"You say you've tried everything else. NSA's Crays drew a blank. Maybe you were looking for some fancy new encryption system when it was actually one so old nobody would ever think of it. Almost four thousand years old, to be exact."

"Darling, that's very romantic. You're improving in the romance department." She gazed at him a second, then flashed a wry smile. "But I can't say the same for the good-sense arena. No offense, but that's like the kind of thing kids write to us suggesting. Nobody employs anything remotely that simple these days."

"I knew you'd think I was crazy. You're not the first." He rose. "But humor me. Just slice those number sequences into pairs and see what they look like phonetically. Something to take your mind off all the madness around here."

"Well, all right." She sighed, then settled unsteadily into the rickety chair he'd just vacated. "Make you a proposition, sweetie. Get me some coffee, nice and strong, and I'll forget I have good sense and play with this a little."

"You're a trooper." He turned and headed for the kitchen. "I remember that about you. Not to mention great in bed."

"We strive for excellence in all things."

Just as he reached the doorway, the kitchen light flicked on. It was Adriana, in blue robe and furry slippers, now reaching up to retrieve her coffee pan.

While Eva was typing away behind him, he leaned against the doorframe in his still-wet clothes to watch a Greek grandmother shuffle about her private domain preparing a traditional breakfast. He suspected no male hand had ever touched those sparkling utensils. The Old World had its ways, yesterday and forever.

While he drowsed against the doorjamb, the aroma of fresh Greek coffee began filling the room. _Sarakin_. That was the Japanese name for their homegrown loan sharks, the so-called salary-men financiers. He knew that the Yakuza's four largest _sarakin_ operations gave out more consumer loans than all of Japan's banks combined. If you added to that the profits in illegal amphetamines, prostitution, bars, shakedowns of businesses, protection rackets . . . the usual list, and you were talking multi multibillions. The major problem was washing all that dirty money. They routinely invested in respectable but losing propositions abroad, on the sound theory that one dollar cleaned was worth two unlaundered.

Was that what the Soviet scam was all about? Money from the Japanese mob being laundered through loans to the USSR? What better way to wash it? Nobody would ever bother asking where it came from.

But there was one major problem with that neat scenario. Politically the Yakuza were ultra-rightist hardliners. So why would they expose their money with the Soviets, laundered or not? Particularly now, with so much political instability there--hardliners, reformers, nationalists. Somehow it didn't compute.

"Michael, come here a second." The voice had an edge of triumph.

"What?" He glanced around groggily.

"Just come here and take a look at this." She was staring at the screen.

He turned and walked over, still entranced by the heady, pungent essence of fresh Greek coffee now flooding the room. "Is it anything--?"

"Just look at it and tell me what you think." She leaned back from the screen and shifted the Zenith toward him. The ice-blue letters cast an eerie glow through the dull morning light. The color reflected off his eyes, matching them.

"You did it already?"

"I started with a one-to-one replacement of numbers with letters. But it's sequence-inverted, which means I had to . . . anyway, what do think so far? Am I a genius or what?"

He drew a chair next to the screen and started to examine it. But at that moment Adriana set a tray of coffee down beside the computer, steaming and fresh, together with dark figs and two bowls of yogurt.

"_Kafe evropaiko_," she commanded, then thrust a cup into his hand.

"_Malista, efcharisto_." He absently nodded his thanks, took a sip of the steaming brew, then returned his attention to the screen.

At first he thought he was just groggy, his vision playing tricks, but then the string of letters began to come into focus. Incredible!

"Okay, what about this part here," he asked, pointing to the fourth line, where the letters turned to nonsensical garbage, "and then down here again?"

"That's what I was talking about. The interlacing switches there. It happens every hundred numbers. They started by taking the second fifty digits and interlacing them back into the first fifty. Then they switched the algorithm and interlaced the third fifty digits ahead, into the fourth fifty, but backwards. Then it repeats again."

"You figured all that out just fooling around with it?"

"Darling, I do this for a living, for godsake. After a while you have good instincts." She tapped her fingers nervously on the wooden table, then remembered the coffee and reached for a cup. "Nice little trick.

Standard but nice. Every so often you fold the data back into themselves somehow. That way there are no repetitions of number sequences--for words that are used a lot--to give you away. But once you've played with this stuff as much as I have . . . anyway, it's always the first thing I check for."

"Congratulations."

"Tell me the truth." She looked at him, sipping her coffee. "Can you really still read this? It's been years."

"Memory like an elephant. Though you may have to help me along now and then." He pointed. "Look. I think that word's modern Greek. They've mixed it in where there's not an old word for something." He pushed around the computer. "Want to run the whole data file through your system? Clean it up?"

"My pleasure." She was clearing the screen. "I can't believe it just fell apart like this. The reason our Crays didn't crack it was it's too simple by half."

He reached for his coffee, feeling a surge of satisfaction. His hunch had been dead on. Whoever came up with this idea for an encryption must have been a fan of ancient Greek history, and a knowledgeable one. What better cipher for Project Daedalus communiques than the language Daedalus himself used? They'd taken that four-thousand-year-old tongue, an archaic forerunner of ancient Greek, and then scrambled it using a mathematical algorithm. Mino Industries was communicating with the Soviets using an encoded version of Minoan Linear B.

It was absolutely poetic. It also appeared, upon first examination, to be very naive. Yet upon reflection it turned out to be brilliant. You convert a totally unheard-of language to numbers, throw in a few encryption tricks, and the result is something that would drive all the hotdog DES-oriented supercomputers crazy. All those chips would be trying trillions of keys when there actually was no key. Yes, you had to admit it was inspired.

Except the Daedalus crowd was about to experience a problem, a small headache. Make that a major headache. Because their secret protocol was about to become headlines. He figured that ought to go a long way toward stopping any more shooting.

"Okay. It's humming." She reached for her yogurt. "This time around all the garbage will be gone." She took a bite, then burst out laughing.

"You know, this is wonderful, working with you. Darling, I've just decided. Let's do something together, maybe live on the Ulysses for a while. I might even get to like it. It sounds romantic."

"I'm still looking for the romance in life."

"Well, love, you've found it. It's me." She leaned over and kissed him on the lips. "End of quest."

"Thought I'd never hear you say that. But first you have to help me translate this. I'm over a decade out of date. My modern Greek's a little rusty too, and a lot of the technical terms in this look to be transliterated--"

"No, sweetie, that's not the first thing we have to do. The first thing is to make sure you've got a separate copy of anything you're working with. Not in the computer. I'll spare you my horror stories about erased files, hard disks going down, all the rest." She was rising, energized. "Cardinal computer rule number one. Always dupe anything you're working on, no matter how sure you are nothing can go wrong.

Believe me."

"Sounds good." He looked up. "What are you doing?"

"I need that disk I showed you tonight. We can use it for the backup.

It's in my purse, which I now realize I left in the car when I came in.

I was slightly crazy at the time." She was turning. "God, it seems like ages."

"Look, why don't you let me--?"

"You don't know where I parked it. My secret hiding place."

"Maybe we ought to send Zeno, or Adriana--"

"Just sit tight. Only be a minute." She wrapped her coat about her and, before he could protest, disappeared out the door, humming.

She was a marvel. Everything he'd remembered.

"Are you still awake?" Zeno was trudging into the room, still wearing his frayed nightshirt.

"We just solved the riddle of the sphinx, old friend. Except now we have to translate it."

"You should be sleeping, Michael. Go now, catch an hour or so. I will start making arrangements. Get tickets for you both on the car ferry to Athens, a pistol, maybe new passports if you want. We have work to do."