The Mask of Atreus (42 page)

"Get the ramp set up," Calvin said. "I'll watch her. Give me my knife."

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He met her eyes impassively, but at her look of contempt, he shrugged and smiled a little.

"Nice, isn't it?" he said, showing the weapon with its slender blade. "A Third Reich Luftwaffe dagger. I got it from
my
mentor."

"Edward Graves," she said.

Calvin's face tightened.

"Now, how did you know that?" he said. "Tell me what you know and who else knows it, and we'll make a deal."

"Like you did with Richard?"

"Richard was a lousy businessman," he said. "I'm sure we can do better."

"Don't bet on it."

He shrugged again.

"You want to be a martyr, who am I to stop you?" he said. He held up the knife and let her see it. She caught her own face reflected in the blade. She looked far away, a dream image, bright and strange like a mermaid rearing from the surf.

"Give me a hand with this," said the White Rabbit. He was shunting the great black box down the plank ramp he had set against the rear doors. It was still covered by the dark blanket.

"Don't run," said Calvin.

He needn't have warned her. They were parked behind a large stone building, in a walled courtyard with a wroughtiron gate through which they had driven but which was now closed and, presumably, locked electronically. There was nowhere to run. He'd shoot her down in seconds. Bowers turned and braced his weight against the wheeled box as the kid guided it down to the gravel.

"We need to get this inside," said the kid. "What about her?"

Deborah felt a sudden urgent need to speak, to delay whatever decision he would come to.

"You want to know how long I've known?" she said. "A long time. Remember the night we spent in Athens, when you said you knew what I meant about how Richard looked? The first time we met you said you had never met Richard. And you 356

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think it never occurred to me that the only person other than me who had seen the address the lab was going to send the results to was you? Do you think it never occurred to me that while I was e-mailing you details of my movements in Greece, some maniac was trying to kill me? You think it never occurred to me that whoever that maniac was thought I knew something, something he had seen me studying on Richard's computer, or that you were the only person who knew for a fact that I would have seen the letter you had sent to Richard at the museum? Actually, Calvin, it was earlier than all those. It was the first day we met, when you said that that 'barbaric'

tomahawk was evidence of Manifest Destiny. You think those things didn't add up in my head to your being a white supremacist moron?"

They didn't. Not really. They should have, but they didn't.
Not till you saw the tattoo. If nothing else, you should have
known that men who look like him don't date women like you.
Yeah? Their loss.

Now you recover your antiromantic defiance. Too bad you
didn't have it before when you were talking to Cerniga and
said absolutely nothing about all the clues you were starting
to string together, all those rancid little bread crumbs that led
straight to Calvin Bowers's door.

She hadn't known then. Not for sure.

Calvin considered her. The rain was streaming down his face, but he seemed quite unaware of it.

"So who else did you tell?"

Deborah said nothing, staring into his face with all the defiance and contempt she could manage. He smiled slightly, an amused, doubtful smile that said he didn't trust her, but that was OK. For now.

"We'll lock her up with it," he said. "Until she's ready to talk. If she has any doubts about our seriousness, I think she's about to see something that will convince her otherwise."

CHAPTER 73

It was a house, she supposed, or had been once. But it didn't really look like any house she had ever seen. It looked more like a temple, an ancient Greek temple made of white stone and fluted columns. Cerniga had suggested that Atreus might have inherited a lot of money from their founder's shady business dealings during the war. This house was probably built out of that money. Beyond the courtyard wall she could hear the erratic hum of traffic fairly close by, but she had no clear sense of where it was coming from.

"It was built by my predecessor," said Calvin, propelling her forward by her elbow, "the man who set all this in motion fifty years ago. Mr. Edward Graves. A great man and a great friend to me. A kind of father, almost. I wish he'd lived to see it. I maintain it as a ritual hall for our little organization, but the legal connection is very circuitous."

"It's a bourgeois monstrosity," said Deborah.

