ro za qo pu pte ka
pa zo ti du ta qe
The numbers continued on to ninety. He checked the files and, sure enough, she had a Lotus data management system on the hard disk. He quickly structured a format for his matrix, then began coding in the sounds. The setup was simple, but the next part would need some programming. The numbers in the protocol had to be converted to sounds. It looked easy, but what if they'd been deliberately garbled somehow? He'd be no better off than before.
Think positive.
As he finished coding in the grid, he could hear the tentative stirrings of early morning Iraklion outside. Trucks were starting up, birds coming alive. He began noticing the lack of sleep, but he pushed it aside and took another sip of raki. Just keep going, he told himself. You're about to find out if great minds really do think alike…
"Darling, what in the world are you doing with my computer?" The voice was like a whisper over his shoulder.
"How about checking to see if you've got any video games?" He turned around, startled in spite of himself. What had woken her? She was probably wired. "Eva, why did you take off tonight? And what was that nonsense you were yelling at me?"
"Maybe it wasn't nonsense. Alex said you were working for him. He said you two were partners. It's not really true, is it?" She slumped into a chair. She was wearing a light dressing gown, her hair tousled. With a groan she rubbed at her eyes. "I don't need this."
"You can forget about Alex. He's playing way over his head. It's always bad judgment to underestimate the other team's strengths." He reached for her. "You've just got to decide who you trust. You might start with Zeno. He's offered to help me get you out of Crete."
"And go where?" She moved against him. "Michael, they found me here. They'll find me anywhere."
"Not if we turn this scene around and take the action to them. But that's the next move. Right now, you just have to be out of Crete while I do a little checking. How about flying to Miami, grabbing a plane down to Nassau, then-"
"You're going to get me on the Ulysses or die trying, aren't you."
He decided to let the crack pass. It was true, however. If she ever saw it, he was sure she'd start to understand.
"You know," she went on, "this afternoon I was merely worried. Now I'm actually frightened. Guess I'm not as brave as I thought. I'm sorry about tonight, running off like that."
"Not the first time I've had a woman give me the gate." He laughed, then reached out and stroked her hair, missing the long tresses of the old days. "Now, you can help me out with something. Does the name Yakuza mean anything to you?"
"What are you talking about?" She studied him, puzzled.
"I probably shouldn't tell you this, maybe it'll just upset your morning, but that wiseguy who broke up our party last night was a Japanese hood. From the Mino-gumi syndicate. Back home they're Numero Uno. They run Tokyo and Osaka and they've got half the Liberal Democratic Party in their pocket. Then there's the old CIA connection, from days gone by."
"How do you know?"
"After you took off, our friend dropped in again. Uninvited as usual. That's when Novosty finished him off with his Uzi and I got a closer look."
"Alex killed-! My God, that makes three."
"By actual count. He's gone a little trigger happy in his old age. That or he's very, very scared." He rubbed at the scratch on his neck, remembering. "What if it's the Japanese mob that's behind this? They have the funding, that's for sure. Among other things, they run consumer loans in Japan, legalized loan sharking. They've got more money than God."
"This is too much. I don't know anything about…" She rose, trembling. "I'll go with you to Nassau, Michael. Let's take the Ulysses and just disappear in the middle of the Atlantic."
"It's a deal." He beamed. "But first we've got to answer some questions. You say the Yakuza are not part of anything you know about?"
"I'm only vaguely aware they exist."
"And you don't know who runs Mino Industries?"
"Never heard of it before."
"It's a bunch of nice, clean-cut mobsters. Problem is, one of the owner's kobun, street men, tried to kill us tonight. Maybe we're finally getting a little light at the end of the tunnel." He looked her over. Eva was always beautiful in the mornings. There was something wanton about her this time of day. "Come here a minute."
He took her and cradled her in his arms, then brushed his lips against her brow. "You okay?"
"I think so." She took a deep breath.
"Never knew you to quit just because things got tough." He drew her around. "You're the cryptography expert. Why don't we try to find out what kind of phonetics Ventris's numerical correlates for Linear B would produce from these numbers?"
"What are you talking about?" She rubbed at her eyes.
"You know, in my travels I've discovered something. A great mind often has a touch of poetry. Sometimes, in order to think like the other guy, you need to be a little artistic. So, I wonder… about that cipher."
"You mean-?"
"Just a crazy, early morning idea." He patted the keyboard of the laptop. "What if the mind behind it is using a system no computer in the world would ever have heard of?"
"There's no such thing, believe me."
"Maybe yes, maybe no." He flipped open his book to the central section, a glossy portfolio of photos. He'd shot them himself with an old Nikon. "Take a look at this and refresh your memory."
