She let the occasional bubble escape her nose, tricking her body into thinking she was close to taking a new breath, which eased the strain and lessened the instinct for her body to rebel.
Keep going . . .
She fluttered her legs and pawed at the wall with her free palm.
Then the reach of her flashlight’s beam struck an obstruction in the tunnel ahead. She swam up to it. A boulder blocked the aqueduct. The passage around it was too narrow for her to get through.
Inwardly cursing, she probed the rock and found it to be more of a slab, jammed crookedly in the tunnel.
Maybe . . .
She grabbed the upper edge and braced her feet against the walls. She tugged, pulled, and rocked the slab until it finally fell flat on the bottom, opening a wider gap above it. She shoved her head, and one arm through, then wiggled and contorted her torso. Her toes scrabbled at the stone behind her as she fought to jam her way past the obstruction.
Then she got stuck.
She knew it in an instant. While Gray might enjoy the heft and weight of her hormonally enlarged breasts—and Jack, too, for that matter—it proved problematic now. She tried reversing back out, prepared to return to the cistern and admit defeat.
But the effort only jammed her tighter.
Can’t get through—or back.
An edge of panic threaded through her. Her lungs grew strained, and not just from resisting the pressure of the rock walls. Images of Jack flashed through her: gurgling happily in the bath, fussing over a nipple, sucking his little thumb. Even now, doubts plagued her. A part of her still wondered if Jack wouldn’t be better without her. And even deeper—
Am I better without him?
Before guilt sapped her strength and will, she ground her teeth. She didn’t know which was the right course with Jack, but she knew one thing for certain.
I’ll be the one to make that decision.
She wasn’t about to die down here and have that choice taken from her. So she exhaled all her breath, emptying her lungs completely. Life-giving air bubbled over her face, billowed through her hair.
With her chest collapsed, she gained a fraction of extra space, enough to free herself. She hung there for a heartbeat. She still had enough oxygen to get back, but what good would that do? How would that bring her any closer to Jack’s side, if that was her decision?
Screw it.
She kicked with her legs and sailed past the obstruction.
Following her light, she sped along the aqueduct, quickly passing the point of no return. Her diaphragm cramped below her lungs, trying to force her to take a breath. Her vision squeezed. Her motions became more frantic.
Still, the spear of her light only found more darkness ahead.
Her vision narrowed toward a pinpoint.
Not going to make it.
7:44 A.M.
Gray paced the edge of the cistern’s black pool. He checked his watch for the hundredth time. Sweat pebbled his brow, and his breath heaved in and out.
“She’s been gone over ten minutes,” he said to no one but himself. “She should be back by now.”
Maria tried to calm him. “She could be looking for help.”
“Or just catching her breath for the swim back,” Mac offered.
Gray shook his head. He had already stripped to his boxers, needing to do something, to be proactive while he waited. He stepped to the pool’s edge.
“Give her another minute,” Maria warned.
Father Bailey offered a grimmer insight. “It’ll do no good to go after her. If she got into trouble, it’s already too late. No one could hold their breath for ten minutes. You’ll only endanger your life, too.”
Gray balled a fist, ready to punch the priest. Instead, those words goaded Gray to the water’s edge.
I can’t wait any longer.
As he leaned to dive in, the black water grew brighter below him. He stumbled back as the glow became a bright light. A head popped out of the water, the face obscured by a mask and the mouthpiece of a scuba regulator. But Gray recognized her.
“Seichan . . .”
Before she could respond, another figure, then another, surfaced behind her. The strangers wore masks, wetsuits, and scuba gear.
Gray was momentarily baffled. Who were these men? How did Seichan raise a rescue team in scuba gear so quickly? Then he knew the answer. He glanced over to Maria, remembering there had been a crew already in the lake, searching for Kowalski’s body. Seichan must have eventually escaped the aqueduct and reached the open lake, where she hailed the search crew and recruited them for this rescue.
