"It's—it's just something that's been in the back of my mind." She moved on.
With a shrug, he took another drink of the ouzo and followed her on down the hall toward the famous Throne Room. He was bracing himself now for what was next.
Its walls were decorated with frescoes of the massive Minoan body shields, shaped as a figure-eight, that signified the men's quarters of Knossos. And incised in stone above King Minos's wide alabaster throne was his fearsome emblem of authority, symbol of his domination of the ancient world.
There it was. He looked around, reassuring himself that it was everywhere, just as he'd remembered. He'd also been right about something else. It was precisely the same, right down to the smooth curves of the blade, as the "watermark" that had been on the sheet of "paper" Alex had given him. Almost four thousand years old, it was the insignia of the new Daedalus Corporation.
The Minoan double ax.
The dusk was settling majestically over Tokyo, after a rare smogless day. The view was particularly inspiring from the fifty-fifth-floor penthouse of the granite-clad Mino Industries building. The corner office was an earth-tone tan, carpeted in a thick wool shag the color of elm bark. The heavy doors at the far end of the office were emblazoned with a two-bladed ax, and in the center of the wide expanse between the door and the single desk, on a gleaming steel pedestal, stood a meter-long model of an airplane more advanced than any the world had yet seen.
The temperature of the room was kept at a constant 59 degrees Fahrenheit, a frigid comfort-accommodation for the tawny, eight-foot snow leopard named Neko now resting on a pallet beside the window, gazing down. Remnant of an endangered species, she'd been rescued as a starving, motherless cub during an expedition in the Himalayas and raised for the past six years as a pampered pet of the penthouse's owner.
Along the sound-proof walls were gilt-framed photographs of a Japanese executive jogging with Jimmy Carter in Tokyo, golfing with Ferdinand Marcos in Manila, receiving an accolade from Linus Pauling in San Francisco, dining with Henry Kissinger in Paris. He was the same man now sitting behind the massive slate desk.