Uncharted: The Fourth Labyrinth (3 page)

Victor Sullivan had practically raised him from his early teens and taught him everything—or nearly everything—he knew about staying alive in the “hard-to-find-acquisitions” business. They’d been all over the world hunting for treasure and antiquities for pretty much anyone who could afford to pay the tab. And in all that time he had never heard Sully sound as grim and weary as he had on the phone.

A taxi driver laid on the horn as Drake hustled across the street. A chilly October wind blasted him, and he shivered, wishing he had a coat. He had left his bags in a locker at JFK, figuring he would be headed back to the airport on his way out of the city, but nothing in there would have helped. Ecuador had been warm and humid. Drake had spent too much time in hot and sticky locales in his life, so he didn’t mind the chilly autumn wind, but it was a rapid shift, like stepping through a door to the other end of the world.

Wouldn’t that make my life easy?
he thought. But of course that kind of stuff happened only in science fiction and fantasy stories, where the heroes were all noble and dead wasn’t always forever. Real life had less convenient rules.

Drake hauled open the heavy glass-and-brass door and walked up the pebbled incline between the outer and inner doors. A man with a long, filthy, matted beard and sunken eyes stood to one side wearing a sign announcing the arrival of the End Times, but there was no way to tell if he was celebrating or regretting the moment.

When he stepped into the main concourse—the enormous, ornate chamber that came immediately to mind when he thought of Grand Central Terminal—he made a beeline for the huge clock. He spotted Sully standing beneath it, but the older man was turned away, watching the stairs across the terminal, probably thinking about the baby carriage scene in De Palma’s
Untouchables
, a homage to the Russian flick
Battleship Potemkin
. They’d passed through Grand Central together a few times, and every time Sully had to tell him about those stairs. Sully saw him coming and perked up, shaking off whatever he’d been thinking about. From the haunted look in his eyes, Drake decided maybe it wasn’t old gangster movies, after all.

“Nate,” Sully said. “Thanks for coming.”

“I was already traveling. Just had to take a detour,” Drake replied. Their rapport mostly consisted of banter, but for once he thought maybe the lighthearted approach wasn’t appropriate. “What’s going on, Sully? You said ‘murder.’ One look at you and I’m guessing this isn’t some cozy mystery.”

Sully frowned, smoothing his gray mustache. “I’m not my usual jovial self, huh? I guess not. But you look more than a little like crap yourself, so maybe you shouldn’t judge.”

Drake raised his eyebrows. “Great to see you, too.”

A tired smile touched Sully’s face and a bit of the usual mischievous twinkle lit his eyes, but then the smile faded and his gaze turned dark. He nodded his head toward the row of arched doorways that led through into the train tunnels and platforms.

“Come on. This way,” he said.

Drake followed without asking any more questions. If Sully had a particular way he wanted the answer to unfold, Drake would indulge him. He’d earned that, and far more, in the years they’d been friends. He studied Sully as they reached a staircase and started down to a lower level. A drinker and an inveterate ladies’ man, he looked, as always, as if he would have been more at home gambling in 1950s Havana than dealing with twenty-first-century America. His graying hair looked a bit unruly, and dark circles under his eyes implied he hadn’t gotten a lot of sleep the night before. He wore a brown leather bomber jacket over one of his guayaberas—linen shirts that were most popular in Latin America and the Caribbean. Both the shirt and the khaki pants he was wearing were rumpled, indicating that whatever sleep he had gotten, he’d been wearing the same clothes since the day before.

It had been almost two months since Drake had seen Sully, but they’d spoken on the phone less than a week ago, and at the time there’d been no indication that anything was amiss. But murder gave no warning.

Sully led him through the lower-level concourse and past the arched entrances to a warren of underground railway tunnels until at last he turned through one of those archways and walked down a dozen steps to a train platform. Lights flickered unreliably in the darkness of the ceiling above them. The rumble of trains both near and distant made it feel like at any moment the world might shake itself apart. The noise reminded Drake of counting the seconds between thunder strikes as a child, trying to figure out how far away the storm might be and if the lightning might be coming his way.