"I didn't mean the house," said Calvin, "though he also built that. The house is unimportant, however. It's merely a shell."

"Protecting what?"

"You are about to find out," he said, sounding pleased, even a little excited.

There were a set of large double doors atop a flight of shallow stone steps, and Deborah began to walk toward them as the kid moved the makeshift ramp from the back of the van to the stairs.

She paused, waiting for Calvin to unlock the doors, inching away from the White Rabbit with his leer and his unfeeling eyes, and wondered if she should run for it. Could 358

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getting shot down out here be any worse than what awaited her inside?

"In you go," said Calvin, gesturing like an eighteenthcentury nobleman. They walked into a square lobby and then a hallway with dark hardwood floors and framed pictures, athletic male bodies, rugged landscapes, and studies of ancient weapons. One wall showed black-and-white photographs of classical--or reproduction classical--statues on display in a museum hung with swastikas, all dated prominently to the late 1930s and marked simply "Berlin." One showed the Nazi high command in full dress uniform inspecting a famous marble discus thrower. Then, one eye and the pistol still on Deborah, Calvin stooped and dragged aside an Oriental rug, revealing a rectangle of wood less faded than the surrounding floor. He flicked a pair of recessed brass catches, and the floor dropped slowly away: a hatch revealing a stone ramp sloping sharply down into the bowels of the house.

"Down here," said Calvin, still more pleased with the look on her face.

She edged forward and peered down uneasily. There was something familiar about the large stone blocks that made up the walls.

"Go on," he said, nudging her with the gun barrel. She tensed, then began to descend as Calvin behind her picked up a large flashlight and switched it on. She stooped to get under the wooden floor, and for a moment she smelled the warm, cut timber of the house, but as she walked down the stone ramp, that scent was replaced with the aroma of cool, damp earth. The light flashed off the stone walls, and she felt the temperature drop as they advanced cautiously. They were halfway down before she could see what was at the bottom of the walled ramp.

"Oh my God," she said.

"Exactly," said Calvin. "Impressive, isn't it."

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At the bottom were a set of heavy doors between two sturdy columns. Above the massive lintel was a triangular stone carved with a pair of imperial lions. It was the Treasury of Atreus from Mycenae, reproduced as it would have originally looked, transported into the heart of Atlanta and hewn from Georgia granite.

Deborah faltered.

"It's an exact replica of the original," said Calvin, "built to one-third of the original scale. It was constructed secretly over ten years by private contractors. Very private. Our own people did most of the work. It exists on no blueprints or plans of the house. Search the building from top to bottom; no one would find it."

Behind her the kid was laboring to ease the box on its casters down the ramp.

"I don't understand," she said. "I thought . . . I don't understand."

Calvin just smiled that bland, knowing smile of his, took a heavy key from his pocket and a flashlight from a bracket on the wall.

"I thought not," he said, as he fitted it into the lock. The mechanism clicked in several places up the massive doors, and as he wrenched the latch and cracked them open, revealing an impenetrable darkness beyond, she heard a resounding echo from inside.

"You thought that seeing this would make me think you were serious about killing me?" she said, recovering a little of her poise. "This just convinces me that you're a lunatic."

"Not this," he said, pushing the thick, studded doors open and flicking on a light. "This."

It was exactly like the tholos tomb in Mycenae, a great beehive of Cyclopean masonry, grayer in color, but otherwise the same, the great vaulted dome, the chill emptiness. There were differences: the huge torch brackets, the angry red banners daubed with swastikas, but the only one that mattered, 360

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the only one Calvin's flashlight picked out and held, was the body on the ground.

It was sprawled on its back, one arm flung out as if in supplication.

Deborah closed her eyes tightly and locked her teeth together so that she wouldn't sob aloud. There was a broken tobacco pipe on the ground at her feet. Marcus had met the same fate as his father.

