CHPATER THIRTY-NINE

CHASING THE MONKS

“MASTAKOURI STREET.” TORQUIN held out the old man’s scribbled note, matching it against a street sign. “Number four-seven-seven. Long way to go.”

As we walked up a steep, cobblestoned street, I stayed close to Aly. She hadn’t said a word.

We were above the center of town. Here, old stone houses lined sharply curved roads. Mastakouri Street was just wide enough for a car to pass. A man with a food cart at the intersection was busy frying dough. The smell made me hungry even though we’d had breakfast only an hour ago. It seemed that everyone in Greece ate all the time.

Marco and Torquin were walking together, sharing a bag of Greek cookies covered with powdered sugar. I slowed down, taking Aly’s arm, letting them pull ahead. “Hey,” I said softly, “are you okay? What happened with the phone call?”

Her eyes misted over. “Mom said hello. Like she was in the next town. Like nothing had ever happened. I had planned what to say. Twenty seconds. ‘Hi, Mom. I’m in a secret place. A scientific project. But I’m safe. Don’t worry.’”

“How did she react?” I asked.

“I couldn’t say it,” Aly said. “When I heard her voice, all I did was cry. Not even a word. G7W is supposed to make me into a superbrain, Jack. But it didn’t help with this. I panicked. When I looked at my watch, eighteen seconds had gone by. So I had to hang up. But just before my thumb hit the off button, I heard her voice again. She said, ‘Aly? Is that you?’”

Tears began to run down her cheeks. I put my arm around her shoulder and let her head sink. “At least she knows you’re alive.”

Aly shook her head. “You were right, Jack. I shouldn’t have done it. I feel a thousand times worse.”

We just walked in silence. Aly was sniffling, and I held her tight.

Ahead of us, Torquin’s bare feet slapped loudly on the cobblestones. A couple of boys passed us by, urging along a stubborn goat. At the intersection ahead, three men in hooded robes shopped for vegetables at an outdoor display. If you squinted, you’d think you were in the Middle Ages.

“Aha!” Torquin yelled, pointing at a street number painted on the curb. “Four-six-one…four-six-nine…four-seven-three…”

Torquin stopped short. He looked up at a shingled restaurant with a sandwich-board menu out front. Two young businesswomen emerged, chatting, and let out a little scream when they saw his hulking figure.

He was staring upward, over their heads.

We ran to his side and looked. Atop the entrance was a large sign:

Marco spat out a cloud of confectioner’s sugar. “You asked him where the Colossus was,” he said.

“Colossus…Diner!” Torquin bellowed. He ripped up the sheet and threw it to the ground, stomping on it with his feet. “Not funny!”

“Maybe you ought to contact KI for Cass’s tracking info, dude,” Marco said. “Not sure grilling Greek geezers is working for us.”

A mother and three children were about to enter the place, but the kids took one look at the raging Torquin and began to cry. As the mom quickly shooed them away, the door opened. A man in a suit stepped out and looked forlornly at the lost customers.

“Pahhh!” Torquin shouted in disgust, kicking the sandwich board. The sign teetered, then clattered in a heap to the sidewalk.

The man looked at Torquin in disbelief. He gestured angrily, spewing Greek words that didn’t sound too nice. Torquin retorted in Torquin-Greek, the two men stepping closer until they were nearly face-to-face.

“Easy, guys!” Marco said, trying to separate them.

A small crowd was beginning to gather. Behind the diner man, a frightened-looking waiter was tapping out a number on a cell phone.

Aly tugged at my sleeve. “Jack, look!”

She was gazing out into the street. The three hooded men, finished with their shopping, were walking past us, down the hill. One of their hoods had fallen off. The man was balding on top, and he’d spun around to glance at the fight in front of the diner.

When he turned to his colleagues again, I could see the back of his head.

And a white lambda against his dark brown hair.

“Act natural!” Marco whispered. “We can’t let them realize we’re following them.”

A block ahead of us, at the bottom of the hilly street, the monks had stopped short. The hoodless guy was talking on a cell. He seemed agitated. As the others listened to him, their peaceful expressions vanished.

We quickly turned to each other and tried to look natural. “How ’bout those Cavs?” Marco said.

A siren punctuated the quiet. I looked up the street toward the diner, where the owner was setting his sign upright again. A police car pulled away, its lights flashing. Through the back window I could see a mop of dirty red hair.

“This is so messed up,” I said. “Torquin should be with us.”

“Duh,” Marco replied. “He would be, too, if he hadn’t gotten himself arrested on a TWT charge—Trashing While Torquin.”

There wasn’t much we could do. It all happened so quickly. The police had cuffed Torquin despite our protests. And even though one of them spoke English, he didn’t believe Marco’s claim that Torquin was our father.

We’d have to try to get him later.