No train awaited them at the platform. Drake had half expected that they were about to embark on a journey, but if they were, it apparently wouldn’t be by train. The tracks were empty, and other than themselves, the platform looked abandoned—except for the yellow line of police tape that had been used to cordon off the end of the platform from the public. Drake didn’t have to ask; he knew where they were headed now.

Two platforms over, a train clanked and hissed, waiting as a few stragglers hurried alongside it. A conductor stood outside the door, ushering them along. The man glanced at Drake and Sully. Once upon a time he would have minded his own business—New York had been that kind of town—but after 9/11 all that had changed. Sully knew it, too, because he stopped at the crime scene tape, making no move to go beyond it. They were suspicious enough just being down here without any obvious reason. Drake thought maybe the conductor would think they were plainclothes detectives, but then he realized they were probably underdressed for that. And if he had caught a glimpse of the guayabera under Sully’s bomber jacket, the man would know right off the bat they weren’t cops. Most police kept their quirks on the inside.

Standing by the police tape, Sully withdrew a cigar from inside his jacket pocket. He wasn’t much for rules, but he didn’t light it, just stuck it between his lips and rolled it around in his teeth for a minute, thinking. Drake had never known him to be a man prone to rumination.

“You’re starting to freak me out a little, Sully. How about you start by telling me who died?”

Sully stared at a spot beyond the police tape for a moment longer, then took the cigar from his mouth and turned to Drake.

“This platform’s been closed since last night. A train came in from Connecticut—plenty of stops along the way—and when it left, there was an old steamer trunk on the platform. Mostly people were getting on, leaving the city, but there were some arriving, too. One of the conductors remembered the trunk and that two men were sitting near it. He assumed they had carried it on but didn’t look too closely at them. Dark coats; that’s all he remembers.”

Sully shook his head, eyes narrowed in frustration. “Think about that, Nate. Anything in the world could have been in that trunk. The whole thing could have been full of Semtex or something. Can you imagine explosives in that kind of volume detonating under the city? We’re so obsessed with planes, but nobody’s paying attention to …”

He trailed off, taking a breath. He looked more angry than grieving, but Drake knew Sully well enough to see that he was both.

“So, this trunk
wasn’t
filled with explosives?” Drake ventured.

Sully shot him a hard look. “I was making a point. But no, it wasn’t. Place reacted like it could’ve been, though. Hundreds of trains were prevented from coming in, thousands of people evacuated. Transportation Authority brought in counterterrorism agents, and NYPD had a bomb squad down here. Bomb-sniffing dogs didn’t get a read on it, but they were still treating it like it was going to explode. A couple of the guys who wrangle those dogs—one of them used to train them to sniff for corpses, and he knows the smell pretty well. He said he thought there was a body in the trunk. Turned out he was right.”

Drake put a hand on his shoulder, hating to see his friend in pain. “Sully—”

“It was Luka,” Sully said, his jaw working, eyes flashing with anger. “But not all of him, Nate. No arms and no legs. Just his torso. They’d cut his head off, too, but at least that was in the trunk. Whoever killed him, they didn’t amputate his limbs to make it harder to ID him or they wouldn’t have put his—”

Sully faltered. Sneering, he jammed the cigar back into his mouth and stared again at the area beyond the yellow tape. The train two platforms away pulled out, clanking loudly, and Drake wondered if the conductor was still watching them. He wondered why the cops or the FBI weren’t on top of them already, wondering what they were doing there. If the trunk had been filled with explosives instead of Sully’s dead friend, they would never have been able to come down here without being stopped. But murder didn’t get the same attention.

In his life, Luka Hzujak had been an archaeologist, a college professor, and a collector of antiquities. He had also been one of Victor Sullivan’s oldest and dearest friends, a man who saw the modern understanding of history as just as much a mystery as the unfolding of tomorrow. Luka was known for pissing off his colleagues and employers because he refused to settle for the currently accepted versions of historical episodes, particularly from ancient times. In recent years he had established himself as a successful author of controversial histories written in language accessible to the general public. Drake had met Luka perhaps a dozen times and had liked him a great deal. He could picture the man’s mischievous face and the way he’d always stroked his goatee like some cartoon devil. Luka had never condemned Sully for the work he and Drake did, mostly because he thought the most significant evidence available to challenge historians’ version of the past came from tomb raiders and treasure hunters.

