Jada hurried to the door, putting her gun in the rear of her waistband. Drake didn’t even do that, holding on to Sully’s gun but keeping it out of sight as he followed her to the balcony. He stood half inside and half out. The noises of Santorini were dim and distant enough not to intrude on the breathtaking vista of the caldera and the rest of the islands that ringed it.
Sully stood at the balcony to the left, leaning with his back to them. On the next balcony, separated from theirs by a gap of barely a foot, a thirtysomething black woman with flawless skin and copper-penny eyes smiled as Jada and Drake emerged.
“These must be your mates,” the woman said in a bright British accent. She held Sully’s cigar in one hand and a wineglass in the other. “Nice to meet you both.”
“Jada and Nate, meet Gwen,” Sully said, barely looking at them, clearly enchanted. As he half turned to make the introduction, Drake saw the wineglass in his hand. “Gwen, say hello to Jada and Nate.”
Gwen raised her nearly drained wineglass in a salute. “Cheers.”
“Hi,” Jada said.
“Hello,” Drake added.
They had come onto the balcony-Drake only halfway, still hiding the gun-carrying an air of urgency that Gwen must have seen. Her eyes narrowed, and she gave a small, reluctant smile.
“Looks like you have business to attend to,” Gwen said. She puffed on the cigar, coughing a little before handing it back to Sully. “There, I’ve tried it. And it sort of tastes sweet and like crap at the same time. I hope you’re happy.”
Sully smiled at her. “Very.”
Gwen glanced at Jada and Drake. Sully did as well, though he had an irritated smile on his face, as if wondering why they weren’t going away. It was obvious he had been doing some serious flirting with the woman, and it seemed like he might have been making some progress. Now she handed him back the second wineglass.
“I’ll only be a few minutes,” Sully promised her. “It’s a sin to leave a bottle of wine this good half full.”
“Sorry. It’s getting late, and I have to meet some friends,” Gwen said. “Maybe tomorrow night?”
Sully smiled. “I’ll be here.”
“It’s a date.”
Gwen turned to go back inside, and Sully shot Drake and Jada an unforgiving look. They retreated to the suite together, and Sully closed the French doors before turning toward them.
“This better be good,” he grumbled.
“You won’t be here tomorrow night,” Drake said. “Well, probably not.”
“Thanks, genius,” Sully muttered, one eyebrow raised. “As if I didn’t know that.”
“But you just told her-”
“Hey, a guy can hope. It’s about all I can do if you two are going to barge in on me any time I’ve made a new friend.”
Drake lifted the gun, drawing Sully’s attention to it. “We barged in because we thought the spooky ninjas were about to cut your throat and chuck you over the cliff. Then we got here, and hello, no sign of Sully. The doors are open, and we’re thinking ‘intruder.’ ”
“It was so hard to imagine I might be smoking a cigar and relaxing with my thoughts?”
“We didn’t see you,” Jada said, obviously irritated with his truculence. “Not until we smelled your stinky cigar.”
Sully actually looked wounded. He brandished the smoldering cigar. “This is a Cuban. They’re harder to smuggle into the States than guns, drugs, or antiquities.”
“Oh, well, in that case, good job, Uncle Vic,” Jada said, her voice dripping with sarcasm.
“We were worried about you, dumbass,” Drake said. “Or did you miss that part?”
Sully gave him a devious smile. “No, I got that. I just like to rile you guys up. You deserve it after interrupting what could’ve been a beautiful-Wait. Why were you so worried? Did something happen?”
Drake opened his mouth, then closed it again. He glanced at Jada.
“We’re not sure.”
“What do you mean, ‘not sure.’ Either something happened or it didn’t.”
“It might’ve,” Jada said. “We might’ve seen one of the hooded men from the labyrinth up in the village, on a roof.”
“I guess it’s pointless to ask if you noticed anything weird or saw anyone skulking around,” Drake said. “Your attention being otherwise occupied by the lovely Gwen.”
Sully grinned. “Smokin’ hot, right?”
Drake gave a nod of appreciation. “No argument.”
“Okay,” Sully said, turning to Jada. “So you maybe saw something and you maybe didn’t. We’ll stay vigilant-”
Jada shot him a dubious look.
“We’ll work on our vigilance. Get better with that,” Sully corrected. “But since none of us has had their throat cut tonight, can we talk about something that’s actually important?”
“Like?” Drake asked.
Sully stabbed his cigar out in an empty hotel water glass, then made a beeline for Drake’s duffel. He dug through it and pulled out the maps and journal Luka had squirreled away for Jada to discover in Egypt. He set the maps aside and started flipping through the pages again.
“Before I went out for a smoke, I had a little wine and took a closer look at the journal.”
“We’ve been through the whole thing,” Jada said.
Sully found his page, stroked the paper with a finger, holding it open, and nodded to her. “I know. But sometimes things like this don’t make sense until you’ve gotten new information. When you look back through it, it’s like you’ve got new glasses on, and you can see things you didn’t see before.”
“How much wine did you have?” Drake teased.
“Two glasses,” Sully said. “I opened a beer, but it tastes like crap.”
“Focus?” Jada prodded, hands on her hips. Drake would have thought it difficult to look stern with magenta bangs, but somehow she managed.
“Right.” Sully nodded. “So I found a book about Akrotiri in the little library in the hotel-it’s out in the living room-and I was reading about the excavation there. If there ever was an Atlantis, I understand why so many people believe this was it. Atlantis was supposed to be advanced, right? Well, Akrotiri was so far ahead of the rest of the world for its time, it’s amazing. They only unearthed one tiny tip of the town. More of it is there, and some is underwater. But what they found-we’re talking multistory buildings, neighborhoods, looms to weave textiles that they exported. They had hot and cold running water. Think about that. Four thousand years ago, before anyone else, hot and cold running water. Then the volcano erupted, and it was bye-bye Akrotiri.”
“This is all fascinating,” Drake said, “but-”
“Yeah, yeah,” Sully said, frowning. “I’m getting to it. The volcano wasn’t the only thing. They had a lot of earthquakes on Thera in those days, leading up to the big blow. But the earthquakes didn’t stop then. They’re not as frequent, but they still happen. There was a major one here in 1956-did a lot of damage to the modern village of Akrotiri, which is near the excavation but not right next door. The modern village had been built around a medieval fortress that stood at the top of a hill, but the earthquake in ’56 did a ton of damage, destroyed a lot of houses, and turned the fortress into unsafe ruins. They rebuilt the houses at the bottom of the hill, but the fortress has essentially been abandoned and off-limits for more than half a century.”
Sully smiled. “All interesting, right. But a hell of a lot more interesting when you consider this.”
He opened the journal to the page he’d marked with his finger. There were labyrinth designs and notes scribbled all over the two-page spread, so it took a moment before Drake noticed the sideways scrawl in the margins of the left-hand page.
“Quake of ’56,” Luka had written. “Under Goulas?”
“What the hell is ‘Goulas’?” Drake asked.
“I’m guessing the Greek name for this fortress you’re talking about,” Jada said.