scarf covered her head. If you had seen her from behind you would have taken her for one of the old women who inhabited every Greek village, as gnarled and wizened as the olive trees and just as much part of the landscape. But if you looked from the front, you would have seen that the dress was pulled in at the waist, tracing the curves beneath, and that below the hem of the skirt her ankles were smooth and slender. Her dark hair was pulled back under the scarf, except for one loose strand which hung over her cheek. It only seemed to accentuate the wild beauty in her face.

“Grant?” The face screwed up and her dark eyes blazed. “I didn’t think you’d come back. I didn’t think you’d dare.”

Her voice was the same as he remembered it, with a quickness like a lick of flame in the way she pronounced the English words. He put his hat back on, just so he could lift it in mock courtesy. “Marina. I . . .”

“If I ever wanted to see you again, it would only be to kill you.”

Grant shrugged. “Time for that later. I came to warn you.”

“The same way you warned Alexei?”

“I didn’t kill your brother.” Grant spoke deliberately, coldly.

“No?” She had begun to move toward him, carried away by her anger, and Grant braced himself. He had never underestimated her. Most of the men who had had regretted it. “Three days after the ambush he went to meet you in the gorge at Impros. Neither of you ever came back—but only one of you is alive now.”

“I promise you, his death had nothing to do with me.” That wasn’t entirely true. He could almost taste the poison bile that had clogged his throat as he’d waited in the gorge with the Webley, the sweat stinging his eyes like tears. “Christ, he was almost like a brother to me.”

There was a lot more he could have said, but that would only have made things worse. And he didn’t have much time. He glanced over his shoulder, then back at Marina. “I came to warn you.” He’d already said that, he knew. “You remember the book?”

She looked up, caught off guard. “What?”

“The book. The archaeologist’s notebook I gave you to hide. You remember it?”

A gust of wind suddenly lifted her scarf and snatched it away. It sailed across the garden, catching in the branches of a tree by the wall. Marina’s long hair billowed out behind her, savage and untamed.

“I don’t remember it.”

“Yes you do. Two days after the invasion. I brought it here—the archaeologist asked me to. You were upset because he’d been killed.”

“Pemberton was a good man,” said Marina softly. “A
good
Englishman.” She stared at Grant a moment longer. A tear glistened in the corner of her eye. It wouldn’t fall, but nor would she wipe it away. Grant just stood and waited.

She seemed to decide something.

“Come inside.”

The house was exactly as he remembered it: a kitchen, a bedroom and a living room, all simple but impeccably tidy. A charred log smoldered in the stone hearth, and bunches of wildflowers and dried lavender were arranged in vases on the windowsills. Photographs hung on the walls: a man in a broad-brimmed hat sitting on a donkey, struggling to keep still for the camera; two young women laughing by a river bank; a young man in a conscript’s uniform, his face grainy and drawn as he tried to look brave. Grant didn’t look at that one.

Marina disappeared into the kitchen, returning a few minutes later with two tiny coffee cups and two glasses of water. She had also brushed her hair, Grant noticed. She put the drinks down on the lace tablecloth and seated herself across from him. Grant sipped his coffee cautiously and made a face. It was thick as tar.

“Have you lost your taste for Greek coffee?”

“Just checking it for strychnine.”

Marina laughed, despite herself. “I promise you, when I kill you it will be with my own hands.”

“That’s all right, then.” Grant tipped the cup back and drained it in one gulp. He watched as Marina drank hers. She must be twenty-seven now, he thought—thinner than she had been the day he limped into her house, but still with the same wild, unpredictable beauty. Even then, she and her brother had been making names for themselves with the
andartiko
, the Greek resistance. In the months that followed, helped and supplied by Grant, they had become one of the most formidable thorns in the Germans’ side. And more than that, Grant and Marina had become lovers. It had been a clandestine affair, hiding from Germans and Greeks alike: brief moments snatched in shepherds’ huts and behind broken stone walls, usually during the heat of the day before their nighttime missions. Grant could still remember the taste of the sweat on her neck; the rustle of the myrtle and oleander; her moans
and the way he had tried to silence them with kisses. They had been brutal, savage times, but that had only made the sex more urgent, more vital. Until it all ended on that blisteringly clear April day, in a gorge in the White Mountains, with the smell of rosemary and cordite.

Grant realized she was watching him and quickly took a sip of water.

“So you came to warn me. About what—Pemberton’s notebook?”

She had mastered her emotions now and was calmer, speaking with clipped politeness. Though there was still a flush in her cheeks.

“It’s . . .” He hesitated. “It’s a long story.”

“Then tell it from the beginning.” She leaned back and folded her arms across her breasts. “Tell me what happened after you left Crete.”

“I went back to England.” Even that simple statement hid a multitude of stories: an inflatable boat racing in to a beach near Dover under cover of darkness; a threadbare bedroom on Old Compton Street over a café, twitching the curtains each time a bobby walked down the street; midnight meetings in the shells of bombed-out houses. “Then one day I was walking down Baker Street and a man bumped into me. Literally—more like a rugby tackle. Terribly apologetic, frightfully sorry, insisted on buying me a cup of tea. He was so keen I said yes.”

“He was a spy?”

“I think he worked at Marks & Spencer. A clothes shop,” Grant added, seeing her blank look. “But he was a Jew. He told me about some friends of his who were trying to persuade our government to hand over Palestine to the Hebrews. God knows how they found me, but they had this idea I could help them lay hands on some weapons.”

“And?”

“I could. We’d stashed guns all over the Mediterranean in the war and it was a fair bet some of them had been left behind. They handed over some cash, I bought a boat and we were in business. You know how it is. You get into something,
word goes around, soon other people come knocking on your door wanting the same thing. We’ve finished one war but there’s another one starting already. Only now the amateurs have got a taste for it, they all want to catch up with the professionals and they’re willing to spend.”

“So you give them the guns to kill each other.”

Grant shrugged. “They’d kill each other anyway. I just help level the playing field. But it all went to hell three weeks ago. The army found out about it; they were waiting for me on the beach.” He leaned forward. “And that’s where it gets interesting. A man came to visit me in prison—an English spy. He didn’t give a damn for Palestine and he didn’t care much about my guns. He wanted me to tell him where Pemberton’s notebook was.”

Marina was leaning forward too, now, drawn in to the story. Grant tried not to notice how close their faces were. “But how did he know?”

“I must have mentioned it in my report—that Pemberton gave it to me when he died. The man who came to see me was just fishing. But he was hungry. He must have been—he’d come all the way from London just to ask me what I knew. Offered me money, a ticket out of jail. Probably a bloody knighthood if I’d pushed him.”

“What did you tell him?”

“What do you think? I told him to go to hell.”

“But he still let you out of the prison.”

“I escaped.”

“And came straight here—why? To take the book for yourself?”

Grant suddenly reached forward and took her hands in his. She gasped with surprise and pulled back, but she couldn’t break his grip. “To warn you. This English spook came all the way to a dungeon in Palestine to find out if I had it, six years after the event. I don’t think he’s a nice man. He knows I had the book; he knows my connection to you and he knows your connection to Pemberton. It’s not going to take him long to join the dots.” He stared into her eyes. “Have you got the book?”

Marina squirmed against his grip, tossing her head with anger. “What will you do with it? Sell it to this man?”