He looked around for a good place to sit down. It was going to be a long day, and he didn’t want to be on his feet the whole time. But first he supposed that for the sake of thoroughness he should check the Acropolis to make sure Locke hadn’t arrived first.
He pulled Dario and the other two aside.
“We don’t want any trouble up here,” he said in Italian. “If we spot Locke, take him as quietly as you can. The other two we take for a ride and cap them in the garbage dump. And remember, Westfield is for me and Dario.”
“What if they don’t come so quietly?” Dario said.
“Then Gia said we leave the Greeks some corpses next to the Parthenon, but make sure you get whatever they’re carrying. Dario, you’re with me. We’re going to get the lay of the land.”
Adamo passed the crowd and went up the steps. He squinted at the sun.
If they were going to be up here all day, he would have to get a bottle of water before he settled in.
Because they’d taken the shorter route up, Stacy thought she, Tyler, and Grant would be the first ones on the Acropolis plateau, but that notion was disabused when she saw workmen moving heavy marble blocks with the help of a gantry crane. She was surprised to see them on a Sunday morning, but then she remembered a guide they had passed saying that there was some rush to get part of the restoration completed for an event happening later in June.
She was also surprised to see an elderly man who was pushing his wife in a wheelchair, thinking he must be very spry to get up there so fast.
Stacy had been to the Acropolis a dozen times, but the sight was always breathtaking. Despite the destruction over the millennia, the Parthenon had lost none of its grandeur. Some architects thought it was the most perfectly proportioned building on earth, and she would be hard-pressed to argue with them. The columns were imperceptibly tapered like a cigar to counteract the optical illusion in which parallel straight lines appear to bow toward each other. In addition, to give the Parthenon the appearance of strength the columns leaned inward, but so slightly that they would meet only if they were extended one mile into the sky.
The brilliance of people dead for thousands of years continued to awe her.
As they took a direct route toward the opposite end of the Acropolis, Tyler and Grant couldn’t help but gawk at the array of immense marble columns that supported the remnants of the temple’s roof. Stacy wished she were seeing it for the first time, as they were.
She yelped as she lost her footing on one of the many slick marble slabs that were exposed in the gravel path. Tyler caught her before she could fall.
“You okay?” he said.
“I always forget about the stupid marble. One time I went down on my butt. It’s like standing on inclined ice.”
“Thanks for the tip.”
He looked at her and smiled before walking one. She had awakened late, so she hadn’t had a chance to talk to him about their brief connection last night, but there really wasn’t much to say. She supposed the attraction was the result of the stressful situations they’d faced together. Under the circumstances, however, acting on it was not only inappropriate but a serious distraction they didn’t need.
As they walked next to the temple, she said, “Isn’t it amazing?”
Tyler just nodded.
“How long has it been here?” Grant asked.
“Since 2500 B.C. Back then, all the relief sculptures that ringed the temple would have been painted in bright colors.”
“I can’t imagine that.”
“Most people see the pictures and think it was always white, but spectrography tells us differently now, even though weather has wiped almost all traces of the paint away.”
“Where are the sculptures that England didn’t get?”
“At the New Acropolis Museum built at the southern base of the Acropolis. The old museum is over there.” She pointed at a tired building on the western side of the Parthenon. Wires stretching around it made it clear that the building was closed.
“Looks like it’s seen better days.”
“It was too small and antiquated to house the treasures properly, so they built the new museum not only as a state-of-the-art showpiece but also to counter the British Museum’s insistence that the Elgin Marbles were safer in London.”
“And the Greeks don’t agree, apparently.”
“It’s been a sore point for two hundred years, but the Greeks didn’t have much of a case until the new museum was built.”
They passed the eastern end of the Parthenon. The east pediment was almost completely destroyed, with just the slanted edges of the roof visible on each side. The only statue on the pediment was the reclining Herakles on the left end. With the original still in the British Museum, the Greeks had constructed a reproduction to show what it would have looked like in place. Eight columns supported the roof. Counting from the left, Herakles was between the second and third columns.
Stacy took out a printout of the pediment as it would have appeared in ancient times. Aphrodite’s feet would have been just to the left of the seventh column.
Tyler took another few dozen steps and removed the geolabe from his backpack. Stacy had helped him recalibrate it at the hotel using the Stomachion puzzle, so the dials all pointed to the noon position once again. He turned it on its side as Archimedes had instructed and held it up. Stacy could tell they were too close. It blotted out the entire structure, including the pediment. They would have to back up until it barely covered the columns from end to end, with the top of the geolabe lined up along the base of the pediment.
They stepped back until they were near the edge of the Acropolis, behind a small stone wall surrounding a raised circular platform. Now the geolabe lined up perfectly. While Stacy steadied it, Tyler rotated the first knob until the left-hand dial pointed to Herakles’s rump. Then he flipped the geolabe over and read off the reading from the notches etched in the dial.
“Thirty-two degrees.”
Grant jotted it down. “Got it.”
Tyler flipped the geolabe back and repeated the steps by pointing the right-hand dial where Aphrodite’s feet would be.
“Seventy-one degrees.”
Grant took out a map of Naples and laid it on the stone railing. He traced the lines at those angles from the Castel Dell’Ovo and the Castel Sant’Elmo until they intersected.
“And here we are. The entrance to the tunnels leading to the Midas chamber is going to be somewhere in the vicinity of Piazza San Gaetano.”
He pointed to a square in the heart of Naples. There was no Roman fortress in the vicinity, but it could have been razed thousands of years ago. Or the Syracuse spy just got lost in the tunnels.
Stacy looked up, amazed at how quickly they’d completed their task.
“Really?” she said. “Could it be that easy?”
“It’s not,” Tyler said. His eyes were riveted on something to the right of the Parthenon. “Don’t make any sudden movements.”
“Why?”
“Grant, does that look like a tourist to you?”
Stacy moved only her eyes and saw a man sauntering toward them dressed in a shiny silk shirt and dark pants. Grant slowly turned his head and got the barest glimpse before turning back.
“Nope,” Grant said. “Not a tourist. He’s one of the Italian meatballs I punched out at the British Museum.”
FORTY-FIVE