Seichan spat out her mouthpiece and shifted her mask up. “Ready to get out of here?” she called to him.
Hell, yeah.
Over the next half hour, the search-and-rescue team ferried everyone through the aqueduct and out to the banks of Lake Albano. While their group should have been jubilant at surviving, no one celebrated.
Sirens echoed all around. Helicopters chased across the sky as the morning sun crested the caldera’s edge. Gray stood beside the lake with his satellite phone pressed to his ear. He stared up at the smoking ruins of the Pontifical Palace. A thick black pall churned skyward, while fires smoldered at its heart. From what could be seen, that entire section of the volcanic rim had been blasted into a cratered pile of rubble.
Gray barely heard Painter on the phone. “The jets had proper military clearance and call signs,” the director explained. “They might even have been Italian Air Force jets. We don’t know yet. Reports are that the pilots ditched the two aircraft into the Mediterranean after jettisoning from the planes. Search crews are scouring the seas.”
Gray tore his gaze from the destruction above to the reason behind it. Monsignor Roe and Major Bossard, both wrapped in blankets, stood guard over a tarp-wrapped treasure, the Da Vinci map.
How many had died over that damned thing?
He remembered the monsignor’s story of a summer school under way on the papal grounds. The new observatory was a mile from the palace, but was it far enough away? His grip tightened on the phone. He intended to make sure the deaths here were not in vain and that those responsible were held accountable.
Gray spoke sternly: “We may not know who orchestrated this attack, but from their tactics and hardware—the jets, the submarine up in the Arctic—these are not lone-wolf terrorists.”
Painter agreed. “Whoever they are, they must be state-sponsored. Some hostile country or countries is backing them. Kat also believes it’s why they seem to know our every move. Too many intelligence agencies are involved. We don’t know where our intel is leaking, but until we plug it—”
“We need to go dark over here.”
“I suggest pitch black.”
Gray stared at the small group huddled on the shore. They needed to get moving, get out of sight ASAP. But what then? Two questions were the most pressing.
Where do we go next?
And more important . . .
Who is our enemy?
17
June 23, 11:22 A.M. TRT
Çanakkale Province, Turkey
At last, the world will soon burn.
With glory shining bright in her breast, Nehir Saat descended into the depths of the buried city. She had been summoned from the neighboring village of Kumkale, where in a small tea shop she had borne witness to the first harbinger of Armageddon. On a television there, she and other Sons and Daughters had watched the cacophony of news coming from Italy, the footage of a palace burning, of bodies in the streets.
Only the sheeted forms of children finally made her look away.
Innocents turned into martyrs, she had to remind herself, but it failed to quell the grief, even guilt over their deaths. She prayed they had not suffered and had found their way to paradise—where they would not have long to wait. She took solace in the fact that when the gates of Hell fell, paradise would eventually return to earth.
Bringing with it all those children.
Including her own.
Both of them.
She paused on a stair and closed her eyes, momentarily overwhelmed by grief. When she was a child, her father had sold her and her brother into prostitution. She was eight, Kadir ten. She had been raped repeatedly and carried scars both physical and emotional.
Eventually, when they were not earning enough for their father, he sold them to a monster in Istanbul. She was forced into a temporary marriage—known as a mut’a—which contracts the union for a set period of time, from one hour to ninety-nine years. During that contract, she bore two children, a boy and a girl, both unwanted by her provisional husband. The babies were slaughtered after their births. She had tried to protect the last child, the girl whom Nehir had silently named Huri, which meant angel. As punishment, her husband cut the ragged line down Nehir’s chin and throat. Kadir, only fourteen at the time, but already large, became enraged and broke the man’s neck. She and her brother had fled afterward, but Kadir remained her protector always.
Eventually they drew the attention of the Sons and Daughters.
