The Labyrinth of Minos (A Carter Devereux Mystery Thriller Book 5) Read online

  The Labyrinth of Minos

  A Carter Devereux Mystery Thriller Book 5

  JC Ryan

  Contents

  Your Free Gift

  Preface

  Foreword

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Also by JC Ryan

  Your Free Gift

  About JC Ryan

  Your Free Gift

  As a way of saying thanks for your purchase, I’m offering you a free eBook if you join my newsletter here: JC Ryan Books

  MYSTERIES FROM THE ANCIENTS

  THOUGHT PROVOKING UNSOLVED ARCHAEOLOGICAL MYSTERIES

  This book is exclusive to my readers. You will not find this book anywhere else.

  We spend a lot of time researching and documenting our past, yet there are still many questions left unanswered. Our ancestors left a lot of traces for us, and it seems that not all of them were ever meant to be understood. Despite our best efforts, they remain mysteries to this day.

  Inside you will find some of the most fascinating and thought-provoking facts about archaeological discoveries which still have no clear explanation.

  Read all about The Great Pyramid at Giza, The Piri Reis Map, Doomsday, Giant Geoglyphs, The Great Flood, Ancient Science and Mathematics, Human Flight, Pyramids, Fertility Stones, the Tower of Babel, Mysterious Tunnels, The Mystery of The Anasazi and much more.

  Don’t miss this opportunity to get this free eBook. Click Here to join the mailing list and get it now.

  Preface

  The word ‘labyrinth’ has a Minoan origin, the pre-Greek language spoken by the people of Knossos in Crete. Generally labyrinth refers to a maze but in some parts of the world it is also widely associated with the Lydian word ‘labrys’ which is a double-edged axe.

  Foreword

  From the historical record

  MYTHS OF HUMAN-ANIMAL hybrids and the involvement of the gods in human affairs are common in folklore from all over the world. Myths and legends, we are told, are works of fiction, superstition, fantasy, or the vivid imagination of uninformed, over-religious, ancient peoples.

  What gave rise to those myths? Was it only imagination? Lack of understanding? Could there be some veracity in every myth?

  According to Homer's "Iliad," the Greek king, Agamemnon went to war against the Trojans for abducting and keeping Helen, the queen of Sparta. Agamemnon’s army besieged the city of Troy for ten years before finally conquering it. For millennia it was believed that this story was a myth. There never was a city of Troy nor a Trojan war.

  That was until 1868, when the German businessman and archaeologist, Heinrich Schliemann, excavated a site at Hisarlik, Turkey and discovered treasures belonging to King Priam, the king of Troy. To this day there are still those who describe it as fantasy, but many archaeologists are now agreeing that there was a city called Troy and a Trojan war, pretty much as the poet, Homer, described it.

  Archaeologist Manfred Korfmann, a modern-day excavator of Hisarlik, says the story of the Trojan War contains some truth. "According to the current state of our knowledge, the story told in the Iliad most likely contains a kernel of historical truth or, to put it differently, a historical substrate. Any future discussions about the historicity of the Trojan War only make sense if they ask what exactly we understand this kernel or substrate to be."

  Another myth from the Greeks is that of King Minos of Crete and the Minotaur, and could very well be one of those that holds a kernel of historical truth.

  Mention the name Minos, and two images immediately come to mind: One, of Minos feeding Athenian youths to the Minotaur in the Labyrinth. The other, of Minos becoming a judge of the Underworld as depicted in both Virgil’s Aeneid and Dante’s Inferno.

  The Minotaur, a half-bull, half-human hybrid living in a labyrinth on the island of Crete is one of the most intriguing of the Greek myths.

  King Minos, for whom the Minoan civilization, previously known as the Cretan civilization, was named, is regarded as the most important ruler of that civilization. His headquarters were in Knossos, the largest city on the island of Crete at the time. Today, more than three and a half thousand years after Minos, thanks to the discovery of the city in 1878, visitors can enjoy the mythical city’s former glory again.

  Minos was one of three children born from the union between the god Zeus and Europa, the daughter of the Phoenician king, Aginoras. The earliest references to King Minos can be found in the epics of Homer, the Iliad and Odyssey, dating back to the 9th Century BC.

