Destiny (24 page)

“What's that sound?” Lesauvage asked.

“Running water,” Annja said. “There's probably a stream or groundwater running down there. Like I said, the soldiers would have wanted a steady supply of freshwater.”

“How far down?”

Holding her flashlight, Annja climbed down into the wolf pit. She shone the light around and spotted rusty iron handles covered with fungus set into the wall.

“Do you need a rope?” Lesauvage asked.

“No.” Annja threw a leg over the edge of the pit and started down. Her boots rang against the iron handles. Three rungs down, one of them snapped off beneath her weight, nearly rusted through.

She almost fell, only hanging on with her hands.

The tunnel walls showed tool marks. Someone had cut through the solid rock into the shallow stream below. Cold air rushed up around Annja, chilling her.

She thought about the tunnel. The Romans, or whoever had constructed it, had known the stream was there. They hadn't drilled blindly through the rock in the hopes of hitting water.

They found it sometime before they decided to dig down to it, Annja realized. And if they found it before they dug down to it, there had to be another entrance.

That gave her hope. She finished the climb and dropped into the stream. The water came up to her calves, but her boots were tall enough to keep her feet dry.

She aimed the flashlight up the stream and down. The tunnel was almost eight feet across and barely five feet in height.

Upstream? Or downstream? She wasn't sure. Her flashlight didn't penetrate far enough to show her much.

A gleam of white suddenly caught her attention. Mired in the dirt and clay that coated the rock, scattered bones lay in disarray.

Enemies? Annja wondered. Or soldiers no one else cared enough to bury?

Amid the death, though, the dull gleam of metal reflected the flashlight beam. She knelt and dragged a hand through the running water, closing her hand on some of the smaller objects she touched.

When she lifted her hand, she held three gold coins and two silver ones. One of the gold ones bore the insignia of the Brotherhood of the Silent Rain.

“Miss Creed?” Lesauvage called.

“I'm here.” Annja pocketed the coins and returned to the tunnel. When she looked up, Lesauvage was shining his light into her eyes.

“Well?” he asked.

“I'm coming up. Douse the light.”

For a moment Lesauvage hesitated, obviously struggling with whether he wanted to obey.

“Please,” Annja called up. “I can't see the rungs.”

That near admission of helplessness salved Lesauvage's pride somewhat. “Of course.” He moved the light away.

Annja glanced down, trying to will the spots from her vision. Then she noticed a single green leaf riding the stream.

Upstream, she thought, smiling. There's nowhere else that leaf could have come from. She felt certain another opening existed upstream. The storm's fury had probably torn leaves from the trees, and at least one of them had found its way into the cave.

She took hold of the rungs and climbed. At the top, she clambered out of the wolf trap.

“Well?” Lesauvage asked.

Roux and Avery stood near the wolf trap. The young man looked anxious. Roux wore an irritated look, like someone who'd been asked to stay on long after a party had lost its charm.

Annja looked at Roux and spoke in Latin, trusting that for all his hauteur, Lesauvage hadn't learned the spoken language. He might have learned to read bits and pieces, but surely not enough to speak it.

“We can escape down there,” she told Roux. “Upstream. Take the boy.”

Roux nodded, looking slightly less irritated.

Lesauvage pointed his pistol at Annja's head. “What the hell did you say?”

Without a word, Annja took the coins from her pocket and tossed them to the middle of the stone floor. Enough light existed to catch their golden gleam.

“The treasure's down there.” Annja pictured the sword in her mind as she switched off her light and shoved it into her pants pocket. “It's in the stream. You're rich.”

Drawn by greed, Lesauvage and his men looked at the coins, swiveling their flashlight beams.

“Now,” Annja said in Latin.

Roux grabbed Avery and shoved him toward the hole. The boy yelped in fear and tried to get away, but the old man's strength proved too much for him. Avery disappeared, falling through the wolf trap with Roux on top of him.

Cursing, Lesauvage raised his pistol again. “Kill them!” he shouted.

