The Lost Temple (2 page)

Pemberton edged out from behind the column that sheltered him and flapped his hand, trying to attract the Greek’s attention without alerting the Germans. They seemed oblivious to the danger: three of them had lit cigarettes and stood there smoking, while the others packed their equipment into rucksacks. One of them made a joke, and nervous laughter rippled around the courtyard.

“Psst,” Pemberton hissed through clenched teeth, pushing caution to its limits in his desperation to stop the Greek. What was the man thinking? The Germans had almost finished unloading the canister and were ready to go. In a few more seconds they would be on the move—and Pemberton would be safe.

The Greek must have heard Pemberton. He turned sharply,
angling the gun; then smiled broadly as he recognized the English archaeologist, a familiar presence in the valley. A broken row of teeth gleamed very white against his wizened brown skin. He lifted the rifle to his shoulder, squinted down its rusted sights and fired.

Blood exploded from the German sergeant’s throat as the shot reverberated around the courtyard. On the roof of the shrine, the Greek was frantically trying to reload, tugging on the heavy bolt of his rifle. But the Germans had seen him. Jagged lightning flared from the muzzles of their machine pistols and a torrent of bullets tore into him. The force of their impact rolled him backward, leaving a sticky smear of blood across the flat roof.

The guns went quiet. In the far distance, Pemberton could hear the battle for Heraklion still raging, but the sounds were flat and unreal after the savagery of the
Schmeissers
. One of the soldiers ran forward, up a shallow flight of stairs to the roof of the shrine where the dead Greek lay. He kicked the body, then fired a single redundant bullet into the corpse’s skull. Pemberton shuddered and edged further round the column that shielded him. Evans’s reconstructed rooms were little more than showpieces, with no more depth than the Wild West façades of a Hollywood studio. With men in the courtyard and now to his left as well, there was precious little space for Pemberton to hide. He pressed his back against the pillar, not daring to move.

Opposite, by the back wall, a shadow moved in the doorway. Pemberton froze, then breathed again. A tiny kitten had sauntered through the door and was standing in the sunlight, staring at him with wide eyes.

“Go away,” Pemberton mouthed, craning over his shoulder to make sure the German on the roof couldn’t see him. What if the cat’s movement attracted his gaze?

The kitten sat down on its hind legs, lifted a paw and began licking itself.

“Shoo.” Glancing around, Pemberton could see the soldier was still on the roof across from him, using it as a lookout
to scan the area for more partisans. If he looked over now he would surely see Pemberton.

The men in the courtyard shouted impatiently. Their sergeant was dying and they were keen to get him help. With a last look down the valley the soldier on the roof turned back. Pemberton’s shoulders slumped forward and he hugged his knapsack with relief.

But the cat had stopped washing itself and was standing very still, wobbling a little on its stubby legs. A crow had flown down and perched on the bullet-riddled corpse, oblivious to the German standing a few feet away—or to the young predator crouched in the shadows. The kitten’s tail quivered and its open jaw made a strange clicking sound. Then it pounced.

After that, everything happened too fast for Pemberton to see. The man on the roof spun round, spraying an indiscriminate stream of bullets into the open room. His comrades in the courtyard could see even less, but they were in no mood for caution. They opened up with everything they had, and suddenly the air was filled with a storm of lead, concrete, stone and plaster. Something sliced open Pemberton’s cheek, just missing his eye, but he barely felt it. He leaped to his feet and, still clutching the bag, hurled himself through the opposite doorway. He never saw what happened to the cat.

