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