“I’m sorry, Sully,” Drake said. “Something like that—it shouldn’t happen to anyone, never mind someone like Luka. Have the cops turned up anything?”

Drake didn’t bother asking where Sully had gotten his information about the discovery of the body. It seemed clear he had a source in the NYPD, which really came as no surprise. Sully seemed to have a drinking buddy or a gambling compadre just about everywhere. Six years past, they had spent a few rainy weeks in Bhutan searching for ancient demon and animal masks. The first day, they had gone to the marketplace to find something to keep the rain off them, and a man selling goat cheese and wine had clapped Sully on the back and hugged him like a long-lost brother. When the guy had stepped back, Drake had seen the wary suspicion in the merchant’s eyes. He and Sully were friends, but they didn’t trust each other. That seemed to be a common dynamic, and it extended from Bhutan to the United States to Easter Island. Drake trusted Sully, at least most days, but one of the first things the man had taught him was that a certain amount of mistrust was healthy and would keep him alive.

But Sully’s NYPD contact hadn’t been much help.

“They’ve got squat,” Sully said.

Drake frowned, turning to look up at the flickering lights. “Seriously? It’s Grand Central. They’ve got to have cameras everywhere.”

“ ’Course they do. Doesn’t mean they all work. When the budget’s tight, choices have to be made. Some things fall by the wayside,” Sully said, turning to look at him again. “But we’ve got something the cops don’t.”

“What’s that?”

The look in Sully’s eyes was a mixture of pain and pride. “We have Jada.”

3

Drake and Sully took the subway train that shuttled passengers between Grand Central and Times Square, then boarded another subway car, this one headed north. They sat quietly together, Sully warily watching other passengers. The lights flickered on and off, making strange scars out of the scratches some vandals had put on the windows. The seat beneath Drake had been sliced open, but that didn’t bother him as much as the smell that permeated the air, trace aromas of sweat and urine, like the ghost of someone else’s stink. The car rattled on the tracks, rocking back and forth in a lulling motion that might have put Drake to sleep on a day without murder in it.

Sully glanced around, more paranoid than Drake had ever seen him.

“What’s going on, Sully?” Drake said, voice low. He glanced around to see if anyone was paying attention to them, his friend’s paranoia contagious. But it was the New York subway; as a rule, people tended to pretend they were the only ones on the train. “How come you’ve got Jada hidden away?”

“It wasn’t my idea,” Sully muttered, glancing sharply at Drake. “She won’t talk to the cops ’cause she’s afraid of ending up just as dead as her father.”

“She knows who did it?” Drake asked, intrigued.

“No. But she might know why. Now shut your trap. We’ll be there soon enough.”

Drake didn’t argue. He could see Luka’s murder had Sully spooked. If he wanted to be overcautious because he feared Jada might also be in danger, Drake wouldn’t blame him. Sully was the girl’s godfather, and he took the role seriously. With Luka dead, he would do whatever he had to in order to make sure the girl was taken care of.

Though she wasn’t really a girl anymore, was she? The last time Drake had seen Jadranka Hzujak, she had been eleven or twelve years old. In the intervening years, he had been vaguely aware that the girl had been growing up, but it had been happening so far off his radar that it was difficult to imagine Jada as an adult. Five or six years ago, he and Sully had gotten together with Luka and had dinner in a little dive in Soho that looked like it hadn’t changed in decades. Over dinner, Luka had mentioned that Jada had been enjoying college, which meant she had to be in her mid-twenties now. But he couldn’t shake the image of the little girl she’d been out of his mind.

As the train pulled into the 79th Street station, Sully tapped Drake on the knee and got up, slipping through the standing passengers. Drake followed, smiling as he made his way around a prodigiously pregnant young woman.

On the platform, Sully leaned up against the side of a newsstand and waited for the train to close its doors and pull away. Drake thought he was being overly cautious, but he had altered his travel plans and come to New York and been in motion since he had gotten off the plane at JFK. A couple of minutes just standing still was welcome. Besides, he knew this game. Sully wanted to wait for the platform to clear to make it more difficult for anyone who might be trying to follow them to remain inconspicuous.