inside these cells before I go out to mum. I’m sure a few more moments of peace will not do her any harm. It’s time to let my nose take me to the temptation it can detect already. But I think I need a moment to compose myself and control the urge to run in there and demolish the entire tray.’
Mrs Manto smiled and followed Aristo through into the kitchen. She was proud of her duty to look after this family. The destiny of her family became intertwined with the Symitzis family more than a hundred years ago when her namesake grandmother became housekeeper and cook to the then head of the Symitzis family, Antonios Symitzis, in Smyrna in Asia Minor (modern-day Turkey).
It was hard when they had to leave their home in a hurry in 1922 A.D. as the army of Kemal Ataturk was knocking on the gates of the city and he was preparing to invite himself and his hungry-for-vengeance followers to a veritable feast of looting and massacre and wholesale destruction. Her grandmother did not even doubt what she wanted to do and she followed the Symitzis family to Cyprus. Since then two successive generations, first her mother and now herself, had also proved their love and loyalty to the Symitzis family over and over again.
‘Hi, mum.’ He planted big kisses on his mum’s cheeks and hugged her close.
‘Hi, darling. I’ve missed you, you know. Come and sit with me.’ She waited until he took a cup of coffee and joined her at the table. ‘How was your trip?’
‘It went very well. Our oil and gas division has struck a huge deposit of natural gas off the coast of the Northern Territory. The news has already got out and we’ve had an informal approach from Parlamen Proprietary Ltd for an outright acquisition of our activities or at the very least a joint venture.’
Elli looked at her son, her expression belying her challenge to him. Unable to resist, only to amuse herself, she was continuously testing him, even though she had absolute faith in his abilities and business instinct and was in no doubt that she had made the right choice for the person to lead the company into the next phase of its development. ‘What would you do?’
‘I would turn the tables on them and make an offer to buy them outright and consolidate our neighbouring fields. It would be a once in a lifetime opportunity to snatch the largest Australian miner. You know they have been in a dead end for two years now. I bet they are looking for a way out of their dire financial situation and for a way to revive their sluggish share price. We already own a 26 % holding in Parlamen, from the sale of those mines to them five years ago. They have very valuable assets. The company is at the moment severely undervalued by the market. And I hear they are in negotiations with Artanda Mining, the South African company listed in London. We need to move fast.’
‘I agree. We have the financial resources to pull this off. You have my blessing to go ahead. Now, do we have any news out of South Africa? The proposed equality tax would be damaging financially. And the troubles near Johannesburg and Cape Town are worrying me. The unrest could cripple our operations there.’
‘We are monitoring the situation. There is no danger yet for a disruption to our activities there, and all our mines are operating normally. But I think it’s only a matter of time before the trouble reaches us. I’ve already taken steps to increase the security of our operations and employees there.’ Aristo knew instantly from the almost imperceptible change in his mother’s expression that her mind had already moved onto another matter. Sometimes you felt as if you could see her brain working, its wheels turning. He waited for her to speak.
‘Aristo. There is something else I have been considering for some time now. I have decided not to dispose of our personal care division, but keep it and strengthen it significantly and possibly spin it off retaining a near-majority stake. I think Iraklios would be the right person to handle this project and I want you to work with him. I want you to compile a list of potential acquisitions and have it ready for me within two weeks.’
‘I’ll get right down to it.’
‘Good.’
Aristo allowed a pause before he raised something that had been bothering him and that he suspected would, perhaps, lead his mother to put up her guard. He was curious to see her reaction to what he was about to say. ‘There is something else that happened on the trip. I met this businessman, Andrew Le Charos.’ If Elli was stunned, she did not show it. Aristo had no way of imagining what that name meant to her. ‘You may have heard of him.’ Elli nodded. ‘Apparently he’s one of the richest men in Australia, the owner of one of the biggest private companies over there. He made his fortune in mining in Western Australia and made a bundle in property in the last ten years. He now lives in Sydney and his company is based there. He had a proposal for me. He made an informal offer for our mining operations in Queensland and mentioned in passing his interest in our oil operations in the Northern Territory as well. I was quite surprised to put it mildly. He had just met me and he was very forthcoming, very blunt. I told him we were not interested in selling any of our operations there, but would be open to joint ventures or some kind of consolidation to reduce operational costs. He simply nodded, gave me a warm smile and then changed the subject altogether. Before he moved away, though, he did ask me to pass his regards to you. And as he walked away, I saw him turn back to stare at me. It felt as if he was trying to look inside my soul. I felt a bit uncomfortable and not a little bit mystified, to tell you the truth.’ Aristo paused and looked at his mother. When he continued his tone was subtly interrogatory though he tried to disguise his challenge as curiosity. ‘How do you know him? And more precisely how well do you know him?’
‘It’s a long story. I will tell it to you another time. But let me say that we worked together briefly on some projects a long time ago and then we fell out. Let’s just say he fell a few notches in my estimation. I thought at the time that he was suddenly greedy, demanding of ever larger shares in the profit from our deals and ventures, and even though some measure of hunger is useful to succeed in business, you have to be fair and let some of the profit go to others who have worked hard and deserve it. In the end his behaviour was such that I found I could no longer trust him.’
Elli decided not to tell Aristo yet of the other matter troubling her. She had remembered why those icons in her dream could be important. Was it possible? Could it be? Could those be the fabled Likureian icons? She needed more information. She had to set in motion the search for those icons. She would need them for the mission that it seemed had been involuntarily thrust upon her.
She felt that she had been waiting for this moment all her life. Her whole life, everything that had happened to her, to her grandmother, to her mother; it all seemed to prepare her for this moment. She knew what she had to do. She had to finish what started all those centuries ago.
CHAPTER 4
Cappadocia, Asia Minor
(Modern-day Turkey)
Present day
It was a bright sunny August day with a glorious blue cloudless sky. The heat was stifling outside, but inside the caves it was comfortable and cool. The only sounds were voices and the distant impact of chisel on rock.
It had been a gruelling day for the excavation team that were running out of funds and out of time. They had been doubling and redoubling their efforts. And with funds almost exhausted, they could not afford to employ more people and had to do the additional work themselves. That had meant little sleep and many cups of coffee.
Giorgos was sure this particular cave hid something precious. He had done his research and to him the trail led here. It would be a natural place to hide something so precious away from prying eyes and the threat of looting.
Giorgos was with a special archaeological expedition, a collaboration between the Greek and Turkish Departments of Antiquities, which had been excavating a cave believed to be a Byzantine chapel carved out of the rock in around 1453 A.D.
Survivors of the fall of Constantinople in 1453 A.D. fled to all directions. A band of them came here, in this remote area, scattered with caves hewn out of the unusually shaped hills, a perfect refuge, which had been used in the past as shelter from Saracen and other attacks on the coastal settlements.
Giorgos hoped that the cave hid a secret bigger than a chapel and some random artefacts, and he wished he could coerce the cave and seduce it to gorge out its secrets.
He was tired of endless archaeological excavations with little treasure. He ached for that big break, the glory of that big discovery, to rival the discovery of the tombs of the Macedonian Kings in Vergina in Macedonia, Northern