The palace of Knossos was no longer the labyrinth it had been in legend, but there were still ways to lose yourself in it and Pemberton knew the layout better than any man alive. He burst through the door, almost oblivious to the shouts that followed, and dropped over the edge of the balcony into the open ruins below. A slit opening led into an underground chamber, beneath the room he had come from, then out into the sunlight again. Here a succession of long corridors stretched out to his left but he ignored them and turned right. They had not excavated much here, afraid of disturbing the foundations of the ruins above, but they had driven a
couple of test tunnels under the great courtyard. One of them went all the way to the far side. If he could get there he might be able to work his way down to the east gate and slip out among the trees at the bottom of the valley. Footsteps pounded on the terraces above him and he pressed himself flat against the buttress wall. If anyone looked over the edge now he would be in plain sight. But no one came. There was the opening, a black hole in the embankment a few yards away. He ran to it and squeezed in. It was not much wider than Pemberton himself: several times, he banged his shoulders on the old timber joists that shored up the ceiling. Fine streams of loose dirt sifted through the cracks, settling in the creases of his shirt and trickling down his collar. Worst of all, there was no room to look back to see if anyone had followed him. He could only struggle grimly on, pushing his bag in front of him, toward the small square of light that winked at the end of the tunnel.

At last he reached it. With a final heave, he pushed the bag out so that it dropped on to the floor, then slithered after it. He was now in the shaft of the grand staircase, the best-preserved part of the palace. That had not satisfied Evans, who had embellished it still further with replica frescoes and painted columns, so that it looked almost as it must have done those thirty-three centuries earlier. To his right, a flight of stairs led up toward the courtyard, while another flight disappeared down on his left to the lower levels. If Pemberton could only get down there . . .

Flat footsteps rang out on the stairs above. Before Pemberton could move, they rounded the corner and stopped short on the landing. A German paratrooper stared down on him. He was limping slightly, perhaps from the parachute drop, but the gun in his hand didn’t waver.

“
Was haben wir hier?
” His young eyes widened as he took in the strange sight. He had expected another farmer, or maybe a lost soldier, not this bedraggled, bespectacled English archaeologist. “
Was bist du denn für einer? Engländer? Soldat?
” He jabbed the
Schmeisser
at Pemberton. “
Spion?
”

Pemberton wrapped his arms round the bag and closed his eyes. Everything had been for nothing and now he would die here: one last skeleton in the Minotaur’s labyrinth. Irrelevantly, he thought of all the tombs he had broken open during his career and wondered if their angry denizens would be waiting to abuse him in the afterlife. At least he might see Grace again.

A shot rang out, echoing around the gloomy shaft. To his surprise, Pemberton didn’t feel a thing. Perhaps the soldier had missed—or perhaps he was already dead. He waited for what seemed an eternity for the man to finish the job. When nothing happened he opened his eyes.

On the landing, the German soldier lay flat on his back, his toes in the air and the soles of his boots pointing toward Pemberton. Blood dripped from the step. Before Pemberton could hoist in this sudden reversal, a dark figure had flitted past. He ran up the stairs three at a time, checked the German’s pulse then turned back. He was not wearing a uniform, but there was a pistol in his hand and what looked suspiciously like a knife bulging from his boot. His tanned face was frowning, troubled by something.

He stared down at Pemberton. “Are you the King of Greece?”

Pemberton gazed up blankly at the man who had saved him. Sunlight from the shaft above cast a slanted shadow over his face, revealing a tough mouth, weather-beaten skin and stubble that suggested he had left his bed in a hurry that morning. Dark eyes glinted in the gloom.

There was nothing Pemberton could think to say except, “Do I look Greek?”

The man shrugged. “They told me he might be here.”

“He was.” Pemberton struggled to his feet, not quite sure how he had come to be having this conversation. “He stayed at my house.” He still remembered the shock of returning to the villa and finding the Greek monarch there: the New Zealand guards patrolling the garden, the liaison officers shouting into the radio they had erected in his study, the redundant
courtiers sitting on the terrace chain-smoking their way through endless hands of cards. “They moved him on—to Chania, I think.”

“Well, he’s not there now.” The man snapped open the breech of his revolver and replaced the spent cartridge from the pouch on his belt. “He escaped this morning—no one knows where he went. They told me to look out for him here.”

Pemberton squinted at him. “Who are you?”

“Grant.” He didn’t offer a hand.

“John Pemberton. I’m the curator here.”

“Good for you.” Grant holstered the revolver and knelt down to pick up the machine pistol. He rifled through the dead German’s uniform, extracting three spare magazines and—to Pemberton’s horror—two hand grenades.

