He turned to Lea who was still sleeping beside him, and nudged her awake.
“Time to reset your watch to East Coast time,” he said. “We’re here.”
“Didn’t you sleep?” she asked, rubbing her eyes and hoisting herself up in the seat. “I always sleep on planes.” She glanced surreptitiously at Ryan.
“I never sleep on planes,” Hawke said. “Especially if I’m expected to do a halo jump out of one.”
“What’s a halo jump?” Ryan asked. He was sitting on the aisle seat on the other side of Lea, ogling one of the flight attendants.
“High Altitude Low Opening,” Lea spoke before Hawke had a chance to respond.
“Sounds cool, actually,” said Ryan.
Hawke smirked. “It usually is. At thirty thousand feet it’s around minus thirty-five degrees or thereabouts.”
“No, I meant…”
“He knows what you meant, Ryan.”
“Ah… well, I knew that,” Ryan said, embarrassed.
“Of course you did,” Hawke said. “To be honest your lecture about ancient Greece and the Ionian Texts back over the Atlantic almost put me into a very deep sleep.”
“Hey, you asked me if I knew anything about it.”
“And the problem with that,” Lea said, smiling wearily, “is that Ryan Bloody Bale knows everything about everything.”
“Except about how to keep a woman happy, apparently,” Hawke muttered.
“What was that?” Lea asked.
“I was just saying that ancient Greece is a fascinating subject.”
“Ah — yes, indeed!” Ryan piped up. “Especially the gods. Poseidon, of course, was one of the twelve great Olympian immortals of the ancient Greek Pantheon. The people feared him so much they called him the earth-shaker because of his ability to create earthquakes and massive tsunamis with his trident.”
“So not a great bloke to invite to your average beach party then?” Hawke said.
“The gods are not to be mocked,” said Ryan, pushing his glasses up on the bridge of his nose. Hawke wasn’t sure if he was being serious or not.
They left the airport and hailed a cab. Moments later they were driving through a crisp New York afternoon. Lea instructed the driver to go to the hotel Eden had booked for them before their flight.
Hawke was already switching back into SBS mode and wondering if the people who killed Professor Fleetwood and stole the Ionian Texts might have prepared a welcoming committee for them here in America.
Presumably they had the same information that Fleetwood had given to Eden and possibly much more, but when they arrived at the Hotel Plaza Athenee there was no one waiting except the front desk clerk and a young bellhop.
Upstairs, Hawke was less than impressed.
“Hang on — so Eden only booked two bloody rooms?”
“Government budget.” Lea shrugged her shoulders and smiled.
“You’re sharing with your ex, right?” Hawke protested, nodding his head in the direction of Ryan, who was struggling to open the window.
“Get out of it, Joe Hawke! You two are sharing, and that’s my room over there.” She pointed across the corridor at the door opposite theirs.
“Talk about motivation to get out of here before nightfall…”
Ryan sat at the table by the still-closed window and took a MacBook Air out of his luggage.
“So what do we know, then?” Hawke asked.
“Not much,” said Lea. “All we have is a vague reference to New York, and the fact a potter left a map to the tomb inside some of his work thousands of years ago.”
“And don’t forget Fleetwood’s cryptic last words,” Hawke said.
“I’ve been thinking about those,” Ryan said. “Her reference to the ‘ultimate power’ probably has something to do with Poseidon’s trident.”
“The trident?” Hawke asked. “Maybe that’s what Eden was being so coy about. What about the vase — anything on that?”
“The vase in question is probably one called the Poseidon Vase by this Vienna Painter Eden told you about. Greek Attic vase creators are named after various things, one of which is often large collections around the world. The Vienna Painter is named after an amphora in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.”
Hawke smiled. “I wouldn’t want to say that after a couple of pints.”
“Like I said,” Lea muttered. “Not as funny as you think you are.”
Ryan continued without replying. “It’s one of a pair, the other featuring Amphitrite. They make a set because the scene is one of Poseidon fishing, and then the other has Amphitrite holding the fish. The obvious corollary is that the Vienna Painter hid the location of the vault in either one or both of these vases.”
Hawke mouthed the word corollary to Lea behind Ryan’s back and winked.
Lea smiled at him as Ryan continued, oblivious. “Amphitrite — who would have thought it?”
“So who was Amphitrite?” Hawke asked.
Ryan stared at the MacBook for a few moments as he flicked through a few pages before winding up on Wikipedia. “Amphitrite was an ancient goddess, originally the wife of the great sea god Poseidon, one of the twelve great Olympian gods of the ancient Greek Pantheon. She was a nereid, which was a sea nymph a little like the sirens.”
“The ones that used to sing sailors to their deaths by making them sail into rocks?” Lea asked.
“Uh-huh, but nereids were good and they used to help sailors make safe passage through dangerous storms. According to ancient Homeric scripture, all this starts with Kronos.”
“Who?” Hawke said. “Sounds like an aftershave.”
Lea sighed. “Only the kind you would buy.”
Ryan sighed and shook his head in disappointment. “Kronos, he was a Titan who descended directly from the ultimate divine beings — Uranus, who was the sky, and Gaia, who was the earth. Kronos had three divine children, Poseidon, Zeus and Hades.”
Hawke frowned. “This is getting complicated.”
“Hardly. Poseidon inherited divine power over the sea, Zeus got the sky and Hades got the underworld. Simples.”
“What else does it say about Poseidon in particular?” Hawke asked.
“With the exception of his father Zeus, king of all gods, he was the most powerful god the earth has known. As I say, he was once called the earth-shaker because of his ability to cause earthquakes and tsunamis. He was also known among the ancients for his unpredictable temper and wild nature. He was not a god to displease, it seems.”
“But the ancient gods were myths.” Hawke said. “This is what I’m just not understanding.” He walked to the door and checked the spyhole to make sure the corridor was still empty.
Ryan continued. “According to this, the myth of Amphitrite is…” he squinted through his glasses at the screen. “Er… the process of deification in reversal. In the earliest days she was understood to be a sea-goddess, but the Olympian pantheon reduced her status to Poseidon’s consort — a bit like when Princess Diana was stripped of her HRH status.”
“Nice topical analogy, Ryan.” Lea shook her head and sighed.
“He likes keeping it simple, I can see that,” said Hawke.
“Hey, if it helps proles like you to understand, then I’m happy with it.”
“Hey, Hawke is not a prole,” Lea said. “He’s a pleb.”
Ryan continued. “Anyway, much later, the ancient poets and storytellers reduced Amphitrite once again to a metaphor for the sea itself and — wait — this is important.”
Lea looked at him. “What?”
“We need to make sure Hawke knows what metaphor means.”
“Get on with it, Rupert,” Hawke said. “Unless you want a knuckle sandwich.”