Search: A Novel of Forbidden History (57 page)

Lyle descended slowly, and with each step, he asked himself what he was doing here.

Arresting Ironwood had been the right thing to do. That did warrant the logistical nightmare of arranging this mission, made possible only because the condemned was picking up the tab for his own funeral. But there’d been gunfire aboveground. Men were dead. If he and Roz and the rest of them weren’t out of here by first light, more would die.

And for what?

Archaeology?

He deeply regretted thinking this was a good idea. Mostly, he regretted having Roz here with him. Biggest road trip yet, she’d called it. Looked forward to it.

At step 138, Lyle’s flashlight beam found the floor. At step 140, he could see the single opening in the curved wall that led out into darkness. There’d be no room for anyone to hide inside the stairwell. The shooter would be outside the doorway.

Lyle stood on the last step and shone his light through the opening.
The beam was swallowed up, ineffective. Whatever was out there, it was a huge space.

“You ready?” he whispered.

“For anything,” Roz whispered back.

Lyle committed to memory the layout of the small space beyond the bottom step, then turned off his flashlight.

He took three paces with his hand extended and touched the stone wall exactly when he anticipated he would. Next he moved his hand slowly to the right until it reached the open doorway.

Then he listened, hearing nothing.

He whispered to Roz. “Sideways, against the wall.”

She moved to stand behind him, left shoulder against the wall.

He slipped his gun inside his parka and, in one smooth motion flicked on a flashlight just as he threw it out the doorway to the right.

The flashlight spun through the air, painting the floor of the space beyond, but nothing else—no walls or ceiling. Hitting the floor, it rolled, then rocked back and forth until the movement stopped. Its beam followed suit, eventually settling so the cone of light shone steady at a ninety-degree angle to the doorway, off to the left.

Lyle didn’t wait for any reaction from the shooter outside. He repeated the toss with a second flashlight, this time to the left.

The second flashlight struck the floor, its beam pointing away from the doorway.

Lyle pulled off his parka, zipped it up, then held it out just at the doorway’s edge. Moved it slightly, angled it. Pulled it back a bit—

Crack!

The shoulder of the parka exploded in a puff of insulation made visible by the flash of ricochet sparks as the bullet caromed up the stairwell. Almost instantaneously, with the flash whiting out his vision, Lyle let the parka fall to the floor. The tossed flashlights had created just enough light for the shooter, whose eyes were by now dark-adapted, to pick out the white of the polar camouflage parka. Not in detail, but enough to know the shape was there.

Another
crack
and another flash of ricochet sparks as the parka jumped and—Roz gasped. “Leg.” He heard the rustle of her parka as she slid to the floor. “Oh crap,” she breathed.

A scrape beyond the doorway. “Shh . . .” Lyle warned, almost inaudible. Roz’s breaths were coming in short gulps. She was in pain.

More footsteps. The shooter approaching to inspect his prey.

Lyle’s hand sought Roz’s face. His fingers pressed against her lips. Felt the vibration of a hum from her.
Please, Roz . . . please . . .
He couldn’t speak.

Roz tensed, and Lyle felt the unvoiced scream of pain as it was building.

The footsteps were even closer now. Lyle knew the shooter had a gun in his hand. Knew they were vulnerable in the faint light from the fallen flashlights.

If Roz so much as breathed now, they’d both be dead.

The footsteps stopped. The shooter was right outside the doorway. Looking down at the parka, about to realize there was no one in it, that it was a trap and the enemy was just inside and—

Lyle felt Roz’s mouth open against his hand as she tried to suck in breath to release her pain in the only way she could and—

With no other choice, no other hope, Lyle threw himself over his parka with a primal roar, firing his gun blindly, sighting the shooter with each strobing muzzle flash, rolling as he fired and as the shooter returned fire, and then—

It was over.

Lyle lay prone on the cold rock, arms outstretched, gun ready, breathing hard, scanning back and forth, blinded by the gunfire, knowing at least that the shooter was blinded as well, calling up each strobelike image, certain he’d hit the shooter with his third or fourth shot. He pictured the man doubling over. Running off. Or was he just ducking for cover?

Lyle’s breathing slowed. Roz was in the stairwell bleeding out. He had to get back to her—but was the shooter waiting for him to do just that?

He blinked, eyes straining to pick up details in the dim light from the two tossed flashlights. Something beside him, a cloth-wrapped bundle? Cautious, he tugged at it. Froze as he saw a skull, skin shriveled tight and black, cheekbones oddly flat.
A body?
Beyond it, more cloth-wrapped mounds. More bodies? All around him? How many? What had happened here?

But this wasn’t the time. Couldn’t be the time. He was up and stumbling, running, diving through the tower doorway, and no one shot him. “
Roz!”

She answered, weakly. “Sorry . . .”

Her right leg was soaked and limp.

In the darkness, Lyle scooped her up, nearly tripping over his shredded parka, found stairs and started hurtling up them, knee forgotten.

On step 54, descending flashlights found them.

Bounding down the spiral staircase, David was first to see Marano in Lyle’s arms, her right leg crimson, her face dead white.

Jess pushed past him, her utility knife already out.

Working swiftly, she sliced open the padded trousers, cutting through every layer, one after the other with steady hands, no hesitation. She’d kept telling David she’d been trained.
For what?
he’d wondered. Now he knew.

