The Sons Of Cleito (The Abductions of Langley Garret Book 1) (9 page)

'I don't think so. I kept it in a metal trunk along with, well, you know, the bits and pieces you collect through your life. When we lived in London I know it was in the attic and I clearly remember seeing the letter when I was looking for some old papers I needed for a visa and residency application.'

'So when was that?'

'Not long after we got married. I needed the papers to be able to travel with Helen.'

'Right. So what about this trunk? Have you still got it?'

'I'm not sure. We have a small lock up box in the basement of our building, so it's probably there unless it got lost over the years,' I replied. The Grey Lady didn't look up as she made more notes in her file. When she looked up at me again, she waited a moment and then handed me a writing pad and a pen. I looked at her with a question mark stamped all over my face. She stood up and folded her file closed. I went to stand, but she waved her hand telling me to stay seated.

'I'll be back later. In the meantime I want you to try and remember what was written in the letter from your mother.'

'And write it down?'

'Word for word as best you can.'

'Eh, right.'

She only nodded and then disappeared behind me and closed the hatch. I looked at the writing pad and it was a match for my brain. Totally blank. I was staring at the wall in front of me, lined with rivets and pipes and hadn't really noticed the pen in my hand doodling on the pad, drawing silly circles and squares as I tried to remember the letter. I wrote
Mother
alongside my artwork and then
Letter
. Without thinking again, I wrote
Helen
under that along with
London, Vienna, Beirut, Zurich and Neuchâtel
. I underlined
Vienna
. I looked at the words and added,
gods and spirits
and
fantasies
. My list was growing with the additions of
Greek
,
Decem Filios
,
Evenor and Leucippe,
Sons of Cleito
,
The First King, Gaia and Uranus and Atlantis.
Then I added
Hazel Eyes that could have killed
,
Leda
and
Chara
. The
Grey Lady
was my last addition. I tore out the page, folded it and put in my pocket and returned to my assignment of trying to remember what was in my mother's letter. The thought of electrified genitals helped me remember a few words from the beginning of the letter.

I had no idea how long it was, but it was quite some time later when the Grey Lady returned. She sat opposite me and I passed her the writing pad, which contained two and half pages of notes from what I could recall from the contents of the letter. She read it slowly without saying a word, while I sat waiting for my pass or fail mark. As she read, she made more notes in her file, looking up once or twice at me with eyes that said absolutely nothing, yet made the hairs on the back of my neck stand to attention. She tore out the pages I had written and neatly inserted them in her file before standing up.

'That will be all Mr Garret.'

'What? I'm free to go?'

'Back to you cabin, yes.'

'But after that, will I be released somewhere and I can just forget about all this and go home?'

'I'm sorry Mr Garret. That won't be possible.'

I must have looked disappointed, or maybe she felt sorry for me, which was highly unlikely, but she did wait for me to speak.

'Can I ask you one question?'

'Yes.'

'Why am I here?'

'I can't tell you that Mr Garret. I'm sorry these matters are out of my hands. You can return to your cabin now,' she said as she opened the hatch and my escort, Submariner Crater Face stood waiting for me.

In

Escape is a word that simply does not collocate with submarine. Words such as claustrophobic, noisy, fetid, suffocating and drown do however. While no one was telling me anything, I did manage to notice the name badge on Submariner Crater Face's uniform. It simply read
Forbes
. After a few days Forbes, as I knew him now, did answer one quite important question for me. I asked him how long a submarine could stay underwater. He was quite open in telling me that it was possible to stay submerged for quite a few months on end, but normally three months was the limit as that's when they usually ran out of food. Of course I asked him how long this mission had been at sea, but naturally he wasn't allowed to tell me. He did half smile when I told him that at least I knew my maximum underwater prison term now, and then he offered to exchange his out of date motoring magazines with mine. It was a nice gesture until I discovered that his were even older than mine. But it was the thought that counted.

My smuggled note in my pocket was my only other reading material and although it was only a list of a several disconnected words, it kept me returning to read it and thinking that it contained the reason I was here. Like the puzzle that needs you to go outside the nine dots to be solved, my little enigma needed me to go outside the words for my answer. Luckily I had a lot of time on my hands because the answer certainly wasn't arriving in any particular hurry.

I hadn't kept count of the days so didn't know how long I'd been holed up in my submarine prison when Forbes arrived with relatively good news.

'You're being transferred today.'

'To where?

'I don't know, just make sure you're ready in two hours.'

'But up? I mean off the submarine?'

'I believe so.'

'Oh god I hope so Forbes.'

I had expected winches, ropes and flying foxes but had to settle on a rather disappointing black inflatable with a very loud motor for my transfer from one hollow steel vessel to another, and there was a frighteningly high rope ladder climb involved on the other end of my transfer. However, once aboard and escorted to my new cabin, I noticed that the only real difference between where I had been and where I was now was that the motoring magazines were slightly more recent and there was a small port hole for my viewing, and breathing pleasure. Samuels had replaced Forbes, but thankfully there was no sign of the Grey Lady and her foreboding jumper leads.

It could have been the sea air, or the fact that I was being rather nicely ignored that some clarity came to my head, closely followed by the bleeding obvious. I took out my short word list from my pocket and started putting things neatly into place. Unlike my other places of confinement, this one was equipped with two pencils and a small notepad. I enjoyed these luxury additions and started making some notes. I was often distracted though by the almost fluorescent orange overalls I had to wear that were not to my taste at all.

