"Michael," she continued, looking around, "maybe this is the very room
where Pasiphae gave birth to the Minotaur. What do you suppose?"
"That would fit the story." He moved on, his eyes still adjusting to
the shadows. "The only thing the legends actually say is that King
Minos ordered Daedalus, resident genius, to create a secret labyrinth
in the cellar of the palace to keep the beast. But nobody's ever
located it."
"You know, I think the labyrinth was no myth. It was real, only it was
here. All around us. We're in it now." She handed back the bottle. "It
was this whole sinister palace, this realm of the dead. After all these
years, I finally think maybe you were right."
Vindicated at last? Had even Eva come around? But why didn't he feel
any satisfaction? Instead he found himself aware of the old chill, the
almost occult intuition that had first told him the palace wasn't the
happy playground everybody supposed it was. Once more it felt like
death.
But now something else was entering his senses. Was it imagination? In
the encroaching dark the lower levels of the palace seemed to be
totally deserted, with only a couple of persistent German tourists
arguing out near the parking lot, and yet . . .
They weren't alone. He could feel it. He knew it. Was it the spirits of
the dead?
No, it was far more real. Someone was with them, somewhere. In the
shadows. They were being watched.
He looked at Eva, trying to make out her eyes in the semidarkness. Did
she sense it too? That somebody was nearby, waiting, maybe listening?
"Darling, let's talk some more about the myth of Daedalus. In the
version I remember he--"
"Not much more to the tale. After a while a Greek prince called Theseus
arrived, to brave the labyrinth and do battle with the man-eating
Minotaur. When he showed up, King Minos's beautiful daughter, Ariadne,
instantly fell in love with him, naturally."
"I love myths. They're always so realistic."
"Well, he dumped her later, so I guess he did turn out to be a creep.
But anyway, she persuaded Daedalus to give him a ball of string. He
attached it to the door of the labyrinth and unwound it as he went in.
After he killed the beast, he followed the twine back out, and escaped.
With Ariadne. Unfortunately, when Minos discovered what had happened,
he was so mad he locked the great chief architect in a tower. But
Daedalus managed to get out, hoping to escape from the island. However,
it wasn't going to be easy, since Minos had clamped down on all the
harbors, having the ships searched. That's when Daedalus declared,
'Minos may control the land and the sea, but he doesn't control the
regions above.' And he constructed some wings, attached them to his
shoulders with wax, and soared away into space. First human ever. Up
till then, only the gods could just leave the earth anytime they
wanted."
"What?" She'd stopped dead still.
"Daedalus. You remember. The first person to fly, mankind's ago-old
dream. In fact, a few years back some Americans duplicated the feat
with a human-powered glider. They made it from here on Crete over to
the island of--"
"No, you said 'space.' "
"Did I?" He smiled. "Call it poetic license. But why not? Back in those
days I guess the skies themselves could be considered outer space, if
they even knew such a thing existed." Then he looked at her and
sobered. "What's--?"
"It's--it's just something that's been in the back of my mind." She
moved on.
With a shrug, he took another drink of the ouzo and followed her on
down the hall toward the famous Throne Room. He was bracing himself now
for what was next.
Its walls were decorated with frescoes of the massive Minoan body
shields, shaped as a figure-eight, that signified the men's quarters of
Knossos. And incised in stone above King Minos's wide alabaster throne
was his fearsome emblem of authority, symbol of his domination of the
ancient world.
There it was. He looked around, reassuring himself that it was
everywhere, just as he'd remembered. He'd also been right about
something else. It was precisely the same, right down to the smooth
curves of the blade, as the "watermark" that had been on the sheet of
"paper" Alex had given him. Almost four thousand years old, it was the
insignia of the new Daedalus Corporation.
The Minoan double ax.
Wednesday 6:12 P.M.
The dusk was settling majestically over Tokyo, after a rare smogless
day. The view was particularly inspiring from the fifty-fifth-floor
penthouse of the granite-clad Mino Industries building. The corner
office was an earth-tone tan, carpeted in a thick wool shag the color
of elm bark. The heavy doors at the far end of the office were
emblazoned with a two-bladed ax, and in the center of the wide expanse
between the door and the single desk, on a gleaming steel pedestal,
stood a meter-long model of an airplane more advanced than any the
world had yet seen.
The temperature of the room was kept at a constant 59 degrees
Fahrenheit, a frigid comfort-accommodation for the tawny, eight-foot
snow leopard named Neko now resting on a pallet beside the window,
gazing down. Remnant of an endangered species, she'd been rescued as a
starving, motherless cub during an expedition in the Himalayas and
raised for the past six years as a pampered pet of the penthouse's
owner.
