“I’m so sorry to hear about your father,” the archaeologist said. “When Gretchen told me about his murder-and then Dr. Cheney…”
Welch trailed off, then shook his head, at a loss for words. He gestured to the chairs. “Please, sit. I’ve ordered some tahini and pita to start. The waiter will bring water as well. But, tell me, please-what can I do for you?”
Sully slid his chair back to give himself the best view of the restaurant. Welch had taken the corner seat, but Drake knew Sully would be on guard and let them know if trouble might be coming. The shooting in Manhattan had left them on edge, and the constant feeling of being observed gnawed at Drake, but he would let Sully worry about that for the moment. His focus had to be on Welch.
“There are two things, Mr. Welch,” Jada said, tucking a lock of hair behind her ear. “First, we have some questions and we’re hoping you can enlighten us. There’s so much we don’t know.”
“I’ll do my best,” Welch said, nodding.
“Second,” Jada began, “well, we’d like to get in and have a look at the dig, but with as few people knowing we’re there as possible.”
Welch started to reply, brow furrowed, ready to shake his head. Then he stopped himself, perhaps thinking of the murders of Luka Hzujak and Maynard Cheney. He glanced at Drake, then back at Jada.
“You really think this all has to do with something your father figured out after he came here?”
Jada nodded. “We do.”
Welch took a deep breath. “Okay,” he said, exhaling. “I’ll see if I can make it happen. In the meantime, what can I tell you about the work we’re doing?”
The waiter arrived with glasses of water for all of them, and then a second appeared and set the tahini and pita on the table. Drake would have rather had nachos, but as hungry as he was, the sesame paste and soft bread would do just fine.
“All right,” Drake said before taking a bite. “Tell us about Daedalus and the three labyrinths.”
Welch sipped his water. “That’s the biggest thing to come out of the dig so far. How much do you already know?”
Drake chewed, trying to swallow so he could reply. Jada jumped in.
“My father talked about his work a lot,” she said. “The way I understand it, he believed that Daedalus was an actual person, not a mythological character, and that he designed not only the labyrinth at Knossos-as most stories tell it-but also two others, including the one you’re excavating right now.”
Welch nodded all through her statement. “Oh, there’s no doubt about it now. Look, most scholars will agree that the most enduring myths eventually prove to have had some real-life antecedent. The ancient Greeks, for instance, believed that the Trojan War had taken place and that Troy was an actual place. In modern times, historians had basically decided the whole thing had been made up, that it was just a story, right up until a German archaeologist named Heinrich Schliemann actually discovered the ruins of Troy in 1870. So much for the people who dismiss myth as just stories.
“The thing about ancient Greece is that the people who tried to write the histories tended to pull from a variety of sources. A Mycenaean ruler might be confused with a figure in some older Phoenician story, and two pieces of truth might get jammed together, through oral tradition and exaggeration and superstition, into something else. My job as an archaeologist is to try to unravel the threads that time has wound together.”
Drake glanced at Sully, whose attention was on the other guests and the waitstaff. To someone who didn’t know him, he would look bored and disinterested, just a guy hungrily anticipating his dinner instead of a guy ready for a fight. Sully had Luka’s journal and maps stuffed into the rear waistband of his pants, right next to his gun. They had agreed it would be unwise to leave it back at the hotel, but Drake felt constantly aware of its presence among them. More than anything, it explained why Sully was so on guard. But Welch didn’t seem put off by Sully’s ignoring him at all.
“All right, so-Daedalus?” Drake asked.
“He was real?” Jada said.
Welch took a breath, reached up and removed his glasses, and began to clean them with the hem of the tablecloth.
“In the late Bronze Age, there was an inventor and builder considered to be one of the cleverest men in the world. Stories were told about him in many languages and cultures under many different names, but the one that seems to have stuck is Daedalus. He was a craftsman, an artisan, and the labyrinth of Knossos was long considered his greatest achievement.
“There is a great deal of disagreement in academic circles about whether or not the palace discovered at Knossos in the 1870s is actually the labyrinth Daedalus designed,” Welch went on, replacing his glasses and reaching for his water glass. He looked intent now, lost in the history inside his mind. “The structure contains thousands of interlocking rooms, but many, myself included, have maintained that it was not the labyrinth itself, that the actual maze was located somewhere nearby.”
The waiter arrived, interrupting him, and they all gave their orders. Welch waited only moments after the waiter’s departure, eager now that his story had begun.
“What you have to understand is that our current excavation-the labyrinth of Sobek-essentially proves that theory. The main palace of Crocodilopolis, the Temple of Sobek, has been a given for decades. But the labyrinth is a separate structure, not far from the temple. The Cretan labyrinth at Knossos must have been the same.”
Drake shook his head. “Wait,” he said, holding up a hand. “You’re saying they’ve never found the labyrinth at Knossos? The one with the Minotaur? King Minos, the whole thing?”
Welch smiled, scraping a bit of tahini onto a piece of pita. “Amazing, isn’t it? This stuff is legend, but it gets mixed up in the public consciousness. People don’t know what’s real and what isn’t. So here’s what is real.”
He took a bite, chewed a few times, and swallowed, barely conscious of the action.
“The palace at Knossos is there. But an English gentleman, Sir Arthur Evans-an amateur, because there weren’t a lot of professionals in those days-oversaw the excavation of the palace. During the process, he hired people to ‘restore’ the place.” Welch made little air quotes with his fingers. “Some of that restoration included taking entire rooms and having artists paint frescoes on the walls in what he claimed was the style of the Minoan civilization-Minoan for King Minos, right?-only it was all bullshit. Instead of restoring what was there, Evans’s restoration team covered it all up, ruining a huge opportunity. A lot of what might have been learned was lost, which is part of the reason no consensus has been able to be formed about whether or not the palace at Knossos and the labyrinth of King Minos are one and the same.
“But our dig-well, it makes a pretty persuasive argument that there’s a separate building somewhere at Knossos. Not only that, but every day we’re finding more and more evidence connecting the labyrinth of Sobek to the labyrinth at Knossos and to a third, as yet unidentified labyrinth. We’ve found tablets with writing and markings in sacred chambers, most of them written in Linear B, that establish pretty firmly that Daedalus designed three of them and Knossos and Crocodilopolis were two of the three.”
“Not four?” Sully asked, startling them all by speaking.
Welch frowned, turning to him. “I’m sorry?”
“My father left some notes,” Jada said. “We got the impression he thought there was a fourth labyrinth.”
“That’s the first I’ve heard of it,” Welch said. “No, all of the writings we’ve found talk about ‘Three Labyrinths of the Master Builder.’ Notations elsewhere make it pretty clear Daedalus is the Master Builder, and we’ve been going on that theory.”