She suspected it was Kadir—whose reputation in the slums of Istanbul grew with his size—was the one whom they truly wanted to recruit. But her brother would never leave her side, so they were taken together. Little did they know that Nehir would prove to be the true warrior of the pair. Kadir was too slow, both in mind and body, and in many ways, his heart was too easily wounded. But he did as he was told.
Nehir, on the other hand, was swift with her knives, flawless with her marksmanship. But it was her sharp intelligence that allowed her to rise quickly in the ranks and eventually become the First Daughter of Mūsā.
Determination had driven her back then—and now.
She intended to live long enough to see this world burned away and replaced with a new paradise—a paradise where those who had died in Allah’s good graces would be returned to their loved ones. Including her lost children.
And now I am so near to seeing it happen.
With a lighter spirit, she continued down the stairs, summoned by Mūsā to the heart of Bayt al-Hikma, the House of Wisdom. This level of the buried city housed countless texts, some dating back to 1258, to the Fall of Baghdad, when Mongol hordes led by Genghis Khan’s grandson invaded the city, setting fire to mosques and homes, slaughtering its inhabitants. But the worst atrocity of all was the destruction of the city’s centuries-old academy of higher learning, the true flower of the Islamic Golden Age: the House of Wisdom. The Mongols had plundered the school, tossing its books into the Tigris River. It was said those waters ran black for days from all the ink—then later red with the blood of murdered scholars.
It was why, even today, the Sons and Daughters wore those colors.
But before the siege could be fully set, a scholar named Nasir al-Din al-Tusi—the first who would bear the title of Mūsā—rescued four hundred thousand books, stealing them away under the cover of darkness. It was those texts that became the foundation for the new House of Wisdom, one hidden from the world. To protect this secret, Nasir gathered the first Sons and Daughters, training them harshly and completely to be its warrior-scholars, guaranteeing that such an atrocity never happened again.
And it hadn’t.
The current Mūsā was the forty-eighth to rule the House of Wisdom.
And he will carry it to its greatest glory.
With utmost humility and respect, Nehir bowed and entered into the sprawling warren of rooms that made up the library. It spread over forty acres and now housed tenfold what Nasir had rescued.
She found her leader in a small chamber lined by rows of long desks. Mūsā stood behind one, flanked by two elder Sons, who served the library.
She paused at the chamber’s threshold.
Mūsā noted her presence and waved her forward. She crossed to the table, keeping her head bowed, her eyes cast down.
“My dear Daughter,” Mūsā said warmly, “Allah truly smiles upon you.”
“Thank you,” she muttered, feeling awkward at such praise.
“The two books you secured from Dr. Cargill have proven fortuitous. Monumentally so.”
He nodded toward the table’s surface, where the old volumes were spread open, with more books piled to either side, likely gathered for research into the revelations found within the texts recovered from the dhow in Greenland.
Mūsā touched one of them. “Herein lie the treacherous last words of the traitorous fourth brother to the Banū Mūsā. While his story is incomplete, we’ve discerned much in a short time, offering us hope to pick up the lost trail to Tartarus.”
Her heart pounded. She had hoped as much when she had been handed those old volumes and delivered them here.
At long last.
Mūsā straightened and stared at her. “I will pray that Allah continues to smile on you, though I already have faith that this will happen. For I have an important task for you.”
“Whatever you command.”
“You and your brother Kadir must go and search for that lost trail. I will send you with a cadre of Sons and Daughters, along with the two prisoners. Use one against the other to enlist their cooperation to help you find those threads. You will also take the Storm Atlas, as I believe it will still be of value in discovering the true path to Tartarus.”
She bowed deeper, honored by the responsibility. “I will not fail you.”
“Of this, I also have faith.”
She straightened, accepting his praise, feeling even worthy of it. “But where do we go? Where might we pick up this lost trail?”
He motioned her to his side. When she joined him, he pointed to the open journal written by Hunayn ibn Mūsā. His fingertip ran along a scrawled line on one page. “The log of the voyage is interrupted after this, but the traitor named his ship’s last port before continuing to Tartarus. It is there where you will seek his trail.”
