Jack awoke with a start to the rays of morning sunlight playing across his face. He opened his eyes, looked round blearily, then shut them again. He must be dreaming, he thought. He was lying on his back in the middle of a king-sized bed on freshly laundered linen. The bed occupied one side of a cavernous room, its walls whitewashed and hung with half a dozen modernist paintings which all seemed vaguely familiar. Opposite him was a huge bay window, its tinted glass revealing a cloudless sky and a line of sun-bleached hills.
He began to raise himself and felt a stab of pain in his left side. He looked down and saw that a bandage covered his ribcage below a mass of bruising. Suddenly it all came back to him, their extraordinary adventure in the volcano, their final passage into the audience chamber, the image of Costas sprawled in agony and Katya standing beside him. He sat up with a jolt as he remembered her last word, his mind reeling in disbelief.
“Good morning, Dr. Howard. Your host is awaiting you.”
Jack looked up and saw a demure man of indeterminate age standing at the door. He had the Mongoloid features of central Asia, yet his English accent was as immaculate as his manservant’s uniform.
“Where am I?” Jack demanded gruffly.
“All in good time, sir. The bathroom?”
Jack looked in the direction the man had indicated. He knew there was little point in remonstrating and eased himself onto the richly hued mahogany floor. He padded into the bathroom, ignoring the Jacuzzi and opting instead for the shower. He returned to find new clothes laid out for him, an Armani black roll-neck shirt, white slacks and Gucci leather shoes, all in his size. With his three-day stubble and weather-beaten features he felt at odds with designer clothing, but he was thankful to be out of the E-suit with its unpleasant lining of congealed blood and seawater.
He smoothed back his thick hair and spotted the manservant hovering discreetly outside the doorway.
“Right,” Jack said grimly. “Let’s find your lord and master.”
As he followed the man down an escalator, Jack realized that the room he had occupied was one of a number of self-contained pods dotted around the ravines and slopes of the hillside, all linked together by a nexus of tubular passageways that radiated out from a central hub rising from the valley floor.
The edifice they were now entering was a vast circular building capped by a gleaming white dome. As they approached, Jack saw that the exterior panels had been angled to catch the morning sun as it shone down the valley, and below stood another battery of solar panels next to a structure that looked like a generating station. The whole complex seemed bizarrely futuristic, like a mock-up for a lunar station yet more elaborate than anything NASA had ever devised.
The attendant closed the doors behind Jack and he stepped guardedly into the room. Nothing about the utilitarian exterior had prepared him for the scene inside. It was an exact replica of the Pantheon in Rome. The vast space had precisely the dimensions of the original, capacious enough to accommodate a sphere more than forty-three metres in diameter, larger even than the dome of St. Peter’s in the Vatican. From the opening far above, a shaft of sunlight lit up the coffered vaulting, its gilt surface illuminating the interior just as the original would have done in the second century AD.
Below the dome the walls of the rotunda were broken by a succession of deep niches and shallow recesses, each flanked by marble columns and capped by an elaborate entablature. The floor and walls were inlaid with exotic marbles from the Roman period. At a glance Jack could identify the Egyptian red porphyry favoured by the emperors, green lapis lacedaemonis from Sparta and the beautiful honey-coloured giallo antico of Tunisia.
To Jack, this was more than antiquarian whimsy on a grand scale. Instead of the catafalques of kings, the niches were filled with books and the recesses with paintings and sculpture. The huge apse beside Jack was an auditorium with rows of luxurious seats in front of a full-sized cinema screen, and computer workstations were dotted around the room. Directly opposite the apse was an immense window. It faced north; the distant ridge Jack had seen from his bedroom window here filled the view, with the sea to the left.
The most striking addition to the ancient scheme was in the very centre, an image at once supremely modern and completely in keeping with the Roman conception. It was a planetarium projector, gleaming on its pedestal like a Sputnik. In antiquity the initiate could gaze upwards and see order triumphing over chaos; here, though, the fantasy was taken one step further, into a dangerous realm of hubris the ancients would never have dared enter. To project an image of the night sky inside the dome was the ultimate illusion of power, the fantasy of total control over the heavens themselves.
It was the playroom of a man of culture and scholarship, Jack reflected, of incalculable wealth and indolence, someone whose ego knew no bounds and who would always seek to dominate the world around him.
“My small conceit,” a voice boomed. “Unfortunately I could not have the original so I built a copy. An improved version, you will agree. Now you understand why I felt so at home inside that chamber in the volcano.”
The remarkable acoustics meant the voice could have come from beside Jack, but in fact it emanated from a chair next to the window in the far wall. The chair swivelled round and Aslan came into view, his posture and red robe exactly as Jack remembered before he lost consciousness.
“I trust you enjoyed a comfortable night. My doctors attended to your injuries.” He gestured towards a low-set table in front of him. “Breakfast?”
Jack remained where he was and scanned the room again. It had a second occupant, Olga Bortsev, Katya’s research assistant. She was staring at him from one of the niches in front of a table covered with open folio volumes. Jack cast her a malevolent glare and she looked back at him defiantly.
“Where is Dr. Kazantzakis?” he demanded.
“Ah yes, your friend Costas,” Aslan replied with a hollow laugh. “You need not be concerned. He is alive if not kicking. He is assisting us on the island.”
Jack reluctantly made his way across the room. His body desperately craved replenishment. As he approached the table, two waiters appeared with drinks and sumptuous platters of food. Jack chose a seat at the far end from Aslan and settled down gingerly in the soft leather cushions.
“Where is Katya?” he asked.
Aslan ignored him.
“I trust you liked my paintings,” he said conversationally. “I had your suite hung with some of my latest acquisitions. I understand your family has a special interest in cubist and expressionist art of the early twentieth century.”
Jack’s grandfather had been a major patron of European artists in the years following the First World War, and the Howard Gallery was famous for its modernist paintings and sculpture.
“Some nice canvases,” Jack said drily. “Picasso, ‘Woman with a Baby,’ 1938. Missing from the Museum of Modern Art in Paris since last year. And I see your collection is not restricted to paintings.” He gestured towards a glass case in one of the niches. Inside was an artefact instantly recognizable the world over as the Mask of Agamemnon, the greatest treasure from Bronze Age Mycenae. It normally resided in the National Museum of Athens, but like the Picasso had disappeared in a series of daring heists across Europe the previous summer. To Jack it was a symbol of nobility that mocked the arrogance of its grotesque new custodian.
“I was a professor of Islamic art, and that is where my heart lies,” Aslan said. “But I do not restrict my collecting to the fourteen hundred years since Muhammad received the word of Allah. The glory of God shines through the art of all ages. He has blessed me with the gift to make a collection that truly reflects His glory. Allah be praised.”