‘Okay, okay, so shoot me. I apologize. I’m just wound up about that flash drive.’
Maggie nodded. ‘I spoke to our resident computer whiz. He’s like a modern doctor, won’t make house calls. Said you’ll know if there’s a potential problem when access requires a password. Otherwise, just use it. If it’s password protected, you’ll have to bring the drive down to him because that’s where the equipment is that he needs to get around it.’
Andreas let out a deep breath. ‘Thank you, Maggie, that was very efficient of you, as always.’
‘Keep going, I love it when you kiss my butt.’
Kouros laughed again. Andreas shot him a glare, and Kouros laughed some more.
Andreas put up his hands. ‘Enough already. I give up. Now, please, tell me who’s the other guy on the tape?’
‘Fine, just be patient, okay?’
Andreas nodded. ‘Okay, promise.’
She looked out the window. ‘I just pray he’s not a bad guy.’ She turned back to Andreas. ‘You know how interested I am in our church’s history.’
Andreas nodded.
‘I don’t think I’ve missed a lecture in Athens on the subject in years, unless I’ve heard it before or know the speaker will bore me to death.’ She let out a deep breath.
‘One speaker in particular fascinated me. I never missed one of his lectures, even went to Thessaloniki twice to hear him. He didn’t speak very often, possibly once a year, at most. But he was mesmerizing.’ She nodded. ‘Yes, he’s your man.’
‘What’s his name?’
‘The name isn’t important, you won’t recognize it. It’s who he is that’s… mind-blowing.’ She paused. ‘The twenty principal monasteries on Mount Athos are ranked in a hierarchical order that cannot be changed. He’s from one of the five most senior monasteries. He must have been well liked and respected by his monastery because I remember at one lecture he was introduced as his monastery’s representative to the Holy Community.’
‘What’s that?’ asked Kouros.
‘Mount Athos is a self-governing monastic state within Greece, made up of twenty self-governing territories, each with a ruling monastery and each with a representative to the Holy Community, the governing body of Mount Athos. They’re monks who must be at least thirty years old, but usually much older, and well versed in church law and doctrine. They move from their monasteries to Karyas, Mount Athos’ capital, where they meet in the tenth-century Church of the Protaton, the oldest church on the Holy Mountain, and from what I hear, enjoy modern communications with the outside world and a pretty fancy lifestyle. At least for monks.’
That explained the Italian suit, thought Andreas.
‘Anyway, he didn’t seem to be lecturing anywhere, and I was worried he might be ill or, God forbid, passed away.’ She crossed herself. ‘So, I went to a lecture by another representative and asked him if he knew what had happened to the other monk. You’d have thought I’d asked him to commit blasphemy. I thought it was because I was a woman, and that really pissed me off.’
Pity the poor monk who did that, thought Andreas.
‘I called the head of police in Karyas and asked him to find out what happened to the monk. I couldn’t believe it. He knew, but wouldn’t tell me, either. I reminded him who I worked for and that unless he wanted to be reassigned to duty on a bread-and-water prison barge off the coast of Turkey in August, he’d better start talking.’
‘I didn’t know we had that sort of place,’ said Kouros.
She smiled. ‘We don’t, but he got my point and told me what I wanted to know. The monk was alive and well, but in a position many on Mount Athos preferred playing down. A group of four monks, called the Holy Administration, serves as the executive committee of the Holy Community. One member of the group must come from one of the five senior monasteries, the other three from the remaining fifteen. He was one of the four overseers.’
She paused and shut her eyes. ‘But he was more than just a member of the Holy Administration. He was from a senior monastery.’ Maggie opened her eyes. ‘And that made him protos, the head of it all. He’s their president, the most powerful churchman on Mount Athos.’
Andreas picked up the flash drive and stared at it. He’d guessed right about the man being from the Holy Mountain, but never imagined that it was his mountain. ‘You know, Maggie, somehow I’m not as excited as I once was to learn what’s on this thing.’ He fluttered his lips. ‘But what the hell, what’s the worst that can happen?’
He slid the drive into his computer’s USB port, hoping the answer to his question was not eternal damnation.
The Protos wasn’t used to arriving home in secret. But Sergey was adamant. No one should see them arriving so early in the morning from the mainland. Karyas was a small village and gossip its primary pastime — especially among civilians working for the civil governor appointed by Greece’s ministry of foreign affairs and charged with supervising the area’s secular matters. It was their way of impressing co-workers back on the mainland that what they did really was important, even if they seemed to be living in the middle of nowhere.
A simple, ‘It’s Easter Week and the Protos was away last night,’ would spawn endless speculation on his whereabouts, and perhaps a ‘My cousin Nick drives a taxi and thought he saw the Protos at the Athens airport,’ followed by more speculation over the reason for the trip at such a busy time. That was not the sort of gossip Sergey wanted to risk reaching the ears of nervous killers.
By mid-morning they were back at the Protaton, in the Protos’ Church, a place of serenity and prayer. Yet the Protos’ thoughts were on its martyrs, for here a protos and monks loyal to him were slaughtered on orders of a ruler who had replaced Orthodoxy with another faith and sought retribution against that protos for denouncing his new faith as heresy. But that was in 1282, in a time of savage zealots murdering monks in the name of God.
The words repeated through the Protos’ mind: ‘a time of savage zealots, murdering monks in the name of God.’ He shook his head and thought of Vassilis. Old friend, why did you get us into this?
Three faces stared at the computer screen. Twenty-one faces stared back. Make that forty-two: twenty-one on each of two photographs. That was all Andreas, Kouros, and Maggie found on the flash drive. That and a few cryptic lines typed on a one-page document. The reluctant computer whiz that Andreas had Kouros ‘drag up here by his geek whatever’ had no better luck. He swore nothing else was on the drive and left.
They’d been staring at the photographs for what seemed eternity, and must have read the words a hundred times. The document bore no sender or recipient, only two lines:
THE END WILL COME AS A THIEF IN THE NIGHT.
PREPARE, FOR THE TIME IS IN THEIR HANDS.
‘Okay, I get the “thief in the night” reference to Revelation,’ said Maggie. ‘No one knows when the end may come, so be prepared spiritually and morally for that moment, but the part about time being “in their hands” makes no sense. Eastern Orthodoxy doesn’t believe mortals can bring about or even anticipate the end.’
Kouros smiled. ‘Sort of sounds like the answer I get every time I ask a Greek bureaucrat about the status of anything. “It will happen when it happens, it’s in God’s hands.”’
Andreas laughed, Maggie stuck out her tongue.
‘So whose “hands” are we talking about?’ said Kouros. ‘It has to tie into the photographs; otherwise, why did he put it on the drive?’
‘Well, we know one of them is the Protos, so unless he’s a bad guy, it can’t be all of them.’ Andreas kept switching between the two photographs; each showed twenty-one clerics, identically posed in full regalia in three rows of seven, as if attending the same ceremony. The photographs looked to be taken at the same time, although in one a tiny oriental rug was centered at the feet of the clerics in the front row and an empty chair sat at the right end of each row. He shook his head. ‘There’s something not right about this.’ He brought the photos up onto the screen together, one above the other.