time of year.’
‘No,’ Gabriel said, his smile fading. ‘I mean, where do we go?’
‘Why would I know? I don’t even know what we’re doing here.’
Gabriel’s smile was gone.
‘Why don’t you tell me why we’re here,’ Stratton said, trying to keep it together before it all fell apart.
Gabriel nodded, controlling his annoyance. He had vowed to act more like a partner this time, and, anyway, it was clear that this was going to be as much about them versus their bosses as it was looking for the mysterious demon. ‘I had another image while in Turkey,’ he said.
‘I gathered that much,’ Stratton said. His doubts about Gabriel went up and down like a big dipper. At this moment they were very high.
‘I saw medieval walls and buildings, Knights . . . crusaders I suppose, and they were on a Mediterranean island.’
‘Why Rhodes?’ Stratton asked. ‘There must be hundreds of islands with medieval buildings. European knights were all over the Med.’
‘I saw thousands of homes crammed around a horseshoe harbour. Our people came up with this place. Apparently Rhodes’ old city is medieval, densely packed with buildings and has a horseshoe harbour.’
Stratton was beginning to feel trapped on this assignment. ‘The man you see, the one who hit you in the wood, is he here too?’ he asked.
‘If this is the right place,’ he said.
‘Have you actually seen him?’
‘I’ve never seen him,’ Gabriel said pressing one hand to his forehead with the other held up, stopping the conversation.‘Stratton, I want to apologise to you.This last week I’ve had time think, and I, well, I realised what a difficult position you must have been in when we first met. I never took a moment to consider it from your point of view.You were thrown in the deep end, with someone you didn’t know, who claimed to do something that must’ve sounded wacky to you - and probably still does. I not only expected you to believe in me without question, but to help me as much as you could at the same time. I am arrogant and I apologise . . . Truth is, you did pretty good back there in the forest.You took me to the right place and you didn’t block me.That’s more than I’ve gotten from most decoders I’ve ever used. But asking for you to rejoin me was thoughtless. I didn’t stop to think that working with me was the last place you wanted to be . . . If you want to go, I’ll tell them it was my fault and I was unhelpful and impossible to work with.’
An apologetic smile crept on to Gabriel’s face as he looked at Stratton. ‘But I need help on this. I can’t do it alone. I’d like you to stay on.’
Any anger Stratton had for the man dissolved in the face of such sincere contrition. It was nevertheless tempting to accept Gabriel’s offer for him to get out, but he could not. It was a plea for help and it would be desertion. Like it or not, it seemed he was stuck with this old man for the immediate future.
‘Okay . . . Partners. Just explain something to me. Why can’t you see his features?’ Stratton asked.
‘I see into his heart, not his face,’ Gabriel said.‘And through his eyes, but not like they are windows. I feel his emotional reaction to things. He’s nostalgic. Something he saw allowed him to imagine himself as a knight, on castle battlements, fighting an enemy who came in wooden ships by their thousands. The knights did not lose the fight and the enemy left in their boats. That’s the adventure he had and what I saw. I told that to our people, they decoded it and they sent us here.’
Stratton sighed. He was not enjoying this. ‘Why don’t we find a hotel and take it from there?’ he suggested.
‘Agreed.’
They picked up their bags and headed out of the airport to the waiting taxis.
Gabriel sat in the back of the car while Stratton sat beside the driver as they followed the coastline. Twenty minutes later they reached the twentieth-century outskirts of the city of Rhodes where they left the beach and climbed a hill. The modern houses gave way to a cluster of ancient remains signposted as the Acropolis and a mile further on they came to an imposing medieval wall with a vast moat in front of it. They followed the road in front of the wall for another mile, gradually downhill and back to the sea, then along the front of a harbour where ships lay at berth. Suddenly the taxi turned in through an arch and the road became narrow and changed from tarmac to cobblestone. They stopped in a cramped, sloping square with a fountain in the centre and shuttered shops on the higher ground facing the arched entrance and battlements.
Stratton asked the driver if he knew of a hotel but the man did not appear to want to spend any more time with them than he had to and shrugged ignorance.
A moment later they were standing in the square overshadowed by the heavily fortified ramparts on one side and two-storey buildings tightly packed together on the other, holding their baggage, the taxi gone, and looking at the narrow streets that led away in every direction.There were few people about and, in short, the atmosphere was ghost town.
‘This isn’t it,’ Gabriel said.
Stratton said nothing but inwardly sighed. Why was he surprised, he asked himself. There were some sixteen hundred Greek islands, six hundred of them inhabited, and then there were the thousands of miles of mainland coastline and all the towns along that - not to mention places in Turkey that could match the description. The whole idea of detailed research was to avoid pointless journeys such as this. If they had got it wrong with all the databases at their fingertips, what chance had Stratton and Gabriel of finding the place.
‘Why’s it wrong?’ Stratton asked.
‘There aren’t any people.’
‘It’s out of season,’ Stratton reminded him.
‘What I mean is I saw hundreds and hundreds of houses, more than a thousand maybe, but no people. Just a few. The houses are nearly all empty.’
‘Like this,’ Stratton pointed out, holding on to his frustration.
‘No. The houses in my viewing have been empty for a long time.’
‘Was it an ancient town like Pompeii?’ Stratton asked.
‘No. That’s too far back. The houses still stand but many are in ruin. Walls collapsed. No windows or doors. Overgrown.’
Stratton tried to think of any town destroyed by a natural disaster, or chemical or radiation attack which was still empty but nothing came to mind.
‘I wish I could draw it for you,’ Gabriel sighed, ‘But I can’t. All I can say is this place doesn’t fit what I saw.’ He looked away as if he did not want to think about it any more.
Stratton thought about reporting back to Sumners. Perhaps the boffins could draw up a list of possible towns for them to check out, or at least get pictures of to show Gabriel and save some travelling. He wondered why they had not done that in the first place.
‘You hungry?’ Stratton asked him, trying to think of something to help ease the tension he could feel rising in Gabriel.
‘I haven’t been very hungry lately . . . I don’t think you realise how serious this is.’
Gabriel was right. Stratton did not.
‘We’re running out of time. Each day he gets closer to his goal, whatever or wherever that is; he pushes relentlessly towards it.’
He could feel the change in Gabriel. Back in London and Thetford he was tired and frustrated, but now he looked more drawn, weaker and sounded much more desperate.
A man sipping a hot drink from a mug stepped from a shop nearby and looked at them.
‘Hello,’ he said in a charming manner. ‘Can I help you?’
Stratton turned to him. He was middle-aged, small, comfortably dressed and as harmless looking as he sounded.
‘You are English,’ he said confidently, then, when Stratton did not answer immediately, he looked unsure. ‘Francoise? German? My Dutch is not so good.’
‘English,’ Stratton said.
‘Ah. I thought so. I am rarely wrong. I am Cristos,’ he continued, remaining in his doorway with his free hand casually in his pocket. ‘This is my travel shop. If you need anything: car, boat, flight, hotel, I can help you.’
