"How long has it been since we were last here together?" She brushed her dark bangs back from her brow as she squinted into the waning sun, sniffing at her cactus flower.

"It's beginning to seem like forever. But I think it's about--what?-- almost twelve years now."

"And how old is the palace supposed to be? I've gotten a little rusty."

"The latest theory going is that it was destroyed about fourteen hundred B.C. So we're talking roughly three and a half thousand years since it was last used."

"Guess our little decade doesn't count for much in the grand scheme."

"Time flies." He remembered how she'd been back then, that day so long ago when she had been in her mid-twenties, as inviting as the brazen ladies-in-waiting of the palace frescoes, and even more voluptuous.

_Mais, ce sont des Parisiennes_, a dazzled French scholar had marveled.

She was like that. Perfect sensuality. For a while he'd forgotten all about archaeology and just concentrated on beauty.

The place where all this occurred was the Palace of Knossos, lovingly restored in the early part of the twentieth century by the wealthy English archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans. There an almost modern civilization had flowered to magnificent heights, then mysteriously vanished. The path leading to the palace down the hill was becoming wider as they walked, opening on the distant olive groves in the valley. The vista was stunning, probably the reason it had been built here.

He looked over and noticed she was digging in her purse again. This time she drew out a pack of Dunhills. He watched while she flicked a gold lighter, the one he'd given her as a present so long ago, emblazoned with a lapis lazuli skull and crossbones. At the time, the hint had worked. She'd quit.

"The return of the death wish? When did you start that again?"

"Last week." She defiantly took a puff.

"Any particular reason?"

"No, darling, I just did it." She exhaled. "I'm wound up. I'm . . . I'm scared. Michael, for godsake, how many reasons am I supposed to need?"

"Hey, lighten up." He'd quit a month after they met, but it hadn't been a big deal. "I've mellowed out from the old days. Life is like most other things--a lot more fun when you don't take it too seriously."

They were moving across the empty parking lot, headed for the entrance to the palace. It had once been a twelve-hundred-room labyrinth, perhaps deliberately confusing. Now the upper courtyard and chambers lay exposed to the sky, their massive red-and-ocher columns glistening in the waning sunlight. The columns tapered downward, as though tree trunks had been planted upside down to prevent resprouting.

It was a poetic place to meet Eva again, he thought. And thoroughly bizarre as well. She'd gotten her Ph.D. in linguistics, specializing in ancient Aegean languages, then a few months later she'd surprised everybody by accepting a slot at the National Security Agency, that sprawling electronic beehive of eavesdropping that lies midway between Washington and Baltimore, on the thousand acres of Fort Meade. It'd seemed a startling about-face at the time, but maybe it made sense.

Besides, it was that or teaching.

NSA was a midsized city, producing among other things forty tons of classified paper trash a day. Its official insignia, appropriately, was a fierce eagle clasping a key--whether to unlock the secrets of others or to protect its own was unclear. Eva's particular branch, SIGINT--for signals intelligence--was an operation so secret NSA refused even to admit it existed. Employing ten acres of mainframe computers, Eva's SIGINT group monitored and analyzed every Russian transmission anywhere: their satellite downlinks, the microwave telephone networks within the Soviet Union, the chatter of civilian and military pilots, missile telemetry far above the Pacific, the split-second bursts of submarines reporting to base, even the limousine radiophone trysts between Politburo members and their mistresses. The instant an electromagnetic pulse left the earth, no matter its form or frequency, it belonged to the giant electronic ears of the NSA.

So why shouldn't Eva end up as the agency's top Russian codebreaker?

She was a master at deciphering obscure texts, and she'd spoken Russian all her life. Who better to make a career of cracking secret Soviet communications. Her linguistics Ph.D. was being used to real purpose.

"I want you to help me think some, love," she went on. "I know it may sound a little bizarre, but I'd like to talk about some of the legends surrounding this place. You know, try and sort out fact and fiction."

Now they were headed side by side down the stairway leading into the central court, an expanse of sandstone and alabaster tile glinting golden in the pale sun. On their left a flight of stairs seemed to lead out, but in fact they led right back in again. The deceptions of the palace began at the very entrance.

"The truth is, about all we have is stories, though sometimes stories can be more true than so-called history. The standard version is that this area was where the athletes performed ritual somersaults over the sacred bulls."

The restored frescoes around them showed corridors crowded with lithe Minoan priestesses, eyes rounded with green malachite, faces powdered white, lips a blood red. They all were bare-breasted, wearing only diaphanous chemises, while their jewels glistened in the sunshine as they fanned themselves with ostrich plumes.