Next Jess ordered Ironwood to hold his flashlight on the wound she found, a small dark circle weakly pulsing with blood. “No exit wound,” she said, and, within seconds, from the trouser material and Marano’s own knife, she rigged a tourniquet that she tightened around the agent’s thigh, above the wound.

“Can you find your way back?” she asked Lyle.

He nodded, shaken. Jess was in charge now.

“Get the survival packs. You can use them? The meds? IV fluids?”

“Yeah,” Lyle said. “I can do that.”

“Then do it fast. She’s in shock, but she’ll make it if you do it fast.”

Lyle lifted Marano, held her close, started up the stairs again.

“Did you get him?” David called up to him.

“I think so,” Lyle called back

Jess had a different question. “Did you see what’s down there?”

“I did,” the answer floated down. “Bodies. Lots of them.”

Jess stepped out of the stone tower and swung her flashlight all around.

There was no sign of the assailant who had attacked Lyle and Marano, but the bodies were everywhere. Each one bound in a blanket, clutching a gold book.

Ironwood was in heaven. “The Mycenaeans had books like this,” he said reverently. “Gold sheets with writing and illustrations hammered in. I think there are exactly two known to exist.” He shone his flashlight over at Jess, kneeling by a body. “Unless your people have more squirreled away.”

“Three or four,” she said, “but nothing like this.”

David knelt beside her, examining one of the books. “The symbols in it, they’re like the ones on the door and the disk. And look at this . . .” He showed her a page with a distinctive pattern. “Recognize it?”

She did. “The Southern Cross.”

“So they’re star maps or astronomy texts.”

“Or navigation charts.” Ironwood sounded struck with wonder. “They sailed the world, and
this
is how they did it.”

David retrieved the two flashlights Lyle had thrown, then began taking photographs, walking from one body to the next. “Jess, you think they were buried here?”

Other than the blankets, she saw no sign of funerary preparations.

“I think they died here, in place.”

“All of them? At the same time?” Ironwood was intrigued.

Once again Jess wished her family’s longtime rival weren’t here. “I don’t know. Maybe they all drank hemlock. Maybe volcanic fumes filled this cavern. Maybe they all just froze to death.”

David directed one of the recovered flashlights at the stone path that ran through the center of the cavern. It was edged by braziers on either side. “I wonder if these people had anything to do with where this path goes.”

Jess tapped her watch, making the display light up. “We’ve got two hours. Half an hour to get back to the surface with as many of these books as we can carry. An hour to get out of bombing range.”

“That gives us thirty minutes down here,” David said.

“Forty-five if we move it,” Ironwood said.

They began to walk quickly along the path. It followed the curve of the cavern floor, but smoothly. Here the stones were set on the diagonal, though, in a diamond pattern, different from the style used in the corridors above them, and in the temples.

“They must have rolled something along here, a lot,” David said. “Look at all the grooves.”

Jess saw them. “Were there wheeled carts in any of the murals?”

“They’re not wheel tracks,” Ironwood said. “They’re not contiguous. It’s like they dragged something a bit, picked it up, dragged it again.”

Jess thought of the worn paths in the floor stones of the Shrine of Turus. How many generations of defenders had followed that path? Of all those generations, how was it that she became the first defender to follow this path into . . . what?”

“Hold it.” David stopped abruptly. “Lyle said he thought he got the guy.”

Jess and Ironwood converged their flashlight beams on David’s, and Jess saw the drops of fresh blood on the stones.

“Winged him, maybe,” Ironwood said, “but he’s still out there.”

As one, they all switched off their flashlights, listened.

No sound, but ahead of them . . .

“Do you see that?” David whispered. “Something flashing . . .”

“A flashlight?” Ironwood said.

“It’s like someone’s swinging it.”

David switched on his flashlight. “If he’s busy, maybe he won’t notice us.”

Still bodies all around them, they pressed on.

The cavern ended in a solid wall of blank rock, but in its center were set two tall gleaming metal panels, each twelve feet high, eight feet across, flanked by braziers larger than the ones that edged the stone path.

“Can you imagine what this looked like with those things lit?” David said.

Ironwood ran his flashlight over a brazier. “We should take wood or charcoal from them. For carbon dating.”

Jess was searching for any sign of Lyle’s shooter. They’d found more blood on the path, but not enough to think he’d be dropping soon. A few minutes earlier, the odd moving light that might have been a swinging flashlight had stopped.

“Is that what was flashing?” David asked.

Jess saw what he saw, felt her pulse race.

Ironwood recognized it, too. “Your cross again, Jessica.”

Centered low on the two metal panels was the sign of her family, as in the murals in the halls above. Once again it was a simple Tuareg cross. This cross, though, was polished gold, at least a meter high and almost as wide, perfectly symmetrical, mounted on a golden rail that fit into brackets on the metal panels.

Jess felt the power of the moment, but she was tormented by new questions she couldn’t answer.
Why was this built? What does that cross mean? Is this where the First Gods arose? Is this the White Island they left us for?
She turned from the sign of her family to David beside her. Looked up at his face, glowing gold on one side, deeply shadowed on the other.

Suddenly she saw another face.

The Shrine of Turus. The carved figure of the male.
That eerie, skeletal face wasn’t the product of uneven erosion. It was the face of the bodies on the floor here. Dark and narrow, the nose flat, the cheekbones . . .