She looked down at the photo of a large Minoan clay jar from the palace, a giant pithoi, once a container for oil or unguents or water for the bath. Along the sides were inscribed rows of wavy lines and symbols. It was the Minoan written language, which, along with cuneiform and hieroglyphics, was among the oldest in the world. "You mean Linear B."
"Language of King Minos. As you undoubtedly remember, it's actually a syllabary, and a damned good one. Each of these little pictures is a syllable, a consonant followed by a vowel. Come on, this was your thing, way back when. Look, this wavy flag here reads mi, and here, this little pitchfork with a tail reads no." He glanced up. "Anyway, surely you recall that Linear B has almost a hundred of these syllable signs. But Ventris assigned them numbers since they're so hard to reproduce in typeface. For example, this series here, mi-no-ta-ro reads numerically as-" he checked the appendix, "13-52-59-02. Run them together and minotaro reads 13525902. And just like the early Greeks, the Minoans didn't insert a space between words. If somebody was using Linear B, via Ventris' system, the thing would come out looking like an unintelligible string of numbers."
"You don't really-"
"You say you've tried everything else. NSA's Crays drew a blank. Maybe you were looking for some fancy new encryption system when it was actually one so old nobody would ever think of it. Almost four thousand years old, to be exact."
"Darling, that's very romantic. You're improving in the romance department." She gazed at him a second, then flashed a wry smile. "But I can't say the same for the good-sense arena. No offense, but that's like the kind of thing kids write to us suggesting. Nobody employs anything remotely that simple these days."
"I knew you'd think I was crazy. You're not the first." He rose. "But humor me. Just slice those number sequences into pairs and see what they look like phonetically. Something to take your mind off all the madness around here."
"Well, all right." She sighed, then settled unsteadily into the rickety chair he'd just vacated. "Make you a proposition, sweetie. Get me some coffee, nice and strong, and I'll forget I have good sense and play with this a little."
"You're a trooper." He turned and headed for the kitchen. "I remember that about you. Not to mention great in bed."
"We strive for excellence in all things."
Just as he reached the doorway, the kitchen light flicked on. It was Adriana, in blue robe and furry slippers, now reaching up to retrieve her coffee pan.
While Eva was typing away behind him, he leaned against the doorframe in his still-wet clothes to watch a Greek grandmother shuffle about her private domain preparing a traditional breakfast. He suspected no male hand had ever touched those sparkling utensils. The Old World had its ways, yesterday and forever.
While he drowsed against the doorjamb, the aroma of fresh Greek coffee began filling the room. Sarakin. That was the Japanese name for their homegrown loan sharks, the so-called salary-men financiers. He knew that the Yakuza's four largest sarakin operations gave out more consumer loans than all of Japan's banks combined. If you added to that the profits in illegal amphetamines, prostitution, bars, shakedowns of businesses, protection rackets… the usual list, and you were talking multi multibillions. The major problem was washing all that dirty money. They routinely invested in respectable but losing propositions abroad, on the sound theory that one dollar cleaned was worth two unlaundered.
Was that what the Soviet scam was all about? Money from the Japanese mob being laundered through loans to the USSR? What better way to wash it? Nobody would ever bother asking where it came from.
But there was one major problem with that neat scenario. Politically the Yakuza were ultra-rightist hardliners. So why would they expose their money with the Soviets, laundered or not? Particularly now, with so much political instability there-hardliners, reformers, nationalists. Somehow it didn't compute.
"Michael, come here a second." The voice had an edge of triumph.
"What?" He glanced around groggily.
"Just come here and take a look at this." She was staring at the screen.
He turned and walked over, still entranced by the heady, pungent essence of fresh Greek coffee now flooding the room. "Is it anything-?"
"Just look at it and tell me what you think." She leaned back from the screen and shifted the Zenith toward him. The ice-blue letters cast an eerie glow through the dull morning light. The color reflected off his eyes, matching them.
"You did it already?"
"I started with a one-to-one replacement of numbers with letters. But it's sequence-inverted, which means I had to… anyway, what do think so far? Am I a genius or what?"
He drew a chair next to the screen and started to examine it. But at that moment Adriana set a tray of coffee down beside the computer, steaming and fresh, together with dark figs and two bowls of yogurt.
"Kafe evropaiko," she commanded, then thrust a cup into his hand.
"Malista, efcharisto." He absently nodded his thanks, took a sip of the steaming brew, then returned his attention to the screen.
At first he thought he was just groggy, his vision playing tricks, but then the string of letters began to come into focus. Incredible!