There were no frescoes, however, of the powerful, bloodthirsty King Minos.

"Michael," she called out, her voice echoing off the hard walls, "you know, this place has always felt a little sinister to me. None of the lightness and gaiety in those frescoes seems real."

"That's part of what made me start wondering if the Minoans hadn't somehow managed to make a monkey out of every ponderous scholar on the planet." They were moving down the monumental grand staircase, three restored flights of which had originally been five, toward the rooms called the royal chambers. "Maybe the reason this place had no walls or fortifications was because you only came here when you were dead. Who the hell knows."

Whatever the truth was, the eerie feeling of the palace seemed to make the ancient stories even more vivid. The legends told that King Minos's wife, Pasiphae, had a burning passion for one of the sacred white bulls he kept, so she arranged for his chief architect, Daedalus, to design a hollow wooden cow for her covered over with a hide. She concealed herself inside and, as luck would have it, lured one of the beasts. The progeny of that union was equally beastly--the Minotaur, a monster with a human body and a bull's head.

Now they were rounding a final corner in the twisting maze of stairs.

Directly ahead was the boudoir of the queen. The past welled up for him.

The frescoes over the alabaster arches showed bold blue dolphins pirouetting in a pastel sea dotted with starfish and sea urchins. And just beneath them stood the famous bathroom of the queen, connected to the vast drainage complex of the palace, great stone channels curved in precise parabolas to control and dampen turbulence. Daedalus was an engineer-architect who had mastered the science of fluid dynamics thousands of years before the invention of wind tunnels and supercomputers.

"My favorite spot. The bedroom." He slipped the small bottle of ouzo from his trench coat pocket. In the dank of the palace's lower depths, he needed its warmth. "I've had unspeakably erotic thoughts about this place--now it can be told--with you no small part of them." He handed her the bottle. "Want a hit of high octane?"

"Glad to know I've had a place in your memory all these years, even if it was X-rated." She took the bottle with a knowing smile, then drank.

"It's like licorice."

He laughed. "Blended with JP-7."

"Michael," she continued, looking around, "maybe this is the very room where Pasiphae gave birth to the Minotaur. What do you suppose?"

"That would fit the story." He moved on, his eyes still adjusting to the shadows. "The only thing the legends actually say is that King Minos ordered Daedalus, resident genius, to create a secret labyrinth in the cellar of the palace to keep the beast. But nobody's ever located it."

"You know, I think the labyrinth was no myth. It was real, only it was here. All around us. We're in it now." She handed back the bottle. "It was this whole sinister palace, this realm of the dead. After all these years, I finally think maybe you were right."

Vindicated at last? Had even Eva come around? But why didn't he feel any satisfaction? Instead he found himself aware of the old chill, the almost occult intuition that had first told him the palace wasn't the happy playground everybody supposed it was. Once more it felt like death.

But now something else was entering his senses. Was it imagination? In the encroaching dark the lower levels of the palace seemed to be totally deserted, with only a couple of persistent German tourists arguing out near the parking lot, and yet . . .

They weren't alone. He could feel it. He knew it. Was it the spirits of the dead?

No, it was far more real. Someone was with them, somewhere. In the shadows. They were being watched.

He looked at Eva, trying to make out her eyes in the semidarkness. Did she sense it too? That somebody was nearby, waiting, maybe listening?

"Darling, let's talk some more about the myth of Daedalus. In the version I remember he--"

"Not much more to the tale. After a while a Greek prince called Theseus arrived, to brave the labyrinth and do battle with the man-eating Minotaur. When he showed up, King Minos's beautiful daughter, Ariadne, instantly fell in love with him, naturally."

"I love myths. They're always so realistic."

"Well, he dumped her later, so I guess he did turn out to be a creep.

But anyway, she persuaded Daedalus to give him a ball of string. He attached it to the door of the labyrinth and unwound it as he went in.

After he killed the beast, he followed the twine back out, and escaped.

With Ariadne. Unfortunately, when Minos discovered what had happened, he was so mad he locked the great chief architect in a tower. But Daedalus managed to get out, hoping to escape from the island. However, it wasn't going to be easy, since Minos had clamped down on all the harbors, having the ships searched. That's when Daedalus declared, 'Minos may control the land and the sea, but he doesn't control the regions above.' And he constructed some wings, attached them to his shoulders with wax, and soared away into space. First human ever. Up till then, only the gods could just leave the earth anytime they wanted."

"What?" She'd stopped dead still.

"Daedalus. You remember. The first person to fly, mankind's ago-old dream. In fact, a few years back some Americans duplicated the feat with a human-powered glider. They made it from here on Crete over to the island of--"

"No, you said 'space.' "