Ms. Kassis’s words about her papou were flashing in my brains. For years he studied an ancient sect—monks of some sort. They were devoted to preserving the Colossus’s memory. Fanatics, really.

“How can that monk be a Select?” Aly said. “He’s way older than fourteen!”

“Either Bhegad is lying about our fates,” I said, “or these guys have some sort of secret cure.”

Aly was punching out a number on the cell phone. “Where’d you get that?” Marco demanded.

“Long story,” Aly said. “I’m calling us a taxi. One of those monks is holding a set of car keys. We have to tail them.”

The hoodless monk snapped his phone shut and shoved it into a pocket of his robe. The men began walking again, faster, arguing. I could hear Aly muttering into the phone, giving our location. In the middle of the next block the monks entered a parking lot. Two of them headed toward an old, beat-up convertible, while the other paid the lot attendant.

“The taxi dispatcher spoke English, sort of,” Aly said. “Taki’s only a couple of blocks away.”

The monk’s car was belching and wheezing. Slowly it started up, but it bucked and died on its way out.

A taxi came zooming up from behind us, blowing its horn. We turned to see Taki beaming at us through the open driver’s window. “Thank you for finding phone!” he said.

Aly handed it to him as we piled into the backseat. He didn’t ask for any explanation.

“Follow those monks!” Marco said.

Taki nodded. “I give you free ride.”

We took off. At about ten miles an hour. The monks’ jalopy putt-putted into the street, and I wondered if we’d have to rescue them.

Finally the car began to pick up speed. In a few moments we were cruising onto the highway. “Yo, Zorba, do you have any cousins who are monks?” Marco asked.

“My uncle Stavros is priest in Greek church. He say these men not real monks. Is crazy people.” Taki gave us a wink and a wry smile.

Greece, you’ll find, is tolerant of eccentrics, Ms. Kassis had said.

A group of Colossus cultists with lambda hair would definitely pass as eccentric in the real world.

We were heading east, away from the city limits, past the long strip of hotels and beaches. The road followed the Mediterranean shore, and the beaches gave way to steep cliffs. A stream of black exhaust rose from the tailpipe of the monks’ car. Every few minutes the engine made a popping noise.

“They’re in a hurry,” Aly said.

“Ms. Kassis told us these guys were devoted to the Colossus,” I said. “Maybe they’re not so crazy. Maybe they know something about its remains.”

“A Colossus fingernail could be catnip for Turkey Lurkey,” Marco said.

Finally the monks began to slow down. They pulled to a stop in front of a beat-up shack, where a lock hung from a rusted hasp. “Keep going,” I said to Taki.

“We could just stop and introduce ourselves,” Marco said.

“Too risky,” I shot back. “You remember what Bhegad taught us. There’s an enemy group after the Loculi. What if these guys are Massa?”

Taki drove for another mile or so, until I asked him to turn back around. When we arrived at the shack again, the car and the monks were gone.

A pickup truck, its cab crammed with jugs of olive oil, was parked at the side of the road. To its left was a small, rickety gate to a wooden staircase leading straight down the cliff.

Taki looked a little dubious. “Why you want to go here? I take you to beach.”

As Aly and Marco walked to the gate, I tried to pay Taki but he refused. With a reminder that we could call him anytime, he took off.

I joined my two friends at the top of a cliff. The sea was hundreds of feet below us, its waves winking in the sunlight. The stairs wound steeply downward and ended at a wide plateau that jutted from the cliffside—a ledge that was three times the size of my backyard. More stairs led downward from the ledge’s left side to another ledge, and then another—three massive plateaus, connected, descending sideways along the coastal wall. Each ledge was ringed with a whitewashed wooden fence.

The highest of the three ledges, the one closest to us, contained a massive, domed, rectangular building built into the cliff. In the center of the pebbly, sun-drenched yard, monk robes dried on clotheslines. Next to the fence were three enormous stone urns, each one taller than a man. Two guys on ladders were filling these up with jugs of olive oil that had the same logo as the truck on the cliff top.

“These monks must be total Greek salad freaks,” Marco commented. “That’s some serious oil.”

The second ledge was about sixty feet below the first. It held what looked like a greenhouse, also built right into the cliff, along with another scraggly yard.

Dozens of monks were pouring out of doors set in the cliffside on both levels. They raced down the stairs to the bottommost plateau, their flip-flops clopping loudly.

“The levels are all connected,” Aly said. “Their monastery must be built into the cliff.”

I strained to see what was happening down at that third level. But the angle was wrong. I opened the gate to the first set of stairs. “Let’s get closer.”

I heard a volley of shouts. Then, rising above them, came a high-pitched screech. It rang out over the sea with a volume and fierceness that nearly blew us back on our heels.

“I think we found Tweety,” Marco said.