Along the sound-proof walls were gilt-framed photographs of a Japanese
executive jogging with Jimmy Carter in Tokyo, golfing with Ferdinand
Marcos in Manila, receiving an accolade from Linus Pauling in San
Francisco, dining with Henry Kissinger in Paris. He was the same man
now sitting behind the massive slate desk.
"You believe he was an American?" Tanzan Mino, president and CEO of the
Daedalus Corporation, a paper creation of the Mino Industries Group,
adjusted his pale silk tie and examined the subordinate now standing
before him. He had just turned seventy-three, but the energy in his
youthful frame made him seem at least a decade younger, perhaps two.
"_Hai_, Mino-sama." The other man, in a dark suit, bowed. "We have
reason to believe the Russian has . . . they were seen exchanging an
envelope."
"And your people failed to intercept either of them?"
The man bowed again, more deeply. "An attempt was made, but
unfortunately the Soviet escaped, and the American . . . my people were
unsure what action to take. We do know the funds have not been
deposited as scheduled."
Tanzan Mino sighed and brushed at his silver temples. His dark eyes
seemed to penetrate whatever they settled upon, and the uncomfortable
vice-president now standing in front of him was receiving their full
ire.
Back in the old days, when he directed the Mino-gumi clan's operations
at street level, finger joints were severed for this kind of
incompetence. But now, now the organization had modernized; he operated
in a world beholden to computers and financial printouts. It was a new
age, one he secretly loathed.
He'd been worried from the start that difficulties might arise. The
idiocy of Japan's modern financial regulations had driven him to
launder the payoffs thoroughly. In the old days, when he was
Washington's man, controlling the Liberal Democratic Party, no meddling
tax agency would have dared audit any of his shadow companies. But
after a bastard maverick named Vance--with the CIA, no less!-- had blown
the whistle on his and the Company's clandestine understanding . . .
He had arranged the initial financing for the project, as well as the
political accommodations, with letters of credit, promissory notes, and
his word. And, eventually, if need be, the full financing could be
raised by partial liquidation of his massive real estate holdings in
Hawaii.
But the near-term expenses--and the necessary payoffs in the LDP--that
was different. In Japanese _kosaihi_, the "money politics" of gifts and
outright bribes, secrecy was everything. He remembered how he'd had to
arrange for the mighty Yoshio Kodama, a powerbroker who had once shared
his virtual ownership of the Japanese Diet and the Japanese press, to
accept responsibility for the CIA-Lockheed bribe affair. It was a close
call. That had involved a mere twelve million of American cash to
Japanese politicians, but it had changed the rules forever. These days--
particularly after the Recruit debacle had disgraced the LDP yet again--
money had to be laundered and totally untraceable.
Promises had been made, schedules signed off, the veil of total secrecy
kept intact. Everything was arranged. The Soviets, incompetents that
they were, had no inkling of the larger plan.
Now it all came down to the funds. He needed the money at once.
He turned in his chair, pressed a gray button on his desk,
and watched the window blinds disappear into their frame. Neko rose
from her languorous pose, stretched her spotted white fur, and gazed
down. This was the panoramic view she loved almost as much as he did,
for her perhaps it was the memory of a snowy Himalayan crest; for him
it was the sprawl of Tokyo, the elegant peak of Mount Fuji to the west,
the bustling port of Yokohama to the south. From this vantage atop the
powerful financial world of Japan, Tanzan Mino wanted two final
triumphs to crown his career. He wanted to see Japan become the twenty-
first century's leader in space, and he wanted his country finally to
realize its historic wartime objective: economic domination of the
continent of Asia, from Siberia to Malaysia, with freedom forever from
the specter of energy and resource dependence. The plan now in motion
would achieve both.
He revolved again in his chair, ignored the subordinate standing before
his desk, and studied the model. It was a perfect replica, one-
hundredth the actual size, of the spaceplane that would revolutionize
the future, the symbol that would soon signify his country's
transcendence in the high-tech age to come.
Then his gaze shifted.
"You were 'unsure what action to take'?" He leaned back, touching his
fingertips together, and sadness entered his voice. "You know, there
was a time when I thought Japan might still one day recapture the
spirit we have lost, the spirit of _bushido_. In centuries gone by, a
samurai never had to ask himself 'what action to take.' He acted intu-
itively. Instinctively. Do you understand?"
"_Hai, wakarimasu_." The man bowed stiffly.
"I am prepared to funnel trillions of yen into this project before it
is over. Legitimate, clean funds. So the sum now in question is almost
inconsequential. However, it is the bait we need to set the trap, and
it must be handled exactly as I have specified."
"_Hai_, Mino-sama." Again he bowed.
"The next time you stand before me, I want to hear that the laundered
Soviet funds have been deposited in the Shokin Gaigoku Bank as agreed.
You have one week." He slowly turned back to the window. "Now, must I
tell you what you have to do?" The man bowed low one last time. He knew
exactly.