Annja closed her hand around the sword and pulled.

As soon as the sword was in the cave with her, Annja's senses went into overdrive. It was like time slowed down and everyone was moving in slow motion.

She swung the sword, cutting through Lesauvage's pistol before he could fire, hitting the barrel and knocking the weapon off target. When he fired, the yellow-white muzzle-flash flamed in a spherical shape and the bullet ricocheted from the ceiling.

The other men had trouble aiming at her for fear of hitting Lesauvage. She stepped toward him as he tried to point his pistol at her again.

Planting her right foot, Annja pivoted and slammed her left foot into the center of Lesauvage's chest, knocking him back into his men. Machine pistol-chatter filled the cave with a deafening rattle that defied the sonorous cracks of thunder. Ricochets struck sparks from the wall, and two of Lesauvage's men went down with screams of pain.

Annja ran for the wolf trap and dropped to the bottom of the pit. Bullets cut the air over her head and slammed against the stone oval hanging from the ropes.

Reacting instinctively, as if the sword had been part of her for her whole life, Annja swept the blade from her hip and launched it at the double-stranded line.

The sword sailed straight and true through the rope. Stepping over the tunnel's edge, she dropped and landed in the stream below, bending her knees to take the shock.

Lying in the rush of water, Avery and Roux stared at her in surprise.

In the next instant, the ropes parted and the heavy stone oval slammed down onto the tunnel. The fit wasn't exact. Flashlight illumination leaked through the cracks. It was enough to show that Lesauvage's men were wasting no time about pursuit.

“The sword.” Roux pushed himself to his feet.

Annja reached into the otherwhere for the weapon and was relieved to find it there. “I've got it,” she said.

“Did you get any of their weapons?” Roux asked.

“No.”

The old man cursed and shook his head. “At the very least you could have slain one of them and taken his weapons.”

“Next time,” Annja said. “If you want, you can wait for them down here. They'll probably get that tunnel opened again in a minute. You can get all the weapons you want.”

Roux glared at her. “She was never a wiseass.”

“I'm not Joan,” Annja said. She turned her attention to Avery.

The young man looked as though he was in shock and about to pass out. He cradled his wounded hand in his good one.

“Can you run?” Annja asked.

“I…I think so.”

“Upstream,” Annja said. “There should be another way out.” She took the lead, splashing through the water. She set the flashlight to wide angle.

Behind them they could hear Lesauvage's men wrestling to remove the heavy stone oval.

“What makes you think there's another way out?” Roux asked. “I trust you haven't been here before?”

“I saw a leaf float past me. It came from outside.”

“It could have passed through an underwater opening. For all you know, this stream could run for miles underground.”

“I hope not.” Annja followed the slope up into the heart of the mountain.

The way got tricky and footing was treacherous. There were sinkholes along the way that plunged them up to their chests in near freezing water. They scrambled out and kept going. The rock ran smooth as time and fungus had made it slippery. Again and again, they fell with bruising impacts that left them shaken. They kept moving, certain that Lesauvage and his men would follow.

Annja tried to make sense of the direction they were heading, but she had to give up and acknowledge that they were lost. She listened, but she couldn't tell if they were being pursued.

Maybe not, she thought hopefully. With the treasure right there, Lesauvage wouldn't let anything else stand in his way.

She kept running.

 

C
ORVIN
L
ESAUVAGE WAS
in heaven. Hanging from the rungs set into the wall, he played his flashlight beam over the treasure that Benoit the Relentless had dumped into the Roman garrison's hiding place all those years ago.

It didn't matter to Lesauvage how Benoit had managed to find the place. Maybe he'd learned of it while searching for La Bête. Or perhaps one of his men had known about it.

The fact was that everyone who knew about it now was dead.

Except for Annja Creed, Avery Moreau and the hard-eyed old man who had accompanied her.

Lesauvage reconciled himself with the knowledge that they wouldn't get down off the mountain in the storm. He wouldn't allow that to happen. If they told the authorities about his ill-gotten gain, it could cause him no end of problems.

