The Mask of Atreus (21 page)

The bike was little more than a moped: a couple of hundred cc's at most. It was an indeterminate dark color, patched with rust. The man on it looked slight, clad in boots, a stained T-shirt, and what might have been army fatigues. He wore a full helmet of a fluorescent green that seemed better suited to a bigger, faster bike. It completely covered his face.
Marcus?

She couldn't be sure, but she didn't think so. There was a 172

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long, thin object wrapped into a ragged bundle slung across his back: a rifle.

Suddenly he turned, and the dark visor of the helmet looked right at her, so that she could almost feel the eyes behind it. She remembered the bright yellow of her backpack and wished she had lain on top of it. But then the bike revved a little more, and he moved on, picking up speed as he headed down.

Safe. For now.

Deborah lay where she was for a minute or more, listening to the slowing of her heart and breathing.

He would come back. He would go another quarter of a mile or so, realize he had missed her, and would start back up the mountain, hoping to catch her in the open. She considered her position. The olive grove would cover her for another thousand yards or more if she headed straight down toward the town instead of zigzagging with the road. It would take her longer, and she didn't know what kind of cover she would get thereafter, and she would have to cross the road as it cut back across the orchard, but for a while she would be safer.

She considered jettisoning her backpack altogether but opted instead for draping it with a suitably drab overshirt she had brought along for the cool of the evening, but not until after she had slipped a stone the size of a cantaloupe inside it. It wouldn't be much help if they continued playing big game hunter and distant prey, but if he got close to her, she would be glad of something she could use as a weapon. She felt its heft and the way it swung on the shoulder strap, and she thought she could probably kill him with a well-directed swipe. The thought sickened her a little. She swallowed a long draught of water and started moving swiftly, quietly down through the scented and dusty trees, listening all the time.

The olive trees were small and widely spaced, so they never offered anything like a canopy or the kind of dense shadow and limited sight lines of a real forest, so she kept 173

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moving, ready to throw herself back to the hard earth at the sound of the motorbike. If, on the other hand, he had decided to park it by the road and come after her on foot, he would almost certainly see her before she saw him.
Well, no point thinking about that.

After a few minutes of brisk descent, she saw a ridge of concrete running along the orchard floor twenty yards ahead and knew that this was where the road cut back across her path. If she started clambering down the retaining wall, she would be visible from any number of points, so she got down on her belly and crawled the last ten yards to the lip, till she could see beyond the trees, over the road ten feet below, and down into another grove of olive trees on the other side. She looked all around, all senses reaching out for signs of the bike or its rider.

Nothing.

She pulled herself forward, feeling the sudden leap of pain in both wrist and thigh, ignoring them both as she dropped first one leg, then the other, over the sharp edge of the retaining wall till she was hanging awkwardly from her fingertips. She dropped into the ditch, scraping her elbow and face against the stone as she tried to absorb the shock of the last few feet with her knees. It was an ungainly landing, but she hauled herself out of the gully and onto the road, head snapping from side to side in search of her pursuer.
Still nothing.

She loped across the hot asphalt, into the trees on the other side, and, stooping a little now as the throbbing in her thigh grew more insistent, began stumbling down to the next crossing.

It seemed he had gone. She was getting much lower now, closer to the outlying farm buildings behind the old town and the huddle of tourist shops and cafes that lined the road fronting the Roman ruins. Surely he wouldn't risk shooting at her down here? He had missed his chance and ridden off, to report back, perhaps to . . . whomever.

Again the trees thinned into a vista of sky. In the distance 174

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she could see rooftops and the five monolithic columns of the ancient temple to Apollo. She crawled the last yards as before to the upper lip of the retaining wall, looked up and down the road, and across to the final huddled ranks of ancient trees and freedom. She was about to throw one leg over the rim when it occurred to her to make sure the drop was no worse this time, and she peered over the edge. Below her, nestled in the drainage ditch by the road, was a motorcycle. Beside it, lying flat in the grass, his rifle trained on the bend in the road which arced sharply back up the mountain to the Acrocorinth, was a slight figure in a lime green helmet.