CHAPTER 74

"We'll lock you inside for a little while," said Calvin, "while we adjust our plans, and then we'll talk."

"You killed him in Greece and then brought him back here?" she said. "Why?"

She didn't care. She was just talking because she didn't want to be locked in the dark with Marcus's murdered body.

"Of course not," he said. "He came back looking for me. Found me, in fact."

"And you killed him," she said.

"Obviously," he said.

"Why?" she said, swallowing back the unsteadiness in her voice. "He was just an enthusiastic collector like Richard, who thought he had found the body of Agamemnon."

"He was," Calvin agreed. "Till he met me. Somehow he connected me to my predecessor and discovered my little tomb, his tomb as it turns out. For a little while."

He grinned at his joke.

"Once he had discovered my"--he looked for the words--

"philosophical orientation, he started doing research of a very different kind. By the time I found him, he had done what you apparently have not."

"What's that?" she said, still not caring.

"He had discovered what is contained within that box."

As he said it, the kid, who had been pushing the display case into the center of the chamber, looked up.

"It's nearly ready," he said. "Hold on."

Deborah thought quickly. The more she seemed to know, the more she could have told other people. That might keep her alive.

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"I know everything," she said.

"Right," said Calvin, scornfully. "Of course you do."

"I know that if the police run a ballistics check on your gun they'll nail you for the death of Sergei Voloshinov, an MVD agent who you killed because he knew as well as I do what you have in that box."

That stopped him. He looked genuinely surprised for a second, but then he began to smile.

"You want to know what else I know?" said Deborah, challenging his silence, his smugness.

Bowers ignored her, turning to the kid as he felt underneath the box, located the power cord, and slotted it home. From under the blanket came an unearthly glow that threw the contours of the rough-hewn boulders into sharp relief. At the same time, a panel of soft lights that had been invisible till this moment flickered into life directly above. The kid scuttled back toward the wall and watched, his face drawn and anxious, even a little fearful.

"The moment of truth," said Calvin.

He took a step over to the foot of the casket and slowly, reverently drew back the blanket.

The box contained the wizened body of a man, roughly preserved, though largely invisible beneath the gleaming gold mask and the weather-stained banner, which was a faded red overlaid with a stylized black eagle.

"You should have left him to stink in Berlin," she said. The kid snapped his head round to stare at her, and for a second she thought she had gone too far. But Calvin was smiling his oily, self-satisfied smile, and that seemed to quell the boy.

"Our general is home at last," Calvin murmured, a light in his eyes that she had never seen before, "and Atreus's mission is fulfilled. We have brought the mortal remains of Adolf Hitler to America, and to his bones our people will flock. Who will stand before such an army?"

So she had been right. It wouldn't save her, not now, but she had, at least, been right.

CHAPTER 75

"She knew," hissed the kid.

"It doesn't matter," said Calvin, still smiling over his trophy.

"Man, we have to talk. Now."

Calvin's unblinking gaze finally slid away from the halfmummified corpse and found the White Rabbit's face. For a second he just looked, reading the kid's anxiety, and then he nodded and took a step out of the tomb.

"What about her?" said the kid.

"Lock her in," said Calvin, turning his smile on Deborah.

"For the moment."

Deborah sat in the beehive tomb, as far from Marcus's body as she could get, staring at the glass-topped casket which was the focus of the chamber's only light, and thought. She had kept her half suspicions about Calvin under wraps in the vague hope that if he was involved, she might learn from him where the weapon was and what it was. Well, now she knew, and it would avail her nothing.

But that wasn't the only reason you ignored your doubts
about Calvin, was it?

She had ignored them because if they weren't true . . .
If you could convince yourself they weren't true . . .

. . . then maybe they would settle down in a cottage with a picket fence and raise their allocated two point two children?

Ironic, wasn't it? She had stifled her unease to make the
relationship
work like some paper-thin heroine in a TV movie, and now her beloved (and his White Rabbit henchman) 364