He stared at the gleaming precious metals in the glare of his flashlight a moment longer, then he climbed the rungs back up to the cave. His men awaited him.

“We hunt,” he declared.

They all grinned and howled in eager anticipation. Quickly, they took up the old Celtic chant he'd taught them in the cave beneath his house. Then they took the special concoction of drugs he'd created, which he told them contained ancient magic. It was mostly speed with a mild hallucinogenic, enough to make them physically able to push themselves past the level of normal human endurance and never know any fear.

Within minutes, they were all high, edgy and ready to explode. Eager to kill.

“They're down there,” Lesauvage said, feeling the drug's effects himself. He felt impossibly strong and invincible. Almost godlike. “I want them dead.”

Dropping back through the wolf trap, Lesauvage lowered himself into the stream. He didn't know which way to go. Closing his eyes, he tried to sense his prey, but there were no signs of them.

He reached into the water and came up with a gold coin. He laughed a little, feeling the heavy weight of it in his hand. The coin had two sides. One was blank. The other held the symbol of the Brotherhood of the Silent Rain. He designated the insignia “heads” and flipped the coin.

The gold disc whirled in the air. Lesauvage slid a hand under it and looked down at the symbol lying in his palm.

It was heads.

“This way,” he told his men. They headed upstream.

Baying and laughing, the Wild Hunt took up the chase.

 

B
ROTHER
G
ASPAR STOOD
back for a moment while two of the young monks entered the Roman garrison. Cold rain pelted him, a barrage of hostility fueled by nature. He fully expected an exchange of gunfire within the cave at any moment.

Instead, the two monks returned. They were armed with pistols, rifles and swords.

“There is something you should see,” one of them said.

Brother Gaspar followed the monks into the cave. He saw the stone oval suspended over the wolf trap at once. Peering down into the hole while another monk pointed his flashlight, Brother Gaspar saw the water and the gold and silver below.

“Benoit's ransom,” Brother Gaspar said. “I'd thought it lost forever.” He looked up at the young monk. Then he noticed a dead man sprawled on the floor. “Who is that?”

“One of Lesauvage's men.”

Brother Gaspar knew that Lesauvage and his men had not left. Their motorcycles were still parked outside. “What happened to him?”

“He was shot,” the young monk said. He touched a spot between his own eyes. “He was dead when we got here.”

“They're in the tunnel below.” Brother Gaspar looked down at the water. “Where does it lead?”

The young monk shook his head. “We've tapped into an underground stream as a well. Perhaps it's another one.”

“And perhaps this one leads to the one we use.” Brother Gaspar realized that the monastery had been left virtually undefended. He turned from the wolf trap. “Take half of your men into the tunnel. Follow them. The others will return to the monastery with me.” He hurried out into the storm, once again hating the secrets that bound him to his life in this horrible place.

The treasure had been found. Did that mean that Father Roger of Falhout's dreadful secret had been discovered, too?

Brother Gaspar lifted his robes and ran as fast as he was able. Nearly 240 years ago, some of the terrible secrets the Vatican had chosen to hide had spilled out. Over a hundred deaths had resulted because of that choice.

How many more lives would be sacrificed to keep the secret?

 

L
IGHTNING FLARED
overhead, exploding inside the cave like a light bulb shorting out.

Glancing up, shielding her eyes against the spots that danced in her vision, Annja saw a hole nearly a foot across at the roof of the cave they were in. The hole was almost twenty feet above them.

“There,” Roux said, pointing.

“I see it,” Annja replied.

Lightning strobed the sky again, igniting another flare that danced across the water swirling at their knees. The water level was rising, and that concerned her. A flash flood would drown them.

“We can't get up there,” Roux said, slapping the slab of rock that framed the cave.

Judging from the walls, the cave had been carved by constantly flowing water thousands of years ago. The result was a smooth surface that couldn't be climbed.