Being certain that my mother and her letter formed the basis of all my problems; I circled these items and drew a bubble from each one. I wrote
spy
in the bubble connected to my mother and
coded message
in the bubble connected to the letter. The contents of the letter, as best I could recall, told the story of Evenor, one of the original inhabitants of Atlantis, who was born from the Earth, and how he took a wife named Leucippe. They only had one child, a daughter, Cleito. Unfortunately, at about her marriageable age, Cleito's parents died. There was no explanation why that I could remember, but Cleito then slept with the god Poseidon and from this produced five sets of twin sons. The eldest son, Atlas, later became the first king of Atlantis, with his nine younger brothers becoming governors under his rule. Perhaps this was the hierarchy that was still being used and that it represented something similar to a board of directors – and to what the lines on my neck represented. Ten brothers who were five sets of twins.

I drew a line down the page and started an organigram with Atlas at the head and his brothers under him, assuming that these were all code names for people within some kind of organisation. I couldn't remember all the brothers' names but wrote in the few I could recall. I then added a note below equating Atlantis with what I had been told was the island of Decem Filios, or Ten Sons. That seemed to pull a few things together in my mind. Under each of the ten sons I noted what I could remember about them. Ampheres and Evaemon were given many men to rule over and a large territory, while Atlas' twin brother Gadeirus was given the responsibility for the extreme regions of the island, which I presumed meant Atlantis. I couldn't remember the name but I knew that one set of twins were told to go with Alastor, the spirit of blood feuds and vengeance and learn from his powers. Another story in the letter referred to
the smasher, the destroyer and the shatterer
, but I couldn't remember their names or connection.

I left a gap under my organigram and noted what I could remember about the references to Zeus. It said that he was the king of all the gods, and also god of the sky, weather, thunder, lightning, law, order, and fate. It pretty much covered controlling everything I thought. I drew a line from Zeus to just above my organigram and Atlas and wrote,
Aim  = Power and Control
. I sat back and looked at my notes and thinking it was enough to move onto why I was involved.

When the woman with hazel eyes that could have killed set in train the process that ended with me being delivered to Decem Filios and to Leda and Chara, they must have been on the same side, or at least working in cooperation. Although I had been drugged, tied up and dumped on a barren island, I couldn't say that they had been overly threatening or violent. Hazel Eyes only asked me enough questions to make sure I was who she was supposed to abduct, and Leda and Chara seemed set on a path to re-educate me. Perhaps they wanted information about the letter, but they hadn't really asked. Maybe that would have come later. Unless they knew exactly what was in the letter, or perhaps were the part of the content. I knew the underwater performance by Chara was a fake after noticing the exact same wave from her the second time. A little mistake perhaps. One thing was for sure, I wasn't held on the mythical Atlantis. There was good reason to assume that Leda had wanted me to turn against Helen, but why? Was Helen a threat or an enemy in Leda's eyes? Was Helen working against what Leda was working towards? Anyway, they all became Team One in my notes.

When I was taken from the island, it was by a far more threatening Team Two. In another situation it could have been seen that they had rescued or saved me, but killing Chara for no logical reason other than maybe stopping her from suddenly screaming at the sight of black balaclavas and guns was barbaric. Then locking me away in a submarine and threatening me with electrocuted genitals weren't actions that I would associate with being rescued. Then there was the Grey Lady, who unlike Leda, seemed only interested in knowing about the contents of my mother's letter – and urgently, as if something was about to happen that related to the letter.

Then there was my wife. Making the assumption that seeing as I hadn't seen the letter in a very long time, it was possible that Helen had taken it. Now whether she had given it to Team One as I had dubbed them, I didn't know, but it seemed sure that she hadn't given it to Team Two because the Grey Lady wanted to know what the letter contained. So Helen probably wasn't working with them. So was she working with Team One? I had my doubts, as Leda had made a point of ensuring I saw the video of Helen and with it, leading me to believe she was working against Leda and her friends – and me. I couldn't make sense of where Helen fit into all this. I tried to remember if Leda or Chara had mentioned my mother's letter, and I couldn't recall that they had. I had a vague memory that I had mentioned it once myself, but Leda hadn't been interested, so she either knew all about the contents of the letter, or it didn't matter to her at all. But to the Grey Lady, it was all that mattered.

I went back to the time after I had met Helen at university when we had both belonged to a flaky group of save the world hippies. We all spent more time doing drugs, getting pissed and fucking each other rather than actually saving anything though. If she had been a spy or agent of some description, our regular moves around Europe later tied in well as they were always because of her job, which was as a political advisor. The real question though was, why was I her assignment as had been made so clear in the video?

Going back to the video, there were all the mentions of
it
that obviously contained the answer to everything.

'I'd know if he had any idea about it,' she had said as well as, 'I'm sure he has no clue about it at all.'

The man had said, ' It's only a few months from now.'

Whatever
it
was, it was her job to make sure I didn't know about it, so logically this
it
had something to do with my mother, her letter and why Helen had stayed so long with me.

While I was on pronouns, it hit me that Leda and Chara used them a lot. Always referring to
us
and
we
. I started a new page in my notebook with three columns, which I headed,
It, Us, and Them
. When I could replace these pronouns with nouns, I would have my answer, if I ever could. My main problem though was in deciding on which team Helen belonged. It had to be Team One because Team Two didn't seem to know anything about the letter's content. Only that it existed. If this was the case, Helen must have known I would be taken to Decem Filios, and then if I added my conclusion that Leda and Chara and perhaps friends seemed to be planning a long term stay for me, that would have meant I wouldn't have been around in a few months when
it
happened. I looked at the column I had headed with
It
and wrote,
Zeus
-
Aim  = Power and Control
. Then under
Us
I wrote
, Leda, Chara and Hazel Eyes
. That left
Them
, who had to be the Grey Lady and Team Two, who were now holding me prisoner. So maybe it was their job to stop what this
it
thing was from happening. My remaining mystery was still in which column to put Helen.