Now, for the first time, he checked his watch.
Eleven thirty five. Less than half an hour till Knossos met its doom.
It raised a new problem: what was his own best course now? To stay here? To go seek out the Minotaur as first planned? Or to drop back through the open manhole he now spotted over in one corner, and put his trust in flight?
That last idea—it had much to commend it. For one thing, almost any manhole where he might come up, save only this one, would put him in a position to keep a whole skin and escape the palace, even without the thread of Daedalus to guide him.
For another, any attempt on his part now to slay the Minotaur was doomed to failure in advance. Obviously. Theseus had made off with the Smith & Wesson. Without it, or equivalent, no one could hope to meet the monster and live.
Lamp in hand, Burke went over to the manhole and sat down on the edge, legs dangling, in preparation for the drop into the drainage tunnel below.
Only then, as he momentarily hesitated there, bracing himself, his mind turned to the one subject he most wished to avoid.
Ariadne.
It had to come, of course. He'd known it all along. You couldn't ignore a woman in a moment of crisis such as this one—not when she meant as much to you as Ariadne did to him.