“Surely you won’t use those here?”

“Why not?” Grant tucked the grenades into his belt and slung the machine pistol over his shoulder. “If you’re worried about chipping the paintwork I’d say you’re a few thousand years too late.” He turned back up the stairs. “Wait here.”

Pemberton’s mouth was very dry. “Where are you going?”

“To find the King of Greece.”

Pemberton waited, huddled in the shadows in the crook of the stairwell. Grant’s footsteps died away quickly and he was left in silence. Trying not to jingle the buckles, he opened the knapsack and reached in. The notebook was still there, thank God; he ran his fingers over the leather and wondered what on earth he was doing. Where had Grant come from? Would he come back? Even if he did get rid of the soldiers in the palace, how would they ever manage to evade the others that must be swarming all over the island? Pemberton was no stranger to warfare, but for twenty years he had only experienced it through the muffled blanket of archaeology: scorch marks on walls, bronze blades pitted and notched, very occasionally a skeleton to be photographed, tagged and displayed. Now he was in the middle of it, and the idea that he might become fodder for some future archaeologist was not a pleasant thought.

Shouts rang out, very nearby, followed by three quick shots. Pemberton flinched. This was a dangerous place to be—he needed somewhere darker, more out of the way. Treading softly on the broad stairs, he tiptoed further down, toward the Hall of the Colonnades.

Grant knelt beside the bodies of two German soldiers and slotted three new cartridges into his Webley. It was a habit he had learned early on, always to reload when you had the chance. He’d lost count of the number of times the extra bullets had saved his life.

He holstered the Webley and gripped the
Schmeisser. Two more
, he thought. He had been watching the valley from a hidden lookout all day, ever since a panicked adjutant had arrived at his billet gibbering that the King of Greece had gone missing. He had seen the planes streaming in, the blizzard of paratroops falling over the island and the smoke rising from the towns, and felt his rage mount. Why should he be sidelined because some idiot politician was worried about a king whose own subjects didn’t even want him? He had seen Pemberton leave the villa, then watched the squad of paratroopers make their landing up the valley. That was when he had left his post and crawled down the slope to the palace. SOE hadn’t sent him to Greece to gawp at royalty; they had sent him to kill Nazis. And that was what he intended to do.

Keeping low, he crept down the eastern slope of the palace. He had had plenty of time to study it from above, but now that he was down among the ruins it was almost impossible to reconcile his bird’s-eye view with the sprawling chaos around him. It was a sniper’s dream, so much cover spread across so many different levels that he didn’t know where to look.

“Patience,” he murmured to himself. It had never been his strong point. But there were still two Germans prowling this labyrinth, and if he blundered about he would make easy prey. Better to . . .

A fragment of stone on the wall beside him exploded
under the impact of a bullet. He hadn’t seen where the shot came from; instinctively, he grabbed the
Schmeisser
with both hands and swung round to lay down a suppressing fire. Two bullets spat out of the muzzle; then—nothing.
Jammed
. He tore it off his shoulder and threw it away, diving to his right as more shots whistled over his head.
The bastard was above him
. Staying on his stomach, he wriggled along the shallow trench that had once been a royal corridor. A dark chamber loomed at the end of it, a cellar built into the hillside. If he could make that, he would at least have a roof to protect him. Blood pounded in his ears; he could hear the German soldier scrambling down after him. Abandoning caution, he flung himself through the open doorway as another volley of bullets chased him in.

He had come into a long, thin room, with a succession of bays opening off on either side like cattle stalls. Low walls divided them, and each seemed to be occupied by massive clay urns, every one taller than Grant himself. For a moment he thought about trying to crawl inside one to hide—then dismissed the idea. He’d be trapped like a rat in a bag.

More shots flew through the doorway, kicking up plumes of dust from the dry floor. He ran to the end of the chamber, looking for a door, even a hole in the wall. There was nothing—the door he’d come in by was the only way out.
Just my luck
, he thought grimly,
the one solid room in this whole bloody ruin
. The last bay on his right was empty: he hurled himself into it as his pursuer came running through the door.