The Lost Temple

T
HE
L
OST
T
EMPLE

A
LSO BY
T
OM
H
ARPER

The Mosaic of Shadows

Knights of the Cross

Siege of Heaven

A
S
E
DWIN
T
HOMAS

The Blighted Cliffs

The Chains of Albion

Treason’s River

Tom Harper

St. Martin’s Paperbacks

NOTE:
If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

First published in the United Kingdom by Century, an imprint of Random House Group Limited

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

THE LOST TEMPLE

Copyright © 2007 by Tom Harper.

Cover photograph © Ben Heys/Shutterstock

All rights reserved.

For information address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2008024943

ISBN: 978-0-312-94357-8

Printed in the United States of America

St. Martin’s Press hardcover edition / November 2008

St. Martin’s Paperbacks edition / September 2009

St. Martin’s Paperbacks are published by St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

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For Oliver Johnson
the Special One

When, by chance, this story had fallen into my hands, I—eager to tell the truth of history—felt compelled to spread it more widely: not out of vanity, but rather so that I might provide entertainment for an idle mind.

Preface to
A Journal of the Trojan War
, Dictys of Crete

Crete, 20 May 1941

Legend said this was the first place men flew. Like artificial birds, they had dressed themselves with beeswax and feathers, launched themselves from the lofty palace and soared over the jewelled sea. They had climbed high, ever nearer the sun—until one, a boy, flew too close, melted his wings and fell. By the time the last feather settled on the water, the boy had slipped beneath the waves, into myth. Now there were men in the sky again. Instead of feathers they flew on wings of silk, and the webbed harnesses which held them would not melt in the sun.
Fallschirmjäger
, they called themselves: hunters from the sky. They did not fall, but swooped down to the earth like hungry eagles.

Pemberton saw them from his office window. He had known he was in trouble when the bombing stopped. For the past week it had been a regular terror: the drone of the engines, then the howl of the diving Stukas and the ground shaking under their explosions. Sometimes the bombs had come so near the villa that the artifacts shivered in their display cases, rattling like loose teacups on saucers, until the staff moved them down to the basement. Now the bombs had stopped. The illustrious refugees who had made his life a misery had departed and the staff were all gone—Pemberton had sent them home to their villages and families that morning. He was the only one left. And it was time for him to go.

He grabbed his knapsack from the hatstand in the corner and turned it out over the desk. A week-old sandwich fell limply on to his desk, followed by a half-empty Thermos, his camera, torch and penknife, and a few crumpled chocolate wrappers. He kept the torch and the penknife and discarded the rest, though he made sure to pop the film out of the camera. Then, trembling with haste, he unlocked the desk drawer and pulled out the notebook. Dust had spidered the creases in the soft brown leather, and the gold monogram in the corner had almost worn away. It had been a gift from his wife, almost her last, and he treasured it—but that was not what made it most valuable. The invaders could have everything in the villa—the artifacts and museum pieces, the clothes and the furnishings imported from England, even his beloved library—but not that.

There was nothing else he could do. He buckled the knapsack and walked to the door. He stepped out into the sun, while above him a multicolored canopy of silk clouds—white, red, green, and yellow—drifted earthwards from the sky.

Pemberton had waited until he was certain, until he saw the first parachutes blossoming in the afternoon sky. Now it was too late. The whole valley throbbed with the echo of the Junkers-52 transport planes roaring overhead, and he could already hear the staccato thump of gunfire from round the bend that led north to the harbor at Heraklion. The Germans must have landed south of the town, cutting him off, and with every passing moment more reinforcements were jumping in from the Junkers. He wouldn’t get through that way. So he went south, up into the hills and toward the mountains.

He walked quickly. He had been on Crete since before the war, two years now, and his long hikes into the island’s interior had become legendary among his colleagues. The flab that had begun to creep over his belt after too many college dinners had retreated, and if the sun had bleached the last traces of black out of his hair, it had compensated by breathing new health and color into his cheeks. He was fifty-six, but felt younger now than he had ten years earlier.