  For Zeus at the first begat Minos to be a watcher over Crete, and Minos again got him a son, even the peerless Deucalion, and Deucalion begat me, a lord over many men in wide Crete; and now have the ships brought me hither a bane to thee and thy father and the other Trojans. Iliad (Book 13.450)

  And Phaedra and Procris I saw, and fair Ariadne, the daughter of Minos of baneful mind, whom once Theseus was fain to bear from Crete to the hill of sacred Athens…” Odyssey (Book 11.321)

  Minos had two siblings who rivalled him when he declared himself king and proclaimed that it was the will of the gods that he should be king. As proof of his claim, he offered a bull to the god of the Mediterranean Sea, Poseidon, and asked that the god would send him another bull also to be offered. According to the myth, Poseidon was pleased with the first offering and sent Minos a beautiful white bull from the sea. However, the bull was so beautiful and impressive that Minos and the citizens decided not to offer the bull but to set it free and sacrifice another in its place.

  And that’s where the problems started.

  Poseidon was furious that his white bull was not offered to him, and as punishment he made Minos’s wife, the goddess, Pasiphae fall in love with the white bull. She was so much in love with the bull that she asked the sculptor and engineer Daedalus to construct a hollowed out wooden cow. Pasiphae hid inside the wooden cow, and the white bull was mesmerized by the cow and coupled with it. The result of this union was the birth of a powerful creature with a human body and the head of a bull, the Minotaur.

  The beast lived on human flesh and frightened Minos and the citizens so much that Daedalus was ordered to build a structure, the Labyrinth, to contain the monster.

  During this time, Minos, so the story goes, wanted to subject the city of Athens to his
rule and asked the gods to bring plague and hunger to its citizens. The gods apparently obliged. The Oracle of Delphi advised the ruler of Athens that the only way to alleviate their suffering was to give in to Minos’ demands: “send seven boys and seven girls to Crete every nine years to be sacrificed to the Minotaur.”

  Archaeologists distinguish between the historical Minos and the mythological Minos, selecting only those parts which have been verified by archaeology as true and everything else as myth. The question is if archaeologists can put their hands on their hearts and say, ‘we’ve uncovered everything — there are no more discoveries to be made that might turn myth into fact’?

  They’ve been wrong before, and they could be wrong again.

  Although the story of the Minotaur is taken as a myth, it needs to be noted that a real Labyrinth cave was discovered on the island of Crete. Could this cave have been the inspiration for the story of Minos’s Labyrinth and the fearsome Minotaur that resided within it?

  1

  IT WAS EARLY on a crisp but sunny September morning. Carter and Mackenzie were out on the deck of their log home on their idyllic Quebecois ranch, Freydis, each with a mug of steaming coffee in hand. Their children, Liam, almost nine years old, and Beth, just turned five, together with the five other kids making up the scholars of the Freydis homeschool were out on a field trip. They were under the watchful eyes of Steve Anderson, Mackenzie’s dad, an ex-science teacher, and Carter’s old friend Ahote. It would be their last fishing expedition of the year before winter would arrive.

  The children had begged to go and see the new wolf pups as part of the field trip. Keeva had given birth about two weeks ago but had finally come out of hiding and showed the small litter, only two pups, to Mackenzie. Loki, Keeva’s mate, kept them close to the den, though. Mackenzie wanted the children to meet the pups as well, but Beth and one of the other children were a bit of a handful, and the pups too young to be manhandled. Mackenzie would trust her life to the wolves, whose special connection to her had once given her the strength to carry on in the face of the darkest days of her life. To Carter and other observers, this relationship between Mackenzie and the majestic animals could only be described as mystifying, incomprehensible, something akin to telepathy.

  Mackenzie, though, knew that wild animals could revert to their natural behavior in a fraction of a second if their instincts were triggered, especially when their young were threatened. The pups would have to be older, or Beth more settled, before it would be a good idea to introduce them. And then she hoped the wolf pups would develop as strong a connection with her own young as their parents had with her. Carter agreed with her reasoning.

  “Let’s wait for Keeva to bring the pups to us when she’s ready,” she’d suggested to them. Though disappointed, the children knew that tone of voice. It meant no arguing.

  So, instead of accompanying the kids on their field trip, Carter and Mackenzie were taking the rare moment by themselves to discuss their projects. They’d moved from the kitchen, where the family breakfast had created a mess neither wanted to tackle right then, to the deck. Carter set his mug down and leaned across the table to hold his wife’s hand. Her fiery hair shone in the golden morning sun, and he counted his blessings for the millionth time since he’d engineered their meeting on campus more than a decade ago.

  It had been a few months since they’d wrapped up their last mission for A-Echelon, a top-secret arm of the CIA. They’d both been recruited to the agency, whose mission was to investigate ancient mysteries for any truth that could be exploited in the interest of national security for the US and her allies. Carter, an archaeologist of mixed but growing repute at the time, and Mackenzie, a molecular biologist, had met on the campus of the university where they both taught.