CHAPTER 37

He was no more than ten feet away, and Deborah would have laid a good deal of money that it was only the helmet that had stopped him from hearing her approach. She drew back sharply--too sharply, in fact--and then lay in the dust and dry grass wondering if the movement had given her away.
Now what?

He seemed to have dug in, prepared a little quasi-military foxhole--as he probably had done on top of the Acrocorinth--

waiting for her to come waltzing down the road blithe and stupid as only a tourist could be. The idea irritated her like something small and hard lodged in her gut.

If she dropped on him, she thought, she would have a momentary advantage. She could swing her rock-weighted backpack and . . . But the helmet rendered such an approach risky at best and, with something like relief, she discarded the option. She could wait him out, though God alone knew how long that might take. The sun was on its way down, and though it wouldn't be properly dark for hours, she didn't like the idea of being caught out here after sunset, particularly if he was out here with her.

She could try to distract him, flicking stones into the underbrush like they did in the movies, so that she could slip past as he went to investigate. She frowned, rolling carefully onto her back and looking up through the tree limbs to the sky. That seemed a pretty surefire way of getting herself killed.

No. Ruling out the naive impulse to just introduce herself and somehow talk her way out of this whole morbid farce, 176

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that left waiting. She didn't like it, because she wanted to be doing something constructive, but it seemed the safest plan: assuming she could keep quiet until he decided to abandon his watch.

Immediately she ran through more movie cliches, all of them better suited to comedy than tragedy, though all of them would probably leave her with a bullet in her head: an irresistible impulse to sneeze, the ringing of a cell phone, a sudden need to urinate. She forced herself to stop thinking of them and lie still, wondering at the strangeness of the situation, the two of them lying there silently, her head no more than a dozen feet from that of the man who was trying to kill her.

That was unavoidable now. Not only was it clear that she wasn't dealing with some gun-happy idiot who had mistaken her for a rabbit, it was clear that he was after her, specifically her, and--really for the first time--the question of
who
was gradually eclipsed by the question of
why
. She had fled to Greece to avoid what had looked like danger at home. Lying here less than five yards from the motorcyclist, it was tough not to see the irony--as well as the stupidity--of that decision.

"Come home now. Your life in danger."

Those words didn't seem quite so arbitrary now . . . She had been afraid that one of the policemen investigating Richard's death was not a cop at all, and she had been sure that someone was following her and with no official purpose in mind. That someone had turned out to be Marcus, with whom she had formed a kind of investigative pact, though that was also starting to look like a questionable decision. All idiocy aside, however, she couldn't see why anyone would want her dead. It wasn't (God knew) like she'd learned anything significant about Richard's death. Surely his killers would want her alive so that she could eventually incriminate herself completely with her absurd activities. But what if it wasn't so much about what she knew as it was about what they
thought
she knew?

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She had had momentary access to Richard's--now partial--secret collection, as she had to his computer files. Perhaps she had actually seen something significant but hadn't realized what it was, something that joined the dots from Agamemnon, to Schliemann, to Richard, to his killers. She stared at the extraordinary blue of the sky, listened to the buzz and thrum of the crickets, and wondered what she could have missed.

Then she heard movement below. The motorcyclist was stirring.

Oh God. This is it.