When he had gone about a quarter of a mile, he looked back. In the dip below, the excavated walls of the palace of Knossos were just visible in the ring of pine trees. The palace had been his life’s obsession and even in his hurry he felt a stab of loss at abandoning it to the invaders. As a student before the Great War he had helped the legendary Sir Arthur Evans dig it out of its three-thousand-year sleep—a golden age, when it felt as if they tunnelled into myth itself and every day brought new finds that turned legends into history. Thirty years later, widowed, he had returned as the site’s curator. Archaeology’s age of heroes had passed: the swift charge of discovery had given way to the meticulous crawl of scholarly analysis, but he had been happy enough. He had even managed a few discoveries of his own—and one that would have astounded even Evans. He reached behind his back and squeezed the knapsack, making sure yet again that the notebook was still there.

Another plane swept in low from the north. In the clear air he could see it plainly: the squat nose, the black cross on its side, even the white ribbon of the static line trailing behind. It must have reached the end of its drop run; in a moment it would swing round, wheeling back to the mainland for another cargo. Except that it didn’t turn. It carried on over the palace and up the valley, straight for him.

Pemberton was no coward. He had stood in the trenches in Flanders and forced himself over the top with the others, but the sight of the oncoming plane froze him still. He tipped back his head and spun round as it lumbered overhead, the beat of its engines so slow he thought it must drop out of the sky. The square hatch in the fuselage gaped like a wound.

Pemberton jumped: a figure had appeared in the hatchway and was peering out. He must have seen Pemberton, and for a second Pemberton felt a strange communion as their gazes met. Then the man fell. Arms outstretched like wings, he dropped from the plane, hung there a moment, then was whipped away by the slipstream. A long tail unravelled behind him, pulled taut and blossomed into the white dome of
a parachute, jerking him upright like a marionette. Even then, he still seemed to be falling with terrifying speed.

It had taken seconds, but already there were more men in the air behind him. The plane hadn’t finished its drop run at all. Pemberton looked down. The wind would carry the paratroopers past him, but not so far that he could escape them. He was trapped. With no alternative, he turned back toward the palace in the trees.

He scrambled up the four-thousand-year-old steps and collapsed behind a wall, breathing hard. Evans’s ambition had not been satisfied simply by excavating the palace: in places he had actually tried to rebuild it and the result was a clutch of half-built rooms emerging from the ruins like ghosts. Some visitors found them evocative, others an insult to archaeology; Pemberton, though professionally expected to disapprove, had always been secretly fond of them. He had never thought he would find himself hiding for his life there. He twisted round and lifted himself to peer out of the window in the resurrected wall.

For a moment he dared to hope that perhaps the paratroopers had headed inland. Then he saw them. They were even closer than he’d feared: in the few minutes it had taken him to run back to the palace, they had extricated themselves from their parachutes, formed up and begun maneuvering down the valley. He could see them spread out in a thin line, moving through the dappled olive groves that sloped down to the palace. He counted six of them, in tight-fitting rimless helmets and baggy green smocks that seemed strangely impractical for fighting. If they had taken the road to the west, they would have gone well past the ruined palace. As it was, they would walk straight into it.

From away behind him something hard and metallic grated on stone. He spun about in terror—then, belatedly, remembered the men in the valley. Had they seen him? No. They had vanished under the shadow of the south wall and were temporarily out of sight. He looked back, more careful this time. In the great courtyard, where the ancients had
once danced on the backs of bulls, a huge crimson parachute lay spread out like a bloodstain. The fabric writhed and shivered in the breeze, while behind it a tangled mane of black ropes trailed out to a steel canister about the size of a coffin. Pemberton could see the crack of the impact in the gypsum slabs and he felt a flash of anger at such casual vandalism.

The first of the German soldiers, a sergeant, hauled himself over the parapet and ran across the courtyard to the canister. The others followed, crowding round him as he knelt and opened the lid. Some of the men were stepping out of the baggy overalls they had worn for the drop, revealing the gray battledress and bandoliers beneath, while others took the weapons the sergeant was handing out.

But away from the soldiers, something was moving. From the corner of his eye, Pemberton saw a figure creeping across the roof of the shrine that stood a little way to his left. He wore a white smock, with a black scarf tied over his head, every inch the traditional Cretan farmer. In his hand, held carefully to avoid scraping it on the stone, was a rifle. It looked even more ancient than the man himself—it could hardly have seen use in the half-century since the Turks were chased off the island—but there was no doubting what he meant to do with it.