The thought flicked at Sean’s heart. He’d been tortured once. It was the worst thing he’d ever endured in his life. Fortunately, he had escaped and made his way back to safety. He doubted Adriana would have the same opportunity. He pictured her in a dark room, bound and gagged, undergoing intense questioning. The idea tied his stomach in knots.
The president went on. “If you find the Eye of Zeus, Gikas will bring Adriana to you.”
“Let me guess, you want me to work out a trade.”
Dawkins nodded. “You catch on fast.”
Sean knew how government types worked, even if they weren’t really government types at their core. “Of course, I assume you won’t be letting the antikythera get into the hands of kidnapper.”
“We will have men on standby. As soon as Gikas presents her, they will move in.”
“That means you will need to be in a neutral place,” Sean’s mind was already working.
“Precisely.”
“This is all working on a huge assumption, Mr. President. What if I can’t find this artifact? It may not even exist.”
Dawkins stood up and clapped both hands on his thighs. “Sometimes you have to have a little faith, Sean. I am putting my faith in you that you’ll get the job done. We cannot let Dimitris Gikas get his hands on the relic. It must be kept from him at all costs.”
“Sounds like you believe this thing does exist,” Sean said with a hint of cynicism.
The president didn’t hesitate. “I do. And for the sake of your girlfriend, you should, too.”
He made a good point. Sean knew he was right, too. A plan was already formulating in his brain. He would first need to find anything Adriana might have left behind regarding her research on the antikythera. From what he recalled, she constantly made backups of information she’d gleaned, sometimes digital, sometimes as low-fi as handwritten notes on napkins.
Sean would need help too. He would need an all-access pass to Europe. Getting his gun across borders wouldn’t be an issue, but if he got caught with it he would need insurance that he wouldn’t be incarcerated. On top of all that, there was one more thing Sean felt he needed.
“I’m going to need to bring someone else on to help me with this,” he said after a few seconds of looking down at the floor silently. He raised his eyes and met with the president’s.
Dawkins tapped his fingers on the antikythera files. “This is highly classified information, Sean. We cannot let any of it get into the hands of the public. I’m sure you can appreciate the sensitive nature of it.”
“The person I’m talking about is used to working on delicate things like this, Mr. President. I need him. He has an intricate knowledge of ancient languages, cultures, and history. He’s also handy in a fight. I trust him like a brother.”
The president narrowed his eyes suspiciously. “What’s his name?”
Sean smiled broadly. “My buddy from the IAA. Tommy Schultz.”
Chapter 8
Adriana lay on her side, staring out the lone window of the wine cellar. The chilly room was almost pitch black save for the pale light of the waning moon coming through the narrow window. A palm branch occasionally waved across her view, blowing in the breeze that rolled up the hillside from the sea.
The man who had abducted her had provided a military cot for her to sleep on, with only a thin sheet to provide her warmth. She fought to keep from shivering, knowing that two cameras were watching her at all times from the corners of the room. She wouldn’t give them the satisfaction.
She cursed herself for being careless enough to get caught. The men had been waiting in her hotel room in Rome. She’d just returned from a locker she’d secured at the train station. Leaving all the eggs in one basket was something she’d avoided since getting into her sometimes-dangerous line of work.
When one of the ambushers stepped out from behind the door, grabbing her from behind, she’d dropped the locker key to the floor. As she sidestepped the stocky attacker, she kicked the key under a leather club chair in the corner with her left foot.
The man attempting to grab her took a knee to the groin as she used his momentum against him and pulled him toward her. He dropped to the ground instantly, moaning in agony. Unfortunately, there’d been a second man in the room. She heard the hammer of the pistol pull back.
She’d had no choice but to surrender. The man with the gun had been smart enough to keep his distance, but remain close enough that there would be no chance of missing his target. A second later, she’d felt a small prick on her thigh. The drugs worked fast, knocking her unconscious within a minute. Adriana didn’t remember anything after that until she woke up on the strange island.
She’d heard the man in charge speaking in Greek a few times; his guards had done the same. Since there were only a few places where that language was spoken, it was safe to assume she was somewhere in Greece. The view of the Ionian Sea had confirmed that.
At first, she wondered if the men were human traffickers, just looking to nab another young woman. It was soon apparent that selling sex slaves was not the agenda of the men who held her. They were after the same thing she was, a fact that almost scared her more than the other notion.
Adriana had been researching the Eye of Zeus for months. Much of her knowledge regarding the relic came from an old book she’d discovered, a journal handed down through the decades. The origin of the diary was uncertain, at least at first. It had taken many hours of digging to discover the place that it had called home.
The Benedictine Monastery of Santa Croce was located in a region of Italy known as le Marche. Throughout the year, the place received visitors, mostly tourists, wanting to see a working monastery. The construction on the abbey was completed around A.D. 980, making it one of the oldest operating monasteries in Europe. Adriana had admired the structure, as well as its mountainous surroundings. The views from almost everywhere there were nothing short of astounding.
The builders of the monastery had included special windows in the scriptorium to allow light into the room throughout the day, thus providing the monks with the means to work longer hours on their translations.
It was in that scriptorium where a monk had created Adriana’s journal several hundred years prior. Giordano Bruno had been an astronomer and historian in the early 1500s. His studies led him on a fascinating journey through the annals of time, landing on a piece of history he’d never been aware of before.
It seemed that the ancient Greeks had possessed a small cache of relics they’d used during the prime of their empire. When Bruno had discovered the history of the devices, fear filled his heart. The antikytheras were mechanisms that had supposedly been created by the oracles of ancient Greece. Bruno knew that if he documented the artifacts, and alluded to the manner in which they were created, he could be accused of heresy. To cover his tracks, he wrote everything in his journal in a language long forgotten to nearly everyone. Only one other monk in the abbey could speak old Greek, and that monk was twenty years Bruno’s senior.
Adriana had found the book in an old bookstore in Copenhagen on a corner of the Strøget, a pedestrian street in the heart of the city. The storeowner explained that he had never encountered anyone able to read the book, and was glad that someone who could actually read it had wandered in.
Now, as she lay in the shadows of Dimitris Gikas’s wine cellar, she wondered what was going to happen. She’d left Bruno’s journal in a locker at the train station, along with something even more important. The diary had led her to a chain of extremely old documents that dated back over two thousand years to the time of Julius Caesar, and she believed that those papers were the keys to finding the last resting place of the Eye of Zeus.