For a wild moment she thought that he had decided to climb the retaining wall to get a better view of the road. She shut her eyes and strained to hear but could make nothing of the sounds below. In a single movement she pulled herself into a crouch and pivoted as noiselessly as possible, unconsciously raising the heavy backpack to strike if a hand and then that helmet appeared over the concrete rim. The sound of the motorbike being kicked into life was so loud in the anxious stillness that she almost cried out. A second later she had the presence of mind to throw herself back onto the ground so that he wouldn't see her as he pulled away. She lay for twenty or thirty seconds, following the sound. He was going back up the mountain, hoping to catch her on her way down. She waited another ten seconds, peered over the road to check he was out of sight, and threw herself down. Her twisted ankle gave a shout of protest, but she went straight into a stumbling run, across the road and into what promised to be the last olive grove before she reached the farms below. She could still make out the thin whirring of the motorbike climbing the mountain. From above, she realized, he could turn and see her running through the trees. But maybe he wouldn't look back, and trying to run down the road itself would take too long and leave her even more exposed. Her great loping strides had become short and uneven, a stuttering limp that would get worse the longer she went. No: return to the road, and he would catch her for sure. 178

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It took her no more than a minute to stumble through the next grove of trees. When she came to the steep drop down to the road she barely paused. The sound of the bike had receded to nothing, and she was sure she would have heard it had he returned. She glanced, dropped, and ran not across the road, but along it. Fifty yards ahead it turned sharply toward the north, down toward the ancient ruins and the bay. She put her head down and tried to block out the pain as she ran. Her shirt was drenched with sweat, and her face was streaming so that her eyes stung from the salt. She had made it round the corner when her ankle gave way, and she sprawled into the rain ditch.

This time she did cry out, but it was more frustration than fear or pain, as if that long-dormant reptilian instinct had decided that that was the more useful emotion. She was dragging herself to her feet when she heard--or imagined she heard--the high-pitched whine of a small engine. She paused for the briefest of moments to be sure. Yes. It was him. He was coming back down and, judging by the new shrillness in the sound, he was moving very fast. He had seen her.
Now it's a race.

She looked straight ahead. The road stretched forward, a long straight ribbon of hot, shimmering asphalt. In a hundred yards or so, there were buildings to the side, but they were set back in coarse meadows and looked like little more than garden sheds. Then there was the high fencing around the back edge of the ruins, some of whose columns were just visible through the trees which lined the site. Another two hundred yards beyond there, the road joined what passed for the main drag. Take the right fork, and she would be at the tourist shops and cafes in no more than a minute or two. If she had minutes, which she doubted. She forced her legs to work as hard and fast as she could manage. The blood from her thigh had now trickled down to stain her sock, leaving what looked like a savage gash that ran almost the length of her leg. She shrugged the sight off. It wasn't as bad as it looked. Her sprained wrist was irrelevant. What counted now 179

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was dehydration, exhaustion, and the slight twist to her ankle which had halved her road speed.

Just a few more yards . . .

She passed the sheds, watched by a solitary goat, and did not pause. The motorbike sound had receded a little as the road had carried him over to the eastern side of the mountain, but now it was getting louder again. One more zag, and he'd be racing flat-out, straight down on top of her. She ran. The ancient columns of Apollo's temple flickered into view, but the ruins seemed deserted, and with the thick wire fence between her and them, it probably wouldn't much matter if there was a busload of off-duty marines on the other side. The bike engine had faded again. Maybe he would reconsider, think she had gone back to hiding, and would double back. Deborah grimaced through the pain in her ankle, gritting her teeth like some ancient Roman biting down on a leather strap during surgery. She ran on, light-headed, starting to weave involuntarily across the blazing pavement. The difference in sound when the bike rounded the corner behind her was like another gunshot. One moment it was a distant whirr, a cicada, perhaps, or a neighbor's lawnmower, then all barriers to the sound were gone, and he was roaring down the road behind her. She didn't turn. If he was poised to shoot her now, she could only hope he missed. She didn't have the energy to dodge.

She ran on, ten yards, fifteen yards, twenty-five yards, then she was at the junction and rounding the corner to the right in a sprawling, staggering trot. The ancient site's perimeter was walled here with high, regular stone blocks which cut the motorbike's engine noise in half. Ahead she could see tables and chairs spilling out onto the sidewalk, the sudden flare of color from a stand of postcards, a shop front, a bus . . . people.