The Emperor Awakes (59 page)

The decision was floating there in the air, almost invisible, like an indecisive cloud, becoming more elusive with every passing second. She suddenly pushed the thoughts out of her mind and focused her eyes on Vasilis, an air of selfishness, a healthy dose of defiance raising its ugly head and animating her face.

‘I will help you on condition that you re-arrange your schedule, so that you start spending at least a few weeks at a time here in Cyprus with me. Perhaps not this time as you seem to be busy with something, but after this, whatever it is, is finished.’

His mouth twitched and started to droop, his eyes spoke volumes in their own special language she knew so well. He looked hurt, but his eyes were saying “maybe”, and yet they seemed to be passing judgement condemning her conduct as screaming of intransigence and belligerence that was so unlike her.

She almost felt sorry for him and was close to relenting and capitulating.

‘OK, alright, stop that. Don’t give me that sorrowful pleading charm of yours.’

His face spoke with the raising of a quizzical brow.

‘Vasilis, stop it. Don’t make that face. Come, on. You know you are doing it. It’s always like that. You always do it when you want me to do something. This time it’s not working.’

The brow rose higher.

She broke the impasse. ‘What do you expect to find there?’

‘A body.’ Vasilis blurted out with no qualms about shocking Lara.

‘You mean bones, a skeleton?’

‘No, I mean a body or more specifically a part or parts of it.’

Even with her belief that nothing could shock her, Lara had gone white. This was serious. The reality that Vasilis might be involved in something shady began to dawn on her, but she chose not to voice her suspicions and her concerns in case she was wrong.

She didn’t want to mess things up between them, if she was wrong, especially as things had been going well between them lately, and she was in no doubt that it was all legitimate and above board. He would never forgive her, if she insulted him by thinking him capable of anything illegitimate. She had to know more about this matter.

‘I don’t understand. What’s so special about this body you are looking for? What research do you have to back it up? How do you think you can find something where we have been excavating for months and have found nothing?’

‘I just know. I have a feeling.’ Vasilis said, an inner voice leading him to waters untravelled, and Lara could see his firm belief in his words. Her scepticism began to waiver, but she could not help a bit of mocking for her amusement. And there was also the fact that she could not be seen to so easily capitulate and accept that there could be the possibility of some truth in what he had said.

‘A voice at the back of your mind is speaking to you?’

‘Something like that. You know I’ve always been a bit unconventional, for some people crazy even, in doing things my way, but my instinct has served me well so far. So indulge me on this. Have some faith.’

Lara took a quick decision. ‘OK. But I’m coming with you.’

‘No, you’re not. You are staying here to watch my back.’

‘It’s non-negotiable.’ Lara was adamant. ‘I can get you a pass and have you attend the dig for a couple of days for people to get used to you. We’ll introduce you as a visiting expert archaeologist from Crete.’

‘Will that work? Who’s checking authorisations?’

‘Trust me, it won’t be a problem.’

‘Won’t they recognise me?’

‘You have a bit of a high profile, but I don’t think they read the society or the business pages. But we’ll give you a little disguise just in case.’ Lara said and winked at Vasilis.

Suddenly Vasilis had a strange feeling that they were being watched. He turned to the two men at the table next to them. The eyes he saw were empty and cold and licensed to kill. They had to get out of there.

There was another reason for Vasilis’ urgency to leave. Vasilis did not want to involve the other diners in any violent altercation that might follow. They had to leave before anything happened that got people hurt.

A waiter was passing by with the most humungous tray split in two, one half laden and piled on high with a mountain of meat laced with rice, the other half with fruit and bordered in semi-circle shapes with two jugs full of steaming hot juices and gravy.

Vasilis tripped the waiter as he was passing by the adjacent table. The whole pile practically buried and burned the two men. But it was enough to distract the two men and put them out of action for long enough for Vasilis and Lara to make their escape.

Vasilis grabbed Lara’s hand and they ran outside where a taxi was already waiting with the meter running. Vasilis had taken that precaution in the event that they had to make a quick get-away.

They got into the taxi, and, in a movie-like moment, Vasilis fired a sharp order to the taxi driver to step on it. The taxi speeded off.

Katerina and Aristo had witnessed Vasilis’ and Lara’s sudden rush for the exit. They stood to the side of the restaurant and waited. It took less than a minute for the two men, whom they suspected to be Ruinands, to come out of the restaurant, get into another waiting taxi and follow at great speed.

Katerina and Aristo got into a taxi that had at that moment left a couple on the kerb and followed close behind the other two taxis, bringing up the rear.

‘Katerina, we will need to find a way to sabotage the taxi in front of us to give Vasilis a fighting chance to break free of the pursuit.’ Aristo’s mind was working furiously for a solution.

The car chase was on. Inside the first taxi, Vasilis turned to Lara, who was almost a wreck from the sudden excitement, his voice on the verge of breaking.

‘Lara, we cannot wait for a few days. We’ll have to go to the site tonight. They must be after the same thing that I am. We have to shake them off first, though. How the hell did they know where to find us? I was careful. I was sure I had not been followed.’

‘And to think that they were sitting next to us for all this time and we didn’t suspect a thing.’

‘I’m not surprised. We were a bit engrossed in our own world back there as is always the case when we get together.’ Vasilis said and smiled sweetly at Lara.

‘I dare say more than a bit engrossed.’

Vasilis leaned towards the driver. ‘We need to shake off the taxi following us.’

‘No problem, sir. Though there are actually two taxis following us.’

‘What? Two?’ Vasilis turned back to look, but couldn’t be sure that the third taxi was not an innocent bystander.