She leaned down and read what was written.
صياغة هيفايستوس
Her blood chilled with the implication as she translated it.
The Forge of Hephaestus.
“It is no easy task I’ve set for you.” Mūsā stared hard at her, as if sensing her trepidation. “For you must travel to where even angels fear to tread.”
Third
The Forge of Hephaestus
Sing, clear-voiced Muse, of Hephaestus famed for inventions. With bright-eyed Athena he taught men glorious crafts throughout the world—men who before used to dwell in caves in the mountains like wild beasts.
—HOMERIC HYMN 20 (TRANSLATION BY HUGH G. EVELYN-WHITE. HESIOD, THE HOMERIC HYMNS AND HOMERICA. CAMBRIDGE, MASS., HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS; LONDON, WILLIAM HEINEMANN, 1914)
18
June 23, 8:49 P.M. CEST
Tyrrhenian Sea
These bastards do know how to travel in style.
From the view out of the window, Kowalski took in the breadth of the superyacht stretching out around of him. He and Elena had landed aboard the yacht five hours ago. They’d been flown from the coast of Turkey to a small island, where a helicopter had ferried them to the middle of the Tyrrhenian Sea for a rendezvous with this sleek ship.
And what a beaut it is.
The silver yacht was more than three hundred feet long and rose from a deep draft to a superstructure of four levels. He was currently imprisoned on its top floor, in a wide lounge with panoramic views toward the bow and both sides. Behind him, Elena sat at a desk buried in books and scratched notes on a yellow legal pad. She had already filled one and was onto her second. He didn’t interrupt her or begrudge her focus.
In fact, he was counting on it.
He used the time to study his floating prison, judging it with the critical eyes of a former seaman. As they shackled him into leg irons, he had listened to the engines belowdecks. Sounded like twin diesels, maybe hybrids, definitely powering a water-jet propulsion drive. Once he and Elena had been taken aboard, the ship had ramped its engines and swept northwest over the sea, r
unning close to thirty knots, an impressive speed for a yacht this size.
And that was not all that impressed.
The yacht didn’t have just one helipad, but two: one at the bow, and another directly over his head. In addition, he had been marched through a garage space that housed a line of black jet-skis with their noses pointed toward the closed door to the sea—along with what appeared to be a four-man submersible equipped with dual launchers for mini-torpedoes.
The latter was a firm reminder. Though the ship’s sleek profile might look like a party boat on the outside, inside it was all business. The crew—easily several dozen—all carried weapons, which they concealed when on deck, but showed more brazenly when inside.
He tapped a knuckle against the window. Even this glass looked extra thick, likely bulletproof, probably able to withstand a blast.
With a sigh, he stared out at the view beyond the bow. The sun sat on the horizon, perched just above the dark volcanic cones of an island, setting their cinder edges on fire. The lower slopes were dark, ominous, falling away to shadowy forests and small lighted hamlets along the coast.
“Whoever named this place had no imagination,” Kowalski mumbled. “You got an island covered in volcanos, so you name it Volcano.”
“Vulcano,” Elena corrected, stretching back from the desk. She removed a set of petite reading glasses, tossed them on a legal pad, and rubbed red-rimmed eyes. “The place was not named for the volcanos, but for the Roman god of fire, Vulcan. The same god who the Greeks called Hephaestus.”
Kowalski turned from the window with a jangle of his leg irons. “Then I guess calling it Vulcano is better than naming it Hephaestos or something.”
“Actually, it was once called that, too.”
He’d meant it as a joke, but she took him seriously.
Women just don’t get me.
“The ancient Greeks named this island Thérmessa, which means ‘land of heat.’” She nudged a thick book on her table. “But here a Greek historian calls it Hiera of Hephaestus or ‘the Sacred Place of Hephaestus.’ Which could also be translated as ‘Sacred Fire,’ depending on the context.”
The Last Odyssey: A Thriller Page 16