"Okay, what about this part here," he asked, pointing to the fourth line, where the letters turned to nonsensical garbage, "and then down here again?"
"That's what I was talking about. The interlacing switches there. It happens every hundred numbers. They started by taking the second fifty digits and interlacing them back into the first fifty. Then they switched the algorithm and interlaced the third fifty digits ahead, into the fourth fifty, but backwards. Then it repeats again."
"You figured all that out just fooling around with it?"
"Darling, I do this for a living, for godsake. After a while you have good instincts." She tapped her fingers nervously on the wooden table, then remembered the coffee and reached for a cup. "Nice little trick. Standard but nice. Every so often you fold the data back into themselves somehow. That way there are no repetitions of number sequences-for words that are used a lot-to give you away. But once you've played with this stuff as much as I have… anyway, it's always the first thing I check for."
"Congratulations."
"Tell me the truth." She looked at him, sipping her coffee. "Can you really still read this? It's been years."
"Memory like an elephant. Though you may have to help me along now and then." He pointed. "Look. I think that word's modern Greek. They've mixed it in where there's not an old word for something." He pushed around the computer. "Want to run the whole data file through your system? Clean it up?"
"My pleasure." She was clearing the screen. "I can't believe it just fell apart like this. The reason our Crays didn't crack it was it's too simple by half."
He reached for his coffee, feeling a surge of satisfaction. His hunch had been dead on. Whoever came up with this idea for an encryption must have been a fan of ancient Greek history, and a knowledgeable one. What better cipher for Project Daedalus communiques than the language Daedalus himself used? They'd taken that four-thousand-year-old tongue, an archaic forerunner of ancient Greek, and then scrambled it using a mathematical algorithm. Mino Industries was communicating with the Soviets using an encoded version of Minoan Linear B.
It was absolutely poetic. It also appeared, upon first examination, to be very naive. Yet upon reflection it turned out to be brilliant. You convert a totally unheard-of language to numbers, throw in a few encryption tricks, and the result is something that would drive all the hotdog DES-oriented supercomputers crazy. All those chips would be trying trillions of keys when there actually was no key. Yes, you had to admit it was inspired.
Except the Daedalus crowd was about to experience a problem, a small headache. Make that a major headache. Because their secret protocol was about to become headlines. He figured that ought to go a long way toward stopping any more shooting.
"Okay. It's humming." She reached for her yogurt. "This time around all the garbage will be gone." She took a bite, then burst out laughing. "You know, this is wonderful, working with you. Darling, I've just decided. Let's do something together, maybe live on the Ulysses for a while. I might even get to like it. It sounds romantic."
"I'm still looking for the romance in life."
"Well, love, you've found it. It's me." She leaned over and kissed him on the lips. "End of quest."
"Thought I'd never hear you say that. But first you have to help me translate this. I'm over a decade out of date. My modern Greek's a little rusty too, and a lot of the technical terms in this look to be transliterated-"
"No, sweetie, that's not the first thing we have to do. The first thing is to make sure you've got a separate copy of anything you're working with. Not in the computer. I'll spare you my horror stories about erased files, hard disks going down, all the rest." She was rising, energized. "Cardinal computer rule number one. Always dupe anything you're working on, no matter how sure you are nothing can go wrong. Believe me."
"Sounds good." He looked up. "What are you doing?"
"I need that disk I showed you tonight. We can use it for the backup. It's in my purse, which I now realize I left in the car when I came in. I was slightly crazy at the time." She was turning. "God, it seems like ages."
"Look, why don't you let me-?"
"You don't know where I parked it. My secret hiding place."
"Maybe we ought to send Zeno, or Adriana-"
"Just sit tight. Only be a minute." She wrapped her coat about her and, before he could protest, disappeared out the door, humming.
She was a marvel. Everything he'd remembered.
"Are you still awake?" Zeno was trudging into the room, still wearing his frayed nightshirt.
"We just solved the riddle of the sphinx, old friend. Except now we have to translate it."
"You should be sleeping, Michael. Go now, catch an hour or so. I will start making arrangements. Get tickets for you both on the car ferry to Athens, a pistol, maybe new passports if you want. We have work to do." He reached and took the cup of coffee Adriana was urging on him.
"All right. As soon as she gets back."
"What?" He froze, then looked toward the back. "What do you mean? I thought she was still asleep."
"She went out to the car, wherever it is."
"I wish she had asked me. I would have been happy-"
"You know how she is. There's no stopping her when she gets rolling."
"This is not good." He turned and called to Adriana to bring his trousers and shoes. "We must find her."
"You're right. It was stupid. Damned stupid." He was getting up. "Let's do it together."