He finally became aware of the pumping of his own heart as he made his way north up Syngrou Avenue, trying to urge the traffic forward by sheer will.
The thing now was to get out of Athens, take Leoforos Athinon west, then head up the new Highway 1 toward the mountains, lose them in the country, find some place to spend the night. His final destination was only about two hundred kilometers away. He just had to be fresh and ready tomorrow, with everything in place.
But at least he now knew the game had no rules. Maybe knowing that gave him an edge. And so far his timing was still intact. He'd handled it. Maybe not too well, maybe with too much risk, but he'd handled it.
Novosty's note had said there would be a straight swap. But the other team clearly had no intention of bothering with niceties. Fine. That cut both ways.
The place was Delphi, the location Novosty had specified. Heading warily up the Sacred Way, Vance paused for a moment to take in the view. From where he stood, the vista was majestic, overwhelming humanity's puny scale. He'd always loved it. Toward the north the sheer granite cliffs of the Phaedriades Mountains towered almost two thousand feet skyward to form a semicircular barrier, while down below the river Pleistos meandered through mile after mile of dark olive groves. It was an eyeful of rugged grandeur, craggy peaks encircling a harsh plain that stretched as far as the eye could see. Greece in the midday sun: austere, timeless.
His destination, the ancient temple of the Delphic oracle farther up the hill, overlooked this panorama, row center in a magnificient natural amphitheater. The Greek legends told that the great god Zeus had once dispatched two eagles, one flying east and one flying west, to find out where they would meet. They came together at the center
of the earth, Delphi, whose main temple, the Sanctuary of Apollo, contained the domelike boulder Omphalos, thereafter named the "navel of the world." Here east and west met.
He'd parked the Alfa on the roadway down below, and now as he stared up the mountainside, past the conical cypress trees, he could just make out the remains of the stone temple where almost three thousand years ago the priestess, the Delphic oracle, screamed her prophesies. She was a Pythia, an ancient woman innocent of mind who lived in the depths of the temple next to a fiery altar whose flame was attended night and day. There, perched on a high tripod poised over a vaporous fissure in the earth, she inhaled intoxicating gases, chewed laurel leaves, and issued wild, frenzied utterances. Those incoherent sounds were translated by priests into answers appropriate to the queries set before her.