At that moment the taxi took a sharp left and increased speed, but the Ruinands were with them and catching up fast. They were driving on the coastal road now and it was busy. They had to weave in and out of the cars ahead of them and avoid incoming traffic as well.

The chase had been going on for about fifteen minutes when, out of nowhere, Vasilis and Lara saw a sudden flash of light and, turning to look back, they saw the chasing taxi carrying the Ruinands suddenly veered off course and, closely avoiding collision with a bus, climb the pavement and smash its way to an abrupt stop inside the elaborately-decorated window of a patisserie.

Vasilis and Lara had no way of knowing that the spectacle had the hallmark of Aristo’s handiwork stamped all over it.

Aristo had an inspiration. He used a laser gun to blind the driver of a truck travelling towards them in the opposite direction while it was almost level with the taxi carrying the two Ruinands in front.

The truck veered to the right while another car in front of them did not hold back, but like a horse rearing up when frightened, speeded up to avoid the truck, and crashed into, actually almost climbed on, the Ruinand taxi and forced it off the road on a straight collision course to oblivion. The truck rushed to join that car, and like comrades-in-arms, the two vehicles blocked the Ruinand taxi in a half bear hug, determined not to let their prey escape.

But the Ruinands as “diehard refusniks” in the death-defying stakes, denied death its blood. They got out and dusted themselves. They were too late to catch up, but unbeknownst to Katerina and Aristo they had inside information on their movements from the traitor in their midst.

Katerina’s and Aristo’s taxi only just avoided the near crash scene by the skin of its teeth, their heart on tender-hooks, until they were out of the near carnage. The hair-raising experience over, they fell behind Vasilis’ taxi at a safe distance.

Vasilis and Lara had seen the incident and thought they were out of the woods, but their relief did not last long as they saw what they suspected could be another enemy taxi, but which they hoped was an innocent one still behind them.

About half an hour after the crash incident, Vasilis’ taxi came to a stop near a shed at the foot of Mount Zalakas. The taxi carrying Katerina and Aristo stopped behind them and they got out.

Vasilis and Lara had taken a fighting stance, but let their guard down and relaxed when they recognised Katerina and Aristo coming towards them.

Vasilis’ jaw dropped when he saw Katerina and Aristo. ‘What are you two doing here?’

‘I could ask you the same thing. To help you, if you let us. You thought we were chasing you as well, didn’t you?’ Aristo hugged his brother.

‘Well, yes, I couldn’t see inside your taxi, now could I? So I told the driver to go faster and faster.’

‘Yes, I suspected as much. No wonder we could not catch up.’ Aristo looked at Lara. ‘Hi, Lara. It’s good to see you again. It could have been under better circumstances, though.’

‘It’s always some crisis or other that brings us together, isn’t it?’ Lara laughed and looked to Katerina. ‘Katerina, it’s good to see you.’

‘You too.’

Vasilis had had enough of this civil idle chitchat. He decided to cut in. ‘Enough with the pleasantries. We need to get a move on.’ Vasilis turned to Lara. ‘Lara, what’s the best way to get inside?’

‘We’ll use the tunnel we’ve discovered. We’ve supported a large part of it, but it goes deep inside the mountain and we have not explored its full length yet. We’ll have to be careful. It could be dangerous. We can use the cables carrying the cable car to get up near the top of the mountain and then descend from there.’

‘And how do you propose we do that?’ Vasilis’ words had only a subtle hint of irony, just enough to tease, but not so much as to offend. He put down a challenge for Lara. He could not resist teasing her, testing her for his amusement, taking advantage of her short fuse and non-existent sense of humour in tense moments.

‘I’ve thought about it already. Why do you think I was maddeningly texting in the taxi? Someone is expecting us there.’

But the man they met, Raul, was not the one Lara was talking to, although he looked like him and talked like him. The Ruinands had caught up with the real Raul and with them somehow.

A small pod, powered by a self-generating energy motor, big enough to carry four people, had already been connected to the cables and was waiting for them. All four of them got into the pod, hooked up to the cable for extra safety, and the pod launched into the dark moonless sky.

They had not gone very far when suddenly they stopped suspended in mid-air. After a few harrowing seconds, with the only sound the near slow splitting of one of the cables, it ended up being a false alarm and they started off again.

Just as they were approaching the top of the mountain and the end of the first part of their journey, the cables started to strain from the combined weight of four people. The cables snapped just as the last of the four, Aristo gripped the edge of the landing platform jutting out of the mountain and began to slide down before they pulled him up and saved his life.

They looked down in horror as their erstwhile transport fell, slicing through the humid air and crashing to the ground a few hundred metres below, a distance that seemed like light years from where they now stood.

Raul and the Ruinands, who had by now joined him at the ground-level end of the cable route, heard the almighty crash at the bottom of the ravine and were pleased with their handiwork believing that they had succeeded in eliminating all four of their targets.

They stood there for a while with pricked ears looking at the mountain, probing the stillness of the night, observing like hawks for any movement, but nothing stirred. The translucent glow from the lights of the village was quite far off in the distance and did not reach the mountain.

The pitch black made their work easier. If only the moon could throw enough light on the mountain to help them make out any shadows of movement. But as it was they saw nothing, not even the slightest flicker of a torchlight.

They made to leave. But then a member of the team thought he had seen something. It was only for a moment, but he was sure it was there, a flash of light on the side of the mountain near the top framed in the night sky.

He stopped and turned. He focused on the area of the mountain near the spot where he thought he saw that suspicious flash of light. He called to his ‘friends’, gesturing with his head in the direction of the mountain.

‘We have to get up there. They’re still alive. Or at least some of them are. Come on.’

CHAPTER 60