“With no warning he slipped his gun off his shoulder, levelled it, and fired. The noise was devastating. We could see the muzzle flashes, like a jet of fire. Bullets sprayed in a semicircle as if from a hose.” Investigating a break-in at an English country house, DCI Robbie Peele comes face to face with armed burglars seeking some of the strangest objects in world archaeology, ancient clay disks inscribed with an unknown alphabet. A Middle Eastern terrorist cell is determined to steal them. Why? And why are Mossad involved? The vital clue is a long-abandoned Muslim village in Crete, where terrible things happened, witnessed by a Victorian explorer who left coded diaries. But Crete poses as many puzzles as it solves. What do the disks really say, in what language, and who made them? And why is the answer stirring up the Middle East? This is archaeology at its most intriguing – and most dangerous.