“Then we keep going,” Annja said. Heading upstream once again, she ran, knowing that Avery Moreau was growing steadily weaker and the flashlight beam was growing more dim.

 

L
ESS THAN FIFTEEN
minutes later, Annja found the source of the water. A cistern had formed within the mountain. The hollow half bowl collected water in a natural reservoir, but with the current storm, it had exceeded capacity.

However, the thing that drew Annja's attention most was the light that bled through the cracks where the cistern had separated from the cave roof. A waterfall of glistening water poured into the lower cave.

“Light,” Roux said.

“I see it.” Warily, Annja drew her sword and moved closer.

The light source was stationary, not the flickering randomness of the lightning. And it was pale yellow, not flaring white.

Cautiously, she made her way up the pile of broken rock that had spilled over the cistern's side. Holding the sword in one hand, trying to avoid as much of the water as she could, Annja peered through the crack.

A room lay beyond. It was another cavern actually, but someone had built a low stone dam to help trap the water in the cistern. Plastic five-gallon water containers sat in neat rows beside the dam. Candles burned in sconces on the walls.

“What is it?” Roux asked.

“A room,” Annja answered.

“Someone is living there?”

“Several someones from the look of things,” Annja answered. The cold was eating into her now. She was beginning to feel as if warmth had never existed.

“Is there a way in?” Roux asked.

Annja tossed him the flashlight. He caught it before it hit the water.

Avery Moreau leaned against the wall nearby. He held his arms wrapped around himself. His teeth chattered and his breath blew out in gray fogs. “He's going to kill us, you know. Lesauvage. He won't let us escape because we know too much.”

“Hang in there, Avery,” Annja said.

Reluctantly, the young man nodded. He heard her, but he didn't share her hope.

Hefting a large stone block, Annja took a firm hold and swung it at the cistern's edge. The impact sounded like a cannon shot inside the cave.

The third time she slammed the stone into the cistern, the side cracked. Then sections of the cistern tumbled to the cave floor and the stream below. Water deluged Annja, knocking her from her feet.

Roux tramped through the sudden increase in the water level and pinned her with the flashlight beam. “Are you all right?”

“I'm fine.” Annja pushed herself to her feet. She was soaked and the cold ate into her like acid.

The broken section of the cistern wall drained most of the water. Annja knew whoever had purposefully created the larger reservoir from the natural one wouldn't be happy with the damage she'd done.

Catching hold of the cistern's edge, she heaved herself up and in. Kneeling, she offered her hand to Avery and pulled him along, then did the same for Roux. She took a candle-powered lantern from a hook on the wall.

Stone steps, shaped from the bones of the mountain, led out of the cistern room. Annja was certain they followed the meanderings of a cave shaft—with occasional sculpting, as testified to by the tool marks on the walls—but there was function and design.

When she waved the lantern close to the steps, she found impressions worn deeply into them.

“Whoever lives here has been here for a long time,” she observed.

“It's a monastery,” Roux said. His voice echoed in the stairwell.

“What makes you so sure?”

“Can you imagine anyone else living like this? Cloistered. Underground. With only the rudimentary amenities. And you said you didn't know where the Brotherhood of the Silent Rain came from.” Roux looked around. “I think you can safely say that you do now.”

 

T
HREE TURNS LATER
, Annja came upon a door to the right. She tried it and found it unlocked.

I guess there's no need to lock doors on a subterranean fortress no one knows about, Annja thought. She followed the door inside.

The cavern was long and quiet. Spiderwebs filled the open spaces of the roof. Rectangular openings in the walls occurred at regular intervals.

Annja held the lantern up high. Another doorway stood at the opposite end of the cave.

“What is this place?” Avery asked. His voice sounded brittle.

“A cemetery,” Annja said.

The young man stopped in his tracks. “We shouldn't be in here, should we?”

“No,” Annja agreed. “But we are. This could be the shortest route to an exit.” She didn't really think so, but there were questions she needed answered. She walked to the closest wall and began examining the coffins.