  His involvement with A-Echelon came first, when he was recruited by his grandfather’s handler, James Rhodes, now recently retired as head of the agency. Mackenzie’s had come later, when her exploration of ancient medicine in search for modern applications caught the attention of James Rhodes during one of his visits to Freydis. At the time, James was the deputy director of A-Echelon, and when he saw what she had uncovered and the potential it held, immediately convinced his director, Hunter Patrick, that Mackenzie had to be recruited.

  Carter’s last two missions had involved both of them, which meant Mackenzie’s research project had to go on the back burner. Now, with the Nabatean secret society defeated and all of them who were not dead in custody, Mackenzie and Carter needed to discuss what had to be done to get her research project back on track. Mackenzie every now and then said she was eager to get back to it, and she was also regularly prompted by the new Director of A-Echelon, James Rhodes’s replacement, Irene O’Connell, to resume the work. But for some reason or another she seemed to be dragging her feet to make a start.

  It was about three months since they had returned to Freydis after a harrowing experience with the malevolent members of the Council of the Covenant of Nabatea, as well as the shady character of Russell McCormick, Assistant Director of the Counterintelligence Division of the FBI, and Kelly White, a misguided Counterintelligence Special Agent in the US Army Intelligence and Security Command, INSCOM. The actions of those two succeeded not only in turning President Grant and Bill Griffin, Director of the CIA, both of whom had always been very loyal and supportive, against them, but very nearly landed Carter and Mackenzie in jail. Fortunately, with the help of their trusted friends of Executive Advantage, Sean Walker and Dylan Mulligan, the charges leveled against the Devereuxs by McCormick and White were short-lived, and they could proceed to smoke out the Nabateans and stop them from a power-grab which would have had ghastly consequences.

  The whole nightmare started on March 15 and ended only three months later. No wonder Carter and Mackenzie were taking their time to enjoy the peace and tranquility of Freydis and spend every moment they could with their children, family, and friends.

  Upon their return to Freydis in June, Carter immediately got busy with reorganizing and managing the translation work on the Library of the Giants and starting work on the newly acquired Library of the Nabateans, which he and his team had unearthed in Matera, Italy. He had to hire more translators, procure more computer equipment, and oversee construction of more offices and accommodation for the ever-increasing number of people working and living on Freydis.

  Freydis, the ranch Carter’s late grandfather, Will Devereux had willed to him, had once been a rustic place with a single log cabin and Ahote and Bly’s smaller cabin a mile or so away. Over the past two years, however, it had become a thriving little village with close to thirty people calling it home these days.

  For some time, Carter had sensed that Mackenzie had settled back into the Freydis rhythm, and that she was back in the emotional space where he could broach the subject of restarting her research, yet he also sensed some hesitation on her part.

  “Mackie,” Carter said, “I have been getting the impression lately that you’ve been wanting to get back to your research, but something is holding you back. Right?”

  She smiled and looked at him. “You know me too well, Carter. Not that it’s a bad thing, though. I like it. And yes, I am sort of ready to take it up again.”

  “So, what is it that’s holding you back?

  “The children on the one hand,” she said. “I’ve been away from them so much. Someone needs to tame Beth, and even a boy Liam’s age needs his mother. On the other hand, I have to admit, I’m a bit scared as well…” she paused for a moment.

  Carter started to ask a question, but she held her hand up. “I’m the one who talked you out of leaving A-Echelon after you rescued us from that hell-hole in Saudi Arabia. I’m the one who told you we can’t back down, but you know what scares me when I look back over the past few years? It’s as if when you and I touch anything from ancient times, there is an evil force just waiting to destroy us.”

  Carter nodded in silence. Those were thoughts that had passed through his mind oft
en. He didn’t interrupt her.

  “The children and I have fallen into the hands of bad people, our family was attacked and almost killed here on Freydis, you and I almost landed in jail not long ago, assassins were hired to kill us in Italy…

  “How many more times will we escape the evil forces bent on terminating us? That’s what’s worrying me and holding me back. My respirocyte research has already gotten me and the children locked up, and it almost destroyed Liu’s life as well. We also know the Nabateans wanted to get their hands on my research work, and they were more than happy to kill us in the process.

  “I’m convinced I’ll find what I’ve been looking for in one of those libraries, or a lead to it. The question is, at what price?”

  Carter took Mackenzie’s hand again and said. “I know Mackie. It’s as if we’re tempting fate every time we set out to investigate – as if we stir up a hornets’ nest – but as far as we know you’re the most knowledgeable person in the world about the concept of respirocytes in ancient times. There is no one else with access to the information you have available in those ancient libraries.”